Looking for the One God Inside Our Denominational and Faith Divisions

January 19, 2015

Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, was fond of sharing this story: He had a very close Muslim friend, Mohammed, and the two of them used to pray together, even as they remained aware of their differences, as Muslim and Christian. Aware too that certain schools of thought, both Muslim and Christian, warn against this type of prayer, fearing that the various faiths are not praying to the same God, the two of them didn’t call their sessions together prayer. Rather they imagined themselves as “digging a well together”. One day Christian asked Mohammed: “When we get to the bottom of our well, what will we find? Muslim water or Christian water?” Mohammed, half-amused but still deadly serious, replied: “Come on now, we’ve spent all this time walking together, and you’re still asking me this question. You know well that at the bottom of that well, what we’ll find is God’s water.”

There are important religious truths couched inside that story. First off, all religions worthy of the name believe that the first thing we need to affirm about God is that God is ineffable, that is, God is beyond all human imagination, conceptualization, and language. Everything we think and say about God, even within scripture and our defined dogmas, is more inadequate than adequate. It reveals some truth, but, this side of eternity, never the complete truth. No dogma and no religion ever provide an adequate expression of God. If this is true, and it is, then all religious truth is always partial and limited in its historical expression and cannot claim adequacy. All religions, all dogmas, and all expressions of theology, irrespective of denomination or religion, must humbly acknowledge their incompleteness. Only God is absolute, and an absolute knowledge of God lies at the bottom of the well, at the end of our religious journey.

That fact radically changes the way we need to conceive of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue. Since no one, us included, has the full truth, the way of ecumenism and interfaith dialogue should not be conceived, as has been so much the case up to the present, of one side winning the other side over: We, alone, have the truth and you must join us! Rather the way has to be conceived of precisely “digging a well together”, namely, as each of us, with an open heart, longing for those others who are not at our table, refusing all proselyting, becoming engaged through our own religious tradition in the search for deeper conversion. That search is precisely the search to get to the bottom of the well, knowing that, once there, we, as all other sincere, authentic religious searchers, will find both God’s water and unity with everyone else who is there.

The renowned ecumenist, Avery Dulles, called this the path of “progressive convergence”. Eventual unity among the various churches and various faiths will not come about by everyone in the world converting to one denomination or one religion. Rather it will come about, and can only come about, by each of us converting more deeply inside our own tradition. As each of us and each faith move more deeply into the mystery of God we will progressively draw closer and closer to each other. Christian de Cherge’s story illustrates this wonderfully.

And this path, when correctly taken, does not lead us into relativism and the naïve belief that all religions are equal. Nor does it mean that we do not enthusiastically and openly celebrate our own religious faith tradition, stand ready to defend it, and stand ready to welcome anyone into it. But it does mean that we must humbly accept that, while we have the truth, the truth is not ours alone. God is not a tribal deity and God’s salvific intent is universal. God desires the salvation of those in other denominations and in other religious traditions just surely as he desires our own. Hence, as Jesus teaches us, God has “other sheep”, loved individuals and loved communities who are not of our fold. God’s love and revelation embrace everyone.

The path to unity among Christians of different denominations and the path to unity among world religions is not then the path of proselytism within which any one tradition, Christianity included, claims absolute truth for itself and demands that union can be achieved only by everyone converting to its side. Rather it lies in “digging a well together”, that is, in each of us, within our own tradition, converting more deeply into the mystery of God and into all that asks of us. As we move deeper into the mystery of God we will find ourselves more and more one, as brothers and sisters in faith.

No religion is absolute, only God is absolute. Knowing that, should make us less smug in the practice of our own religion, more respectful of other denominations and religions, and more willing to let God’s vision trump our own.

The Importance of the Interior and Private

January 12, 2015

We can never be challenged too strongly with regards to being committed to social justice. A key, non-negotiable, summons that comes from Jesus himself is precisely the challenge to reach out to the poor, to the excluded, to those whom society deems expendable.

Therefore the huge, global issues of justice should preoccupy us. Can we be good Christians or even decent human beings without letting the daily news baptize us? The majority of the world still lives in hunger, thousands are dying of Ebola and other such illnesses, countless lives are torn apart by war and violence, and we are still, as a world, a long ways from dealing realistically with racism, sexism, abortion, and the integrity of physical creation. These are major moral issues and we may not escape into our own private world and simply ignore them.

However, precisely because they are so mammoth and important, we can get the impression that the other moral issues we have to deal with, issues of private morality, are not as important. It’s all too easy to conclude that, given the mega-problems in our world, it doesn’t matter much how we live in the deeper recesses of our private worlds.

Our private, little moral concerns can look pretty petty when weighed against the problems of the world as a whole. Do we really believe that God cares much whether or not we say our morning prayers, gossip about a colleague, nurse a grudge or two, or are less than fully honest in our sexual lives? Does God really care about these things?

Yes. God cares because we care. Large, global issues notwithstanding, issues of personal integrity are generally what make or break our happiness, not to mention our character and our intimate relationships. In the end, they aren’t petty concerns at all. They shape the big things. Social morality is simply a reflection of private morality. What we see in the global picture is simply a magnification of the human heart.

When ego, greed, lust, and selfishness are not dealt with inside the private recesses of the heart, it’s naive to think that they will be dealt with at a global level. How are we to build a just, loving world, if we cannot, first of all, tame selfishness inside us? There will be no transparency at a global level as long as we continue to think it’s okay to not be transparent in our private lives. The global simply reflects the private. The failure to recognize this is, to my mind, the elephant in the room in terms of our inability to bring justice to the earth.

Social action that does not have private morality as its base is not spirituality, but simple political action, power dealing with power, important in itself, but the not to be confused with real transformation. The kingdom of God doesn’t work that way. It works by conversion and real conversion is an eminently personal act. Carlos Castaneda, the Native American mystic, writes: “I come from Latin America where intellectuals are always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs are being thrown. But nothing has changed much. It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to stop being jealous or to come to internal silence, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins.”

Thomas Merton makes the same point. During the 1960s, when so many intellectuals were involved in various social struggles, Merton was tucked away in a monastery, far (it would seem) from the real battlefronts. Stung by outside criticism of his monastic seclusion, he admitted that to most outsiders it “must seem like small potatoes” to be engaged mainly in a war against one’s private demons. However, he still believed that he was fighting the real battle: that of changing hearts. When you change a heart, he says, you have helped bring about some permanent structural, moral change on this planet. Everything else is simply one power attempting to displace another.

Private morality and all that comes with it – private prayer and the attempt to be honest and transparent in even the smallest and most secret of things – is the core from which all morality takes its root. Jan Walgrave, commenting on the social importance of mysticism, suggests: “You can generate more energy by splitting a single atom than you can by harnessing all the forces of water and wind on earth. That is precisely what Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed did. They split the inner atom of love. Great energy flowed out.” John of the Cross, in teaching about the vital importance of honesty in small things, says: “It makes no difference whether a bird is tied down by a heavy rope or by the slenderest of cords, it can’t fly in either case.”

Private morality is not an unimportant, unaffordable luxury, a soft virtue, something that stands in the way of commitment to social justice. It’s the deep place where the moral atom needs to be split.

Understanding and Appreciating Our Differences

January 5, 2015

It’s common for us to see God’s grace and blessing in what unites us. We naturally sense the presence of grace when, at our core, we feel a strong moral bond with certain other persons, churches, and faiths. That, biblically, is what defines family.

But what if what separates us, what if what makes other persons, churches, and faiths seem foreign and strange is also a grace, a difference intended by God? Can we think of our differences, as we think of our unity, as a gift from God? Most religions, including Christianity, would answer affirmatively.

