Working Too Hard – It Begins as Virtue and Ends as Escape

November 25, 2012

There are dangers in overwork, not matter how good the work and no matter how noble the motivation for doing it. Spiritual guides, beginning with Jesus, have always warned of the dangers of becoming too taken-up in our work. Many are the spouses in a marriage, many are the children in a family, many are the friends, and many are churches, who wish that someone they love and need more attention from was less busy.

But it is hard not to be over-busy and consumed by work, particularly during our generative years when the duties of raising children, paying mortgages, and running our churches and civic organizations falls more squarely on our shoulders. If you are a sensitive person you will wrestle constantly with the pressure to not surrender yourself to too many demands. As Henri Nouwen once described this, our lives often seem like over-packed suitcases with too much in them. There is always one more task to do, one more phone call to make, one more person to see, one more bill to pay, one more thing to check on the internet, one more leaky faucet to tend to, one more demand from some church or social agency, and one more item that needs to be picked up from the store. The demands never end and we are always conscious of some task that we still need to do. Our days are too short for all that needs to be done.

And so we give ourselves over to our work. It begins in good will and innocence but it invariably transmutes into something else. Initially we give ourselves over to all these demands because this is what is asked of us, but as more and more time goes by that commitment becomes less and less altruistic and more self-serving.

First off, though we are generally blind to this, our work soon becomes an escape. We remain busy and preoccupied enough that we have an inbuilt excuse and rationalization so as not to have to deal with relationships be that within our own families, our churches, or with God. Being weighed-down constantly with work and duty is a burden but it is also the ultimate protection. We do not get to smell the flowers, but we do not have to deal either with the deeper things that lurk under the surface of our lives. We can avoid the unresolved issues in our relationships and our psyches. We have the perfect excuse! We are too busy.

Generally too our society supports us in this escapism. With virtually every other addiction, we are eventually sent off to a clinic, but if we are addicted to our work, we are generally admired for our disease and praised for our selflessness: If I drink too much, or eat too much, or become dependent on a drug, I am frowned upon and pitied; but if I overwork to the point of neglecting huge and important imperatives in my life, they say this of me: “Isn’t he wonderful! He’s so dedicated!” Workaholism is the one addiction for which we get praised.

Beyond providing us with an unhealthy escape from some important issues with which we need to be dealing, overwork brings with it a second major danger: The more we over-invest in our work the greater the danger of taking too much of our meaning from our work rather than from our relationships. As we become more and more immersed in our work, to the detriment of our relationships, we will naturally begin too to draw more and more of our meaning and value from our work and, as numerous spiritual writers have pointed out, the dangers in this are many, not least among these is the danger that we will eventually find it harder and harder to find meaning in anything outside of our work. Old habits are hard to break. If we spend years drawing our identity from working hard and being loved for being anything from a professional athlete to a dedicated mum, it will not be easy to simply shift gears and draw our meaning from something else.

Classical spiritual writers are unanimous in warning about the danger of overwork and of becoming over-preoccupied with our work. This is in fact what Jesus warns Martha about in the famous passage in scripture where she, consumed with the very necessary work of preparing a meal, complains to Jesus that her sister, Mary, is not carrying her share of the load. In a rather surprising response, Jesus, instead of chastising Mary for her idleness and praising Martha for her dedication, tells Martha that Mary has chosen the better part, that, at this moment and in this circumstance, Mary’s idleness trumps Martha’s busyness. Why? Because sometimes there are more important things in life than work, even the noble and necessary work of tending to hospitality and preparing a meal for others.

Idleness may well be the devil’s workshop, but busyness is not always a virtue.

Some Light-hearted Thoughts on a Very Heavy Subject

November 18, 2012

Some years ago, a friend of mine was facing the birth of her first child. While happy that she was soon to be a mother, she openly confessed her fears about the actual birth-process, the pain, the dangers, the unknown. But she consoled herself with this thought: Hundreds of millions of women have done this and have somehow managed it. Surely, if so many women have done, and are doing, this – I too can manage it somehow.

I sometimes take those words and apply them to the prospect of dying. Death is the most daunting, unsettling, and heavy topic there is, for all of us, our occasional false bravado notwithstanding. When we say that we are not afraid of dying, mostly we’re whistling in dark and, even there, the tune comes out easier when our own death remains still an abstract thing, something in the indefinite and infinite future. My thoughts here, no doubt, fit that description, whistling in the dark. But why not? Surely even whistling in the dark is better than denial.

So I like my friend’s methodology for steeling her courage in the face of having to face pain and the unknown: Hundreds of millions of women have managed this, so I should be able to manage it too! And in the case of dying, the numbers are even more consoling, billions and billions of people have managed it, and everyone, including myself, is going to have to manage it. A hundred years from now, every one of us reading these words will have had to manage his or her death.

And so I sometimes look at death this way: Billions and billions of people have managed this, men, women, children, even babies. Some were old, some were young; some were prepared, some were not; some welcomed it, some met it with bitter resistance; some died from natural causes, some died through violence; some died surrounded by love and loved ones, some died alone without any human love whatsoever surrounding them; some died peacefully, some died crying out in fear; some died at a ripe old age, some died in the prime of their youth or even before that; some suffered for years from seemingly meaningless dementia with those around them wondering why God and nature seemed to cruelly keep them alive; others in robust physical health with seemingly everything to live for took their own lives; some died full of faith and hope, and some died feeling only darkness and despair; some died breathing out gratitude, and some died breathing out resentment; some died in the embrace of religion and their churches, some died completely outside of that embrace; and some died as Mother Teresa, while others died as Hitler. But every one of them somehow managed it, the great unknown, the greatest of all unknowns. It seems it can be managed. And nobody has come back from the other world with horror stories about dying (given that all our horror movies about ghosts and haunted houses are pure fiction, through and through).

Most people, I suspect, have the same experience that I do when I think about the dead, particularly about persons I have known who died. The initial grief and sadness of their loss eventually wears off and is replaced by an inchoate sense that it’s alright, that they are alright, and that death has in some strange way washed things clean. In the end, we have a pretty good feeling about our dead loved ones and about the dead in general, even if their departure from this earth was far from ideal, as for instance if they died angry, or through immaturity, or because they committed a crime, or by suicide. Somehow it eventually all washes clean and what remains is the inchoate sense, a solid intuition, that wherever they are they are now in better and safer hands than our own.

When I was a young seminarian we once had to translate Cicero’s treatise on aging and dying from Latin into English. I was eighteen years old at the time, but was very taken by Cicero’s thoughts on why we shouldn’t fear death. He was stoic, but, in the end, his lack of fear of dying was a little like my friend’s approach to giving birth: Given how universal it is, we should be able to manage it!

