Faith – Beyond the Head and the Heart

May 12, 2025

C.S. Lewis, one of the great Christian apologists, didn’t become a Christian without resistance and struggle. He grew into adulthood nursing a certain skepticism and agnosticism. He wasn’t drawn naturally to faith or to Christ. But he was always radically honest in trying to listen to the deepest voices inside and at a certain point he came to the realization that Christ and his teaching were compelling in such a way that left him unfree. In conscience he had to become a Christian.

Many of us are familiar with the words he wrote on the night when he first knelt down and gave himself over to faith in Christ. Having just come back from a long walk and a religious discussion with J.R.R. Tolkien (who was his colleague at Oxford) he describes how he knelt down and committed himself to faith in Christ. But, by his own admission, this wasn’t an easy genuflection: I knelt down as the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom. Wow! Not exactly what we take for first fervor.

But he goes on to describe why, despite all his natural reluctance, he became a convert: Because I had come to realize that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and God’s compulsion is our liberation. What is God’s compulsion?

Here’s an example. There’s a famous incident in the Gospel of John where Peter, like C.S. Lewis, is also a reluctant convert. This is the story.

Jesus had just identified himself with the Bread of Life and ended that teaching by saying that unless we eat his body and drink his blood we cannot have life in us. Understandably this was both confusing and perplexing to his audience, so perplexing in fact that the Gospels tell us that the crowds all walked away, saying this is an intolerable teaching. Then, when the crowds had gone, Jesus turned to his disciples and asked them: Do want to walk away too? Peter was not exactly enthusiastic and affirmative in his answer. He responded by saying, “We have no other place to go.” However (and this is one of Peter’s shining moments in the Gospels) he then adds: We know that you have the words of everlasting life.

When you parse out Peter’s response, here’s its substance. Peter has just heard a teaching that he doesn’t understand and what he understands he doesn’t like. At that moment, Jesus looks like the opposite of truth and life. Peter’s head is resistant and so is his heart. But underneath both his head and his heart there is another part of Peter that knows that, irrespective of resistance of his head and his heart, this teaching will bring him life.

At that moment, like C.S. Lewis, Peter is a most reluctant Apostle. However, he still gives his life over to Christ, despite the resistance in his head and in his heart. Why? Because like C.S. Lewis, he had come to understand that God’s compulsion is our liberation.

I remember once seeing an interview with Daniel Berrigan. The host asked him, “Father, where does your faith lie? Is it in your head or in your heart?” Berrigan’s response was both colorful and insightful: “Faith is rarely where your head is at, and faith even less rarely where your heart is at. Faith is where your ass is at.” By way of commentary, he added: “Anyone who has ever been in a commitment over a long period of time knows that there will be times and seasons when your head isn’t in it, your heart isn’t in it, but you’re in it because you know that the path to life for you lies in staying inside that commitment.”

What ultimately do we trust enough to give our lives over to? I believe we need to answer that question not with heads nor with our hearts. It’s not that our heads and our hearts are untrustworthy in themselves, it’s just as we know from experience, they don’t always speak for what’s deepest inside us. God’s compulsion sits below our thinking and our feeling. Our heads tell us what we think is wise to do. Our hearts tell us what we would like to do. But a deeper voice in us tells us what we have to do.

The deepest voice of God inside us isn’t always at ease with our head or our heart. That voice is God’s compulsion inside us and it can make us the most reluctant convert in the history of Christianity, it can have us standing before Jesus telling him that he looks the opposite of truth and life, it can have us looking with utter disillusion at the seemingly chronic infidelity of our churches, and still have us say, we have no other place to go. You have the words of everlasting life. Doubt, disillusionment, and lack of understanding aren’t virtues, but they can push us to a place where we have to decide before what ultimately we need to genuflect.

Paradox, Seeming Inconsistency, and Tension

May 5, 2025

The thought of some of the greatest and most influential people in history seems at times riddled with inconsistencies. Jesus, Augustine, Socrates, Aristotle, among others, appear at times to be contradicting themselves. It’s not always easy to see how everything squares with everything else in their teachings.

That’s why the great religions and philosophies of the world are so prone to multiple interpretations. For example, given the depth and scope of Jesus’ teaching, Christianity in particular is open to different kinds of understanding. It’s no accident that there are hundreds of denominations within Christianity and every variety of spirituality and worship inside these. Jesus’ teaching is so rich that it would seem none of us can carry it like master. Rather we each pick our parts selectively, struggle to hold them in some consistency, and end up much narrower than the master.

Consistency, someone once quipped, is the product of a small mind, just as inconsistency is the mark of a great one. There’s a truth in that, though it must be carefully understood. For instance, sometimes we achieve a certain consistency, a view of things that seemingly has no internal contradictions, though at a high price, namely, we end up narrow, non-inclusive, one-sided, impoverished, and reductionistic. Whatever else might be said about them, racism, bigotry, fundamentalism, and unhealthy nationalism are consistent. However, their consistency is predicated on a synthesis that is so narrowly drawn that it ignores and denigrates important areas of life.

Conversely, sometimes what looks like inconsistency is really a person holding together a number of important truths in a higher synthesis. The person may look inconsistent, but what she is really doing is holding several truths in creative tension that are seemingly in opposition to each other but are not. The person who tries this juggling act will often find herself in great tension, but (metaphorically) she will also find that she has no blocked arteries and very resilient lungs, that blood flows freely to every part of her person and she is able draw life-giving oxygen from whatever kind of air within which she finds herself.

Jesus was like that. He held important truths together in creative tension and as a consequence was misunderstood by just about everyone and scandalized people on both sides of the religious and ideological spectrum. His teachings are more “both/and” than “either/or”. We struggle with that. It’s easier to carry a select few truths than try to carry them all.

What are some of the seeming contradictory truths that Jesus held together and carried in a creative tension? Here are ten of them, chosen because a healthy spirituality must always carry both sides of these.