Thus in both the Jewish and the Christian scriptures there is the strong, recurring motif that God’s message to us generally comes through the stranger, the foreigner, from the one who is different from us, from a source from which we would never expect to hear God’s voice. Added to this is the notion that when God speaks to us we generally experience it as a surprise, as something unexpected, and as something that does not easily square with our normal expectations as to how God should work and how we should learn. There’s a reason for this. Simply put, when we think we are hearing God’s voice in what’s familiar, comfortable, and secure, the temptation is always to reshape the message according to our own image and likeness, and so God often comes to us through the unfamiliar.

Moreover, what’s familiar is comfortable and offers us security; but, as we know, real transformative growth mostly happens when, like the aged Sarah and Abraham, we are forced to set off to a place that’s foreign and frightening and that strips us of all that is comfortable and secure. Set off, God told Sarah and Abraham, to a land where you don’t know where you’re going. Real growth happens and real grace breaks in when we have to deal with what is other, foreign, different. Learn to understand, writes John of the Cross, more by not understanding than by understanding. What’s dark, unfamiliar, frightening, and uninvited will stretch us in ways that the familiar and secure cannot. God sends his word to the earth through “angels” and they’re not exactly something we’re familiar with.

If this is true, then our differences are also a grace. Accordingly, seeing things differently does not mean that we are not seeing the same things. Accordingly, different notions about God and different ways of speaking about God do not mean that we’re speaking of a different God. The same holds true for our churches, having difference concepts of what it means to be church does not necessarily mean that there isn’t some deeper underlying unity inside our diversity. Similarly for how we conceive of the real presence of Christ in the Eucharist, how we imagine Christ as being really present inside of bread and wine, can take many forms and can be spoken of in different ways, without it meaning that we’re speaking of a different reality.

John Paul II, addressing an interfaith gathering, once commented that “there are differences in which are reflected the genius and spiritual riches of God to the nations.” Christian de Cherge, after a lifetime of dialogue with Islam, suggests that our differences have a “quasi-sacramental function”, that is, they help to give real flesh in this world to the riches of God, who is ineffable and can never be captured in any one expression.

Our differences then are part of the mystery of our unity. Real unity, which needs to reflect the richness of God, does not exist in uniformity and homogenization, but only in bringing into harmony many different gifts and richness, like a beautiful bouquet of flowers brings together of a variety of different flowers inside one vase. Our legitimate differences are rooted inside of the same God.

This has implications for every area of our lives, from how we receive immigrants in our countries, to how we deal with different personalities inside our families and places of work, to how we deal with other Christian denominations and other religions. Without endorsing a naive syncretism and without denying the rightful place for discernment, it must still be affirmed that our differences, conceived as an expression of a deeper unity that we cannot yet conceive, open us up more fully to the deep unfathomable, ineffable mystery of God and, at the same time, prevents us from making an idol of our own ideas, our own religious traditions, our own ways of understanding faith, and our own theologies and ideologies. Moreover, accepting differences as being intended by God and as the presence of grace in our lives should prevent us from constructing our identity, particularly our religious identity, on the basis of opposition to others and the unhealthy need to forever protest our own uniqueness and truth against what’s other.

God loves us all equally. Difference, then, understood as part of the mystery of unity, should help keep us humble and honest enough to let others take their proper place before God.

My Top Ten Books for 2014

December 29, 2014

The pressures of work and ministry, unfortunately, limit the time I have available to read as widely as I would like. Still, addicted as I am to books and knowing that without the insight and stimulation that I draw from them I would forever stagnate spiritually and creatively, I scrupulously carve out some time most days to read. As well, given my ministry and personality, I like to read various genres of books: novels, biography, critical essays, and, not least, books on scripture, theology, and spirituality.

Here’s my bias apposite reading: In my freshman year at University, I was introduced to good novels. I realized then how impoverished I’d been without good literature in my life. Since that time, more than 40 years ago, I’ve never been without a novel lying open somewhere within my reach. Good novelists often have insights that psychologists and spiritual writers can only envy, firing the imagination and the emotional intelligence in a way that academic books often cannot. As well, always lying open somewhere within reach too will be a good biography or a book of essays. These serve to stretch my horizons, as these perennially constrict both my imagination and my heart. Finally, there are theological and spirituality books which, given both my temperament and my vocation, I read with passion, but which also serve as a source of professional development for me.

So given these particular appetites, what are the best ten books that I read in 2014?

Among novels, I particularly recommend these four:

Anthony Doerr, All the Light We Cannot See. This isn’t just one of the top books that I read this past year, it is, making an exception for the great classics of English literature, for me, one of the best novels that I’ve ever read. This is simply a great book; not quite the Diary of Anne Frank, but a story which moves the heart in a similar fashion.
Marilynne Robinson, Lila . Robinson picks up some of her characters from Gilead, inserts a lost, young woman named Lila and, through her voice, gives us a near poetry of loneliness and faith. Aside from her emotional depth and perfect prose, Robinson also offers an apologia for the compassion and mercy of God that can help make faith more credible to many of its skeptics today.
Sue Monk Kidd, The Invention of Wings. This is a powerful historical novel about both the evil of slavery and of sexism. Mirroring the Christian story of redemption, good ultimately triumphs, but not before someone has to sweat some blood in martyrdom. Sue Monk Kidd is always worth reading, but this book stands out, even for a novelist of her caliber.
Jhumpa Lahire, The Lowland. Like many of Lahire’s novels this story also sets itself within the particular trials of emigrating from India to America, but the flashlight that it shines into human relationships helps lay bare some very universal struggles.

Among biographical essays, two books stood out for me this past year.

Trevor Herriot, The Road is How, A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul. The flow of the book follows its title. Herriot does a walking pilgrimage across part of Saskatchewan’s prairies, a land roamed for centuries by the buffalo, and lets nature and desire speak to his soul. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book about nature, human nature, sexuality, faith, and desire.
Nancy Rappaport, In Her Wake, A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide. In this book, Nancy Rappaport does what all of us should do if we have lost a loved one to suicide, namely, work through that person’s story and find the threads to cleanse and redeem his or her memory.

Among theological and spirituality books, I recommend:

James Martin, A Pilgrimage. This is Jim Martin at his best, offering a good, balanced, healthy Christology, presented in a reader-friendly way. Scholarship accessible to everyone.
Barbara Brown Taylor, Learning to Walk in the Dark. She made the cover of TIME magazine for this book, deservedly. Taylor offers an insight into the dark night of the soul for those who can’t, or won’t, read more technical theological literature.
Gerhard Lohfink, Jesus of Nazareth, What He Wanted, Who He Was. This is more of a scholarly book, though still pretty accessible to the non-professional. It combines solid scholarship, creative insight, good balance, and committed Christian faith.
Christian Salenson, Christian de Cherge, A Theology of Hope. Christian de Cherge was the Abbott of the community of Trappist monks who were martyred in Algeria in 1996. This book collects his key writings, particularly as they pertain to the question of the relationship of Christianity to other religions, especially to Islam. Faith, it is said, is built upon the blood of martyrs. Future interreligious dialogue can be built on both the blood and the writings of this martyr. An exceptional book, though hardly surprising, given the exceptional faith and character of Christian de Cherge.

May many good books find you in 2015.

Being Ready for Christmas

December 22, 2014

Many of us arrive at Christmas tired, running, distracted, and already fatigued with the lights, songs, and celebrations of Christmas. Advent is meant to be a time of preparation for Christmas; but for many of us it is not exactly a time for the kind of preparation that enables Christ be born more deeply in our lives. Instead our preparation for Christmas is mostly a time of making ready to celebrate with our families, friends, and colleagues. The days leading up to Christmas are rarely serene. Instead we find ourselves harried and hurried putting up decorations, shopping for gifts, sending out cards, preparing food, and attending Christmas socials. Moreover, when Christmas arrives, we are already tired of Christmas carols, having heard them already, non-stop, for weeks in our shopping malls, restaurants, public squares, and on our radio stations.

