In his autobiography, Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis recounts a conversation he once had with an old monk.  Kazantzakis, a young man at the time, was visiting a monastery and was very taken by a famed ascetic, Father Makarios, who lived there. But a series of visits with the old monk left him with some ambivalent feelings as well.  The monk’s austere lifestyle stirred a certain religious romanticism in Kazantzakis, but it repelled him too; he wanted the romanticism, but in a more-palatable way. Here’s their conversation as Kazantzakis records it:

“Yours is a hard life, Father. I too want to be saved. Is there no other way?”

“More agreeable?” asked the ascetic, smiling compassionately.

“More human, Father.”

“One, only one.”

“What is that?”

“Ascent. To climb a series of steps. From the full stomach to hunger, from the slaked throat to thirst, from joy to suffering. God sits at the summit of hunger, thirst, and suffering; the devil sits at the summit of the comfortable life. Choose.”

“I am still young. The world is nice.  I have time to choose.”

Reaching out, the old monk touched my knee and said:

“Wake up, my child. Wake up before death wakes you up.”

I shuttered and said:

“I am still young.”

“Death loves the young,” the old man replied. “The inferno loves the young. Life is like a lighted candle, easily extinguished. Take care – wake up!” 

Wake up! Wake up before death wakes you up. In a less dramatic expression that’s a virtual leitmotif in the Gospels. Jesus is always telling us to wake up, to stay awake, to be vigilant, to be more alert to a deeper reality. What’s meant by that? How are we asleep to depth? How are we to wake up and stay awake?

How are we asleep? All of us know how difficult it is for us to be inside the present moment, to not be asleep to the real riches inside our own lives. The distractions and worries of daily life tend to so consume us that we habitually take for granted what’s most precious to us, our health, the miracle of our senses, the love and friendships that surround us, and the gift of life itself. We go through our daily lives not only with a lack of reflectiveness and lack of gratitude but with a habitual touch of resentment as well, a chronic, grey depression, Robert Moore calls it. We are very much asleep, both to God and to our own lives.

How do we wake up? Today there’s a rich literature that offers us all kinds of advice on how to get into the present moment so as to be awake to the deep riches inside our own lives. While much of this literature is good, little of it is very effective. It invites us to live each day of our lives as if was our last day, but we simply can’t do that. It’s impossible to sustain that kind of intentionality and awareness over a long period of time. An awareness of our mortality does wake us up, as does a stroke, a heart attack, or cancer; but that heightened-awareness is easier to sustain for a short season of our lives than it is for twenty, thirty, forty, or fifty years. Nobody can sustain that kind of awareness all the time. None of us can live seventy or eighty years as if each day was his or her last day. Or can we?

Spiritual wisdom offers a nuanced answer here: We can and we can’t!  On the one hand, the distractions, cares, and pressures of everyday life will invariably have their way with us and we will, in effect, fall asleep to what’s deeper and more important inside of life. But it’s for this reason that every major spiritual tradition has daily rituals designed precisely to wake us from spiritual sleep, akin an alarm clock waking us from physical sleep.

It’s for this reason we need to begin each day with prayer. What happens if we don’t pray on a given morning is not that we incur God’s wrath, but rather that we tend to miss the morning, spending the hours until noon trapped inside a certain dullness of heart. The same can be said about praying before meals. We don’t displease God by not first centering ourselves in gratitude before eating, but we miss out on the richness of what we’re doing. Liturgical prayer and the Eucharist have the same intent, among their other intentions. They’re meant to, regularly, call us out of a certain sleep.

None of us lives each day of our lives as if it was his or her last day. Our heartaches, headaches, distractions, and busyness invariably lull us to sleep. That’s forgivable; it’s what it means to be human. So we should ensure that we have regular spiritual rituals, spiritual alarm clocks, to jolt us back awake  – so that it doesn’t take a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or death to wake us up.

Anyone familiar with the life and writings of Simone Weil will, I am sure, agree that she was a woman of exceptional faith. She was also a woman with an unwavering commitment to the poor. But, and this may seem anomalous, she was also exceptional and unwavering in a certain resistance she had towards the institutional church. During her lifetime she longed for daily Eucharist, even as she resisted baptism and membership in the church. Why?

