Searching for the Right Fuel

July 28, 2014

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.

Suicide – Reclaiming the Memory of Our Loved One

July 21, 2014

Each year I write a column on suicide. Mostly I say the same thing over and over again, simply because it needs to be said. I don’t claim any originality or special insight, I only write about suicide because there is such a desperate need for anyone to address the question. Moreover, in my case, as a Catholic priest and spiritual writer, I feel it important to offer something to try to help dispel the false perception which so many people, not least many inside the church itself, have of the church’s understanding of suicide. Simply put, I’m no expert, not anyone’s savior, there’s just so little out there.

And, each year, that column finds its audience. I am constantly surprised and occasionally overwhelmed by the feedback. For the last ten years, I don’t think a single week has gone by when I did not receive an email, a letter, or phone call from someone who has lost a loved one to suicide.

When talking about suicide, at least to those who are left behind when a loved one succumbs to this, the same themes must be emphasized over and over again. As Margaret Atwood puts it, sometimes something needs to be said and said until it doesn’t need to be said anymore. What needs to be said over and over again about suicide? That, in most cases, suicide is a disease; that it takes people out of life against their will; that it is the emotional equivalent of a stroke, heart attack, or cancer; that people who fall victim to this disease, almost invariably, are very sensitive persons who end up for a myriad of reasons being too bruised to be touched; that those of us left behind should not spend a lot of time second-guessing, wondering whether we failed in some way; and, finally, that given God’s mercy, the particular anatomy of suicide, and the sensitive souls of those who fall prey to it, we should not be unduly anxious about the eternal salvation of those who fall prey to it.

This year, prompted by particularly moving book by Harvard psychiatrist, Nancy Rappaport, I would like to add another thing that needs to be said about suicide, namely, that it is incumbent on those of us who are left behind to work at redeeming the life and memory of a loved one who died by suicide. What’s implied in this?

There is still a huge stigma surrounding suicide. For many reasons, we find it hard both to understand suicide and to come to peace with it. Obituaries rarely name it, opting instead for a euphemism of some kind to name the cause of death. Moreover and more troubling, we, the ones left behind, tend to bury not only the one who dies by suicide but his or her memory as well. Pictures come off the walls, scrapbooks and photos are excised, and there is forever a discreet hush around the cause of their deaths. Ultimately neither their deaths nor their persons are genuinely dealt with. There is no healthy closure, only a certain closing of the book, a cold closing, one that leaves a lot of business unfinished. This is unfortunate, a form of denial. We must work at redeeming the life and memory of our loved ones who have died by suicide.

This is what Nancy Rappaport does with the life and memory of her own mother, who died by suicide when Nancy was still a child. ((In Her Wake, A Child Psychiatrist Explores the Mystery of Her Mother’s Suicide (Basic Book, N.Y., c2009) After her mother’s suicide, Nancy lived, as do so many of us who have lost a loved one to suicide, with a haunting shadow surrounding her mother’s death. And that shadow then colored everything else about her mother. It ricocheted backwards so as to have the suicide too much define her mother’s character, her integrity, and her love for those around her. A suicide, that’s botched in our understanding, in effect, does that, it functions like the antithesis of a canonization.

With this as a background, Nancy Rappaport sets off to make sense of her mother’s suicide, to redeem her bond to her mother, and, in essence, to redeem her mother’s memory in the wake of her suicide. Her effort mirrors that of novelist, Mary Gordon, whose book, Circling my Mother, attempts to come to grips with her mother’s Alzheimer’s and her death. Gordon, like Rappaport, is too trying to put a proper face on the diminishment and death of a loved one, redeeming the memory both for herself and for others. The difference is that, for most people, suicide trumps Alzheimer’s in terms of stigma and loss.

Few things stigmatize someone’s life and meaning as does a death by suicide, and so there is something truly redemptive in properly coming to grips with this kind of stigma. We must do for our loved ones what Nancy Rappaport did for her mother, namely, redeem their lives and their memory.

A Visit from the Goddess of Night

July 14, 2014

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.

