The Meaning of Christmas – Connecting the Dots between the Crib and the Cross

December 21, 2015

Christmas 2015

The Gospel stories about the birth of Jesus are not a simple retelling of the events that took place then, at the stable in Bethlehem. In his commentaries on the birth of Jesus, the renowned scripture scholar, Raymond Brown, highlights that these narratives were written long after Jesus had already been crucified and had risen from the dead and that they are colored by what his death and resurrection mean. At one level, they are as much stories about Jesus’ passion and death as they are about his birth. When the Gospel writers looked back at the birth of Jesus through the prism of the resurrection they saw in his birth already the pattern for both his active ministry and his death and resurrection: God comes into the world and some believe and accept him and others hate and reject him. For some, his person gives meaning, for others it causes confusion and anger. There is an adult message about Christ in Christmas and the meaning of Christmas is to be understood as much by looking at the cross as by looking at the crib. Hardly the stuff of our Christmas lights, carols, cribs, and Santa.

And yet, these too have their place. Karl Rahner, not naïve to what Raymond Brown asserts, argues that, even so, Christmas is still about happiness and the simple joy of children captures the meaning of Christmas more accurately than any adult cynicism. At Christmas, Rahner contends, God gives us a special permission to be happy: “Do not be afraid to be happy, for ever since I [God] wept, joy is the standard of living that is really more suitable than the anxiety and grief of those who think they have no hope. … I no longer go away from the world, even if you do not see me now. … I am there. It is Christmas. Light the candles. They have more right to exist than all the darkness. It is Christmas. Christmas that last forever.” At Christmas, the crib trumps the cross, even as the cross does not fully disappear.

How do the cross and the crib fit together? Does Calvary cast a permanent shadow on Bethlehem? Should Christmas disturb us more than console us? Is our simple joy at Christmas somehow missing the real point?

No. Joy is the meaning of Christmas. Our carols have it right. At Christmas, God gives us a special permission to be happy, though that must be carefully understood. There is no innate contradiction between joy and suffering, between being happy and undergoing all the pain that life hands us. Joy is not to be identified with pleasure and with the absence of suffering in our lives. Genuine joy is a constant that remains with us throughout all of our experiences in life, including our pain and suffering. Jesus promised us “a joy that no one can take away from you”. Clearly that means something that doesn’t disappear because we get sick, have a loved one die, are betrayed by a spouse, lose our job, are rejected by a friend, are subject to physical pain, or are enduring emotional distress. None of us will escape pain and suffering. Joy must be able to co-exist with these. Indeed it is meant to grow deeper through the experiences of pain and suffering. We are meant to be women and men of joy, even as we live in pain. That’s a coloring, taken from their understanding of Jesus’ death and resurrection, which the Gospel writers insert into their narratives about his birth.

But, of course, that is not what children see when they get caught up in the excitement of Christmas and when they look at the Christ-child in the crib. Their joy is still innocent, healthily protected by their naiveté, still awaiting disillusion, but real nonetheless. The naïve joy of a child is real and the temptation to rewrite and recolor it in light of the disillusionment of later years is wrong. What was real was real. The fond memories we have of anticipating and celebrating Christmas as children are not invalidated when Santa has been deconstructed. Christmas invites us still, as John Shea poetically puts it, “to plunge headlong into the pudding.” And despite all the disillusionment within our adult lives, Christmas still offers us, depressed adults, that wonderful invitation.

Even when we no longer believe in Santa, and all the cribs, lights, carols, cards, colorful wrapping-paper, and gifts of Christmas no longer bring the same thrill, the same invitation still remains: Christmas invites us to be happy, and that demands of us an elemental asceticism, a fasting from adult cynicism, a discipline of joy that can hold the cross and the crib together so as to be able to live in a joy that no one, and no tragedy, can take from us. This will allow us, at Christmas, like children, to plunge headlong into the pudding.

Christmas gives, both children and adults, permission to be happy.

Sex and Our Culture

December 14, 2015

No generation in history, I suspect, has ever experienced as much change as we have experienced in the past sixty years. That change is not just in the areas of science, technology, medicine, travel, and communications; it is especially in the area of our social infrastructure, of our communal ethos. And perhaps nowhere is this change more radical than in the area of how we understand sex. In the past seventy years we have witnessed three major, tectonic shifts in how we understand the place of sex in our lives.

First, we moved away from the concept that sex is morally connected to procreation. With few exceptions, prior to 1950, at least in terms of our moral and religious notions around sex, sex was understood as constitutively connected to procreation. This connection wasn’t always respected of course, but it was part of our communal ethos. That connection, while still upheld in some of our churches, effectively broke-down in our culture about sixty years ago.

The second severing was more radical. Up to the 1960s, our culture tied sex to marriage. The norm was that the only moral place for sex was inside of a marriage. Again, of course, this wasn’t always respected and there was plenty of sex taking place outside of marriage. But it wasn’t morally or religiously accepted or blessed. People had sex outside of marriage, but nobody claimed this was right. It was something for which you apologized. The sexual revolution of the 1960s effectively severed that link. Sex, in our cultural understanding, has become an extension of dating and one of the fruits of that is that more and more people now live together outside of marriage and before marriage, without any sense of moral implication. This has become so prevalent today that sex outside of marriage is more the norm than the exception. More and more young people today will not even have a moral discussion on this with either their parents or their churches. Their glib answer: “We don’t think like you!” They don’t.

But the shift in our sexual ethos didn’t stop there. Today more and more we are witnessing, not least on our university campus, the phenomenon of “hook-up” sex, where sex is deliberately and consciously cut off from love, emotion, and commitment. This constitutes the most-radical shift of all. Sex is now cut off from love. As Donna Freitas (The End of Sex), among others, has documented, more and more young people are making a conscious decision to delay looking for a marriage partner while they prepare for a career or launch that career and, while in that hiatus, which might last anywhere from ten to twenty years, they plan to be sexually active, but with that sexual activity consciously cut off from love, emotion, and commitment (all of which are feared as time-demanding, messy, and in the way of study, work, fun, and freedom). The idea is to eventually tie sex to love and commitment, but first to split it off for some years. Sadly this ethos is taking root among many young people today. Of course, again, as with the other shifts in our understanding of sex, this too has always been around, to which the phenomenon of prostitution and single’s bars attest. But, until now, no one has claimed that this is healthy.

What’s particularly disturbing is not that there is sex taking place outside of its prescribed Christian ground, marriage. Human beings have struggled with sex since the beginning of time. What’s more worrisome is that more and more this is not only being held-up as the norm, it is also, among many of our own children, being understood and hailed as moral progress, a liberation from darkness, with the concomitant understanding, often voiced with some moral smugness, that anyone still holding the traditional view of sex is in need of moral and psychological enlightenment. Who’s judging who here?

This may not make me popular among many of my contemporaries, but I want to state here unequivocally that our culture’s severing of the non-negotiable tie between sex and marriage is just plain wrong. It’s also naïve.

I once attended a conference on sexuality where the keynote speaker, a renowned theologian, suggested the churches have always been far too-uptight about sex. She’s right about that. We’re still a long ways from healthily integrating sexuality and spirituality. However she went on to ask: “Why all this anxiety about sex? Who’s ever been hurt by it anyway?” A more-sober insight might suggest: “Who hasn’t been hurt by it?” History is strewn with broken hearts, broken families, broken lives, terminal bitterness, murders, and suicides within which sex is the canker.

Our churches have, admittedly, never produced a fully healthy, robust theology and spirituality of sex, though nobody else, secular or religious, has either. However, what it has produced, its traditional morality and ethos, does give a fair and important warning to our culture: Don’t be naïve about sexual energy. It isn’t always as friendly and inconsequential as you think!

