Suicide and Jesus’ Descent into Hell

July 21, 2025

In a book entitled Peculiar Treasures, the renowned novelist and spiritual writerFrederick Buechner reflects on the character of Judas, the man who betrayed Jesus with a kiss and then died by suicide.

Buechner, who had lost his own father to suicide, speculates on the reasons why Judas dies by suicide. Referring to an ancient church tradition, he suggests that perhaps Judas chose suicide out of hope instead of despair, that is, he felt dammed and counted on Jesus’ mercy after death, thinking that perhaps “hell might be his last chance of making it to heaven.”

Then, imagining Jesus’ descent into hell, Buechner writes: “It’s a scene to conjure with. Once again they met in the shadows, the two old friends, both of them a little worse for wear after all that had happened, only this time it was Jesus who was the one to give the kiss, and this time it wasn’t the kiss of death that was given.” (Jeffrery Munroe, Reading Buechner, InterVarsity Press)

As Christians, as very article of faith in our Creeds, we believe that after his death Jesus “descended into hell.” What’s meant by that?

The popular conception of this in the language of our catechesis, in our iconography, and in Christian piety, might be summarized this way. After the sin of Adam and Eve, ‘original sin,’ the gates of heaven were closed, so that from the time of Adam and Eve until the death of Jesus, no one could go to heaven. However, in his death, Jesus atoned for our sins and during the time between his death on Good Friday and his resurrection on Easter Sunday, he went to that place in the underworld, Sheol, where all the good people who had died throughout history were waiting and he led them into heaven. This was his “descent into hell.”

But, whatever the literal truth in that popular conception, there’s a powerful theological truth undergirding the doctrine. In essence it’s this: The love and compassion that Jesus manifested in his death has the power to go into hell itself, that is, there is no “hell” (physical, psychological, or spiritual) we can create that Christ’s love cannot penetrate so as to offer healing for the very wound which caused that hell itself.

God’s love, healing, and forgiveness can penetrate any hell we can create and heal the wound that caused that hell.

This is perhaps the single most consoling doctrine not just in Christianity but in all religion. When we are powerless to help others or ourselves, God can still help us.

It’s for this reason that Christians don’t believe in reincarnation. It isn’t needed. We don’t need to get ourselves completely right to go to heaven. When we are powerless, God can still do for us what we can’t do for ourselves.

That’s a deep consolation because not everyone dies a happy death. Many of us die in anger, in bitterness, not fully reconciled with others, with unfinished business of soul. And some of us die by suicide, imprisoned in a private hell where, due to illness and wound rather than moral fault, we believe our death is our only way to life.

The doctrine of Jesus’ descent into hell is particularly helpful regarding how we might understand how those who die by suicide are met by God after their deaths. For too long we have been falsely anxious about this, fearing that suicide is a grave human and moral failure, an act of despair, unforgiveable (certainly on this side of eternity). However, in most cases, it is an illness, one not freely chosen. Like cancer, a heart attack, or an accident, it takes someone out of life against his or her committed choice. For this reason, we are encouraged to no longer use the phrase “committed suicide.” Nobody “commits” cancer or “commits” a heart attack. He or she “succumbs” to it. So too for most suicides.

With this in mind, we can better appreciate the image Frederick Buechner uses in speculating about the suicide of Judas’ and his meeting with Jesus in hell.

In essence, this is Buechner’s image: After his betrayal of Jesus, Judas descends into a private hell wherein he senses that what he has done cannot be forgiven and he is doomed forever to live in that darkness. That falsity, that illness, that fatally misguided logic tells him that going to hell is his last chance of going to heaven. So, he takes his own life. After his death, Jesus meets him in the shadows of that misguided hell and kisses him, not in condemnation or damnation, but in unconditional love, understanding, and forgiveness.

This image, I believe, can help us understand what happens in suicide: the misguided logic of those taking their own lives, and God’s loving, compassionate, forgiving, invitational descent into their private hell within which they believe their deaths are a favor to their loved ones and that “hell might be their last chance to go to heaven.”

Purgatory as Purification Through Love

July 14, 2025

Imagine being born blind and living into adulthood without ever having seen light and color. Then, through some miraculous operation, doctors are able to give you sight. What would you feel immediately upon opening your eyes? Wonder? Bewilderment? Ecstasy? Pain? Some combination of all of these?