Disciples with many Faces

July 7, 2014

In a new book entitled, Jesus of Nazareth, famed German scripture-scholar, Gerhard Lohfink, describes how people in the gospels relate to Jesus in different ways. Not everyone was an apostle, not everyone was a disciple, and not everyone who contributed to Jesus’ cause even followed him. Different individuals had their own way of connecting to Jesus. Here’s how he puts it:

“We may say that the gospels, especially Mark, are aware of a great variety of forms of participation in Jesus’ cause. There were the Twelve. There was a broader circle of disciples. There were those who participated in Jesus’ life. There were localized, resident adherents who made their houses available. There were people who helped in particular situations, if only by offering a cup of water. Finally, there were the beneficiaries who profited from Jesus’ cause and for that reason did not speak against it.”

Lohfink then makes this observation: “These structural lines that run through the gospels are not accidental. … In today’s church, because it is a shapeless mass, we can find all these forms expressed. It is a complex pattern, as complex as the human body. The openness of the gospels, the openness of Jesus must warn us against regarding people as lacking in faith if they are unable to adopt a disciple’s way of life or if it is something completely alien to them. In any event, Jesus never did.”

If what Lohfink says is true, this has implications as to how we should understand the church, both as it is conceived in the abstract and how it is understood practically within our parish structures. Simply put, the similarity to Jesus’ time is obvious. When we look at church life today, especially as we see it lived out concretely within parishes, it is obvious that it is made up of much more than only the core, committed congregation, namely, those who participate regularly in church life and accept (at least for the main part) the dogmatic and moral teachings their churches. The church also contains a wide variety of the less-engaged: people who practice occasionally, people who accept some of its teachings, guests who visit our churches, people who don’t explicitly commit but are sympathetic to the church and offer it various kinds of support, and, not least, people who link themselves to God in more-privatized ways, those who are spiritual but not religious. As Lohfink points out, these people were already around Jesus and “they were not unimportant” to his mission.

But we must be careful in how we understand this. This does not mean that there are tiers within discipleship, where some are called to a higher holiness and others to a lower one, as if the full gospel applies only to some. There were some centuries in church history where Christian spirituality suffered from exactly this misunderstanding, where it was common to think that monks, nuns, contemplatives, priests, and other such people were called to live the full gospel while others were exempt from the more demanding of Jesus’ invitations. No such exemptions. The church may never be divided into the perfect and less perfect, the better and the half-baked, full-participation and partial-participation. The full gospel applies to everyone, as does Jesus’ invitation to intimacy with him. Jesus doesn’t call people according to more or less. Christian discipleship doesn’t ideally admit of levels, notches, layers, and different tiers of participation … but something akin to this does forever happen, analogous to what happens in a love relationship. Each individual chooses how deep he or she will go and some go deeper than others, though ideally everyone is meant to go its full depth.

And, given human history and human freedom, this is not surprising. There will always be a great variation in both depth and participation. Each of us has his or her own history of being graced and wounded, formed and deformed, and so we all come to adulthood with very different capacities to see, understand, love, accept love, and give ourselves over to someone or something beyond us. None of us is whole and none of us is fully mature. All of us are limited in what we can do. Hence, religiously, nobody can be expected to respond to something that is completely outside of his or her sphere of possibility and so we will inevitably gather around Jesus in very different ways, depending upon our capacity to see and to give ourselves over. Jesus, it seemed, was okay with that.

In his view, there was no such a category as a Cafeteria-disciple or a Disciple-light. There shouldn’t be such categories either in our understanding. We are all around Jesus in our different ways and we must be careful not to judge each other, given that Donatism and her adopted children are forever on the prowl.

Robert Moore on Human Energy

June 30, 2014

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.

On Being Perpetually Distracted

June 23, 2014

There’s a story in the Hindu tradition that runs something like this: God and a man are walking down a road. The man asks God: “What is the world like?” God answers: “I’d like to tell you, but my throat is parched. I need a cup of cold water. If you can go and get me a cup of cold water, I’ll tell you what the world is like.” The man heads off to the nearest house to ask for a cup of cold water. He knocks on the door and it is opened by a beautiful young woman. He asks for a cup of cold water. She answers: “I will gladly get it for you, but it’s just time for the noon meal, why don’t you come in first and eat.” He does.

Thirty years later, they’ve had five children, he’s a respected merchant, she’s a respected member of the community, they’re in their house one evening when a hurricane comes and uproots their house. The man cries out: “Help me, God!” And a voice comes from the center of the hurricane says: “Where’s my cup of cold water?”

