Several years ago, Mel Gibson produced and directed a movie which enjoyed a spectacular popularity. Entitled, The Passion of the Christ, the movie depicts Jesus’ paschal journey from the Garden of Gethsemane to his death on Golgotha, but with a very heavy emphasis on his physical suffering.  The movie shows in graphic detail what someone who was being crucified might have had to endure in terms of being physically beaten, tortured, and humiliated.

While most church groups applauded the film and suggested that, finally, someone made a movie the truly depicted Jesus’ suffering, many scripture scholars and spiritual writers were critical of the movie. Why? What’s wrong with showing, at length and in graphic detail, the blood and gore of the crucifixion – which, indeed, must have been pretty horrific?

What’s wrong (or better, perhaps, amiss) is that this is precisely what the Gospel accounts of Jesus’ death don’t do. All four Gospels take pains to not focus on the physical sufferings of Jesus. Their descriptions of his physical sufferings are stunningly brief: “They crucified him with the two criminals.” “Pilate had Jesus scourged and handed him over to be crucified.”  Why the brevity here? Why no detailed description?

The reason that the Evangelists don’t focus us on what Jesus was enduring physically is that they want us to focus something else, namely, on what Jesus was enduring emotionally and morally. The passion of Jesus is, in its real depth, a moral drama, not a physical one, the suffering of a lover, not that of an athlete.

Thus we see that, when Jesus is anticipating his passion, the anxiety he expresses is not about the whips that will beat him or the nails that will pierce his hands. He is pained and anxious rather about the aloneness he is facing, how he will be betrayed and abandoned by those who profess to love him, and how he will, in the wonderful phraseology of Gil Bailie, be “unanimity-minus-one”.

That the passion of Jesus is a love-drama is also evident in its setting. It begins with him sweating blood in a garden – and ends with him being buried in a garden. Jesus is sweating blood in a garden, not in an arena. What’s significant about a garden?

In archetypal symbolism, gardens are not for growing vegetables or even for growing flowers. Gardens are for lovers, the place to experience delight, the place to drink wine, the place where Adam and Eve were naked and didn’t know it, the place where one makes love.

And so the Evangelists place the beginning and the end of Jesus’ passion in a garden to emphasize that it is Jesus, as lover (not Jesus as King, or Magus, or Prophet) who is undergoing this drama. And what precisely was the drama?  When Jesus is sweating blood in the Garden and begging his Father to spare him having to “drink the cup”, the real choice he is facing is not: Will I let myself die or will I invoke divine power and save my life? Rather the choice was: “How will die? Will I die angry, bitter, and unforgiving, or will I die with a warm, forgiving heart?”

Of course, we know how Jesus resolved this drama, how he chose forgiveness and died forgiving his executioners, and how, inside all that darkness, he remained solidly inside the message that he had preached his whole ministry, namely, that ultimately love, community, and forgiveness triumph.

Moreover, what Jesus did in that great moral drama is something we’re supposed to imitate rather than simply admire because that drama is also ultimately the drama of love within our own lives, presenting itself to us in countless ways. Namely:

At the end of our lives, how will we die? Will our hearts be angry, clinging, unforgiving, and bitter at the unfairness of life? Or, will our hearts be forgiving, grateful, empathic, warm, as was the heart of Jesus when he said to his Father not my will but yours be done?

Moreover this is not just one, major choice we face at the hour of death; it is also a choice we face daily, many times daily. Countless times in our daily interactions with others, our families, our colleagues, our friends, and with society at large, we suffer moments of coldness, misunderstanding, unfairness, and positive violation. From the indifference of a family member to our enthusiasm, to a sarcastic comment that is intended to hurt us, to a gross unfairness in our workplace, to being the victim of a prejudice or abuse; our kitchen tables, our workplaces, our meeting rooms, and the streets we share with others, are all places where we daily experience, in small and big ways, what Jesus felt in the garden of Gethsemane, unanimity-minus-one. In that darkness will we let go of our light? In the face of hatred will we let go of love?

