There has always been an innate and healthy tension between theology and catechesis, between what’s happening in theology departments in universities and the church pew. Theologians and bishops are often not each other’s favorite people. And that’s understandable. Why?

Theology and catechesis have different purposes, even as both are valid and both are needed.

Catechesis, in essence, is an effort to teach the fundamentals of the faith. Indeed, in its original Greek, catechesis means “echoing”. Thus catechesis is not so much an effort to understand the faith as it is to simply “echo” it, namely, to transmit it as clearly as possible. A catechist then is not trying to prove the foundations of the faith, although he or she may be trying to give a certain apologetics or rationale for it. Catechesis does not search for intellectual difficulties or seeming contradictions in the doctrines it teaches, its intent is rather to teach those truths and dogmas to those for whom they are still relatively new. And its audience is precisely those for whom its truths are still relatively new, namely, the neophyte, the religious novice.

Catechesis is therefore, by definition, an essentially conservative endeavor. Its aim is not so much to stretch minds to new places as it is to teach the basics, to impart principles that help hold minds together. Catechesis tries to build a foundation inside of person, not stretch that foundation.

Theology, on the other hand, does not simply try to echo the faith, it seeks to understand it and articulate it in a language that makes it palatable to a questioning and critical mind. For more than 900 years, for the most part, Christianity has accepted St. Anselm’s definition of theology as “faith seeking understanding”.  If Anselm is right, then the task of theology is to critically examine the Christian faith, both in terms of what faith itself is and in terms of what is contained in our Christian dogmas, so as to produce a vision of both faith and dogma that can handle all the questions that can be thrown at them both from inside the church and from outside skeptics.

Hence, the audience for theology differs from the audience for catechesis. Theology has three, ideal, audiences: church-goers who are already catechized and are seeking a deeper intellectual grasp of their faith, the academy of learning (universities, colleges, the arts, intellectual centers) where faith and dogma are often questioned, and the culture and world as a whole where Christianity has to justify itself and justify itself intellectually.

Theology therefore is an essentially liberal endeavor. Why? We say theology is liberal for the same reason that we never speak of a “Conservative Arts College”.  That would be an oxymoron. Institutions of higher learning, universities, schools of art, and the like are, as Cardinal Newman classically articulated in his book on education, The Idea of a University, by definition, liberal, namely, they are intended to stretch people, to make them deal with difficult and critical questions, to bring them to a level of maturity within their discipline (faith and dogma, in this case) so as to leave them unafraid to face whatever issues arise, and to help them to be leaders in their field. Catechesis seeks to produce an orthodox disciple; theology seeks to produce an informed leader.

The church needs both. It needs to emphasize both catechesis and theology, focusing both on those who need to learn the essentials of their faith and on those who are trying to make intellectual sense of their faith. There is, admittedly, an innate tension between the two. The pew invariably feels that theologians are too liberal; while theologians tend to look wearily at the pew, concerned that the hard questions are not being addressed. However it should never be a question of either/or; but always both/and. The church needs people who are solidly catechized, who know clearly the essentials of their faith, even as it needs people who have tried to articulate that faith at a more critical level and have stared without fear or denial into the fierce storm of intellectual objections to, ecclesial angers at, and every kind of protest against the faith.

Orthodoxy is important, but it’s meant to be as much a trampoline from which to spring as it’s meant to be a container that holds you. For example, the word “seminary” comes from the Latin, seminarium, meaning a “greenhouse”. A greenhouse isn’t a place to grow an oak tree. It’s a place to put young, tender, seedling plants that need protection from the harsher outdoor climate. It’s a place to protect a young plant or to grow a very tender plant, but it isn’t a place to grow huge tree.

The relationship between catechesis and theology might be characterized in the same way. Catechesis is the seminary, a necessary place to start and protect young and overly-tender plants, whereas theology is a less-protected place where you ultimately grow the oak tree.

Many of us, I suspect, have heard snippets of an interview that Pope Francis did for a series of Jesuit publications, including the USA magazine, America, where, among other things, he suggested that we might be wise to not always emphasize the moral issues around abortion, gay marriage, and contraception in our conversations. That’s, of course, the phrase that most caught the attention of the media, but the whole interview is remarkable for its candor and includes a whole range of thoughts that help give us a sense of how Francis intends to color his papacy. Here are a few of his thoughts, in his own words:

·        On why our pastoral focus needs to be on healing and not on reiterating certain moral concerns

“I see clearly that the thing the church needs most today is the ability to heal wounds and to warm the hearts of the faithful; it needs nearness, proximity. I see the church as a field hospital after battle. It is useless to ask an injured person if he has high cholesterol and about the levels of his blood sugars! You have to heal his wounds. Then we can talk about something else. … 