This story is not so much a spiritual criticism as it is a fundamental lesson in anthropology and spirituality: To be a human being is to be perpetually distracted. We aren’t persons who live in habitual spiritual awareness who occasionally get distracted. We’re persons who live in habitual distraction who occasionally become spiritually aware. We tend be so preoccupied with the ordinary business of living that it takes a hurricane of some sort for God to break through.

C.S. Lewis, commenting on why we tend to turn to God only during a hurricane, once put it this way: God is always speaking to us, but normally we aren’t aware, aren’t listening. Accordingly pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world.

However none of us want that kind of pain; none of us want some disaster, some health breakdown, or some hurricane to shake us up. We prefer a powerful positive event, a miracle or mini-miracle, to happen to us to awaken God’s presence in us because we nurse the false daydream that, if God broke into our lives in some miraculous way, we would then move beyond our distracted spiritual state and get more serious about our spiritual lives. But that’s the exact delusion inside the biblical character in the parable of Lazarus and Dives, where the rich man asks Abraham to send him back from the dead to warn his brothers that they must change their way of living or risk the fiery flames. His plea expresses exactly that false assumption: “If someone comes back from the dead, they will listen to him!” Abraham doesn’t buy the logic. He answers: “They have Moses and the Prophets. If they don’t listen to them, they won’t be convinced either, even if someone came back from the dead.” What lies unspoken but critically important in that reply, something easily missed by us, the reader, is that Jesus has already come back from the dead and we aren’t listening to him. Why should we suppose that we would listen to anyone else who comes back from the dead? Our preoccupation with the ordinary business of our lives is so strong that we are not attentive to the one who has already come back from the dead.

Given this truth, the Hindu tale just recounted is, in a way, more consoling than chiding. To be human is to be habitually distracted from spiritual things. Such is human nature. Such is our nature. But knowing that our endless proclivity for distraction is normal doesn’t give us permission to be comfortable with that fact. Great spiritual mentors, not least Jesus, strongly urge us to wake up, to move beyond our over-preoccupation with the affairs of everyday life. Jesus challenges us to not be anxious about how we are to provide for ourselves. He also challenges us to read the signs of the times, namely, to see the finger of God, the spiritual dimension of things, in the everyday events of our lives. All great spiritual literature does the same. Today there is a rich literature in most spiritual traditions challenging us to mindfulness, to not be mindlessly absorbed in the everyday affairs of our lives.

But great spiritual literature also assures us that God understands us, that grace respects nature, that God didn’t make a mistake in designing human nature, and that God didn’t make us in such a way that we find ourselves congenitally distracted and then facing God’s anger because we are following our nature. Human nature naturally finds itself absorbed in the affairs of everyday life, and God designed human nature in just this way.

And so, I think, God must be akin to a loving parent or grandparent, looking at his or her children at the family gathering, happy that they have interesting lives that so absorb them, content not to be always the center of their conscious attention.

On Not Being Stingy With God’s Mercy

June 16, 2014

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.”

The Regrets We Can Live With

June 9, 2014

In her recent book, The Invention of Wings, Sue Monk Kidd presents us with a deeply conflicted heroine, Sarah, a highly sensitive woman who grows up the daughter of a slave-owner and a child of privilege. But Sarah’s moral sensitivity soon trumps her sense of privilege and she makes a series of hard choices to distance herself from both slavery and privilege.

Perhaps the most difficult among those hard choices was the choice to refuse an offer of marriage from a man. Sarah badly wants marriage, motherhood, and children; but, when the man she has loved for years finally proposes, there were things inside her that she won’t compromise and she ends up saying no. What was her hesitancy?

When her suitor, Israel, finally proposes, Sarah asks him whether, inside their marriage, she could still pursue her dream to become a Quaker minister. Israel, a man of his time who could only grasp a woman’s role as that of wife and mother, is frank in his reply. For him, that could not be a possibility. Sarah immediately intuits the implications of that answer: “It was his way of telling me that I could not have him and myself both.” Her suitor then further aggravates the situation by suggesting that her desire to become a minister is simply a compensation, a second-best, for not being married. She turns down his offer.

But a renunciation does not cease being painful just because it’s has been made for a noble reason. Throughout her life, Sarah often feels an acute regret for her choice, for having her principles trump her heart. However she eventually makes peace with her regrets. Feeling the bitterness of her loss more acutely on the day her sister’s wedding, she shares with her sister how: “I longed for it [marriage] in that excruciating way one has of romanticizing the life that she didn’t choose. But sitting here now, I knew if I’d accepted Israel’s proposal, I would have regretted that too. I’d chosen the regret that I could live with the best, that’s all. I’d chosen the life I belonged to.”

