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.

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. 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.