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.

Praying In a Crisis

March 17, 2013

How do we lift our darkest, most depressed, most lonely moments up to God? How can we pray when we are most deeply alone, helpless, and our whole world seems to be collapsing?

We can learn from Jesus and how he prayed the night before his death in the Garden of Gethsemane, in his darkest hour: It was late at night; he had just had his last meal with his closest friends, and he had one hour to prepare to face his death. His humanity breaks through and Jesus finds himself prostrate on the ground, begging for escape. Here’s how the Gospels describe it:

Jesus withdrew from his disciples, about a stone’s throw away, and threw himself to the ground and prayed. “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you, if you are willing, take this cup away from me. Nevertheless, let your will be done, not mine.” And he came back and found his disciples sleeping. So he withdrew again and in anguish prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood. When he rose from prayer he went to the disciples and found them sleeping for sheer grief. And he said to them, “Why are you asleep? Get up and pray not to be put to the test.” And he prayed a third time, and an angel came and strengthened him, and he rose to face with strength what lay before him.

This prayer by Jesus in Gethsemane can serve as a model for how we can pray when we’re in crisis. Looking at the prayer, we can highlight seven elements, each of which has something to teach us in terms of how to pray in our darkest times:

1. The prayer issues forth from his loneliness: The Gospels highlight this, both in terms of telling us that the prayer takes place in a garden (the archetypal place for love) and in that Jesus is “a stone’s throw away” from his loved ones who cannot be present to what he is undergoing. In our deepest crises, we are always painfully alone, a stone’s throw away from others. Deep prayer should issue from that place.

2. The prayer is one of great familiarity: He begins the prayer by calling his father “Abba”, the most familiar term possible, the phrase that a young child would use sitting on his or her father’s lap. In our darkest hours, we must be most familiar with God.

3. The prayer is one of complete honesty: Classically prayer is defined as “lifting mind and heart to God”. Jesus does this here, radically, in searing honesty. He asks God to take the suffering away, to give him escape. His humanity cringes before duty and he asks for escape. That’s honest prayer, true prayer.

4. The prayer is one of utter helplessness: He falls to the ground, prostrate, with no illusions about his own strength. His prayer contains the petition that if God is to do this through him, God needs to provide the strength for it.

5. The prayer is one of openness, despite personal resistance: Even as he cringes before what he is being asked to undergo and asks for escape, he still gives God the radical permission to enter his freedom. His prayer opens him to God’s will, if that is what’s ultimately being asked of him.

6. The prayer is one of repetition: He repeats the prayer several times, each time more earnestly, sweating blood, not just once, but several times over.

7. The prayer is one of transformation: Eventually an angel (divine strength) comes and fortifies him and he gives himself over to what he is being asked to undergo on the basis of a new strength that comes from beyond him. But that strength can only flow into him after he has, through helplessness, let go of his own strength. It is only after the desert has done its work on us that we are open to let God’s strength flow into us.

In his book, Stride Towards Freedom, Martin Luther King recounts how one night, after receiving a death threat, he panicked, gave into fear, and, not unlike Jesus in Gethsemane, literally collapsed to the floor in fear, loneliness, helplessness – and prayer. He confessed that his prayer that night was mostly a plea to God to let him find an honorable means of escape, but God asked something else of him. Here are his final words to God in that prayer:

“But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” Then he adds: “At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” An angel found him.

When we pray honestly, whatever our pain, an angel of God will always find us.

The Major Imperatives within Mature Discipleship

March 10, 2013

In his autobiography, Morris West suggests that at a certain age our lives simplify and we need have only three phrases left in our spiritual vocabulary: Thank you! Thank you! Thank you! He is right, if we understand fully what is implied in living out gratitude. Gratitude is the ultimate virtue, undergirding everything else, even love. It is synonymous with holiness.

Gratitude not only defines sanctity, it also defines maturity. We are mature to the degree that we are grateful. But what brings us there? What makes for a deeper human maturity? I would like to suggest ten major demands that reside inside both human and Christian maturity:

1. Be willing to carry more and more of life’s complexities with empathy: Few things in life, including our own hearts and motives, are black or white, either-or, simply good or simply bad. Maturity invites us to see, understand, and accept this complexity with empathy so that, like Jesus, we cry tears of understanding over our own troubled cities and our own complex hearts.

2. Transform jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred rather than give them back in kind: Any pain or tension that we do not transform we will retransmit. In the face of jealousy, anger, bitterness, and hatred we must be like water purifiers, holding the poisons and toxins inside of us and giving back just the pure water, rather than being like electrical cords that simply pass on the energy that flows through them.

3. Let suffering soften rather than harden our souls: Suffering and humiliation find us all, in full measure, but how we respond to them, with forgiveness or bitterness, will determine the level of our maturity and the color of our person. This is perhaps our ultimate moral test: Will my humiliations soften or harden my soul?

