Faith isn’t something you ever simply achieve. It’s not something that you ever nail down as a fait accompli. Faith works this way: Some days you walk on water and other days you sink like a stone.  Faith invariably gives way to doubt before it again recovers its confidence, then it loses it again.

We see this graphically illustrated in the famous story in the gospels of Peter walking on water. The story goes this way: The disciples had just witnessed a major miracle, Jesus feeding more than 5000 people with five loaves of bread and two fishes. Having just witnessed a miracle, their faith was strong. Soon afterwards they get into a boat to cross a lake. Jesus is not with them. A few miles out they run into a fierce storm and begin to panic. Jesus comes walking towards them on the water. Initially they’re frightened and take him for a ghost. But he calms their fear by telling them, right from the center of the storm, that he is not just Jesus but that he is God’s very presence.

Peter is immediately buoyed up in his faith and asks Jesus to let him too walk on the water. Jesus invites him to do so and Peter gets out of the boat confidently and begins to walk on the water. But then, realizing what he was doing and the incredulous nature of it, he immediately starts to sink, cries out for help, and Jesus has to reach out and rescue him from drowning.

What we see illustrated here are two things that lie at the heart of our experience of faith, namely, that faith (literally) has its ups and downs and that it works best when we don’t confuse it with our own powers.

Faith has its ups and downs: We see this, almost pictorially illustrated, in the incident of Peter walking on the water. Initially his faith feels strong and he confidently steps onto the sea and begins to walk. But, almost immediately upon realizing what he was doing, he starts to sink. Our own faith works exactly like that, at times it lets us walk on water and at other times we sink like a stone. The gospel-image of Peter walking on the sea speaks for itself.

However if we feel discouraged because our faith vacillates in this way, we can take consolation from these words from Julian of Norwich. Describing one of her visions, she writes: “After this He [Jesus] showed a most excellent spiritual pleasure in my soul: I was completely filled with everlasting certainty, powerfully sustained without any painful fear. This feeling was so joyful and so spiritual that I was wholly in peace and in repose and there was nothing on earth that would have grieved me. This lasted only a while, and I was changed and left to myself in such sadness and weariness of my life, and annoyance with myself that scarcely was I able to have patience to live.  … And immediately after this, our Blessed Lord gave me again the comfort and the rest in my soul, in delight and in security so blissful and so powerful that no fear, no sorrow, no bodily pain that could be suffered would have distressed me. And then pain showed again to my feeling, and then the joy and delight, and now the one, and now the other, various times.” (Showings 15)

Julian of Norwich was a renowned mystic with an exceptional faith and, yet, like Peter, she too vacillated between walking on water and sinking like a stone. Her confident feelings came – but they also left.

As well, faith works best when we don’t confuse it with our own efforts. For example, Donald Nichol, in his book, Holiness, shares a story of a British missionary working in Africa. At one point, early on in his stay there, the missionary was called upon to mediate a dispute between two tribes. He had no preparation for this, was naïve, and totally out of his depth. But he gave himself over to the task in faith and, surprisingly, reconciled the two tribes. Afterwards, buoyed by this success, he began to fancy himself as mediator and began to present himself as an arbiter of disputes. But now, however, his efforts were invariably unhelpful. Here’s the irony: when he didn’t know what he was doing, but trusted solely in God, he was able to walk on water; as soon as he began to wrap himself in the process, he sank like a stone. Faith works like that: We can walk on water only as long as we don’t think that we are doing it with our own strength.

The Sufi mystic, Rumi, once wrote that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not, and then we know it again.  Faith works like that, some days we walk on water, other days we sink like a stone, and then later we walk on water again.

Sometimes everything can seem right on the surface while, deep down, nothing is right at all. We see this, for example, in the famous parable in the gospels about the Prodigal Son and his Older Brother. By every outward appearance the Older Brother is doing everything right: He’s perfectly obedient to his father, is at home, and is doing everything his father asks of him. And, unlike his younger brother, he’s not wasting his father’s property on prostitutes and partying. He seems a model of generosity and morality.

However, as soon becomes obvious in the story, things are far from right. While his life looks so good on the outside, he is full of resentment and bitter moralizing inside and is, in fact, envious of his brother’s amorality. What’s happening? In essence, his actions are right, but his energy is wrong.

