The Slow, Imperceptible March of Goodness

September 8, 2013

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 Value of Atheists

September 1, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Have I Been Saved?

August 25, 2013

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?

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.