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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We need to give away some of our own possessions in order to be healthy. Wealth that is hoarded always corrupts those who possess it. Any gift that is not shared turns sour. If we are not generous with our gifts we will be bitterly envied and will eventually turn bitter and envious ourselves.

These are all axioms with the same warning, we can only be healthy if we are giving away some of our riches to others. Among other things, this should remind us that we need to give to the poor, not simply because they need it, though they do, but because unless we give to the poor we cannot be healthy ourselves. When we give to the poor both charity and justice are served, but some healthy self-interest is served as well, namely, we cannot be healthy or happy unless we share our riches, of every kind, with the poor. That truth is written inside human experience and inside every authentic ethical and faith tradition.

For example: We know from experience that when we give of ourselves to others we experience a certain joy in our lives, just as when we selfishly hoard or protect what is ours we grow anxious and paranoid. Native American cultures have forever enshrined this in their concept of Potlatch, namely, their belief that, while everyone has a right to private property, there are real limits to how much someone may own. Once our wealth reaches a certain point we need to begin to give some of it away – not because others need it but because our own health and happiness will begin to deteriorate if we hoard all of those possessions for ourselves.

Jewish spirituality shares the same idea: Again and again in the Jewish scriptures, we see that when a religious leader or prophet tells the Jewish community that they are the chosen people, a nation specially blessed, that affirmation comes with the admonition that this blessing is not for them alone, but that, through them, all the nations of the earth might be blessed. In Jewish spirituality, blessing is always intended to flow through the person receiving it so as to enrich others.  Hindu, Buddhist, and Islamic spiritualities, each in their own way, also affirms this, namely that it is only in giving away some of our gifts that we ourselves can remain healthy.

Jesus and the Gospels, of course, teach this repeatedly and without compromise: For instance, the Gospel of Luke, a Gospel within which Jesus warns us that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, nevertheless praises the rich who are generous, condemning only the rich who are stingy. For Luke, generosity is the key to health and heaven. In the Gospel of Matthew, when Jesus reveals what will be great test for the final judgment, his single set of criteria have entirely to do with how we gave to the poor: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Cloth the naked? Finally, even more strongly, in the story of the widow who gives her last two pennies away, Jesus challenges us to not only give of our surplus to the poor, but to also give away some of what we need to live on.  The Gospels, and the rest of the Christian scriptures, strongly challenge us to give to the poor – not because they need our charity, though they do, but because our giving to them is the only way we can stay healthy.

We see the same message, consistent and repeated, in the social doctrine of the Catholic Church.

From Pope Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 to Pope Francis’ recent, Evangelii Gaudium, we hear the same refrain: While we have a moral right to own private property, that right is not absolute and is mitigated by a number of things, namely, we only have a right to surplus when everyone else has the necessities for life. Hence, we must always be looking towards the poor in terms of dealing with our surplus. Moreover, Catholic social doctrine tells us too that the earth was given by God for everyone and that truth too limits how we define what is really ours as a possession. Properly speaking, we are stewards of our possessions rather than owners of them. Implicit in all of this, of course, is the implication that we can be moral and healthy only when we view private ownership in a larger picture that includes the poor.

We need, always, to be giving some of our possessions away in order to be healthy. The poor do need us, but we also need them. They are, as Jesus puts it so clearly when he tells us we will be judged by how we gave to the poor, our passports to heaven. And they are also our passports to health. Our health depends upon sharing our riches.

After Mother Teresa died, her diaries revealed something that shocked many people, namely, during the last sixty years of her life, from age 27 until she died at age 87, she struggled to imagine that God existed and had no affective experience of either the person or the existence of God. Yet, during all those years, everything in her life incarnated and radiated an exceptional, one-in-a-hundred-million, selflessness, altruism, and faith commitment.

On the surface this might seem incongruous, even contradictory; but those two things, her feeling that God was absent and her exceptional selflessness, are not unconnected. The opposite. The latter depends precisely upon the former; her inability to feel God affectively, the dryness of her faith experience, the dark night that enveloped her, were precisely the reason her faith was so pure and her actions were so selfless. In short, with all affective feelings gone and with her imagination helpless to create images of God and a concept of God’s existence, she was no longer able to manipulate her experience of God and reshape it to fit her own needs. She had to receive God on God’s own terms, not on her terms. The very dryness of her faith was what made it so pure. The seeming absence of God also helped assure the absence of her own ego.