There will always be regrets in our lives, deep regrets. Thomas Aquinas wrote: Every choice is a renunciation. For this reason, we find it so difficult to make hard choices, particularly as these pertain to any type of permanent commitment. We want the right things, but we do not want to forego other things. We want it all!

But we can’t have it all, none of us, no matter how full of talent, energy, and opportunity we are; and sometimes it takes us a long time to properly understand why. At one point in Kidd’s story, Sarah, in her thirties, single, unemployed, mainly alienated from her own family, frustrated by society limits and her limited choices as a woman, is living as a guest with a woman friend, Lucretia, a Quaker minister. One evening, sitting with Lucretia, lamenting the limits of her life, Sarah asks: “Why would God plant such deep yearnings in us. … if they only come to nothing?” It was more of a sigh than a question, but Lucretia replies: “God fills us with all sorts of yearnings that go against the grain of the world – but the fact that these yearnings come to nothing, well, I doubt that’s God’s doing. … I think we know that’s men’s doing.”

For Lucretia, if the world was only fair, we’d have no broken dreams. Partly she’s right; much of what’s wrong on this planet is our doing. But our frustrations ultimately tap into a deeper, less-culpable root, the inadequacy of life itself. Life, this side of eternity, is not whole. We, this side of eternity, are not whole. This side of eternity, nothing is whole. In the words of Karl Rahner: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished.

This has many implications, not least the simple (though not-easily-digestible) fact that we can’t have it all or do it all. Our lives have very real limits and we need to stop crucifying what we have and what we have achieved by what we haven’t got and what we haven’t achieved. Despite the current myth to the contrary, no one gets it all! Most of us, I suspect, can relate to some of these regrets: I’ve raised my children well, but now I will never go anywhere professionally. I’m very successful at work, but I am less successful as a husband and father. I never married for the wrong reasons, but now I am single and alone. I’ve sacrificed ordinary life for an ideal, but now I fiercely miss what I’ve had to give up. Or, like Sue Monk Kidd’s, Sarah: I’ve never compromised my principles, but that has a brought a brutal loneliness into my life.

It’s never a matter of living with regrets or without them. Everyone has regrets. Hopefully, though, we’ve chosen the regret we can live with best.

Wearied in our Patience

June 2, 2014

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!

Our Gaze upon the City

May 26, 2014

Jesus, it seems, had mixed feelings towards the world. He loved the world, laid down his life for it, and challenged us to love the world, even as he criticized it harshly and stated clearly that it was opposed to him.

So what’s to be our attitude? How are we to see the world? Is our gaze to be one of judgment or sympathy? Do we weep over the world in sympathy as Jesus wept over Jerusalem or do we strive to keep ourselves separate from a world that habitually scapegoats its God and crucifies its Christ? Are we too soft or too hard on our world?

Maybe we need first to ask: What exactly constitutes the world? Is it that part of the world that opposes the churches: strident secularism, militant atheism, and the mass exodus in some parts of the world of people from the churches? Or, is it that part of our world that seems indifferent to the churches: pop culture, the entertainment industry, the sports industry, mainstream academia, the editorials in most of our major newspapers? Or, given the fact that it was religiously-minded people who orchestrated the crucifixion, might the world that opposes Christ be huge parts of religion itself: Christian fundamentalism, Extreme Islam, misguided faith of all kinds?

The question isn’t easy. The world that opposes Christ, I suspect, is made up of all of these, the strident, the indifferent, and the misguided. All are interwoven in our present world and help constitute a darkness that the Word is trying to penetrate. But that darkness has its own ambivalence. Inside that stridency, seeming indifference, and misguided religion, we see all kinds of light as well. Darkness, itself, is not pure, and this can leave us in a quandary as to how we should, ideally, gaze upon our world.

Scripture assures us that God is the author of all that is good. Hence everything in our world that radiates life, goodness, health, generosity, faith, intelligence, color, and wit comes from God, irrespective of where it is embedded. Hence when we look at our world we may not superficially and easily divide it into two parts, one good and the other bad. When we do that, we end up often putting God in opposition to God and creating the very thing off of which atheism can feed. Atheism, as Michael Buckley so astutely asserts, is always a parasite that feeds off bad religion. Seeing the God’s presence in the world as either black or white is bad religion.