It wasn’t the church’s faults and failings that bothered her. She was a realist and accepted that every family and institution has its infidelities, flaws, and sin. She had little problem forgiving the church for its shortcomings. Her resistance to full genuflection within the institutional church had its root instead in a particular anxiety she felt before any social institution, that is, she saw how an uncritical patriotism or misguided loyalty often leaves individual members of an institution unable to see the sins and shortcomings within that institution. For instance, fiercely patriotic citizens can be blind to the injustices done by their own countries and deeply pious people can be constrained by their loyalty to the church so as to turn a blind eye on the church’s faults, as was the case with many saints who supported the Crusades and the Inquisition. Blind loyalty to country, church, family, or anything else, Weil believed, becomes a form of idolatry.

She’s right. Blind loyalty can easily become idolatry, despite its sincerity and high motives. It might seem wrong to criticize loyalty, but we can be too loyal, loyal to the point where our loyalty blinds us from seeing the real harm sometimes being done by those to whom we are uncritically giving that loyalty.

We are all familiar with certain axioms which each in their own way, would have loyalty trumping everything else: My country, right or wrong! The church, love it or leave it! A family’s dirty secrets need to remain inside the family; they’re nobody else’s business! But these axioms, with their naïve and uncritical call for loyalty to one’s own, are neither wise nor Christian.  Both human wisdom and Christian discipleship call us to something deeper.

All families, all countries, and all churches have their sins and shortcomings, but we show our love and loyalty when, instead of blinding our eyes to those faults, we instead challenge ourselves and everyone within that circle to look at and correct those sins and shortcomings. We can learn lessons here from Recovery and 12-Step programs. What they have learned through years of experience in dealing with dysfunction of every kind is that the loving thing to do in the face of sickness, inside of any group or relationship, is to confront that pathology. To not confront it is to enable it. Real love and real loyalty do not remain uncritical. They never say: This is my family, my country, or my church – right or wrong! Instead, when things are wrong, they tell us to show love and loyalty not by protecting our own, but by confronting what’s wrong.

That’s in fact the biblical tradition of the prophets, exactly what the prophets did. They loved their people and were fiercely loyal to their own religious tradition, but they were not so blindly loyal so as to be uncritical of the real faults inside that religious community. They were never constrained by false loyalty so as to be blind to the sins within their own religious structures and remain muted in the face of those faults. They never said of their religious tradition: Love or leave it!  Instead, they said: We need to change this – and we need to change it in the name of loyalty and love.

Jesus followed in the same path. He was faithful and loyal to Judaism, but he was not silent in the face of its faults and wrongdoings in his time. In the name of love, he challenged everything that was wrong. He taught, and taught strongly, that blind religious loyalty can be idolatry. He would be last person to teach that loyalty and love mean never criticizing your own. Indeed, he de-literalizes the meaning of family, country, and church and asks us to understand these in a higher way. He asks: Who is my mother and who are my brothers and sisters? And he goes on to say that these are not to be defined by biology, country, or religious denomination. Real family, he says, is made up by something else, namely, by those who hear the word of God and keep it, irrespective of biology, country, or religion. Consequently biology, country, and religion must be criticized and opposed whenever they stand in the way of this deeper union in faith and justice.

Blood may be thicker than water. But, for Jesus, faith and justice are thicker than blood, country, and church. Moreover, for him, genuine love and loyalty manifest themselves in a commitment to challenge things that are wrong, even when that means seeming to be disloyal to one’s own.

Many of us, I suspect, know about the work of the renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard and the dissemination of his insights through the work of his student, Gil Bailie. With gratitude to them, I pass along one of their insights, an invaluable look at how we try to handle resentment in our lives.

When astronauts journey into space, their capsules are equipped with a machine that gets rid of the carbon monoxide they produce as they breathe. If that machine breaks down, they’re in trouble, as was shown in the movie Apollo 13. Traveling inside a space capsule is possible only if there’s a machine constantly getting rid of the carbon monoxide being produced.

That’s also true for our human journey. All groups constantly produce the suffocating gas of resentment and jealousy. Resentment is present inside of virtually every human community and family because, as Girard puts it, we’re “mimetic”, which means, among other things, that we always want what others have. This inevitably creates tension, resentment, jealousy, and conflict. It’s no accident that two of the Ten Commandments have to do with jealousy.

What’s the machine inside human life that tries to rid us of the carbon monoxide of jealousy and resentment? Anthropologists tell us that we try to rid ourselves of tension by scapegoating. How does scapegoating work and how does it get rid of tension?