4. Forgive: In the end there is only one condition for entering heaven (and living inside human community), namely, forgiveness. Perhaps the greatest struggle we have in the second-half of our lives is to forgive: forgive those who have hurt us, forgive ourselves for our own shortcomings, and forgive God for seemingly hanging us out unfairly to dry in this world. The greatest moral imperative of all is not to die with a bitter, unforgiving heart.

5. Live in gratitude: To be a saint is to be fueled by gratitude, nothing more and nothing less. Let no one deceive you with the notion that a passion for truth, for church, or even for God can trump or bracket the non-negotiable imperative to be gracious always. Holiness is gratitude. Outside of gratitude we find ourselves doing many of the right things for the wrong reasons.

6. Bless more and curse less: We are mature when we define ourselves by what we are for rather than by what we are against and especially when, like Jesus, we are looking out at others and seeing them as blessed (“Blessed are you!”) rather than as cursed (“Who do you think you are!”). The capacity to praise more than to criticize defines maturity.

7. Live in an ever-greater transparency and honesty: We are as sick as our sickest secret, but we are also as healthy as we are honest. We need, as Martin Luther once put it, “to sin bravely and honestly”. Maturity does not mean that we are perfect or faultless, but that we are honest.

8. Pray both affectively and liturgically: The fuel we need to resource ourselves for gratitude and forgiveness does not lie in the strength of our own willpower, but in grace and community. We access that through prayer. We are mature to the degree that we open our own helplessness and invite in God’s strength and to the degree that we pray with others that the whole world will do the same thing.

9. Become ever-wider in your embrace: We grow in maturity to the degree that we define family (Who is my brother or sister?) in way that is ever-more ecumenical, interfaith, post-ideological, and non-discriminatory. We are mature only when we are compassionate as God is compassionate, namely, when our sun too shines those we like and those we do not. There comes a time when it is time to turn in our cherished moral placards for a basin and a towel.

10. Stand where you stand and let God protect you: In the end, we are all vulnerable, contingent, and helpless both to protect our loved ones and ourselves. We cannot guarantee life, safety, salvation, or forgiveness for ourselves or for those we love. Maturity depends upon accepting this with trust rather than anxiety. We can only do our best, whatever our place in life, wherever we stand, whatever our limits, whatever our shortcoming, and trust that this is enough, that if we die at our post, honest, doing our duty, God will do the rest.

God is a prodigiously-loving, fully-understanding, completely-empathic parent. We are mature and free of false anxiety to the degree that we grasp that and trust that truth.

Honoring An Abundant and Prodigal God

March 3, 2013

There’s a disturbing trend within our churches today. Simply put, we are seeing the embrace of our churches become less-and-less inclusive. More-and-more, our churches are demanding a purity and exclusivity not demanded by Jesus in Gospels.

Indeed the very word “inclusivity” is often glibly dismissed as being part of the “I am spiritual but not religious” ethos, as if being inclusive were some kind of light-weight, New-Age, thing rather than a central demand within Christian discipleship itself.

What does it mean to be inclusive? We can begin with the word “Catholic”: The opposite of being “Catholic” is not being “Protestant”. The opposite of “Catholic” is being narrow, exclusive, and overly selective in our embrace. The opposite of being “Catholic” is to define our faith-family too-narrowly. “Catholic” means wide, universal. It means incarnating the embrace of an abundant and prodigal God whose sun shines on all indiscriminately, the bad as well as the good. Jesus once defined this by saying: “In my father’s house there are many rooms.” God’s heart is wide, abundance, prodigal, and universally-embracing, a heart that takes care to pray for those “other sheep who are not of this fold”. To be “Catholic” is to imitate that.

In the Gospels we see that Jesus’ passion for inclusivity virtually always trumps his concern for purity and worthiness. He associates and dines with sinners without setting any prior moral conditions that have to be met to before those sinners are deemed worthy of his presence. His disciples, much like many good sincere church-people today, were forever trying to keep certain people away from him because they deemed them unworthy; but Jesus always protested that he didn’t need that kind of protection and that, indeed, he wanted them all to come to him: Let them come to me! Indeed, that is still Jesus’ call: Let them come to me, all of them!

We need to be more inclusive. I highlight this because today our faith families are shrinking and instead of us weeping empathically about this loss of wholeness we are more prone to be secretly gleeful about it: Good riddance: they weren’t real Christians anyway! Or, in the words of some Catholic commentators, they were Cafeteria-Catholics, picking and choosing which parts of the Gospel they like and turning a meaty Catholicism into Catholic-Light.