So how should we view our world, how might we gaze upon the city within which we live? We need to gaze upon our city in the same way as Jesus gazed upon his city, Jerusalem, when he wept over it with equal parts of sympathy and judgment. What do I see when I look upon the city I presently live in and upon the different cities within which I have lived? First of all, I see everyone I have ever loved living there. Neither the city nor the world is an abstract concept. To speak of either is to speak of our loved ones and that healthily complicates both our sympathy and our judgment. If I believe the world to be a bad place, what am I saying about my loved ones? And what sets me apart? Still, a certain judgment still needs to be made. Is our world good or bad?

On the one hand, when I look at our world today, I see, in many places, a lot of good, a world bursting with energy, color, zest, and with a healthy thirst for life and the transcendent. I see that the majority of people are good-hearted, honest, generous, and desirous of peace. I see wonderful intelligence and wit. I see a healthy pride and a healthy (if at times, overdone) emphasis on the physical and on bodily health. Very importantly too I see a world that, in most places, is growing in tolerance in terms of racism, sexism, and religion.

On the other hand, I also see a world that is often shallow, self-absorbed, and not given over much to sacrifice. I see a world within which the rich do not care enough about the poor. I see a world that is far too irresponsible in its sexual ethos. I see a world that is becoming addicted to information technology without any critical reaction. I see a world that is unhealthily prone to ideology, hype, and fad, that lives too much in the moment rather than in hope, that finds it difficult to grow up, that finds it difficult to accept aging and death, and that has not moved beyond an adolescent grandiosity in terms of appropriating its own faith heritage.

So what do our cities look like? Are they good or bad? Our own cities, I suspect, look a lot like Jerusalem looked to Jesus as he gazed upon it – mostly good, honest folk, struggling because we won’t let God help us.

Dag Hammarskjold on Sexuality and Desire

May 19, 2014

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.

Mother’s Day

May 12, 2014

There’s an old adage that offers a wise counsel, even as it leaves us powerless to heed its advice: Pick your parents wisely!

Easier said than done; but the adage holds. We’re not fully our own persons. We’re also products of our parents who don’t give us only our physical DNA, but, in complex confluence of how they are inside their own persons and how they relate to us and to the world, also profoundly help shape our person and our character. As adults, it can be both freeing and emotionally-crippling to reflect upon exactly what we really inherited from our parents. They shape us.

I have this in the back of my mind today, Mother’s Day, as I reflect upon my own mother and the DNA that I inherited from her. She died forty-three years ago but she left a lot of herself here, with my siblings, with me. What did she give me, beyond some of my bodily features?

What she gave me didn’t happen in a vacuum. She raised a large family, with the help of a very supportive husband, my dad, and, while they had a marriage made in heaven, they had to spend most of it chronically strapped for money, time, and energy. The demands on her were always somewhat beyond that for which she had adequate resources. But, somehow, she always managed, always managed to make do, always found a way to stretch everything, including her time and energy, to feed, cloth, and properly mother us.

She frequently didn’t have the time, energy, or heroic patience to provide us with the individual affection and warmth that a child so desperately desires and needs, even though she was a naturally warm and kind-hearted person. The pressure of so many needs could wear her idealism and attention pretty thin at times. And so she wasn’t a Hollywood mom, always perfectly dressed and perfectly affectionate; but she gave us, and in spades, the most important thing that a home is really asked to give, safety and security. The one need in a child that trumps all others is the need to feel safe and secure.

My mother was often torn in so many directions that she couldn’t give us her full attention and warm affection, but she did provide us with what we needed most of all, safety and security. She gave us a house and a home that was always steady and robustly sane – often times, loudly so. Inside that ambience we were always safe. Nobody could have given me a greater gift or greater riches in my youth.

Moreover, inside all that busyness, scrambling to provide, and the conscriptive attention deficit disorder that she had chronically to deal with she taught us something else of importance, namely, that you don’t have to wait until everything is perfect, until all your bills are paid, your health is perfect, you have the right leisure time, and there are no large headaches waiting for you tomorrow, in order to celebrate and enjoy a moment. She knew how to celebrate the temporary. Every feast-day, birthday, or Sunday was an occasion for a special meal and a special celebration no matter whatever might be putting a damper on life. And, perhaps most important of all, my mother was largely responsible for giving me faith, though, in this, she had my dad as an equal partner; however she, more than anyone else, pushed me to be open to hear the call to priesthood.

