An Addiction to Comfort

July 7, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Raissa and Jacques Maritain and the New Evangelization

June 30, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Contemplative Sound Bytes

June 23, 2013

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

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

Here are some of Finley’s perspectives:

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

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

And not least:

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

Struggling for Our Father’s Blessing

June 16, 2013

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

One of those was a piece entitled, Infant Sorrow:

My mother groaned! my father wept.

Into this dangerous world I leapt:

Helpless, naked, piping loud:

Life a fiend hid in a cloud.

Struggling in my father’s hands,

Striving against my swaddling bands,

Bound and weary I thought it best

To sulk upon my mother’s breast.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Andrew Greeley – RIP

June 9, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Always in a Hurry

June 2, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ordinary Time

May 26, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Fundamental Option

May 19, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Wages of Celibacy

May 12, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Boldness with God

May 5, 2013

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guidelines for the Long Haul – Revisited

April 28, 2013

Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a column entitled, Guidelines for the Long Haul. Revisiting it recently, I was encouraged that my principles haven’t swayed during the past quarter-century, only taken on more nuance. I still recommend those same commandments, nostalgically revisited, somewhat redacted, but fully re-endorsed:

1) Be grateful…never look a gift universe in the mouth!

Resist pessimism and false guilt. To be a saint is to be warmed by gratitude, nothing less. The highest compliment you can give a gift-giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift. You owe it to your Creator to appreciate things, to be as happy as you can. Life is meant to be more than a test. Add this to your daily prayer: Give us today our daily bread, and help us to enjoy it without guilt.

2) Don’t be naive about God… God will settle for not less than everything!

God doesn’t want part of your life; God wants it all. Distrust all talk about the consolation of religion. Faith puts a rope around you and takes you to where you’d rather not go. Accept that virtue will give you a constant reminder of what you’ve missed out on. Take this Daniel Berrigan counsel to the bank: “Before you get serious about Jesus, consider carefully how good you’re going to look on wood!”

3) Walk forward when possible…or at least try to get one foot in front of the next!

See what you see, it’s enough to walk by. Expect long periods of confusion. Let ordinary life be enough for you. It doesn’t have to be interesting all the time. Take consolation in the fact that Jesus cried, saints sinned, Peter betrayed. Be as morally stubborn as a mule; the only thing that shatters dreams is compromise. Start over often. Nobody is old in God’s eyes; nothing is too late in terms of conversion. Know that there are two kinds of darkness you can enter: the fearful darkness of paranoia, which brings sadness, and the fetal darkness of conversion, which brings life.

4) Pray…that God will hang on to you!

Distrust popularity polls. Trust prayer. Prayer grounds you in something deeper. Be willing to die a little to be with God since God died to be with you. Let your heart become the place where the tears of God and the tears of God’s children merge into the tears of hope.

5) Love…if a life is large enough for love, it’s large enough!

Create a space for love in your life. Consciously cultivate it. Know that nothing can be loved too much. Things can only be loved in the wrong way. Say to those you love: “You, at least, shall not die!” Know there are only two potential tragedies in life: Not to love and not to tell those you love that you love them.

6) Accept what you are…and fear not, you are inadequate!

Accept the human condition. Only God is whole. If you’re weak, alone, without confidence, and without answers, say so; then listen. Accept the torture of a life of inadequate self-expression. There are many kinds of martyrdom. Recognize your own brand. If you die for a good reason, it’s something you can live with!

7) Don’t mummify…let go, so as not to be pushed!

Accept daily deaths. Don’t seize life as a possession. Possessiveness kills enjoyment, kills relationships, and eventually kills you. Let go gracefully. Name your deaths, claim your births, mourn your losses, let the old ascend, and receive the spirit for the life you’re actually living. Banish restless daydreams; they torture you. Keep in mind that it’s difficult to distinguish a moment of dying from a moment of birth.

8) Refuse to take things seriously…call yourself a fool regularly!

God’s laughter fills the emptiness of our tombs. Keep in mind that it’s easy to be heavy, hard to be light. Laughter is a direct insult to the realism, dignity, and austerity of hell. Don’t confuse sneering with laughter. Laugh with people, not at them. Laugh and give yourself over to silliness; craziness helps too, as does a good night’s sleep.

9) Stay within the family … you’re on a group outing!