Sensitive to Community, Beyond Ourselves

December 7, 2015

Some years ago I was challenged by a Bishop regarding an article I’d written. We were talking in his office and the tone eventually got a little testy: “How can you write something like that?” he asked. “Because it’s true,” was my blunt reply. He already knew it was true, but now, realizing that, he became more aware of his real agenda: “Yes, I know it’s true, but that doesn’t mean it should be said in that way in a Catholic newspaper like ours. This isn’t a university classroom or the New York Times. It’s a diocesan newspaper and that’s not the best context within which to say something like that. It will confuse a lot of readers.”

I’m not immune to pride and arrogance and so my spontaneous reaction was defensive. Immediately there were certain voices in me saying: “I am only saying what’s true. The truth needs to be spoken. Why are you afraid to hear the truth? Are we really doing people a favor by shielding them from things they’d rather not hear?”

But I’m glad I swallowed my pride, bit my tongue, muttered a half-sincere apology, and walked out of his office without saying any of those things out loud because, after my initial feelings had subsided and I’d had a more sober and prayerful reflection on our conversation, I realized he was right. Having the truth is one thing, speaking it in a place and a manner that’s helpful is quite another. It’s not for nothing that Jesus challenged us to speak our truth in parables because truth, as T.S. Eliot once quipped, cannot always be swallowed whole and the context and tone within which it is spoken generally dictate whether it’s helpful or not to speak it at a given time or to a given person. Simply put, it isn’t always helpful, or charitable, or mature, to throw a truth into someone’s face.

St. Paul says as much in his Epistle to the Romans in words to this effect: We who are strong must be considerate of those who are sensitive about things like this. We must not just please ourselves. (Romans 15, 1) That can come across as patronizing, as if Paul were telling a certain elite to tone down some of their enlightened views and actions for the sake of those who are less enlightened, but that’s not what’s at stake here. Undergirding this kind of admonition is a fundamental distinction that’s critically important in our teaching, preaching, and pastoral practice, namely, the distinction between Catechesis and Theology, the distinction between nurturing and shoring-up someone’s faith as opposed to stretching someone’s faith so as to make it more universally compassionate.

Catechesis is meant to teach doctrine, teach prayers, teach creeds, clarify biblical and church teachings, and give people a solid, orthodox framework within which to understand their Christian faith. Theology, on the other hand, presupposes that those studying it are already catechized, that they already know their creeds and prayers and have a solid, orthodox foundation. Theology’s function, among other things, is then to stretch its students in function of giving them the symbolic tools with which to understand their faith in a way that leaves no dark, hidden corners into which they are afraid to venture for fear of shaking their faith. Catechesis and Theology have different functions and must respect each other since both are needed: Young seedling plants need to be protected and gently nurtured; just as older, mature plants have to be given the wherewithal to live and thrive inside all the environmental challenges in which they find themselves.

Thus the challenge coming to me from the bishop was, in effect, to be more careful with my audience so as to distinguish theology classrooms and academic periodicals from catechetical situations and church newspapers.

It carried too a special challenge to humility and charity, such as was, for example, shown by the scientist-philosopher, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Elderly, retired, and in declining health, he still found himself “silenced” by the Vatican in that we has forbidden to publish his theological thoughts. But, rather than reacting with anger and arrogance, he reacted with charity and humility. Writing to his Jesuit Provincial, acknowledges needs beyond his own: “I fully recognize that Rome may have its own reasons for judging that, in its present form, my concept of Christianity may be premature or incomplete and that at the present moment its wider diffusion may therefore be inopportune. … [This letter] is to assure you that, in spite of any apparent evidence to the contrary, I am resolved to remain a child of obedience. Obviously, I cannot abandon my own personal search – that would involve me in an interior catastrophe and in disloyalty to my most cherished vocation; but I have ceased to propagate my ideas and am confining myself to achieving a deeper personal insight into them.”

Recognizing the importance of sensitivity as to where and how we speak the truth, Jesus advises: “Speak your truth in parables.”

The Hiddenness of God and the Darkness of Faith

November 30, 2015

When I first began teaching theology, I fantasized about writing a book about the hiddenness of God. Why does God remain hidden and invisible? Why doesn’t God just show himself plainly in a way that nobody can dispute?

One of the standard answers to that question was this: If God did manifest himself plainly there wouldn’t be any need for faith. But that begged the question: Who wants faith? Wouldn’t it be better to just plainly see God? There were other answers to that question of course, except I didn’t know them or didn’t grasp them with enough depth for them to be meaningful. For example, one such answer taught that God is pure Spirit and that spirit cannot be perceived through our normal human senses. But that seemed too abstract to me. And so I began to search for different answers or for better articulations of our stock answers to this question. And there was a pot of gold at the end of the search; it led me to the mystics, particularly to John of the Cross, and to spiritual writers such as Carlo Carretto.

What’s their answer? They offer no simple answers. What they offer instead are various perspectives that throw light on the ineffability of God, the mystery of faith, and the mystery of human knowing in general. In essence, how we know as human beings and how we know God is deeply paradoxical, that is, the more deeply we know anything, the more that person or object begins to become less conceptually clear. One of the most famous mystics in history suggests that as we enter into deeper intimacy we concomitantly enter into a “cloud of unknowing”, namely, into a knowing so deep that it can no longer be conceptualized. What does this mean?

Three analogies can help us here: the analogy of a baby in its mother’s womb; the analogy of darkness as excessive light; and the analogy of deep intimacy as breaking down our conceptual images:

First: Imagine a baby in its mother’s womb. In the womb, the baby is so totally enveloped and surrounded by the mother that, paradoxically, it cannot see the mother and cannot have any concept of the mother. Its inability to see or picture its mother is caused by the mother’s omnipresence, not by her absence. The mother is too present, too all enveloping, to be seen or conceptualized. The baby has to be born to see its mother. So too for us and God. Scripture tells us that we live, and move, and breathe, and have our being in God. We are in God’s womb, enveloped by God, and, like a baby, we must first be born (death as our second birth) to see God face to face. That’s faith’s darkness.

Second: Excessive light is a darkness: If you stare straight into the sun with an unshielded eye, what do you see? Nothing. The very excess of light renders you as blind as if you were in pitch darkness. And that’s also the reason why we have difficulty in seeing God and why, generally, the deeper we journey into intimacy with God, the deeper we are journeying into Light, the more God seems to disappear and become harder and harder to picture or imagine. We’re being blinded, not by God’s absence, but by a blinding light to the unshielded eye. The darkness of faith is the darkness of excessive light.

A final analogy: Deep intimacy is iconoclastic. The deeper our intimacy with anyone the more our pictures and images of that person begin to break down. Imagine this: A friend says to you: “I understand you perfectly: I know your family, your background, your ethnicity, your psychological and emotional temperaments, your strengths, your weakness, and your habits. I understand you.” Would you feel understood? I suspect not. Now imagine a very different scenario: A friend says to you: “You’re a mystery to me! I’ve known you for years, but you’ve a depth that’s somehow beyond me. The longer I know you, the more I know that you are your own mystery.” In this non-understanding, in being allowed to be the full mystery of your own person in that friend’s understanding, you would, paradoxically, feel much better understood. John of the Cross submits that the deeper we journey into intimacy, the more we will begin to understand by not understanding than by understanding. Our relationship to God works in the same way. Initially, when our intimacy is not so deep, we feel that we understand things and we have firm feelings and ideas about God. But the deeper we journey, the more those feelings and ideas will begin to feel false and empty because our growing intimacy is opening us to the fuller mystery of God. Paradoxically this feels like God is disappearing and becoming non-existent.