I’ve long since lost my undergraduate notes on Cicero, so I looked the treatise up on the Internet recently. Here’s a kernel from that treatise: “Death should be held of no account! For clearly the impact of death is negligible if it utterly annihilates the soul, or even desirable, if it conducts the soul to some place where it is to live forever. What, then, shall I fear, if after death I am destined to be either not unhappy or happy?”

Our faith tells us that, given the benevolence of the God we believe in, only the second option, happiness, awaits us. And we already intuit that.

Sexuality – Its Power and Purpose

November 11, 2012

We are all powerfully, incurably, and wonderfully sexed, this is part of a conspiracy between God and nature. Sexuality lies right next to our instinct for breathing and it is ever-present in our lives.

Spiritual literature tends to be naïve and in denial about the power of sexuality, as if it could be dismissed as some insignificant factor in the spiritual journey, and as if it could be dismissed at all. It cannot be. It will always make itself felt, consciously or unconsciously. Nature is almost cruel in this regard, particularly to the young. It fills youthful bodies with powerful hormones before those persons have the emotional and intellectual maturity to properly understand and creatively channel that energy. Nature’s cruelty, or anomaly, is that it gives someone an adult body before that same person is adult in his or her emotions and intellect. There are a lot of physical and moral dangers in a still-developing child walking around in a fully adult body.

Further, today this is being exacerbated by the fact that we reaching puberty at an ever younger age and are marrying at an ever-later one. This makes for a situation, almost the norm in many cultures, where a young girl or boy reaches puberty at age eleven or twelve and will get married only about twenty years later. This begs the obvious question: How is his or her sexuality to be emotionally and morally contained during all those years? Where does that leave him or her in the struggle to remain faithful to the commandments?

Admittedly, nature seems almost cruel here, but it has its own angle. Its dominant concern is to get each of us into the gene pool and all those powerful hormones it begins pouring into our bodies at adolescence and all those myriad ways in which it heats up our emotions have the same intent, it wants us to be fruitful and multiply, to perpetuate ourselves and our own species. And nature is uncompromising here: At every level of our being (physical, emotional, psychological, and spiritual) there is a pressure, a sexual one, to get us into the gene pool. So when you next see a young man or woman strutting his or her sexuality, be both sympathetic and understanding, you were once there, and nature is just trying to get him or her into the gene pool. Such are its ways and such are its propensities, and God is in on the conspiracy.

Of course getting into the gene pool means much more than physically having children, though that is deep, deep imperative written everywhere inside us that may be ignored only in the face of some major psychological and moral risks. There are other ways of having children, though nature all on its own does not easily accept that. It wants children in the flesh. But the full bloom of sexuality, generative living, takes on other life-giving forms. We have all heard the slogan: Have a child. Plant a tree. Write a book. There are different ways to get into the gene pool and all of us know persons who, while not having children of their own and neither writing a book nor planting a tree, are wonderfully generative women and men. Indeed the religious vow of celibacy is predicated on that truth. Sexuality also has a powerful spiritual dimension.

But, with that being admitted, we may never be naïve to its sheer, blind power. Dealing with the brute and unrelenting power of our sexuality lies at the root of many of our deepest psychological and moral struggles. This takes on many guises, but the pressure always has the same intent: Nature and God keep an unrelenting pressure on us to get into the gene pool, that is, to always open our lives to something bigger than ourselves and to always remain cognizant of the fact that intimacy with others, the cosmos, and God is our real goal. It is no great surprise that our sexuality is so grandiose that it would have us want to make love to the whole world. Isn’t that our real goal

As well, sexuality wreaks havoc with many people’s church lives. It is no secret that today one of the major reasons why many young people, and indeed people of all ages, are no longer going regularly to their churches has to do, in one way or the other, with their struggles with sexuality and their perception of how their churches view their situation. My point here is not that we and the churches should change the commandments regarding sex, but that we should do a couple of things: First, we should more realistically acknowledge its brute power in our lives and integrate sexual complexity more honestly into our spiritualties. Second, we should be far more empathic and pastorally sensitive to the issues that beset people because of their sexuality.

Sexuality is sacred a fire. It takes it origins in God and is everywhere, powerfully present inside creation. Denial is not our friend here.

Purgatory as Seeing Fully for the First Time

November 4, 2012

Imagine being born blind and living into adulthood without ever having seen light and color. Then, through some miraculous operation, doctors are able to give you sight. What would you feel immediately upon opening your eyes? Wonder? Bewilderment? Ecstasy? Pain? Some combination of all of these?

We now know the answer to that question. This kind of sight-restoring operation has been done and is being done and we now have some indication of how a person reacts upon opening his or her eyes and seeing light and color for the first time. What happens might surprise us. Here is how J.Z. Young, an authority on brain function, describes what happens:

“The patient on opening his eyes gets little or no enjoyment; indeed, he finds the experience painful. He reports only a spinning mass of light and colors. He proves to be quite unable to pick up objects by sight, to recognize what they are, or to name them. He has no conception of space with objects in it, although he knows all about objects and their names by touch. ‘Of course,’ you will say, ‘he must take a little time to learn to recognize them by sight.’ Not a little time, but a very long time, in fact, years. His brain has not been trained in the rules of seeing. We are not conscious that there are any such rules; we think we see, as we say naturally. But we have in fact learned a whole set of rules during childhood.” (See: Emilie Griffin, Souls in Full Flight, p. 143-144)

Might this be a helpful analogy for what happens to us in what Roman Catholics call purgatory? Could the purification we experience after death be understood in this very way, namely, as an opening of our vision and heart to a light and a love that are so full so as to force upon us the same kind of painful relearning and reconceptualization that have just been described? Might purgatory be understood precisely as being embraced by God in such a way that this warmth and light so dwarf our earthly concepts of love and knowledge that, like a person born blind who is given sight, we have to struggle painfully in the very ecstasy of that light to unlearn and relearn virtually our entire way of thinking and loving? Might purgatory be understood not as God’s absence or some kind of punishment or retribution for sin, but as what happens to us when we are fully embraced, in ecstasy, by God, perfect love and perfect truth?

Indeed isn’t this what faith, hope, and charity, the three theological virtues, are already trying to move us towards in this life? Isn’t faith a knowing beyond what we can conceptualize? Isn’t hope an anchoring of ourselves in something beyond what we can control and guarantee for ourselves? And isn’t charity a reaching out beyond what affectively feeds us?

St. Paul, in describing our condition on earth, tells us that here, in this life, we see only as “through a mirror, reflecting dimly” but that, after death, we will see “face to face”. Clearly in describing our present condition here on earth he is highlighting a certain blindness, an embryonic darkness, an inability to actually see things as they really are. It is significant to note too that he says this in a context within which he is pointing out that, already now in this life, faith, hope, and charity help lift that blindness.