To more fully appreciate what is being said here it can be helpful to contrast Mother Teresa, both in the barrenness of her experience of faith and the effect this had on her life, with countless popular religious figures, past and present, who, sadly, too frequently radiate the exact opposite. They boost of a robust, affective faith, declaring again and again how real God is in their lives and how deeply they sense the presence of Jesus. And indeed there is no reason to doubt their sincerity and honesty; a genuine fervor does flow out of them. But, unlike Mother Teresa, both their preaching and their own lives often exhibit far too much ego, narcissism, projection, and manipulation of God and religion for their own benefit. Without being cruel, it is fair to say that we, and indeed the whole world, never much confuse many of our popular religious preachers and writers with Mother Teresa. We see in their religious fervor far too much of themselves and how their religious experience benefit them. The irony is that they, so many popular religious preachers and writers, boast of a much stronger faith than did Mother Teresa, but their experience of God translates far less altruistically into their lives.

Ludwig Feuerbach and Friedrich Nietzsche have written perhaps the most penetrating critique that has yet been written on religion and religious experience. Their theory is that all religious experience is ultimately human projection, that we create God in our own image and likeness, and that we then use that image of God for our own benefit. For them, all religious experience is ultimately self-created for our own benefit. In their view, inside of all religious experience there is always an element of manipulation, rationalization, and dishonesty, although the person having the experience is blind to that fact. He or she is convinced that God is somehow dictating what is happening inside his or her soul, when in fact it is mostly self-interest that is dictating what is happening inside the soul, and that is why we so commonly see that distressing discrepancy between the religious fervor inside so many of us and the self-interest that is ultimately served by that religiosity.

What’s to be said about this? My guess is that Nietzsche and Feuerbach are 95% correct. However they are 5% wrong and that 5% makes all the difference. The evidence suggests that 95% of the time we do manipulate our experience of God to serve our own interests. However God arranges things so that we cannot do this all the time. God corrects our proclivity to create a God who works for our self-interest by sending us, as he did to Mother Teresa, crushing dark nights of the soul, namely, periods of imaginative and affective dryness within which we simply are unable to imagine and affectively feel either God’s existence or God’s love for us. While we continue to somehow “know” God at a deeper level, our imaginations and our emotions run out of gas, completely. And when this happens, we find ourselves powerless to manipulate our experience of God in any way – and certainly not to work it for our own benefit. God can then flow into us purely, with our egos, narcissism, and selfishness now unable to color the experience.

Leonard Cohen coined this now-famous line: There is a crack in everything, but that’s how the light gets in! Since we cannot resist habitually manipulating our faith and religious experience to make it work for our own benefit, God eventually puts a stop to it. As he did with Mother Teresa, God sends us crushing dark nights that purify us, in spite of ourselves.

The church has always struggled with sex, but so have everyone else. There aren’t any cultures, religious or secular, pre-modern or modern, post-modern or post-religious, that exhibit a truly healthy sexual ethos. Every church and every culture struggles with integrating sexual energy, if not in its creed about sex, at least in the living out of that creed. Secular culture looks at the church and accuses it of being uptight and anti-erotic. Partly this true, but the church might well protest that much of its sexual reticence is rooted in the fact that it is one of the few voices still remaining who are challenging anyone towards sexual responsibility. As well, the church might also challenge any culture that claims to have found the key to healthy sexuality to step forward and show the evidence. No culture will take up that claim. Everyone is struggling.

Part of that struggle is the seeming innate incompatibility between what Charles Taylor calls “sexual fulfillment and piety”, between “squaring our highest aspirations with an integral respect for the full range of human fulfillments.”