But, lest we judge him too harshly, we need to have the honesty to acknowledge that we all struggle in this way, at least if we are moral and generous. What is played out in the bitterness of the Older Brother is, in the astute words of Alice Miller, “the drama of the gifted child”, namely, the resentment, self-pity, and propensity for bitter moralizing that inevitably besets those of us who don’t stray from our duties, who do stay home, and who carry the brunt of the load for our families, churches, and communities. Sadly, often, the feeling we are left with when we give our lives over in sacrifice is not joy and gratitude for having been given the grace, opportunity, and good sense to stay home and serve but rather resentment that the load fell on our shoulders, that so many others dodged it, and that so many in the world are having a fling while we are on the straight and narrow. Too often, among us, good and honest people who are fighting for truth and God’s cause, we find a spirit of bitter moralizing that colors and compromises both our generosity and our sacrifice. But I say this with sympathy: It’s not easy to give oneself over, to forego one’s dreams, ambitions, comfort, and pleasure for the sake of God, truth, duty, family, and community.

How might we do it? How might we imitate the fidelity of the Older Brother without falling into his envy, self-pity, and bitterness? Where can we access the right fuel to live out the Gospel?

As Christians, of course, we need to look at Jesus. He lived a life of radical generosity and self-surrender and yet never fell into the kind of self-pity that emanates from the sense of having missed out on something. He was never disappointed or bitter that he had given his life over. Nor indeed did he, like Hamlet, turn his renunciation into an existential tragedy, that of the lonely, alienated hero who is outwardly intriguing but not generative. Jesus remained always free, warm, forgiving, non-judgmental, and generative. Moreover, throughout this entire life of self-sacrifice, he always radiated a joy that shocked his contemporaries. What was his secret?

The answer, the gospels tell us, lies in the parable of the man who is ploughing a field and finds a buried treasure and in the parable of the merchant who after years of searching finds the pearl of great price. In each case, the man gives away everything he owns so that he can buy the treasure or the pearl. And what must be highlighted in each of these parables is that neither man regrets for a second what he had to give up but instead each acts out of the unspeakable joy of what he has discovered and what riches this is now going to bring into his life. Each man is so fuelled by the joy of what he has discovered that he is not focused on what he has given up.

Only in this kind of context can self-sacrifice make sense and be truly generative. If the pain of what is sacrificed overshadows the joy of what is discovered, that is, if the focus is more on what we have lost and given up rather than on what we have found, we will end up doing the right actions but with the wrong energy, carrying other people’s crosses and sending them the bill. And we will be unable to stop ourselves from being judgmental, bitter, and secretly envious of the amoral.

To the very extent that we die to ourselves in order to live for others, we run the perennial risk of falling into the kind of bitterness that besets us whenever we feel we have missed out on something. That’s an occupational hazard, a very serious one, inside Christian discipleship and the spiritual life in general. And so, our focus must always be on the treasure, the pearl of great price, the rich meaning, the self-authenticating joy that is the natural fruit of any real self-sacrifice. And that joyful energy will take us beyond self-pity and envy of the amoral.

There are few more insightful studies into the spirituality of aging than the late James Hillman’s book, The Force of Character.  Ironically Hillman was more critical of Christian spirituality than sympathetic to it; yet his brilliant insights into nature’s design and intent offer perspectives on the spirituality of aging that often eclipse what is found in explicitly Christian writings.

Hillman begins this book, a discourse on the nature of aging, with a question: Why would nature design things so that, as humans, just as we reach the pinnacle of our maturity and finally get more of a genuine grip on our lives, our bodies begin to fall apart?  Why do we suffer such a bevy of physical ailments as we age? Is this a cruel trick or does nature have a specific intent in mind when it does this? What might nature have in mind when the ailments and physical foibles of age begin to play some havoc with our days and nights?

He answers these questions with a metaphor: The best wines have to be aged and mellowed in cracked old barrels. This image of course needs little explication. We all know the difference between a mellow old wine and a tart young one that could still use some maturation. What we don’t grasp as immediately is how that old wine became so mellow, what processes it had to endure to give up the sharp tang of its youth.

Thus, Hillman’s metaphor speaks brilliantly: Our physical bodies are the containers within which our souls mellow and mature; and our souls mellow and mature more deeply when our bodies begin to show cracks than they do when we are physically strong and whole, akin to what John Updike wrote after undergoing a death-threatening illness. For Updike, there are some secrets that are hidden from health. For Hillman there is a depth of maturity that is also hidden from health.

With that fundamental insight as his ground, Hillman then goes on in each chapter of the book to take up one aspect of aging, one aspect of the loss of the wholeness of our youth, and show how it is designed to help mellow and mature the soul. And since he is dealing with various lapses in our bodies and our health, we can expect that what follows will be pretty earthy and far from glamorous.