Anthropologists who study initiation rites in various cultures tell us that the initiatory process needed to move someone from being a child to an adult needs to instill four salient truths: Your life is not your own. Life is hard. You will die. Your life is not about you.

The culture and church out of which she came had already indelibly etched those truths into her. For her generation, especially if you were poor and lived in a rural area, life was naturally hard and mortality rates were high. Lots of people died young. And the ethos of her generation held that family, church, neighbor, and country could ask you for your life, and your duty was to give it over, without whining or self-pity. It was selfish to think first of yourself. She had inhaled that ethos and then she etched it into us, particularly the truth about your life as not being about you. The other facts, that life was hard and that you were going to die, were left to speak for themselves; but, from the time you graduated from toys to school, the message was clear: Your life is not your own. Your life is not about you. Anthropologists might well study my mother’s initiatory vision and tactics.

No mother is perfect, and neither was mine. She had her faults and I carry many of those too, along with the better things she gave me. But, reflecting on my mother, I have only good feelings and warm gratitude. I chose my mother wisely!

A Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire, and Soul

May 5, 2014

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.

Accepting Truth, Whatever its Cloak

April 27, 2014

When I was student in the seminary, I had two kinds of teachers: One kind, precisely because they were fiercely loyal to all that is Christian and Catholic, would have us read great secular thinkers but always with the intent of wanting to help show where these thinkers were wrong. Our intellectual task as a Catholic seminarian, they would tell us, is to be able to defend Catholicism against the kinds of criticisms found in the writings of these secular, sometimes, anti-Christian thinkers and to keep own faith and teaching free of their influence. The second set of professors approached things differently: They would have us read great secular thinkers, even if they were bitterly critical of Christianity and Catholicism, but with the intent of seeing what we could positively learn from them. These are great minds, they told us, and, whether sympathetic to Christianity or not, we have something to learn from them. Do not read uncritically, was their challenge, but still read with the intent of being instructed.

Early on as a seminary student, because I was still insecure intellectually, I leaned more towards the self-protective approach of the first set of professors and read most secular thinkers defensively. I have to smile now as I look back on the idealistic, but naïve and intellectually frightened, young man I was then, a nineteen year-old undergraduate trying to poke holes in the likes of thinkers like Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, Freud, Durkheim, and Lenin. I imagined myself, David fighting Goliath. It seems misguided and grandiose now, but I still have a fondness for that nineteen year-old who was engaged in this battle.

Later on, precisely because some of the valuable insights in a number of great secular thinkers began to break through, despite my resistance, I began more and more to lean towards the approach of the second set of professors who had invited us to learn from others’ insights, no matter the cloak of the author. Now as I age, both chronologically and in ministry, I find that I am richer and more compassionate to the exact extent that I can do that, namely, remain faithful to the truth wherever I find it, no matter its source. Hence, today I find myself drinking from intellectual wells of every sort, particularly from secular novelists and essayists, my critical faculties are still patrolling like soldiers on duty, but now with a thirst for the insights these writers have into life and the soul. I no longer read with the intent of trying to prove someone wrong, even if that author is anti-Christian. I have too much to learn.

Sometimes in our fear of being tainted in our orthodoxy we forget that many of the great theologians in Christian tradition were unafraid to pick up pagan thinkers, mine their insights for truth, and then blend these with their faith: St. Augustine did this with Platonism. Thomas Aquinas, in the face of considerable ecclesial criticism, did the same thing with Aristotle. Ironically, centuries later, we now take many of their intellectual categories, which they originally took from pagan thought, as our very criteria for orthodoxy.

More recently, Liberation Theology, at its best, has done this with Marxist theory; just as, Feminism, at its best, has done the same with secular social theory. But much of these efforts have been, in the name of orthodoxy, viewed with either suspicion or positive rejection. Dare one say that Jesus did the same thing? He picked up parables and stories that were current in his culture and tailored them to further his own religious and moral teachings. Moreover, he taught, and with precious little equivocation, that we are to honor truth wherever we see it, irrespective of who’s carrying it.

But isn’t this syncretism? If one picks up truths from diverse pagan and secular sources and harmonizes them with one’s Christian faith, how does one avoid the accusation of being syncretistic?