Commenting on this in his book, A Secular Age, Taylor suggests that there is a real tension in trying to combine sexual fulfillment with piety and that this reflects a more general tension between human flourishing in general and dedication to God. He adds: “That this tension should be particularly evident in the sexual domain is readily understandable. Intense and profound sexual fulfillment focuses us powerfully on the exchange within the couple; it strongly attaches us possessively to what is privately shared.  … It is not for nothing that the early monks and hermits saw sexual renunciation as opening the way to the wider love of God. … Now that there is a tension between fulfillment and piety should not surprise us in a world distorted by sin … but we have to avoid turning this into a constitutive incompatibility.”

How can we avoid doing that? How can we avoid somehow pitting sexual fulfillment against holiness? How can we be robustly sexual and fully spiritual at one and the same time?

In a soon-to-be-released book, The Road is How, A Prairie Pilgrimage through Nature, Desire and Soul, Trevor Herriot, suggests that human fulfillment and dedication to God, sex and holiness, can be brought together in a way that properly respects both of them. How? Without using the word that is at once so-honored and so-maligned, he presents us with an image of what chastity means at its true root. Much like Annie Dillard in her book, Holy the Firm, Herriot draws a certain concept of chastity out of the rhythms of nature and then presents those rhythms as the paradigm of how we should be relating to nature and to each other. And, for Herriot, those rhythms cast a particularly enlightening beam on how we should be relating sexually. His words:

“These days, we watch truckloads of grain pass by and sense that something in us and in the earth is harmed when food is grown and consumed with little intimacy, care, and respect. The local and slow food movements are showing us that the way we grow, distribute, prepare, and eat food is important for the health of our body-to-earth exchanges. The next step may be to realize that the energy that brings pollen to ovary and grows the grain, once it enters our bodies, also needs to be husbanded. The way we respond to our desire to merge, connect, and be fruitful – stirrings felt so deeply, but often so shallowly expressed – determines the quality of our body-to-body exchanges.  …

In a world bathed in industrial and impersonal sex, where real connection and tenderness are rare, will we sense also that something in us and in the earth is being harmed from the same absence of intimacy, care, and respect? Will we learn that any given expression of our erotic energies either connects us to or divides us from the world around us and our souls?  We are discovering that we must steward the energies captured by nature in the hydrocarbons or in living plants and animals, and thereby improve the ways we receive the fruits of the earth, but we struggle to see the primary responsibility we bear for the small but cumulatively significant explosions of energy we access and transmit as we respond to our own longings to connect, merge, and be fruitful. Learning how to steward the way we bear fruit ourselves as spiritual/sexual beings with a full set of animal desires and angelic ambitions may be more important to the human journey than we fully understand.”

Chastity, as imagined by Charles Taylor, Annie Dillard, and Trevor Herriot, has always been the one thing that properly protects sex, the white dress adorning the bride, the means of squaring our highest aspirations with an integral respect for the full range of human fulfillments, and, not least, the trusted guideline for how we can access and transmit our sexual energy with intimacy, care, and respect.

No one, be that an individual or an institution, controls access to God. Jesus makes this abundantly clear.

We see this, for example, in the story of Jesus cleansing the temple by overturning the money tables. This incident is often used to justify anger and violence in God’s name. Invariably, when someone affirms that God is non-violent, he or she is met with the reaction: “What about Jesus driving the money changers out of the temple?” “What about Jesus losing his temper and displaying anger?”

Whatever the legitimacy of those questions, the story of Jesus cleansing the temple has a deeper intent. This is particularly clear in John’s Gospel where this incident is set within a context wherein Jesus is replacing a series of former religious customs with a new Christian way of doing things. For example, immediately prior to this incident of cleansing the temple, Jesus, at the Wedding Feast of Cana, replaces a former religious custom (upon entering a Jewish house you purified yourself with a number of ritual ablutions before you could sit at the table) with the new Christian way of purifying yourself for a seat at the heavenly table (for Christians, the wine of Christian community, the wine of the Eucharist, now cleanses you so that you can sit at the table).