1) A strong sense of individuality, a focus on private integrity and private prayer, but coupled with an equally strong commitment to community, family, civic and ecclesial involvement, and social justice.

2) A healthy capacity to drink in life and enjoy it without guilt, even as one befriends an equally healthy capacity for asceticism and renunciation.

3) A self-confidence and healthy self-assertion in using the particular gifts that God has given us but held always in tension with a healthy humility and a habitual self-effacement.

4) An eye for the prophetic, a sympathy for what lies outside the center, for what is marginalized, a challenging voice for the excluded, even as one recognizes the importance of the institutional, defends against anarchy, and helps nurture what’s sacred within family, church, and tradition.

5) A perpetual openness to what’s new, what’s strange, what causes discomfort, to what’s liberal, even as one works to ground oneself in what conserves, in the familiar, in routine, in what gives rhythm and makes for stability.

6) An eye for the sacred, for God, for the eternal horizon, but always coupled with an unabashed love for this world, for its joys, for its achievements, its present moment.

7) A passion for sexuality and a defense of its goodness and earthiness, coupled with an equal defense of chastity and reverence.

8) An eye for world community, for stretching the boundaries we were born into, for an ever more inclusive embrace of the foreigner and the stranger, even as one remains deeply loyal to family, personal roots, and hospitality at home.

9) A hope and an idealism that defies the facts, that relies on God’s promises rather than on the evening news, that will not let the truth of the resurrection be silenced by the accidents of history, but is still held together with a realism that is pragmatic, programmatic, and is committed to doing its share of the work.

10) A focus on the next life, on life after death, on the fact that this is not our final home, even as we focus on the reality and goodness of life here on earth.

Jesus held all of these together in one synthesis and he paid the price – misunderstanding. Are we willing to pay that price to give fuller expression to Christ?

A Needed Reminder

April 28, 2025

A Benedictine monk shared this story with me. During his early years in religious life, he had been resentful because he was required to ask permission from his Abbott if he wanted anything: “I thought it was silly, me, a grown man, an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted a new shirt. I felt like a child.”

But as he aged his perspective changed: “I’m not sure of all the reasons, though I’m sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to realize that there was some deep wisdom in having to ask permission for everything. We don’t own anything; nothing comes to us by right. Everything is gift. So ideally everything should be asked for and not taken as if it were ours by right. We need to be grateful to God and the universe for everything that’s been given us. Now, when I need something and need to ask permission from the Abbott, I no longer feel like a child. Rather, I feel that I’m more properly in tune with the way things should be in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”

What this monk came to understand is a principle which undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything comes to us as gift, nothing can be claimed as if owed to us. We should be grateful to God and to the universe for giving us what we have and careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.

But this goes against much in our instinctual selves and within our culture. Within both, there are strong voices which tell us that if you cannot take what you want then you’re a weak person, weak in a double way. First, you’re a weak personality, too timid to fully claim life. Second, you’ve been weakened by religious and moral scruples and are unable to properly seize the day and be fully alive. These voices tell us that we need to grow up because there is much in us that’s fearful and infantile, a child held captive by superstitious forces.

It’s precisely because of these voices that today, in a culture that professes to be Christian and moral, leading political and social figures can in all sincerity believe and say that empathy is a human weakness.

We need an important reminder.

The voice of Jesus is radically antithetical to these voices. Empathy is the penultimate human virtue, the antithesis of weakness. Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive, and accumulative within our society and, notwithstanding the admiration it receives, tell us clearly that this is not what it means to come to the banquet which lies at the heart of God’s kingdom. He would not share our admiration of the rich and famous who too often claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have qualified this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”

When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside every book that was given to us the Latin words: ad usum. Literally: for your use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you didn’t own it. It was only for your use; real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true as well of everything else given to us for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, merely given to us for our use.

One of the young men in that novitiate group who left the order is today a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and he once shared with me how today, as a doctor, he still writes those words ad usum in every one of his books. His rational is this: “I don’t belong to a religious order. I don’t have a vow of poverty, but the principle our novice master taught us is just as valid for me in the world as it is for a religious novice. We don’t own anything. Those books aren’t really mine. They’ve been given to me, temporarily, for my use. Nothing ultimately belongs to anybody and it’s best never to forget that.” No matter how rich, strong, and grown-up we are, there’s something healthy in having to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately. Everything comes to us as gift and so we may never take anything for granted, but only as granted!

Seeing Spring and Easter

April 21, 2025

In my mid-20s, I spent a year studying at the University of San Francisco. I had just been ordained a priest and was finishing a graduate degree in theology. Easter Sunday that year was a particularly gorgeous, sunny, spring day, but it didn’t find me in a sunny mood. I was a long way from home, away from my family and my community, homesick, and alone. Almost all the friends I had made during that year of studies, other graduate students in theology, were gone, celebrating Easter with their families. I was homesick and alone and, beyond that, I nursed the congenital heartaches and obsessions of the young and restless. My mood was far from spring and Easter.

I went for a walk that afternoon and the spring air, the sun, and the fact that it was Easter did little to cheer me up, if anything they helped catalyze a deeper sense of aloneness. But there are different ways of waking up. As Leonard Cohen says, there’s a crack in everything and that’s where the light gets in. I needed a little awakening and eventually it was provided. At the entrance of a park, I saw a blind beggar sitting with a cardboard sign in front of him that read: It’s springtime and I am blind! The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was as blind as he was! For what I was seeing it might as well have been Good Friday and raining and cold. That day, sunshine, spring, and Easter were wasted on me.

It was a moment of grace and I have recalled that encounter many times since, though it didn’t alter my mood at the time. I continued my walk, restless as before, and eventually went home for dinner. During that year of studies, I was a live-in chaplain at a convent that had a youth hostel attached to it and the rule of the house was that the chaplain was to eat by himself in his own private dining room. So, even though that wasn’t exactly what a doctor would have ordered for a restless and homesick young man, I ate dinner alone that Easter Sunday evening.