Picking up truth from a variety of sources is not syncretism. Syncretism is combining insights gleaned from everywhere in a way that is uncritical of internal contradiction. But we must not confuse tension with contradiction. Tension is not necessarily a sign of contradiction; it’s often the opposite: True faith is humble enough to accept truth, wherever it sees it, irrespective of the tension it causes and irrespective of the religion or ideology of whoever is speaking it. Big mind and big hearts are large enough to contain and carry large ambiguities and great tensions. And, true worshippers of God accept God’s goodness and truth wherever these are manifest, no matter how religiously or morally inconvenient that manifestation might be.

God is the author of all that is good and all that is true! Hence, since no one religion, one church, one culture, one philosophy, or one ideology contains all of the truth, we must be open to perceive and receive goodness and truth in many, many different places – and we must be open to the tensions and ambiguity this brings into our lives.

God’s Quiet Presence in Our Lives

April 21, 2014

The poet, Rumi, submits that we live with a deep secret that sometimes we know, and then not.

That can be very helpful in understanding our faith. One of the reasons why we struggle with faith is that God’s presence inside us and in our world is rarely dramatic, overwhelming, sensational, something impossible to ignore. God doesn’t work like that. Rather God’s presence, much to our frustration and loss of patience sometimes, is something that lies quiet and seemingly helpless inside us. It rarely makes a huge splash.

Because we are not sufficiently aware of this, we tend to misunderstand the dynamics of faith and find ourselves habitually trying to ground our faith on precisely something that is loud and dramatic. We are forever looking for something beyond what God gives us. But we should know from the very way God was born into our world, that faith needs to ground itself on something that is quiet and undramatic. Jesus, as we know, was born into our world with no fanfare and no power, a baby lying helpless in the straw, another child among millions. Nothing spectacular to human eyes surrounded his birth. Then, during his ministry, he never performed miracles to prove his divinity; but only as acts of compassion or to reveal something about God. Jesus never used divine power in an attempt to prove that God exists, beyond doubt. His ministry, like his birth, wasn’t an attempt to prove God’s existence. It was intended rather to teach us what God is like and that God loves us unconditionally.

Moreover, Jesus’ teaching about God’s presence in our lives also makes clear that this presence is mostly quiet and hidden, a plant growing silently as we sleep, yeast leavening dough in a manner hidden from our eyes, summer slowly turning a barren tree green, an insignificant mustard plant eventually surprising us with its growth, a man or woman forgiving an enemy. God, it seems, works in ways that are quiet and hidden from our eyes. The God that Jesus incarnates is neither dramatic nor splashy.

And there’s an important faith-lesson in this. Simply put, God lies inside us, deep inside, but in a way that’s almost non-existent, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored. However, while that presence is never overpowering, it has within it a gentle, unremitting imperative, a compulsion towards something higher, which invites us to draw upon it. And, if we do draw upon it, it gushes up in us in an infinite stream that instructs us, nurtures us, and fills us with endless energy.

This is important for understanding faith. God lies inside us as an invitation that fully respects our freedom, never overpowers us; but also never goes away. It lies there precisely like a baby lying helpless in the straw, gently beckoning us, but helpless in itself to make us pick it up.

For example, C.S. Lewis, in explaining why he finally became, in his words, “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom”, writes that, for years, he was able to effectively ignore a voice inside him, precisely, because it was almost non-existent, almost unfelt, and largely unnoticed. On the other hand, in retrospect, he realized it had always been there, a gentle, incessant nudge, beckoning him to draw from it, something he eventually recognized as a gentle, but unyielding, imperative, a “compulsion” which, if obeyed, leads to liberation.

Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite and mystic, describes a similar experience in her autobiography, Before the Living God. Chronicling her late adolescent years, Burrows describes both her religious flightiness and her lack of attraction to the religious life at that time in her life. Yet she eventually ends up not only being serious about religion but becoming a Carmelite nun. What happened? One day, in a chapel, almost against her will, triggered by a series of accidental circumstances, she opened herself to voice inside her that she had, until then, mainly ignored because it lay inside her precisely as a voice that was almost non-existent, almost unfelt, and largely unnoticed. But once touched, it gushed up as the deepest and most real thing inside her and set the direction of her life forever afterwards. Like C.S. Lewis, she too, once she had opened herself to it, felt it as an unyielding moral compulsion opening her to ultimate liberation.