Thus, for instance, he begins one chapter with the question: Why does it happen that, as we age, we find it more difficult to sleep uninterrupted through the night but instead are awakened with the need to go to the bathroom and heed a call of nature? What is nature’s wisdom and intent in that?

Hillman answers with another insightful analogy: In monasteries, monks get up each night while it is still dark and do an exercise they call “Vigils”. If you asked them why they don’t do this prayer during the day so as to save themselves getting up in the middle of the night, they would tell you that this particular exercise can only be done at night, in the dark, in the particular mood that the night brings. The night, the dark, and the more somber angels this brings cannot be artificially replicated during the day, in the light. Light brings a sunnier mood and there are certain things we will not face in the light of day, but only when the dark besets us.

So what happens when our aging bodies make us get up at night to heed nature’s call? We heed nature’s call but then often are unable to fall back into sleep immediately. Instead we lie in our beds trying to will ourselves back to sleep when something unwanted and unintended happens. We receive a visit from the mythical goddess of night, Nyx. And she doesn’t come alone; she brings along her children: unresolved bitterness, lingering grudges, unwanted paranoia, frightening shadows, and a bevy of other dark spirits whom we can normally avoid and whom we refuse to face when the lights are on. But now, in the dark, unable to sleep, we must deal with them, and dealing with them, making our peace with Nyx and her children, helps mellow our souls and helps us grow to a deeper maturity.

Monks already know this and so, each night, they schedule a session with the goddess of night. They don’t call it that of course and might even be offended by the reference to their Vigil prayer as a visit with this mythical goddess, but their spiritual wisdom mirrors that of nature. Both nature and monks know that a certain work inside the soul can only be done in the darkness of night.

Monks have secrets worth knowing and nature eventually teaches them to us, whether we want the lesson or not. Nature eventually turns us all into monks: Our aging bodies eventually become a monastic cell within which our souls deepen, mellow, and mature, like wines being seasoned in cracked old barrels.

Few thinkers have influenced me as profoundly as Robert L. Moore. Who is he? He’s a scholar who has spent almost 50 years studying human energy from the perspective of psychology, anthropology, and spirituality. Few scholars are his equal in linking human energy, even when it is raw and grandiose, to the image and likeness of God inside of us. He merits an audience.

Recently, I had the privilege of attending an Institute at which he keynoted. I share with you a couple of his insights:

Our growing anxiety and our need to build “an arc” so as not drown in it:

Our lives today are awash with anxiety and this is wreaking psychological and spiritual havoc everywhere. We are being assailed by “unregulated anxiety” and, as this anxiety is rising, our capacity to handle it is simultaneously going down. This is causing, in his words, a “pan-tribal regression”, that is, we are seeing most everywhere groups huddle together in paranoia and self-protection. And what are the consequences of this?

Studies have shown that when we feel threatened our capacity to listen to each other begins to shut down, even biologically. In brief, when we feel anxiety our brains instinctually move towards a more primitive place, namely, towards the reptile, more cold-blooded, part of us.  This is further compounded by the fact that we have less cultural and spiritual vessels to help contain our anxiety. Many of our former cultural and spiritual rituals to deal with anxiety have either deteriorated or died. Hence, it is no surprise to see so much paranoia and violence in our world today. We are drowning in anxiety and lack the psychological and spiritual resources to deal with that. This, for Moore, can be called “Noah’s flood” in our time, the world is drowning in anxiety and we need to learn to build a “spiritual arc” (an “inner psychic temple”) in order to not drown and, like Noah, help preserve life on this planet.

But, Moore warns, this won’t be easy. We are still very much in a state of denial and, ironically, at one level that denial is actually healthily protecting us. As Moore puts it, if we punch through our denial and other defense mechanisms without first building an inner psychic temple, we can fall into psychosis because we can be overwhelmed by our archetypal energies. Our defense mechanisms are needed, at least for a while, to help safeguard our sanity. Fundamentalism is one of those safeguards: People are turning to rigid ways in order to try to remain sane.

On our fear of God, our attempts to block off God from our lives, and our naïve religion:

We have many defense mechanisms against the “numinous”, but that is understandable. When we are standing before God and trying to access that energy it is somewhat akin to a person standing before an electrical wire carrying 200,000 volts and trying to plug in a coffee maker. That’s an image for our struggle to try to access and contain Godly energy. We are constantly pressured by this energy, from within and without, and need, inside of us, to construct a psychological chalice, a holy grail, an inner temple, to consciously hold our God energies. This psychological chalice is too the cup of the Eucharist.