Faith, by definition, implies a paradoxical darkness, the closer we get to God in this life, the more God seems to disappear because overpowering light can seem like darkness.

Our Muslim Brothers and Sisters

November 23, 2015

This is not a good time to be a Muslim in the Western world. As the violence perpetrated by radical Islamic groups such as ISIS, Al Qaeda, and Boko Haram becomes more and more prevalent, huge numbers of people are becoming paranoid about and even openly hostile towards the Islam religion, seeing all Muslims as a threat. Popular opinion more and more blames the Moslem religion itself for that violence, suggesting that there is something inherent in Islam itself that’s responsible for this kind of violence. That equation needs to be challenged, both in the name of truth and in the name of what’s best in us as Christians.

First of all, it’s untrue: Painting all Muslims with the same brush is like painting all Christians with the same brush, akin to looking at most the depraved man who calls himself a Christian and saying: “That’s Christians for you! They’re all the same!” Second, it’s also unfair: Islamic militants no more speak for Islam than Hitler speaks for Christianity (and that comparison isn’t idly chosen). Finally, such an equation misleads our sympathy: The first victim of Islamic terrorism is Islam itself, namely, authentic God-fearing Muslims are the first victims of this violence.

When we look at the history of any terrorist Islamic group such as ISIS or Al-Qaeda, we see that it first establishes itself by terrorizing and killing thousands of its own people, honest, God-fearing Muslims. And it goes on killing them. ISIS, Al-Qaeda, and Boko Haram have killed thousands more Muslims than they have killed Christians or persons of any other religion. While their ultimate target may well be the secularized, Christian West, but more immediately their real war is against true Islam.

Moreover the victims of Islamic terrorists are not just the thousands of moderate Muslims who have been direct victims of their violence and killings, but also all other Muslims who are now painted with the same brush and negatively judged in both their religiosity and their sincerity. Whenever Islamic terrorists perpetrate an act of violence, its victims are not just those who die, are injured, or who lose loved ones, it’s also all true Muslims, particularly those living in the West because they are now viewed through the eyes of suspicion, fear, and hatred.

But the Muslim religion is not to blame here. There is nothing inherent in either the Koran or in Islam itself that morally or religiously undergirds this kind of violence. We would holler “unfair” if someone were to say that what happened during the Inquisition is inherent in the Gospels. We owe Islam the same judgement. One of the great students of World Religions, the renowned Houston Smith, submits that we should always judge a religion by its best expressions, by its saints and graced-history rather than by its psychopaths and aberrations. I hope that others offer us, Christians, this courtesy. Hitler was somehow a product of the Christian West, as was Mother Teresa. Houston Smith’s point is that the latter, not the former, is a truer basis for judging Christianity. We owe our Islamic brothers and sisters the same courtesy.

And that’s more a recognition of the truth than a courtesy. The word “Islam/Muslim” has its origins in the word “peace”, and that connotation, along with the concept of “surrender to God”, constitutes the essence of what it means to be a Muslim. And for more than 90% of Muslims in the world, that is exactly what it means to be a Muslim, namely, to be a man or woman of peace who has surrendered to God and who now tries to live a life that is centered on faith, prayer, responsibility, and hospitality. Any interpretation of Islam by a radicalized group that gives divine sanction to terrorist violence is false and belies Islam. Islamic extremists don’t speak for God, Mohammed, Islam, or for what it means to surrender in faith, but only for a self-serving ideology, and true Muslims are, in the end, the real victims of that.

Terrorist attacks, like the recent ones in Paris and Mali, call for more, not less, sympathy for true Muslims. It’s time to establish a greater solidarity with Islam, notwithstanding extremist terrorism. We are both part of the same family: We have the same God, suffer the same anxieties, are subject to the same mortality, and will share the same heaven. Muslims more than ever need our understanding, sympathy, support, and fellowship in faith.

Christian de Cherge, the Trappist monk who was martyred by Islamic terrorists in Algeria in 1996, wrote a remarkable letter to his family on France shortly before he died. Well aware that he had a good chance of being killed by Islamic terrorists, he shared with his family that, should this happen, they should know that he had already forgiven his killers and that he foresaw himself and them, his killers, in the same heaven, playing together under God’s gaze, a gaze that lovingly takes in all of God’s children, Muslims no less than Christians.

Lacking the Self-Confidence for Greatness

November 16, 2015

We all have our own images of greatness as these pertain to virtue and saintliness. We picture, for instance, St. Francis of Assisi, kissing a leper; or Mother Teresa, publicly hugging a dying beggar; or John Paul II, standing before a crowd of millions and telling them how much he loves them; or Therese of Lisieux, telling a fellow community member who has been deliberately cruel to her how much she loves her; or even of the iconic, Veronica, in the crucifixion scene, who amidst all the fear and brutality of the crucifixion rushes forward and wipes the face of Jesus.

There are a number of common features within these pictures that speak of exceptional character; but there’s another common denominator here that speaks of exceptionality in a different way, that is, each of these people had an exceptionally strong self-image and an exceptionally strong self-confidence.

It takes more than just a big heart to reach across what separates you from a leper; it also takes a strong self-confidence. It takes more than an empathic heart to publicly hug a dying beggar; it also takes a very robust self-image. It takes more than mere compassion to stand before millions of people and announce that you love them and that it’s important for them to hear this from you; it also takes the rare inner-confidence. It takes more than a saintly soul to meet deliberate cruelty with warm affection; it also requires that first you yourself have experienced deep love in your life. And it takes more than simple courage to ignore the threat and hysteria of a lynch mob so as to rush into an intoxicated crowd and lovingly dry the face of the one they hate; it takes someone who has herself first experienced a strong love from someone else. We must first be loved in order to love. We can’t give what we haven’t got.

Great men and women like St. Francis, Mother Teresa, John Paul II, and Therese of Lisieux are also people with a stunning self-confidence. They have no doubt that God has specially gifted them and they have the confidence to publicly display those gifts. The sad fact is that many of us, perhaps most of us, simply lack sufficient self-image and self-confidence to do what they did. Perhaps our hearts are just as loving as theirs and our empathy just as deep, but, for all kinds of reasons, not least because of how we have been wounded and the shame and reticence that are born from that, it is existentially impossible for us to, like these spiritual giants, stand up in front of the world and say: “I love you – and it’s important that you hear this from me!” Our tongues would surely break off as an inner voice would be saying: “Who do you think you are? Who are you to think the world needs to hear of your special love?”

Truth be told, too often it isn’t virtue that’s our problem; it’s self-confidence. Mostly we aren’t bad, we’re just wounded. William Wordsworth once said something to the effect that we often judge a person to be cold when he or she is only wounded. How true.

Thankfully God doesn’t judge by appearances. God reads the heart and discerns between malice and wound, between coldness and lack of self-confidence. God knows that no one can love unless he or she has first been loved, and that very few, perhaps no one, can publicly display the heart of a giant, the courage of a hero, and the love of saint when that big heart, courage, and love haven’t, first, been felt in an affective and effective way inside of that person’s own life.

So what’s helpful in knowing this? A deeper self-understanding is always helpful and there can be a consolation, though hopefully not a rationalization, in knowing that our hesitancy to step out publicly and do things like Mother Teresa is perhaps more rooted in our lack of a healthy ego than in some kind of selfishness and egoism. But of course, after that consolation comes the challenge to throw away the crutches we have been using to cope with our wounds and our crippled self-image so as to begin to let our heart, courage, and love manifest themselves more publicly. Our tongues won’t break off if we speak out loud about our love and concern, but we will only know that once we actually do it. But, to do that, we will have to first step through a paralyzing shame to a self-abandon that up to now we haven’t mastered.