During the return flight from Rio de Janeiro I said that if a homosexual person is of good will and is in search of God, I am no one to judge.  By saying this, I said what the catechism says. Religion has the right to express its opinion in the service of the people, but God in creation has set us free: it is not possible to interfere spiritually in the life of a person. A person once asked me, in a provocative manner, if I approved of homosexuality. I replied with another question: ‘Tell me: when God looks at a gay person, does he endorse the existence of this person with love, or reject and condemn this person?’  … I also consider the situation of a woman with a failed marriage in her past and who also had an abortion. Then this woman remarries, and is now happy and has five children. That abortion is her past weighs heavily on her conscience and she sincerely regrets it. She would like to move forward in her Christian life. What is the confessor to do?  We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage and the use of contraceptive methods. This is not possible. I have not spoken much about these things, and I have been reprimanded for that. But when we speak about these issues, we have to talk about them in context. The teaching of the church, for that matter, is clear and I am a son of the church, but it is not necessary to talk about these issues all the time.”

·        On women in the church

“Women are asking deep questions that must be addressed. … We must therefore investigate further the role of women in the church. … The challenge today is this: to think about the specific place of women also in those places where the authority of the church is exercised for various areas of the church.”

·        On what it means to think with the church

“All the faithful, considered as a whole, are infallible in matters of belief, and the people display this infallibility in believing, through a supernatural sense of the faith of all the people walking together. This is what I understand today as ‘thinking with the church’. … We should not even think, therefore, that ‘thinking with the church’ means only thinking with the hierarchy of the church.”

·        On manifesting a wide Catholicity

“This church with which we should be thinking is the home of all, not a small chapel that can hold only a small group of selected people. We must not reduce the bosom of the universal church to a nest protecting mediocrity.

·        On Benedict’s decision to allow a wider use of the Tridentine Mass

“I think the decision was prudent and motivated by the desire to help people who have this sensitivity. What is worrying, though, is the risk of the ideologization of the Vetus Ordo [the decree authorizing a limited use of the Latin mass], to its exploitation.”

·        On the temptation to defensively circle the wagons in face of a growing secularity

“If the Christian is a restorationist, a legalist, if he wants everything clear and safe, then he will find nothing. Tradition and memory of the past must help us to have the courage to open up new areas to God. Those who today always look for disciplinarian solutions, those who long for an exaggerated doctrinal ‘security’, those who stubbornly try to recover a past that no longer exists – they have a static and inner-directed view of things. In this way faith becomes an ideology among other ideologies. … It is amazing to see the denunciations of lack of orthodoxy that come to Rome.”

Perhaps it’s best not to add much commentary to this. His words speak for themselves and, obviously, for him.

It’s hard not to fake humility; yet, seemingly, we need to do just that.

For instance, some of the sayings of Jesus on humility seem to raise more questions than they answer. For example, in the parable of taking seats at the table, Jesus suggests that we should not move towards the highest place, lest somebody more important comes along and we will be humiliated by being asked to move lower. Rather, he says, move towards the lowest place so that the host might come and ask us to move higher, and in this way our very humility will be showcased before the other guests. Whoever humbles himself will be exalted, and whoever exalts himself will be humbled. On the surface, this would seem like little more than a strategy to get honored while all the while looking humble.

The biblical invitation to not consider oneself better than others begs the question: Can someone who is living an essentially moral and generous life really believe that he or she is no better than someone who is uncaring, selfish, or even malicious in how he or she relates to God, others, and the world? Do we really believe that we are no better than others?  Did Mother Teresa really believe in her heart that she was no better than anyone else? Could she really look at herself and say: “I’m just as great a sinner as there is on this planet?” Or, did she, and must we, in the end, feign humility because we don’t really believe that we’re no better than what’s worst on this planet?

And so we can ask ourselves: Is our belief that we are no better than others, often times, really only a pose, something we have to affirm about ourselves but which doesn’t stand the full test of honesty?  Further, isn’t our humility, in the end, really not just a subtle strategy to be honored in a deeper, more-respected way? Who wants to be seen as proud and full of himself? And, can we ever be humble without then taking pride in that? Do we really believe that we are no better than anyone else?

I’m partial to an insight John Shea once offered in trying to answer this. Looking at some diary entries by Bede Griffiths, where Griffiths openly confesses that he is no better than anyone else, Shea asks whether given the quality of Griffiths’ moral and spiritual life and given the depth and compassion he developed through years of prayer and discipline could Griffiths really have believed that he was no better than anyone else? Could he really not compare himself with others? Is it really possible for any of us not to compare ourselves with others?

Shea suggests that the key to those questions lies in looking closely at what Griffiths means when he asserts that he is no better than anyone else. When Griffiths makes those assertions he is not focused on his, or anyone else’s, moral actions. At the level of moral actions, it is humanly impossible not to make comparisons. We all make comparisons, even when we deny that we do so. But the roots of humility do not lie in where we stand, above or below, others in terms of our moral actions.