Beyond that, we must also ask the question: Why is there such a resistance in us regarding being aware of the great presence? Why our habitual refusal of the awareness of God? Why do we prefer to walk alone, without God? For Moore, this is really a key part of the mystery of iniquity: We habitually shut out a gracious God, preferring darkness to light.

On the difference between science and theology:

The difference between science and theology is the difference between a jet-engine and a rocket-engine. A jet engine needs oxygen and can only fly to a certain height; it has to remain inside our atmosphere. A rocket engine is powered in such a way that it can fly outside of the atmosphere.

On how we are to build an inner psychic temple:

We all have amazing potential, but are forever shooting low. It is possible to learn to walk in the way of beauty, to live elegantly because we are already sitting in radiance. There is a radical compassion already inside of us, but we must “awake” to it. We are already living in a huge love. The road home must already be home. And so we need to be really suspicious whenever we feel alone, because we are never alone. When we are feeling lonely we are being tricked.

What are some steps towards living the way of beauty and compassion? In brief:

Cut through your denial, recognize what you lack. Eliminate “the waffle” from your life, learn to hold the tension, balance opposites, and consciously (through prayer) try to abide in the Great Presence. Employ a “holy fierceness” in doing that.

Few spiritual writers exhibit Moore’s combination of depth and balance. He merits an audience.

Today, for a number of reasons, we struggle to be generous and prodigal with God’s mercy.

As the number of people who attend church services continues to decline, the temptation among many of our church leaders and ministers is to see this more as a pruning than as a tragedy and to respond by making God’s mercy less, rather than more, accessible. For example, a seminary professor whom I know shares that, after forty years of teaching a course designed to prepare seminarians to administer the sacrament of penance, today sometimes the first question that the seminarians ask is: “When can I refuse absolution?”  In effect, how scrupulous must I be in dispensing God’s mercy?

To their credit, their motivation is mostly sincere, however misguided. They sincerely fear playing fast and loose with God’s grace, fearing that they might end up dispensing cheap grace.

Partly that’s a valid motive.  Fear of playing fast and loose with God’s grace, coupled with concerns for truth, orthodoxy, proper public form, and fear of scandal have their own legitimacy.  Mercy needs always to be tempered by truth. But sometimes the motives driving our hesitancy are less noble and our anxiety about handing out cheap grace arises more out of timidity, fear, legalism, and our desire, however unconscious, for power.

But even when mercy is withheld for the nobler of those reasons, we’re still misguided, bad shepherds, out of tune with the God whom Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad and the good, the undeserving and the deserving, the uninitiated and the initiated. One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God, like the light and warmth of the sun, cannot not go out to everyone. Consequently it’s always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, and has a reach beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend; dole out God’s forgiveness, as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off cut access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear, we limit it to the size of our own minds.

It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they perennially tried to prevent children, prostitutes, tax collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds from coming to Jesus.  However, always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come! I want them to come.”

Early on in my ministry, I lived in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. I fear I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “don’t be soft. Only the truth sets people free. Risk truth over mercy.”

As I age, I am ever more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need more to risk God’s mercy. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free.

But, like the apostles, we, well-intentioned persons, are forever trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as it is offered in word, sacrament, and community. But God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

George Eliot once wrote: “When death, the great reconciler, has come, it is never our tenderness that we repent of, but our severity.”

Thirty years ago, before the airline hijackings of September 11, 2001, before the shoe-bomber and others like him, it was simpler to travel by air. You didn’t need to take off your shoes to pass through security, you could carry liquids with you, laptops and other electronic devices, if you had any, did not have to be brought out of your carry-on bags, the door to the cockpit wasn’t barricaded with steel, and there was much less paranoia in general about security. You even got to see the pilot occasionally.

I remember such an occasion thirty years ago when I did see the pilot, and heard him engage in conversation with a particular passenger. It was an early morning flight from Dublin to London in a small, commuter-type plane with no business-class section. I was seated in the aisle-seat in the first row and directly across the aisle from me, in the first row of seats, sat a middle-aged woman who, very soon, made it clear that she had a phobia about flying.  Shortly after we were seated she called the airline attendant over and told her that her family had talked her into taking this flight but that she was terribly frightened and was having second thoughts about staying on the plane. The attendant gently tried to reassure her that everything was safe; indeed statistically she was safer in the air than on the ground. But logic doesn’t so easily quiet a phobia. The woman was reassured for the moment, aided no doubt by the fact that she was sitting ten feet from the door which was still wide open and that our plane was, for the moment, obviously not going anywhere.