And so Christmas, itself, generally finds us more in a pressured and tired space than in a leisured and rested one. Indeed sometimes the Christmas season is more an endurance test than a time of genuine enjoyment. Moreover and more seriously, if we are honest with ourselves, we have to admit that in our preparations for Christmas, we, in fact, make very little space for the spiritual, for Christ to be born more deeply in our lives. Our time of preparation is generally more of a time to prepare our houses than a time to prepare our souls, more of a time of shopping than of prayer, and more of a time of already feasting than a time of fasting as a preparation for a feast. Today advent is perhaps more about already celebrating Christmas than it is about preparing for it.

And the end result is that, like the biblical innkeepers who had no room for Mary and Joseph at the first Christmas, we generally arrive at Christmas with “no room at the inn”, no space in our lives for a spiritual rebirth. Our hearts are good, we want Christmas to renew us spiritually, but our lives are too pressured, too full of activity and tiredness, for us to have any real energy to make Christmas a special time of spiritual renewal for ourselves. The spirit of Christmas is still in us, real, but lying like a neglected baby in the straw waiting to be picked up. And we do intend to pick up the baby, but simply never get around to it.

So how bad are we?

Now, while this should challenge us to take a look at ourselves, it is not as bad as many religious critics make it out to be. Arriving at Christmas with a life too busy and too distracted to make more room for Christ doesn’t make us bad persons. It doesn’t mean that we are mindless pagans. And it doesn’t mean that Christ has died in our lives. We are not bad, faithless, and pagan because we habitually arrive at Christmas too distracted, too busy, too pressured, and too tired to make much of a conscious effort to make this feast a time of real spiritual renewal in our lives. Our spiritual lethargy simply defines us as more human than angelic, more earthy than platonic, and as more sensual than spiritual. I suspect that God fully understands this condition.

Indeed, everyone struggles with this in some fashion. No one is perfect; no one gives a full place in his or her life to Christ, even at Christmas time. That should bring us some consolation. But it should also leave us with a pressing challenge: There is too little room for Christ in our busy, distracted lives! We must work at clearing some space for Christ, at making Christmas a time of spiritual refreshment and renewal in our lives.

How do we do that?

In the days leading up to Christmas, many of us struggle to do all the things we need to do to be ready for all that needs to happen in our houses, churches, and places of work. We need to shop for gifts, send out cards, put up lights and decorations, plan menus, buy food, attend a goodly number of Christmas socials at work, at church, at friends’ houses. This, added on to the normal pressures within our lives, not infrequently leaves us with the feeling: I’m not going to make it! I won’t be ready! I won’t be ready for Christmas! That’s a common feeling.

But being ready for Christmas, getting everything we need to do done on time, making it, does not depend upon getting everything neatly checked off on our to-do list: gifts, done; cards, done; decorations, done; food, ready; the requisite number of social obligations, completed. Even if that list is only half done, if you find yourself in church at Christmas, if you find yourself at table with your family on Christmas day, and if you find yourself greeting your neighbors and colleagues with a little more warmth, then it doesn’t matter if you are distracted, tired, over-fed, and not thinking explicitly about Jesus, you’ve made it.

The Visitation – Revisited

December 15, 2014

We are all familiar with the biblical story of the Visitation. It happens at the beginning of Luke’s Gospel. Mary and her cousin, Elizabeth, both pregnant, meet. One is carrying Jesus and the other is carrying John the Baptist. The Gospels want us to recognize that both these pregnancies are biologically impossible; one is a virginal conception and the other is a conception that occurs far beyond someone’s childbearing years. So there is clearly something of the divine in each. In simple language, each woman is carrying a special gift from heaven and each is carrying a part of the divine promise that will one day establish God’s peace on this earth.

But neither Mary nor Elizabeth, much less anyone around them, consciously recognizes the divine connection between the two children they are carrying. The Gospels present them to us as “cousins”, both the children and their mothers; but the Gospels want us to think deeper than biology. They are cousins in the same way that Christ, and those things that are also of the divine, are cousins. This, among other things, is what is contained in the concept of the Visitation.

Mary and Elizabeth meet, both are pregnant with the divine. Each is carrying a child from heaven, one is carrying Christ and the other is carrying a unique prophet, the “cousin” of the Christ. And a curious thing happens when they meet. Christ’s cousin, inside his mother, without explicit consciousness, leaps for joy in the presence of Christ and that reaction releases the Magnificat inside of the one carrying Christ.

There’s a lot in that image: Christ’s cousin unconsciously leaps for joy in the presence of Christ and that reaction draws the Magnificat out of the one who is carrying the Christ. Christian de Cherge, the Trappist Abbott who was martyred in Algeria in 1996, suggests that, among other things, this image is the key to how we, as Christians, are meant to meet other religions in the world. He sees the image as illustrating this paradigm:

Christianity is carrying Christ and other religions are also carrying something divine, a divine “”cousin”, one who points to Christ. But all of this is unconscious; we do not really grasp the bond, the connection, between what we are carrying and what the other is carrying. But we will recognize their kinship, however unconsciously, when we stand before another who does not share our Christian faith but is sincere and true to his or her own faith. In that encounter we will sense the connection: What we are carrying will make something leap for joy inside the other and that reaction will help draw the Magnificat out of us and, like Mary, we will want to stay with that other for mutual support.

And we need that support, as does the other. As Christian de Cherge puts it: “We know that those whom we have come to meet are like Elizabeth: they are bearers of a message that comes from God. Our church does not tell us and does not know what the exact bond is between the Good News we bear and the message that gives life to the other. … We may never know exactly what that bond is, but we do know that the other is also a bearer of a message that comes from God. So what should we do? What does witness consist in? What about mission? … See, when Mary arrives, it is Elizabeth who speaks first. Or did she? … For most certainly Mary would have said: ‘Peace, Peace be with you’. And this simple greeting made something vibrate, someone, inside of Elizabeth. And in this vibration, something was said. … Which is the Good News, not the whole of the Good News, but what can be glimpsed of it in the moment.”

Christian de Cherge then adds this comment: “In the end, if we are attentive, if we situate our encounter with the other in the attention and the desire to meet the other, and in our need for the other and what he has to say to us, it is likely that the other is going to say something to us that will connect with what we are carrying, something that will reveal complicity with us … allowing us to broaden our Eucharist.”

We need each other, everyone on this planet, Christians and non-Christians, Jews and Muslims, Protestants and Roman Catholics, Evangelicals and Unitarians, sincere agnostics and atheists; we need each other to understand God’s revelation. Nobody understands fully without the other. Thus our interrelations with each other should not be born only out of enthusiasm for the truth we have been given, but it should issue forth too from our lack of the other. Without the other, without recognizing that the other too is carrying the divine, we will, as Christian de Cherge asserts, be unable to truly release our own Magnificat. Without each other, none of us will ever be able to pray the Eucharist “for the many”.

Honoring Talent and Grace – Jean Beliveau RIP

December 8, 2014

For those of you who aren’t Canadian, perhaps this name might not mean much, but, this past week, Canada lost one of its great cultural icons, Jean Beliveau, a famed athlete. He died and all Canadians, including this Canadian in exile, mourn his passing.

Jean Beliveau was more than an athlete, though certainly he was a one-in-a-million athlete. The record of his achievements almost defies belief. He played in the National Hockey League for 20 seasons and ended up with ten championship rings. Later, as an executive, he was part of another seven championships. Imagine anyone, in any sport, at the highest level, winning 17 championships!

