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.

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.