Such a judgment, however sincere and well intentioned, needs to operate under two huge caution flags: First, such a judgment leaves the person making it rather vulnerable. Who is a true, fully practicing Catholic? Several years ago, I was asked by a Roman Catholic School Board to write a definition of what it means to be a “practicing Catholic”. I agonized over the task, examined the classical working definitions for that, and eventually produced a bit of a formula. But I prefaced the definition with this preamble: Only Jesus and Mary were fully practicing Catholics. Everyone else, without a single exception, falls short. We are all Cafeteria-Catholics. We all fall short; all have shortcomings, and all live the Gospel somewhat selectively. To cite the most salient example: Many of us bear down more on church-going and private morality, to the neglect of the non-negotiable Gospel demand apposite justice; others simply reverse this. Who’s closer to Jesus? Who’s more of a Cafeteria-Catholic?

The answer to that question lies inside the secret realm of conscience. But what we do know is that none of us gets it fully right. All of us stand in need of God’s forgiveness and all of us stand in need of the patience of our ecclesial communities.

The second caution flag is this: The God that Jesus reveals to us is a God of infinite abundance. Inside God there is no scarcity, no stinginess, no sparing of mercy. As the parable of the Sower makes clear, this God scatters his seed indiscriminately on every kind of soil – bad soil, mediocre soil, good soil, excellent soil. God can do this because God’s love and mercy are limitlessness. God, it seems, never worries about someone receiving cheap, undeserved grace. As well, Jesus assures us that God is prodigal: Like the father of the prodigal son and his older brother, God embraces both the missteps of our immaturity as well as the bitterness and resentment within our maturity. Good religion needs to honor that.

Today, on both sides of the ideological divide, conservative or liberal alike, we need to remind ourselves of what it means to live under an abundant, prodigal, universally-embracing, and “Catholic” God. What it means, among other things of course, is a constant stretching of the heart to an ever-wider inclusivity. How wide are our hearts?

Exclusivity can mask itself as depth and as passion for truth; but it invariably reveals itself, in its inability to handle ambiguity and otherness, as rigidity and fear, as if God and Jesus needed our protection. More importantly, it often too reveals itself as lacking genuine empathy for those outside its own circle; and, in that, it fails to honor its own abundant and prodigal God.

Overcoming Anxiety

February 24, 2013

Anxiety, like all tensions, eats at us at various levels. More superficially, we worry about many things. Deep down though we are anxious in a way that colors most everything we do. So much of what motivates and drives us is an unconscious attempt to free ourselves from anxiety. We are forever nursing the hope that we can free ourselves from anxiety through achievement, success, financial security, fame, leaving a mark, and through power and sex. We nurse the secret belief that if we have the right combination of these our lives we will have the substance we need to feel secure and non-anxious.

But experience soon teaches us that these things, though good in themselves, are not our cure. Indeed they can, and often do, make us more anxious: As soon as we have financial security, we become anxious about protecting it; and as soon as we have power, we are constantly looking over our shoulders in fear about losing it. As well, success can quickly become a cancer because we have a congenital propensity to identify our self-worth with our achievements and this pressures us always to be doing something of importance for fear of no longer feeling worthwhile. And sex, unless it is experienced inside a truly committed and unconditional relationship, becomes a drug, with the same addictive quality and ineffectiveness as any other drug. Sex, like achievement and fame, will not quell the deep demons inside us.

We are forever trying to give ourselves wholeness, but we cannot. We cannot self-justify. We cannot make ourselves immortal. We cannot write our own names into heaven. Only love casts out anxiety and, indeed, only a certain kind of love can give us substance. Only God’s love can write our names into heaven. What’s the algebra here?

Some years ago, I went on a weeklong retreat directed by Fr. Robert Michel, a French-Canadian, Oblate missionary. He began the retreat with these words: “I want to make this a very simple retreat for you. I want to teach you how to pray in a particular way. I want to teach you how to pray so that in your prayer, sometime, perhaps not this week, perhaps not even this year, but sometime, you will open yourself so that in your deepest self you will hear God say to you: ‘I love you!’ Because before you hear this inside you, nothing will be enough for you. You’ll be searching for this and for that, running here and running there, trying every kind of thing, but nothing will ever be quite right. After you hear this from God, you will have substance; you will have found the thing you’ve been looking for so long. Only after you have heard these words will you finally be free of your anxiety.

In a culture too-easily given to false-sophistication, it can be tempting to dismiss his words as naïve, or over-pious, or sentimental; but what these words are inviting us to is, in essence, what Jesus invites us to in John’s Gospel.

As we know, in the Gospel of John, Jesus exhibits very little humanity. John’s Gospel depicts him as divine from the first page to the last. And, in that Gospel, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are an invitation: “What are you looking for?” The entire Gospel of John then tries to answer that question: What are we looking for? Throughout John’s Gospel, Jesus tells us that we are looking for many things: Living-water which quenches our deepest thirst and never needs to be drunk again, a truth that sets us free, a rebirth to something above, a light that shines eternally. But these images can seem abstract. What’s the real kernel inside them?