And there’s a lesson in this too for our understanding of ego within spirituality. We’ve invariably seen ego as bad and identified it with egotism; but that’s over-simplistic because spiritual giants generally have strong egos, though without being egotists. Ironically too many of us are crippled by too-little ego and that’s why we never do great things like spiritual giants do. Egoism is bad, but a healthy, robust ego is not.

Faith, Doubt, Dark Nights, and Maturity

November 9, 2015

In one of his books on contemplative prayer, Thomas Keating shares with us a line that he occasionally uses in spiritual direction. People come to him, sharing how they used to have a warm and solid sense of God in their lives but now complain that all that warmth and confidence have disappeared and they’re left struggling with belief and struggling to pray as they used to. They feel a deep sense of loss and invariably this is their question: “What’s wrong with me?” Keating’s answer: God is wrong with you!

His answer, in essence, says this: Despite your pain, there is something very right with you. You have moved past being a religious neophyte, past an initiatory stage of religious growth, which was right for you for its time, and are now being led into a deeper, not lesser, faith. Moreover, that loss of fervor has brought you to a deeper maturity. So, in effect, what you’re asking is this: I used to be quite sure of myself religiously and, no doubt, probably somewhat arrogant and judgmental. I felt I understood God and religion and I looked with some disdain at the world. Then the bottom fell out of my faith and my certainty and I’m now finding myself a lot less sure of myself, considerably more humble, more empathetic, and less judgmental. What’s wrong with me?

Asked in this way, the question answers itself. Clearly that person is growing, not regressing.

Lost is a place too! Christina Crawford wrote those words, describing her own painful journey through darkness into a deeper maturity. To be saved, we have to first realize that we’re lost, and usually some kind of bottom has to fall out of our lives for us to come to that realization. Sometimes there’s no other cure for arrogance and presumption than a painful loss of certitude about our own ideas about God, faith, and religion. John of the Cross suggests that a deeper religious faith begins when, as he puts it, we forced to understand more by not understanding than by understanding. But that can be a very confusing and painful experience that precisely prompts the feeling: What’s wrong with me?

A curious, paradoxical dynamic lies behind this: We tend to confuse faith with our capacity on any given day to conjure up a concept of God and imagine God’s existence. Moreover we think our faith is strongest at those times when we have affective and emotive feelings attached to our imaginations about God. Our faith feels strongest when bolstered by and inflamed by feelings of fervor. Great spiritual writers will tell us that this stage of fervor is a good stage in our faith, but an initiatory one, one more commonly experienced when we are neophytes. Experience tends to support this. In the earlier stages of a religious journey it is common to possess strong, affective images and feelings about God. At this stage, our relationship with God parallels the relationship between a couple on their honeymoon. On your honeymoon you have strong emotions and possess a certain certainty about your love, but it’s a place you come home from. A honeymoon is an initiatory stage in love, a valuable gift, but something that disappears after it has done its work. A honeymoon is not a marriage, though often confused with one. It’s the same with faith; strong imaginative images of God are not faith, though they’re often confused with it.

Strong imaginative images and strong feelings about God are, in the end, just that, images. Wonderful, but images nonetheless, icons. An image is not the reality. An icon can be beautiful and helpful and point us in the right direction, but when mistaken for the reality it becomes an idol. For this reason, the great spiritual writers tell us that God at certain moments of our spiritual journey “takes away” our certainty and deprives us of all warm, felt feelings in faith. God does this precisely so that we cannot turn our icons into idols, so that we cannot let the experience of faith get in the way of the end of faith itself, namely, an encounter the reality and person of God.

Mystics such as John of the Cross call this experience of seemingly losing our faith, “a dark night of the soul”. This describes the experience where we used to feel God’s presence with a certain warmth and solidity, but now we feel like God is non-existent and we are left in doubt. This is what Jesus experienced on the cross and this is what Mother Teresa wrote about in her journals.

And while that darkness can be confusing, it can also be maturing: It can help move us from being arrogant, judgmental, religious neophytes to being humble, empathic men and women, living inside a cloud of unknowing, understanding more by not understanding than by understanding, helpfully lost in a darkness we cannot manipulate or control, so as to finally be pushed into genuine faith, hope, and charity.

The Communion of Saints

November 2, 2015

At any given time, most of the world believes that death isn’t final, that some form of immortality exists. Most people believe that those who have died still exist in some state, in some modality, in some place, in some heaven or hell, however that might be conceived. In some conceptions, immortality is seen as a state wherein a person is still conscious and relational; while in other concepts, existence after death is understood as real but impersonal, like a drop of water that has flowed back into the oceans.

As Christians, this is our belief: We believe that the dead are still alive, still themselves and, very importantly, still in a living, conscious, and loving relationship with us and with each other. That’s our common concept of heaven and, however simplistic its popular expression at times, it is wonderfully correct. That’s exactly what Christian faith and Christian dogma, not to mention deep intuitive experience, invite us to. After death we live on, conscious, self-conscious, in communication with others who have died before us, in communion with those we left behind on earth, and in communion with the divine itself. That’s the Christian doctrine of the Communion of Saints.

But how is this to be understood? Not least, how do we connect to our loved ones after they have died? Two interpenetrating biblical images can help serve as an entry-point for our understanding of this. Both come from the Gospels.

The Gospels say that at the instant of Jesus’ death, the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to bottom; and the earth shook and the rocks were split. The tombs were opened, and many bodies of the saints who had fallen asleep were raised. (Matthew 27, 50-52) The Gospels then go on to tell us that on the morning of the Resurrection several women came to Jesus’ grave to anoint his dead body with embalming spices, but rather than finding his dead body, they meet instead an empty grave and two angels who challenge them with words to this effect: Why are you looking for a live person in a cemetery? He isn’t here. He’s alive and you can find him in Galilee. (Luke 24, 5) What’s contained in these images?

As Christians, we believe that we are given eternal life through Jesus’ death. Among other images, the Gospels express that in this metaphor: Jesus death, they tell us, “opened the tombs” and emptied graveyards. For this reason, Christians have never had a huge cult around cemeteries. As Christians, we don’t do much in the way of spiritual practices around our cemeteries. Why? Because we believe all those graves are empty. Our loved ones aren’t there and aren’t to be found there. They’re with Jesus, in “Galilee”.

What’s “Galilee”, in terms of a biblical image? In the Gospels, Galilee is more than a place on a map; it’s also a place inside the Spirit, God’s Spirit and our own. In the Gospels, Galilee is the place where, for the most part, the good things happen. It’s the place where the disciples first meet Jesus, where they fall in love with him, where they commit themselves to him, and where miracles happen. Galilee is the place where Jesus invites us to walk on water. Galilee is the place where the disciples’ souls enlarge and thrive.

And that is also a place for each of our deceased loved ones. In each of their lives, there was a Galilee, a place where their persons and souls were most alive, where their lives radiated the energy and exuberance of the divine. When we look at the life of a loved one who has died we need to ask: Where was she most alive? What qualities did she, most-uniquely, embody and bring into a room? Where did she lift my spirit and make me want to be a better person?

Name those things, and you will have named your loved one’s Galilee – and you will also have named the Galilee of the Gospels, namely, that place in the heart where Jesus invites you to meet him. And that is too where you will meet your loved ones in the communion of saints. Don’t look for a live person in a cemetery. She’s not there. She’s in Galilee. Meet her there.