We now know the answer to that question. This kind of sight-restoring operation has been done and is being done, and we now have some indication of how a person reacts upon opening his or her eyes and seeing light and color for the first time. What happens might surprise us. Here’s how J.Z. Young, an authority on brain function, describes what happens:

“The patient on opening his eyes gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of light and colors. He proves to be quite unable to pick up objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch. ‘Of course,’ you will say, ‘he must take a little time to learn to recognize them by sight.’ Not a little time, but a very long time, in fact, years. His brain has not been trained in the rules of seeing. We are not conscious that there are any such rules; we think we see, as we say naturally. But we have in fact learned a whole set of rules during childhood.” (See: Emilie Griffin, Souls in Full Flight, p. 143-144)

Might this be a helpful analogy for what happens to us in what Roman Catholics call purgatory? Could the purification we experience after death be understood analogously in this way, namely, as an opening of our vision and heart to a light and a love that are so full so as to force upon us the same kind of painful relearning and reconceptualization that have just been described? Might purgatory be understood precisely as being embraced by God in such a way that perfect warmth and light so dwarf our earthly concepts of love and knowledge that, like a person born blind who is given sight, we need to struggle painfully in the very ecstasy of that light to adapt to a radically deeper way of thinking and loving? Might purgatory be understood not as God’s absence or as some kind of punishment or retribution for sin, but as what happens to us when we are finally fully embraced, in ecstasy, by God, perfect love and perfect truth?

Indeed, isn’t this what faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, are already trying to move us toward in this life? Isn’t faith a knowing beyond what we can conceptualize? Isn’t hope an anchoring of ourselves in something beyond what we can control and guarantee for ourselves? And isn’t charity a reaching out beyond what affectively comes naturally to us?

St. Paul, in describing our condition on earth, tells us that in this life we see only as “through a mirror, reflecting dimly” but after death we will see “face to face”. Clearly in describing our present condition on earth he is highlighting a certain blindness, a congenital darkness, an inability to actually see things as they really are. It is significant to note too that he says this in a context wherein he is pointing out that already now in this life, faith, hope, and charity help lift away that blindness.

Of course, these are only questions, perhaps unsettlingly to Protestants and Roman Catholics alike. Many Protestants and Evangelicals reject the very concept of purgatory on the grounds that, biblically, there are only two eternal places, heaven and hell. Many Roman Catholics, on the other hand, get anxious whenever purgatory seems to get stripped of its popular conception as a place or state apart from heaven. But purgatory conceived of in this way, as the full opening of our eyes and hearts so as to cause a painful reconceptualization of things, might help make the concept more palatable to Protestants and Evangelicals and help strip the concept of some of its false popular connotations within Roman Catholic piety.

True purgation can happen only through love because it is only when we experience love’s true embrace that we see our sin clearly for what it is and are empowered with the grace to move beyond it. Only light dispels darkness, and only love casts out sin.

Therese of Lisieux would sometimes pray to God: “Punish me with a kiss!” The embrace of full love is the only possible purification for sin because only when we are embraced by love do we actually understand what sin is and, only then, are we given the desire, the vision, and the strength to live in love and truth.

But that inbreaking of love and light can be, all at the same time, delightful and bewildering, ecstatic and unsettling, wonderful and excruciating, euphoric and painful – nothing less than purgatory.

Poetry and Spirituality

July 7, 2025

Who still reads poetry? In a digital age and in a time when the empirical has for the most part replaced the spiritual, what’s the value of poetry? What does it bring to the table?

One of the intellectual giants of our generation, Charles Taylor, in a recent book Cosmic Connections, Poetry in the Age of Disenchantment, answers that question. Poetry is meant to reenchant us, to help us see beyond the tedium of everyday ordinariness, to see again the deep innate connections among all things.

For Taylor, as children, we are in touch naturally with the deep innate connections among all things; however, our normal growth and development work away at dissolving our original inarticulate sense of cosmic order. But we sense this loss and have an inchoate longing to recover that sense of wholeness.

And that’s where good poetry can help us.

When we experience something, we don’t simply receive it, like a camera taking a photo, we help define its meaning. In Taylor’s words, “We do not just register things; we re-create the meaning of things.” Thus, like any good work of art, the function of poetry is to transfigure a scene so that the deeper order of things becomes visible and shines through. The French poet, Stephane Mallarme, suggests that the function of art is not to paint something, but to paint the effect it is meant to produce.

For Taylor, a good poem can do that. How? By helping us see things from a bigger perspective.

Wrapped up in our own lives, we are too close and so absorbed that we cannot properly name what we are going through. “Poetry gives it a plot, a story, and this in a way that gives it a dramatic shape. We can now see our life as a story, a drama, a struggle, with the dignity and deeper meaning that it has. For example, by giving poetic expression to a distressful emotion, poetry allows us to hold it at a distance. The business of the poet is to make poetry out of the raw material of the unpoetical. As William Wordsworth once said, poetry is “emotion recollected in tranquility.”

And to do that, the poet needs to employ a different language.