These are of course only questions, perhaps equally upsetting to Protestants and Roman Catholics alike. Many Protestants and Evangelicals reject the very concept of purgatory on the grounds that, biblically, there are only two eternal places, heaven and hell. Many Roman Catholics, on the other hand, get anxious whenever purgatory seems to get stripped of its popular conception as a place or state apart from heaven. But purgatory conceived of in this way, as the full opening of our eyes and hearts so as to cause a painful reconceptualization of things, might help make the concept more palatable to Protestants and Evangelicals and help strip the concept of some of its false popular connotations within Roman Catholic piety.

True purgation happens only through love because it is only when we experience love’s true embrace that we can see our sin and drink in, for the first time, the power to move beyond it. Only light dispels darkness and only love casts out sin.

Therese of Lisieux would sometimes pray to God: “Punish me with a kiss!” The embrace of full love is the only true purification for sin because only when we are embraced by love do we actually understand what sin is and, only there, are we given the desire, the vision, and the strength to live in love and truth. But that inbreaking of love and light is, all at the same time, delightful and bewildering, ecstatic and unsettling, wonderful and excruciating, euphoric and painful. Indeed, it’s nothing less than purgatory.

Living With Less Fear

October 28, 2012

We live with too much fear of God. This has many faces, from the superstitious fear of the naive, to the legalistic fear of the over-scrupulous, to the intellectual fear of the very sophisticated. In the end, we all struggle to believe that God is the last person of whom we need to be afraid. But in our own ways, we all struggle with fear of God.

There is of course a healthy fear, not just of God but also of anyone whom we love. Scripture tells us that “fear of God is the beginning of wisdom”, but fear, in this context, is not understood as fear of punishment or arbitrariness. Fear of God in its healthy sense is basically love’s fear, fear of not living with the proper reverence and respect before the one we love, namely, fear of violating love’s proper boundaries. But that is not fear of hellfire, as we commonly understand this. Fear is the antithesis of faith and a sign that something is wrong in our love. We aren’t afraid of what we love and of what truly loves us.

Everything inside of our Christian faith invites us to move towards God in intimacy rather than in fear. Indeed in virtually every instance in scripture where God appears within ordinary life, either through an angel, a special phenomenon, or through an appearance of the resurrected Christ, the first words are invariably: “Do not be afraid!” The soothing of fear, not its intensification, is the normal criterion that the voice we are hearing is coming from love.

With that in mind, I would like to offer ten principles, all rooted in the person and revelation of Jesus, that, hopefully, can be of help in purifying our image of God so that our faith might cast out fear rather than enkindle it.

I begin with a story that, though true, can act as a parable to expose and highlight many of our unconscious fears of God: Fear that God is not as understanding and compassionate as we are. Fear that God is not a big-hearted as we are. Fear that God does not read the heart and cannot tell the difference between wound and coldness, immaturity and sin. Fear that God gives us only one chance and cannot bear any missteps and infidelities. Fear that God doesn’t respect our humanity, that God created us in one way but wants us to live in another way in order to be saved. Fear that God is threatened by our achievements, like a petty tyrant. Fear that God is threatened by our doubts and questions, like an insecure leader. Fear that God cannot stand up to the intellectual and cultural scrutiny of our world but somehow needs be segregated and protected like an over-pious novice. Fear that God is less interested in our lives than we are and less solicitous for our salvation and that of our loved ones than we are. And, not least, fear that God is as helpless before our moral helplessness as we are.

Here’s the parable: A number of years ago, I was at the funeral of a young man who had died tragically in a car accident. At the time of his death, on the surface, his relationship to his church and to some of its moral teachings was far from ideal: He was not attending church regularly, was living with his girlfriend outside of marriage, was not much concerned about poor or the larger community, and was, in simple terms, partying pretty hard. But everyone who knew him also knew of his essential goodness and his wonderful heart. There wasn’t an ounce of malice in him and heaven would be forever a less-colorful and more impoverished place if he weren’t there. At the reception following the church service, one of his aunts said to me: “He was such a good person, if I were running the gates of heaven, I would certainly let him in.” I assured her that, no doubt, God felt the same way, given that God’s understanding and forgiveness infinitely surpass our own.

What are the ten principles inviting us to live in less fear?

1. God’s insight and understanding surpass our own.

2. God’s compassion and forgiveness surpass our own.

3. God respects nature, our human make-up, and our innate propensities.

4. God is a blessing parent, not a threatening one.

5. God can handle our questions and doubts and angers.

6. God reads the heart and can tell the difference between wound and malice.

7. God gives us more than one chance, opening another door every time we close one.

8. God desires our salvation and the salvation of our loved ones more than we do.

9. God is the author of all that is good.

10. God can, and does, descend into hell to help us.

“There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear. For fear has to do with punishment, and whoever fears has not been perfected in love.” 1 John 4, 18

Never Grow Weary

October 21, 2012

There is a Norwegian proverb that reads: Heroism consists of hanging on one minute longer.

When I was a child in elementary school one of the stories assigned to us in our textbook for literature had that title and It told the story of a young boy who had fallen through the ice while skating and was left clinging, cold and alone, to the edge of the ice with no help in sight. As he hung on in this seemingly hopeless situation he was tempted many times to simply let go since no one was going to come along to rescue him. But he held on, despite all odds. Finally, when everything seemed beyond hope, he clung on one minute longer and after that extra minute help arrived. The story was simple and its moral was simple: This young boy lived because he had the courage and strength to hang on one minute longer. Rescue comes just after you have given up on it, so extend your courage and waiting one minute longer.

This is a tale of physical heroism and it makes its point clearly, heroism often consists in staying the course long enough, of hanging on when it seems hopeless, of suffering cold and aloneness while waiting for a new day.

Scripture teaches much the same thing about moral heroism: In the Second Letter to the Thessalonians, Paul ends a long, challenging admonition by stating: You must never grow weary of doing what is right. And in his letter to the Galatians, Paul virtually repeats the Norwegian proverb: Let us not become weary of doing good, for at the proper time we will reap a harvest if we do not give up.

This sounds so simple and yet it cuts to the heart of many of our moral struggles. We give up too soon, give in too soon, and don’t carry our solitude to its highest level. We simply don’t carry tension long enough.

All of us experience tension in our lives: tension in our families, tension in our friendships, tension in our places of work, tension in our churches, tension in our communities, and tension within our conversations around other people, politics, and current events. And, being good-hearted people, we carry that tension with patience, respect, graciousness, and forbearance – for a while! Then, at a certain point we feel ourselves stretched to the limit, grow weary of doing what is right, feel something snap inside of us, and hear some inner-voice say: Enough! I’ve put up with this too long! I won’t tolerate this anymore! And we let go, unlike the little boy clinging to the ice and waiting for rescue. We let go of patience, respect, graciousness, and forbearance, either by venting and giving back in kind or simply by fleeing the situation with an attitude of good riddance. Either way, we refuse to carry the tension any longer.