The Gospel of John eventually answers that a very clear way. Near the end of the Gospel (indeed this was probably the original end of John’s Gospel) we have that poignant, post-resurrection meeting between Jesus and Mary of Magdala. It takes place in a Garden, the archetypal place where love happens: Mary, carrying spices to embalm his dead body, goes searching for Jesus on Easter Sunday morning. She meets him, but doesn’t recognize him. Supposing him to be the gardener, she asks him where she might find the body of the dead Jesus. Jesus replies by repeating the question with which he opened the Gospel: “What are you looking for?” Then, before she can answer, he gives the deepest answer to that question: He pronounces her name in love: “Mary”. In that very-particularized affirmation of love (for which Robert Michel invites us to pray) he writes her name into heaven. He gives her substance, and he cures her of her anxiety.

Since love needs to be mutual, that affirmation has to be responded to in kind. And … in that lies the risk: As Simone Weil puts it: “Inner communion is good for the good and bad for the bad. God invites all the dammed into paradise, but for them it is hell.” God willing, for us it is heaven!

Anxiety

February 17, 2013

A friend of mine likes to jokingly pretend he’s the ultimate egoist and will occasionally crack this quip: “Life is hard because I have to deal with the magnitude me!” Ironically our ultimate struggle in life is exactly the opposite: We are forever dealing with the insubstantiality of me! We are forever fearful that we have no substance, nothing of lasting value, no immortality. We fear that we might ultimately disappear.

Jesus called this anxiety and frequently cautions us against giving into this fear. It’s interesting to note that, for Jesus, the opposite of faith is not doubt or atheism, but anxiety, a certain fear, a certain insecurity. What, more precisely, is this fear

At one level, Jesus makes it clear: We are too anxious, he tells us, about our physical needs, food, drink, clothing, and shelter. As well, we are too anxious about how we are perceived, about having a good name and about being respected in the community. We see this in his warning about how we are to imitate the lilies of the field in their trust in God and his multiple warnings about not doing things to be seen by others as being good. But we’re always anxious about these things, all of us, and our fear here is not necessarily unhealthy. Nature and God have programmed us to have these instincts, though Jesus invites us to move beyond them.

More deeply, beyond our anxiety for our physical needs and our good name, we nurse a much deeper fear. We’re fearful about our very substance. We’re fearful that, in the end, we are really only, as the author of Ecclesiastes puts it, vanity, vapor, something insubstantial blown away in the wind. That’s the ultimate anxiety and you see it already in animals, in their irrevocable and often violent drive to get into the gene pool, nature’s form of immortality. We have the same irrevocable (and sometimes violent) drive for immortality, to get into the gene pool. But, for us, that takes on multiple forms: Plant a tree. Have a child. Write a book. In essence, leave some indelible mark on this planet. Guarantee your own immortality. Make sure you can’t be forgotten.

We are always anxious about our substance and immortality and are always trying to create this for ourselves. But, as Jesus, often and gently, points out, we cannot do this for ourselves. No success, no monument, no fame, no tree, no child, and no book, will give ultimately still the anxiety for substance and immortality inside us. Only God can do that. We see one of Jesus’ gentle reminders of this in the Gospels when the disciples come back to him buoyed-up by the success of a mission and share with him the wonderful things they have done. He shares their joy, but then, in essence, gently reminds them: Real consolation does not lie in success, even if it’s for the Kingdom. Real consolation lies in knowing that our “names are written in heaven”, that God has each of us individually, lovingly, and irrevocably, locked into His radar screen. Real consolation lies in recognizing that we don’t have to create our own substance and immortality. God has already done this for us.

But because we are anxious and fearful we try, as St. Paul puts it, “to boast”, that is, to create for ourselves some immortal mark on this planet. Classical Protestant spirituality, following St. Paul, would say that we are forever attempting to “justify ourselves”, to write our own names in heaven, through our attempts to immortalize ourselves.

How do we ever move beyond this? Where can we find the trust to give up on fear and anxiety, especially to move beyond the ceaseless pressure inside us to create some kind of immortality for ourselves?

Only love casts our fear. And our deepest fear can only be cast out by the deepest love of all. To give up on anxiety and on our need to create substance and immortality for ourselves we need to know unconditional love. Unconditional love, whether it comes from God or from another person, gives us substance and immortality. Gabriel Marcel once said that to love another person is to say to him or her: You, at least, will never die!

But unconditional love, this side of eternity, is not easily found. God loves us unconditionally, but, most times, we are too wounded (emotionally, psychologically, and morally) to be able to existentially appropriate that. Simply put, it’s hard to believe that God loves us when it seems no one else does and we struggle to love ourselves. No wonder we are habitually anxious and forever trying to in some way earn love through some kind of measuring-up or standing-out.

