Rationalizing Our Anger and Moral Indignations

August 18, 2013

I have come to set the earth on fire and how I wish it were already blazing. … Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth? No, I tell you, but rather division. From now on a household of five will be divided, three against two and two against three.

This saying of Jesus is one of the most misunderstood teachings in all of scripture and, because of this, from the time of Jesus’ birth until this very day, we have been able to cloak a lot of our lack of charity, lack of respect, bitterness, and hatred inside the mantle of prophecy, claiming that the divisions we cause are the divisions to which Jesus is referring when he said he is bringing fire to the earth. But we are wrong. Why?

First, the fire that Jesus passionately longs to bring to this earth is not the fire of division and polarization, but the fire of the Holy Spirit, the fire of Pentecost, namely, the fire of charity, joy, peace, goodness, understanding, and forgiveness. And this fire unites rather than divides. Moreover, in answer to his question: “Do you think that I have come to establish peace on earth?” the answer is: absolutely, without doubt. Jesus came precisely to bring peace to this earth, as the angels proclaim at his birth, as his entire ministry attests to, and as he powerfully witnesses to in his death. Jesus came to bring peace to the world; no one may doubt that.

Then how does division enter? And why does Jesus tell us that his person and teaching will bring about polarization, hatred, and division? If the fire that Jesus brings to this earth is meant to unite us, why does it so often divide us?

It is not Jesus’ message that divides; it is how we react to that message that divides. We see this already at the time of his birth. Jesus is born, and some react with understanding and joy, while others react with misunderstanding and hatred. That dynamic has continued down through the centuries to this very day when Jesus is not only misunderstood and seen as a threat by many non-Christians, but especially when his person and message are used to justify bitter and hate-filled divisions among Christians and to justify the bitterness that invariably characterizes our public debates on religious and moral issues. Jesus still divides, not because his person and message are one-sided, divisive, or hate-filled, but because we too often use them in that way.

In effect, from the time of his birth until today, we have perennially used Jesus’ to rationalize our own anger and fears. We all do it, and the effects of this are seen everywhere: from the bitter polarization within our politics, to the bitter misunderstandings between our churches, to the hate-filled rhetoric of our radio and television talk-shows, to the editorials and blogs that demonize everyone who does not agree with them, to the judgmental way we talk about each other inside our coffee circles. We are all venting, mostly unhealthily, but forever under the guise of bringing the fire of love and truth to the planet. However, if the truth be told, more often than not, the fire we are bringing is more the fire of Babel than of Pentecost. Our moral fevers invariably bring about more division than unity.

Several years ago, for example, I was at a clergy meeting at which each of the priests present was asked to state publicly what he felt was the salient gift that he brought to his ministry. One of the priests, who had a long history of being a problem-child to both his bishop and his parishioners, self-confidently described himself in this way: “My gift is that I’m an agitator! I stir things up! I don’t let people get comfortable. I bring Christ’s fire! I’m prophetic!” He was certainly right about the agitation, the discomfort, and the fire. His bishop had no end of phone calls attesting to that. But there was a lot of skepticism as to his being a prophet. His approach to things and his rhetoric too much resembled that of an ideologically-driven talk-show host who divides the world up too-neatly between angels and demons, absolute right and absolute wrong, and has a too-facile division as to who is on God’s side and who is on the devil’s side. That kind of talk is mostly bitter, hate-filled, one-sided, and high divisive, but it justifies itself under the banner of truth and love, self-proclaiming itself as prophetic.

Daniel Berrigan rightly suggests that a real prophet makes a vow of love, not of alienation. It is easy to get this in reverse, and we frequently do.

Granted, there is a fire that divides, even while remaining the fire of love and Pentecost. But it is as fire that is always and everywhere respectful, charitable, and inclusive, never enflaming us with bitterness, as does so much of our contemporary religious and moral rhetoric.

Embittered Moralizing – An Occupational Hazard for Good, Faithful Persons

August 11, 2013

In a masterful book on grace, Piet Fransen suggests that we can test how well we understand grace by gauging our reaction to this story:

Imagine a man who during his whole life is entirely careless about God and morality. He’s selfish, ignores the commandments, ignores all things religious, and is basically consumed with pursuing his own pleasure – wine, sex, and song. Then, just hours before his death, he repents of his irresponsibility, makes a sincere confession, receives the sacraments of the church, and dies inside that conversion.

What’s our spontaneous reaction to that story? Isn’t it wonderful that he received the grace of conversion before he died? Or, more likely: The lucky beggar! He got away with it! He got to have all that pleasure and still gets to go to heaven!

If we felt the latter emotion, even for a moment, we have never deeply understood the concept of grace. Rather, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we are still seeing life away from God’s house as fuller than life inside God’s house, are still doing the right things mostly out of bitter duty, and are secretly envying the amoral. But, if this is true, we must be gentle with ourselves. This is an occupational hazard for good, faithful persons.

Jesus, himself, expresses this in the parable of the vineyard workers. This parable was addressed to Peter in answer to a question. Peter, on behalf of the other disciples, had just asked Jesus what reward they were going to receive for their fidelity to him. Jesus answers by telling him the story of very rich and generous landowner who goes out one morning and hires workers to work in his vineyard. He hires some early in the morning, promises them a good wage, keeps hiring others as the day progresses, each new group having to work fewer hours than the group before them, and ends the day by hiring a group of workers just one hour before work is to end. Then he tells his foreman to pay everyone a full day’s wage. But this leaves the workers who toiled the whole day somewhat bitter. “This isn’t fair!” they protest. “We worked the whole day and bore the heat of the sun and this last group worked just one hour. It’s unfair that we all receive the same wage!” The generous landowner, obviously representing God, is gentle in his response: “Friend, didn’t you agree to this wage? And isn’t a good wage? Are you envious and angry because I’m generous?”

Remember to whom those words are being addressed: Jesus is addressing Peter … and, in effect, through this parable, is addressing all good people who are morally and religiously bearing the heat of the day. And Jesus is assuring us that we will be rewarded richly for doing this. But, as the parable makes clear, there’s a catch: Simply put, we will be rewarded with heaven and it will be wonderful; but, and this is the catch, we can have everything and enjoy nothing because we are watching what everyone else is getting!

I sometimes try to highlight this point rather graphically when I give retreats to priests and religious. I have them consider this scenario: Imagine you live out your life in fidelity to the your vow of celibacy, metaphorically and otherwise bearing the heat of the day and, when you get to heaven, the first person you meet there is Hugh Hefner, the founder of Playboy. In shock you protest to God: “How did he get in here? It’s not fair, given the life he lived and the life that I was asked to live!” And God, the over-generous landowner, gently replies: “Friend, didn’t you agree to a life of celibacy, and isn’t heaven a wonderful place? Are you envious and angry because I’m generous?” And, how different this reaction to that of a true saint who, upon meeting someone like this in heaven, would, like the father of the prodigal son, rush over in joy, embrace the person, and say: “I’m overwhelmed with joy that you made it!”

Thomas Halik, a Czech writer, suggests that one of the reasons why so many people in the world reject the churches is that they see us as “embittered moralizers”, older brothers of the prodigal son, doing our religious and moral duties, but bitterly, and criticizing those who don’t live like us out of hidden envy. Nietzsche made a similar accusation more than a hundred years ago.

Sadly, there’s more than a little truth in that accusation. Too often, we are embittered moralizers, secretly envying the amoral and criticizing our world out of bitterness. But that’s an occupational hazard for the good and the faithful. Peter and first apostles struggled with it. Why should we be immune?