Elizabeth Johnson, leaning on Karl Rahner, adds this thought: “Hoping against hope, we affirm that they [our loved ones who have died] have fallen not into nothingness but into the embrace of the living God. And that is where we can find them again; when we open our hearts to the silent calmness of God’s own life in which we dwell, not by selfishly calling them back to where we are, but by descending into the depth of our own hearts where God also abides.”

And the “Galilee” of our loved ones can also be found inside our own “Galilee”. There’s a deep place inside the heart, inside faith, hope, and charity, were everyone, living or deceased, is met.

Religion, Secular Thought, and Health and Happiness

October 26, 2015

There is no such a thing as pure objectivity, a view that is free of all bias.

Yet that’s the claim often made by non-religious, secular thinkers in debates about values and public policy. They argue that their views, unlike those who admit that their views are grounded in religious principles, are objective and free from bias. Their underlying assumption is that a purely rational argument, a view in effect from nowhere, is objective in a way that religious arguments, based upon someone’s faith and religious perspective, can never be, as if there was such a thing as a purely objective starting point. There isn’t.

We all have a bias. The late Langdon Gilkey used to put this in a gentle, more-palatable way. We don’t have a bias, he says, but rather a “pre-ontology”, a subjective stance from which we look at reality. And that stance includes both the place where we stand, outside, when we look into any reality, as well as the software through which we perceive and reason as we look at anything. He’s right. There’s no view from nowhere, no view that’s unbiased, and no view that’s purely objective. Everyone has a bias. The religious person and the secular person simply stand at different subjective places and process things through different subjective, mental software.

Does this mean then that all views are equally subjective and that everything is relative? Can we not then distinguish between science and superstition? No. There are clearly degrees of objectivity, even if no one can claim absolute objectivity. To admit that even the strictest empirical scientific research will always contain a degree of subjectivity is not to put science on the same level as superstition or even of faith. Empirical science and rational thought must be given their due. It is medical doctors, not faith-healers, who cure physical diseases. Likewise, the scientific theory of evolution and the fundamentalist religious belief that our world was made in seven days are not to be given an equal claim. Much as religious thinkers are sometimes irritated by the absolutist claims of some secularists, science and critical rational thinking must be given their due.

But religious thinking must also be given its due, especially in our debates about values and politics. Religious opinion also needs to be respected, not least with the more-explicit acknowledgement that secular reasoning too operates out of a certain faith, as well as by the acknowledgement that, like its scientific and philosophical counterparts, religious thinking also brings invaluable and needed perspectives to any debate. A lot of the world’s knowledge is contained within science and philosophy, but most of the world’s wisdom is contained in its religious and faith perspectives. Just as we cannot live on religion alone, we too cannot live on science and philosophy alone. Wisdom needs knowledge and knowledge needs wisdom. Science and religion need to more deeply befriend each other.

More important however than having a proper apologetic about the place of faith and religion inside of public policy is an understanding of this for our own health and happiness. We need to understand how subjectivity colors everything, not so much so that we might eventually convince secularists that religious perspectives are important in any discussion, but so that we can more deliberately choose the right pre-ontology so as to see the world through better eyes and make better judgments on the world.

The 12^th century mystic, Hugo of St. Victor, gives us, I believe, the right pre-ontology out of which to operate: Love is the eye! For Hugo, we see most accurately when our eyesight works through the lens of love and altruism, just as we see most inaccurately when our eyesight is colored by suspicion and self-interest. And this isn’t an abstract idea. Experience tells us this. When we look at someone in love, beyond of course those periods when love is overly-obsessed with romantic attraction, we see straight. We then see the other as he or she really is, with full recognition of his or her virtues and faults. That’s as accurate as we will ever see. Conversely, when we see someone through the eyes of suspicion or self-interest our vision is clouded and there’s not as fair a perception.

Jesus says as much with the first words that comes out of his mouth in the Synoptic Gospels. In his very first remarks, he invites us, in one word, to see the world as it really is. His first word? Metanoia. This is a Greek word that is generally translated in English bibles, as Repent, but it literally means “to enter a different, higher mind”. And that connotation is highlighted when we contrast it to another Greek word which we already know, namely, Paranoia. Metanoia is the opposite of paranoia.

When we look at the world through the eyes of paranoia, we are not seeing straight. Conversely, when we look at the world through eyes of metanoia, we are seeing straight, religiously and scientifically. Love, indeed, is the eye.

Displacing Ego and Narcissism

October 19, 2015

The Buddhists have a little axiom that explains more about ourselves than we would like. They say that you can understand most of what’s wrong in the world and inside yourself by looking at a group-photo. Invariably you will look first at how you turned out before looking at whether or not this is a good photo of the group. Basically, we assess the quality of things on the basis of how we are doing.

Rene Descartes must be smiling. He began his philosophical search with the question: What’s the one thing that’s indubitable? What’s the one thing, for sure, of which we can be certain. His answer, his famous dictum: I think, therefore I am! Ultimately what’s most real to us is our own consciousness. And it’s so obsessively real that, until we can find a maturity beyond our natural instincts, it locks us inside a certain prison. What prison? Psychologists call it narcissism, an excessive self-preoccupation that keeps us fixated on ourselves and on our own private headaches and idiosyncratic heartaches. Like the Buddhist commentary on the group-photo, we worry little about how others are doing; our focus is first of all upon ourselves.

And this condition is not a childish thing that can be brushed off by glibly affirming that we have grown-up, are beyond ego, and are unselfish. Ego and its child, narcissism, do not go away simply because we consider ourselves mature and spiritual. They’re incurable because they’re an innate part of our make-up. Moreover, they’re not meant to go away, nor are they, in themselves, a moral defect. Our ego is the center of our conscious personality, part of our core make-up, and each of us needs a strong ego to remain glued-together, sane, healthily self-protective, and able to give of oneself to others.

But it usually comes as a shock to people when someone suggests that great people, spiritual people, have strong egos. For example, Francis of Assisi, Theresa of Avila, Therese of Lisieux, and Mother Teresa, for all their humility, had strong egos, namely, they had a clear sense of their own identity, their own giftedness, and their own importance. However, in each case, they also had the strong concomitant sense that their persons and gifts did not originate with themselves and were not meant for them. Rather, like Israel’s sense of itself as chosen people, they were clear that the source of their giftedness was God and that their gifts were intended not for themselves but for others. And, in that, lies the difference between being having a strong ego and being an egoist. An egoist has a strong ego and is gifted, but he understands himself as both the creator and objective of that gift. Conversely, great persons have strong egos but are always aware that their giftedness does not come from them but is something flowing through them as a gift for others.

The goal in maturing then is not to kill the ego but rather to have a healthy ego, one that is integrated into a larger self that precisely is concerned with the group-photo. But coming to that maturity is a struggle that will leave us, too often, in either inflation (too full of ourselves and too unaware of God) or in depression (too empty of our own value and too unaware of God).

Maturity and sanctity do not lie in killing or denigrating the ego, as is sometimes expressed in well-meaning, though misguided, spiritualities, as if human nature was evil. Ego is integral and critical to our natural make-up, part of our instinctual DNA. We need a healthy ego to be and remain healthy. So the intent is never to kill or denigrate the ego, but rather to give it its proper, mature role, that is, to keep us sane, in touch with our gifts, and in touch with both the source and intent of those gifts.

But this can only be achieved paradoxically: Jesus tells us that we can find life only by losing our lives. A famous prayer attributed to Francis of Assisi gives this its classic, popular expression: O divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek: to be consoled as to console; to be understood as to understand; to be loved as to love. For it is in giving that we receive; it is in pardoning that we are pardoned; and it is in dying to self that we are born to eternal life. Only by denying our ego can we have a healthy ego.