But that wasn’t what defined his greatness, nor the reason why a country fell in love with him and made him a national icon. It was his grace, the exceptional way that he carried himself both on and off the ice. Seventeen championships are remarkable, but his real achievement was the respect that he drew from everyone, both inside the athletic arena and outside of it. I don’t know of any pro athlete, in any sport, who has garnered this type of respect. Indeed, long after his professional career was over, the Canadian Prime Minister, asked him to become the Governor-General of Canada, an office offered only to someone who is, for an entire country, a symbol of unity, dignity, and grace. He graciously declined.

What made him so unique? There have been other great athletes and pop stars who were humble and gracious. What sets him apart? Greatness is somewhat of an intangible; it’s hard to nail down what precisely sets someone apart in this way. Why Jean Beliveau? He was a just a hockey player after all. What made him so singular in drawing respect?

The renowned Polish, psychiatrist, Kasmir Dabrowski, had a thought-provoking theory about human maturity and what it takes to get here. For him, we grow by breaking down, by being driven to our knees through various crises which force us to move beyond our mediocre habits and immaturities. Richard Rohr calls this falling upwards: We mature through failure, grow arrogant through success. Mostly that’s true. Success, more than failure, destroys lives.

But is that logical? Isn’t it more logical to grow through success? Shouldn’t success induce gratitude within us and make us more generous and big-hearted? Someone asked Dabrowski that question in class one day. This was his answer: “You’re right, success should make us more grateful and big-hearted; that’s the ideal way to grow … except, in more than 40 years of clinical experience, have never seen it work that way. It only works that way in rare, exceptional cases … and that, I believe, is what makes for a great person.” A great person is someone in whom success enlarges the soul rather than swells the ego.

When Jean Beliveau broke into the National Hockey League he was, at that time, the tallest, some-skilled, most-graceful, and handsomest player in the league. No small gifts to carry. He was a little like the young, King Saul in the bible who when he was initially crowned king was described this way: Among the men of Benjamin was a man called Saul, a handsome man in the prime of life. Of all the Israelites there was no one more handsome than he; he stood head and shoulders taller than anyone else. But, sadly, all of that giftedness and success did not make Saul a good king. Rather it destroyed him. Clinging falsely to his giftedness, his life became a tragedy. His height and grace and handsomeness left him jealous before the gifts of others and he became paranoid and spiteful and eventually ended up taking his own life. Saul’s story is one of the great tragedies ever written; and sadly it keeps getting written too many times in the lives of the hugely talented. Giftedness comes with its own perils. Giftedness and success just as easily swell the ego as enlarge the soul.

Sadly we see a lot of that today, not least in the sports world where ego and self-promotion is legitimized and is often even seen as a desired quality inside an athlete, a virtue rather than a vice, because bravado and arrogant strut can help intimidate opponents, win games, and make the world watch. It makes for color, for hype, brings fans to the park, and awards a certain notoriety and fame. Character gets trumped by color and hype, but arrogance can be a help win games.

Even so, I’m glad I once knew a different time, a time when athletes and most everyone else still had to be apologetic about ego and self-promotion. I’m glad that when I was a boy, obsessed with sports and looking for a hero among athletes, there was a superstar, Jean Beliveau, who eschewed arrogance, bravado, strut, the taunting of opponents, and crass self-promotion, and played the game with such grace and humility that it invoked the right kind of admiration, even as it won games.

Self-Sacrifice and the Eucharist

December 1, 2014

In 1996, Muslim extremists martyred nearly an entire community of Trappist monks in Atlas, Algeria. Many of us, thanks to the movie, Of Gods and Men, are familiar with their story and are familiar too with the extraordinary faith and courage with which these monks, particularly their Abbott, Christian de Cherge, met their deaths. Indeed the last letters of Christian de Cherge reveal a faith and love that is truly extraordinary.

For example, in the months leading up to his death, when he already sensed what was to befall him, he wrote a letter to his family within which he already forgave his killers and hoped that they would later be with him in heaven, with both them and him playing in the sun before God. As well, after his first face-to-face meeting with a terrorist leader, who has just beheaded nine people, he prayed: “Disarm me, disarm them.”

In his journals, which are published today, he shares this story: On the morning of his first communion, he told his mother that he really didn’t understand what he was doing in receiving the Eucharist. His mother replied, simply: “You will understand later on.” His journals then trace how his understanding of the Eucharist deepened during his lifetime, especially in the light of his interrelation with Islam and one extraordinary incident in his life. This was the extraordinary incident:

From July 1959 until January 1961, Christian was an officer serving with the French army in Algeria. While there, he befriended a man named Mohammed, a family man, a simple man, and a devout Muslim. They soon forged a very deep bond. One day, during a military skirmish, Christian was taken captive by the Algerian army. His friend, Mohammed, intervened and convinced his captors that Christian was sympathetic to their cause. Christian was released but, the next day, Mohammed was found murdered, in retaliation for his role in freeing Christian.

This act of selflessness by his Muslim friend, who in effect gave his life for Christian, permanently seared Christian’s soul. It was never far from his mind and his decision, as a monk, to return to Algeria and live in solidarity with the Muslim community at Atlas and remain there until he died, was largely a result of that foundational event. But it also deepened his understanding of the Eucharist.

His mother had told him: “You will understand later”, and now he did understand: The Eucharist doesn’t just make Jesus present; it also makes present his sacrificial death for us. Jesus died for us “and for the many”; but so too did his friend, Mohammed. He also gave his death for another and in that sacrifice both imitated Jesus’ death and participated in it. Thus, for Christian, every time he celebrated the Eucharist, he celebrated too the gift of Mohammed’s sacrifice for him. His friend, Mohammed, had also shed his blood “for the many”.

Mohammed’s sacrifice helped Christian to recognize and more deeply appropriate Jesus’ sacrifice because he believed that, in the Eucharist, Jesus’ sacrifice and his friend’s sacrifice were both made real and both rendered present. Christian believed that Christ’s sacrifice includes the sacrifice shown in every act of sacrificial love and consequently his friend’s sacrifice was part of Christ’s sacrifice.

He’s right. At every Eucharist we memorialize the gift that Jesus made of his death, but that memorial includes too the sacrificial gift of everyone who has imitated Jesus’ selfless love and sacrifice. In the Eucharist, the sacrifice of Christ that we memorialize includes the sacrifice of all who have died, however unconsciously, “for the many”.

The Eucharist is a far-reaching mystery with multiple depths and levels of meaning. We don’t ever fully grasp it. But we’re in good company: When Jesus instituted the Eucharist at the Last Supper the apostles also didn’t really understand what he was doing, as is witnessed by Peter’s protests when Jesus tries to wash their feet. Peter’s protests show clearly that he did not comprehend what Jesus meant in this Eucharistic gesture. And so, Jesus’ words to Peter and the apostles are almost identical to those Christian de Cherge’s mother spoke to him when he told her that he didn’t understand the Eucharist: “Later, you will understand.”

When I made my first communion, I had a childlike understanding of the Eucharist. In my seven-year-old, catechized mind, I believed that I was receiving the real body of Jesus and that, at the mass where the Eucharistic hosts were consecrated, we celebrated the sacrifice of Jesus that opened the gates of heaven for us. Numerous theology degrees and sixty years later, I know now that what I understood about the Eucharist as a child was correct; but I also know that when those two things, Christ’s real presence and Christ’s sacrifice for us, are unpackaged, we find ourselves immersed in an ineffable mystery within which, among other things, all who sacrifice in love for us are also part of the Real Presence.

And so we keep going to Eucharist, knowing that later, we will understand.

Two Churches, Two Sacred Places, Two Struggles

November 24, 2014

God has given us two churches, one found is everywhere and the other is found at select places. Some of us prefer one of these and struggle with the other, but both are sacred places where God can be found and worshipped.