We needn’t be immune, but we do need to be honest in admitting that, despite our real goodness and fidelity, this indicates that we are still far from being full saints.

Our Need to Give to the Poor

August 4, 2013

We need to give to the poor, not because they need it, though they do, but because we need to do that in order to be healthy. That’s an axiom that is grounded in scripture where, time and again, we are taught that giving to the poor is something that we need to do for our own health.

We see this truth expressed in many religions and cultures. For example, a number of indigenous North American people practiced something they called potlatch. This was a festival, sometimes attached to the celebration of a birth or wedding, at which a rich person gave away gifts to the community. Its primary purpose was to ensure a certain distribution of wealth but also to ensure that wealthy individuals stayed healthy by being solicitous in terms of not accumulating too much wealth. Too much excess, it was believed, left a person unhealthy. This has been a perennial belief in most cultures.

In Christianity we have enshrined this in the challenge to be charitable to the poor and we have classically seen our giving to the poor as a virtue, rightly so. Charitable giving is a virtue; but, for a Christian, perhaps it’s more obligation than virtue. When we look at the Law of Moses in scripture we see that a certain amount of giving to the poor was prescribed by law. The idea was that giving to the poor was an obligation, not a negotiable moral option. Simply put, the Law of Moses obligated people, legally, to give to the poor.

Scripture abounds with examples of this. Consider, for example, these precepts and laws:

· First of all, the Law of Moses assumed that everything we have belongs to God and is not really ours. We are only its stewards and guardians. We may enjoy it at God’s pleasure, but ultimately it’s not ours. (Leviticus 25,23)

· Every seventh year, all slaves were to be set free and each was to take with him or her enough of the master’s goods to be able to live an independent life. (Deuteronomy 15, 14).

· Every seventh year all economic debts were to be cancelled (the original meaning of the “statute of limitations”).

· Every seventh year one’s land was to lie fallow and enjoy its own Sabbath. During that year, the land’s owner not only didn’t sow anything, he or she didn’t reap anything either. The poor were to reap whatever the fields and vineyards produced that year.

· And, at all times, landowners were forbidden to reap and harvest the corners of their fields, with the intent that these edges were to be reaped by the poor.

· Finally, even more radically, every fiftieth year all lands were to be restored to the original tribe or household who had first owned them. One’s “ownership” of property had a certain time limit. Things weren’t yours forever.

Moreover doing all of this was not considered as virtue; these were laws, legal obligations.

And there was a double intent behind these laws. On the one hand, they were intended for the health of the one who was giving something away to the poor and, at the same time, they were an attempt to ensure that the poor did not become so destitute so that they would have to steal what they needed in order to live.

We have much to learn from this as a society. For the most part we are generous and charitable people. We give away some of our surplus and, despite warnings from professionals who work with street people that this isn’t helpful, our hearts are still moved by those begging on our streets and we continue to slip them money (even as we don’t believe their claim that they need money for food or bus-fare). For the most part, our hearts are still at the right place.

But, we tend to see this as something we are doing purely for someone else without realizing that our own health is a vital part of the equation. Further, we tend to see this as virtue more than as obligation, as charity more than as justice. And perhaps it’s for this reason that, despite our good hearts and our generosity, the gap between the rich and the poor, both with our own culture and within the world as a whole, continues to widen. Millions and millions of people continue to fall through the cracks without the getting the benefit, in law, to reap the corners of our wealth and have their debts forgiven every seven years.

We need to give to the poor because they need it, admittedly; but we need to do it too because we cannot be healthy unless we do this. And we need to see our giving not so much as charity but as obligation, as justice, as something we owe.

On this deathbed, Vincent de Paul is reputed to have challenged his followers with words to this effect: It is more blessed to give than to receive- and it is also easier!

Struggling to Understand Suicide

July 28, 2013

Sadly, today, there are many deaths by suicide. Very few people have not been deeply affected by the suicide of a loved one. In the United States alone, there are more than thirty-three thousand suicides a year. That averages out to ninety such deaths per day, about three to four every hour.

And yet suicide remains widely misunderstood and generally leaves those who are left behind with a particularly devastating kind of grief. Among all deaths, suicide perhaps weighs heaviest on those left behind. Why?

Suicide hits us so hard because it is surrounded with the ultimate taboo. In the popular mind, suicide is generally seen, consciously or unconsciously, as the ultimate act of despair, the ultimate bad thing a person can do. This shouldn’t surprise us since suicide does go against the deepest instinct inside us, our will to live. Thus, even when it’s treated with understanding and compassion, it still leaves those left behind with a certain amount of shame and a lot of second-guessing. Also, more often than not, it ruins the memory of the person who died. His photographs slowly disappear from our walls and the manner of his death is spoken about with an all-too-hushed discretion. None of this should be surprising: Suicide is the ultimate taboo.

So what’s to be said about suicide? How can we move towards understanding it more empathically?

Understanding suicide more compassionately won’t take away its sting, nothing will, except time; but our own long-term healing and the redemption of the memory of the one died can be helped by keeping a number of things in mind.

Suicide, in most cases, is a disease, not something freely willed. The person who dies in this way dies against his or her will, akin to those who jumped to their deaths from the Twin Towers after terrorist planes had set those buildings on fire on September 11, 2001. They were jumping to certain death, but only because they were already burning to death where they were standing. Death by suicide is analogous to death by cancer, stroke, or heart attack; except, in the case of suicide, it’s a question of emotional-cancer, emotional-stroke, or an emotional-heart attack.

Moreover, still to be more fully explored, is the potential role that biochemistry plays in suicide. Since some suicidal depressions are treatable by drugs, clearly then some suicides are caused by biochemical deficiencies, as are many other diseases that kill us.

The person who dies in this way, almost invariably, is a very sensitive human being. Suicide is rarely done in arrogance, as an act of contempt. There are of course examples of persons, like Hitler, who are too proud to endure normal human contingency and kill themselves out of arrogance, but that’s a very different kind of suicide, not the kind that most of us have seen in a loved one. Generally our own experience with the loved ones that we’ve lost to suicide was that these persons were anything but arrogant. More accurately described, they were too bruised to touch and were wounded in some deep way that we couldn’t comprehend or help heal. Indeed, often times when sufficient time has passed after their deaths, in retrospect, we get some sense of their wound, one which we never clearly perceived while they were alive. Their suicide then no longer seems as surprising.
Finally, we need not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of those who die in this way. God’s understanding and compassion infinitely surpass our own. Our lost loved ones are in safer hands than ours. If we, limited as we are, can already reach through this tragedy with some understanding and love, we can rest secure in the fact that, given the width and depth of God’s love, the one who dies through suicide meets, on the other side, a compassion that’s deeper than our own and a judgment that intuits the deepest motives of their heart.

Moreover, God’s love, as we are assured of in our scriptures and as is manifest in Jesus’ resurrection, is not as helpless as our own in dealing with this. We, in dealing with our loved ones, sometimes find ourselves helpless, without a strategy and without energy, standing outside an oak-like door, shutout because of someone’s fear, wound, sickness, or loneliness. Most persons who die by suicide are precisely locked inside this kind of private room by some cancerous wound through which we cannot reach and through which they themselves cannot reach. Our best efforts leave us still unable to penetrate that private hell. But, as we see in the resurrection appearances of Jesus, God’s love and compassion are not rendered helpless by locked doors. God’s love doesn’t stand outside, helplessly knocking. Rather it goes right through the locked doors, stands inside the huddle of fear and loneliness, and breathes out peace. So too for our loved ones who die by suicide. We find ourselves helpless, but God can, and does, go through those locked doors and, once there, breathes out peace inside a tortured, huddled heart.