Consider this example: Imagine going out for lunch with a number of your colleagues or co-workers.  There will be, as is always the case, some personality conflicts and tensions among us. But we can have a harmonious and even fun-filled lunch together. How? By talking about certain people who aren’t there, whom we all dislike, whom we all consider eccentric or difficult, and whom we all judge to be a negative or eccentric presence.  And so we talk about them: how terrible the boss is, how difficult a particular colleague is, how eccentric one of our co-workers is. In doing that, in highlighting how different or negative to us someone else is, we make our own tensions with each other disappear for that moment. That’s the essence of scapegoating. We create community with each other by projecting our tension onto someone else. By exiling that person from our community we create community with each other; but our unity is then based upon what we are against rather than upon what we are for.

All groups, until they reach a certain level of maturity, do this. And we do the same thing to cope with tension in our private lives. It works this way: We get up some morning and, for a myriad of reasons, feel out sorts, weighed down by a mixture of free-floating frustration, anxiety, and anger. So what do we do? We find someone to blame. Invariably we will soon pick someone (in our family, at our place of work, or a politician, or a religious figure) on whom to place that tension. Someone whom we consider difficult, or ignorant, or politically wrong, or morally corrupt, or religiously bad will soon bear the weight of our tension and resentment.

Moreover, not only will we project our tension onto someone, we will invariably “sacralize” the indignation we feel, that is, we will project our tension and anger onto that other not just because he or she is different from ourselves or because we consider him or her difficult, ignorant, or lazy, but especially because we feel ourselves as morally superior to him or her: we’re right and he’s is wrong; we’re good and she’s bad. Thus our resentment towards that person is a holy resentment, necessary for the cause of God, and truth, and goodness. Such are all crucifixions, hangings, and excommunications.

That’s the normal human machine to rid ourselves of resentment inside our communities and inside ourselves. Jesus was crucified precisely because a community did this to him, and did it to him for holy reasons.

But, the ultimate victim of scapegoating, Jesus, invites us to something higher, and he models that for us in the way he died. Jesus took away tension by transforming it rather than by transmitting it. What Jesus does for us is comparable to what a water-purifier does. A water-purifier takes in water containing dirt, toxins, and poisons. It holds the impurities inside of itself and gives back only pure water.  Jesus, as the Lamb of God, took away our sins and purified us in his blood not by some divine magic but, precisely, by absorbing and transforming our sin. Like a water-purifier, he took in hatred, held it, transformed it, and gave back love; he took in jealousy, held it, transformed it, and gave back affirmation; he took in resentment, held it, transformed it, and gave back compassion; and ultimately, he took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. That’s the Christian design for taking tension and resentment out of our lives.

And, as Soren Kierkegaard suggests, we shouldn’t just admire what Jesus did here, we should imitate it.

The universe works in pairs. From the atoms to the human species, generativity is predicated on union with another. Happiness, it would seem, is also predicated on that.

So where does that leave singles and celibates? How can they be normal, generative, and happy?

For many people living single and celibate, life can seem unfair. Everything, it seems, is set up for couples, while they are single. And that isn’t the only problem. A further problem is that, too often, neither our churches nor our society give singles and celibates the symbolic-tools to understand their state in a life-giving way.

Consequently, single persons often feel like they’re looking in at life from the outside, that they’re abnormal, that they’re missing something essential within life. Moreover, unlike married persons and vowed religious, few single persons feel that they have positively chosen their state of life. They feel it rather as an unfortunate conscription. Few single persons feel easeful and accepting of their lot. Instead they regard it as something temporary, something still to be overcome. Rarely does a single person, especially a younger person, see himself or herself growing old and dying single – and happy. Invariably the feeling is: This has to change. I didn’t choose this! I can’t see myself like this for the rest of my life!

There are real dangers in feeling like this. First, there’s the danger of never fully and joyfully picking up one’s life and seeing it as worthwhile, of never positively accepting what one is, of never accepting the spirit that fits the life that one is actually living. As well, there’s the danger of panicking and marrying simply because marriage is seen as a panacea with no real possibility of happiness outside of it.