But she began to be more progressively more panicky after the doors were closed and the plane began to back away from the gate. The airline attendant reappeared to calm her and, for a few moments again, her reassurance worked. The woman grew calm and our plane took its place in the queue of planes waiting to take off. Suddenly, the woman broke out in a full-scale anxiety-attack, shouting to the airline attendant that she needed to get off the plane. The attendant, having already twice failed to effectively calm her, opened the door to the cockpit to talk to the pilot and, within a minute, the pilot emerged and began to speak to the panicked woman.

He might have been a professional counselor, given the patience and empathy with which he treated her. He took her hand and gently gave her reassurances: “It’s okay to feel like this! Lots of people have these fears. You’re perfectly safe here. I have flown this route countless times in this very airplane; I guarantee it’s safe. Your family will be waiting for you in London, think of how happy they’ll be! And once you’ll have done this, you’ll be free from this fear for the rest of your life. I will personally escort you off the plane in London! “

His words seemed to work a magic, the woman calmed down and nodded to him that she was ready. Yes, she was going to do this. The pilot returned to his seat in the cockpit, and I sat in awe of his patience.

But a phobia is what it is. After several minutes, just as it was our turn to move out for takeoff, the woman went into another anxiety-attack, worse than the first. The airline attendant got up and quickly opened the cockpit door, sharing the situation with the pilot. The door closed without a word and our plane turned round and slowly taxied back to our gate. Upon arrival, the pilot announced that we had returned to the gate because a passenger was experiencing “an emergency” but that we wouldn’t be too long at the gate. A jetway bridge came out from the gate and the door of the plane opened. The airline attendant opened the door to the cockpit and I could hear the pilot’s voice clearly.  Irritated, angry, sharp in tone, he said to the attendant: Get her off! Just get her off this plane! Gone were his patience, gentleness, warmth, and empathy. He had already tried these, to no avail. The woman had had her chance.  It was time to move on: Get her off! Just get her off this plane!

We all sympathized with his loss of patience. We’d run out of patience too. We needed to get on with our trip. It wasn’t like he hadn’t tried. He’d just run out of patience, got worn-down, had had enough. That’s understandable and forgivable. He’d had done well, pretty well in fact … but, in the end, not well enough.

Ultimately he had given in to weariness and scripture tells us that we must never grow weary of doing what’s right. Of course, we mostly we don’t have the strength to do that. Mostly we do the right thing until our patience runs out, and then it’s: Just get her off this plane!

The lusts of the flesh reveal the loneliness of the soul.

Dag Hammarskjold, the former Secretary-General of the United Nations, wrote those words and they highlight part of the deeper intentionality of sexual desire. And this insight was more than just a theoretical one for Hammarskjold. He knew loneliness and unfulfilled desire.

As more and more of his journals are published in English, we are becoming more aware that Dag Hammarskjold was both a man of extraordinary moral integrity and extraordinary spiritual depth. And he came by it legitimately. His father, at one time the Prime Minister of Sweden, had been a great statesman of uncompromising integrity and his mother had been a woman of great warmth and spiritual depth. Hammarskjold inherited the best of both, and it made him both a rare statesman and a great spiritual writer. However not everything was whole in his life.

While in his professional life he dealt with issues of world importance and was taxed for every ounce of his energies, the rest of his life was not nearly so complete. As a young man, he had lost a woman he deeply loved to another man, and this was a wound that never left him. He never dated or pursued marriage again. He longed to be married, but, for all kinds of reasons, as is the case for millions of people, it just never happened. He was, in the words of his biographer, Walter Lipsey, “checkmated rather than mated.”

Hammarskjold, in his journals, often reflects on this “checkmate” and upon the lacuna it left in his life. There’s a searing honesty about its pain and about how he tries to grapple with it. On the one hand, he is clear that this is a pain that cannot be denied and which never goes away; on the other hand, he is able to redirect it somewhat, sublimating it into a wider embrace, into a different kind of marriage bed.

“I feel pain, a longing to share in this embrace [of a husband and wife], to be absorbed, to share in this encounter. A longing like carnal desire, but directed toward earth, water, sky, and returned by the whispers of the trees, the fragrance of the soil, the caresses of the wind, the embrace of water and light.”  Was this satisfying? Not quite, but it brought a certain peace: “Content? No, no, no – but refreshed, rested, while waiting.”