That’s the real drama of the Passion of the Christ – and the ropes, whips, and nails are not the central drama.

When we no longer know how to pray, the Spirit, in groans too deep for words, prays through us.

Saint Paul wrote those words and they contain both a stunning revelation and a wonderful consolation, namely, there is deep prayer happening inside us beyond our conscious awareness and independent of our deliberate efforts. What is this unconscious prayer? It is our deep innate desire, relentlessly on fire, forever somewhat frustrated, making itself felt through the groaning of our bodies and souls, silently begging the very energies of the universe, not least God Himself, to let it come to consummation.

Allow me an analogy: Some years ago, a friend of mine bought a house that had sat empty and abandoned for a number of years. The surface of the driveway was cracked and a bamboo plant, now several feet high, had grown up through the pavement. My friend cut down the bamboo tree, chopped down several feet into its roots to try to destroy them, poured a chemical poison into the root system in hopes of killing whatever was left, packed some gravel over the spot, and paved over the top with a thick layer of concrete.  But the little tree was not so easily thwarted. Two years later, the pavement began to heave as the bamboo plant again began to assert itself. Its powerful life force was still blindly pushing outward and upward, cement blockage notwithstanding.

Life, all life, has powerful inner pressures and is not easily thwarted. It pushes relentlessly and blindly towards its own ends, irrespective of resistance. Sometimes resistance does kill it. There are, as the saying goes, storms we cannot weather. But we do weather most of what life throws at us and our deep life-principle remains strong and robust, even as on the surface the frustrations we have experienced and the dreams in us that have been shamed slowly muzzle us into a mute despair so that our prayer-lives begin to express less and less of what we are actually feeling.

But it is through that very frustration that the Spirit prays, darkly, silently, in groans too deep for words. In our striving, our yearning, our broken dreams, our tears, in the daydreams we escape into, and even in our sexual desire, the Spirit of God prays through us, as does our soul, our life-principle. Like the life forces innate in that bamboo plant, powerful forces are blindly working inside us too, pushing us outward and upward to eventually throw off whatever cement lies on top of us. This is true, of course, also of our joys. The Spirit also prays through our gratitude, both when we express consciously it and even when we only sense it unconsciously.

Our deepest prayers are mostly not those we express in our churches and private oratories. Our deepest prayers are spoken in our silent gratitude and silent tears. The person praising God’s name ecstatically and the person bitterly cursing God’s name in anger are, in different ways, in radically different ways of groaning, both praying.

There are many lessons to be drawn from this. First, from this we can learn to forgive life a little more for its frustrations and we can learn to give ourselves permission to be more patient with life and with ourselves. Who of us does not lament that the pressures and frustrations of life keep us from fully enjoying life’s pleasures, from smelling the flowers, from being more present to family, from celebrating with friends, from peaceful solitude, and from deeper prayer? So we are forever making resolutions to slow down, to find a quiet space inside our pressured lives in which to pray. But, after failing over and over again, we eventually despair of finding a quiet, contemplative space for prayer in our lives.  Although we need to continue to search for that, we can already live with the consolation that, deep down, our very frustration in not being able to find that quiet space is already a prayer. In the groans of our inadequacy the Spirit is already praying through our bodies and souls in a way deeper than words.

One of the oldest, classical definitions of prayer defines it this way: Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God. Too often in our efforts to pray formally, both communally and privately, we fail to do that, namely, to actually lift our hearts and minds to God. Why? Because what is really in our hearts and minds, alongside our gratitude and more gracious thoughts, is not something we generally connect with prayer at all. Our frustrations, bitterness, jealousies, lusts, curses, sloth, and quiet despair are usually understood to be the very antithesis of prayer, something to be overcome in order to pray.

But a deeper thing is happening under the surface: Our frustration, longing, lust, jealousy, and escapist daydreams, things we are ashamed to take to prayer, are in fact already lifting our hearts and minds to God in more honest ways that we ever do consciously.