Here’s how Taylor puts this: “Poetry is the ‘translation’ of insight into subtler languages. What cannot adequately be understood in instrumental language, namely, value, morality, ethics, love, and art, require explorations which can only be carried out in other vocabularies. The language of empiricism is essentially an instrument by which we can build a responsible and reliable picture of the world as it lies before us, but that world is no longer seen as the site of spirit and magic forces. Rather the universe is now understood in terms of laws defined purely by efficient causality.”

And he goes on: “So a crucial distinction comes to the fore, between ordinary, flat, instrumental language which designates different objects, and combines these designates into accurate portraits of things and events, all of which serve the purpose of controlling and manipulating things. … [while] on the other hand, truly insightful speech [good art] reveals the very nature of things and restores contact with them. Poetic language gives us a sense that we are called, we receive a call. There is someone or something out there.”

Poetry parallels music as a paralinguistic practice. But what has any of this to do with spirituality, not least Christian spirituality? Aren’t poetry and art purely subjective and, as such, often amoral? Taylor would sharply disagree in so far at this pertains to good poetry and goodart. Good art, he suggests, is never a matter “of shifting taste”.

Taylor suggests that the meanings we experience in good poetry and art have their place alongside moral and ethical demands. Why? Because, for Taylor, in good poetry and good art “the experience is one of joy and not just one of pleasure.” The difference? “You experience joy when you learn or are reminded of something positive, which has a strong ethical or spiritual significance, whereas intense pleasure tends to enfold you even more in yourself.” For Taylor, joy awakens a “felt intuition” which is not merely subjective. It is an opening to the ontological, to God.

Finally, quoting Baudelaire, Taylor leaves us with this insight: “It is both by poetry and through poetry, by and through music, that the soul glimpses the splendor beyond the grave; and when an exquisite poem brings tears to the edge of the eyes, these tears are not the proof of an excess of enjoyment, they are rather the testimony of an irritated melancholy, of a postulation of the nerves of a nature exiled in the imperfect and which would like to seize immediately, on this earth, a revealed paradise.”

So, what has poetry to do with spirituality”? To recast St. Augustine: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and when poetry and music stir our hearts with irritated melancholy, we recognize that ultimately our rest lies in you alone.

Does God have a sense of humor?

June 30, 2025

Does God have sense of humor?

This may seem a frivolous or impious question, it’s anything but that. It’s an important question and a reverent one as well. Why? Because healthy humor and playful banter help bring joy, lightness of heart, and healthy perspective into our lives. Can we imagine all that wonderful lightness of heart having no connection to God?

Does God have a sense of humor? For sure! Without doubt! Jesus teaches that God is the author of all good things. Humor, playfulness, and healthy banter are good, healthy things. They can have their ultimate origin only in God.

Why are they good things? What positive role do they play in our lives?

Freud once suggested that sometimes we can understand things more clearly by looking at their opposites. What are the opposites of humor, playfulness, and banter? We see their opposite in three things: over-seriousness, needless irritation, and pomposity (none of which are healthy).

Consider this example: I have lived almost my entire adult life within a religious community of men, and by and large it has been positive and life-giving. But among the (literally) hundreds of men with whom I have shared community over more than fifty years, there have sometimes been confreres who were over-serious and their presence in the community room or at table could sometimes effectively rob the room of joy.

I recall one such incident at table where someone shared a rather earthy joke (spicy, though not in bad taste). Most of us responded with a hearty laugh, but as soon as the laughter died down, one of our confreres in a heavy and overly pious tone, asked: Would you tell a joke like that in front of the Blessed Sacrament? That not only ended the laughter in the room and injected a certain heaviness into our gathering, it also effectively drained the oxygen out of the room.

Over-seriousness, while not a moral deficiency, can leave us too raw before the demands of family and community to which we can never perfectly measure up. On the other hand, playfulness, humor, and banter, when healthy, can provide some important “grease” for family and community life.

For example, when you join a religious congregation you take a vow to live within a community (of men, in my case) for the rest of your life. Moreover, you don’t get to choose with whom you get to live. You are simply assigned to a community, which invariably will include some members whose temperament is very different from yours and with whom you would not normally choose to live.

Well, I have lived in this type of religious community for nearly sixty years and, with very few exceptions, it has been life-giving and enjoyable; mostly because I have been blessed nearly always to live in a community where part of our very ethos has been the daily exchange of humor, playfulness, and banter. Prayer and a common mission of course have been the main glue that held us together but humor, playfulness, and banter have been the grease that have kept petty tensions and the occupational hazard of pomposity at bay.