Don’t journey alone. Resist the temptation to be spiritual, but not religious. Be “born again”, regularly into community. Accept that there are strings attached. The journey includes family, church, country, and the whole human race. Don’t be seduced by the lure of absolute freedom. Freedom and meaning lie in obedience to community: community humbles, deflates the ego, puts you into purgatory, and eventually into heaven.

10) Don’t be afraid to go soft…redemption lies in tears!

All of Jesus’ teaching can be put into one word: Surrender. If you will not have a softening of the heart you will eventually have a softening of the brain. Hardness pulls downward. Softness rises. A bird can soar because a bird is soft. A stone sinks because it’s hard. Fragility is force. Sensitivity defines soul. Tenderness defines love. Tears are salt water, the water of our origins.

A Call for Less Self-Protection

April 21, 2013

Today, among many of us churchgoers, there is growing-propensity to self-protect rather than risk crucifixion for the world. We are well intentioned in this, but, good intentions notwithstanding, our actions are the opposite of Jesus. He loved the world enough to let himself be crucified rather than self-protect.

We see this propensity for self-protection everywhere inside our churches today, albeit it is not without cause. In most parts of the world, the church is under siege in some fashion, either because of active persecution or simply because it’s being disrespected, unfairly perceived, and unfairly treated. Secularized culture carries inside itself a certain anti-Christian and anti-ecclesial bias and many church-people feel that this bias is the last prejudice that is still intellectually acceptable in our culture.

And this isn’t simple paranoia. There’s some substance to it. Secular culture has it virtues, but it is also clearly somewhat immature and grandiose in its relationship to its Judeo-Christian heritage. Not unlike an adolescent feeling his own strength for the first time, it can be overly critical and bitterly unfair to its own parentage. Adolescents are often very hard on their parents and secular culture is often very hard on its Judeo-Christian heritage.

Given this fact, I can understand why so many church leaders and concerned church members today are becoming more and more defensive. However, while I understand the instinct behind this, I cannot agree with the response, namely, our propensity to circle the wagons, batten down the hatches, and see our culture as an enemy against which we need to protect ourselves rather than as the world that Jesus died for and which we are called to love and save. Why is self-protection wrong, given all the reasons that seem to call for it?

What’s wrong with our propensity to self-protect is that it’s the exact opposite of what Jesus did. We see this everywhere in the Gospels. Jesus’ disciples were forever trying to protect him from various groups whom they deemed unworthy of his presence and Jesus was forever clear that he didn’t need or want to be protected: “Let them come to me!” was one of his mantras.

Moreover, and more importantly, his disciples were also trying to protect him against persons and things they deemed as a threat to him. Thus they tried to talk him out of accepting his crucifixion and, indeed, at the time of his arrest, tried to protect him through violent resistance, the sword. As he was being arrested, they asked him: Should we use force to protect you? Should we strike with the sword? Sadly, they didn’t wait for his answer and Peter, trying to protect him, did strike with the sword, cutting off the ear of one of the men arresting Jesus.

What was Jesus’ response to this effort at protection? We have his words: No more of this! But we don’t have the tone of those words. Were they spoken in anger, as sharp reprimand? Were they spoken in frustration, recognizing that Peter, the rock, the future pope, had so badly misunderstood his message? Or, were they spoken in that sad tone a mother uses when she tells her children to stop fighting even as the resignation in her voice betrays the fact that she knows they never will? Whatever the tone, the message is clear: His first followers didn’t understand one of the central things about their master: Jesus had spent his entire ministry healing people, including healing diseased ears so that people might hear again, and on his last night on earth the leader of his apostles cuts off the ear of someone in an attempt to protect him.

The lesson is in the irony: Jesus’ healing of ears had revealed his longing for dialogue and Peter’s severing of an ear had revealed his itch to cut off dialogue. Jesus’ whole person and message had incarnated and preached vulnerability and radical acceptance of crucifixion rather than self-protection and his followers, at the first show of hostility, had responded with violence and self-protection.

That lesson shouldn’t be lost: Everything about Jesus speaks of vulnerability rather than self-protection. He was born in a manger, a feeding trough, a place where animals come to eat, and he ends up on a table, “flesh for the life of the world”, to be eaten up by the world; the first words out of his mouth call for metanoia, the opposite of paranoia; and in the end he gives himself over to crucifixion rather than to self-protection. That was Jesus’ response to a world that grossly misunderstood him and violently mistreated him. He opened is arms in vulnerability rather than closed his fists in self-defense.