Finally, some wisdom about ego from the Taoist master, Chuang Tzu: If you are crossing a river in small boat, he says, and another boat runs into you, you will be angry if there is someone steering that runaway boat; but you will not experience that same anger if the boat is empty. Why no anger then? Chuang Tzu’s answer: A person who has let go of his or her ego “leaves no trace”. Such a person does not trigger anger in others.

The Stigma of Suicide

October 12, 2015

Recently I read, in succession, three books on suicide, each written by a mother who lost one of her children to suicide. All three books are powerful, mature, not given to false sentiment, and worth reading: Lois Severson, Healing the Wound from my Daughter’s Suicide, Grief Translated into Words, lost her daughter, Patty, to suicide; Gloria Hutchinson, Damage Done, Suicide of an Only Son, lost her son, David, to suicide; and Marjorie Antus, My Daughter, Her Suicide, and God, A Memoir of Hope, lost her daughter, Mary, to suicide. Patty and David were in their mid-twenties, Mary was still a teen.

You cannot read these biographies and not have your heart ache for these three young people who died in this unfortunate manner. What these books describe in each case is a person who is very loveable, oversensitive, has a history of emotional struggles, and is in all likelihood suffering from a chemical imbalance. Hearing their stories should leave you more convinced than ever that no God worth worshipping could ever condemn any of these persons to exclusion from the family of life simply because of the manner of their deaths. Gabriel Marcel had an axiom which said: To love someone is to say of that person, you at least will not die. That’s solid Christian doctrine.

As Christians we believe that, as a community of believers, we make up the Body of Christ along with all of those who have died in faith before us. Part of that belief is that Christ has given us the power to bind and loose which, among other things, means that our love for someone can hold that person inside our family, inside the community of grace, and inside of heaven itself. In all three of these books, these mothers make it clear that this is exactly what they are doing. Their family, their circle of grace, their love, and their heaven includes their lost child. My heaven too includes these three young people, as should any true understanding of God, of grace, of love, and of the family of life.

That’s a deep consolation, but it doesn’t take away the pain. For a parent, the loss of a child to any kind of death leaves a wound that, this side of eternity, will find no healing. The death of one’s child goes against nature, parents aren’t supposed to bury their children. The death of any child is hard, but if that death comes by suicide, that pain is compounded. There’s the frustration and anger that, unlike a death from a physical disease, this is unwarranted, unnecessary, and an act of betrayal in some way. And there’s the endless second-guessing: How responsible am I for this? How should have I been more alert? Where was I negligent? Why wasn’t I around at the crucial moment? Guilt and anger comingle with the grief.

But that isn’t all. Beyond all of this, which is itself more than sufficient to break a person, lies the stigma attached to suicide. In the end, despite a better understanding of suicide and a more enlightened attitude towards it, there is still a social, moral, and religious stigma attached to it, equally true in both secular and religious circles. In the not too-distant past, churches used to refuse to bury someone who died by suicide on blessed ground. The churches have changed their attitudes and their practice on this, but, truth be told, many people still struggle in their gut to accord a blessed, peaceful farewell to someone who has died by suicide. The stigma still remains. Someone who dies in this manner is still seen as somehow accursed, as dying outside the family of life and the circle of grace. There is, for most people, nothing consoling in their deaths.

I have suggested elsewhere in my writings that the majority of suicides should be understood as death by a mortal illness: a deadly chemical imbalance, an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, or an oversensitivity that strips someone of the resiliency needed to live. Here, however, I want address more specifically the issue of the stigma attached to suicide.

There’s still a stigma attached to suicide, that’s clear. With that in mind, it can be helpful to reflect upon the manner in which Jesus died. His death was clearly not a suicide, but it was similarly stigmatized. Crucifixion carried a stigma from every point of view: religious, moral, and social. A person dying in this way was understood to be dying outside the mercy of God and outside the blessing and acceptance of the community. The families of those crucified carried a certain shame and those who died by crucifixion were also buried apart, in grounds that then took on their own stigma. And it was understood that they were outside the mercy of God and of the community.

Jesus death was clearly not a suicide, but it evoked a similar perception. The same stigma as we attach to suicide was also attached to the manner in which he died.

Innocence, Complexity, and Sanctity

October 5, 2015

Some years ago, I officiated at a wedding. As the officiating priest, I was invited to the reception and dance that followed upon the church service. Not knowing the family well and having church services the next morning, I left right after the banquet and the toasts, just as the dancing was about to start. When I was seemingly out of earshot, I heard the bride’s father say to someone: “I’m glad that Father has gone; now we can celebrate with some rock music!”

I didn’t take the remark personally since the man meant well, but the remark stung nevertheless because it betrayed an attitude that painted me, and others like me, as religious but naïve, as good to sit at the head table and be specially introduced, but as being best out of sight when real life begins; as if being religious means that you are unable to handle the earthiness and beat of rock music, as if church and earthy celebration are in opposition to each other, as if sanctity demands an elemental innocence the precludes human complexity, and as if full-blood and religion are best kept separate.

But that’s an attitude within most people, however unexpressed. The idea is that God and human complexity do not go together. Ironically that attitude is particularly prevalent among the over-pious and those most negative towards religion. For the both the over-pious and the militant-impious, God and robust life cannot go together. And that’s also basically true for the rest of us as is evident in our inability to attribute complexity, earthiness, and temptation to Jesus, to the Virgin Mary, to the saints, and to other publicly-recognized religious figures such as Mother Theresa. It seems that we can only picture holiness as linked to a certain naiveté. For us, holiness needs to be sheltered and protected like a young child. As a result we then project such an over-idealization of innocence and simplicity onto Jesus, Mary, and our religious exemplars that it becomes impossible for us to ever really identify with them. We can give them admiration, but very little else.

For example, the Virgin Mary of our piety could not have written the Magnificat. She lacks the complexity to write such a prayer because we have projected on to her such an innocence, delicacy, and childlikeness so as to leave her less than fully adult and fully intelligent. Ultimately this has a negative effect religiously. To identify an unrealistic innocence and simplicity with holiness sets out an unattainable ideal that has too many people believe that their own red blood, with its restless stirrings, makes them bad candidates for the church and sanctity.

In the Roman Catholic Rite of baptism, at a point, the priest or deacon pronounces these words: See in this white garment the outward sign of your Christian dignity. With your family and friends to help you by word and example, bring that dignity unstained into the everlasting life of heaven. That’s a wonderful statement celebrating the beauty and virtue of innocence. But it celebrates an innocence that has yet to meet adult life.

The innocence of a child is stunning in its beauty and holds up for us a mirror within which to see our moral and psychological scars and the missteps we have taken as adults, not unlike the humbling we can feel when we look at bodies in a mirror when we get older. The beauty of youth is gone. But the disquiet and judgment we feel in the presence of a child’s innocence is more a neurosis and misconception than a genuine judgment on our sanctity and moral goodness. Children are innocent because they have not yet had to deal with life, its infinite complexities, and its inevitable wounds. Young children are so beautifully innocent because they are still naïve and pre-sophisticated. To move to adulthood they will have to pass through inevitable initiations which will leave more than a few smudges on the childlike purity of their baptismal robes.

