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.

Prayer As Keeping Us Outside The Great March

January 6, 2013

In virtually all of his novels, Milan Kundera, manifests a strong impatience with every kind of ideology, hype, or fad that makes for group-think or crowd-hysteria. He is suspicious of slogans, demonstrations, and marches of all kinds, no matter the cause. He calls all these the great march and, to his mind, they invariably lead to violence, all of them. Kundera likes artists because they tend to steer clear of causes, wanting to paint or write rather than march.

There are causes worth fighting for and there are injustices and wounds in our world that demand our involvement beyond our wanting rather to paint or write. Still Kundera’s severe judgment on marches and demonstrations of all kinds, the great march, is fair warning. Why?

Because in our more reflective moments we know how hard it is not to get caught up in ideology, hype, fad, group-think, and crowd-hysteria in a way that leaves us mindless. It’s hard to know what we really think and believe, as opposed to what the cultural circles we move within prescribe for us. It’s hard not to be caught up in the fashion of the moment.

But it’s even harder for us to ground ourselves in something deeper; to root ourselves in a perspective outside what Thomas Hardy once called the “madding” crowd. How can we ground ourselves in a depth that immunizes us from ideology, fad, hype, fashion, and the subtle group-hysterias that plague every culture?

In Luke’s Gospel, the disciples sense that Jesus is drawing his wisdom, calm, strength, and power from somewhere beyond himself, that he is grounding himself in something beyond both the enticements and threats of the present moment. Their hunch is that he is finding this depth in prayer. They too want to connect to this depth and power and they have come to realize that prayer is the route, the only route, to take them there. And so they ask Jesus to teach them how to pray. What did he teach them? How do we pray in such a way so as to ground ourselves in something truly beyond our own individual and collective narcissism?

Metaphorically, this is described for us in the passage in Scripture which records the martyrdom of St. Stephen. This is the scene:

A crowd of very sincere, though misguided, persons, driven by religious fervor, but caught up in some group-hysteria, gather to stone Stephen to death. Here’s how scripture describes it: “They were infuriated when they heard this and ground their teeth at him. But Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit, gazed into heaven and saw the glory of God, and Jesus standing at God’s right hand. ‘Look! I can see the heaven thrown open,’ he said, ‘and the Son of man standing at the right hand of God.’ All the members of the council shouted out and stopped their ears with their hands; then they made a concerted rush at him, thrust him out of the city and stoned him.” (Acts 7, 54-58)

Stephen’s death was real, but the description of his dying is replete with metaphors that tell us what it means to pray and what it means to not pray.

What does it mean not to pray? The crowd, notwithstanding their religious fervor and sincerity, do not pray. The description here says it all: Their gaze is on in Stephen, at whom they are looking with misunderstanding and hatred. Moreover, his message of love is at that moment an inconvenient truth so they are stopping their ears so as not to hear. And they are in the grip of group-hysteria. They are not seeing the heavens laid open, but rather a very earthly person whom they hate; and they are not in the flow of the Holy Spirit but in the grip of hysteria. That is why their gaze never rises above their bitter glare at Stephen. They are solely in the moment, in the now, seeing only what is below the heavens, and that is non-prayer. No matter how sincere we are religiously, what has just been described is not prayer. Indeed sometimes even our sincere prayer together is nothing more than the deepening of our group narcissism and a deeper enslavement to the maddening crowd. Our eyes are still on each other and not on God.

Stephen, on the other hand, is praying. He is described as having his eyes turned upward (a metaphor, not a pictorial description) and he is gazing into heaven and seeing the heavens laid open. His gaze is beyond the crowd, beyond the moment, beyond human divisions, beyond hatred, beyond even the fear of his own death. He is gazing into something beyond the crowd and the present moment. This, and only this, is prayer.

I share Kundera’s fear about the great march and how easily and blindly I, and most everyone else, can fall into step. His hunch is that art can help ground us outside the maddening crowd. I would add that prayer is even more helpful.

My Top Books for 2012

December 30, 2012

Concerning taste, there should be no disputes! St. Augustine wrote those words seventeen hundred years ago and their truth applies not just to taste in food, but also to taste in literature. Not everyone’s soul is fed in the same way and we eventually gravitate towards where we are fed. So I am not sure what books are best for you. I pick up a good number of books each year and tend to finish them, even if their subject matter doesn’t always measure up to their attractive cover and title. Mostly though, they feed me. What a poor world we would be if we didn’t have books! Among all the books that I picked up during 2012, which do I most recommend?