And in that’s how, ideally, we should respond to the world when it’s unfair to us. Unlike Peter, who instinctually struck with the sword without remembering Jesus’ message, we shouldn’t let an outside threat erase what was so central to Jesus’ person and teaching and respond in a manner antithetical to the Gospel, hostility for hostility, immaturity for immaturity.

Stone Jars and Softer Containers

April 14, 2013

In his novel, A Month of Sundays, John Updike presents us with a character, a lapsed Vicar, who, though struggling himself with faith, is extremely critical of his young assistant whose faith and theology he judges to be fluffy and lightweight. He describes his young assistant this way:

His is a “limp-wristed theology, a perfectly custardly confection of Jungian-Reichian soma-mysticism swimming in soupy caramel of Tillichic, Jasperian, Bultmannish blather, all served up in a dime-store dish of his gutless generation’s give-away Gemutlichkeit.” None of that for the lapsed Vicar, of course, that mixture offends his sense of aesthetics. For him, it’s: “Let’s have it in its original stony jars or not at all!”

That’s sounds brilliant and clever, and it is. But is it wise or is it merely another of those things that sounds brilliant but doesn’t necessarily compute into wisdom? I confess that there was a time in my life when I would have grabbed kind of statement and run with it. I too nursed that attitude: Let’s have it in the old jars, stone, solid. Don’t give me some fluffy Gemutlichkeit where you sit around in small groups, holding hands and affirming each other!

But, as I age, I grow more skeptical of my younger self and of some of the wisdom of my generation. We were fed a lot out of stone jars and our religion, our politics, our economics, and our attitudes reflect that. We were taught to be tough, pure in doctrine, uncompromising, loyal to your own, to not accept anything that we didn’t earn, and to be proud of the hard knocks we had to endure. We were taught too to have an innate distrust for anything that appeared soft, unearned, and as not coming from a solid looking jar.

And that had its upside: For the most part, we grew up strong, independent, tough, entrepreneurial, not looking for any unearned handouts to fatten our wallets or our self-esteem. We didn’t believe in affirmative action, in holding hands, or in saying “I love you” very often. We learned to dig deep inside ourselves and to harness our own strengths. Stone jars nourish that way.

But our tough skins, our uncompromising character, and our pride in never taking anything we didn’t earn also has a dark underbelly. We tend to be aggressive and competitive in ways that make it hard for us to ever bless anyone, particularly the young or those who are more talented than we are. We’re overly-prone to jealousy, don’t easily let go of center stage, and we can be narrow and too-easily given over to false patriotism, racism, sexism, and other types of arrogance and superiority.

Recently, on the radio, I listened to an interview of a young woman, herself already a mother, who shared how she, daily, needs to phone her own mother and have her mother affirm her and how she hopes to affirm her own young child in that same manner. My spontaneous reaction was negative: How saccharine! What a pampered generation! A grown woman still needing that kind of affirmation from her mother! I didn’t grow up like that! My generation didn’t grow up like that! What soft sentimentality!

But, for all our distrust of sentimentality, we didn’t turn out all that well, when all is said and done. For all our toughness and disdain of sentimentality, we find it hard to affirm and bless others.

And so I look at those lines from Updike (keeping in mind that these are thoughts put into the mind of a fictional character that don’t necessarily reflect Updike’s own attitude) with a critical eye. I acknowledge they’re brilliant and I respect the instinct behind them. They’re ultimately rooted in a refined taste, in a desire for proper aesthetics, and in a concomitant disdain for any sloppiness and sentimentality that would try to pass themselves off as depth. We can all appreciate why Updike’s Vicar might feel that way because we would all feel a similar indignation were a cheap soft-drink trying to peddle itself as a vintage wine. All of us have our own favorite stony jars.

But, with that being acknowledged, we need to admit as well that Tillich, Jasper, Jung, and mysticism hardly make for a cheap, over-sweet soup. And, more importantly, we also need to admit that among those persons who feel the need to meet in small groups and hold hands and among those young people who need to phone their mothers daily for affirmation, we often find a warm embodiment of God’s love that is not nearly as evident within some of our more-elite circles where we prefer our nourishment from stonier jars, ache for a higher aesthetics, feel offended that standards seem to be coming down, long for a purer orthodoxy, and, like Updike’s Vicar, cast a bitter judgment on our colleagues.