Some day you will have to face your Maker!  We’ve all heard that phrase. The hour will come when we will stand alone before God with no place to hide, no room to rationalize, and no excuses to offer for our weaknesses and sin. We will stand in a searing light, naked and exposed, and all we ever did, good and bad, will stand with us in that light. That prospect, however vaguely felt, makes for a dark corner in every person’s mind.

But we can go through our daily lives with that prospect mostly consigned to the back of our minds. We know that someday we will have to face it all, but that day is a long ways off and, for now, we can peacefully accommodate ourselves to our procrastinations and weaknesses. The time to radically face ourselves and our Maker, to stand in the searing light of full judgment, will only come at the time of death.

But, why wait until death? Why live with so much unnecessary fear? Why hide from God’s judgment? Why delay throwing ourselves into God’s mercy and peace?

Searing judgment of our souls is meant to be a daily occurrence, not a single traumatic moment at the end of our lives. We are meant to bring ourselves, with all our complexities and weaknesses, into God’s full light every day. How?

There are many ways to do this, though all of them are predicated on the same thing, namely, on bringing ourselves before God in searing honesty. In essence, we face the light of God’s full judgment every time we pray in real honesty. Genuine prayer brings us into that searing light. And, in the great prayer traditions, one particular form of prayer, contemplative prayer, is singled out as being most helpful in doing this, that is, prayer without words, without images, the prayer of quiet, centering prayer.

There are various methods for praying in this way. From the Desert Fathers, through the author of the Cloud of Unknowing, through Thomas Merton, through John Main, through Thomas Keating, through Laurence Freeman, among others, we have been invited to supplement our other methods of prayer with contemplative prayer, that is, prayer without images, without words, without concentrating on holy thoughts, and without looking for affective, faith-filled feelings in our prayer.

How do we pray in this way? We pray in this way by wordlessly bringing ourselves into God’s presence in a way that we hide nothing of ourselves. Perhaps a description of how this kind of prayer differs from other kinds of prayer might best serve us here.

Normal, meditative types of prayer essentially work this way: You set off to pray, find a quiet place, sit or kneel down, make a conscious act to center yourself in prayer, focus on an inspiring text or thought, begin to meditate on those words, try to hear what is being said inside you, articulate the challenge or insight that is making itself heard there, and then connect this all to your relationship to God, through gratitude, love, praise, or petition.  In this kind of prayer, your focus is on an inspiring word or insight, the response this creates in you, and your own response to God in the light of that.  But, and this is its shortcoming, the words, images, and feelings in that kind of prayer, for all their goodness, can still act as a camouflage that protects you from being fully exposed and naked before God, akin to what we can do in a conversation with another person when we can talk about all kinds of things, good things, but avoid talking about what is really at issue.

Contemplative prayer, by way of contrast, is prayer without words or images. It works this way: You set off to pray, find a quiet place, sit or kneel, and make a conscious act to simply place yourself before God. Then you simply stay there, naked and unprotected by any words, images, conversations, rationalizations, or even by any holy feelings about Jesus, his Mother, some saint, some icon, or inspirational idea. All of these, good as they are, can help you avoid having to be there naked before God. Contemplative prayer brings you into God’s presence without protection, with no possibility of hiding anything. The silence and absence of prayerful conversation is what leaves you naked and exposed, like a plant sitting in the sun, silently drinking in its rays.

We are meant to face God like this every day of our lives, not just at the moment of our death. So, each day, we should set aside some time to put ourselves into God’s presence without words and without images, where, naked, stripped of everything, silent, exposed, hiding nothing,  completely vulnerable, we simply sit, full face, before God’s judgment and mercy.

By doing this, we will preempt any traumatic encounter at the time of our death and, more importantly, we will begin, already here and now, to enjoy more fully God’s empathic embrace.