Partially those fears are well-founded. Being single and celibate does bring with it a real loss. Denial is not a friend here. Pious wishing or platonic spiritualities that deny the power of sexuality don’t placate our emotions or erase the fact that God said: It is not good for the man to be alone. The universe works in pairs and to be single is to be different, more different than we dare admit. Thomas Merton, reflecting on his own celibate state, once put it this way: “The refusal of woman is fault in my chastity. … And all my compensations are a desperate and useless expedient to cover this irreparable loss which I have not fully accepted. … I can learn to accept it in the spirit and in love and it will no longer be ‘irreparable.’ The cross repairs and transforms it. The tragic chastity which suddenly realizes itself to be mere loss, and the fear that death has won – that one is sterile, useless, hateful. I do not say this is my lot, but in my vow I can see this as an ever-present possibility.” Celibacy and the single life bring with them real dangers for immaturity and unhappiness.

But, paradoxically, admitting this truth is the first step in beginning to live positively beyond those dangers. Sexuality is a dimension of our self-awareness. We awake to consciousness and feel ourselves, at every level, as cut off, sexed, lonely monads separated and aching for unity. Celibacy is indeed a fault in our humanity.

However, to be celibate and single doesn’t necessarily mean that one is asexual or sterile. Today the impression is often given that no happiness exists outside of sexual union. That’s superficial and untrue. Sexuality is the drive in us towards connection, community, family, friendship, affection, love, creativity, delight, and generativity. We are happy and whole when these things are in our lives, not on the basis of whether or not we sleep alone. The single celibate life offers its own opportunities for achieving these. God never closes one door without opening countless others. For instance, when our culture recognizes that it’s easier to find a lover than a friend, it recognizes too that human sexuality and generativity are more than biological.

There are other ways of being healthily sexual, of getting pregnant and impregnating, of being mother or father, of sexual enjoying intimacy. Sexuality, love, generativity, family, enjoyment, and delight have multiple modalities.

Early on in my ministry, I once served as a spiritual director to a young man who was discerning between marriage and priesthood. His greatest hesitation in moving towards priesthood was one particular fear: “I’ve always been afraid of being a priest because celibacy will mean dying alone. My father died when I was 15, but he died in my mother’s arms. I’ve always resisted celibacy because I want to die like my father died – in a woman’s arms. But, meditating on Christ’s life one day, it struck me that Jesus died alone, loved, but in nobody’s arms. He was alone, but powerfully linked to everyone in a different way. It struck me that this too could be a good way to die!”

It can be, but only if first, as Merton says, the cross repairs and transforms us.

What are we ultimately, saints or sinners? What’s deepest inside us, goodness or selfishness? Or, are we dualists with two innate principles inside us, one good and one evil, in a perpetual dual with each other?

Certainly, at the level of experience, we feel a conflict. There’s a saint inside us who wants to mirror the greatness of life, even as there is someone else inside us that wants to walk a seedier path. I like the honesty of Henri Nouwen when he describes this conflict in his own life: “I want to be great saint,” he once confessed, “but I don’t want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience.” It’s because of this bi-polar tension inside us that we find it so hard to make clear moral choices. We want the right things, but we also want many of the wrong things. Every choice is a renunciation and so the struggle between saint and sinner inside us often manifests itself precisely in our inability to make hard choices.

But we don’t feel this tension only in our struggle to make clear moral decisions; we feel it daily in our spontaneous reaction to situations that affect us adversely. Simply put, we are forever bouncing back and forth between being petty and being big-hearted, spiteful and forgiving, whenever we are negatively impacted by others.

For instance, we all have had this kind of experience: We are at work and in a good emotional state, thinking peaceful and patient thoughts, nursing warm feelings, wishing harm to no one, when a co-worker comes in and, without good reason, slights or insults us in some way.  In one instant, our whole inner world reverses: A door slams shut and we begin to feel cold and spiteful, thinking anything but warm thoughts, seemingly becoming different persons: moving from being big-hearted to being spiteful, from being saints to entertaining murderous feelings.

Which is our true person? What are we really, saints with big hearts or petty, spiteful persons? Seemingly, we are both, saints and sinners, since goodness and selfishness both flow through us.

Interestingly, we don’t always react in the same way. Sometimes in the face of a slight, insult, or even positive attack and injustice, we react with patience, understanding, and forgiveness. Why? What changes the chemistry? Why do we sometimes meet pettiness with a big-heart and, other times, meet it in kind, with spite?

Ultimately, don’t know the reason; that’s part of the mystery of human freedom. Certain factors obviously play in; for example, if we are in a good inner-space when we are ignored, slighted, or unfairly treated, we are more prone to react with patience and understanding, with a big heart. Conversely, if we are tired, pressured, and feeling unloved and unappreciated, we are more likely to react negatively, and return spite for spite.