But that exact point, when we have to choose between giving up or holding on, carrying tension or letting it go, is a crucial moral site, one that determines character: Big-heartedness, nobility of character, deep maturity, and spiritual sanctity often manifest themselves around these questions: How much tension can we carry? How great is our patience and forbearance? How much can we put up with? Mature parents put up with a lot of tension in raising their children. Mature teachers put up with a lot of tension in trying to open the minds and hearts of their students. Mature friends absorb a lot of tension in remaining faithful to each other. Mature young women and men put up with a lot of sexual tension while waiting for marriage. Mature Christians put up with a lot of tension in helping to absorb the immaturities and sins of their churches. Men and women are noble of character precisely when they can walk with patience, respect, graciousness, and forbearance amid crushing and unfair tensions, when they never grow weary of doing what is right.

Of course this comes with a caveat: Carrying tension does not mean carrying abuse. Those of noble character and sanctity of soul challenge abuse rather than enable it through well-intentioned acquiescence. Sometimes, in the name of virtue and loyalty, we are encouraged to absorb abuse, but that is antithetical to what Jesus did. He loved, challenged, and absorbed tension in a way that took away the sins of the world. We know now, thanks to long bitter experience, that, no matter how noble our intention, when we absorb abuse as opposed to challenging it, we don’t take away the sin, we enable it.

But all of this will not be easy. It’s the way of long loneliness, with many temptations to let go and slip away. But, if you persevere and never grown weary of doing what is right, at your funeral, those who knew you will be blessed and grateful that you continued to believe in them even when for a time they had stopped believing in themselves.

Pride in Subtle Forms

October 14, 2012

One of the wonderful features of young children is their emotional honesty. They don’t hide their feeling or wants. They have no subtlety. When they want something they simply demand it. They holler. They cry. They snatch things from each other. And they aren’t ashamed of any of this. They offer no apologies for selfishness, no disguises.

As we grow-up we become emotionally more-disciplined and leave most of this behind. But we also become much less emotionally honest. Our selfishness and our faults become less crass, but, this side of eternity, they never really disappear. They just become subtler.

The church has, classically, named something it calls the “seven deadly sins”: pride, envy, wrath, sloth, greed, gluttony, and lust. How these manifest themselves in their crassest forms is evident. But how do these manifest themselves in their subtler forms? How do they manifest themselves among the supposedly mature? Great spiritual writers have always had various treatises, some more astute than others, on what they call the religious faults of those who are beyond initial conversion? And it’s valuable sometimes to look at ourselves with naked honesty and ask ourselves how we have morphed the crasser faults of children into the subtler faults of adults. How, for instance, does pride manifest itself in our lives in more subtle ways?

How pride lives in us during our more mature years is probably best described by Jesus in the famous parable of the Pharisee and Publican. The Pharisee, vilified in this story, is proud precisely of his spiritual and human maturity. That’s a subtle pride of which it is almost impossible to rid ourselves. As we mature morally and religiously it becomes almost impossible not to compare ourselves with others who are struggling and to not feel both a certain smugness, that we are not like them, and a certain disdain for their condition. Spiritual writers often describe the fault in this way: Pride in the mature person takes the form of refusing to be small before God and refusing to recognize properly our interconnection with others. It is a refusal to accept our own poverty, namely, to recognize that we are standing before God and others with empty hands and that all we have and have achieved has come our way by grace more so than by our own efforts.

During our adult years pride often disguises itself as a humility which is a strategy for further enhancement. It takes Jesus’ invitation to heart: Whoever wants to be first must be last and be the servant of all! Then, as we are taking the last place and being of service, we cannot help but feel very good about ourselves and nurse the secret knowledge that our humility is in fact a superiority and something for which we will later be recognized and admired.

As well, as we mature, pride will take on this noble face: We will begin to do the right things for seemingly the right reasons, though often deceiving ourselves because, in the end, we will still be doing them in service to our own pride. Our motivation for generosity is often more inspired by the desire to feel good about ourselves than by real love of others. For example, a number of times during my years of ministry, I have been tempted to move to the inner-city to live among the poor as a sign of my commitment to social justice. It took a good spiritual director to point out to me that, at least in my case, such a move there would, no doubt, do a lot more for me than for the poor. My moving there would make me feel good, enhance my status among my colleagues, and be a wonderful inscription inside my curriculum vitae, but would not, unless I would more radically change my life and ministry, do much for the poor. Ultimately, it would serve my pride more than it would serve the poor.

Ruth Burrows cautions that this same dynamic holds in terms of our motivation for prayer and generosity. Thus, she writes: “The way we worry about spiritual failure, the inability to pray, distractions, ugly thoughts and temptations we can’t get rid of … it’s not because God is defrauded, for he isn’t, it’s because we are not so beautiful as we would like to be.”

And subtle pride, invariably, brings with it a condescending judgment about others. We see this most strongly perhaps in the period shortly after first conversion; when young lovers, recent religious converts, and neophytes in service and justice, still caught-up in the emotional fervor of the honeymoon, think they alone know how to relate to each other, to Jesus, and to the poor. The fervor is admirable, but the pride invariably spawns a couple of nasty children, arrogance and elitism.

Pride is inextricably linked to our nature and partly it’s healthy, but it’s a life-long moral struggle to keep it healthy.

Tribalism and Fear: Unworthy of Christianity

October 7, 2012

In her most recent book, a series of essays entitled, When I was a Child I Read Books, Marilynne Robinson includes an essay called Wondrous Love. She begins the essay autobiographically, confessing her deep, long-standing, faith as a Christian and her ever deepening wonder and awe at the mystery of God. She goes on to express some of her fears apposite to what is happening today in many of the churches and inside many of us; namely, new forms of tribalism and fear are reducing our wondrous God to a “tribal deity” and our own “local Baal”.

The God of all nations, all families, and all peoples, she asserts, is too frequently being invoked by of us as a God, more exclusively, of my own nation, my own family, my own church, and my own people. She cites various examples of this, including her own sadness at how sincere Christians cannot accept each other’s authenticity: “I must assume that those who disagree with my understanding of Christianity are Christians all the same, that we are members of one household. I confess that from time to time I find this difficult. This difficulty is owed in part to the fact that I have reason to believe they would not extend this courtesy to me.” This, she rightly asserts, is unworthy of God, of Christianity, and of what’s best in us. We know better, though we usually don’t act on that and are thus indicted by what Freud called “the narcissism of minor differences.”

And this takes it root in fear, fear of many things. Not least among those fears is our fear of the secularized world and how we feel this has put us on a slippery slope in terms of our Christian heritage and our moral values. To quote Robinson here: “These people see the onrush of secularism intent on driving religion to the margins, maybe over the edge, and for the sake of Christianity they want to enlist society itself in its defense. They want politicians to make statements of faith, and when merchants hang their seasonal signs and banners they want them to say something more specific than ‘Happy Holidays’.