Re-iterating again that taste is subjective; here are the books that most spoke to me this past year:

· Jennifer Haigh, Faith. This is a novel set in Boston during the height of the clergy sexual abuse crisis. It is insightful, fair, knowledgeable as to the lay of the ecclesial and clerical land, and a great narrative, a page turner. Few books will give you this kind of insight into the clerical sexual abuse crisis.

· Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending. Barnes won the Booker Prize for this novel. Lots of emotional intelligence here, a bit over-earthy at times, and a quick read. Amoral to the simplistic eye, but a moral book at a deeper level.

· Kate O’Brien, The Land of Spices. First published in 1941 and condemned by the Catholic censors then for a single passage which today could appear in a high school catechesis book. A look into the inner-life of a convent boarding school in Ireland, it focuses on the growth of a young student and the inner religious and emotional struggles of the Mother Superior in charge of the school. Deeply insightful, a rare piece of literature.

· Rachel Joyce, The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry. Unlikely indeed. Set in England, a retiree sets off to mail a letter and just keeps walking. At first no one notices, then the world notices, and eventually nobody notices. Delightful and a page-turner.

· Joseph Girzone, The Homeless Bishop. Perhaps more a treatise of spirituality than a novel, and perhaps more naïve than realistic, but a wonderful idealistic vision of what the church could be if we in fact took the gospel seriously.

· Vannay Radner, Under the Shadow of the Bunyan Tree. Historical fiction, an account of one family’s nightmare under the Khmer Rouge during the genocide in Cambodia. A haunting book, no doubt largely autobiographical.

· Marilynne Robinson, When I Was a Child I Read Books. Known mostly as a novelist, Robinson has given us a book of essays, mostly commentary on our religious, political, and cultural situation today. Great insight and great balance. An important read vis-à-vis the tension between faith and culture today.

· Tomas Halik, Patience with God, The Story of Zacchaeus, and, The Night of the Confessor. Thomas Halik is a Czechoslovakian priest, ordained underground during the Soviet occupation, who now teaches spirituality at a University in Czechoslovakia. His books are finally available in English. I recommend both these works, particularly the first one, Patience with God, whose thesis might be summed up in the words: An atheist is just another word for someone who doesn’t have enough patience with God.

· Peter Tyler, John of the Cross. The great Spanish mystic, John of the Cross, is a Christian treasure. Unfortunately, because of his distance from us in time and language, his writings are best approached with the aid of a guide. Peter Tyler is such a guide and this book can be a good introduction to John of the Cross.

· Thomas Keating, Manifesting God. Thomas Keating is one of the major spiritual leaders of our time and perhaps our foremost guide in contemplative prayer. His insights are scattered within a large number of books; but if you are looking for a single book, a handbook so to speak, on Thomas Keating and his vision of contemplative prayer, this is his most synthetic book.

· Michael W. Higgins & Kevin Burns, Genius Born of Anguish, The Life and Legacy of Henri Nouwen. Michael Higgins is the official authorized biographer of Henri Nouwen. This book is not yet that definitive biography but an interim look at one of the most popular and influential spirituality writers of the last half-century. The book will perturb both the devotees and the critics of Henri Nouwen. It is neither hagiography nor brutal deconstruction. What Higgins and Burns do in this book is show us Nouwen as he was: A man who was almost pathologically needy, often depressed, and forever aching for more affirmation, even as he was a person of extraordinary insight, extraordinary faith, and extraordinary honesty. An anguished genius, he was an imperfect saint, but a saint nonetheless.

Not everyone’s taste or needs match my own. Each of these books, for its own reasons, spoke to me. I offer them under that canopy. But … go where you’re fed!

King Herod and the Wise Men – A Christmas Challenge

December 23, 2012

Christmas 2012

The Christmas story is surely one of the greatest stories ever told. It chronicles a birth from which the world records time as before or after. Moreover, it is written in a way that has inflamed the romantic imagination for 2000 years. This hasn’t always been for the good. Beyond spawning every kind of legend imaginable, the story of Christmas has, in the Christian imagination, too often taken on a centrality not accorded to it in the Gospels themselves. This is not surprising, given its richness.

Inside its great narrative there are multiple mini-narratives, each of which comes laden with its own archetypal symbols. One of these mini-narratives, rich in archetypal imagery, is the story King Herod and the wise men.

We see this in the Gospel of Matthew when he tells us how various people reacted to the announcement of Jesus’ birth. Matthew sets up a powerful archetypal contrast, blessing and curse, between the reaction of the wise men, who bring their gifts and place them at the feet of the new king, and King Herod, who tries to kill him.