A friend of mine is fond of saying this about innocence: As an adult, I wouldn’t give a penny for the naïve purity of a child, but I would give everything to find true childlike innocence inside the complexity of my adult life. I think that what he means is this: Jesus went into the singles’ bars of his time, except he didn’t sin. The task in spirituality is not to try to emulate the naive innocence and non-complexity of our childhood. That’s an exercise in denial and a formula for rationalization. The task is rather to move towards a second-naiveté, a post-sophistication which has already taken into account the full complexity of our lives. Only then will we have again the innocent joy of children, even as we are able to stand steady inside the rawness of rock music, the power and complexity of human sexuality, the concupiscent tendencies of the human heart, and the uncanny and wily maneuverings innate inside the human spirit. From there we can write the Magnificat.

Caring for Our Soul

September 28, 2015

What does it profit you if you gain the whole world but suffer the loss of your own soul?

Jesus taught that and, I suspect, we generally don’t grasp the full range of it meaning. We tend to take Jesus’ words to mean this: What good is it if someone gains riches, fame, pleasure, and glory and then dies and goes to hell? What good is earthly glory or pleasure if we miss out on eternal life?

Well, Jesus’ teaching does mean that, no question, but there are other lessons in this teaching that have important things to teach us about health and happiness already here in this life. How do we lose our souls? What does it mean “to lose your soul” already in this world? What is a soul and how can it be lost?

Since a soul is immaterial and spiritual it cannot be pictured. We have to use abstract terms to try to understand it. Philosophers, going right back to Aristotle, have tended to define the soul as a double principle inside every living being: For them, the soul is both the principle of life and energy inside us as well as the principle of integration. In essence, the soul is two things: It’s the fire inside us giving us life and energy and it’s the glue that holds us together. While that sounds abstract, it’s anything but that because we have first-hand experience of what this means.

If you have ever been at the bedside of a dying person, you know exactly when the soul leaves the body. You know the precise moment, not because you see something float away from the body, but rather because one minute you see a person, whatever her struggle and agony, with energy, fire, tension in her body and a minute later that body is completely inert, devoid of all energy and life. Nothing animates it anymore. It becomes a corpse. As well, however aged or diseased that body might be, until the second of death it is still one integrated organism. But at the very second of death that body ceases to be one organism and becomes instead a series of chemicals which now begin to separate and go their own ways. Once the soul is gone, so too are gone all life and integration. The body no longer contains any energy and it’s no longer glued together.

And since the soul is a double principle doing two things for us, there are two corresponding ways of losing our souls. We can have our vitality and energy go dead or we can become unglued and fall apart, petrification or dissipation, in either case we lose our souls.

If that is true, then this very much nuances the question of how we should care for our souls. What is healthy food for our souls? For instance, if I am watching television on a given night, what’s good for my soul? A religious channel? A sports channel? A mindless sitcom? The nature channel? Some iconoclastic talk-show? What’s healthy for my soul?

This is a legitimate question, but also a trick one. We lose our soul in opposite ways and thus care of the soul is a refined alchemy that has to know when to heat things up and when to cool things down: What’s healthy for my soul on a given night depends a lot upon what I’m struggling with more on that night: Am I losing my soul because I’m losing vitality, energy, hope, and graciousness in my life? Am I growing bitter, rigid, sterile, becoming a person who’s painful to be around? Or, conversely, am I full of life and energy but so full of it that I am falling apart, dissipating, losing my sense of self? Am I petrifying or dissipating? Both are a loss of soul. In the former situation, the soul needs more fire, something to rekindle its energy. In the latter case, the soul already has too much fire; it needs some cooling down and some glue.

This tension between the principle of energy and the principle of integration within the human soul is also one of the great archetypal tensions between liberals and conservatives. In terms of an oversimplification, but a useful one, it’s true to say that liberals tend to protect and promote the energy-principle, the fire, while conservatives tend to protect and promote the integration-principle, the glue. Both are right, both are needed, and both need to respect the other’s instinct because the soul is a double principle and both these principles need protection.

After we die we can go to heaven or hell. That’s one way of speaking about losing or saving our souls. But Christian theology also teaches that heaven and hell start already now. Already here in this life, we can weaken or destroy the God-given life inside us by either petrification or dissipation. We can lose our souls by not having enough fire or we can lose them by not having enough glue.

Things Beyond Our Imagination

September 21, 2015

Recently, at an academic dinner, I was sitting across the table from a nuclear scientist. At one point, I asked him this question: Do you believe that there’s human life on other planets? His answer surprised me: “As a scientist, no, I don’t believe there’s human life on another planet. Scientifically, the odds are strongly against it. But, as a Christian, I believe there’s human life on other planets. Why? My logic is this: Why would God chose to have only one child?”

Why would God choose to have only one child? Good logic. Why indeed would an infinite God, capable of creating and loving beyond all imagination, want to do this only once? Why would an infinite God, at a certain point, say: “That’s enough. That’s my limit. These are all the people I can handle and love! Anything beyond this is too much for me! Now is the time to stop creating and enjoy what I’ve done.”

Put this way, my scientist friend’s hunch makes a lot of sense. Given that God is infinite, why would God ever stop doing what God is doing? Why would God favor just us, who have been already been given life, and not give that same gift endlessly to others? By what logic, other than the limits of our own mind, might we posit an end to creation?

We struggle with this because what God has already created, both in terms of the immensity of the universe and the number of people who have been born in history, is already too much for our imagination to grasp. There are billions and billions of planets, with trillions of processes happening on each of these every second. Just on our planet, earth, there are now more than seven billion people living, millions more have lived before us, and many more are being born every second. And inside of each of these persons there is a unique heart and mind caught-up in an infinite and complex array of joys, heartaches, and moral choices. Moreover, all of these trillions of human and cosmic processes have been going on for millions and billions of years. How can we imagine a heart and a mind somewhere that knows and loves and cares intimately about every individual person, every individual joy, every individual heartache, every individual moral choice, and every individual planet, star, and grain of sand, as if it were an only child?

The answer is clear: It cannot be imagined! To try to imagine this is to end up either in atheism or nursing a false concept of God. Any God worth believing in has to be able to know and love beyond human imagination, otherwise the immensity of our universe and the uniqueness of our lives are not being held inside the loving care of anyone’s hand and heart.

But how can God know, love, and care for all of this immensity and complexity? Moreover, how will all these billions and billions of people go to heaven, so that all of us end up in one body of love within which we will be in intimate community with each other? That’s beyond all imagination, at least in terms of human capacity, but my hunch is that heaven cannot be imagined not because it is too complex but because it is too simple, namely, simple in the way Scholastic philosophy affirms that God is simple: God so embodies and encompasses all complexity so as to constitute a reality too simple to be imagined.

It seems too that the origins of our universe are also too simple to be imagined: Our universe, in so far as we know it, had a beginning and scientists believe (The Big Bang Theory) that everything originated from a single cell of energy too tiny to measure or imagine. This single cell exploded with a force and an energy that is still going on today, still expanding outward and creating billions and billions of planets in its wake. And scientists believe that all of this will come back together again, involute, sometime in a future which will take billions of more years to unfold.

So here’s my hunch: Maybe the billions and billions of people, living and dead and still to be born, in both their origins and in their eventual destiny, parallel what has happened and is happening in the origin, expansion, and eventual involution of our universe, that is, just as God is creating billions and billions of planets, God is creating billions and billions of people. And, just as our physical universe will one day come back together again into a single unity, so too will all people come together again in a single community within which God’s intimate love for each of us will bring us together and hold us together in a unity too simple to be imagined, except that now that union with God and each other will not be unconscious but will be known and felt in a very heightened, self-conscious gratitude and ecstasy.

Our Overstimulated Grandiosity – and Our Impoverished Symbols

September 14, 2015

There are now more than seven billion people on this earth and each one of us feels that he or she is the center of the universe. That accounts for most of the problems we have in the world, in our neighborhoods, and in our families.