When most people think of church, they generally think of a building, a cathedral, a shrine, a temple, a synagogue, a mosque, or a holy site. Roman Catholics might think of St. Peter’s Basilica in Rome or some famous cathedral or their local parish church. Anglicans and Episcopalians might think of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London or their local church building, even as Muslims might think of Mecca or their local mosque. These are all churches, privileged holy places where God meets us. This is one kind of church, housed in a building or a holy location. But what grounds this concept?

In the Book of Genesis we read that Jacob had a dream within which he saw a ladder connecting earth to heaven with angels going up and down on this ladder. Waking from the dream, Jacob realizes that he has had a very privileged experience within which the gap between heaven and earth was, for a moment, bridged. Not wanting to lose this experience, nor this special place, he sets up a stone as a pillar, as an altar, to mark the place, a concrete physical spot, where he sensed a special connection between heaven and earth, so that he find his way back to this privileged spot. That’s the first church building and that’s ultimately the meaning of every church building, every temple, every shrine, every mosque, and every holy site. It’s a privileged place where there’s a ladder between heaven and earth, with the angels of God ascending and descending. It’s a special place where one can go to pray.

But there’s a second kind of church that has nothing to do with buildings, churches, temples, shrines, or holy sites. This is the church that Jesus reveals to the Samaritan woman in John’s Gospel. Most of us are familiar with the dialogue Jesus has with this woman. In their conversation she confesses a certain confusion regarding churches. She tells Jesus that she lives in a world that disagrees about where the real church, the real ladder between heaven and earth, is to be found: The Jews tell her that the real place to worship, the authentic church, is the temple in Jerusalem, but her own community, the Samaritans, tell her that the proper place to worship is Mount Gerizim. So which is the proper place to worship?

Jesus tells her that she need not necessarily worship at either of those sites. Rather the real temple, the real sacred place, the real privileged place where a ladder runs between heaven and earth, upon which angels ascend and descend, is inside of her. The real church is not always a building or a holy site, but a place of conscience and spirit inside a person, accessible to us without having to travel to the Holy Land, Rome, London, Salt Lake City, Mecca, Lourdes, or your neighborhood church. The ladder upon which angels ascend and descend between heaven and earth can be found everywhere, nature itself is a cathedral and, inside each of us, there’s a church.

Thus there are two real churches given us by God; one is outside of us, physical and concrete, the other is inside of us, spiritual and amorphous. Ideally, of course, a healthy sense of church would have us all worshipping deeply at both places, outside in our church buildings and inside in our heart and conscience. Unfortunately, that isn’t always the case. Today huge ecclesial tensions exist within all major religions and within all Christian denominations, between those who define church primarily or exclusively by one’s active participation inside of a church building (If you aren’t coming to church, you aren’t a real believer!) and those who define church, however unconsciously, as sincerity and worship within conscience and spirit. (I’m spiritual but not religious!)

Both are right, both are wrong, and both need to widen their understanding of church. God gave us both churches, and both are vital. I know persons, not least some very good male friends, who struggle with spiritual interiority. They grasp the meaning of church buildings, holy sites, and church structures, and these genuinely ground their religious lives. They can relate to the church as a building and as an institution that holds holy services; they can grasp Jacob’s ladder there. Conversely, I have good friends, not least some women friends, who have a rich spiritual interiority but struggle with the church as an institution, one that, to their mind, too-easily and sometimes idolatrously privileges certain human organizations, sites, and persons as sine qua non avenues to heaven; they struggle to see Jacob’s ladder inside such concrete, imperfect physicality.

Both need to learn from each other, and grasp more deeply the interrelationship of the two churches that God gave us.

Less People Are Going to Church – Whom to Blame?

November 17, 2014

It’s no secret that today there’s been a massive drop-off in church attendance. Moreover that drop-off in church-going is not paralleled by the same widespread growth in atheism and agnosticism. Rather, more and more people are claiming to be spiritual but not religious, faith-filled but not church-goers. Why this exodus from our churches?

The temptation inside religious circles is to blame what’s happening on secularity. Secular culture, many people argue, is perhaps the most powerful narcotic ever perpetrated on this planet, both for good and for bad. It swallows most of us whole with its seductive promises of heaven on this side of eternity. Within our secularized world, the pursuit of the good life simply squeezes out almost all deeper religious desire. Interestingly, this is also the major criticism that Islamic extremists make of Western culture. For them it’s a drug, which once ingested, has no cure. That’s why they want to block their youth from Western influences.

But is this true? Is secular culture the enemy? Are we, church-goers, the last true remnant of God and truth left standing, prophetic and marginalized in a society that’s shallow, irreligious, and godless? Many, including myself, would argue that this conclusion is far, far too simple. Secular society can be shallow, irreligious, and godless, there’s more than sufficient evidence for that; but, beneath its shallowness and its congenital allergy to our churches, real religious desire still burns and the churches must ask themselves: Why aren’t more people turning to us to deal with their religious desires? Why are so many people who are seeking spirituality not interested in looking at what the church offers? Why, instead, are they turning to everything except the church? Why, indeed, do so many people have the attitude: “The church has nothing to offer me: I find it boring, irrelevant, caught up inside its own petty issues, hopelessly out of step with my life.”

Secularity is, no doubt, partly to blame, but so too are the churches themselves. There’s an axiom that says: All atheism is a parasite off of bad theism. That logic also holds regarding attitudes towards the church: Bad attitudes towards the church feed off bad church practices.

The great Jewish scholar, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, would agree. In his book, God In Search of Man, he writes: “It is customary to blame secular science and anti-religious philosophy for the eclipse of religion in modern society. It would be more honest to blame religion for its own defeats. Religion declined not because it was refuted, but because it became irrelevant, dull, oppressive, insipid. When faith is completely replaced by creed, worship by discipline, love by habit; when the crisis of today is ignored because of the splendor of the past; when faith becomes an heirloom rather than a living fountain; when religion speaks only in the name of authority rather than the voice of compassion – its message becomes meaningless.”

Novelist Marilynne Robinson (who has both a deep sympathy for and a commitment to the church) echoes Heschel. For her, as churches today, we are not radiating the immensity of God and the larger mystery of Christ. Rather, despite our good will, we are too much subordinating the mystery of Christ to tribalism, resentment, fear, and self-protection. This is one of the major reasons for our marginalization. Christianity, Robinson submits, “is too great a narrative to be reduced to serving any parochial interest or to be underwritten by any lesser tale.” It is our narrow attitudes, she believes, that denigrate the Christian message and leave the churches, for good reason, marginalized: “Undignified, obscurantist, and xenophobic Christianity closes the path for many” to enter the church.” Blaming the world for our problems, she argues, does nothing to enhance the respect the world has for religion or for Christianity. The drop-off in church attendance is very much our own fault because far too often we are not radiating a church with a compassionate embrace and we are not in fact addressing the real energies that are burning inside people. For Robinson, the secular world isn’t, per se, irreligious. Rather it sees our churches as self-absorbed, non-understanding, and non-empathetic to its desires, its wounds, and its needs. And so her challenge to us, church-goers, is this: “It behooves anyone who calls himself or herself a Christian, any institution that calls itself a church, to bring credit to the faith, at very least not to embarrass or disgrace it. Making God a tribal deity, our local Baal, is embarrassing and disgraceful.”

Some years ago, I heard an Evangelical minister state the problem this way: As Christian churches we have the living water, the water Christ promised would quench all fires and all thirsts. But, this is the problem: We aren’t getting the living water to where the fires are! Instead we are spraying water everywhere, except where it’s burning!

He’s right. The answer to the mass exodus from our churches is not to blame the culture; it’s to make better churches!