We are all familiar with this story since it has been much celebrated in song, icon, and legend. Jesus is born inside of a religious tradition, Judaism, and his birth is announced to that faith-community in a manner that befits religion, namely, by the angels, by supernatural revelation. But those outside of that faith-tradition need another way to get to know of his birth, and so his birth is announced to them though nature, astrology, through the stars. The wise men see a special star appear in the sky and begin to follow it, not knowing exactly to where or to what it will lead.

While following the star, they meet King Herod who, upon learning that a new king has supposedly been born, has his own evil interest in matter. He asks the wise men to find the child and bring him back information so that he, too, can go and worship the newborn. We know the rest of story:

The wise men follow the star, find the new king, and, upon seeing him, place their gifts at his feet. What happens to them afterwards? We have all kinds of apocryphal stories about their journey back home, but these, while interesting, are not helpful. We do not know what happened to them afterwards and that is exactly the point. Their slipping away into anonymity is a crucial part of their gift. The idea is that they now disappear because they can now disappear. They have placed their gifts at the feet of the young king and can now leave everything safely in his hands. His star has eclipsed theirs. Far from fighting for their former place, they now happily cede it to him. Like old Simeon, they can happily exit the stage singing: Now, Lord, you can dismiss your servants! We can die! We’re in safe hands!

And Herod, how much to the contrary! The news that a new king has been born threatens him at his core since he is himself a king. The glory and light that will now shine upon the new king will no longer shine on him. So what is his reaction? Far from laying his resources at the feet of the new king, he sets out to kill him. Moreover, to ensure that his murderers find him, he kills all the male babies in the entire area. An entire book on anthropology might be written about this last line. Fish are not the only species that eats its young! But the real point is the contrast between the wise men and Herod: The former see new life as promise and they bless it; the latter sees new life as threat and he curses it.

This is a rich story with a powerful challenge: What is my own reaction to new life, especially to life that threatens me, that will take away some of my own popularity, sunshine, and adulation? Can I, like the wise men, lay my gifts at the feet of the young and move towards anonymity and eventual death, content that the world is in good hands, even though those hands are not my hands? Or, like Herod, will I feel that life as a threat and I try somehow to kill it, lest its star somehow diminish my own?

To bless another person is to give away some of one’s own life so that the other might be more resourced for his or her journey, Good parents do that for their children. Good teachers do that for their students, good mentors do that for their protégés, good pastors do that for their parishioners, good politicians do that for their countries, and good elders do that for the young. They give away some of their own lives to resource the other. The wise men did that for Jesus.

How do we react when a young star’s rising begins to eclipse our own light?

In Safer Hands than Ours

December 16, 2012

One of my jobs as a priest is to preside and preach at funerals. Never an easy task. The deep truths of our faith which can be so consoling at other times often don’t spin their magic when death is still raw. Later on they can do their work; but, at a funeral, the pain is often too all-absorbing for the words of faith to effectively break through and do much in the way of real consolation. Their full effect will take place in a way and in a time that respects the rhythm of human grief.

One sentence of consolation that I do often offer at a funeral is this one: He is now in hands safer than ours. She is now in hands much gentler than our own.

The truth of those words can be particularly consoling when the deceased is a young person, someone whom we feel still needs the hands of an earthly mother and father and whom we would want to trade places with because we feel that he or she is too young to have to leave us and go off in death, alone. That is also true in the case of someone who dies in a far-from-ideal manner, suicide or a senseless accident. Our unspoken fear is always that there should have been more time, that we should have done something more, been more vigilant, been more supportive, and we worry about a loved one departing this earth in so unfortunate a way. Finally, we have this same anxiety about someone who dies and has had a life that somehow never seemed to be free of extraordinary bad circumstance and frustration, and we wish we could somehow do something to make things better. In each of these cases, nothing can be more consoling than to believe that our loved one is now in far safer and gentler hands than our own.

But is this simple wishful thinking, whistling in the dark to keep up our courage? Fudging God’s justice to console ourselves?

Not if Jesus can be believed! Everything that Jesus reveals about God assures us that God’s hands are much gentler and safer than our own. God is the father of the prodigal son and, as we see in that parable, God is more understanding and more compassionate to us than we are too ourselves. We see too in that parable how God does not wait for us to return and apologize after we stray and betray. God runs out to meet us and doesn’t ask for an apology. We see too in the stories just preceding the story of the prodigal son how God does not leave us on our own after we sin, to come to our senses and return repentantly to him. Rather he leaves the ninety-nine others and comes looking for us, anxious, longing, and ready to carry us home, in spite of our sin.