There are three kinds of performers: The first, while singing a song or doing a dance, are making love to themselves. The second, while performing, are making love to the audience. The third, while on stage, are making love to the song, to the dance, to the drama itself.

Of course it’s not difficult to discern who the better performer is. The one making love to the song, of course, best honors the song and draws energy from some deeper place.  And he or she does this by entering into and channeling the energy of the song rather than by entering into and channeling their own energy or the energy of the audience.  What a good artist does, whether that be a singer, a writer, a painter, a dancer, a craftsperson, a carpenter, or a gardener is tap into the deep energies at the heart of things and draw on them to create something that is of God, namely, something that is one, true, good, and beautiful. In the end, and this is true of all good art and all good performance, creativity is not about the person doing the creation. It’s about oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty.

This holds true for all creativity and art, and it holds true too for all good teaching, catechesis, preaching, and evangelization. At the end of the day, it has to be about truth, goodness, beauty, and God, not about oneself or one’s audience.

This is important for many reasons. Not least among those reasons is the fact that many of us hesitate to express our creativity for fear that we will be too-amateur and too-unskilled to measure up. And so we don’t write poetry, write music, write novels, paint pictures, do sculpture, take up dancing, do carpentry, raise flowers, or do gardening because we fear that what we will produce will be too unprofessional to stand out in any way or to measure up in a way that it can be published or exhibited publicly so as to receive recognition and honor. And so, mostly, we mute and hide our creative talents because we cannot do what the great ones do. We punish ourselves by thinking this way:  If no one will publish it, no sense writing it. If nobody will buy it, no sense painting it. If nobody will admire it, no sense doing it.

But that’s the wrong idea of creativity. We are meant to create things, not because we might get them published and receive honor and money for them.  We are meant to create things because creativity, of all kinds, has us enter into the deep center of energy at the heart of things. In creativity we join ourselves to God’s energy and help channel God’s transcendental qualities: oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty. Ultimately, it isn’t important that what we do gets publicly recognized, gets published, or earns us a monetary reward. Creativity is its own reward. When you act like God, you get to feel like God – or, at least, you get to feel some wonderful divine energy.

Moreover, the energy we feel in creativity, no matter how amateur and private the effort, helps still the fires of envy and hostility inside of us. For example, Michael Ondaatje, the author of The English Patient, in a recent novel, Anil’s Ghost, puts it this way: He describes an artist, Ananda, who has just refurbished a statue. Finishing his work, Ananda looks with a certain pride and satisfaction on what he has just done and, though a non-believer, fills with a godly energy: “As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons.” Envy and hostility have to do with frustrated creativity. If we aren’t creating something, we’re hurting something. If we aren’t creative, we soon become bitter. So how do we become creative?

The poet, William Stafford, sharing something he himself did on a daily basis, used to give his students this challenge: Get up every morning and, before you do anything else, write a poem. More often than not, the students would protest: How can you do that? A person can’t always be creative? Stafford’s answer: Lower your standards!

He’s right! We shouldn’t muzzle our creative energies because we don’t feel particularly inspired, or because on one will ever take our efforts seriously, or because we cannot get anyone to publish our work, or because what we produce seems amateur and second-rate in comparison to what professionals do. We don’t write, make music, paint, dance, make crafts, do carpentry, or garden to have our efforts published and critically admired. We do it for our souls, to enter a divine dance, to connect ourselves to the heart of things.

Sometimes we cannot save the world, but we can save our own sanity and help bring God into the world by nurturing our own souls.

Sometimes while presiding at the Eucharist or preaching, I scan the faces in the front pews. What do they reveal? A few are eager, attentive, focused on what’s happening, but a goodly number of faces, particularly among the young, speak of boredom, of dram duty, and of a resignation that says: I have to be in the church just now, though I wish I was elsewhere. These reactions are, of course, understandable. We’re human after all, flesh and blood, and when we try to focus on the world of spirit or on what relativizes flesh and blood, mortality and self-sacrifice, we can expect that most times the reality of this life will trump the promise of other world.