But, be that as it may, ultimately there’s deeper reality at work in all of this, beyond our emotional well being on a given day. How we react to a situation, with grace or spite, for the most part depends upon something else. The Church Fathers had a concept and name for this. They believed that each of us has two souls, a big soul and a petty soul, and how we react to any situation depends largely upon which soul we are thinking with and acting out of at that moment. Thus, if I meet an insult or an injury with my big soul, I am more likely to meet it with patience, understanding, and forgiveness. Conversely, if I meet an insult or a hurt while operating out of my petty soul, I am more likely to respond in kind, with pettiness, coldness, and spite.  And, for the Church Fathers, both of these souls are inside us and both are real; we’re both big-hearted and petty, saint and sinner. The challenge is to operate more out of our big soul than our petty one.

But we must be careful to not understand this dualistically. In affirming that we have two souls, a big soul and a petty soul, the Church Fathers are not teaching a variation of an old dualism, namely, that there are inside us two innate principles, one good and one evil, perpetually fighting for control of our hearts and souls. That kind of struggle in fact does go on inside us, but not between two separate principles.

The saint and sinner inside us are not separate entities. Rather the saint in us, the big soul, is not only our true self, it’s our only self. The sinner in us, the petty soul, is not a separate person or separate moral force doing perpetual battle with the saint, it’s simply the wounded part of the saint, that part of the saint that’s been cursed and never properly blessed.

And our wounded self shouldn’t to be demonized and cursed again. Rather it needs to be befriended and blessed – and then it will cease being petty and spiteful in the face of adversity.

Several years ago, Hollywood produced a movie about the famous Camino walk in Spain. Entitled The Way, it chronicles the story of a father whose son was killed in an accident shortly after beginning this famous five hundred mile pilgrimage. The father, played by Martin Sheen, had been largely estranged from his son, but when he goes to France (where the Camino begins) to collect the ashes of his dead son, he feels a compulsion to complete the walk for his son and sets out with his son’s hiking equipment and backpack, carrying his ashes. 

He’s unsure as to exactly why he is doing this, except that he senses that somehow this is something he must do for his son, that this will somehow address his estrangement from his son, and that this is something he must do to ease his own grief. Despite being in a rather depressed and anti-social state, he is befriended on the trail by three people, each on the trail for different reasons. 

The first of these people is a man from the Netherlands who is walking the trail to lose weight, fearing that, if he doesn’t, his wife will divorce him. The second of his new friends is a French- Canadian woman, ostensibly walking Camino to give up her addiction to smoking, but clearly also trying to steady her life after the breakup of a relationship. The third person is an Irish writer, hoping to overcome “writer’s block”.  And so the story focuses on four unlikely walking companions, each doing this pilgrimage with a certain goal in mind.

They persevere and complete the pilgrimage, enter the Cathedral of Santiago, observe the customs that have marked the end of the Camino for countless pilgrims for a thousand years, and then realize that what each of them had hoped to achieve hadn’t happened. The man from the Netherlands hadn’t lost any weight; the French-Canadian realized that she would not give up smoking; the Irish writer realized that his real issue was not writer’s block, and the father who was doing this walk vicariously for his son realized that he had done it for other, more personal, reasons. None of them got what they wanted, but each of them got what he or she needed. The roads of life work like that, as the Camino Santiago.  

I learned that exact lesson, walking the Camino a year ago. I went there with there with a certain dream in mind. I was six months beyond chemotherapy treatments, refreshed with new energy, on sabbatical, and looking forward to walking this ancient and famed road to stretch myself physically and spiritually. The physical stretch happened and fitted the fantasy I’d had before leaving for the walk. But the spiritual stretch was a long, long ways away from what I’d fantasized.

My dream had been that I would use this walk to do some deeper inner work, to read some classical books on mysticism, blend the depth of the mystics with the mystique of this ancient trail, do some journaling, and return a deeper and more contemplative person. Such was my dream, but the trail had other ideas.

We were many long hours on the trail each day so that there was basically no time to read or to journal. Evenings found me exhausted, without energy for much inner work. A shower and a hot meal were essentially the only thing I was up to. The major book that I’d taken along, The Cloud of Unknowing lay unopened at the bottom of my suitcase. I managed some hours each day, walking alone on the trail, to pray, but it wasn’t the kind of inner work I’d fantasized about. I’d had a fantasy about what I’d wanted to achieve, but, just as for the characters in the movie, apparently this wasn’t what I needed.