So what’s the cure? What will cure our fear and anxiety is a deeper surrender to love, both in terms of our intimacy with those we love in this world and in terms of our intimacy with God. But that surrender requires taking a deep risk. What’s the risk?

To be continued.

What Does It Mean To Focus Our Attention On God?

February 10, 2013

Some years ago, I was at a religious conference where one of the speakers, widely known and respected for her work among the poor, made this comment: “I’m not a theologian, so I don’t know how this plays out theologically; but here’s the base from which I’m operating: I work with the poor. Partly I do this out of my humanity, out of natural compassion; but ultimately my motivation is Christ. I work with the poor because I’m a Christian. However I can go for two or three years on the streets and never mention Christ’s name because I believe that God is mature enough that He doesn’t demand to always be the center of our conscious attention.”

God doesn’t demand to always be the center of our conscious attention! Is that true? Clearly the statement needs some clarification and nuance. On the one hand, there’s a certain freeing-up inside of us that comes from hearing this said, given that most of the time God is not in fact the center or our conscious attention and, this side of eternity, will most likely never be. But, on the other hand, the consolation we feel in hearing this flies strongly in face of the clear challenge that comes to us from scripture, our churches, and spiritual writers warning us against losing ourselves in the ambitions, projects, anxieties, pleasures, and distractions of this world, of letting our focus on this life eclipse the wider horizon, God and eternity. Countless spiritual writers warn us that it’s dangerous to be so immersed in this world so as to lose sight of anything beyond. Jesus too warns us of this danger.

And yet all of us know a lot of people who seem so immersed in this life, in their marriages, their families, their jobs, in entertainment, in sports, and in their daily concerns that they don’t seem at all to have God as center of their conscious attention for any significant portion of their daily lives. Indeed, sometimes these people do not even attend church and often have very little in terms of a formal or private prayer in their lives.

But, and this is the seeming-anomaly, they’re good people, people whose lives radiate a basic (and sometimes very generous degree) of honesty, generosity, goodness, warmth, and healthy concern for others. Moreover they are often robust and witty, the ones you want to be next to at the dinner table, even as they seem to be living and dying merely as devoted children of this earth, not much given to abstraction or religion. A good family gathering, a win by the home team, a good meal or drink with a friend, and a healthy day spent working, are contemplation enough. Their default consciousness focuses on the things of this world, its joys and its sorrows. A shift in consciousness would need to occur for any explicit notion of God to enter their lives. For these people, good people for the most part, ordinary consciousness is mostly agnostic.

How bad is this? Does this dangerously shrink one’s horizons? How badly does a one-sided focus on the things of this life choke out the word of God or render it shallow and extraneous? Are we going to hell in droves because we can’t give God more of our conscious attention and because we can’t be more explicitly religious?

By their fruits you will know them! Jesus said that and it must be our criterion here: If people are living inside an honesty, generosity, goodness, warmth, health, solicitousness, intelligence, and wit that is life-giving, can they be much out of harmony with God? Moreover, we need to ask ourselves: If we are born into this world with such a powerful, innate gravitation towards the things of this earth, if our natural (default) consciousness wants to fix itself more upon matter than spirit, and this seems to be the case for most people, how then do we read the mind of our Creator? What divine intelligence is manifest within the natural instinct to give ourselves over to this life, even as we carry a faith that gives us a vision beyond this world?

Perhaps God is mature enough to not ask for, or want, our conscious attention most of the time. Perhaps God wants us to enjoy our time here, to enjoy the experience of love and friendship, of family and friends, of eating and drinking, and of (at least occasionally) seeing our favorite teams win a championship. Perhaps God wants us, in the famed-words of Yogi Berra, to sometimes just to sit back and enjoy the game! Perhaps God is like a blessing old grandparent; perhaps we pray in an inchoate way when we healthily enjoy the gift of this life; and perhaps there are less-conscious ways in which we can be aware of God.

Like the woman whom I quote above, I also don’t know how this all plays out theologically, but it needs to be said.

Prayer as Sanity and Balance

February 3, 2013

Our generative years are a marathon, not a sprint, and so it’s difficult to sustain graciousness, generosity, and patience through the tiredness, trials, and temptations that beset us through the years of our adult lives. All on our own, relying on willpower alone, we too often fatigue, get worn down, and compromise both our maturity and our discipleship. We need help from beyond, from somewhere even beyond the human supports that help bolster us. We need God’s help, strength from something beyond what’s human. We need prayer.

But too often we think of this in pious rather than realistic terms. Rarely do we grasp how much prayer is really a question of life and death for us. We need to pray not because God needs us to pray but because if we don’t pray we will never find any steadiness in our lives. Simply put, without prayer we will always be either too full of ourselves or too empty of energy, inflated or depressed. Why? What’s the anatomy of this?