Sometimes, gazing at those faces staring back at me in church, I’m reminded of a scene that Virginia Woolf describes in her novel, The Waves.  The scene is a chapel in a boarding school in England where one of the churchwardens is giving the students a spiritual admonition during a worship service. This particular churchwarden isn’t much respected by the students, but that’s not the deepest reason why one student, Neville, is put off by his words, and by what’s happening in general in that worship service. Something inside him is in resistance, not just against the words of this particular churchwarden, whom he disrespects, but against the very world of which this churchwarden is speaking. In essence, young Neville’s blood is too warm at that moment to find palatable any words that speak of contingency, mortality, abnegation, the cross, silence, or of the other world; instead his youthful blood is silently pressuring for the opposite, health, youth, sex, companionship, status, fame, and pleasure.

And so he seeks a distraction. He doesn’t want to see the churchwarden’s face, doesn’t want to hear his words, doesn’t want to hear about God, doesn’t want to hear about afterlife, doesn’t want to be reminded of human mortality, and doesn’t want to hear of sacrifice. Like a drug addict, he needs a fix and, in his case, that means fixating on something powerful enough to be religious, powerful enough to match the other world’s offer of eternal life, something worthy of the admiration that he somewhere knows he needs to give to somebody.  And he knows exactly where to look.  He fixes his gaze and his admiration on the one person in that chapel, a young man named Percival, who, to his youthful mind, is a true incarnation of life and a god worthy of being worshipped.  Here’s how Woolf describes it:

“The brute menaces my liberty, said Neville, when he prays. Unwarmed by imagination, his words fall cold on my head like paving stones, while the gilt cross heaves on his waistcoat. The words of authority are corrupted by those who speak them. I gibe and mock at this sad religion, at these tremulous, grief-stricken figures advancing, cadaverous and wounded.  …  Now I will lean sideways as if to scratch my thigh. So I will see Percival. There he sits, upright among the smaller fry. He breathes through his straight nose rather heavily. His blue and oddly inexpressive eyes are fixed with pagan indifference upon the pillar opposite. He would make an admirable churchwarden. He should have a birch and beat little boys for misdemeanors. He is allied with the Latin phrases on the memorial brasses. He sees nothing; he hears nothing. He is remote from us all in a pagan universe. But look how he flicks his hand to the back of his neck. For such gestures one falls hopelessly in love for a lifetime.”

I cite this description with more than a little sympathy because I too was once that young boy, Neville, sitting in various religious settings with my heart and mind in resistance, quiet outwardly, squirming inwardly, because I did not want to hear or acknowledge anything that didn’t, to my mind, honor the reality I felt so undeniably inside my own blood. I didn’t want to be reminded that my health was fragile, that my youth was passing, that this life wasn’t central, and that we weren’t supposed to be thinking so much about sex.  I didn’t want to hear about mortality, that we will all die sometime; I didn’t want to hear about the cross, that it’s only by dying that we come to life; and I didn’t want to be asked to focus attention on the other world, I wanted this world. I accepted that the church was important, but, for me, the sports arena was more real and more alluring. And, like young Neville, I too had my Percivals, certain peers, certain sports idols, and certain movie stars whose enviable bodies and perfect gestures were the life and immortality I, in fact, yearned for and whose lives didn’t seem to have the limits of my own.

But, I think, God likes this kind of youthful resistance, and built it into us. Why?  Because the stronger the resistance, the richer the final harmony.

External appearances can easily fool us, and often do. That’s true in every area of human life, and religion is no exception.

Some years ago, I lived in a seminary for nearly two years with a young seminarian who, by all outward appearances, appeared to be the ideal candidate for priesthood and ministry. Intelligent, conscientious, prayerful, strongly committed to his studies, and with a deep concern for the poor, he seemed above the more mundane and secular concerns of his peers. He wasn’t interested in drinking beer, arguing football, gossiping, making small talk, or wasting time with the other seminarians. While these other things were going on, he was normally found in either the chapel, the library, or at this desk, busy about more serious things. Moreover, he was always courteous and polite to a fault, no harsh words, bitter slang, or salacious jokes issued from his mouth.  He did all the right things.