The trail taught me something else, deeper, more needed, and more humbling: What I learned from walking the road in the company of three close friends was how spoiled and immature I’d become. Having lived as a celibate priest, outside of the conscriptive demands of marriage, children, and family for more than forty years, I realized how idiosyncratic and self-centered the patterns and habits of my life had become. I was used to calling the shots for my own life, at least in its day-to-day rhythms. The Camino taught me that I need to address other issues in my life that are more pressing and more deeply needed than understanding The Cloud of Unknowing.  The Camino taught me that in a number of important ways, I need to grow up!

Robert Funk once wrote that grace is a sneaking thing: It wounds from behind, where we think we are least vulnerable. It’s harder than we think and we moralize in order to take the edge off it. And, it’s more indulgent than we think; but it’s never indulgent at the point where we think it ought to be indulgent. Such too is the Camino Santiago.

“Home is where we start from.” T.S. Eliot wrote that and it describes an experience that can be felt both as a freedom and as a heartache. I cite my own case:

I grew up in a second-generation immigrant community on the Canadian prairies. My grandparents’ generation had been the first settlers in that region and everything they built, from their houses to their schools, were understandably built with what they could afford and situated along roads and railways they could access. They did the best with what they had and didn’t have the luxury of building with long-term permanence in mind.

Consequently many things of buildings that surrounded me when I was a child have since disappeared: The elementary school that I attended closed while I was still a student there. Both the building and school grounds have long ago disappeared. Wheat fields grow there now and you would never know that a school once existed on that location. The same holds true for the high school I attended. It too has disappeared, buildings and grounds replaced by grain fields. Indeed, the entire town that gave it its address has disappeared. 

After high school, I attended two separate seminaries and each of these too suffered the same fate; both stood empty for number of years and then were gutted by fire. The theological college I taught at for the first 15 years of my priesthood was demolished to make room for a new freeway and now operates out of new buildings on a different site. The farm that I grew up on still operates, though the house I grew up in is now abandoned and the fields rented out. Nobody in my family lives there anymore.  It’s symbolic perhaps that the only building that’s still in use from my early years is the church where I worshipped as child. Every other building of my youth, adolescence, and early adulthood has disappeared. I am an orphan in terms of the buildings that nurtured me in my youth.

But, in this, I’m hardly unique. All of us today, in different forms, are orphaned in this way. Already in 1970, Alvin Toffler, in his famous book, Future Shock, pointed out how transience and impermanence are beginning more and more to shape our psyches, as things, people, places, knowledge, and organizations pass through our lives at an ever-increasing rate. And he wrote this long before the impact of information technology began to reshape our lives much more radically. The transience and impermanence that Toffler describes in 1970 are dwarfed and taken to their square root by information technology today. By today’s standards, things, people, places, knowledge, and organizations were passing through our lives at a snail’s pace forty years ago, in 1970. Today, more than the buildings of our youth are disappearing from our lives.

What’s to be said about this? What does this transience say about our lives and our times? Is this good or bad?

I suspect that we’re all still sorting this out. Transience and impermanence aren’t sins, though they aren’t necessarily virtues either. For me, it seems, they’re a mixed bag, a mixed blessing. On the positive side, they’ve brought us a new freedom. For many centuries, people were too much imprisoned by the suffocating permanence of the things, places, and knowledge of their time. They had stability, but often had petrification as well. Everything held firm, but too firm, few new doors ever opened. The transience and impermanence in our lives sets us free in a way that allows us to let ourselves be nourished and blessed by our roots, even as we aren’t bound by them.

But there’s a huge heartache in this as well. Constantly having the familiar disappear can also grieve the heart, and it should. It’s healthy to want to go back to visit the old houses, schools, neighborhoods, and textbooks that once nurtured us. And so the loss of the things and places of our youth can be painful.

But the pain of transience and impermanence in our lives also helps point us towards the things that don’t change, namely, faith, hope, and love. These can never be bulldozed-under, replaced by grain fields, burnt-down by fire, expropriated and knocked down to make way for a new freeway, or rendered obsolete by newer software. In this world, scripture tells us, we have no lasting city, but we are already inextricably bound up with things that do last forever.