It’s interesting to note that the classical Greek philosophers understood love as having six components: Eros – infatuation and attraction; Mania – obsession; Asteismos – playfulness and banter; Storge – care; Philia – friendship; and Agape – altruism. When we define love we generally make room for most of those components, except Asteismos, playfulness and banter. We pay a price for that.

My Oblate novice master, a wonderful French-Canadian priest, once shared with us (a group of young novices) a joke with a purpose. It runs this way: a family was planning the wedding of their daughter but were unable to afford a venue for the festivities after the church service. So, the priest made them an offer: “Why don’t you use the entrance, the foyer, of the church? There’s enough room for a reception. Bring in a cake and have your reception there.” Things were fine, until the father of the bride asked the priest if they might bring liquor to the reception. The priest replied most emphatically, “Absolutely not! You may not have liquor in a church!” The father of the bride protested, “but Jesus drank wine at the wedding feast of Cana.” To which the priest replied, “But not in front of the Blessed Sacrament!”

This joke can serve as a parable, cautioning us vis-à-vis stripping God of humor and playfulness.

God has a sense of humor, a sense of playfulness, and a talent for banter far beyond that of our best comedians. How could it be otherwise? Can you imagine spending eternity in heaven without laughter and playfulness? Can you imagine a God who is perfect love, but with whom you would be afraid to joke and banter? Is the last laugh before we die to be our last laugh forever? No. God has a sense of humor which will without doubt be for all of us a delightful surprise.

What To Do When There’s Nothing You Can Do

June 23, 2025

What do you do when a wound or a loss leaves you hopelessly disconsolate and there’s nothing you can do to amend the situation?

As well, what do you do or say when you are trying to console someone who is paralyzed by loss? For example, what do you say to someone who is keeping vigil at the bedside of a loved one who is dying young? What do you say to someone who has just lost a loved one to suicide?

What do you do or say when you are helpless to do anything practical to amend a fractured situation?

The poet Rainer Marie Rilke once received a letter from a man who had just lost a loved one, was fighting despair, and was desperately searching for anything to keep his heart from breaking.

Rilke sent him these words: “Don’t be afraid to suffer—take your heaviness and give it back to the earth’s own weight; the mountains are heavy, the oceans are heavy.” (Sonnets to Orpheus) These words echo words from the Book of Lamentations (3,29) where the sacred author tells us that sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait.

Sometimes all we can do is to put our mouths to the dust and wait!Sometimes we must give the heaviness of our grief back to the earth itself.

It’s curious that we can accept those words and the patience they ask for when the pain that afflicts us is physical rather than emotional and psychological. For instance, if we have an accident and suffer a badly broken leg, we simply accept that, no matter the frustration, we will be incapacitated for a number of weeks or months and there’s nothing that can be done about it. We simply must accept the situation and let nature take its course. To our detriment we don’t often accept emotional and psychological fractures in the same way. When our heart is broken, we want a fix in short order. We don’t want our heart on crutches or in a wheelchair for some weeks or months.

Well, not all losses and heartbreaks are the same. There are losses that are less paralyzing, where despite a bitter blow to the heart, there are already elements of consolation and healing present. We experience this, for example, at the funeral of a loved one who lived and died in such a way that, despite losing her to death, at a deeper level we already feel a certain peace, even in her departure.

But there are losses where, for a period afterwards, there is no consolation and there are no words (however true and faith-filled they may be) which take away the bitterness and pain of our loss. For example, I have seen this at times at the funeral of someone who died by suicide. In that raw moment, there is nothing that we can do or say that will lift from the dust the hearts of the loved ones who are left behind and grieving. The words that are needed, words which express our faith and our hope, will be helpful later, but they lose their existential power when the grief is so raw.

I remember a funeral I attended several years ago. The woman to whom we were saying an earthly farewell had died of cancer, still young, in her early fifties. Understandably, her husband was disconsolate. At the reception after the church service, one of his close friends, trying to cheer him up, said to him: “She’s with God; she’s in a better place.” Despite being a man of faith and having just walked out of a church service that publicly celebrated that faith, his response was: “I know you mean well; but that’s the last thing I need to hear today.”

The words of faith we speak to each other in the face of bitter loss and death are true. This woman, no doubt, was in a better place. But in a moment of raw grief, words will not have much emotional or psychological impact.

So, what can we offer others in situations like these? What can others offer us when we are paralyzed by grief?

We can offer our helplessness, our muted selves, our inability to say or do anything that will take the heaviness away. And perhaps nothing is as fruitful in a tragic situation than the empathy that flows out of mutual helplessness. We might still utter the words of faith, but we need to accept that they will bear their full fruit only later.