But the resurrection did still arrive for me on that Easter Sunday, albeit a bit late in the day. Two other graduate students and I had made plans to meet on the ocean at nightfall, light a fire, and celebrate our own version of the Easter vigil. So, just before dark, I caught a bus to the ocean and met my friends (a nun and priest). We lit a large bonfire (still legal in those days), sat around it for several hours, and ended up confessing to each other that we’d each had a miserable Easter. That fire did for us what the blessing of the fire the evening before at the Easter vigil hadn’t done. It broke the spell of restlessness and self-absorption which had us blind to everything outside ourselves. As we watched the fire and talked of everything and nothing, my mood began to shift, my restlessness quieted, the heaviness lifted. I began to sense spring and Easter.

In John’s account of the resurrection, he tells the story of how on the morning of the first Easter the Beloved Disciple runs to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and peers into it. He sees it is empty and that all that remains are the clothes, neatly folded, within which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. But since he is a disciple who sees with the eyes of love, he understands what this means; he grasps the reality of resurrection and knows that Jesus has risen. He sees spring. He understands with his eyes.

Hugo of St. Victor once famously said: Love is the eye. When we see with love we not only see straight and clearly, we also see depth and meaning. The reverse is also true. It is for a good reason that after Jesus rose from the dead some could see him and others could not. Love is the eye. Those searching for life through the eyes of love, like Mary of Magdala searching for Jesus in the garden on Easter Sunday morning, see spring and the resurrection. Any other kind of eye, and we’re blind in springtime.

When I took my walk that Easter afternoon all those years ago in San Francisco, I wasn’t exactly Mary of Magdala looking for Jesus in a garden, nor the Beloved Disciple fired by love running off to look into the tomb of Jesus. In my youthful restlessness I was mostly looking for myself, and meeting mostly my anxious self. And that’s a blindness. When we are caught inside ourselves, we’re blind, blind to both spring and the resurrection. I learned that lesson, not in a church or a classroom but on a lonely, restless Easter Sunday in San Francisco when I ran into a blind beggar and then went home and ate an Easter dinner alone.

The Resurrection: The Ultimate Meta-Narrative

April 14, 2025

Several years ago, while presenting at a conference at our school, a young priest from Quebec, Pierre-Olivier Tremblay, shared a story (in words to this effect).

I spent some years working with young people and what I noticed with many of them was this. They were young and bursting with energy, with dreams, with hopes, an energy that was wonderful to be around. However, while so full of energy, few of them radiated much hope. They lacked hope because they lacked a meta-narrative. They had only their own stories and when things were going well their energy and spirits were high, but when things went wrong (a breakup in a relationship, a death of a loved one, a serious illness) they had nothing to cling to because they didn’t understand their lives within the context of a bigger story, a meta-narrative. They understood themselves solely within their own individual stories – and that is never a basis for hope.

What is a meta-narrative, a bigger story, within which we need to understand our own story? And how is that the basis for hope?

Here’s an example: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was both a world-class scientist and a Christian mystic. His intent as a scientist and as a man of faith was to articulate a theological synthesis which would bring together in one harmonious vision, both the divine intent within cosmic evolution and the divine intent in God becoming incarnate in Jesus Christ.

And he articulated such a vision, one within which a Christian could bring together in one harmonious vision, the scientific theories regarding the origins of the universe, the unfolding of evolution through 15 million years, the purpose and role of Christ in history, and how cosmic and faith history will eventually culminate (just as is described in the hymn in the Epistle to the Ephesians) in the fullness of time, where, through Christ, God will bring all things into one in him. And on that day, goodness will forever triumph over evil, love will triumph over division, peace over chaos, empathy over selfishness, gentleness over cruelty, and forgiveness over vengeance.

As he was expounding this vision at a conference, a colleague challenged him with this question. You believe that good will ultimately triumph over evil; well, what happens if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, what happens to your vision of things then? Teilhard’s answer: if we blow up the world with an atomic bomb, that would be a two-million-year setback; but goodness will triumph over evil, not because I wish it, but because God promised it and, in the resurrection, God showed that God has the power to deliver on that promise.

He’s right. Except for the resurrection, we have no guarantees about anything. Lies, injustice, and violence may triumph in the end. Chaos, cruelty, and death may well be the last word. That’s certainly how it looked the day Jesus died.

However, the resurrection of Jesus is God’s last word on this. In the resurrection, God assures us that no matter how things look, no matter how much evil seems to have the upper hand, no matter how powerless innocence, goodness, and gentleness may look sometimes, no matter how many times our world crucifies Christ, no matter how many times we might blow up the world with an atomic bomb, no matter hopeless it all looks, the ending of our story has been written, and it is a happy ending, an ecstatic one.

The resurrection of Jesus assures us that, as Julian of Norwich affirms, in the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well.

The resurrection, God raising up the crucified Jesus in a way that was real, cosmic and corporeal, and not just a shift in the consciousness of his followers, is the basis not just for our hope but for our Christian faith as such. As St. Paul says, if there were no resurrection, we are the most deluded of all people. But, if Jesus was resurrected, everything we believe in and everything we hope for, not least that in the end goodness, love, community, gentleness, and joy will forever triumph over all that opposes them, is assured. The resurrection of Jesus, and that alone, is the basis for all hope, both for ourselves and for the cosmos itself.

The resurrection is the ultimate meta-narrative. This is the bigger story within which we need to set our own individual stories. When Pierre-Olivier Tremblay (now a bishop in Quebec) remarked that the young people he was working with radiated beautiful energy but radiated very little hope because they lacked a meta-narrative within to set their own stories, the meta-narrative he was referring to was precisely the narrative of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead.

Young or old, our own individual stories are not enough. We need to understand ourselves (and the cosmos itself) within the meta-narrative of the resurrection.

The Chosen

April 7, 2025

I am sure many of you are familiar with the TV series about the life of Jesus called The Chosen. It was launched in 2019, has been in theaters and on streaming platforms since, and now has more than 200 million viewers. It has been translated into 50 languages and has 13 million social media followers, with about 30 percent of its audience being non-Christian.