Why doesn’t God show himself to us more directly and more powerfully so as to make faith easier? That’s a fair question for which, partly, there is no fully satisfying answer. But the answer we do have lies in understanding the manner in which God manifests himself in our lives and in our world. Unlike most everything else that’s trying to get our attention, God never tries to overwhelm us. God, more than anyone else, respects our freedom. For this reason, God lies everywhere, inside us and around us, almost unfelt, largely unnoticed, and easily ignored, a quiet, gentle nudge; but, if drawn upon, the ultimate stream of love and energy.

The Transcript of Our Trial

April 13, 2014

The biblical accounts of Jesus’ passion and death focus very much on his trial, describing it in length and in detail.

And there is a huge irony in how it is described. Jesus is on trial, but the story is written in such a way that, in effect, everyone is on trial, except Jesus. The Jewish authorities who orchestrated his arrest are on trial for their jealousy and dishonesty. The Roman authorities who wield the final power on the matter are on trial for their religious blindness. Jesus’ friends and contemporaries are on trial for their weakness and betrayal. Those who challenge Jesus to invoke divine power and come off the cross are on trial for their superficial faith. And, not least, each of us is on trial for our own weaknesses, jealousies, religious blindness, and superficial faith. The transcript of the trial of Jesus reads like a record of our own betrayals.

Recently the church has tried to help us grasp this by the manner in which it has the Passion proclaimed on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. In many churches today when the Passion is read the narrative is broken up in such a way that one narrator proclaims the overall text, another person takes the part of Jesus, several others take the parts of the various people who spoke during his arrest and trial, and the congregation as a whole is asked to proclaim aloud the parts that were spoken by the crowds. This could not be more appropriate because a congregation in any Christian church today, and we, as individual members of those congregations, in our actions and in our words, in countless ways, mimic perfectly the actions and words of Jesus’ contemporaries in their weaknesses, betrayals, jealousies, religious blindness, and false faith. We too indict Jesus countless times by how we live.

For example, here is how we do it in our words: In Matthew’s account of the trial of Jesus, at a certain moment in the trial, Pontus Pilate comes out to the people, the same people who just five days before had chanted for Jesus to be their king, and tells them that according to custom, at Passover time, he is willing to release one Jewish criminal being held in custody. At the time, he had in custody a particularly infamous murderer named, Barabbas. So Pilate asks the crowd: “Whom should I release for you, Jesus of Nazareth or Barabbas?” The crowd roars back: “Barabbas!” Pilate then asks: “Then what should I do with Jesus of Nazareth?” The crowd’s reply: “Away with him. Have him crucified!” We can make this, very obvious, extrapolation: In every moral choice we make, big or small, ultimately the question we are standing in front of is the same question Pilate asked the crowd: Whom should I release for you, Jesus or Barabbas? Graciousness or violence? Selflessness or self-centeredness?

It is the same when the crowds say to Pilate: “We have no king, except Caesar!” In saying this, they were abandoning their own messianic hopes in favor of a momentary security. We say the same thing every time when, for our own well-being, we sell-out our higher ideals and settle for second best.

As well, all too frequently, we mimic the words of the crowds who challenged Jesus as he was hanging on the cross with these words: “If you are the Son of God, come off the cross, save us, and save yourself.” We do this every time we let our prayers become a test of God’s existence and goodness; if we get a positive answer, God loves us, if not, we begin to doubt.

It is the same, of course, with our actions: Like Jesus’ disciples, we tend to stay with Jesus more when things are going well, when temptation is not too strong, and when we are not facing real, personal threat. But, like Jesus’ original followers, we tend to abandon and betray when things get hard and threatening. Moreover, like the authorities who come to arrest Jesus carrying lanterns and torches, we also often prefer artificial light to the Light of Lights; just as, like those who arrested Jesus, we tend to approach the Prince of Peace carrying clubs and swords, ready for a fight.

Generally, on reading the account of Jesus’ Passion and Death, our spontaneous inclination is to judge very harshly those who surrounded Jesus at his arrest, trial, and sentencing: How could they not see what they were doing? How could they be so blind and jealous? How could they choose false security over God’s ultimate shelter? A murderer over the Messiah? How could his followers so easily abandon him?

Not much has changed in 2000 years. The choices that those around Jesus were making during his trial and sentencing are identical to the choices we are still making today. And most days we are not doing any better than they did because, still, far too often, given blindness and self-interest, we are saying: Away with him! Crucify him!