Spiritual Warfare

November 10, 2014

Spiritual literature has always highlighted the primordial struggle between good and evil, and this has generally been conceived of as a war, a spiritual battle. Thus, as Christians, we have been warned that we must be vigilant against the powers of Satan and various other forces of evil. And we’ve fought these powers not just with prayer and private moral vigilance but with everything from Holy Water, to exorcisms, to a dogmatic avoidance of everything to do with the occult, the paranormal, alchemy, astrology, spiritualism, séances, witchcraft, sorcery, and Ouija boards. For Christians these were seen as dangerous venues through which malevolent spirits could enter our lives and do us harm.

And scripture does, seemingly, warn us about these things. It tells us that for our world to come to its completion and its fulfillment Christ must first triumph over all the powers that oppose God. And for that to happen, Christ has to first vanquish and destroy death, darkness, evil, the powers of hell, the powers of Satan, and various “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers.”

What, concretely, are these powers and how is Christ ultimately to triumph over them? How should we conceive the battle that’s taking place?

We are clearer about how death will be defeated: We believe that the resurrection, Jesus’ and our own, is how that battle is to be won. As to Satan and hell, each of us has her own idea of what these are, but what we share in common as Christians is the belief that these will not be vanquished but will continue to exist, alongside and opposed to God and heaven, for eternity. That’s the common Christian belief, though not the universal one. There have always been theologians and mystics who believed that the full triumph of Christ will occur when the Satan himself converts and goes back to heaven along with everyone else in hell. The love of God, they believe, is so powerful that, in the end, nobody, not even Satan himself, will hold out against it. Eventually love will win everyone over and Christ will be fully triumphant when hell is empty.

But that still leaves us with what scripture calls the “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” Are these simply another way of referring to Satan and his powers? Or do these refer to spiritual forces that many believe are hidden inside the occult, alchemy, astrology, spiritualism, séances, witchcraft, sorcery, and Ouija boards? How might we conceptualize evil spiritual forces?

To the extent that we do not dismiss them out of hand as purely mythical, each of conceptualizes them in some way, usually in the graphic images given us in the Book of Revelation and by centuries of Christian artists. And so we picture some kind of spiritual warfare happening beneath the surface of things, a spiritual battle between good and evil, a warfare wherein, eventually, Christ will triumph by defeating and destroying all these malevolent powers, akin to the primordial battle wherein Michael, the Archangel, initially defeated Satan and threw him out of heaven.

But those are archetypal images, not meant to be pictured literally but intended rather to point us towards something deeper. What really are the “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” that are opposing Christ and how are they to be defeated? How might we conceptualize the spiritual warfare going on beneath the surface of things?

The spiritual warfare that is being described in scripture and inside all authentic spirituality has less to do with the occult and exorcisms than it has to do the malignant grip of narcissism, greed, anger, bitterness, hatred, lust, wound, grudges, and ignorance. These are the real “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” that oppose Christ and the struggle against them is the real battle between good and evil.

Authentic spiritual warfare is to be pictured this way: Inside our world and inside each of us there’s a fierce battle waging, a war between good and evil, and these are the contestants: Hatred is battling love; anger is battling patience; greed is battling generosity; bitterness is battling graciousness, jealousy is battling admiration; choosing to remain inside our wounds is battling healing; holding on to our grudges is battling forgiveness, ego and narcissism are battling compassion and community; and self-hatred is in a bitter battle with the acceptance of love and God’s unconditional embrace. Paranoia is waging a war against metanoia. That’s the real war that’s going on, in our world and inside each of us.

Hatred, anger, paranoia, greed, bitterness, lust, jealousy, non-forgiveness, and self-hatred are the “thrones, dominions, principalities, and powers” about which scripture warns us. Hence the final triumph of Christ will occur when the last of these forces is eventually subdued, when we are finally at peace with goodness, with love, with trust, with ourselves, with others, with our history, with our mistakes, with those who have hurt us, with those whom we have hurt, with our shortcomings, and with our impatience with God.

In the meantime, there will be spiritual warfare, primordial battles all around.

Carrying Our Cross

November 3, 2014

Among Jesus’ many teachings we find this, rather harsh-sounding, invitation: Whoever wants to be my disciple must deny himself, take up his cross daily, and follow me. Whoever finds his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.

I suspect that each of us has a gut-sense of what this means and what it will cost us; but, I suspect too that many of us misunderstand that Jesus is asking here and struggle unhealthily with this invitation. What, concretely, does Jesus mean by this?

To answer that, I would like to lean on some insights offered by James Martin in his book, Jesus, A Pilgrimage. He suggests that taking up our cross daily and giving up life in order to find deeper life means six interpenetrating things:

First, it means accepting that suffering is a part of our lives. Accepting our cross and giving up our lives means that, at some point, we have to make peace with the unalterable fact that frustration, disappointment, pain, misfortune, illness, unfairness, sadness, and death are a part of our lives and they must ultimately be accepted without bitterness. As long as we nurse the notion that pain in our lives is something we need not accept, we will habitually find ourselves bitter – bitter for not having accepted the cross.

Second, taking up our cross and giving up our lives, means that we may not, in our suffering, pass on any bitterness to those around us. We have a strong inclination, almost as part of our natural instincts, to make others suffer when we are suffering: If I’m unhappy, I will make sure that others around me are unhappy too! This does not mean, as Martin points out, that we cannot share our pain with others. But there’s a healthy way of doing this, where our sharing leaves others free, as opposed to an unhealthy kind of sharing which subtly tries to make others unhappy because we are unhappy. There’s a difference between healthily groaning under the weight of our pain and unhealthily whining in self-pity and bitterness under that weight. The cross gives us permission to do the former, but not the latter. Jesus groaned under the weight of his cross, but no self-pity, whining, or bitterness issued forth from his lips or his beaten body.

Third, walking in the footsteps of Jesus as he carries his cross means that we must accept some other deaths before our physical death, that we are invited to let some parts of ourselves die. When Jesus invites us to die in order to find life, he is not, first of all, talking about physical death. If we live in adulthood, there are a myriad of other deaths that we must undergo before we die physically. Maturity and Christian discipleship are about perennially naming our deaths, claiming our births, mourning our losses, letting go of what’s died, and receiving new spirit for the new life that we are now living. These are the stages of the paschal mystery, and the stages of growing up. There are daily deaths.

Fourth, it means that we must wait for the resurrection, that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished. The book of Proverbs tells us that sometimes in the midst of pain the best we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. Any real understanding of the cross agrees. So much of life and discipleship is about waiting, waiting in frustration, inside injustice, inside pain, in longing, battling bitterness, as we wait for something or someone to come and change our situation. We spend about 98% of our lives waiting for fulfillment, in small and big ways. Jesus’ invitation to us to follow him implies waiting, accepting to live inside an unfinished symphony.

Fifth, carrying our cross daily means accepting that God’s gift to us is often not what we expect. God always answers our prayers but, often times, by giving us what we really need rather than what we think we need. The Resurrection, says James Martin, does not come when we expect it and rarely fits our notion of how a resurrection should happen. To carry your cross is to be open to surprise.

Finally, taking up your cross and being willing to give up your life means living in a faith that believes that nothing is impossible for God. As James Martin puts it, this means accepting that God is greater than the human imagination. Indeed, whenever we succumb to the notion that God cannot offer us a way out of our pain into some kind of newness, it’s precisely because we have reduced God down to the size of our own limited imagination. It’s only possible to accept our cross, to live in trust, and to not grow bitter inside pain if we believe in possibilities beyond what we can imagine, namely, if we believe in the Resurrection.

We can take up our cross when we begin to believe in the Resurrection.