But none of us living with him confused him with a saint. He was a sincere young man but not a particularly happy one. Why not?  Because, while externally he was doing everything right, what radiated from his person was not life but depression. His entry into a room had the effect of draining some energy from the room. He was doing everything right, but his energy wasn’t right. The other seminarians, for all their mundane interests, were perceptive and good-hearted enough to recognize that he needed help and would play the Good Samaritan, taking turns sitting beside him at table, hoping to cheer him up a little. The seminary rector too recognized a problem and sent him to a psychologist who told the young man that he was on the edges of a clinical depression and that he would be well-advised to leave the seminary, at least for a while. The young man did leave seminary, eventually regained his health, and is today a man who brings a robust energy into a room.

This is not an uncommon example. One of the struggles we perennially face with religious discernment is that it’s easy to mistake depression for sanctity, sentimentality for piety, rigidity for orthodoxy, narrow sectarianism for loyalty, repressed sexuality for wholeness, and denial of one’s complexity for stability. Depression can look like sanctity because the person within its grip will appear to be free from the normal urges that come from our more-earthy passions. Sentimentality invariably gravitates towards piety and dresses itself as devotion. Rigidity invariably cloaks itself as an overzealous concern for truth and orthodoxy, just as narrow sectarianism forever presents itself as fierce loyalty, and repressed sexuality and denial of one’s complexity, especially one’s sexual complexity, take on the guise of wholeness and stability. Depression, sentimentality, fearfulness, rigidity, sectarianism, repression, and denial like to hide behind nobler things.

I say this sympathetically. None of us are free from these struggles. But, with that being confessed, we shouldn’t be fooled by false sanctity. Depression, sentimentality, fearfulness, narrowness, rigidity, and repression drain the energy from a room.  Real sanctity, piety, orthodoxy, loyalty, wholeness, and stability bring energy into a room and don’t make you swallow hard and feel guilty because your own blood is filled with a more robust energy. The presence of real sanctity sets you free and gives you permission to feel good about your humanity, no matter how red your blood. Real sanctity attracts and radiates life; it doesn’t unconsciously beg you to play the Good Samaritan to cheer it up.

We see this, for example, in Mother Teresa. As we now know from her diaries, she spent the last sixty years of her life in a deep, painful dark night of the soul. During the last sixty years of her life she was struggling interiorly for consolation, yet everything about her radiated the opposite. She filled a room with energy. She lit up a room like a powerful light bulb. She wasn’t just doing all the right things; she was radiating a life-giving energy.

And that is how, in the end, we need to discern genuine sanctity, genuine piety, genuine orthodoxy, genuine loyalty, and genuine wholeness from their false guises. Genuine sanctity brings energy into a room, depression drains it from a room; genuine piety, like a beautiful icon, attracts you, sentimentality makes you uncomfortable, wanting to shield your eyes; genuine orthodoxy makes you want to embrace the whole world, rigidity makes you fearful and petty; genuine loyalty has you standing up for your loved ones, narrow sectarianism makes you a bigot; genuine wholeness has already faced the dark chaos of your human and sexual complexity, repression and denial make you huddle in fear before those dark corners.

There’s a double challenge in this: First, as this pertains to our own lives, we must be more honest and courageous in facing our own chaos and recognize our perpetual propensity to disguise our weaknesses as virtues. Second, we need, as the poet, William Stafford, puts it, to make sure that we are not following the wrong star home.