Robinson, however, is distrustful of enlisting political power to defend Christianity. Why? Because “this country [the United States] in its early period was largely populated by religious people escaping religious persecution at the hands of state churches, whether French Huguenots, Scots Presbyterians, English Congregationalists, or English Catholics.” She adds: “Since my own religious heroes tended to die gruesomely under these regimes. I have no nostalgia for the world before secularism, nor would many of these ‘Christian nation’ exponents, if they looked a little into the history of their own traditions.”

Inside our fear of secularism, she suggests, lies a great irony: We are afraid of secularism because we have, in fact, internalized the great prejudice against Christianity, namely, the belief that faith and Christianity cannot withstand the scrutiny of an intellectually sophisticated culture. And that fear lies at the root of an anti-intellectualism that is very prominent inside many religious and church circles today. How much of our fear today about Christianity being on a slippery slope can be traced back to this prejudice? Why are we so afraid of our world and of secularized intellectuals?

This fear, she asserts, spawns an antagonism that is unworthy of Christianity. Fear and antagonism are very fashionable within religious circles today, almost to be worn as a badge of faith and loyalty. And is this a sign of health? No. Neither fear nor antagonism, she submits, are “becoming in Christians or in the least degree likely to inspire thinking or action of the kind that deserves to be called Christian.” Moreover, “if belief in Christ is necessary to attaining of everlasting life, then it behooves anyone who calls himself or herself a Christian, any institution that calls itself a church, to bring credit to the faith, at very least not to embarrass or disgrace it. Making God a tribal deity, our local Baal, is embarrassing and disgraceful.”

Fear and antagonism do nothing, she adds, to draw respect to Christianity and our churches and to the extent that we let them be associated with Christianity, we risk defacing Christianity in the world’s eyes. But saying that in today’s climate is to be judged as unpatriotic. We are not supposed to care what the world thinks. But it is the world we are trying to convert. And so we need to be careful not to present Christianity as undignified, xenophobic, and unworthy of our wondrous, all-embracing God.

Why all this fear, if we believe that Christianity is the deepest of all truth and believe that Christ will be with us to the end of time? Her last sentences capsulize a challenge we urgently need today. “Christianity is too great a narrative to be reduced to serving any parochial interest or to be underwritten by any lesser tale. Reverence should forbid in particular its being subordinated to tribalism, resentment, or fear.”

Willpower Alone is Not Enough

September 30, 2012

John Shea once wrote a haunting poem about John the Baptist. The poem begins with the Baptist in prison, hearing the dancing above his head and knowing that this is soon to culminate in his being beheaded. Strangely, he’s not too upset. Herod is about to give Herodias’ daughter half his Kingdom and John feels that he might as well die in the bargain, given that he’s only half a man. Why does he feel only half a man? Because, as the poem puts it, he’s only a half-prophet who can only do a half-job. Thus thinks the Baptist:

I can denounce a king, but I cannot enthrone one.

I can strip an idol of its power, but I cannot reveal the true God.

I can wash the soul in sand, but I cannot dress it in white.

I can devour the word of the Lord like wild honey, but I cannot lace his sandal.

I can condemn sin, but I cannot bear it away.

Behold the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

John the Baptist is aware of both his strength and his impotency. He can point out what’s wrong and what should be done, but after that, he’s helpless, with nothing to offer in terms of the strength needed to correct the wrong.

In essence, that’s what we bring to any situation when we criticize something. We are able, often with brilliance and clarity, to show what’s wrong. That contribution, like John the Baptist’s, is not to be undervalued. The gospels tell us that, next to Jesus, there isn’t anyone more important than John the Baptist. But, like John, criticism too is only a half-job, a half-prophecy: It can denounce a king, by showing what’s wrong, and it can wash the soul in sand, by blasting off layers of accumulated rust and dirt, but ultimately it can’t empower us to correct anything. Something else is needed. What?

Anyone who has ever tried to overcome an addiction can answer that question. A clear head, a clear vision of what’s to be done, and a solid resolution to leave a bad habit behind is only a half-job, a first step, an important one, but only an initial one. The tough part is still ahead: Where to find and how to sustain the strength needed to actually change our behaviour and give up a bad habit? Anyone who has ever given up an addiction will tell you that, in the end, they didn’t do it by willpower, or at least certainly not by willpower alone. Grace and community were needed and they were what ultimately provided what willpower alone could not.

At one point in the gospels, Jesus tells his disciples that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. The disciples are stunned and Peter responds by saying: If that is the case than it is impossible! Jesus appreciates that response and adds: It is impossible for humans, but not for God. Anybody who is in recovery from an addiction knows exactly what Jesus means by that. They’ve experienced it: They know that is impossible for them to give up the object of their addiction – and yet they are giving it up, not by their own willpower, but by some higher power, grace.

The gospels speak of this as a baptism and they speaks of two kinds of baptisms: the baptism of John and the baptism of Jesus, adding that John’s baptism is only a preparation for Jesus’ baptism. What’s John’s baptism? It’s a baptism of repentance, a realization of what we are doing wrong and a clear resolution to correct our bad behaviour. What’s Jesus’ baptism? It’s an entry into grace and community in such a way that it empowers us internally to do what is impossible for us to do by our willpower alone.

But how does this work? Is grace a kind of magic? No. It’s not magic. All psychic, emotional, and spiritual energy is, by definition, beyond a simple phenomenological understanding. Simply put, that means that we can’t lay out its inner plumbing. There’s a mystery to all energy. But what we can lay out empirically is its effect: spiritual energy works. Grace works. This has been proven inside the experience of thousands of people (many of them atheists) who have been able to find an energy inside them that clearly does not come from them and yet empowers them beyond their willpower alone. Ask any addict in recovery about this.

Sadly, many of us, who are solid believers, still haven’t grasped the lesson. We’re still trying to live out our lives by John’s baptism alone, that is, by own willpower. That makes us wonderful critics but leaves us mostly powerless to actually change our own lives. What we are looking for, and desperately need, is a deeper immersion into the baptism of Jesus, that is, into community and grace.

Laughter as Faith

September 23, 2012

In our novitiate, when I was a novice with the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, our assistant Novice Director, a sincere but overly-stern man, cautioned us about too much levity in our lives by telling us that there is no recorded incident in scripture of Jesus ever laughing. I was a pious novice but, even then, that didn’t sit well with me. I combed the Gospels trying to prove him wrong, but found out that, technically, he is right. But is he?

A couple of years later, during my seminary studies, I read a book by Peter Berger entitled, A Rumor of Angels, in which he tries to point to various places within our everyday experience where, he submits, we have intimations of the divine, rumors of angels, hints that ordinary experience contains more than just the ordinary, that God is there.

One such experience, he submits, is that of a mother comforting a frightened child at night, using soothing words and gestures to assure the child that he or she need not be afraid that everything is all right, the world is in order. In saying those words, if she means them, and normally she does, the mother is, in effect, implicitly praying the creed.