Embittered moralizing, no matter how valid the indignation enflaming it, takes many forms and is always recognizable in its lack of warmth and its inability to bless others.

Struggling with Secularity

April 7, 2013

We live in a highly secularized culture. Generally this draws one of three reactions from Christians struggling to live out faith in this context:

First, a growing number of Christians of all denominations see secularity more as an enemy of faith and the churches than as an ally. In their view, secularity is a threat to religion and morality and is, in the name of freedom and open-mindedness, slowly suffocating Christian freedom. For them, secularity contains within itself a certain tyranny of relativism which can aptly be labeled “post-Christian” and “a culture of death”.

A second group simply accommodates itself to the culture without a lot of critical reflection either way. They adjust the faith to the culture and the culture to the faith as suits their situation. For them, faith becomes largely a cultural heritage, an ethos more than a religion, though this is not as much of a blind sell-out as it first appears. Deeper struggles go on beneath, prompted not just by the soul’s perennial questions but also by the Judeo-Christian genes inside the DNA of both the culture and the individual. So these individuals selectively take values from both the Judeo-Christian tradition and the secular culture and blend them into a new marriage, seemingly without a lot of religious anxiety.

A third group has a more nuanced approach: Persons such as Charles Taylor, Louis Dupre, Kathleen Norris, and, a generation earlier, Karl Rahner, see secularity as a mixed bag, a culture of both life and death, a culture that in some ways is a progression in and a purification of moral and religious values, even as it is losing ground morally and religiously in other ways. Of major importance in this view is the idea that secular culture, secularity, is the child of Judaism and Christianity. Judeo-Christianity, at least for the most part, gave birth to Rene Descartes, the principles of the Enlightenment, the French revolution, the Scottish revolution, the America revolution, and thus to democracy, the separation of church and state, and the principle that so much undergirds secularity, namely, that we agree to organize public life on the principle of rational consensus rather than on the basis of divine authority (allowing, of course, for divine authority to influence rational consensus).

In this view, the opposite of secularity is not the church, but the Taliban or any view that holds that public life should be governed by divine authority irrespective of rational consensus. Secularity then is more our child than our enemy. However, if that is true, then why is secularity often so bitter and overly-critical in its attitude towards the Christian churches? This can seem like a contradiction, but secularity can be anti-Christian for the same reason that adolescents can be bitter and overly-critical towards their own parents, namely, adolescence is often immature and grandiose. But an immature, grandiose adolescent isn’t a bad person, just an unfinished one.

Viewing secularity from this perspective, it is equally important to highlight both the moral and religious ground that has been lost in secularity as well as the moral and religious ground that has been gained. Both can be seen, for example, by looking a highly secularized culture like the Netherlands: On the hand, it is very weak in church attendance and in explicit Christian practice. Along with this there is the tolerance and legalization of abortion, drugs, prostitution, and pornography. On the other hand, they are a society that takes care of its poor better than any other society in the world and one that is recognized for its emphasis on generosity, peace, and the equality of women. These are not minor religious and moral achievements.

Where do I stand? Mostly with this third group and its belief that secularity is not our enemy but our child and that it carries inside itself both highly generative streams of life and asphyxiating rivulets of death. On the one hand, I draw a lot of my life and joy from its creativity, color, exuberance, and generative energy, often times against my own Germanic-propensity for greyness and acedia. I am also uplifted on a regular basis by the real generosity and genuine goodness that I find in most people I meet. Importantly too, I reap its stunning benefits – freedom, protection of my rights, privacy, opportunity for education, wonderful medical care, information technology, access to information, wide cultural and recreational opportunities, clean water, plentiful food, and, not least, the freedom to practice my faith and religion.

On the negative side, I recognize too its elements of death: The tolerance of abortion, the marginalization of the poor, the itch for euthanasia, lingering racism, widespread sexual irresponsibility, a growing addiction to pornography, and an ever-growing trivialization and superficiality. As reality television becomes more indicative of our culture, I begin to despair more for its depth.

As an adult child of Rene Descartes, I breathe in secularity, a very mixed air, pure and polluted; and I find myself torn between hope and fear, comfortable but uneasy, defending secularity even as I am critical of it.