Prayer, as it is understood in all its best traditions, Christian and other, is meant to do two things for us, both at the same time: Prayer is meant to connect us to divine energy, even as it makes us aware that this energy is not our own, that it comes from elsewhere, and that we may never identify with it. Genuine prayer, in effect, fills us with divine energy and tells us at the same time that this energy isn’t our own; that it works through us, but that it’s not us. To be healthy, we need both: If we lose connection to divine energy we drain of energy, depress, and feel empty. Conversely if we let divine energy flow into us but identify with it, somehow thinking that it is our own, we become grandiose, inflate with self-importance and arrogance, and become selfish and destructive.

Robert Moore offers a very helpful image to illustrate this, that of a small fighter-plane having to fuel-up inflight. We have all seen video footage of a small fighter-jet fueling-up while still in the air. Hovering above it is a mother-plane with a huge reserve of fuel. The little plane has to fly close enough to the mother-plane so that a nozzle from the mother-plane can connect with it so as to refill its fuel tank. If it doesn’t make this type of contact it runs out of fuel and soon crashes. Conversely, if it flies into the mother-plane, identifies with it, it goes up in flames.

Few images capture as astutely the importance of prayer in our lives. Without prayer, we will forever find ourselves vacillating between being too empty of energy or too full of ourselves. If we do not connect with divine energy we will run out of gas. If we do connect with divine energy but identify with it, we will destroy ourselves.

Deep prayer is what energizes us and grounds us, both at the same time. We see this, for example, in a person like Mother Teresa, who was bursting with creative energy but was always very clear that this energy did not come from her, but from God, and she was merely a humble human instrument. Lack of real prayer makes for two kinds of antithesis to Mother Teresa: On the one hand, it makes for a wonderfully talented and energetic man or woman who is full of creative energy, but is also full of grandiosity and ego; or, on the other hand, it makes for a man or woman who feels empty and flat and cannot radiate any positive energy. Without prayer we will forever be bouncing back and forth between grandiosity and depression.

Thus, unless I have real prayer in your life, if I’m sensitive, I will more than likely live inside a certain habitual depression, afraid that really accessing my energies and acting on them would lead others to think I’m full of myself. Since my sensitivity won’t allow that, I entomb many of my best energies on the unconscious premise that it’s better to be depressed than be accused of being an egoistic. But Jesus, himself, in his parable of the talents, warns us strongly about the price that’s to be paid for burying one’s talents, namely, emptiness, anger, and lack of delight in our lives. Often times, if we check beneath our angers and jealousies, we will find there a buried talent that’s bitter because it has been suppressed. Virtue at the cost of suppressing our energies leads to bitterness.

Conversely, if I don’t care if people think me an egotist and I don’t have real prayer in my life, I will let the divine energies flow freely through me, but I will identify with them as if they were my own, my talents, my gifts, and I will end up full of ego and grandiosity, with those around me wishing I was depressed!

Without prayer we will always be either too empty of energy or too full of ourselves.

Ecumenism – Our Neglected Mandate

January 27, 2013

While saying farewell the night before he died, Jesus told those with him that he “had other sheep that are not of this fold” and that those with him at that particular moment were not his only followers. Very importantly, he also said that he longed for unity with those others just as urgently and deeply as he longed for unity with those in the room with him.

Among other things, this means that no matter what our particular Christian denomination, we are not Christ’s only followers and that we have no more right to his love than those millions of others who are not of our own kind. Moreover, to be a disciple of Jesus means that we, like him, also have to hunger and pray for unity with those who are separated from us. Indeed the divisions among us as Christians, the fact that we are divided into more than a hundred separate denominations and the fact that, within these denominations, we are further bitterly divided by ideologies and live in distrust of each other, constitutes perhaps the biggest of all scandals that Christianity has given and continues to give to the world.

For the most part, despite considerable good will and genuine effort in recent years, we are still not praying for each other and reaching out to each other with any real heart. The relationship between Christian denominations today, and often inside of those denominations themselves, is characterized more by re-entrenchment than by openness, distrust than by trust, disrespect than by respect, demonization than by empathy, and lack of charity than by courtesy and graciousness. Sadly, too, more so than by ecumenical hunger and openness, our churches are characterized too much by a self-sufficiency and smugness that says: “We have the truth. We have no need of you!

But who are our real brothers and sisters as Christians? Is it those within our own particular denomination? Perhaps, though perhaps not! Several times during his ministry while Jesus was talking to a group of people, someone approached him and told him that his mother and his family were outside the circle of this particular group, wanting to talk to him. Jesus’ reply is far-reaching: In each case, he responds with a question: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” And he answers his own question by saying: “Those who hear and keep the word of God are mother, and brother, and sister to me.”