What our grief-muted selves are saying in moments of helplessness is what both the Book of Lamentations and the poet Rilke are saying: Sometimes all you can do is to put your mouth to the dust and wait – and by doing that you will be giving your heaviness back to the earth itself. Paradoxically, the acceptance of heaviness can be the one thing that can lift our spirits.

Are You a Practicing Christian?

June 16, 2025

The Acts of the Apostles says that it was at Antioch that the followers of Jesus were first called “Christians”.

I once heard a challenging homily where the priest asked: “If you were put on trial and accused of being a Christian, would they find enough evidence to convict you?” An interesting question, without a simple answer. How exactly would we be judged? What might constitute hard evidence that we are Christians?

I grew up in a Roman Catholic culture that had certain agreed-upon criteria for what made you “a practicing Catholic”, namely: Do you go to church regularly? Are you keeping the Sixth Commandment? Is your married life in order? More recently, both Roman Catholics and other denominations have become fond of judging your Christian standing by your stance on certain moral issues like abortion or gay marriage.

What about Jesus, what did he teach in terms of what makes for a practicing Christian?

There is no simple answer. Jesus, the Gospels, and the rest of the New Testament are complex. For example, when teaching how we will ultimately be judged, Jesus doesn’t mention attending church, keeping the sixth commandment, or how we stand on abortion or gay marriage. He has only these criteria: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the refugee? Visit the sick? Visit prisoners?

What would the verdict be if these were the central criteria by which a jury judges us?

Then there is the Sermon on the Mount. Counselling us as to what it means to be his disciple, Jesus asks: Do you love those who hate you? Bless those who curse you? Do good to those who harm you? Forgive those who have hurt you? Forgive the one who kills you? Do you love beyond your innate instincts? Have you ever really turned the other cheek? Do you radiate God’s compassion which goes out equally to everyone, good and bad alike?

Again, how would our discipleship of Jesus stand up to judgment vis-à-vis these criteria?

However, there are other critical criteria about what does or does not make us practicing followers of Jesus.

One such criterion has to do with community. The scriptures tell us that God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in that person. The word used here for love is “agape”, and in this context it might also be rendered as “shared existence”. God is shared existence, and everyone who shares his or her existence in community lives in God.

If that is true, and it is, then whenever we live inside of family and community, we are a “practicing Christian”. Of course, this may not be simplistically equated with explicit ecclesial community, with going to church, but it does hint strongly at belonging to a graced community. So, does going to church make me a practicing Christian?

Finally, there is another critical criterion. The earthly Jesus left us only one ritual, the Eucharist. On the night before he died, he instituted the Eucharist and told us to continue to celebrate it until he returns. For 2000 years we have been faithful to that invitation, we have kept the Eucharist going. According to the theologian Ronald Knox, this constitutes “our one great act of fidelity”, in that we haven’t always been faithful in other ways. Sometimes we haven’t turned the other cheek, haven’t loved our enemies, haven’t fed the hungry, and haven’t welcomed the refugee, but we have been faithful to Jesus in one critically important way: we have kept celebrating the Eucharist. We have been practicing Christians in at least one important way.

So, facing a jury set to judge whether we are a Christians or not, could the most telling evidence of all be that we regularly participate in the Eucharist? Could this single action convict us as being a practicing Christian?

Among all these potential criteria, which one makes for a practicing Christian?

Perhaps the more fruitful path toward an answer is not to weigh these criteria against each other to try to discern which is most important in determining what makes for a practicing Christian. Perhaps it is more fruitful to focus on the verb “practicing”.

To practice something doesn’t imply that you have mastered it, that you are proficient at it, not alone that you are perfect at it. It only means that you are working at it, trying to master the skill.

Given human nature, all of us have certain shortcomings in terms of measuring up to the demands of Christian discipleship. Like someone struggling to master a musical instrument or an athletic skill, we are all still practicing. Thus, to the extent that we are trying to get better at feeding the hungry, at welcoming the stranger, at loving our enemy, at radiating God’s wide compassion, at sharing our existence in community, and at being habitually at the table of the Eucharist, we are in fact practicing Christians.

God as Holy, but also as Playful, Witty, and Erotic

June 9, 2025

God is the object of all desire, no matter how earthy and unholy our desire might seem. Everything we desire is inside of God. Both Jesus and the Psalms tell us this.

God is the object of all desire and only in God will our deepest longings be satisfied. We express this in our prayers, perhaps without ever being conscious of what we are saying: My soul longs for you in the night. You, Lord, alone, can fill my heart. We say those words, but is it really God that we long for in the night and ache for in our desires? Do we really believe that God is the object of our desires?