Lucky Sevens

March 31, 2013

From the bible to casinos, seven is often considered to be a magical, perfect, and lucky number. Jesus told us to forgive those who hurt us seventy times seven times. Clearly he meant that to mean infinity. Genesis speaks of the seven days of creation, scripture speaks of seven archangels, and the Book of Revelation speaks of the Seven Seals of Revelation. The bible is saturated with the number seven. It would take several pages just to list the references.

What is true for the Christian bible is paralleled elsewhere: There are seven lucky gods of good fortune in Japanese mythology, and the Buddhists believe that Buddha walked seven steps at his birth. In Judaism, there are seven days of mourning, the weekly Torah is divided into seven special sections, there are seven blessings recited at a Jewish wedding, the Jewish bride and groom are feted for seven days, and there are seven primary emotions attributed to God. In the Islamic tradition, there are seven heavens and seven earths, seven fires in hell, seven doors to heaven, and seven doors to hell.

And then there are these facts connected to the number seven: There are seven continents in the world, seven colors to the rainbow, seven days in a week, seven basic musical notes, seven stars in the Big Dipper, and seven celestial bodies visible to the naked eye. Seven is the calling code for telephones in Russia. In North America, major-leagues baseball, basketball, and hockey all decide their final championships through a seven-game series, and seven is the jersey number chosen by many elite athletes, including Mickey Mantle. Casinos too like the number seven. Lining up a row of sevens is the route to many a jackpot.

Jesus, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, nature, the measurement of our weeks, Russian telephone codes, major league sports, Mickey Mantle, and casinos – now that’s an audience! It’s no accident that there are lots of lists of “sevens”:

For example: we have all kinds of theological and church-lists of seven:

Christian theology speaks of the Seven Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Wisdom, Understanding, Council, Fortitude, Knowledge, Piety, and Fear of the Lord. Of Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Envy, Wrath, Sloth (Acedia), Greed, Gluttony, and Lust; and of Seven Corresponding Heavenly Virtues: Humility, Kindness, Patience, Diligence, Charity, Temperance, and Chastity. It also speaks of the Seven Last Words of Jesus: “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do”; “Truly I say to you, today you will be with me in paradise”; “Father, into your hands, I commend my spirit”; “Woman, this is your son … This is your mother”; “My God, my God, why have you forsake me?”; “I thirst”; “It is finished”.

Mohandas Gandhi spoke of Seven Social Sins: Politics without principle, wealth without work, commerce without morality, pleasure without conscience, education without character, science without humanity, and worship without sacrifice. To this, Roman Catholics have added Seven Themes of Catholic Social Teaching: The life and dignity of the human person; the call to family, community, and participation; rights and responsibilities; the option for the poor and vulnerable; the dignity of work and the rights of workers; solidarity; and care for God’s creation.

Roman Catholics have Seven Sacraments: baptism, confirmation, Eucharist, reconciliation, healing of the sick, holy orders, and matrimony. Seven Corporal Works of Mercy: Feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked, shelter the homeless, visit the sick, visit the imprisoned, and bury the dead. And Seven Spiritual Works of Mercy: Instruct the ignorant, counsel the doubtful, admonish sinners, bear wrongs patiently, forgive offenses willingly, comfort the afflicted, and pray for the living and the dead. Moreover, Roman Catholics venerate the Seven Sorrows of Mary: The prophecy of Simeon, the flight into Egypt, the loss of the child Jesus in the temple, meeting Jesus on the way of Calvary, Jesus dying on the cross, receiving the body of Jesus in her arms, placing the body of Jesus into the tomb.

And of course, not least, we have the famous Seven Wonders of the World, though now there are arguments as to what precisely constitutes that list: Some argue for the original list, The Seven Wonders of the Ancient World, others propose The Seven Wonders of the Modern World, some speak of The Seven Wonders of the Contemporary World, and still others affirm that the real wonders of this world are constructed by nature and they list instead The Seven Natural Wonders of this World.

So what’s the true list? What, in fact, constitutes the Seven Wonders of the World?

Recently this story appeared on the internet: A teacher asked her students to name The Seven Wonders of the World. A number of students, with the help no doubt of electronic gadgets, quickly produced the various lists. One young girl, however, without any electronic research, produced her own list. The Seven Wonders of the World, she submitted, are: seeing, feeling, tasting, smelling, touching, breathing, and loving. That list, I believe, trumps all other lists and includes all the sacraments.