Centuries before Christ, the biblical writer, Qoheleth warned us that everything in this life is vanity: “Vanity of vanities, everything is vanity.” However he uses the word “vanity” in a different sense than we do today. For him, it does not connote a psychological narcissism or an unhealthy preoccupation with our appearance and persona. Rather, for him, “vanity” simply means vapor, a passing mist, transience, impermanence, something that disappears too quickly.

Experiencing that transience can give us a heartache; but it can also make us search more deeply inside all this impermanence for that which is permanent.

In his monumental study of atheism, Michael Buckley suggests that atheism is invariably a parasite that feeds off bad religion.  It feeds off bad religion, picks on bad religion, and picks apart bad religion.

If that’s true, then ultimately atheists do us a huge favor. They pick apart bad religion, showing us our blind spots, rationalizations, inconsistencies, double-standards, hypocrisies, moral selectivity, propensity for power, unhealthy fears, and hidden arrogance. Atheism shows us the log in our own eye.

On our honest days, we admit that this is a needed challenge. Ideally, of course, we should be sufficiently self-aware and sufficiently self-critical to see all these things for ourselves or, barring that, be attentive enough to our own prophets to stay aware of where we’re falling short. But that’s rarely the case and, as a result, there’s invariably bad religion and this has always helped spawn negativity towards religion and atheism.

And we see this playing out at different levels: Philosophically, of course, its most powerful expression comes from the two most-famous atheists of the 19th century, Ludwig Feuerbach and Fredrick Nietzsche. Their real criticism of religion and of us, its practitioners, is not so much that belief in God is “the opium of the people” and that a focus on the next life helps keep us subjugated in this life, though they do affirm that. Rather their deeper criticism has to do with our religious actions, namely, that we use the idea of God and religion to rationalize our own desires. For Feuerbach and Nietzsche, God did not make us in his image and likeness; but rather we’ve made God in our image and likeness. For them, God is a projection of the mind and we have perennially used that projection to morally justify and bless our own immaturity, our own will, our own fears, and our own rationalizations. As individuals and as churches, we simply use the idea of God to do whatever we want, and then call it God’s will. We are not, in the end, obedient to any power or a will beyond our own, except that religion makes it seem that we are.

In our ordinary church lives, where few, if any, ever read Feuerbach and Nietzsche, we simply meet this criticism in a different language; bad religion still gets picked apart. Inside the culture, we have people like Christopher Hitchens and Richard Dawkins who keep the knives of atheism sharp and operative. More painful for us though is the fact that bad religion gets picked upon and picked part by many of those who are dear to us, not least our own children. More recently, a lot of that criticism has centered upon the sexual abuse crisis in the church; but, everywhere within our culture, religion and our churches are being picked apart because of our inconsistencies, blinds spots, and moral selectivity.

Much as this criticism hurts and can seem unfair, at the end of the day, most of it is true. Moreover, our attempts to defend ourselves, our apologias, are often simply further rationalizations and further failures to admit our own shortcoming, giving our critics even more of a corpse to feed off.  Defensiveness is not helpful here.

Our response to atheism and to other critics who feed off our religious faults must begin with an acknowledgement of where they are correct, even if those criticisms emanate from voices that are unfair and are, themselves, rationalizing. For example, an unfair media does not create any of our sins and shortcomings, we do. 

Our response to atheism and criticism of our faith and religion should be threefold: First, we should be grateful for the challenge. We’ve never been fully faithful and we’re better off openly hearing what’s being thought of us and said of us than not hearing it. Denial is not a friend. Second, we need to acknowledge, without undue defensiveness, what’s true and resist the temptation defend ourselves in ways that simply create more bad religion for our critics to feed upon. When we’re over-defensive before our critics, we not only caste ourselves and our churches in a bad light; worst of all, we cast God in a bad light.

Finally, most important, the real response to bad religion is never secularism or atheism, but better religion!  We need to be more consistent, both in private conscience and in church practice.

What is better religion? How do we recognize better religion? We recognize true religion in the same way as we recognize true beauty and goodness. They’re self-evident when they appear. Beauty and goodness are received more than discerned. Nobody need tell us what’s beautiful. Beauty is ultimately received.  It declares itself. The same is true for good religion.

But the reverse is also true. Bad religion also declares itself, and no amount of sincerity will ultimately hide that.

Atheism is a parasite that feed offs bad religion. So, when, like today, atheism takes on a particularly nasty aggression, perhaps we need to examine more closely what this mirrors inside of religion.