When we look at what’s beautiful, full of life, attractive, sexually alluring, and pleasurable on earth, do we really think and believe that this is contained in an infinitely richer way inside of God and inside the life into which God invites us? Do we really believe that the joys of heaven will surpass the pleasures of earth and that, already in this world, the joys of virtue are superior to the sensations of sin?

It is not easy to believe this because we struggle congenitally with turning our conscious attention toward God. Often we find religious practice and prayer more of a disruption to life than an entry into it, more a duty than a joy, more an asceticism than a pleasure, and more as something that takes us away from real life than as something that helps us enter its depths.

Moreover, if we are honest, we must admit that we often harbor a secret envy of those who recklessly plumb sacred energy for their own pleasure. Many of us doggedly do our duty in committing ourselves to something higher; but, like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, too often serve God out of obligation and are bitter about the fact that many others do not. This side of eternity, virtue often envies sin, and (full disclosure) this is particularly true regarding sexuality.

Partly this is natural and a sign of health, given the brute fact of our physicality and the weight of the present moment. These naturally impose themselves on us in a way that can make the things of God and spirit seem abstract and unreal. That’s simply the human condition and God, no doubt, understands. Only in certain graced, mystical moments are we affectively above this.

Thus, it can be helpful to more explicitly tease out something we profess in faith but struggle to actually believe, namely, that all that we find attractive, beautiful, irresistible, erotic, and pleasurable here on earth is found even more fully inside of its author, God.

If we believe that God is the author of all that is good, then God is better looking than any movie star, more intelligent than the brightest scientist or philosopher, wittier and funnier than the best comedian, more creative than any artist, writer, or innovator, more sophisticated than the most-learned person on earth, more exuberant and playful than any child, more dynamic than any rock star, and, not least, more erotic and sexually attractive than any person on earth.

We don’t ordinarily think about God this way, but the truth of that is given in Scripture and is codified in Christian dogma where, in essence, we are taught that God is one, true, good, and beautiful and is the author and ultimate source of all that is one, good, true, and beautiful. Which means that God is also witty, playful, and erotic. Everything that is alluring on earth is inside of God.

But knowing that does not take away the power of earthly things to allure, nor should it. Countless things can overwhelm us: a beautiful person, a sunset, a piece of music, a work of art, youthful exuberance, a child’s playfulness, a baby’s innocence, someone’s wit, feelings of intimacy, feelings of nostalgia, a glass of wine on the right evening, a stirring in our sexuality, or, most deeply of all, an inchoate sense of the uniqueness and preciousness of human life itself.

We need to honor these things and thank God for the gift, even as we make ourselves aware that all of this is found more-richly inside of God and that we lose nothing when virtue, religion, or commitment ask us to sacrifice these things for something higher. Jesus, himself, promises that whatever we give up for the sake of what is higher will be given back to us a hundredfold. Knowing this, we can live our lives enjoying fully what is earthy and earthly. The beauties and pleasures of this life are a gift from God, meant to be enjoyed. Moreover, by being aware of their source, we can then also be free enough to accept the very real limits that life puts on our desires. Better still, we need not fear death since what we will lose will be eclipsed a hundredfold by what we gain.

It is Better for You that I Go Away

June 2, 2025

It is better for you that I go away! These are some of Jesus’ parting words on the night before he died.

How can it be better for us when someone we love deeply goes away? That would make sense only if the relationship is dysfunctional or abusive. But how can that be true in a case where we love someone deeply and will painfully miss him or her?

The ascension of Jesus supplies the roots for an answer. He tells his disciples that it is better for them that he goes away because, if he doesn’t, they will be unable to receive his spirit. Why not? Why must he go away in order that those who love him can receive his spirit?

This plays on the mystery of presence and absence. We bring something to others with our presence, but we also leave something with them in our absence. In brief, what we leave in our absence is a new space within which they can receive our person more purely. This may sound hopelessly abstract, but we experience this in ordinary ways in our lives.

Here’s an example: Imagine a young woman, deeply loved by her parents, who has just graduated from high school and is leaving home to attend college, or train for the work force, or begin working in a job. Her childhood years are forever over and she senses it, as do her parents. There’s pain and sadness on both sides. She probably won’t have the words, but if she did, she could say to her parents what Jesus said to his loved ones as he spoke his words of farewell: It is better for you that I go away; otherwise you cannot receive my spirit.

Except, for her, the words would sound like this: It is better for you (and for me) that I go away; otherwise I will always be your little girl and will be unable to gift you with my adult presence. I need to go away so that my absence creates the space for me to come back to you as an adult.

Such is the mystery of presence and absence. Such too is the mystery of Jesus’ ascension, how new spirit can be recognized and received only after there has been an absence, a going away.