In his deeply insightful book, Violence Unveiled, Gil Bailie takes us through a remarkable section of the diaries of Captain James Cook, the famed British scientist and explorer. Visiting the Island of Tahiti in 1777, Cook was taken one day by a local tribal Chief to witness a ritual where a man was sacrificed as an offering to the god, Eatooa. The man was being sacrificed in hope that this particular god would give the tribe some assistance in an upcoming war. Cook, though friendly to the local peoples, could not conceal his detestation for what he considered both a barbaric and superstitious act.  In a conversation with the tribal Chief afterwards, Cook told the Chief, through an interpreter, that in England they would hang a man for doing that.

Cook found the idea of killing someone to appease God to be abhorrent. Yet, as the great irony inside this story makes clear, we have never stopped killing people in God’s name, we have only changed the nomenclature. They called it human sacrifice; we call it capital punishment. In either case, someone dies because we feel that God needs and wants this death for some divine reason.

All peoples, right up to this day, have always done violence in God’s name, believing that the violence is not only justified but is in fact necessitated by God. God, it is argued, needs us to do this violence in his name.  For this reason, ancient cultures often offered human sacrifice. During the medieval ages, as a Christian church, we had the Inquisition believing that God wanted us to kill people who were in doctrinal error. Today we see a new form of this in a number of extremist Islamic groups who believe that God wants infidels of all kinds put to death for the sake of religious purity.

We have forever justified killing and other forms of violence in God’s name, often pointing to texts in scripture, which seemingly, show God as ordering violence in his name. But, in this, we have been wrong. Despite a number of texts which, on the surface, seem to indicate that God is ordering violence (but which are really archetypal and anthropomorphic in nature and do not justify that interpretation) we see, if we read the bible from beginning to end, a progressive revelation (or at least a progressive realization on our part) of the non-violence of God, a revelation that ends in Jesus who reveals a God of radical non-violence. Our faulty idea of the God of the Old Testament who seemingly orders the extermination of whole peoples is indeed primitive and superstitious when placed beside the concept of the Father of Jesus who sends his son into the world as a helpless infant and then lets him die helpless before a mocking crowd. The God whom Jesus reveals is devoid of all violence and asks that we no longer do violence in God’s name.

To offer just one example: In John’s Gospel (8, 2-11), we see the story of the woman who has been caught in adultery. As John tells the story: A crowd of pious persons bring her to Jesus and tell him that they have caught her in the very act of committing adultery and that Moses (their primary interpreter of God’s will) has ordered that, for this offense, she needs to be put to death. Jesus, for his part, says nothing, instead he bends down and begins to write on the ground with his finger. Then, looking up, he tells them: “Let the person among you without sin cast the first stone!” Then he bends down and writes for a second time with his finger. Unbelievably they get the message and lay down their stones and go away.

What has happened here? The key for interpretation is Jesus’ gesture of writing on the ground with his finger. Who writes with his finger? Who writes twice? God does. And what God writes with his finger and writes twice are the Ten Commandments, and he had to write them twice because Moses “broke” them the first time. Coming down the mountain, carrying the tablets of the commandments, Moses caught the people in the very act of committing idolatry and he, gripped in a fever of religious and moral fervor, broke the tables of stone on the golden calf and on peoples’ heads. Moses was the first person to break the commandments and he broke them physically, thinking violence needed to be done for God’s cause.  Then, having broken them, he needed to go up the mountain a second time and have them rewritten by God; but before rewriting them, God gave Moses a stern message: Don’t stone people with the Commandments! Don’t do violence in my name!  The people who wanted to stone the woman caught in adultery understood Jesus’ gesture. Their divine interpreter, Moses, had it wrong.

Too often, though, we are still, in a variety of forms, stoning people with the Commandments, falsely believing that God wants this violence.

De gustibus non est disputandum. That’s a famous line from St. Augustine wherein he suggests that taste is subjective and that what one person fancies might not be to another person’s liking.  Under that canopy I would like to recommend the following books to you. Among the books that I read in 2013, these ten stayed with me in ways that the others didn’t. So, with no promises that your tastes will echo mine, here goes …

Among the different novels that I read, I recommend:

Alice Munro’s, Dear Life – Stories: These stories won’t give you easy moral comfort, but will stretch you. They’re moral in that they name things as they are. Munro might have entitled these stories – It is what it is! Since publishing this novel, she has won the Nobel Prize for Literature, no surprise to anyone in Canada.