Three Kinds of Spiritualities

October 27, 2014

All of us struggle, and we struggle in three ways. First, sometimes we struggle simply to maintain ourselves, to stay healthy and stable, to stay normal, to not fall apart, to not have our lives unravel into chaos and depression. It takes real effort just to maintain our ordinary health, stability, and happiness.

But, even as this is going on, another part of us is forever reaching upwards, struggling to grow, to achieve higher things, to not waste our riches and gifts, to live a life that is more admirable, noble, and altruistic.

Then, at another level, we struggle with a threatening darkness that surrounds and undergirds us. The complexities of life can overwhelm us leaving us feeling threatened, small, excluded, and insignificant. For this reason, a part of us is forever conscious that we stand one season, one breakdown, one lost relationship, one lost job, one death of a loved one, or one thing that we cannot even foresee, away from a descent into paralyzing depression, an illness, or a dark chaos that we cannot control.

In short, we struggle to maintain ourselves, struggle to grow, and struggle to keep depression and death at bay. Because we struggle at these three levels, we need three kinds of spiritualities in our lives.

At one level, we need a spirituality of maintenance, that is, a spirituality that helps us to maintain our normal health, stability, and ordinariness. Too often spiritual teachings neglect this vital aspect of spirituality. Rather we are forever being challenged to grow, be better persons, to be better Christians, to simply be better than we are at present. That’s good, but it naively takes for granted that we are already healthy, stable, and strong enough to be challenged. And, as we know, many times this isn’t the case. There are times in our lives, when the best we can do is to hang on, not fall apart, and fight to regain again some health, stability, and strength in our lives, to simply get one foot in front of the next. At these times in our lives, challenge isn’t exactly what we need, rather we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re feeling and we need to be given a warm hand to help draw us back towards health and strength. The challenge to grow comes later.

And that challenge comes with an invitation that invites us upwards, towards a spirituality of the ascent. All spiritualities worthy of the name, stress the need to make a certain ascent, to grow beyond our immaturities, our laziness, our wounds, and the perennial hedonism and shallowness of our culture. The emphasis here is always to reach upward, beyond, towards the heavens, and towards all that is more noble, altruistic, compassionate, loving, admirable, and saintly. Much of classical Christian spirituality is a spirituality of the ascent, an invitation to something higher, an invitation to be true to what is deepest inside of us, namely, the Image and Likeness of God. Much of Jesus’ preaching invites us precisely to something higher. Confucius, one of the great moral teachers of all time, had a similar pedagogy, inviting people to look to beauty and goodness and to forever reach in that direction. In our own time, John Paul II used this very effectively in his appeal to young people, challenging them always to not settle for compromise or second-best, but to look always for something higher and more noble to give their lives to.

But the challenge to growth also needs a spirituality of descent, a vision and a set of disciplines that point us not just towards the rising sun, but also towards the setting sun. We need a spirituality that doesn’t avoid or deny the complexities of life, the mad conspiracy of forces beyond us, the paralyzing losses and depressions in life, and the looming reality of sickness, diminishment, and death. Sometimes we can only grow by descending into that frightening underworld, where, like Jesus, we undergo a transformation by facing chaos, diminishment, darkness, satanic forces (whatever these may be), and death itself. In some ancient cultures this was called “sitting in the ashes” or “being a child of Saturn” (the archetypal planet of depression). As Christians we call this undergoing the paschal mystery. Whatever the name, all spiritualities worthy of the name will, at some time in your life, invite you to make a painful descent into the frightening underworld of chaos, depression, loss, insignificance, darkness, satanic forces, and death itself.

Life reveals itself above us and below us and on the flat plain of ordinariness. None of these may be ignored. And so we need always to maintain and steady ourselves, even as we reach upwards and sometimes allow ourselves to descent into darkness.

And there’s still time to do all of this. As Rainer Marie Rilke once wrote:

You are not dead yet. It is not too late

To open your depths by plunging into them

And drink in the life

That reveals itself quietly there.

The Goddess of Chastity

October 20, 2014

Ancient Greece expressed much of its psychological and spiritual wisdom inside their myths. They didn’t intend these to be taken literally or as historical, but as metaphor and as an archetypal illustration of why life is as it is and how people engage life both generatively and destructively.

And many of these myths are centered on gods and goddesses. They had gods and goddesses to mirror virtually every aspect of life, every aspect of human behavior, and every innate human propensity. Moreover, many of these gods and goddesses were far from moral in their behavior, especially in their sexual lives. They had messy affairs with each other and with human beings. However, despite the messiness and amorality of their sexual behavior, one of the positive features inside these myths was that, for Ancient Greece, sex was always, somehow, connected to the divine. Even temple prostitution was somehow related to accessing the fertility that emanated from the divine realm.

Within this pantheon of gods and goddesses there was a particular goddess name Artemis. Unlike most of their other goddesses, who were sexually promiscuous, she was chaste and celibate. Her sexual abstinence represented the place and the value of chastity and celibacy. She was pictured as a tall, graceful figure, attractive sexually, but with a beauty that, while sexual, was different from the seductive sexuality of goddesses like Aphrodite and Hera. In the figure of Artemis, sex is pictured as an attractive blend of solitude and integrity. She is frequently pictured as surrounded by members of her own sex or by members of the opposite sex who appear as friends and intimates, but never as lovers.

What’s implied here is that sexual desire can remain healthy and generative even while abstaining from sex. Artemis represents a chaste way of being sexual. She tells us that, in the midst of a sexually-soaked world, one can be generative and happy inside of chastity and even inside celibacy. Perhaps even more importantly, Artemis shows us that chastity need not render one anti-sexual and sterile. Rather she shows that sexuality is wider than sex and that sex itself will be richer and more meaningful if it is also connected to chastity. Artemis declares that claiming your solitude and experiencing friendship and other forms of intimacy are not a substitute for sex but one of the rich modalities of sex itself.

Thomas Moore, in describing Artemis, writes: “Although she is the most virginal of the goddesses, Artemis is not asexual. She embodies a special kind of sexuality where the accent is on individuality, integrity, and solitude.” As such, she is a model not just for celibates but also for people who are sexually active. For sexually active person, Artemis is the cautionary flag that says: I want to be taken seriously, with my integrity and independence assured.

As well, Moore suggests that, irrespective of whether we are celibate or sexually active, we all “have periods in life or just moments in a day when we need to be alone, disconnected from love and sex, devoted to an interest of our own, withdrawn and remote. [Artemis] tells us that this preference may not be an antisocial rejection of people but simply a deep, positive, even sexual focusing of oneself and one’s world.”

What’s taught by this mythical goddess is a much needed lesson for our world today. Our age has turned sex into a soteriology, namely, for us, sex isn’t perceived as a means towards heaven, it is identified with heaven itself. It’s what we’re supposed to be living for. One of the consequences of this is that we can no longer blend our adult awareness with chastity, nor with the genuine complexity and richness of sex. Rather, for many of us, chastity and celibacy are seen as a fearful self-protection, which leave one dry, sterile, moralistic, anti-erotic, sexually-uptight, and on the periphery of life’s joys. Tied to this too is the notion that all those rich realities so positively highlighted by Artemis (as well as by the classical Christian notion of chastity), namely, friendship, non-sexual forms of intimacy, non- sexual pleasures, and the need for integrity and fidelity within sex, are seen as a substitute for sex, and a second-best one at that, rather than as rich modality of sex itself.

We are psychologically and spiritually impoverished by that notion and it puts undue pressure on our sexual lives. When sex is asked to carry the primary load in terms of human generativity and happiness it cannot help but come up short. And we are seeing that in our world today.