It was created and produced by Dallas Jenkins, an Evangelical Christian with wide ecumenical and interfaith sympathies. Jonathan Roumie, a devout Roman Catholic, plays the role of Jesus, and the Jesus he portrays in The Chosen comes through as somewhat different from, and more relatable to, than the Jesus we have generally seen in other movies and portrayals of him. And this has had an interesting impact.

What’s the impact? Joe Hoover, a Jesuit priest writing in a recent issue of America magazine, makes this comment: “I have been a baptized Christian for 53 years, attended a Catholic Christian grade school and for more than two decades have been a member of a religious order that bears the name of Jesus…. and ‘The Chosen’ television series had done things for my understanding and engagement with the life of Christ and his disciples that nothing else has. No sermon, no theological exhortation, no master’s degree, no class on John or Mark or Luke, no spirituality workshop, no 30-day biblically based retreat has brought the Gospels home and made Christ and his people real and relatable to me in quite the way ‘The Chosen’ has.”

That speaks for me as well. The Chosen has had a similar effect on me. Like Joe Hoover, I was baptized as an infant, raised a Roman Catholic, am a member of a religious order, have degrees in theology, have been to every kind of spirituality workshop, and have studied the Gospels under the guidance of some world class scholars, and yet this TV series has given a face to Jesus that I didn’t quite receive in all that past learning and has helped me in my prayer and my relationship to Christ.

In essence, this is what The Chosen has done for me. It has presented a Jesus whom I actually want to be with. Shouldn’t we always want to be with Jesus? Yes, but the Jesus who is often presented to us is not someone, if we are honest with ourselves, we would want to spend a lot of one-on-one time with, with whom we could be at ease and comfortable without affectations.

For instance, the Jesus who has often been presented to us in movies is generally lacking in human warmth, is distant, stern, other-worldly, over pious, and whose very gaze makes you feel guilty because your sin caused his crucifixion. That Jesus is also humorless, doesn’t ever seem to bring God’s smile to the world, and never brings any lightness into a room. He is not a Jesus with whom you are at ease.

Unfortunately, that is often the Jesus who has been presented to us in our preaching, catechesis, Sunday schools, theological classes, and in popular spirituality. The Jesus we meet there, for all the truth and revelation he brings into the world, is generally still too divine and overly pious for us to be at ease with humanly. He is a Jesus we admire, perhaps even adore, and whom we trust enough to commit our lives to (no small thing). But he is also a Jesus with whom we are not much at ease, whom we wouldn’t pick to sit next to at table, with whom we wouldn’t pick to go on vacation, and who is so distant and distinct from us that it is easier for us to have him as an admired teacher than as an intimate friend, let alone as a lover to whom we want to bear our soul.

This is not a plea to humanize Jesus (as is sometimes in fashion today) by making him just a nice man who preaches love but doesn’t at the same time radiate God’s non-negotiable truth. This is not what The Chosen does. Far from it.

The Chosen presents us with a Jesus whose divinity you never doubt, even as he appears as warm and attractive, with a humanity that puts you at ease in his presence; indeed, it lures you into his presence. Watching The Chosen, one never doubts for an instant that Jesus is specially and inextricably linked to his Father and that he brings us God’s truth and revelation without compromise. But this Jesus also brings God’s smile, God’s warmth, and God’s blessing upon our lives which too often suffer from a lack of these.

The great mystic Julian of Norwich once described God is this way: God sits in heaven, completely relaxed, his face looking like a marvelous symphony.

Among other things, The Chosen shows us this relaxed face of God, which to our own detriment we too seldom see.

Searching for Jesus in the Afternoon of Christianity

March 31, 2025

Where might we experience Jesus today in a world that is seemingly too crowded with its own concerns to allow a space for him?

The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled The Afternoon of Christianity, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is “anonymously present”. Halik’s counsel: “Let us search for him ‘by his voice’ like Mary Magdalene; let us search for him in strangers on the road like the disciples on the road to Emmaus; let us search for him in the wounds of the world like the apostle Thomas; let us search for him whenever he passes through the closed doors of fear; let us search for him where he brings the gift of forgiveness and new beginnings.”

The invitation here is to better respond to the signs of the times, given that we are living now in what he calls “the afternoon of Christianity”.

What is the afternoon of Christianity?

He distinguishes three periods in the history of Christianity. He sees the morning of Christianity as the time before 1500 AD, the pre-modern period, the time before secularization. The noonday of Christianity, for him, is the time of secularization and modernity, basically from the 19^th century until our own generation. The afternoon of Christianity, for him, is our time today, the post-modern world, where we are witnessing a breakdown of much of the world as we once knew it with the effects of this on faith and religion. And for Halik, the effect of all of this is that the Christian faith has now outgrown previous forms of religion.

Wow! That’s quite a statement! However, what Halik is proposing is not that the faith is dying, that Christianity is dying, or that the churches are dying. Rather, for him, Christianity today finds itself in a certain cultural homelessness, in a time where so many social structures that once supported it are collapsing, so that the Christian faith is now needing to seek a new shape, a new home, new means of expression, new social and cultural roles, and new allies.

And how will that turn out? We don’t know. But here’s Halik’s hunch: Christianity will not, as many fear, lose its identity and become a non-religious faith. It will not disintegrate into some vague, doctrineless, boundaryless, privatized spirituality. Rather, the hope is that (paradoxically) the very dynamism and diversity that frightens many Christians is the incubation phase of the Christianity of the future.

For him, the challenges that Christianity faces today invite us to bring faith into a new space, like Paul did when he brought Christianity out of the confines of the Judaism of his day. Here is how Halik puts it: “I believe that the Christianity of tomorrow will be above all a community of a new hermeneutic, a new reading, a new and deeper interpretation of the two sources of divine revelation, scripture and tradition, and especially of God’s utterance in the signs of the times.