This is depicted powerfully in the scene in John’s Gospel where Mary Magdala meets the resurrected Jesus on Easter Sunday. Initially, she doesn’t recognize him; but, after she does, her immediate reaction is to embrace him in a familiar hug. However, Jesus stops her with the words, “Don’t cling to me because I have not yet ascended to my Father and to your Father.”

Why? Why is Jesus seemingly reluctant to receive a familiar embrace from a longtime friend?

The hesitancy has precisely to do with the familiarity. Mary wanted to welcome back her old Jesus, but this wasn’t her old Jesus. This was the resurrected Christ, who now had something new to give her. What Jesus was gently telling her when he asked her not to “cling” to him was that if she continued to cling to his old person, to the way she once had him, she would be unable to receive his new presence and what he was now bringing to her.

Mary Magdala’s attempt to embrace the risen Jesus is akin to loving parents who, having painfully missed their now adult daughter while she was away, welcome her home with a hug and the words: Our little girl is back home! Hearing these words, the daughter, whether she voices that or not, would need to say gently: If you cling to the little girl you once had, you will be unable to receive the riches which your adult daughter can now bring you.

This dynamic, how the painful absence of someone we love can transform their presence so that they can now nurture us in a deeper way, is the essence of the mystery of the ascension, Jesus’ ascension and our own.

Still, it’s hard not to cling. As we watch those around us change, grow, move away, and become something other than how we have always known and loved them, like Mary Magdala, it can have us both weeping in joy and regret: in joy to see our little girl now a vibrant adult woman; in regret because we have lost her in how we once had her as our beautiful little girl.

It is better for you that I go away. Jesus spoke those words on the night before he died. I was at the deathbed of both my father and my mother. Our family clung them. There was no way we believed that it was better for us that they were going away. It’s been fifty years now since they died and, painful as their leaving was, we realize they are now able to give us something we could not receive from them before they went away.

Scrutinizing our Motives

May 26, 2025

The main character in T.S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral is Thomas a Beckett, a bishop, who from every outward appearance is saint. He is scrupulously honest, generous to a fault, and a defender of the faith who dies as a martyr. Yet, at a certain point in his life, prior to his martyrdom, he recognizes that he might not be distinguishing between temptation and grace.

Many of us are familiar with how he famously expressed this:

The last temptation is the greatest treason:

To do the right deed for the wrong reason. …

For those who serve the greater cause

May make the cause serve them.

What’s the temptation here that can look like grace?

Simply put, we can be doing a lot of good for the wrong reasons. Moreover, this can be enormously subtle; not least in those of us who serve the greater cause, because, as T.S. Eliot points out, it is easy to make the cause serve us.

How can we make the cause serve us? How can we be doing good for the wrong reasons?

Here’s an example: I can be doing a lot of good things that help others and serve God’s purpose here on earth. I can be generous to the point of martyrdom. However, what if I am doing this (serving the greater cause) mainly because it makes me look good, makes me feel moral and righteous, draws respect, earns me praise and admiration, and will leave behind me a good name?

These questions probe the difference between temptation and grace. I can be doing the right things and, while not doing them for a bad reason, I can still for the most part be doing them for myself. I can be making the cause serve me more so than I am serving the cause.

The late Jesuit Michael J. Buckley (one of the major spiritual mentors in my life) pushes us to make a painful examination of conscience on this. Am I doing things to serve God and others or am I doing them to make myself look and feel good?

In his book What Do You Seek? The Questions of Jesus as Challenge and Promise, Buckley writes this: “For, in a thousand ways, those who serve the greater cause may make the cause serve them. This can be enormously subtle. Sometimes a nuance at the initial formulation of an action or of a life can work the unexpected twist, the unrealized but profound reorientation so that zeal masks a hidden but vicious ambition; it is hidden because ambition and zeal, however profoundly contradictory, can look initially so much alike. The desire to get something achieved can mix the intrinsic worth of a project with the reflected glory of the accomplishment.”

As a priest, in ministry for more than fifty years, I find this a particularly challenging prism through which to examine myself and my fifty plus years of ministry. How much have I served the greater cause and how much have I, blind to self, made it serve me? Who is the bigger winner here: God and the church or me and my good name?

Granted, motivation is tricky to discern and this side of eternity is rarely pure. We are a bundle of mixed motivations, some which serve others and some which serve ourselves; and, as Buckley astutely points out, initially they can look very much alike. Moreover, certain sayings of Jesus seem to suggest that sometimes explicit motivation is less important than actually doing the right thing.