Another such intimation of the divine within ordinary experience, Berger suggests, is the phenomenon of laughter. In laughter, he submits, we intuit our transcendence: Given that we are able to laugh in any situation shows that there is something in us that is above that situation, transcendent to it. In laughter, Berger believes, we have a rumor of angels.

Karl Rahner agrees, suggesting that laughter shows we are on good terms with reality and hence with God. Laughter praises God because it foretells our final state in heaven when we will be in an exuberance of joy. Commenting on the Beatitudes in Luke’s Gospel where Jesus says, blessed are you who are now weeping, for you shall laugh, Rahner says that what Jesus is saying suggests that the happiness of the final state will not just dry away our tears and bring us to peace, it will also bring us to laughter – “to an intoxication of joy”. Here are his words: “’But you shall laugh.’ Thus it is written. And because God’s Word also has recourse to human words in order to express what shall one day be when all shall have been – that is why a mystery of eternity also lies hidden, but real, in everyday life; that is why the laughter of daily life announces and shows that one is on good terms with reality, even in advance of all that all-powerful and eternal consent in which the saved will one day say their amen to everything that he has done and allowed to happen. Laughter is praise of God because it foretells the eternal praise of God at the end of time, when those who must weep here on earth shall laugh.”

But is this superficial? Human optimism substituting itself for hope? An upbeat-spirit masquerading as theology? The naive claim that if I am happy than God is on my side? Indeed, in the Gospels, where is there a recorded incident of Jesus laughing?

Good scripture scholarship has long suggested that looking for an individual text to prove or disprove a certain point is not a good approach to scripture. The teachings of scripture are best gleaned by looking to scripture as a whole. And if we do that in this case, I believe, we will find that both Peter Berger and Karl Rahner are right. As Rahner points out, Jesus, himself, teaches that laughter will be part of the final state in heaven. You shall laugh! But, beyond that, Jesus’ message as a whole invites us of joy, a joy that no one can take from us, and laughter is the exuberant expression of that joy. It is the height, the apex, the crowning jewel, of our final state in heaven.

Hence, in laughter we do have a rumor of angels and we do intuit our transcendence. In laugher we do manifest that we are on good terms with reality, and on good terms with God. In laughter we affirm, loud, joyously, and to the world, the great mantra of Julian of Norwich that, in the end, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well – even though our world is not in that state today

My assistant Novice Director was a wonderful, sincere, gentle, and overly serious man. Levity was not his thing and laughter was not his preferred method of implicitly praying the creed. He showed his deep faith in other ways, believing that laughter is not the only rumor of angels inside of ordinary life.

But it is one of intimation of the divine within human life. Laughter, when it is healthy, when it is not forced or cynical, is, as Rahner says, “an intoxication of joy”, the joy of our final state. Thus when we laugh we also pray the creed.

The Right Answer Alone Is Not Enough

September 16, 2012

Truth alone is not enough. It must be balanced off with the other transcendental properties of God: oneness, goodness, and beauty.

That might sound abstract, but what it means concretely is that sometimes we can have all the right answers and still be wrong. How? If we are acting in truth how can we be wrong?

The first pitfall is this: We may be acting out of truth and, in fact, doing all the right things, but our energy can be wrong. T.S. Eliot once famously said: “The last temptation is the greatest treason: To do the right deed for the wrong reason.” We can see what is at stake here by looking at the older brother of the prodigal son. On the surface his devotion to his father lacks nothing. He rightly attests that his life is blameless and a paradigm of filial devotion. He has kept all the commandments, has never left his father’s house, and has done all the required work. The irony is that he fails to notice that he is not in fact inside his father’s house, but is standing outside of it and is being gently invited in by his father. What is keeping him outside since after all he is doing everything correctly? Bitterness and anger. His actions are correct, but his heart is wrong. Bitterness and anger are not the right energy to fuel truth. We can be scrupulously faithful and still find ourselves standing outside of God’s house and outside the circle of community and celebration because of a bitter heart. Gratitude is the energy that ultimately needs to fuel the truth.

Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we can be doing everything right and still, somehow, be wrong. And where this is particularly important in terms of a challenge is in our efforts, both as individuals and as churches, to offer the truth, the right answers, to those around us, be that our own children who no longer go to church or society as a whole. If, inside of our speaking the truth, there are elements of elitism, arrogance, anger, lack of respect, lack of understanding, or worse still, embittered moralizing, our truth will not be heard, not because our truth is wrong but because our energy is.

That is why Jesus warns us to “speak our truth in parables”. Truth is not a sledgehammer; it is an invitation that we must respectfully offer others.

And there is still a second potential pitfall: We can have the right answers and the right energy, but have the wrong understanding of those answers. We see this, for example, in Mark’s Gospel when Jesus asks the disciples the question: “Who do you say that I am?” Peter answers, and answers correctly, by saying: “You are the Christ, the Messiah.” But he is immediately shut down by Jesus (“Don’t tell that to anyone!”) and is subsequently rebuked with the words: “Get behind me, Satan!” Why? Wasn’t he correct?

Peter’s answer was correct, Jesus was the Christ, but his understanding of what that meant was mostly wrong. For Peter, the concept of a Messiah connoted earthly power and especially earthly privilege, whereas for Jesus it meant suffering and dying. Peter had the right answer, but the wrong understanding of that answer. Some scholars speculate that this is the real reason behind the so-called “messianic secret” in the Gospels, where Jesus repeatedly asks his disciples to not reveal his identity. His reluctance to have his disciples broadcast publicly who he is was based upon his fear that they could not, before the resurrection and Pentecost, properly understand his identity and would invariably preach a false message.

We can have the right answers and still be wrong because we have the wrong energy to go along with the answers or because we have a wrong understanding of the answers. It is good to take that to heart, especially when we step out prophetically either religiously or morally or socially. We may well have the water of life, the truth that sets people free, and the right cause, but nobody except our own kind will accept to receive it from us if our energy is wrong or our understanding of that truth is wrong. It is easy to rationalize that it is because we are prophetic, the faithful remnant, the last warriors of truth still standing, that we are not being heard and why we are hated. But, more often than not, we are not being listened to because we are misguided, elitist, non-empathic, or flat-out unloving, not because we are warriors for truth or justice.

And so we need to be humble and heed Jesus’ warning to guard the “messianic secret” and “speak our truth in parables”. In brief, we need to be solicitous always lest a false energy behind our truth or a misunderstanding of that truth have us so fall out of discipleship that Jesus has to reprimand us with the words: “Get behind me, Satan!”

The Three Levels of Christian Discipleship

September 9, 2012

Nikos Kazantzakis once suggested that there are three kinds of souls and three kinds of prayers:

· I am a bow in your hands, Lord, draw me, lest I rot.

· Do not overdraw me, Lord, I shall break.

· Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!