And no one’s to blame for this, save God perhaps, for making us this way. Each of us is created in the image and likeness of God, meaning that, each of us, holds within a divine spark, a piece of infinity, and an ingrained knowledge of that unique dignity. We are infinite souls inside a finite world. To paraphrase St. Augustine, we are made for the divine and our hearts aren’t just dissatisfied until they rest there again, they’re also grandiose along the journey, enflamed by their own uniqueness and dignity. God has made everything beautiful in its own season, Ecclesiastes tells us, but God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are out of sync with the seasons from beginning to end. We’re overcharged for this planet, and we know it.

Moreover that sense of specialness lies at the center of our awareness: I think, therefore I am! Descartes was right: The only thing we can be absolutely sure of is that we exist and that our own thoughts and feelings are real. We may be dreaming everything else. We awake to self-consciousness aware of our specialness, frustrated by the fact that the world cannot give us what we crave, and insufficiently aware of the fact that everyone else on this earth is also equally unique and special. That’s human nature and it’s always been this way.

Today however a number of things are conspiring together to exacerbate both our grandiosity and our restlessness. In brief, today we are mostly overstimulated in our grandiosity and are not generally given the tools to handle that inflammation of soul.

How are we overstimulated in our grandiosity today? Various factors play together here, but contemporary media and information technology need to be highlighted. Through them, in effect, the whole world is being made available to us during every waking minute of our lives. We are not easily equipped to handle that. While information alone is mostly neutral, and at times even morally inspiring, the downside is that contemporary media overstimulates our grandiosity and restlessness by inundating us with the intimate details of the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, the talented, the powerful, the super-intelligent, the mega-achievers, and the perverted in a way that titillates, seduces, and at times assaults our interior balance so as to leave us cultivating private fantasies of grandiosity, of standing out in a way that makes the world take notice. We see this in an extreme and perverted form in some of the mass shootings that occur in our society, where a lonely, deranged person randomly kills others out of sick vision of grandiosity. We see it too in the growing phenomenon of anorexia. These examples may be atypical, but we’re becoming a society within which most everyone is perilously overstimulated in his or her grandiosity.

And today we are generally without sufficient personal tools to handle this. Human beings have always been restless and grandiose, but in previous generations they had more tools – religious and societal – to handle restlessness, grandiosity, and frustration. For example, in previous generations the cultural ethos gave people much less permission to cultivate ego than it does today. Previous to our own generation, one had to be more apologetic about self-promotion, self-canonization, overt greed, and crass self-centeredness. Humility was espoused as a virtue and no one was supposed to get too big for his or her britches. That threw a lot of cold water on ego, crass self-assertion, and greed, in effect dampening grandiosity. The message back then was clear: You’re not the center of the universe!

By and large, that’s no longer the case today. Society, more and more, gives us license to be grandiose, to set ourselves up as the center and proudly announce that publicly. Not only are we allowed today to get too big for our britches, we aren’t culturally admired unless we do assert ourselves in that way. And that’s a formula for jealousy, bitterness, and violence. Grandiosity and restlessness need healthy guidance both from the culture and from religion. Today, we generally do not see that guidance.

We are dangerously weak in inculcating into the consciousness of society, especially into the consciousness of the young, a number of vital human and religious truths: To God alone belongs the glory! In this life ultimately all symphonies remain unfinished. You are not the center of the earth. There is real sin! Selfishness is not a virtue! Humility is a virtue! You will only find life by giving it away! Other lives are as real as your own!

We have failed our youth by giving them unrealistic expectations, even as we are depriving them of the tools with which to handle those expectations.

God’s Ineffability – What’s Revealed in Jesus’ Eyes?

September 7, 2015

God, as I understand him, is not very well understood. A colleague of mine, now deceased, was fond of saying that. It’s a wise comment.

Anyone who claims to understand God is deceived because the very first dogma we have about God affirms that God is ineffable. That means that we can know God, but never adequately capture God in a concept. God is unimaginable. God cannot be circumscribed and put into a mental picture of any kind. Thank goodness too. If God could be understood then God would be as limited as we are.

But God is infinite. Infinity, precisely because it’s unlimited, cannot be circumscribed. Hence it cannot be captured in a mental picture. Indeed, we don’t even have a way of picturing God’s gender. God is not a man, not a woman, and not some hybrid, half-man and half-woman. God’s gender, like God’s nature, is intellectually inconceivable. We can’t grasp it and have no language or pronoun for it. God, in a modality beyond the categories of human thought, is somehow perfect masculinity and perfect femininity all at the same time. It’s a mystery beyond us.

But while that mystery cannot be grasped with any rational adequacy, we can know it intimately, and indeed know it so deeply that it’s meant to be the most intimate of all knowledge in our lives. It’s no accident that the bible uses the verb “to know” to connote sexual intimacy. There are different ways of knowing, some more inchoate, intuitive, and intimate than others. We can know God in a radical intimacy, even as we cannot conceptualize God with any adequacy. And that’s also true of all the deep realities in life, we can know them and relate to them intimately, but we can never fully understand them.

So where does that leave us with God? In the best of places! We are not on a blind date, struggling to develop intimacy with a complete stranger, with an unknown person who could be benign or malignant. God may be ineffable, but God’s nature is known. Divine revelation, as seen through nature, as seen through other religions, and especially as seen through Jesus, spells out what’s inside God’s ineffable reality. And what’s revealed there is both comforting beyond all comfort and challenging beyond all challenge. What’s revealed in the beauty of creation, in the compassion that’s the hallmark of all true religion, and in Jesus’ revelation of his Father, takes us beyond a blind date into a trustworthy relationship. Nature, religion, and Jesus conspire together to reveal an Ultimate Reality, a Ground of Being, a Creator and Sustainer of the universe, a God, who is wise, intelligent, prodigal, compassionate, loving, forgiving, patient, good, trustworthy, and beautiful beyond imagination.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, once, in a mystical vision, saw all of this hidden inside the eyes of Jesus. Staring at a painting of Jesus on a church-wall one day, Jesus’ eyes suddenly became transfigured and this what Teilhard saw: “These eyes which at first were so gentle and filled with pity that I thought my mother stood before me, became an instant later, like those of a woman, passionate and filled with the power to subdue, yet at the same time so imperiously pure that under their domination it would have been physically impossible for the emotions to go astray. And then they changed again, and became filled with a noble, virile majesty, similar to that which one sees in the eyes of men of great courage or refinement or strength, but incomparably more lofty to behold and more delightful to submit to. This scintillation of diverse beauties was so complete, so captivating, and also so swift that I felt it touch and penetrate all my powers simultaneously, so that the very core of my being vibrated in response to it, sounding a unique note of expansion and happiness.

Now while I was ardently gazing deep into the pupils of Christ’s eyes, which had become abysses of fiery, fascinating life, suddenly I beheld rising up from the depths of those same eyes what seemed like a cloud , blurring and blending all that variety I have been describing to you. Little by little an extraordinary expression of great intensity, spread over the diverse shades of meaning which the divine eyes revealed, first of all penetrating them and then finally absorbing them all. … And I stood dumbfounded. For this final expression, which had dominated and gathered up into itself all the others, was indecipherable. I simply could not tell whether it denoted an indescribable agony or a superabundance of triumphant joy.”

God cannot be deciphered, circumscribed, or captured in human thought; but, from what can be deciphered, we’re in good, safe hands. We can sleep well at night. God has our back. In the end, both for humanity as a whole and for our own individual lives, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. God is good.