Of course, as Christians, we have our own goddesses of chastity, Mary, the mother of Jesus, and many women saints. Why not draw our spirituality of chastity from these women, rather than looking towards some pagan, mythical goddess? Well, for the most part, we do look to Christian models here. Moreover, I suspect that both the Virgin Mary and all of our revered virgin saints would, were she actually a real person, very much befriend Artemis.

The Unhappy Cost of Resentment

October 13, 2014

It’s not only love that makes the world go round. Resentment too is prominent in stirring the drink. In so many ways our world is drowning in resentment. Everywhere you look, it seems, someone is bitter about something and breathing out resentment. What is resentment? Why is this feeling so prevalent in our lives? How do we move beyond it?

Soren Kierkegaard once defined resentment in this way. Resentment, he suggested, happens when we move from the happy feeling of admiration to the unhappy feeling of jealousy. And this, sadly, happens all too frequently in our lives and we are dangerously blind to its occurrence. Me resentful? How dare you make that accusation!

Yet it’s hard to deny that resentment and its concomitant unhappiness color our world. At every level of life, from what we see playing out in the grievances and wars among nations to what we see playing out in the bickering in our board rooms, class rooms, living rooms, and bedrooms, there is evidence of resentment and bitterness. Our world is full of resentment. Everyone, it seems, is bitter about something, and, of course, not without cause. Few are the persons who do not secretly nurse the feeling that they have been ignored, wounded, cheated, treated unfairly, and have drawn too many short straws in life; and so many of us feel that we have every right to protest our right to be resentful and unhappy. We’re not happy, but with good reason.

Yes, there’s always good reason to be resentful; but, and this is the point of this column, according to a number of insightful analysts, both old and new, we are rarely in touch with the real reason why we are so spontaneously bitter. For persons such as Thomas Aquinas, Soren Kierkegaard, Robert Moore, Gil Bailie, Robert Bly, and Richard Rohr, among others, the deep root of our resentment and unhappiness lies in our inability to admire, our inability to praise others, and our inability to give others and the world a simple gaze of admiration.

We’re a society that, for the most part, can’t admire. Admiration is, for us, a lost virtue. Indeed in the many circles today, both in the world and in the churches, admiration is seen as something juvenile and immature, the frenzied, mindless shrieking of teenage girls chasing a rock star. Maturity and sophistication are identified today with the kind of intelligence, wit, and reticence, which don’t easily admire, which don’t easily compliment. Learning and maturity, we believe, need to be picking things apart, suspicious of others’ virtues, distrustful of their motives, on hyper-alert for hypocrisy, and articulating every reason not to admire. Such is the view today.

But what we don’t admit in this view of maturity and learning is how we feel threatened by those whose graces or virtues exceed our own. What we don’t admit is our own jealousy. What we don’t admit is our own resentment. What we don’t admit, and never will admit, is how our need to cut down someone else is an infallible sign of our own jealousy and bad self-image. And what helps us in our denial is this: Cynicism and cold judgment make for a perfect camouflage; we don’t need to admire because we’re bright enough to see that there’s nothing really to admire.

That, too often, is our sophisticated, unhappy state: We can no longer truly admire anybody. We can no longer truly praise anybody. We can no longer look at the world with any praise or admiration. Rather our gaze is perennially soured by resentment, cynicism, judgment, and jealousy.

We can test ourselves on this: Robert Moore often challenges his audiences to ask themselves this question: When was the last time you walked across a room and told a person, especially a younger person or a person whose talents dwarf yours, that you admire her, that you admire what she’s doing, that her gifts enrich your life, and that you are happy that her path has crossed yours? When was the last time you gave someone a heartfelt compliment? Or, to reverse the question: When was the last time that someone, especially someone who is threatened by your talents, gave you a sincere compliment?

We don’t compliment each other easily, or often, and this betrays a secret jealousy. It also reveals a genuine moral flaw in our lives. Thomas Aquinas one submitted that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding from him or her some of the food that he or she needs to live. To not admire, to not praise, to not compliment, is not a sign of sophistication but a sign moral immaturity and personal insecurity. It is also one of the deeper reasons why we so often fill with bitter feelings of resentment and unhappiness.

Why do we so often feel bitter and resentful? We fill with resentment for many reasons, though, not least, because we have lost the virtues of admiration and praise.

Sacred Permission to be Human and the Tools to Handle Frustration

October 6, 2014

Sometimes certain texts in the bible make you wonder: Is this really the word of God? Why is this text in scripture? What’s the lesson here?

For example, we have verses in the Psalms, in passages that we pray liturgically, where we ask God to bash the heads of the children of our enemies against a rock. How does that invite us to love our enemies? We see passages in the Book of Job where Job is in despair and curses not on only the day he was born but the very fact that anyone was born. It’s impossible to find even a trace of anything positive in his lament. Similarly, in a rather famous text, we hear Qoheleth affirm that everything in our lives and in the life of this world is simple vanity, wind, vapor, of no substance and of no consequence. What’s the lesson here? Then, in the Gospels, we have passages where the apostles, discouraged by opposition to their message, ask Jesus to call down fire and destroy the very people to whom they are supposed to minister. Hardly an exemplar for ministry!

Why are these texts in the bible? Because they give us sacred permission to feel the way we feel sometimes and they give us sacred tools to help us deal with the shortcomings and frustrations of our lives. They are, in fact, both very important and very consoling texts because, to put it metaphorically, they give us a large enough keyboard to play all the songs that we need to play in our lives. They give us the laments and the prayers we need to utter sometimes in the face of our human condition, with its many frustrations, and in the face of death, tragedy, and depression.

To give a simple example: A friend of mine shares this story: Recently he was in church with his family, which included his seven year-old son, Michael, and his own mother, Michael’s grandmother. At one point, Michael, seated beside his grandmother, whispered aloud: “I’m so bored!” His grandmother pinched him and chided him: “You are not bored!” as if the sacred ambience of church and an authoritative command could change human nature. They can’t. When we’re bored, we’re bored! And sometimes we need to be given divine permission to feel what we’re spontaneously feeling.

Some years ago, for all the noblest of intentions, a religious community I know wanted to sanitize the Psalms that they pray regularly in the Divine Office to rid them of all elements of anger, violence, vengeance, and war. They had some of their own scripture scholars do the work so that it would be scholarly and serious. They succeeded in that, the product was scholarly and serious, but stripped of all motifs of violence, vengeance, anger, and war what resulted was something that looked more like a Hallmark Card than a series of prayers that express real life and real feelings. We don’t always feel upbeat, generous, and faith-filled. Sometimes we feel angry, bitter, and vengeful. We need to be given sacred permission to feel that way (though not to act that way) and to pray in honesty out of that space.

My parents, and for the most part their whole generation, would, daily, in their prayers, utter these words: To You do we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears. Our own generation tends to view this as morbid, as somehow denigrating both the beauty and joy of life and the perspective that faith is meant to give us. But there’s a hidden richness in that prayer. In praying in that way, they gave themselves sacred permission to accept the limits of their lives. That prayer carries the symbolic tools to handle frustration; something, I submit, we have failed to sufficiently give to our own children. Too many young people today have never been given the symbolic tools to handle frustration, nor sacred permission to feel what they are feeling. Sometimes, all good intentions aside, we have handed our children more of Walt Disney than Gospel.

In the Book of Lamentations we find a passage that while sounding negative on the surface, is paradoxically, in the face of death and tragedy, perhaps the most consoling text of all. The text simply states that, sometimes in life, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait!

That’s sound advice, spoken from the mouth of experience and the mouth of faith.

The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, once wrote these words to a friend who, in the face of the death of a loved one, wondered how or where he could ever find consolation. What do I do with all this grief? Rilke’s reply: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give that heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.” They are, so too is life sometimes and we need to be given God’s permission to feel that heaviness.