On Whining and Weeping

July 21, 2013

Karl Rogers once suggested that what’s most private within us is also most universal. His belief was that many of the private feelings that we would be ashamed to admit in public are, ironically, the very feelings which, if expressed, would resonate most deeply inside the experience of others.

But this isn’t always true in terms of our tears. Sometimes our private tears are only that, private tears, tears which are ours alone and which don’t resonate with the feelings of others but rather cause them an unhealthy discomfort. Why don’t all of our tears draw empathy?

Because not all tears are alike; there’s a difference between weeping and whining. The former is healthy, the latter isn’t.

Weeping is healthy. It’s a wholesome expression in the face of loss. Moreover, when we weep we are giving expression to a sorrow that speaks not just of some private loss and pain, but somehow too of that same sadness within the entire world. The loss we are mourning may seem a private thing, like the death of a loved one, but, if the focus of our grief is on the one lost rather than on ourselves, our weeping is essentially empathic. Our deep sadness then mourns a universal condition and connects us more deeply to the world, where death and loss spare no one. Everyone, ultimately, carries that same sadness.

Whining, on the other hand, is mostly self-pity. Unlike weeping, its focus is not on what has been lost to tragedy but is primarily upon ourselves, our hurt, and our plea for sympathy. To whine is to hold a private wound up for public viewing in order to look for sympathy, like a child showing a bruised knee to his mother. We can feel sorry of a bruised child, the propriety there is not offensive, but the scenario is not nearly as palatable when we are adults.

We cry tears for different reasons and we cry tears in different ways. In all tears, the question is: “Whom am I crying for, for someone else or for myself? What is causing my tears, sympathy for someone, sympathy for something, or self-pity?”

That’s not an easy question to answer because our tears are invariably a mix of both altruism and selfishness. Rarely are our tears pure, without self-pity, like the tears that Jesus wept over Jerusalem or the ones Mary wept under the cross of Jesus. Our tears can indict us just as much as they can exhibit empathy. For instance, Therese of Lisieux suggests that when we cry tears over a broken heart it is generally because we were seeking ourselves, rather than the other, inside that relationship. The tears are real, but they’re hardly noble. In a similar vein, Antoine Vergote, the renowned psychologist, suggests that the tears we cry when we feel guilty about doing something wrong are generally tears of self-pity rather than a sign of actual contrition. True contrition, he contends, evokes something else inside of us, sorrow. What distinguishes sorrow from guilt is that, in sorrow, we weep because something we’ve done has hurt someone else. With tears of guilt, we’re crying because we’re feeling badly.

The difference between whining and weeping is often seen too in their aesthetics. Whining is invariably exhibitionistic, over-sentimental, and causes discomfort to those witnessing it. It fails to keep a respectful aesthetic distance. In essence, it’s bad art! We’ve all experienced this at times, at a funeral perhaps, where, however tragic or sad the occasion, someone’s tears were simply so raw and so exhibitionistic that we experienced them as somehow violating proper propriety. We felt uncomfortable for the person shedding those tears.

We experience this occasionally too to a lesser extent in bad popular art, where, in some song or film or novel, the sadness expressed is simply too raw, too sentimental, or too juvenile to leave us a safe space within which to view it and digest it. Again, the fault is in the aesthetics, bad propriety. Bad art leaves us wanting to shield our eyes so as not to embarrass someone else or it leaves us feeling like we have ingested too much sugar. That’s a second feature of whining; beyond being self-pitying, it’s bad art.

And so we need to be careful about the tears we shed in public and the frustrations we express out loud. Of course, none of our tears are pure, we’re always crying too for ourselves. The same is true for our protests; there’s always some self-interest involved. But, with that being admitted, we should strive to do more weeping and less whining, that is, to insure that when we express sadness or indignation in public our tears and our anger are expressing more empathy than self-pity.

Karl Rogers is right: What’s most private inside us is also what’s most universal. That’s true too for our deep sadness, for our chronic heartaches, for a good number of our frustrations, and for many of the tears we cry. But it’s less true for our whining.

Why Faith Feels Like Doubt and Darkness

July 14, 2013

God is ineffable. This is a truth that’s universally accepted as dogma among all Christians and within all the great religions of the world. What does it mean?

In essence, it means that God is beyond us, not like us, but in an utterly different sphere. More especially, it means that God cannot ever be captured in thought, imagination, or word. Any concepts, images, or words we have about God are inadequate at best and idolatrous at worst. God is always beyond what we can think, speak about, or imagine.

But we do have thoughts, images, and words about God and many of these are given to us in scripture. What’s to be made of our traditional biblical and theological images of God? Aren’t they accurate and adequate? In a word, no, they aren’t. To paraphrase Annie Dillard, the concepts and language about God that are given us in scripture and church tradition are simply words that we have permission to use without being struck dead for idolatry. We should never pretend they are accurate and adequate; scripture itself makes that clear. Not understanding this confuses our notion of faith and doubt.

Because we do not existentially grasp and accept that God is ineffable, we generally confuse faith with imagination. Simply put, because we think God can be imagined and conceptualized, we feel that we have faith precisely to the extent that we can imagine God’s existence and God’s person. Conversely, we feel we are in doubt and agnostic when we cannot imagine these. And so we naively identify faith with the capacity to create the right imaginative fantasies and feelings about God, and vice versa.

But, since God is ineffable, we can never imagine either God existence or God’s person. This is an impossible task, by definition. We have only finite concepts within which to try to capture infinity and thus all our human faculties are incapable of conceptualizing God, tantamount to trying to think of the highest number to which it is possible to count.

Does this mean then that faith opposes human reason? No. Faith doesn’t negate human reason, it simply dwarfs it, akin to the way the most sophisticated formulae within contemporary astrophysics dwarf elementary arithmetic and the way the blinding light of a noonday sun dwarfs the paltry light of a candle. Moreover, though helpful, even these analogies limp and are inaccurate. God’s existence and person may not be imagined as that of some supreme Super-person, someone like us, except supremely greater. To imagine God in this way still puts God into the realm of the finite, a creature still, even if Super-supreme, imaginable, able to be conceptualized, not ineffable, a number we can still count to. God, though, is not a reality that can be counted. God’s existence and person can never be conceptualized.

Moreover, this is true as well for our understanding of God’s love. It too is beyond our imagination and capacity to conceptualize. Our universe, though finite, is so vast and prodigious that our imaginations already run out of room in their efforts simply to picture the finite world. Beyond this, just on this one planet, earth, we have billions upon billions of persons, each of which has a heart and meaning that is individually precious. How can we imagine a God who somehow knows and loves this all intimately? We can’t! Our minds and our hearts simply don’t stretch that far; though they do stretch far enough to ask: Why wouldn’t an infinite God create so an unimaginatively huge a universe and so many billions and billions of people to love and share in this creation? And why would an infinite God suddenly say (after we have been born): “That’s enough! I now have as many people as I want!”

God befuddles the mind, the heart, and the imagination. It cannot be otherwise. Any God who could be understood would not be God. God is not a supreme Superman, like us, only bigger, stronger, and more powerful. The infinite, precisely because it is infinite, cannot be circumscribed and grasped, either in its existence, its person, or its capacity to love. We can know the infinite, but we cannot think the infinite.