How is this all to happen? That’s the thesis of the book. Chapter after chapter lays out possibilities of how we might more courageously read the signs of the times and rather than water down any of the substance of the Christian faith, let the signs of the times lead us to a deeper understanding of both scripture and tradition, especially so that we might bring together in better harmony the Christ of cosmic evolution with the Resurrected Jesus; and then recognize that they are both not just present in what is explicit in our Christian faith and worship, they are also anonymously present in the evolution of our culture and society.

Consequently, we need to search for Jesus Christ not just in our scriptures, our churches, our worship services, our catechetical classes, our Sunday schools, and our explicit Christian fellowship, though of course we need to search there. But, like Mary Magdalene, we need to recognize his voice in the caretaker at the cemetery; like the discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus, when we no longer have the answers, we need to recognize his presence in strangers whose words make our hearts burn inside us; like the doubting Thomas, we need to overcome our doubts about his resurrection by touching his wounds as they are now manifest in the poor and the suffering; like Jesus’ first community who barricaded themselves behind a locked door out of fear, we need to recognize him whenever, inside our huddled fear, something expectedly breathes peace into us; and we need to recognize his presence inside us every time we receive forgiveness and are empowered to begin again. This isn’t a time of dying, it’s a time of kairos, a time when we are being invited to open our eyes in a new way so as to recognize the Christ who is walking with us in some unfamiliar forms.

Melancholy and the Soul

March 24, 2025

Normally none of us likes feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally, we prefer sunshine to darkness, lightheartedness to melancholy. That’s why we tend to do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. Mostly, we run from feelings that sadden or frighten us.

For the most part, we think of melancholy and her children (sadness, gloom, nostalgia, loneliness, depression, restlessness, regret, feelings of loss, intimations of our own mortality, fear of the dark corners of our minds, and heaviness of soul) as negative. However, these feelings have a positive side and are meant to help put us in touch with our own soul.

Simply put, they help keep us in touch with those parts of our soul to which we are normally not attentive. Our souls are deep and complex, and trying to hear what they are saying involves listening to them inside of every mood within our lives, including, and sometimes especially, when we feel sad and out of sorts. In sadness and melancholy, the soul tells us things to which we are normally deaf. Hence, it’s important to examine the positive side of melancholy.

Unfortunately, today it is common to see sadness and heaviness of soul as a loss of health, as a loss of vitality, as an unhealthy condition; but that normally isn’t the case. For instance, in many medieval and Renaissance medical books, melancholy was seen as a gift to the soul, something that one needed to pass through at key points in life in order to come to more depth and empathy. This, of course, doesn’t refer to clinical depression, which is a true loss of health, but to multiple other depressions that draw us inward and downward.

Why do we need to pass through certain kinds of melancholy in order to come to a deeper maturity?

Thomas Moore, who writes with deep insight on how we need to listen more carefully to the impulses and needs of our souls, offers this insight: “Depression gives us valuable qualities that we need in order to be fully human. It gives us weight when we are too light about our lives. It offers a degree of gravitas. It also ages us so that we grow appropriately and don’t pretend to be younger than we are. It makes us grow up and gives us the range of human emotion and character that we need in order to deal with the seriousness of life. In classic Renaissance images found in old medical texts and collections of remedies, depression is depicted as an old person wearing a broad brimmed hat, in the shadows, holding his head in his hands.”

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, echoes what Moore says. His heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it’s not heavy, when there’s too much lightness, sunshine, and frivolity, when life is devoid of the type of anxiety that hints at darkness and mortality. Thus, she always feels the need for gravitas, for some heaviness that signals that life is more than the simple flourishing of good cheer and comfort. For her, lightness equates with superficiality.

In many cultures, and indeed in all the great world religions, periods of melancholy and sadness are considered as necessary paths one must travel in order to deepen one’s understanding and come to empathy. Indeed, isn’t that part of the very essence of undergoing the Paschal Mystery within Christianity? Jesus, himself, when preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice for love, had to painfully accept that there was no path to the joy of Easter Sunday that didn’t involve the heaviness of Good Friday. How can Good Friday be good if melancholy, sadness, and heaviness of soul are signs that there is something wrong with us?

So how might we look at periods of sadness and heaviness in our lives? How might we deal with melancholy and her children?

First off, it’s important to see melancholy (whatever its form) as something normal and potentially healthy in our lives. Heaviness of soul is not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong inside us. Rather, most often, it’s the soul itself crying for our attention, asking to be heard, trying to ground us in some deeper way, and trying, as Moore puts it, to deepen us appropriately.

But for this to happen, we need to resist two opposite temptations, namely, to distract ourselves from the sadness or to indulge in it. We need to give melancholy its proper due, but only that. How do we do that? James Hillman gives us this advice: what to do with heaviness of soul? Put it into a suitcase and carry it with you. Keep it close, but contained; make sure it stays available, but don’t let it take you over.

That’s secular wording which can help us better understand Jesus’ challenge: If you wish to be my disciple, take up your cross every day and follow me.

The Person of Jesus and the Mystery of Christ

March 17, 2025

I was raised a Roman Catholic and essentially inhaled the religious ethos of Roman Catholicism. I went to the seminary, earned theological degrees, and taught theology at a graduate level for a number of years before I ever started making a distinction between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. For me, they were always one and the same thing, Jesus Christ.

To my mind, Jesus Christ was the second person of the Trinity who took on flesh in the incarnation and is still now our God, our advocate, and our friend in heaven. I didn’t distinguish between Jesus and Christ in terms of whom I was praying to, speaking about, or relating to. Indeed, for many years in my writings, I simply used the words Jesus and Christ interchangeably.

Slowly through the years this changed and I have begun to distinguish more between Jesus and Christ. It began with a deepened understanding of what the Gospels and St. Paul mean by the reality of Christ as a mystery which, while always having Jesus as its center, is larger than the historical Jesus. This distinction and its importance became clearer to me when I began to have more contact with Evangelicals, both as students and as colleagues.