For example, Jesus says that it is not necessarily those who say Lord, Lord who will enter the kingdom of heaven, but it is those who in fact do the will of the Father on earth who will enter the kingdom. (Matthew 7, 21) As well, in teaching that we will ultimately be judged on the basis of how we treated the poor (Whatsoever you do to the poor, you do to me), notice that neither group, those who did it right and those who did it wrong, knew explicitly what they were doing. They were rewarded or punished solely on the basis of their actions. (Matthew 25)

So, can we be doing the right things for the wrong reasons? And, indeed, if we are doing them for less than purely altruistic reasons (approval, respect, a good name, good feelings about ourselves) how bad is this? Does it denigrate or destroy the good we are doing? Is the desire for respect, a good name, and good feelings about ourselves genuinely at odds with altruism? Might the two befriend each other? Is God judging us more by our motivation than by our actions?

Am I serving the greater cause or am I having it serve me? That is a critical question for self-reflection. Why? Because it is easy to be blind to our own hypocrisy, even as it is just as easy to be too hard on ourselves.

Jesus – Checking our Emotions

May 19, 2025

There is a poignant scene in the series The Chosen which, irrespective of our reaction to it, demands reflection.

This is the scene: Just before curing Peter’s mother-in-law of a fever, Jesus has a private conversation with Peter’s wife. He begins by telling her that he knows how close they are to each other as husband and wife and then expresses his sympathy to her for the fact that his call has effectively taken Peter out of their house. Then in a gentle tone he asks her how she feels about this. Her answer assures him that, while there is pain, she (like her husband) will willingly make the sacrifice.

Among other things, this sheds light on the fact that when one individual (like Peter) leaves all to follow Christ, he doesn’t pay the cost alone. Those close to him also pay a price. What did it cost the wives of apostles when Jesus called their husbands?

Moreover, this incident (albeit expressed fictionally here) sheds some needed light on how Jesus is not indifferent to the emotional crucifixions we sometimes undergo in order to respond to his call. It assures us that Jesus understands and gives us divine permission not to feel guilty about the pain we feel.

No doubt many will challenge the value of this scene from The Chosen since it is not historical (in so far as we know) but merely a fictional creation. Did the historical Jesus ever have this kind of a conversation with Peter’s wife or the wife of any of his apostles?

However, whether or not this scene is historical is not the point here. The point is that Jesus would not have been callous or indifferent to the pain of the wives and others whom the apostles left behind to follow him.

Mostly we avoid probing this question because we tend to take too literally some of Jesus’ sayings about leaving behind father, mother, wife, and children to follow him. For example, at one point Jesus says this: “If you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower. You must love me more than your father, mother, wife, children, brothers, and sisters—even more than your own life!” (Luke 14:25-27). Perhaps even colder and more callous in its literal expression, is this Gospel text: “He said to another man, ‘Follow Me.’ The man replied, ‘Lord, first let me go and bury my father.’ But Jesus told him, ‘Let the dead bury their own dead. You, however, go and proclaim the kingdom of God.’ Still another said, ‘I will follow You, Lord; but first let me bid farewell to my family.’ Jesus replied, ‘No one who puts a hand to the plow and looks back is fit for service in the kingdom of God.’” (Luke 9, 60-62)

It is easy to misunderstand what Jesus is saying here about not looking back while following him. The images he employs are stark, cold, and emotionally brutal. But these are images, not literal spiritual counsels. The hard, brute emotional choices that one must sometimes make in fidelity to the Gospels might aptly be named as emotional crucifixion. In choosing Jesus we also choose the cross and there is real death, and the pain involved here cannot be softened or explained away.

However, and this is crucial to grasp, the choices we make to renounce ourselves and give ourselves over in genuine self-sacrifice are not made at the psychological or emotional level. Those choices are made at a deeper level, a moral level, where something deeper than our emotions and feelings rules and can for the sake of a deeper meaning and a deeper happiness, override the emotional and the psychological. Thus, when Jesus says, if you come to me but will not leave your family, you cannot be my follower, he is addressing our deepest moral center, that place inside us where we ultimately choose right from wrong and meaning from emptiness. He is not addressing our emotions. He is not challenging us to an unhealthy emotional stoicism.

In challenging us to give up everything to become his disciple, Jesus is not dismissive of the emotional and psychological pain that this will cause us. When he invites us to take up his cross and follow him, he understands this will be an emotional crucifixion. But, in offering us the challenge, at the same time, he gives us permission to feel without guilt the brute affective pain of that choice on our emotions. He is not challenging us to a cold, inhuman stoicism, where for the love of God we are not supposed to feel the pain of losing precious relationships and precious freedoms. Like the Jesus in The Chosen, compassionately checking with Peter’s wife as to where her emotions were vis-à-vis what Jesus is asking of them, Jesus is offering each of us the challenge of self-renunciation and at the same time checking with us how we are dealing emotionally with it.

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.