Because of this, at some point in our lives, faith will feel like darkness, belief like unbelief, and God’s person and existence will feel like nothing, emptiness, non-existence, nada. Our minds and hearts will, at that point, come up dry and empty when they try to imagine or feel God, not because God doesn’t exist or is less present than the physical world, but because God is so massively present, so real, so above all other lights, that God’s reality will dwarf everything to the point to where it gives the impression that it itself doesn’t exist

In faith, God is known this way: As a light so bright that it’s perceived as darkness, as a love so universal that it’s perceived as indifference, and as a reality so real that it’s perceived as nothing.

An Addiction to Comfort

July 7, 2013

Fifty years ago, Kay Cronin, wrote a book entitled, Cross in the Wilderness, chronicling how, in 1847, a small band of Oblate missionaries came from France to the American Pacific Northwest and, after some bitter setbacks in Washington State and Oregon, moved up the coast into Canada and helped found the Roman Catholic church in Vancouver and in significant parts of British Columbia’s mainland.

She describes these men, no doubt with some over-idealization and hagiography, as tough, totally dedicated, and completely without concern for their own comfort and health. They left their beloved France while still young, knew they would probably never see their loved ones again, and accepted to live lives that were constantly in danger both from the harsh elements of their frontier environment and from the threat of death from various Native tribes and various government forces and mercenary soldiers who distrusted them, for opposite reasons. They were threatened many times, chased out of various missions, some were kidnapped for periods of time, and a number of their houses and missions were burnt down. They lived perennially on the edge of danger, never secure, never free from threat.

Moreover, they had next to nothing in terms of creature comforts. They lived in log and mud hovels, ate bad food, and sometimes no food. They had virtually no access to doctors, little access to what might make for good hygiene, and often, while travelling, had to sleep outside without proper shelter from rain and cold, causing many of them to develop rheumatism and other such illnesses at an early age. Moreover, they were never able to sink roots, to get comfortable at any place, to make the kinds of friends and contacts that could be a comfort and support to them. They had faith, God, and each other, and little else.

But they were able to take all of this in stride, without undue self-pity or complaint. They wrote very positive and idealistic letters to their motherhouse in France and to their families and kept journals within which they expressed mostly joy about their modest successes in the ministry, seldom uttering a complaint about the bad housing, bad food, and instability in their lives.

As an Oblate missionary myself, as a member of the same religious family, I read all of this, of course, with pride. I am proud of what these men did, and rightly so. They were selfless to the point of death.

But, that being said, reading their story is also very humbling. Looking at their radical sacrifice of all comfort, for me, is a mirror that I peer into with considerable trepidation and shame. I look at my own life and see far too much in the way of an addiction to comfort and safety. I don’t want what they had: I want healthy food, clean water, proper hygiene, regular rest, access to good doctors, access to news, to information, access to travel, regular contact with family and friends, opportunities for retreats and vacations, access to ongoing education, and, not least, I want safety. I want to be a good missionary, but I want to be comfortable and safe.

I take some consolation in the fact that times today are much different than they were when these French missionaries landed in the Pacific Northwest. I couldn’t do the work I do, at least not for a very long, without proper housing, proper food, proper hygiene, access to education and information, regular rest, and healthy recreational outlets. My life and my ministry are a marathon, not a sprint, and proper self-care is a virtue not a vice.

Still, it’s easy to rationalize and become addicted to comfort and safety. St. Paul, reflecting upon his own missionary life, once wrote that he was comfortable with whatever was dealt to him – much or little. I like to believe that too for my own life, but, and this is true for most of us, the more we live with much, the more we tend to protect ourselves inside that plenty.

Thomas Merton once said that what he feared in his own life was not so much a massive betrayal of his vocation, but a series of “mini-treasons” that lead to a different kind of death. And that’s the peril that I fear too, for myself and for our culture.

As children of our culture, I believe, we easily become addicted to comfort and safety. Once we have grown used to safety, good food, clean water, proper hygiene, access to good doctors and proper medicine, access to constant entertainment, access to instant information, regular connection with our loved ones, boundless educational and recreational opportunities, and wonderful creature comforts of all sorts, the danger looms large that we will not easily, or at all, be able to let go of any of these. Consequently we will end up as good persons, no big betrayals, but no big self-sacrifice either; not only unable to give up our lives for our friends but unable to give up even our comfort.

Raissa and Jacques Maritain and the New Evangelization

June 30, 2013

“The Church has sanctified extreme passions, blessed the frenzied, acclaimed the neurosis it had previously canalized and nothing, it seemed, could stop me at its door. Nothing.”

These are the words of a young intellectual, Maurice Sachs, just after he had converted to Catholicism in the early 20th century and they describe what had most drawn him there, namely, mysticism, sacramental rites, devotional practices, affective piety, and most everything inside of Roman Catholicism that speaks of something outside of what can be understood rationally. In his memoirs, Sachs describes these mystical, sacramental, and devotional elements as “rays of sunshine” and sees them as a radical alternative to the narrow rationalism that was the pervading intellectual atmosphere of this time and which he found suffocating.

Maurice Sachs was just nineteen years old when he was baptized and his journey towards Catholicism was strongly influenced by Raissa Maritain, herself a convert to Christianity from Judaism. She and her famous husband, Jacques, had met at the Sorbonne in Paris in the early 1900s. Both were agnostics at the time; she, agnostic about her Jewish religious heritage, and he, agnostic about his Christian roots. Each had gone to the Sorbonne precisely because, as a non-believer, each wanted to be immersed in science and rationalism. But what they met there deeply disappointed and disillusioned them. They felt suffocated. Their minds and souls wanted more than pure science and reason and they soon left the Sorbonne, unsure of what they were looking for, but mostly sure in the fact that a rational world alone would never satisfy them.

They began to search for an alternative and this led them to two intellectual mavericks, Leon Bloy and Charles Peguy, both of whom, because of their fondness for the mystical and devotional, drew considerable disdain from the intellectual world at the time. Leon Bloy eventually led the Maritains into the church, becoming Raissa’s godfather at her baptism, and one of the things he introduced into their lives, something basically antithetical to everything they had met at the Sorbonne, was mysticism and devotional piety. These, more strongly than Christian dogmas, drew the Maritains into the church.

Not long after becoming Christians, Raissa and Jacques, themselves now outcasts from the intellectual mainstream, began to hold weekly discussions at their house outside Paris. By this time, they had also read Thomas Aquinas and been deeply affected by his vision. It gave them an intellectual framework within which to integrate mysticism, sacraments, and devotion. They now felt ready to mentor others and soon had a large circle of artists, writers, and intellectuals gathered around them, many of who were eventually baptized.

And what did they offer these people that the intellectual and cultural life of Paris at the time was not offering? How did they draw intellectuals and skeptics into the church? They offered them a vision of faith, Christianity, and the church, which spoke to both the heart and the head in ways that neither the rationalism of the universities nor the unbridled piety of church circles at the time was able to speak. Their vision of faith addressed both heart and head. It was both highly devotional and highly intellectual all that same time, a rare formula.

We struggle today in our churches to offer precisely such a vision, one that provides food for the heart and the head equally. We tend to sell off one for the other.

Liberal circles tend towards a vision of faith and church that more properly honors reason but often doesn’t leave much room “to sanctify extreme passions and bless the frenzied”. Consequently, we have lots of young people like Maurice Sachs who distrust a more-critical vision of faith and want their faith served up mostly with devotions, piety, and catechetical clarities. They don’t want scholarly criticism poking its head into their churches and shining its light into their certainties. And, because they feel that the scholarly world doesn’t honor their religiosity, they regard that world in much the same way as the Maritains regarded their rationalist professors at the Sorbonne, a world of burnt-out rationalists, devoid of fire.