In faith fellowship with various groups of Evangelicals, I began to see that one of the ecclesial differences between us, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, is that we, Roman Catholics, while not ignoring Jesus, are very much about Christ, and Evangelicals, while not ignoring Christ, are very much about Jesus.

How we understand the church, how we understand the Eucharist, and how we understand the primary invitation given us in the Gospels are colored by how we perceive ourselves in relationship to Jesus and to Christ.

What’s at stake here?

What’s the difference between saying ‘Jesus’ and saying ‘Christ’? Is there any difference between praying to Jesus and praying to Christ, between relating to Jesus or relating to Christ?

There’s a difference, an important one. Christ is not Jesus’ second name – as in Jack Smith, Susan Parker, or Jesus Christ. While it is correct to use the two names together, as we do commonly in our prayer (We pray through Jesus Christ, Our Lord), there is an important distinction to be made.

Jesus is a person, the second person in the Trinity, the divine person who became incarnate, and the person who calls us to one-to-one intimacy with him. Christ is a mystery of which we are a part. The mystery of Christ includes the person of Jesus but also includes us. We are not part of the body of Jesus, but we are part of the body of Christ.

As Christians we believe that Jesus is the body of Christ, that the Eucharist is the body of Christ, and that we, baptized Christians, are also the body of Christ. Saint Paul states clearly that we, the Christian community, are the body of Christ on earth, just as Jesus and the Eucharist are the body of Christ. And Paul means this literally. We (the Christian community) are not like a body, or some mystical or metaphorical body; nor do we represent or replace Christ’s body. Rather, we are the body of Christ on earth, still giving physical flesh to God on earth.

This has implications for Christian discipleship: Jesus is a person, the person who invites us to one-to-one intimacy with him (which Evangelicals see as the goal of Christian discipleship). Christ is part of a larger mystery which includes Jesus but also includes each of us. In this mystery we are called to intimacy not just with Jesus, but also with each other and with physical creation. In Christ, the goal of Christian discipleship is community of life with Jesus, with each other, and with physical creation (since the mystery of Christ is also cosmic).

At the risk of huge oversimplification, allow me a suggestion: Roman Catholics and Evangelicals can learn from each other on this.

From our Evangelical brothers and sisters, Roman Catholics can learn to focus as much on Jesus as we do on Christ, so that like Evangelicals we might realize more explicitly (as is clear in the Gospel of John) that at the very heart of Christian discipleship lies the invitation to a one-to-one intimacy with a person, Jesus, (and not just with a mystery).

Conversely, Evangelicals can learn from Roman Catholics to focus as much on Christ as on Jesus, with all this implies in terms of defining discipleship more widely than personal intimacy with Jesus and church more widely than simple fellowship. Relating to Christ points to the centrality of the Eucharist as a communal event. As well, it implies seeing Christian discipleship not just as an invitation to intimacy with Jesus, but as an incorporation into an ecclesial body which includes not just Jesus but the community of all believers as well as nature itself.

We can learn from each other to take both Jesus and Christ more seriously.

Casting out Demons Through Silence

March 10, 2025

There is an incident in the Gospels where the disciples of Jesus were unable to cast out a particular demon. When they asked Jesus why, he replied that some demons can only be cast out by prayer. The particular demon he was referring in this instance had rendered a man deaf and mute.

I want to name another demon which seemingly cannot be cast out except by prayer, namely, the demon that forever fractures our personal relationships, families, communities, and churches through misunderstanding and division, making it forever difficult to be in life-giving community with each other.

What particular prayer is needed to cast out this demon? The prayer of a shared silence, akin to a Quaker Silence.

What is a Quaker Silence?

A tiny bit of history first: Quakers are a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations whose members refer to each other as Friends but are generally called Quakers because of a famous statement once made by their founder, George Fox (1624-1691). Legend has it that in the face of some authority figures who were trying to intimidate him, Fox held up his Bible and said: This is the word of God, quake before it!

For the Quakers, particularly early on, their common prayer consisted mainly in sitting together in community in silence, waiting for God to speak to them. They would sit together in silence, waiting on God’s power to come and give them something that they could not give themselves, namely, real community with each other beyond the divisions that separated them. Though they sat individually, their prayer was radically communal. They were sitting as one body, waiting together for God to give them a unity they could not give themselves.

Might this be a practice that we, Christians of every denomination, could practice today in the light of the helplessness we feel in the face of division everywhere (in our families, in our churches, and in our countries)? Given that, as Christians, we are at root one community inside the Body of Christ, a single organic body where physical distance does not really separate us, might we begin as a regular prayer practice to sit with each other in a Quaker Silence, one community, sitting in silence, waiting together, waiting for God to come and give us community that we are powerless to give ourselves?

Practically, how might this be done? Here’s a suggestion: each day set aside a time to sit in silence, alone or ideally with others, for a set period of time (fifteen to twenty minutes) where the intent, unlike in private meditation, is not first of all to nurture your personal intimacy with God, but rather to sit together in community with everyone inside the Body of Christ (and with all sincere persons everywhere) asking God to come and give us communion beyond division.

This could also be a powerful ritual in marriage and in family life. Perhaps one of the most healing therapies inside of a marriage might be for a couple to sit together regularly in a silence, asking God to give them something that they cannot give themselves, namely, an understanding of each other beyond the tensions of everyday life. I remember as a child, praying the rosary together as a family each evening and that ritual having the effect of a Quaker Silence. It calmed the tensions that had built up during the day and left us feeling more peaceful as a family.

I use the term Quaker Silence, but there are various forms of meditation and contemplation which have the same intentionality. For example, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (the religious order I belong to), Saint Eugene de Mazenod, left us a prayer practice he called Oraison. This is its intention: as Oblates we are meant to live together in community, but we are a worldwide congregation scattered over sixty countries around the world. How can we be in community with each other across distance?