Barbara Kingsolver’s, Flight Behavior: This is a novel about global warming which won’t be everyone’s cup of tea, though everyone will learn from it. More important even than her moral message is the flashlight she shines into ordinary life. Told from the viewpoint of a young mother, trapped in poverty and frustrated by her lack of education and her lack of choices, Kingsolver brilliantly lays bare a human heart, with both its temptations and its virtues.

Toni Morrison’s, Home: Morrison isn’t easy reading, and her story line isn’t always the easiest to follow, but her writing is art, the best, and her language conveys a color and feeling that has few equals among novelists. She didn’t win the Nobel Prize for literature undeservedly.

Within the genre of biography and history, these books stood out:

Roger Lipsey’s, Hammarskjold, A Life: Lipsey, using mountains of material from Dag Hammarskjold’s journals and letters, reveals that Hammarskjold was all that was hinted at in Markings, and more. Hammarskjold, both as a public figure and in his private life, tried to mirror the greatness of life. Nearly 800 pages long, it’s worth the effort, the story of a great soul.

Brenna Moore’s, Sacred Dread, Raissa Maritain, the Allure of Suffering and the French Catholic Revival (1905-1944): Not an easy read, but anyone with an interest in the world of Maritains, Leon Bloy, Charles Peguy, and the French Catholic Revival at the beginning of the last century will be given a deeper insight into that world.

Kay Cronin’s, Cross in the Wilderness: An old book, published in 1960, and now available only in libraries, Cronin traces the history of the Oblate missionaries coming to Oregon and British Columbia and opening churches there. I was truly inspired by the selflessness and courage of these men and what they accomplished. French intellectuals, many of them, they were sent into the wilderness with little preparation and survived there on ideals and faith, and flat-out toughness. Food, shelter, and doctors often weren’t available. Reading their story made me, more than ever, proud to be a member of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. 

Mary Gordon’s, The Shadow Man, A Daughter’s Search of Her Father: We only understand ourselves when we understand our parents and how their virtues and weaknesses helped shape our own souls. Mary Gordon, better than most, has been able to do this. Many of us are familiar with her brilliant book on her mother, Circling my Mother. Here she does the same thing with her father. How she understands her father will help us to understand our own.

In the area of spirituality, I much recommend:

Belden C. Lane’s, The Solace of Fierce Landscapes, Desert and Mountain Spirituality: Very much in the genre of Bill Plotkins’, Soulcraft, Lane gives us insights into the important role that geography can play in shaping our souls, and hints of how we might more deliberately expose ourselves to that. For Lane, spirituality isn’t something that should be done only in air-conditioned prayer centers. Rather, nature, the desert, the wind, and the sun need also to wash over our souls and bodies.

Jim Wallis’, Rediscovering Values – On Wall Street, Main Street, and Your Street, A Moral Compass for the New Economy:  This book should come with a warning: It will upset you if you’re a fiscal conservative, but, if you are, you might want to give yourself this challenge. Wallis is as close to a “Dorothy Day” as our generation has.

Donald H. Dunson’s and James A. Dunson’s, Citizen of the World, Suffering and Solidarity in the 21st Century: Socrates once said that he was a citizen of the world first and only, after that, a citizen of Athens. How do we widen our hearts and our attitudes so as to live out a citizenship that’s wider than our own ethnicity, nationality, history, geography, self-interest, and natural affinity? Donald and James Dunson try to answer that, and they do it with remarkable nuance. This book is a genuine moral compass, what prophecy should be. Good prophets don’t spray you with guilt; they make you want to be a better person.

Again, de gustibus non est disputandum.