But there’s a near-perfect flipside to this: The circle of those who are fearful of and disdain the world of scholarly criticism tends to produce a vision of faith which, while making place for the pious, the devotional, and catechetical clarity, lacks the empathy and embrace of a Catholicism that’s wide enough to be acceptable to a thinking mind. While many young people, like Maurice Sachs, are attracted to this kind of Catholicism, millions of other people find it too suffocating, too intellectually narrow, too fearful, too mean, too self-absorbed, and too much into self-protection to be palatable. So many just walk away and many others simply suffer their churches rather than draw any inspiration from them.

And so we can learn a lesson from Raissa and Jacques Maritain in our search for a formula apropos the new evangelization. We need both hard, critical theology and gentle, heartwarming piety.

Contemplative Sound Bytes

June 23, 2013

Recently I attended an Institute on contemplative awareness at which James Finley was the keynote-speaker. He brings some pedigree to the task. He has nearly forty years of experience as a therapist, is a much sought-after lecturer, has written extensively and deeply on the subject of contemplation, and, as a young man, for several years, had Thomas Merton as his spiritual director and mentor. He knows of what he speaks.

I would like to share some of his insights with you by way of a collage of sound bytes, each of which has a certain “stand-alone” quality; but, when taken together, also shed some light on the nature of God, on the nature of contemplation, and on our struggles with both faith and contemplation.

Here are some of Finley’s perspectives:

The mystics bear witness to the perfectly holy nature of human existence, to the fact that we are infinitely loved and held in existence by love, and that there are times when we momentarily glimpse and taste that in our lives. A mystic is a person who has been transformed by such an experience.
Anxiety comes from our estrangement from the consciousness of God’s love inside us.
Why do we spend so many hours trapped outside the richness of our own lives, living like persons standing outside our own houses looking in through the windows of our own homes? Or, worse still, why are we inside our own houses but in a mental condition that has us believing we are living outside? What must we do to wake up before we die?
Our lives are habitually pressured and so this is the perennial task: How do we, in the midst of our pressured lives, give ourselves over to the love that holds us? We cannot make a graced moment happen, but we can work at putting ourselves into a position where we offer the least resistance to be overtaken by a graced moment.
Contemplative awareness isn’t hard to find – it’s hard to not run away from.
Contemplative awareness is seeing things as they are. It’s resting in God. To be in contemplative awareness is to sit like “an unlearned child”, in a time of “non-thinking”.
By sitting still we can learn to be still. Contemplation depends upon fidelity: If you are faithful to your practice, your practice will be faithful to you.
There are some simple rules for the practice of contemplation: Sit still. Sit straight. Have your eyes closed or lowered. Take slow deep natural breaths. Have your hands in a comfortable position. Then be present, open, and awake: Do not cling to nor reject anything that comes to you in thought. As a thought arises, let it arise, if it lingers, let it linger, if it passes away, let it pass away, but don’t let the thought carry you away with it. Move gently and slowly in prayer – don’t violate your body’s stillness.
A recommended exercise: Go to your room just before sunset some night for no other reason than to be there with God when the sun sets. Have absolutely no other agenda than to watch it grow dark. Sit for a full hour. Sit in the unrelenting sovereignty of the day’s end. Sit in radical obedience to the falling light. You’ll know solitude.
People who pray regularly generally do not pray well … but they become persons who rely upon God to make their prayer well. And those who pray regularly will, like everyone else, still experience sadness and death, but sadness and death will no longer have a tyranny over them.
There is a difference between spiritual “sweetness” and spiritual “consolation”: “Sweetness” is feeling good while in prayer; “consolation” is the sense of having your heart enlarged (and that can be painful).
Quoting Gabriel Marcel: We know we love someone when we glimpse in that person something that is too beautiful to die.
From Theresa of Avila:
– When you reach the highest level of human maturity, you will have just one question: How can I be helpful

– Love is two people sitting in a room, talking to each other. Neither knows what to say, but they recognize each other.
Why do the Buddhists speak of “emptiness” in relationship to the concept of God? They do so to refer to God’s infinite simplicity, that is, God as God is before all the distinctions made about God. “Emptiness” is our standing before God’s ineffability, utterly overwhelmed by an over-fullness.
How can we be helpful in the face of others’ suffering when we feel so helpless to do anything about it? When persons share their fragility and pain with someone who hears with a true listening, those others uncover inside themselves the ‘pearl of great price’.

And not least:

The generosity of the Infinite is infinite. Among other things, this means that we must give ourselves over to a generous orthodoxy.
To be unknown by God is altogether too much privacy!
With God, a little sincerity goes a long way!

Struggling for Our Father’s Blessing

June 16, 2013

When I was in elementary school, we were made to memorize a number of poems by William Blake. We didn’t understand them, but they had a wonderful jingle to them, were easy to commit to memory, and remain branded inside me to this day.

One of those was a piece entitled, Infant Sorrow:

My mother groaned! my father wept.

Into this dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Life a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought it best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

Whole books on anthropology, psychology, and spirituality could be written on this poem: our struggle for our father’s blessing, our ambivalence in separating from our mothers, the constriction this creates in our hearts, our inevitable slide into depression as adults, and the impact this has on our spiritual lives. Blake captures a lot in very few words, hidden inside some simple rhymes; but, as already confessed; I didn’t have a clue about any of this when I memorized this poem as a child.

The poem came back to me several years ago, after preaching a homily in a church. The Gospel for that Sunday was the story of Jesus’ baptism. The text runs like this: Jesus goes to the Jordan River to be baptized by John. John immerses him in the water, as Jesus re-emerges, his head breaks the water (an image of birth), the heavens open, and the Father’s voice is heard to say: “This is my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased!”

The point I made in my homily was pretty straightforward: I simply told the congregation that, when we were baptized, the Father spoke the same words over each of us: “This is my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased!” Those should have been safe words; they weren’t. Immediately after the service a young man affronted me, agitated and upset about my homily. He shared that he was out of prison on bail, awaiting sentencing. He had come to Mass that Sunday to try to ready himself to face what awaited him, but the service had the opposite effect. It had increased his anger and agitation, particularly so my homily. Here’s how he expressed his frustration: “I hated your homily because it wasn’t true! Nobody has ever been pleased by what I have done – least of all my own father!”

It’s no accident that this young man was going to prison; he had not been blessed by his own father. Like the narrator in the Blake poem, he was “struggling” in his father’s hands. His own father, unlike God, the Father, had never blessed him, that is, either his father had never been present enough to him and truly interested in him or he had been unable to take delight in his son’s person and energy so as to give him the assurance that he was neither a threat nor a disappointment to his father. In essence, this son had never been a major source of joy to his father, and that is a real absence that wounds.

Hunger for our father’s blessing is perhaps the deepest hunger in our world today. That’s an adage inside certain spirituality and anthropological circles today and the evidence for its truth is found in the body language in a room whenever the phrase is spoken aloud to a group, especially to a group of men.

And what happens when we aren’t sufficiently blessed by our own fathers? Mostly the effects are under the surface and not attributed to our fathers, unless we reach a certain level of conscious realization of how we are wounded. The absence of the father’s blessing is mostly felt inchoately, a thirst, a constriction of the heart, an absence of delight, and a sense of never quite measuring-up. This often finds expression in anger, distrust of authority, and in a low-grade depression that often drives persons into various combinations of acedia, obsession for achievement, and sex as a panacea. It can also have a very negative impact on people religiously. There’s an axiom in Freudian thought that suggests that most anger directed at institutionalized religion is anger directed at your own father or the father-figures in your life. That helps explain why so many people who have had little or no meaningful relationship to organized religion are angry at religion and the churches.