Through the practice of Oraison. Saint Eugene asked us to set aside a half hour each day to sit in a silence that is intended to be a time when we are not just in communion with God but are also intentionally in communion with all Oblates around the world. Akin to a Quaker Silence, it is a prayer wherein each person sits alone, in silence, but in community, asking God to form one community across all distances and differences. When Jesus says some demons are only cast out by prayer, he means it. And perhaps the demon to which this most particularly refers is the demon of misunderstanding and division. We all know how powerless we are to cast it out. Sitting in a communal silence, asking God to do something for us beyond our powerlessness, can exorcise the demon of misunderstanding and division.

Dark Nights of the Heart

March 3, 2025

There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience it will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart; we experience the end of the world as we’ve known it.

However, in this upheaval, Jesus assures us that one thing remains sure: God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and in our disillusionment we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent, and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down, we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish, and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they express it as if God were actively turning our world upside down and deliberately causing all the heartache to purge and cleanse us.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervor and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervor, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security inside our relationships, our prayer, and our work (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity). This is a gift from God and is meant to be enjoyed. But John tells us, at a certain point, God takes away the pleasure and consolation and we experience a certain dark night in that where we once felt fire, passion, consolation, and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion, and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world. These are part of God’s plan and God’s way of drawing us forward. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become a problem because we can get hung up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful; but, on a honeymoon, too often we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we are often more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still partly about ourselves rather than purely about the person we think we love. Sadly, that is why many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much still seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have fewer heartaches if we understood that. Also, before we are purified by disillusionment, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, often say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that most everything we sense as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately than before.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to love, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness, and beyond self-interested love that can masquerade as altruism. Clarity in eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after heartbreak, and real love comes after the honeymoon has passed.

Love and Faith as Fidelity

February 24, 2025

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancé. He was in his mid-forties and had suffered several disillusioning heartbreaks, some of which by his own admission were his fault, the result of feelings shifting unexpectedly on his part. Now, in mid-life, struggling not to be disillusioned about love and romance, he met a woman whom he much respected, much admired, and with whom he felt he would like to build a life. But, unsure of himself, he was humble in his proposal.

In essence, this was his proposal: I’d like to ask you to marry me but I need to put my cards on the table. I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose confidence in my understanding of love. So, I’ll be honest, I can’t promise that I will always feel in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity.

That’s not exactly the type of marriage proposal we see in our romantic movies and novels, predicated as they mostly are on the naïve belief that the passion and excitement we initially experience when we fall in love will remain that way forever. His is a mature proposal, one that doesn’t naively promise something it can’t deliver.

Moreover, beyond pointing us toward a more mature understanding of love, this is also a good image for how faith works. Faith too, in the end, is more about fidelity in our actions than it is about fervor in our feelings. Here’s an example.

When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a thirty-day retreat. His aim was to try to acquire a faith that he would feel with more fervor, which would more affectively warm his heart. He suffered from what he described as a “stoic” faith, a gut-sense of God’s reality and love, but one which didn’t much translate into warm feelings of security about God’s existence and love. By his own admission, he lacked affectivity, fire, emotion, and warmth about his faith and he went off in search of that.

He returned from the retreat still stoic, though changed nonetheless: “I never got what I asked for,” he said, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, and I learned too that this is okay. I don’t necessarily have to have warm and imaginative feelings about my faith. I don’t need to be full of emotion and fire. I only need to be faithful in my actions, to not betray what I believe in. Faith for me now means that I need to live my life in charity, respect, patience, chastity, and generosity. I just need to do it; I don’t need to always feel it.”

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Thus, unromantic though it is, I like the stoic approach that’s expressed in the marriage proposal of my friend, particularly as it applies to faith. For some of us, faith will never be, other than for short periods of time, something that fires our emotions and fills us with warmth. We know how ephemeral feelings can be.

Like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.

Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in!

Our Struggle with Love

February 17, 2025

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. Initially the congregation responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced to invite people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come to their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen, and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of the congregation began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe anymore! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get! This is too messy to continue!”

But the minister held his ground, pointing out that their expectations were naïve, that what they were experiencing was precisely part of the cost of reaching out to the poor, and that Jesus assures us that loving is unsafe and messy, not just in reaching out to the poor but in reaching out to anyone.

We like to think of ourselves as gracious and loving, but, truth be told, that’s often predicated on a naïve notion of love. We struggle to love as Jesus invites us to love, namely, to love each other as I have loved you. The last clause in the sentence contains the real challenge: Jesus doesn’t say, love each other according to the spontaneous reactions of your heart; nor, love each other as society defines love. Rather, love each other as I have loved you.

And, for the most part, we struggle to do that.

We struggle to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek and to reach across to embrace those who hate us. We struggle to pray for those who oppose us.
We struggle to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who murder our loved ones. We struggle to ask God to forgive the people who are hurting us. We struggle to believe, like Jesus, that they are not really cognizant of what they are doing.
We struggle to be big-hearted and take the high road when we’ve been slighted or ignored, and we struggle then to let understanding and empathy replace bitterness and our urge to withdraw. We struggle to let go of grudges.
We struggle to be vulnerable, to risk humiliation and rejection in our offers of love. We struggle to give up our fear of being misunderstood, of not looking good, of not appearing strong and in control. We struggle to set out barefooted, to love without security in our pockets.
We struggle to open our hearts enough to imitate Jesus’ universal, non-discriminating embrace, to stretch our hearts to see everyone as brother or sister, regardless of race, color, or religion. We struggle to stop nursing the silent secret that our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are more precious than those of others.
We struggle to make a preferential option for the poor, to bring the poor to our tables, to abandon our propensity to prefer the attractive and the influential.
We struggle to sacrifice ourselves to the point of losing everything for the sake of others, to actually lay down our lives for our friends – and indeed for our enemies. We struggle to be willing to die for people who oppose us and are trying to crucify us.
We struggle to love with purity of heart, to not subtly seek ourselves within our relationships. We struggle to live chastely, to fully respect and not violate someone else.
We struggle to walk in patience, giving others the full space they need to relate to us according to their own inner dictates. We struggle to sweat blood in order to be faithful. We struggle to wait in proper patience, in God’s good time, for God’s judgment on right and wrong.
We struggle to resist our natural urge to judge others, to not impute motives. We struggle to leave judgment to God.
Finally, not least, we struggle to love and forgive our own selves, knowing that no mistake we make stands between us and God. We struggle to trust that God’s love is enough and that we are forever held inside God’s infinite mercy.