In this, both in how he experienced the pain of his inconsummation and in how he tried to redirect those longings, his feelings parallel those of Thomas Merton. Merton was once asked by a journalist how he felt about celibacy. Merton replied that “celibacy was hell”, that it condemned one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned (“It is not good for the man to be alone”), and that it was in fact a dangerous way to live since it was an abnormal way of living. But Merton then went on to say that, just because it was anomalous and dangerous, didn’t mean that it couldn’t be wonderfully generative and life-giving, both for the one living it as well as for those around him or her. And that was no doubt true in Merton’s own case, just as it was true for Hammarskjold. Both infused more oxygen into the planet.

Moreover, Merton tried to sublimate his desire for a marriage bed in much the same way as Hammarskjold did: “I had decided to marry the silence of the forest. The sweet dark warmth of the whole world will have to be my wife. Out of the heart of that dark warmth comes the secret that is heard only in silence, but it is the root of all the secrets that are whispered by all the lovers in their beds all over the world.”

Both Hammarskjold and Merton longed for that deep, highly individualized, intimate and sexual, one-to-one embrace which was denied them by their place in life and which is denied to millions of us by every sort of circumstance and conscription. Merton chose to forego sexual consummation deliberately, to embrace religious vows; Hammarskjold had it chosen for him, by circumstance. At the end of the day the effect was the same. Both then tried to sublimate that need and desire for congenital intimacy by, in their own words, somehow marrying the world and making love in a less-particularized way.

Many married persons who enjoy that unique depth of one-to-one intimacy that Hammarskjold and Merton longed for, must, I suspect, inchoately also long to find within their sexual intimacy that wider embrace of which Hammarskjold and Merton speak, knowing that they want that too in their sexual embrace.

Thinkers have forever mulled-over the problem of the one and the many, the interrelationship between the particular and the universal, because this isn’t just a theoretical issue in metaphysics, something to entertain philosophers, it’s also something that lies inextricably entangled within the powerful pressure of sexuality in lovers in their beds all over the world.

Nature, desire, and soul – we rarely integrate these well. Yet they are so inextricably linked that how we relate to one deeply colors the others; and, indeed, spirituality itself might be defined as what we each do in terms of integrating these three in our lives.

More recently notable spiritual authors such as Annie Dillard, Kathleen Norris, Bill Plotkin, and Belden Lane have argued persuasively that physical nature profoundly affects the soul, just as how we manage our private desires deeply influences how we treat nature. Spirituality is naïve when it is divorced from nature and desire. In a book just released, The Road Is How: A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul, Canadian writer Trevor Herriot joins these voices in calling for a better integration between 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 as he does this prairie Camino. The result is a remarkable chronicle, a deeply moral book.

As a naturalist, Herriot is involved in various conservation projects from saving grassland birds to preserving the historic grass upon which the buffalo once roamed. Thus it’s no surprise that one of his central themes is the connection he intuits between nature and spirit: “I worry about what happens when we separate spirituality from bodily life and culture, both of which are profoundly connected to soil, climate, and the other givens of place.” And we should worry too: “These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care, and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare, and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges. The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.”

From there it’s a short step to his reflections on sex and desire. Herriot submits that “there is a sadness that comes of misappropriating sexual energy, a kind of functional despair that hums away in the background for most men if they stop long enough to listen to it.” In brief, for him, how we treat our bodies, our spouses, and the other gender greatly helps determine how we treat nature. And the reverse is just as true; how we treat nature will help determine how we treat our own bodies, our spouses, our lovers, and the other gender: “In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?  We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge, and be fruitful. Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.” This is not a language that’s easily digested by either the right or the left.

Like Allan Bloom’s book a generation ago, The Closing of the American Mind, Herriot’s book is poised to have equally strong critics on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. Religious conservatives will be upset about some of his views on sexuality, but I fear that many secular liberals will be just as upset by those views as their right-wing counterparts. The same holds true for some of Herriot’s views on soul, church, historical Christianity, patriarchy, feminism, gender, homosexuality, and global warming. Conservative Christians will find themselves stretched in ways that they would prefer to not think about and strident secularists will find themselves constantly incredulous that someone like Herriot, whom they consider an ally, will speak of soul, spirituality, lust, and chastity in ways that they have long-considered naïve; but holding very complex truths often creates precisely this kind of tension.

James Hillman used to quip: “A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.”  The Road Knows How tells us where many, many of our symptoms belong.