The cleansing of the temple needs to be understood in this context: Jesus is replacing a former religious practice with the Christian way of doing things, and he is revealing something very important about God as he does this. To state it metaphorically: Jesus is replacing a former religious coinage with a new religious coinage. Here are both the metaphor and the lesson:

We’re all familiar with the incident: Jesus comes into the temple area where the money changers have set up their tables, overturns their tables, and drives out the money-changers with the words: “Take all of this out of here and stop using my Father’s house as a market.”

But this has to be carefully understood. On the surface, the text appears brutally clear, but beneath its surface it is subtly symbolic (even if rather brutal in its meaning). How do we begin to unpack its meaning?

It’s important to recognize that those moneychangers performed a needed function. People came to Jerusalem from many different countries to worship at the temple. But they carried the coins of their own countries and, upon arriving at the temple, had to exchange their own currency for Jewish currency so as to be able to buy the animals (doves, sheep, cattle) they needed to offer sacrifice. The moneychangers fulfilled that function, like banking kiosks do today when you step off an airplane in a foreign country and you need to exchange some of your coinage for the coinage of that country.

Now, of course, some of these money changers were less than honest, but that wasn’t the real reason why Jesus reacted so strongly. Nor was he unduly scandalized because commerce was happening in a holy place. When Jesus says, “take all of this out of here and stop using my Father’s house as a market”, he is teaching something beyond the need to be honest and beyond the need to not be buying and selling on church property.  More deeply, not turning the Father’s house into a market might be translated as: “You don’t need to exchange your own currency for any other currency when it comes to worshipping God. You can worship God in your own currency, with your own coinage. Nobody, no individual, no temple, no church, no institution, ultimately sits between you and God and can say: ‘You need to go through us’!”

That’s a strong teaching that doesn’t sit well with many of us. It immediately posits the question: “What about the church? Isn’t it necessary for salvation?” That question is even more poignant today in an age wherein many sincere people already take for granted that they have no need of the church: “I’m spiritual, but not religious.”

Granted there’s a danger in affirming and emphasizing this teaching of Jesus, but, and this is the point, this teaching was not directed towards those in Jesus’ time who said: “I am spiritual, but not religious.” Rather it was addressed to religious individuals and at a religious institution that believed that the way to God had to go through a very particular channel (over which they had control).  All religious coinage had to be transferred into their particular coinage, since in their belief, they controlled access to God.  Jesus tries to cleanse us of any attitude or practice that would enshrine that belief.

This does not deny either the legitimacy or necessity of the church nor of those who do ministry in its name. God does work through the church and its ministers. But this does deny all legitimacy to the claim that the church and those who minister in its name control access to God.

No one controls access to God, and if God ever loses his temper it’s because sometimes we believe we do.

In our normal, daily lives we are invariably so self-preoccupied that we find it difficult to be able to accord others the same reality and value we give to ourselves. In brief, it’s difficult for us to live in true empathy because we are forever consumed with our own heartaches and headaches. From two famous intellectuals, one speaking philosophically and the other psychologically, we get that same insight.

Rene Descartes, as we know, famously suggests that all true thinking must begin with our own reality: I think, therefore I am.  His logic works this way: What’s the only thing you can know that’s real, beyond all doubt? His answer: Your own mind. You know that your own mind is real because you are inside of it. You are real, you can be sure that, but you might be imagining or dreaming everything else. Sigmund Freud, centuries later, coming from another angle, reaches basically the same conclusion. For Freud, we are forever so excessively self-preoccupied that we are unable to see other peoples’ lives as being just as real as ours.

If that’s true, and certainly there’s truth there, then it’s not surprising that real empathy and genuine generativity are a struggle for us since both are predicated precisely on being able to accord to other peoples’ heartaches and headaches the same reality and importance that we give to our own. But it’s hard to do this: It’s hard to give to others without some level of self-interest being involved. It’s hard to have wholly pure motives in serving others. It’s hard to know other people’s heartaches in the same way as we know our own. It’s hard to be purely altruistic.  And … especially it’s hard to overcome this!

Why? Don’t sympathy and empathy come naturally to us?  Sympathy and empathy do come naturally to us, but, like everything else, they come mixed with a lot of other things. What things?