When Griffiths sincerely sees himself and believes himself to be no better than anyone else in this world, he is looking rather at his core, at the depth of his heart, where he sees that he, like everyone else in this world, is vulnerable, alone, fearful, naked, self-centered, inadequate, helpless, contingent, just as much in need of God and others as absolutely every other person on this earth, and, thus, no better than anyone else. 

Nobody gives himself life, sustains himself in life, or gives himself salvation. We are all equally inadequate and helpless here. Our contingency levels us all, from Mother Teresa to Hitler, and the key to genuine humility lies in recognizing that. Indeed, the more morally and psychologically sensitive we are, the more likely we are to recognize our neediness and our solidarity in weakness with everyone else. When a Bede Griffiths makes the claim that he is no better than anyone else and that he stands in need of God’s mercy just as much as every sinner on earth, he is not faking humility, but he is not making moral comparisons either. He is speaking out of something deeper, namely, the fact that ultimately we are all equally helpless to give ourselves life.

The invitation to humility is a clear and constant echo inside of Christian spirituality, from Jesus, through Bede Griffiths, through Mother Teresa, through every spiritual guide worthy of the name: Become like a little child. Take the lowest place. Never consider yourself better than anyone else. Know that you need God’s mercy as much as the greatest sinner on earth. However we don’t come to this by comparing ourselves to others, but by recognizing how utterly naked we all stand outside of God’s mercy.

God writes straight with crooked lines. That axiom sounds clever, but is there real truth or depth to it?  Can good ever really arise out of evil? Do love, truth, and justice ever work out through hatred, lies, and injustice? Do crooked lines really straighten?

The answer to those questions will invariably be negative when we look at the surface of things; but faith is never predicated on how things look on the surface. Faith, as Jim Wallis is fond of saying, doesn’t base itself upon the evidence. Rather faith looks at the word of God and then waits for the evidence to change. It also sees that deeper, under the surface, error is often at the service of truth.

We see a poignant expression of this in a poem, Meditation, written by Raissa Maritain. The poem, powerful in itself, becomes more powerful as an expression of faith when we know its background. This wasn’t a simple expression of faith in some abstract dark time. The dark times were particularly real to the poet.

Raissa, a convert to Roman Catholicism from Judaism, had always retained a deep love for and connection to her Jewish roots. She described herself as a Christian with a Jewish heart. Now, in 1936 when she wrote this poem, she was witnessing the ascent of Adolph Hitler and Nazism in Europe, was hearing first-hand of the accounts of Jews, some of whom were personal friends, being killed in Europe, especially in Poland, and she felt herself, a Jew, threatened and was acquiring the necessary papers to flee France for the United States. Her world was crumpling, her friends were dying, and she was scurrying for her personal safety. Evil was on the ascent and all the trusted political and social powers seemed to be either crushed by it or acquiescing to it. Within that crushing context, she wrote this poem:

Darkness from below, darkness from the heights;

Beneath the Archangel’s black wing

The divine plan unfolds.

Infinite paradox of the creation:

Eternity is being built with time,

And good-imperishable- with evil’s assistance.

Mankind trudges along toward justice

Through the lazy curves of iniquity,

Today’s error is at the service

Of truth to come;

The bit of good,

Seemingly powerless to vanquish

The misfortune of days,

Keeps on being the seed

Of Love’s everlasting tree.

With seventy years of hindsight, we can see that her faith was well founded.  In spite of evil, God does continue to work, God’s plan does continue to unfold, and our very misfortunes become part of the growth of love, truth, and justice. But this is mostly not evident on the surface of things because, there, we are forever too focused on the big movements of power, politically, socially, economically, and religiously. We are forever looking at the big players and trying to read God’s movements there.

However, as Maritain’s poem makes evident, God’s providence often, perhaps mostly, occurs outside of what’s happening visibly inside the seemingly important political, social, and ecclesial structures. That’s why often God’s providence is not very evident. It’s hidden because God often bypasses the places where we’re looking.

When Maritain affirms that the divine plan unfolds in hidden places, she’s echoing how the Evangelist, Luke, introduces John the Baptist in his Gospel. He introduces John by, first, naming all the important political and religious figures of the time (Tiberius, Pontius Pilate, Herod, Philip, Lysanias, Annas, and Caiaphas) and then telling us that the word of God bypassed them all and went instead to John, an obscure eccentric, in the desert.  How shocking that is would become apparent to us if a religious writer today were to name all the important world leaders and all the important church officials of our day, including the pope, and then point out that God’s word is bypassing them and going out instead to an unknown monk inside some obscure monastery. But we would find that hard to believe, do find that hard to believe, and that incredulity mostly blocks us from seeing where God’s providence is working at a deeper place.