In a society where blood relationship meant everything, this statement is a stunning one. Blood may be thicker than water but, Jesus asserts, faith is thicker than blood. Faith is the real basis for family. It trumps biology. Moreover, without straining the logic, implied in this too is that faith also trumps denomination. Who is your real brother or sister as a Christian? Your fellow Roman Catholic? Your fellow Presbyterian? Your fellow Lutheran? Your fellow Baptist? Your fellow Evangelical? Your fellow Methodist? Your fellow Anglican or Episcopalian? Clearly, for Jesus, it is the person who most deeply hears the word of God and keeps it, irrespective of denomination. Christian discipleship is defined more by the heart than by a particular church membership card.

This makes for a non-negotiable mandate within our Christian discipleship: We need to radiate Jesus’ hunger for intimacy with all people of sincere faith and, to that end, our actions towards those outside our own religious circle must always be marked by respect, graciousness, and charity – and a genuine signal that we hunger for unity with them.

Genuine respect, graciousness, and charity can only be predicated on a humility that believes that our own church, whatever our denomination, does not have the whole truth, that we are not free of error, that we are not free of sin, and that we are not fully faithful to the gospel. All of us, all Christian churches, are journeying towards fullness, towards a full understanding of the truth, and towards a more radical and honest fidelity to what Jesus asks of us. None of us has arrived. All of us are journeying still towards where we are called.

Thus, our real ecumenical task, no matter our denomination, is not that of trying to win over converts or convince others that we are more right than they are. Our primary task is inner conversion within our own denomination. Our primary task is to try, as individuals and as churches, to be more faithful to the gospel. If we do that we will eventually come together, as one church, under Christ because as we all go deeper into the mystery of Christ and grow more deeply in our own intimacy with Jesus, we will (in the beautiful phrase of Avery Dulles) “progressively converge”, eventually meet around one center and one person, Jesus Christ.

Kenneth Cragg, after spending years as a Christian missionary to Islam, suggested it will take all the Christian churches to give full expression to the full Christ. Clearly all of us still need to stretch our hearts.

The Intelligence Inside of the Aging Process

January 20, 2013

What can God and nature have had in mind when they designed the aging process? Why is it that just when our mental prowess, our human maturity, and our emotional freedom are at their peak, the body begins to fall apart?

Our faith, of course, because it opens us to a perspective beyond our biological lives, sheds some light on these questions, though it doesn’t always give us a language within which to grasp more reflectively what is happening to us in the aging process. Sometimes a secular perspective can be helpful and that is the case here.

James Hillman, in a brilliant book on aging entitled, The Force of Character and Lasting Life, takes up these questions. What did God and nature have in mind when designing the aging process? He answers with a metaphor: The best wines have to be aged in cracked old barrels. The last years of our lives are meant to mellow the soul and most everything inside our biology conspires together to ensure that this happens. The soul must be properly aged before it leaves. There’s intelligence inside of life, he asserts, that intends aging just as it intends growth in youth. It’s a huge mistake to read the signs of aging as indications of dying rather than as initiations into another way of life. Each physical diminishment (from why we have to get up at night to go to the bathroom to why our skin sags and goes dry) is designed to mature the soul. And they do their work without our consent, relentlessly and ruthlessly.

The aging process, he asserts, eventually turns us all into monks and that, indeed, is its plan, just as it once pumped all those excessive hormones into our bodies to drive us out of our homes at puberty. And God again is in on this conspiracy. Aging isn’t always pleasant or easy; but there’s a rhyme and reason to the process. Aging deliteralizes biology. The soul finally gets to trump the body and it rises to the fore: “We can imagine aging as a transformation in beauty as much as in biology,” writes Hillman. “The old are like images on display that transpose biological life into imagination and art. The old become strikingly memorable, ancestral representations, characters in the play of civilization, each a unique, irreplaceable figure of value. Aging: an art form?”

Increasingly, as we age, our task is not productivity, but reflection, not utility, but character. In Hillman’s words: “Earlier years must focus on getting things done, while later years consider what was done and how.” The former is a function of generativity, we are meant to give our lives away; the latter is a function of dying, we are also meant to give our deaths away.

And the aging process raises a second series of questions: What value do the elderly have once their productive years are over? Indeed the same question might be asked of anyone who cannot be useful and productive in a practical sense: What is the value of someone living with Alzheimer’s? What is the value of people continuing to live on in palliative care when there is no chance of recovery or improvement and they have already slipped away from us mentally? What is the value of the life of a person who so mentally or physically challenged that by normal standards he or she cannot contribute anything?