When I look at life, I also see three great struggles, not unlike those so poetically named by Kazantzakis. And each of these has a corresponding level of Christian discipleship. What are those great struggles and those levels of discipleship? There are three major phases in our human and spiritual journey:

· Essential discipleship – The struggle to get our lives together.

· Generative discipleship – The struggle to give our lives away

· Radical discipleship – The struggle to give our deaths away

Essential discipleship and the struggle to get our lives together is our initial task in life. Beginning with our first breath, we struggle to find an identity and to find fulfillment and peace there. We are born in a hospital and soon taken home to where we have parents, a family, and a place that’s ours. This period of our lives, childhood, is intended by God and nature to be a secure time. As a child, our major struggles have not yet begun. But that will change dramatically at puberty.

Simply put, puberty is designed by God and nature to drive us out of our homes in search of a home that we ourselves build. And it generally does its job well! It hits us with a tumult and violence that overthrows our childhood and sends us out, restless, sexually-driven, full of grandiose dreams, but confused and insecure, in search of a new home, one that we build for ourselves. This struggle, from being restlessly driven out of our first home to finding a place to call home again, is the journey of Essential discipleship.

Normally we do find our way home again. At a certain point, we land. We find ourselves “at home” again, namely, with a place to live that’s our own, a job, a career, a vocation, a spouse, children, a mortgage, a series of responsibilities, and a certain status and identity. At that point, the fundamental struggle in our life changes, though it may take years for us to consciously realize and accept this. Our question then is no longer: “How do I get my life together?” Rather it becomes: ‘How do I give my life away more deeply, more generously, and more meaningfully?” At that stage, we enter the second phase of discipleship.

Generative discipleship and the struggle to give our lives away is a stage most people reach sometime during their twenties or thirties, though some take longer to cross that threshold. Moreover, the crossover is never pure and complete, the struggle for self-identity and private fulfillment never completely goes away; but, at a certain point, we begin to live more for others than for ourselves. Generative discipleship begins then and, for most of us, this will constitute the longest period of our lives. During all those years, our task in life is clear: How do I give my life away more purely, more generously, more generatively?

But being the responsible adults who run the homes, schools, churches, and businesses of the world is not the final stage our lives. We still must die; the most daunting task of all. And so our default line must shift yet one more time: There comes a point in our lives, when our real question is no longer: ‘What can I still do so that my life makes a contribution?’ Rather the question becomes: ‘How can I now live so that my death will be an optimal blessing for my family, my church, and the world?’

Radical discipleship and the struggle to give our deaths away is the final stage of life: As Christians, we believe that Jesus lived for us and that he died for us, that he gave us both his life and his death. But we often fail to distinguish that there are two clear and separate movements here: Jesus gave his life for us in one movement, and he gave his death for us in another. He gave his life for us through his activity, through his generative actions for us; and he gave his death through his passivity, through absorbing in love the helplessness, diminutions, humiliations, and loneliness of dying.

Like Jesus, we too are meant to give our lives away in generosity and selflessness, but we are also meant to leave this planet in such a way that our diminishment and death is our final, and perhaps greatest, gift to the world. Needless to say that’s not easy. Walking in discipleship behind the master will require that we too will eventually sweat blood and feel “a stone’s throw” from everybody. This struggle, to give our deaths away, as we once gave our lives away, constitutes Radical discipleship.

When we look at the demands of discipleship, we see that one size does not fit all!

Of Pharisees, Pots, Bronze Kettles, Liturgical Rubrics, Cups, And Cats

September 2, 2012

Several years ago, I was at church meeting where we were discussing liturgical rubrics. There was heated discussion over a number of issues: Should the congregation be standing or kneeling during the Eucharistic prayer? What is the most reverent way to receive communion? Should laypersons be allowed to cleanse the chalice and cups after communion?

At one point, a woman made a rather pious interjection, inviting us to ask ourselves: “What would Jesus do?” The man chairing the meeting, already drained of patience by the disagreements in the room, responded in irritation: “Jesus has nothing to do with this! We’re talking about liturgical norms!” The words were barely out his mouth when, to his credit, he realized that somehow that didn’t sound right. We all realized it too, and have reminded this good man many times of his faux pas; but, in honesty, his remark voiced the feeling of 95% of the room.

Allow me a second story, to illustrate the same point: I am part of a theological faculty that is helping over one hundred young men prepare for ordination and is helping several hundred lay persons deepen their spiritual lives and prepare to serve in various forms of ministry. Who could ask for a higher task? But the sacredness of the task is not always front and center. A couple of years ago, we came to an Executive meeting and the two salient items on the agenda were “cups and cats”: Our school, not with complete unanimity, was phasing out all disposable cups. As well, we were debating as to whether to open up our campus as a certain sanctuary for feral cats. As he introduced the agenda, our Dean of Theology asked the question: “How did we get to this? We’re a theological institute preparing people for ministry – and the big-ticket items on our agenda are “cups and cats”?

What these two stories have to teach us is that we struggle, still, with the same issues that beset the Scribes and Pharisees in Jesus’ time. And I say this sympathetically. We’re human and invariably we lose perspective, just as the Scribes and Pharisees did. Jesus regularly chided them for, as he put it, “abandoning the commandment of God and holding to human traditions” and consequently getting overly- focused on rituals to do with “the washing of cups, pots, and bronze kettles”. We generally stand under this same indictment. We too tend to lose the center for the periphery.

What is the center? The great commandment of God, that Jesus chides the Scribes and Pharisees for losing sight of, is the invitation to love God above all else and to love your neighbor as yourself. That is the one, great, central law. But in order to live that out practically, we need many ancillary laws, about everything from liturgical rubrics to cups and cats. And these laws are good, providing that they never stand alone, autonomous, not bending to the one great commandment to love God and neighbor.

In both society and in our churches, we have made many laws: civil laws, criminal laws, church laws, canon laws, liturgical laws, and all kinds of laws and guidelines inside our families and within the venues where we work. It is naïve to believe, idealistically, that we can live without laws. St. Augustine once proposed that we could live without laws: “Love and do as you wish!” But, love, as he defined it in this context, meant the highest level of altruistic love. In other words, if you are already a saint you don’t need laws. Sadly, our world, our churches, and we ourselves, don’t measure up to that criterion. We still need laws.

But our laws, all of them, and at every level, are not meant to stand alone, to have their own autonomy. They must bend towards and give acquiescence to a center, and that center is the one great law that relativizes all others: Love God above all else and love your neighbor as yourself.

There is a principle central in all moral theology that in part encapsulates this, the principle of Epikeia (from the Greek, epieikes, meaning reasonable). Laws are meant to be reasonable and are meant to be obeyed in a way that doesn’t violate rationality and common sense. Epikeia is what St. Paul had in mind when he taught that the letter of the law kills while the spirit of the law brings life. In essence, what Epikeia asks of us is that, as we apply a given law in any circumstance of our lives, we ask ourselves the question: “If the law-maker were here, given the intent of this law, what would he or she want me to do in this situation?” That would bend the law to its center, to its sacred intent, to its spirit, and ensure that all our disagreements about pots, bronze kettles, liturgical rubrics, cups, and cats would remain loyal to the question: “What would Jesus do?”