What’s the solution? How do we get this constriction off our hearts, if we haven’t been sufficiently blessed by our own fathers?

Christian spirituality teaches us that we receive by giving. We attain things by giving them away, as the famous Prayer of St. Francis puts it. We cannot make ourselves happy, but we can help make others happy. Thus, we cannot force anyone to bless us – but we can bless others. Wholeness and happiness lie there. Simply put, when we act like God, we get to feel like God … and God never suffers from anger and low-grade depression.

Andrew Greeley – RIP

June 9, 2013

As a young seminarian in the late 1960s, I was very taken by the writings of Andrew Greeley, a priest in Chicago, who was churning out books on popular spirituality. I found his approach wonderfully refreshing because, at least to my mind, he dealt with our perennial religious struggles in a way that was both more realistic and more hope-filled than most of the religious literature to which I had been exposed to until then. He was the spiritual bread I needed, and when I went on a retreat to prepare for final vows, I had a couple of his books in hand. He helped me make that decision.

He died last week at the age of 85, having been in bad health since suffering a fall in 2008. Perhaps the word prodigious best describes his output, both in terms of writing and preaching. He wrote more than 120 books, many of an academic nature, and countless articles and op-ed pieces for both secular and religious publications. Within all of that, he was perhaps best known for his novels, which enjoyed a circulation that most writers can only envy. Because of this prodigious output and popularity, there was often a cynicism about him in both academic and religious circles that gave voice to itself in these words: “Andrew Greeley has never had an unpublished thought!” I move in both those circles and can assure the world that envy is not alien to either circle. Greeley was disliked, perhaps for more than anything else, because, unlike so many of us who criticized him for his prodigious output, he actually did things.

But there were other reasons as well why Greeley had his critics, some to do with his ethos and others with his personality. A lot of conservatives disliked him because they considered him irreverent and overly liberal. The irony is that a lot of liberals disliked him because they considered him too pious and overly conservative. And then there was his personality. He didn’t suffer fools, or critics, easily. To criticize Greeley was to pick a fight. Nobody got to take potshots from him from the safety of a hidden bush. He flushed you out and challenged for an open fight. That’s not the route to stay on easy terms with everyone.

Since I was perennially one his supporters, I was never subjected to his sword. When his novels were popularly criticized as being “lightweight and trashy” and “harmful to the faith of Catholics”, I jumped to his defense with these words: “Nobody has ever left the church because an Andrew Greeley novel, but many people have stayed in the church because of Andrew Greeley’s novels.” Greeley found this phrase in a column of mine and wrote to me, asking permission to use it on the jacket of his future novels, which he frequently did.

In defense of his novels: The most common complaint was they were “trashy and full of sex”. The opposite would be truer to fact. As literary works, his novels suffered more because they were too pious and often thinly disguised Catholic apologia. Any true reading of his novels reveals a man who was deeply pious, much in love with his church, and not-so-subtly defending his church. Moreover he always treated sex as sacrament. Not that his critics would admit this, but his ethos on sexuality was very close to that of John Paul II and his Theology of the Body. Moreover, the strength of his novels was in the story telling. Nobody, including Greeley himself, ever confused his prose with that of Toni Morrison or John Steinbeck; but he could spin off a great tale – and most of his novels did.

I can’t claim him as a friend because, although we corresponded occasionally, we only met once. About a year before his fateful accident, when he was still teaching winter semesters in Arizona, I was in Tucson giving some lectures and he took me out to dinner at his favorite Mexican restaurant. We talked about theology and literature, but mostly he shared with me his admiration for the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious family of which I am a member, and his admiration for his Ordinary in Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, who belongs to that same family. He talked too about his love for Chicago’s sports teams, especially its basketball team, the Chicago Bulls. I invited him to visit our school, but he begged off, sharing that at his age he wanted as much as possible to avoid air-travel. I left the restaurant grateful to have had the chance to meet a remarkable man, and one to whom I owed a huge debt of gratitude.

The anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, once commented “no community should botch its deaths”. Fair warning. A major Catholic figure has died and we, friends and critics alike, need to recognize what he brought us. Like other Christian apologists before him, Tolkien, Lewis, and Chesterton, he too tried to give a reason for the hope that’s within us; and, in that, he succeeded, wonderfully so.

Always in a Hurry

June 2, 2013

Haste is our enemy. It puts us under stress, raises our blood pressure, makes us impatient, renders us more vulnerable to accidents and, most seriously of all, blinds us to the needs of others. Haste is normally not a virtue, irrespective of the goodness of the thing towards which we are hurrying.

In 1970, Princeton University did some research with seminary students to determine whether being committed to helping others in fact made a real difference in a practical situation. They set up this scenario: They would interview a seminarian in an office and, as the interview was ending, ask that seminarian to immediately walk over to a designated classroom across the campus to give a talk. But they always put a tight timeline between when the interview ended and when the seminarian was supposed to appear in the classroom, forcing the seminarian to hurry. On the way to the talk, each seminarian encountered an actor playing a distressed person (akin to the Good Samaritan scene in the gospels). The test was to see whether or not the seminarian would stop and help. What was the result?

One would guess that, being seminarians committed to service, these individuals might be more likely to stop than most other people. But that wasn’t the case. Being seminarians seemed to have no effect on their behavior in this situation. Only one thing did: They were prone to stop and help or to not stop and help mostly on the basis of whether they were in a hurry or not. If they were pressured for time, they didn’t stop; if they were not pressured for time, they were more likely to stop.

From this experiment its authors drew several conclusions: First, that morality becomes a luxury as the speed of our daily lives increases; and, second, that because of time pressures we tend not to see a given situation as a moral one. In essence, the more in a hurry we are, the less likely we are to stop and help someone else in need. Haste and hurry, perhaps more than anything else, prevent us from being good Samaritans.

We know this from our own experience. Our struggle to give proper time to family, prayer, and helping others has mainly to do with time. We’re invariably too busy, too pressured, too hurried, too-driven, to stop and help. A writer that I know confesses that when she comes to die what she will regret most about her life is not the times she broke a commandment, but the many times she stepped over her own children on her way to her den to write. Along similar lines, we tend to blame secular ideology for so much of the breakdown of the family in our society today when, in fact, perhaps the biggest strain of all on the family is the pressure that comes from the workplace that has us under constant pressure, forever in a hurry, and daily stepping over our children because of the pressures of work.

I know this all too well, of course, from my own experience. I am forever pressured, forever in a hurry, forever over-extended, and forever stepping over all kinds of things that call for my attention on my way to work. As a priest, I can rationalize this by pointing to the importance of the ministry. Ministry is meant to conscript us beyond our own agenda, but deeper down, I know that much of this is a rationalization. Sometimes too I rationalize my busyness and hurry by taking consolation in the fact that I came to be this way legitimately. It’s in my genes. Both my father and my mother exhibited a similar struggle. They were wonderful, moral, and loving parents, but they were often over-extended. Responding to too many demands is a mixed virtue.

It’s no accident that virtually all of the classical spiritual writers, writing without the benefit of the Princeton study, warn about the dangers of overwork. Indeed, the dangers of haste and hurry are already written into the very first page of scripture where God invites us to make sure to keep proper Sabbath. When we are in a hurry we see little beyond our own agenda.

The positive side to haste and hurry is that they are, perhaps, the opposite of acedia. The driven-person who is always in a hurry at least isn’t constantly struggling to get through the morning to the lunch hour. She always has a purpose. As well, haste and hurry can help make for a productive individual who is affirmed and admired for what he does, even as he is stepping over his own children to get to his workplace. I know this too: I get a lot of affirmation for my work, even as I have to admit that pressure and hurry prevent me much of the time from being a Good Samaritan.