Jesus gives us too the assurance that God does not give us just one chance, but seventy-seven times seven chances, infinite chances. We don’t ruin our lives forever by making a mistake or even by making that mistake inexcusably again and again and again. Finally, in St. Paul’s farewell message to us in his Letter to the Romans, he assures us that, even though we can’t ever get our lives fully right, it doesn’t matter because in the end nothing, absolutely nothing, can separate us from God’s love and forgiveness. We are, in this life and the next, in hands far safer and gentler than our own.

God is not a God of punishment, but a God of forgiveness. God is not a God who records our sins, but a God who washes them away. God is not a God who demands perfection from us, but a God who asks for a contrite heart when we can’t measure up. God is not a God who gives us only one chance, but a God who gives us infinite chances. God is not a God who waits for us to come to our senses after we have fallen, but a God who comes searching for us, full of understanding and care. God is not a God who is calculating and parsimonious in his gifts, but a prodigal God who sows seeds everywhere without regard for waste or worthiness. God not a God who is powerless before evil and death, but a God who can raise dead bodies to life and redeem what is evil and hopeless. God is not a God who is arbitrary and fickle, but a God who is utterly reliable in his promise and goodness. God is not a God who is stupid and unable to deal with our complexity, but a God who fashioned the depth of the universe and the deepest recesses of the human psyche.

Ultimately, God is not a God who cannot protect us, but is a God in whose hands and in whose promise we are far safer than when we rely upon ourselves.

Marking an Anniversary

December 9, 2012

In late November 1982, while a graduate student in Louvain, Belgium, I began writing this column. That makes for thirty years! When I began writing this, I had no idea as to where this would go, no grand plan. I was putting notes into milk-bottles and floating them out to sea, across an ocean in this case, hoping somebody might read them. The first person that actually pulled a note from one of those bottles was Glenn Argan, the editor of the Western Catholic Reporter, in Edmonton, Canada. I will forever be in debt to him for being the first editor who took a chance on me. He is still editor at the Western Catholic today.

It took some years for the column to attract any attention beyond that first newspaper, but eventually its audience began to widen. Here’s a brief history of its development: The Green Bay Compass picked up the column in the mid-1980s. Cardinal Adam Maida, now in Detroit, was Bishop in Green Bay at the time. I met him at a conference several years ago and he reminded me that it was under his watch in Green Bay that my column was taken up by their diocesan paper, my first American readership.

In the early 1990s, I received invitations to run the column from two national Canadian Catholic newspapers, the Prairie Messenger and the Catholic Register. That was a huge expansion: I was now in two countries, in four newspapers, and more than content with that as an audience.

I’ve never had an agent, nor had the time or heart to actively try to solicit newspapers in terms of taking on the column and was content to simply let it find whatever life it might find on its own. I relied on providence and chance, and I got lucky, pure and simple. In 1987, I taught a summer course in theology at All Hallows College in Dublin and one of the students in the course was Delia Smith, famed in the United Kingdom for everything from theology to cooking to football. At that time I had published only one book, The Loneliness Factor, and had a modest portfolio of columns. Delia took the book to Hodder & Stoughton, a much-respected London publisher, and my portfolio of columns to Otto Herschan, the publisher then of the Catholic Herald in London. That one act forever changed the landscape of my writings.

The Catholic Herald is a national newspaper in England, and is on newsstands as well in many cities worldwide. Moreover, at the time, Otto Herschan, its publisher, also published a national Catholic newspaper in both Ireland and Scotland. Hence the column was now published nationally in those countries as well. That exposure led to other national audiences, in New Zealand, among other countries.

And Delia Smith’s kindness in taking The Loneliness Factor to a major British publishing house also had a huge, eventual, impact on the column: In 1988, Hodder & Stoughton re-released the book under a new title, The Restless Heart, and it went on to win the a major book award in the United Kingdom. That led to a publishing contract with Hodder & Stoughton and eventually that contract itself led to a contract with Doubleday in New York. After Doubleday published The Holy Longing dozens of newspapers began to ask for the column, particularly in the United States, but in other English-speaking countries as well. After the release of The Holy Longing the number of newspapers that carry the column rose from around ten to around seventy, where it stands today. Part of that growth was also due to the efforts of the late Kay Lagried who, having brought the column to the diocesan newspaper in Seattle, Washington, began to solicit other newspapers to take it on. She became, until her untimely death two years ago, the agent I never had. Today the column is estimated to have a readership of well over one million readers.