First, sympathy and empathy come mixed with our more-primal instincts for survival. We aren’t born generous and empathic, we’re born needy, hungry, and instinctually driven for survival. As newborns, we are so consumed with our own survival that we have to grow into an awareness of the reality of others. Nature brings us into this world this way in order to ensure that we do what it takes to survive and this greatly mitigates our empathy. Moreover, beyond how nature has built us, our early experiences soon do further damage to our empathic capacities. Simply put, none of us gets loved purely and wholly and, long before we reach our adulthood, all of us have lost our wholeness. As adults, we are, all of us, to some degree, wounded, fearful, and given over to habits of self-preservation which weaken our empathy.

It works this way: We come into this world with great adaptability. As babies, every instinct inside us works towards life and because of this, unconsciously, we do whatever it takes to stay alive and we adapt to whatever (food, shelter, clothing, language, environment) we need to adapt to in order to stay alive. The adaptations we make as young children help ensure our survival but then leave us wounded in ways that make genuine empathy difficult later in life.

What can we do about all of this? There aren’t any easy answers, psychologically or spiritually, and to suggest that there are isn’t helpful. We are dealing with deeply engrained instincts that don’t sway just because they are intellectually understood and with wounds that need to be healed through the heart.  At the end of the day, what would cure us and open our hearts to empathy and real generativity is the experience of genuine, non-exploitive love. But we can’t make others love us in this way and we struggle mightily to feel God’s love for us when others don’t love us this in way. Moreover we are caught-up in vicious circle: the very wounds that need to be healed through love are the very things that are making it difficult for others to love us. Love is the answer.  It would make us whole, but we cannot will this love upon ourselves. So what can we do?

First, we can admit the problem, admit our lack of wholeness, admit our wounds, admit our excessive self-preoccupation, and admit our lack of empathy. That’s a start. Second, we can humbly seek help from others, from family, friends, recovery groups, therapists. An honest, request for help, usually brings some help. Coupled with this, we can expose ourselves more regularly to the poor (of every kind) and their needs and this will help baptize us into empathy and generativity. Few things have the power to draw us out beyond our own wounds and help us to be self-forgetful as standing before the needy. Finally, we need to seek God’s help by throwing ourselves, in prayer, upon God’s wholeness, asking God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, see others as being as real as we are.

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

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it’s no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal is rather that we have become comfortable, even smug, about not getting along with each other. The scandal is that we no longer hunger for wholeness and that we no longer miss each other inside our separate churches. In virtually all of our churches today there is too little anxiety about those who are not worshipping with us, whether these separated brothers and sisters belong to other denominations or whether they belong to our own. For instance, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue that is of particular concern to them. Sad to say, this holds true for most Christians in all denominations.

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

A woman had ten coins and lost one. She became extremely anxious and agitated and began to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, and sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she found the coin. She was delirious with joy, called together her neighbors and threw a party whose cost far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15, 8-9)

Why such anxiety and such joy over the loss and the finding of a coin whose value was that of a dime? The answer lies in the symbolism: In her culture, nine was not a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety on losing the coin and her joy in finding it had little to do with the value of the coin but with the value of wholeness; an important wholeness in her life had been fractured, a precious set of things was no longer complete. Hence the parable might recast this way:

A woman had ten children. With nine of them, she had a good relationship, but one of her daughters was alienated. Her nine other children came regularly to the family table, but this daughter did not. The woman could not rest in that situation; she needed her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tried every means to reconcile with her daughter and, one day, miracle of miracles, it worked. Her daughter came back to the family. Her family was whole again, everyone was back at table. The woman was overjoyed, withdrew her modest savings from the bank, and threw a lavish party to celebrate that wholeness.

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

Thus we are meant to ask ourselves uncomfortable questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who feels uncomfortable worshipping with us? Are we comfortable that so many people can no longer join us in our church?

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

But this lack of a healthy solicitude for wholeness compromises both our maturity and our following of Jesus. We are mature loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we remain in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold” and when, like the woman who lost one of her coins and would not sleep until every corner of the house was turned upside down in a frantic search for what was lost, we too set out solicitously in search of that lost wholeness.