Again, Hillman’s insights are a valuable supplement to the perspectives offered us through our faith. For Hillman, what aging and disability bring into the world is character. Not just their own. They help give character to the others. Thus, he writes: “Productivity is too narrow a measure of usefulness, disability too cramping a notion of helplessness. An old woman may be helpful simply as a figure valued for her character. Like a stone at the bottom of a riverbed, she may do nothing but stay still and hold her ground, but the river has to take her into account and alter its flow because of her. An older man by his sheer presence plays his part as a character in the drama of the family and neighborhood. He has to be considered, and patterns adjusted simply because he is there. His character brings particular qualities to every scene, adds intricacy and depth by representing the past and the dead. When all the elderly are removed to retirement communities, the river flows smoothly back home. No disruptive rocks. Less character too.”

Aging and disability need to be regarded aesthetically. We are culture that does everything it can to deny, delay, and disguise aging. We put our elders away into separate homes, away from mainstream life, tucked away, no disruptive rocks for us to deal with. We are also a culture that is beginning to talk more and more about euthanasia, defining value purely by utility. If Hillman is right, and he is, than we are paying a high price for this, we have less character and less color.

The Ineffability of God

January 13, 2013

Nicholas Lash, in a deeply insightful essay on God and unbelief, suggests that the God that atheists reject is often simply an idol of their own imaginations: “We need do no more than notice that most of our contemporaries still find it ‘obvious’ that atheism is not only possible, but widespread and that, both intellectually and ethically, it has much to commend it. This might be plausible if being an atheist were a matter of not believing that there exists ‘a person without a body’ who is ‘eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything’ and is ‘the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.’ If, however, by ‘God’ we mean the mystery, announced in Christ, breathing all things out of nothing into peace, then all things have to do with God in every move and fragment of their being, whether they notice this and suppose it to be so or not. Atheism, if it means deciding not to have anything to do with God, is thus self-contradictory and, if successful, self-destructive.”

Lash’s insight is, I believe, very important, not first and foremost for our dialogue with atheists, but for our understanding of our own faith. The first thing that Christianity defines dogmatically about God is that God is ineffable, that is, that it is impossible to conceptualize God and that all of our language about God is more inaccurate than accurate. That isn’t just an abstract dogma. Our failure to understand this, perhaps more than anything else, is the reason why we struggle with faith and struggle to not fudge its demands. What’s at issue here?

All of us, naturally, try to form some picture of God and try to imagine God’s existence. The problem when we try to do this is that we end up in one of two places, both not good.

On the one hand, we often end up with an image of God as some superman, a person like ourselves, except wonderfully superior to us in every way. We picture God as a superhero, divine, all knowing, and all-powerful, but still ultimately like us, capable of being imagined and pictured, someone whom we can circumscribe, put a face to, and count. While this is natural and unavoidable, it leaves us, no matter how sincere we are, always, with an idol, a God created in our own image and likeness, and consequently a God who can easily and rightly be rejected by atheism.

On the other hand, sometimes when we try to form a picture of God and imagine God’s existence, something else happens: We come up dry and empty, unable to either picture God or imagine God’s existence. We then end up either in some form of atheism or afraid to examine our faith because we have unconsciously internalized atheism’s belief that faith is naïve and cannot stand up to the hard questions.

When this happens to us, when we try to imagine God’s existence and come up empty, that failure is not one of faith but of our imagination. We are living not so much inside of atheism as inside of God’s ineffability, inside a “cloud of unknowing”, a “dark night of the soul”. We aren’t atheists. We just feel like we are. It’s not that God doesn’t exist or has disappeared. It’s rather that God’s ineffability has put God outside of our imaginative capacities. Our minds are overmatched. God is still real, still there, but our finite imaginations are coming up empty trying to picture infinite reality, tantamount to what happens when we try to imagine the highest number to which it is possible to count. The infinite cannot be circumscribed by the imagination. It has no floor and it has no ceiling, no beginning and no end. The human imagination cannot deal with that.

God is infinite and, thus, by definition unimaginable and impossible to conceptualize. That’s also true for God’s existence. It cannot be pictured. However the fact that we cannot imagine God is very different than saying that we cannot know God. God can be known, even if not imagined. How?

We all know many things that we cannot imagine, conceptualize, or articulate. Inside us there is something the mystics call “dark knowledge”, namely, an inchoate, intuitive, gut-sense within which we know and understand beyond what we can picture and give words to. And this isn’t some exotic, paranormal talent that fortune-tellers claim to have. The opposite; it’s our bedrock, that solid foundation that we touch in our most sincere and deepest moments, that place inside us where when we are at our best we ground our lives.

God is ineffable, unimaginable, and beyond conception and language. Our faith lets us bracket this for a while and lets us picture God as some idolized super-hero. But eventually that well runs dry and our finite minds are left to know the infinite only in darkness, without images, and our finite hearts are left to feel infinite love only inside a dark trust.