The Resurrection as Revealing God as Redeemer, not as Rescuer

March 24, 2013

Before you get serious about Jesus, first consider how good you are going to look on wood!

That’s a line from Daniel Berrigan that rightly warns us that faith in Jesus and the resurrection won’t save us from humiliation, pain, and death in this life. Faith isn’t meant to do that. Jesus doesn’t grant special exemptions to his friends, no more than God granted special exemptions to Jesus. We see this everywhere in the Gospels, though most clearly in Jesus’ resurrection. To understand this, it’s helpful to compare Jesus’ resurrection to what Jesus himself does in raising Lazarus from the dead.

The Lazarus story begs a lot of questions. John, the evangelist, tells us the story: He begins by pointing out that Lazarus and his sisters, Martha and Mary, were very close friends of Jesus. Hence, we are understandably taken aback by Jesus’ seeming lack of response to Lazarus’ illness and the request to come and heal him. Here’s the story:

Lazarus’ sisters, Martha and Mary, sent word to Jesus that “the man you love is ill” with the implied request that Jesus should come and heal him. But Jesus’ reaction is curious. He doesn’t rush off immediately to try to heal his close friend. Instead he remains where he is for two days longer while his friend dies. Then, after Lazarus has died, he sets off to visit him. As he approaches the village where Lazarus has died, he is met by Martha and then, later, by Mary. Each, in turn, asks him the question: “Why?” Why, since you loved this man, did you not come to save him from death? Indeed, Mary’s question implies even more: “Why?” Why is it that God invariably seems absent when bad things happen to good people? Why doesn’t God rescue his loved ones and save them from pain and death?

Jesus doesn’t offer any theoretical apologia in response. Instead he asks where they have laid the body, lets them take him there, sees the burial site, weeps in sorrow, and then raises his dead friend back to life. So why did he let him die in the first place? The story begs that question: Why? Why didn’t Jesus rush down to save Lazarus since he loved him?

The answer to that question teaches a very important lesson about Jesus, God, and faith, namely, that God is not a God who ordinarily rescues us, but is rather a God who redeems us. God doesn’t ordinarily intervene to save us from humiliation, pain, and death; rather he redeems humiliation, pain, and death after the fact.

Simply put, Jesus treats Lazarus exactly the same way as God, the Father, treats Jesus: Jesus is deeply and intimately loved by his Father and yet his Father doesn’t rescue him from humiliation, pain, and death. In his lowest hour, when he is humiliated, suffering, and dying on the cross, Jesus is jeered by the crowd with the challenge: “If God is your father, let him rescue you!” But there’s no rescue. Instead Jesus dies inside the humiliation and pain. God raises him up only after his death.

This is one of the key revelations inside the resurrection: We have a redeeming, not a rescuing, God.

Indeed, the story of the raising of Lazarus in John’s Gospel was meant to answer a burning question inside the first generation of Christians: They had known Jesus in the flesh, had been intimate friends with him, had seen him heal people and raise people from the dead, so why was he letting them die? Why wasn’t Jesus rescuing them?

It took the early Christians some time to grasp that Jesus doesn’t ordinarily give special exemptions to his friends, no more than God gave special exemptions to Jesus. So, like us, they struggled with the fact that someone can have a deep, genuine faith, be deeply loved by God, and still have to suffer humiliation, pain, and death like everyone else. God didn’t spare Jesus from suffering and death, and Jesus doesn’t spare us from them.

That is one of the key revelations inside of the resurrection and is the one we perhaps most misunderstand. We are forever predicating our faith on, and preaching, a rescuing God, a God who promises special exemptions to those of genuine faith: Have a genuine faith in Jesus, and you will be spared from life’s humiliations and pains! Have a genuine faith in Jesus, and prosperity will come your way! Believe in the resurrection, and rainbows will surround your life!

Would it were so! But Jesus never promised us rescue, exemptions, immunity from cancer, or escape from death. He promised rather that, in the end, there will be redemption, vindication, immunity from suffering, and eternal life. But that’s in the end; meantime, in the early and intermediate chapters of our lives, there will be the same kinds of humiliation, pain, and death that everyone else suffers.

The death and resurrection of Jesus reveal a redeeming, not a rescuing, God.