Yes, love is a struggle.

After his wife Raissa died, Jacques Maritain edited a book of her journals. In the Preface to that book, he describes her struggle with the illness that eventually killed her. Severely debilitated and unable to speak, she struggled mightily in her last days. Her suffering both tested and matured Maritain’s own faith. Mightily sobered by seeing his wife’s sufferings, he wrote: “Only two kinds of people think that love is easy: saints, who through long years of self-sacrifice have made a habit of virtue, and naïve persons who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He’s right. Only saints and those who are naïve think love is easy.

Our Restless Selves

February 10, 2025

During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing and he found it was forever escaping him.

Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence”. Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret, and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives, and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches, and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings”, and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment”, as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

Jesus and The Poor

February 3, 2025

I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instill that in us. However, given our own poverty, understandably we did not have much of a vision in terms of social justice. We were the poor.

Growing up in this way can deeply ingrain certain instincts and attitudes inside you, some good, some bad. Positively, you grow to believe that you need to work hard, that nothing is given to you free, that you need to take care of yourself, and everyone else should do the same. Ironically, that very ethos can blind you to some major truths regarding the poor.

I can testify to this. It took me many years, work that took me over many borders, some firsthand encounters with people who didn’t have the basic necessities of life, and countless hours in theology classrooms before I even became aware of some of the basic biblical and Christian truths regarding the poor.

Now I am struggling to live them, but at least I accept that they are non-negotiable for a Christian, irrespective of denomination or political persuasion. In brief, as a Christian, we are given a non-negotiable mandate to reach out to the poor in compassion and justice. Moreover, this mandate is just as non-negotiable as keeping the commandments, as is clear most everywhere in Scripture.

Here is the essence of that mandate …

The great Jewish prophets coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land; and the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the weakest and most vulnerable groups in a society) are doing while you are alive.
Jesus not only ratifies this; he deepens it, identifying his very person with the poor. (“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me.”). He tells us that we will be judged for eternal life on the basis of how we treated the poor.
Moreover, in both Testaments in the Bible, this is particularly true regarding how we treatforeigners, strangers, and immigrants. How we treat them is how we are in fact treating Jesus.
Note that Jesus defines his mission with these words: I have come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, or government policy that is not good news for the poor may not cloak itself with either Jesus or the Gospel.

As well, most of us have been raised to believe that we have the right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through legitimate inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been enshrined in the laws of democratic countries, and we generally believe that it is morally sanctioned by the Christianity. It is not, as we can see from these truths in Scripture:

God loves everyone. There are no favorite ones or privileged ones in God’s eyes, and

God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. Thus, created goods should flow fairly to all.

Wealth and possessions must be understood as ours to steward rather than to possess absolutely.
No person or nation may have a surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.
All people are obliged to come to the relief of the poor.
The condemnation of injustice is a non-negotiable aspect of our discipleship.
In all situations where there is injustice, unfairness, oppression, grinding poverty, God is not neutral. Rather God wants action against everything and everyone who deals injustice and death.

These principles are strong, so strong in fact that it is easy to believe that Jesus can’t really be asking this of us. Indeed, if taken seriously, these principles would radically disrupt our lives and the social order. It would no longer be business as usual.

To take just one example: there are nearly forty-five million refugees in our world today, most of them looking to cross a border into a new country. Is it realistic for any country today, in biblical terms, “to welcome the stranger”, to simply open its borders and welcome anyone who wants to cross? That’s simply not realistic or socially expedient regarding what it would mean practically in terms of our comfort and security.

While that may be granted, what may not be granted is that our (seemingly) necessary social and political pragmatism in dealing with “the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant” may cloak itself with Jesus and the Bible. It may not. This is antithetical to Jesus. Whether or not this upsets our security and comfort, God is always on the underside of history, on the side of the poor.

Ecumenism: The Imperative for Wholeness Inside the Body of Christ

January 27, 2025

For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.

In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

A woman has ten coins and loses one. She becomes anxious and agitated and begins to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she finds the coin, is delirious with joy, calls together her neighbors, and throws a party whose cost no doubt far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15, 8-10)

Why such anxiety and joy over losing and finding a coin whose value was probably that of a dime? Well, what’s at issue is not the value of the coin; it’s something else. In her culture, nine was not considered a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety about losing the coin and her joy in finding it had to do with the importance of wholeness. A wholeness in her life that had been fractured and a precious set of relationships was no longer complete.

Indeed, the parable might be recast this way: A woman has ten children. With nine of them, she has a good relationship, but one of her daughters is alienated. Her nine other children come home regularly to the family table, but her alienated daughter does not. The woman cannot rest in that situation, cannot be at peace. She needs her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tries every means to reconcile with her daughter and then one day, miracle of miracles, it works. Her daughter comes back to the family. Her family is whole again, everyone is back at the table. The woman is overjoyed, withdraws her modest savings, and throws a lavish party to celebrate that reunion.

Christian faith demands that, like that woman, we need to be anxious, dis-eased, figuratively lighting lamps, and searching for ways to make the Church whole again. Nine is not a whole number. Neither is the number of those who are normally inside our respective churches. Roman Catholicism isn’t a whole number. Protestantism isn’t a whole number. The Evangelical Churches aren’t a whole number. The Orthodox Churches aren’t a whole number. No one Christian denomination is a whole number. Together we make up a whole Christian number – and that is still not a whole faithnumber.

And so, we are meant to be anxious around these questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who is uncomfortable worshiping with us? How can we be comfortable when so many people are no longer at table with us?

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold”. When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost. We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found.