More recently the column has been translated in Spanish and Vietnamese and is now available in those languages.

That’s its “legal” availability. The column is also widely distributed on the internet and within numerous newspapers, newsletters, and church bulletins outside any permission or authorization from anyone. This is particularly true in some parts of Asia, where copyright laws are not as strict as here. Overall, I’m okay with this kind of pirating. I’m writing as a ministry and in most cases the people running the column without permission are doing so because they lack the financial resources to do so legally or because they feel they are so far down the rung of importance with anyone that it doesn’t make a difference. Hats off to them!

Sitting at a desk in Belgium in 1982, pecking away on a typewriter, I had no thoughts about longevity or world-readership. I was putting notes into milk-bottles and hoping somebody would find them. Thirty years later, now with a laptop instead of a typewriter, the effort and the dream remain the same.

Honoring Life’s Complexity

December 2, 2012

In a lecture recently, I made the point that Jesus shocked people equally in both his capacity to thoroughly enjoy his life and in his capacity to renounce it and give it up. It was one and the same Jesus who, at a lavish supper with a woman at his feet bathing him in perfume and affection, could tell his uncomfortable hosts that he was thoroughly enjoying the moment without a trace of guilt and who could tell the same people that the deepest secret of life is to give it all up in self-sacrifice without a trace of thought for yourself.

After the lecture, a young man came up to me and questioned me about the first prong: How could Jesus give himself over to that kind of enjoyment and pleasure? My answer: Precisely because of the other part, his capacity to renounce. One relies on the other, like the two wings on an airplane. Jesus had a shocking capacity to enjoy life because he had an equally shocking capacity to give it up. That is also true of many other aspects of Jesus’ life and ministry: He could condemn sin, but love the sinner; be fiercely loyal to his own, even as he shocked them in his love of those outside their circle; and he could walk in the greatest freedom anyone has ever known, even as he acknowledged that he did nothing on his own.

And that kind of complexity, that kind of capacity to hold near opposites together in a healthy tension, is one of the marks of greatness. Great people do exactly that. Let me offer some examples:

Dorothy Day, soon to be canonized a saint, stood out for exactly that reason: she carried both the non-negotiable Gospel-demand for social justice as well as the non-negotiable Gospel-demand for proper morals and proper religious practice. She was radical and pious. Usually we do not see the same person leading both the peace march and the rosary. Dorothy did both. Most of us can’t. We can do one or the other.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin’s writings continue to inspire people across every type of divide for the same reason. He had the capacity to hold together, at one and the same time, two seemingly competing loves. He was born, he says, with two incurable loves and sensitivities: a love of God and a sense of the other world that he could never betray and an equal love for this physical world and its facticity and beauty. Both were undeniably real to him, both took his breath away, and he tried to live in a way so as to not betray either of them, despite the tension this created in his life. It gave his writings a rare depth. Most other writing, secular or religious, honors only one of those poles to the denigration of the other.

We see the same kind of complexity in the writings of Therese of Lisieux. On the one hand, her focus is radically otherworldly, the vision of someone who sees this world as ephemeral, flimsy, and of little value. Yet, at the same time, she shows herself as almost unhealthily attached to the good things of this world, the love of family, of nature, of beauty. Therese could write eloquently about wanting to die and leave behind this shadowy film we call life and at the same time feel resentful if she wasn’t receiving daily affirmations of love from her family. And she saw no contradiction here because there isn’t any. Both are healthy, when they are held together.

St. Augustine offers another example. He wrote more than six thousand pages and, within those pages, he said things that have helped trigger anything from negative feelings about sex to forced religious conversions; but he also said things that laid the roots of most orthodox Western theology for the past seventeen hundred years. He was able to hold a lot of things in tension. Sadly, we are not his equal and instead pick and choose pieces of his thought to the detriment of his overall vision.

Carlo Carretto, the Italian spiritual writer who died recently, also stood out for his capacity to hold seemingly contrasting truths in tension. It is rare to see in the same person his particular combination of piety and iconoclasm, his fierce loyalty to the church and his strong criticism of it. For him, the two depended upon each other. One is healthy only because the other is also there.

Great minds and great persons properly honor complexity. Nowhere is this clearer than in Jesus. He carried all truth, in all its complexity. Unfortunately, we, his followers, are not up to the master. That’s why there hundreds of different Christian denominations today. That’s also why there are liberals and conservatives both in our churches and our society. We find it easier to carry smaller pieces of the truth than to carry the tension of being loyal to its bigger picture.

But simplicity and clarity aren’t always our friends.