Haste makes waste, so goes the saying. It also makes for a spiritual and a human blindness that can severely limit our compassion.

Ordinary Time

May 26, 2013

In a marvelous little book entitled, The Music of Silence, David Steindl-Rast highlights how each hour of the day has its own special light and its own particular mood and how we are more attentive to the present moment when we recognize and honor these “special angels” lurking inside each hour. He’s right. Every hour of the day and every season of the year have something special to give us, but often times we cannot make ourselves present to meet that gift.

We grasp this more easily for special seasons of the year. Even though we are sometimes unable to be very attentive to a season like Christmas or Easter because of various pressures and distractions, we know that these seasons are special and that there are “angels” inside them that are asking to be met. We know what it means when someone says: “This year I was just too tired and pressured to get into the Christmas spirit. I just missed Christmas this year!”

And this isn’t just true for special seasons like Christmas and Easter. It’s true too, perhaps especially true, for the season we call Ordinary Time. Each year the church calendar sets aside more than thirty weeks for what it calls “Ordinary Time”, a season within which we are supposed to meet the angels of routine, regularity, domesticity, predictability, and ordinariness. Like seasons of high feast, this season too is meant to bring a special richness into our lives.

But it’s easy to miss both that season and its intent. The term “Ordinary Time” sounds bland to us, even as we unconsciously long for precisely what it is meant to bring. We have precious little “ordinary time” in our lives. As our lives grow more pressured, more tired, and more restless, perhaps more than anything else we long for “ordinary time”, quiet, routine, solitude, and space away from the hectic pace of life. For many of us the very expression, “ordinary time”, draws forth a sigh along with the question: “What’s that? When did I last have ‘ordinary time’ in my life?” For many of us “ordinary time” means mostly hurry and pressure, “the rat race”, “the treadmill”.

Many things in our lives conspire against “ordinary time”; not just the busyness that robs us of leisure, but also the heartaches, the obsessions, the loss of health, or the other interruptions to the ordinary that make a mockery of normal routine and rhythm and rob us of even the sense of “ordinary time”. That’s the bane of adulthood.

Many of us, I suspect, remember the opposite as being true for us when we were children. I remember as a child often being bored. I longed almost always for a distraction, for someone to visit our home, for special seasons to celebrate (birthdays, Christmas, New Year’s, Easter), for most anything to shake up the normal routine of “ordinary time”. But that’s because time moves so slowly for a child. When you’re seven years old, one year constitutes one-seventh of your life. That’s a long time. In mid-life and beyond, one year is a tiny fraction of your life and so time speeds up – so much so in fact that, at a point, you also sometimes begin to long for special occasions to be over with, for visitors to go home, and for distractions to disappear so that you can return to a more ordinary rhythm in your life. Routine might be boring, but we sleep a lot better when our lives are being visited by the angels of routine and the ordinary.

Today there’s a rich literature in both secular and religious circles that speaks of the difficulties of being attentive to the present moment, of meeting, as Richard Rohr puts it, “the naked now”, or what David Steindl-Rast calls, “the angels of the hour”. The literature varies greatly in content and intent, but it agrees on one point: It’s extremely difficult to be attentive to the present moment, to be truly inside the present. It’s not easy to live inside “ordinary time”.

There’s a Chinese expression that functions both as a blessing and a curse. You make this wish for someone: May you live in interesting times! As children, had someone wished that on us it would have meant a blessing; our lives then were replete with routine and the ordinary. For a child time moves slowly. Most children have enough of ordinary time.

However, as adults, for most of us, that wish is probably more curse than blessing: The pressures, heartaches, illnesses, losses, demands, and seemly perpetual interruptions that beset our lives, though perhaps not normally recognized as “interesting times”, are indeed the antithesis of routine, regularity, domesticity, predictability, and ordinariness. And they deprive us of “ordinary time”.

The church challenges us to be attentive to the various seasons of the year: Advent, Lent, Christmas, Easter, Ascension, and Pentecost. Today, I submit, it needs to challenge us particularly to be attentive to “ordinary time”. Our failure to be attentive here is perhaps our greatest liturgical shortcoming.

Our Fundamental Option

May 19, 2013

Several years ago, at a conference that I was attending the keynote speaker challenged his audience in this way: All of us, he pointed out, are members of various communities: we live in families, are part of church congregations, have colleagues with whom we work, have a circle of friends, and are part of a larger civic community. In every one of these there will come a time when we will get hurt, when we will not be honored, when we will be taken for granted, and treated unfairly. All of us will get hurt. That is a given. However, and this was his challenge, how we handle that hurt, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of our lives and determine what kind of person we are going to be.

Suffering and humiliation find us all, and in full measure, but how we respond to them will determine both the level of our maturity and what kind of person we are. Suffering and humiliation will either soften our hearts or harden our souls. The dynamic works this way:

There is no depth of soul without suffering. Human experience has long ago taught us this. We attain depth primarily through suffering, especially through the kind of suffering that is also humiliating. If anyone of us were to ask ourselves the question: What has given me depth? What has opened me to deeper perception and deeper understanding? Almost invariably the answer would be one of which we would be ashamed to speak: we were bullied as a child, we were abused in some way, something within our physical appearance makes us feel inferior, we speak with an accent, we are always somehow the outsider, we have a weight problem, we are socially awkward, the list goes on, but the truth is always the same: To the extent that we have depth we have also been humiliated, the two are inextricably connected.

But depth is not all of a kind. Humiliation makes us deep, but it can make us deep in very different ways: It can make us deep in understanding, empathy, and forgiveness or it can make us deep in resentment, bitterness, and vengeance. The young men who shot their classmates in Columbine and the young man who indiscriminately gunned down students at Virginia Tech University had, no doubt, suffered more than their share of humiliation in life and that had made them deep. Sadly, in their case, it made them deep in anger, bitterness, and murder.

We see the opposite in Jesus in how he faces his crucifixion. Crucifixion, as we know, was designed by the Romans as capital punishment; but they had more than mere capital punishment in mind. Crucifixion was also designed to do two other things: to inflict the optimal amount of pain that it was possible for a person to absorb and to utterly and publicly humiliate the one undergoing it.

As Jesus prepares to face his crucifixion and the shameful humiliation within it, he cringes before the challenge and he asks God whether there is another way of getting to the depth of Easter Sunday without having to undergo the humiliation of Good Friday. Eventually, but only after sweating blood, does he accept that there is no other way than to undergo the humiliation of crucifixion. But we get the real lesson only if we really understand what was at stake in Jesus’ choice here. The agonizing choice that he is making is not the choice: Do I submit to death or do I invoke divine power and walk free? He was condemned to death and felt as helpless as would any other human in that situation. Invoking divine power or not invoking it as a means of escape was not the issue about which he was anguishing. The issue was not whether to die or not die. It was about how to die. Jesus’ choice was this: Do I die in bitterness or in love? Do I die in hardness of heart or softness of soul? Do I die in resentment or in forgiveness?

We know which way he chose. His humiliation drove him to extreme depths, but these were depths of empathy, love, and forgiveness.

That is the issue that is perennially at stake in terms of our own maturity and generativity: In our humiliations, do we give ourselves over to bitterness or love, resentment or forgiveness, hardness of heart or softness of soul? And we have to make that choice daily: Every time we find ourselves shamed, ignored, taken for granted, belittled, unjustly attacked, abused, or slandered we stand between resentment and forgiveness, bitterness and love. Which of these we chose will determine both our maturity and our happiness.