Our world, Teilhard de Chardin says, is an immense groping, an immense search that can only progress at the cost of many failures and much human suffering. But, in his view, our sufferings aren’t useless. In our suffering, he affirms, we help pay the price of universal progress and triumph. Our sufferings, whatever their nature, are noble. They help bring about progress in the very world that crushes and sacrifices them.

The divine plan often unfolds under a dark wing, today’s error is at the service of tomorrow’s truth, and God’s providence often bypasses the structures of power. And so our faith needs to look deeper than what’s happening on the surface, our hope needs to ground itself on something beyond what’s on the daily news, and our charity needs to be less fearful and less paranoid. God is always alive and working underneath. Nothing will be lost of our efforts and sufferings, even of our failure and errors.

The famed and feisty psychologist, Fritz Perls, was once asked by a well-meaning Christian if he was saved. He responded by saying, I am still trying to figure out how to be spent!  His retort echoes a line from Theresa of Avila who states that once we reach the highest mansion of maturity we are left with only one question: How can I be helpful? They’re right, and their insight is a needed challenge. We too easily and too frequently get the wrong focus apposite both Christian discipleship and human maturity. 

The real question in our lives, at least during our adult years, shouldn’t be: What must I do to go to heaven? Or, what must I do to avoid going to hell? Not that concerns about our own salvation are unimportant or that heaven and hell are unreal, the point is rather that our deepest motivation has to be to do things for others and not for ourselves. For the main part, our own salvation will take care of itself if we focus on the needs of others. Granted, both scripture and what’s best in human wisdom do say that we may not be so overly-focused on helping others that we neglect our own needs, but both also make it clear, as does the Prayer of St. Francis, that taking care of ourselves is paradoxical and we that receive what we need for our own lives primarily by giving it away to others.

And so our primary concern shouldn’t be with the questions: Am I saved? Or even with the question: “Have I found Jesus as my personal savior?” Again, this needs qualification: A personal and affective relationship to Jesus is not, for a Christian, any Christian, an unimportant or negotiable thing. Indeed in Gospels, particularly in the Gospel of John, a deep, affective, personal relationship to Jesus is the central component within Christian discipleship and is an end in itself. We don’t, at the end of the day, develop a relationship to Jesus so that we have the energy and proper compass out of which to minister to others, though that is very much part of it. Rather we develop an intimate relationship with Jesus because that is an end in itself, the ultimate reason we become Christian.

In affirming that, the traditions of Evangelical Christians and of Roman Catholic devotional practice are correct. Nothing trumps a personal, affective relationship to Jesus and outside of that connection we aren’t in fact real disciples of Christ. However Jesus, himself, mitigates any fundamentalism or one-sided devotional understanding of this by linking intimacy to him with the other half of the great commandment: Love God and love neighbor. Simply put, we show our love for God, our intimacy with Jesus, by laying down our lives for our neighbor. Christian discipleship is never only about Jesus and me, even as it is always still about Jesus and me.

A priest friend of mine who teaches at a secular university was once asked by one of his students: “Father, have you met Jesus Christ?” His answer, no doubt, reflected some fatigue: “Yes,” he replied, “I have met Jesus Christ, and it messed-up my whole life! There are days when I wish I hadn’t met him!” What his answer, in its irreverence, correctly highlights is that meeting Jesus implies a lot more than a private, romantic, affective, and safe encounter with him and that meeting Jesus is more than having a private feeling in the soul that we are loved by and secure with God.

A non-negotiable part of meeting Jesus means being sent out, and not just alone on some private spiritual quest or individualized ministry. It means being called into community, into a church, and then sent out with others, “in pairs”, to, as Nikos Kazantzakis poetically puts it, “walk in Christ’s bloody footsteps”, that is, to walk inside of mess and failure, misunderstanding and crucifixion, confusion and tiredness, darkness and God’s seeming silence, wondering sometimes if you will indeed find a stone upon which to lay your head.  Intimacy with Jesus mostly doesn’t look like intimacy in a Hollywood film or like intimacy as defined in the manuals of privatized spirituality. It looks more like the intimacy that Jesus experienced with his Father as he walked resolutely towards Jerusalem, against the advice of his intimate circle, swallowing hard, knowing what awaited him there. The Jesuit volunteer corps summarize their discipleship in these words: “Ruined for life!” That wonderfully grasps both the intimacy and what it means.

Theresa of Avila suggests that we’re mature in following Christ if our questions and concerns no longer have a self-focus: Am I saved? Have I met Jesus Christ? Do I love Jesus enough? These questions remain and remain valid; but they’re not meant to be our main focus. Our real question needs to be: How can I be helpful?

Fritz Perls simply puts it more graphically: How can I be spent? During our adult lives that trumps the question: Have I been saved?

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.

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.

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.