And, ultimately, for all of us, as was the case with Jesus, we will have to face this choice on the ultimate playing field: In the face of our earthly diminishment and death will we choose to let go and die with a cold heart or a warm soul?

The Wages of Celibacy

May 12, 2013

Recently an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled, The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, is fair. Mostly he asks a lot of hard, necessary questions. Looking at the various sexual scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic priesthood in the past number of years, Bruni suggests that it’s time to re-examine celibacy with an honest and courageous eye and ask ourselves whether its downside outweighs its potential benefits. Bruni, in fact, doesn’t weigh-in definitively on this question; he only points out that celibacy, as a vowed lifestyle, runs more risks than are normally admitted. Near the end his column he writes: “The celibate culture runs the risk of stunting [sexual] development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?”

That’s not an irreverent question, but a necessary one, one we need to have the courage to face: Is celibacy, in fact, abnormal to the human condition? Does it run the risk of stunting sexual development?

Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what celibacy was like. I suspect his answer will come as a surprise to pious ears because he virtually endorses Bruni’s position. He responds: “Celibacy is hell! You live in a loneliness that God himself has condemned when he said: ‘It is not good to be alone!'” However, with that being admitted, Merton immediately goes on to say that just because celibacy is not the normal human condition willed by the Creator doesn’t mean that it cannot be wonderfully generative and fruitful and that perhaps its unique fruitfulness is tied to how extraordinary and abnormal it is.

What Merton is saying, in essence, is that celibacy is abnormal and dooms you to live in a state not been willed by the Creator; but, despite and perhaps because of that abnormality, it can be deeply generative, both for the one living it and for those around him or her.

I know this to be true, as do countless others, because I have been deeply nurtured, as a Christian and as a human being, by the lives of vowed celibates, by numerous priests, sisters, and brothers whose lives have touched my own and whose “abnormality” served precisely to make them wonderfully fruitful.

Moreover, abnormality can have its own attraction: As a young priest, I served as a spiritual director to a young man who was discerning whether to join our order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, or whether to propose marriage to a young woman. It was an agonizing decision for him; he wanted both. And his discernment, while perhaps somewhat overly romantic in terms of his fantasy of both options, was at the same time uncommonly mature. Here (in words to this effect) is how he described his dilemma:

I am the oldest in my family and we lived in a rural area. When I was fifteen years old, one evening, just before supper, my dad, still a young man, had a heart attack. There were no ambulances to call. We bundled him up in the car and my mother sat in the back seat with him and held him, while I, a scared teenager, drove the car enroute to the hospital some 15 miles away. My dad died before we reached the hospital. As tragic as this was, there was an element of beauty in it. My dad died in my mother’s arms. That tragic beauty branded my soul. In my mind, in my fantasy, that’s how I have always wanted to die – in the arms of my wife. And so my major hesitation about entering the Oblates and moving towards priesthood is celibacy. If I become a priest, I won’t die in any human arms. I’ll die as celibates do!

Then one day, in prayer, trying to discern all of this, I had another realization: Jesus didn’t die in the arms of a spouse; he died differently, lonely and alone. I’ve always had a thing about the loneliness of celibates and have always been drawn to people like Soren Kierkegaard, Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Jean Vanier, and Daniel Berrigan, who don’t die in the arms of a spouse. There’s a real beauty in that way of dying too!

Bruni is right in warning that celibacy is abnormal and fraught with dangers. It does run the risk of stunting sexual development and especially of downplaying a fundamental and perhaps irresistible human connection. One of the fundamental anthropological dogmas that scripture teaches us is contained the story of God creating our first parents and his pronouncement: It is not good (and it is dangerous) for the man to be alone! Celibacy does condemn one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned, but it’s a loneliness too within which Jesus gave himself over to us in a death that’s perhaps the most generative in human history.

Boldness with God

May 5, 2013

Some years ago, a woman shared this story at a workshop. She had a six year-old son whom she had conscientiously schooled in prayer. Among other things, she made him kneel beside his bed every night and say aloud a number of prayers, ending with an invocation to “bless mummy, daddy, grandma, and grandpa”. One night, shortly after he had started school, she took him to his room to hear his prayers and to tuck him in for the night. But when it came time for him to kneel by his bedside and recite his prayers, he refused and crawled into bed instead. His mother asked him: “What’s the matter? Don’t you pray anymore?” There was remarkable calm in his reply: “No,” he said, “I don’t pray anymore. The sister teaching us at school told us that we are not supposed to pray, she said that we are supposed to talk to God … and tonight I am tired and have nothing to say!”

This is reminiscent of a scriptural story about King David. One morning, returning from battle with some of his soldiers, he arrived at the temple, tired and hungry, but the only food available consisted of consecrated loaves of bread in the temple, which by Jewish religious law, were to be eaten only by the priests in sacred ritual. David asked the high priest for the loaves and was met by the objection that these loaves were not to be eaten as ordinary food. David replied that he was aware of that, but, given the situation and given that as King he was empowered to make decisions for God on earth, he ordered the priest to give him the loaves.

Biblical tradition commends David for that. He is praised for doing a good thing, for knowing God well enough to know that God would want that bread to be used for exceptional purposes in that situation. He is praised for having a mature faith, for not being unduly legalistic, for not abdicating sound judgment because of fear and piety, and for knowing God well enough to know that God is not a law to be obeyed but rather a loving presence that counsels us and imbues us with life and energy. Jesus, too, praises David for this action when his own disciples are chastised for shelling corn on the Sabbath. He refers to David’s action of feeding his hungry soldiers with the consecrated loaves as an act of deeper understanding, that is, in doing this seemingly sacrilegious act, David was in fact demonstrating an intimacy with God that his critics, because of fear, betrayed themselves as lacking.

One of the things that characterizes mature friendship is a familiarity and intimacy that makes for a robust relationship rather than a fearful one. In a mature relationship there is no place for fearful piety or false reverence. Rather with a close friend we are bold because we know the other’s mind, fully trust the other, and are at a level of relationship where we are unafraid to ask for things, can be shamelessly self-disclosing, are given to playfulness and teasing, and are (like King David) able to responsibly interpret the other’s mind. When we are in a mature relationship with someone we are comfortable and at ease with that person.

That is also one of the qualities of a mature faith and a mature relationship with God. According to John of the Cross, the deeper we move into a relationship with God and the more mature our faith becomes, the more bold we will become with God. Like King David and like the young boy just described, fearful piety will be replaced by a healthy familiarity. And this will not be the kind of familiarity that breeds contempt; that takes the other for granted. Rather it will be the kind of familiarity that is grounded in intimacy which, while remaining respectful and never taking the other for granted, is more at ease and playful than fearful and pious in that other’s presence.

But, if that is true, then what are we to make of the fact that scripture tells us “the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom” and the fact that religious tradition has always deemed piety a virtue? Do fear and piety militate against “boldness” with God? Was King David wrong in his bold interpretation of God’s will.

There is a religious fear that is healthy and there is a piety that is healthy, but neither of these is exhibited in a relationship that is fearful, legalistic, scrupulous, over-pious, or over-serious. Healthy religious fear and healthy piety manifest themselves in a relationship that is robust.

We should not let ourselves be fooled by fear and piety. Fear easily masks itself as religious reverence. Piety can easily pass itself off as religious depth. But genuine intimacy unmasks both. A healthy relationship is robust, bold, and is characterized by lack of fear, ease, playfulness, and humor. And that is particularly true of our relationship with God.