Categorical Imperatives

August 26, 2012

There’s a well-known axiom that I will phrase more delicately than its usual expression. It goes this way: Every time you tell yourself that you should do something, you pay a bad price. The insinuation is that we are forever mistaking the voice of neurosis for the voice of conscience and putting ourselves under false obligations that rob us of both of freedom and maturity.

Is that true? Yes and no. The axiom sounds cleverer than it is. It says that there should not be any shoulds in our lives; but that statement is self-contradictory.

Still it needs to be given its due. There’s wisdom in its instinct, even if it is expressed with the subtlety of a sledgehammer. It has this positive challenge:

Many times when we feel a nagging obligation inside (“I must do this! I should do that!”) the imperative is not coming from God or truth but from some other voice that is being falsely heard as the voice of God. Put more technically, most of the voices we hear inside that demand that we do something are psychological and emotional rather than moral or religious. They don’t tell us what’s right or wrong, or what God wants of us, they only tell us how we feel about certain things. For example: a feeling of guilt does not indicate that we did something wrong, it only tells how we feel about what we did, and that feeling can be healthy or unhealthy. Perhaps we didn’t do anything wrong at all, but are only wounded and neurotic. Sorrow and contrition are better indicators of morality than any feeling of guilt.

So where do these feelings of obligation and guilt come from? They come from nature and nurture, from genetics and socialization, from our unconscious and from our wounds. Freudians, Jungians, and Hillmanians offer different explanations, but they all agree on the main thing, that is, many of the voices inside of us that speak of right and wrong and demand that we do this or that are not moral or religious voices at all. They may well have important things to teach us but, if we take them as the voice of God and morality, we will end up acting out of something other than God and conscience. Many of the ‘shoulds’ we feel inside of us are not the voice of conscience at all.

But, with that being said, some important qualifications need to be added: Simply put, sometimes the voice of obligation that we feel inside is profoundly moral and religious, God’s voice. False voices speak inside but so too do true ones. C.S. Lewis, for example, in describing his own conversion, shares how he didn’t want to become a Christian but something inside of him told him that he had to become one. Despite being “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom”, at a point in his life, he came to realize “that God’s compulsion” was his liberation. He became a Christian because, paradoxically, in a moment of genuine freedom, he came to know he had no other choice existentially except to surrender himself to something, God’s compulsion, which presented itself to him as an obligation.

“God’s compulsion” is precisely a deep and authentic ‘should’ inside us, and the great paradox is that when we submit to it we become freer and more mature. It’s also what brings joy into our lives. It’s no accident that the book in which Lewis describes this experience is called, Surprised by Joy.

There’s a great paradox at the heart of life that’s hard to accept, namely, that freedom lies in obedience, maturity lies in surrender, and joy lies in accepting duty and obligation. Jesus clearly taught and embodied this paradox: He was the freest human person to ever walk this planet, yet he insisted constantly that he did nothing on his own, that everything he did was in obedience to his Father. He was the paradigm of human maturity, even as his life was one within which he habitually surrendered his own will. And he was free of all false religion, false morality, and false guilt, even as he constantly drew upon moral and religious imperatives deep inside of his own soul and inside of his own religious tradition.

Simone Weil, that extraordinary philosopher and mystic who guarded her freedom so deeply that, despite her belief in the truth of Christ, she resisted baptism because she wasn’t sure that the visible church on earth merited this kind of trust, was, despite fierce instinctual resistance, clear that what she ultimately wanted and needed was to be obedient. We spend our whole lives, she once stated, searching for someone or something to be obedient to because unless we give ourselves over in obedience to something greater than ourselves, we inflate and grow silly – even to ourselves. She’s right.

We need to stop obeying false voices inside of us. Neurosis is not to be confused with conscience. But, that being admitted, there are some ‘shoulds” that we should do!

Our Attitude Towards Wealth

August 19, 2012

The rich are getting richer, and we are almost beyond surprise at how rich that is.

Every day, our newspapers, our televisions, and the internet, report financial compensations that, even just a generation ago, were unimaginable: Corporate executives receiving a hundred million dollar bonuses, an athlete signing a contract for a hundred million dollars, entertainers signing contracts for tens of millions, people in information technology earning billions, and ordinary folks everywhere joining the millionaire club.

And what’s our reaction? Difficult to judge. We express indignation and protest that this is out of proportion, even as we nurse a not-so-secret envy: I wish it was me!

We adore the rich and famous, pure and simple, and in the end, despite our envy, we grant them their due: Good for them! They worked for it. They have the talent. They deserve all they get!

But how should we view being rich from a faith perspective? Jesus warned that riches are dangerous, dangerous to the soul and dangerous to society. So what should be our attitude towards having wealth, both as this pertains to the very rich and as it pertains to us?

First, it is good to avoid a number of things: To begin with, we must never idealize poverty and see wealth as a bad thing in itself. God is rich, not poor, and heaven will not be a place of poverty. Poverty is something to be overcome, eradicated. The poor don’t enjoy being poor. Next, we must avoid too-quickly politicizing both poverty and wealth. Our lens must always be moral rather than political, though obviously both wealth and poverty have huge political implications. Finally, before attacking the possession of wealth, we must ensure that we are free from embittered moralizing which, whatever its moral guise, is little more than envy.

What principles should guide us in terms of an attitude towards wealth?

Underlying everything else, we must always keep in mind Jesus’ warning that the possession of wealth is dangerous, that it is hard for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven. Moreover that warning should be a huge aid in helping us to accept some other principles:

First: The possession of wealth is not a bad thing of itself; it is how we use it and what it can do to our hearts that can be bad. Jesus makes a distinction between the generous rich and the miserly rich. The former are good because they imitate God, the latter are bad. When we are generous, particularly in a very prodigious way, riches won’t close our hearts. But the reverse is also true. All miserliness, all stinginess, all lack of generosity closes our hearts in ways that make it hard to enter the kingdom of heaven, or genuine human community to put in purely human terms.

And so the challenge for all of us who are rich in any way is to continually give our wealth away. We need to do this, not because the poor need what we give them, though they do; we need to do this so that we can remain healthy. Philanthropy, of every kind, is more about the health of the one giving than the health of the one receiving. The generous rich can inherit the kingdom, the miserly rich cannot. The poor are everyone’s ticket into heaven – and to human health.

Finally, this too must always be kept in mind as we view wealth, both our own and that of the very rich. What we have is not our own, it’s given to us in trust. God is the sole owner of all that is and the world properly belongs to everyone. What we claim as our own, private property, is what has been given to us in trust, to steward for the good of everyone. It’s not really ours.

Further still, we need to remember that it wasn’t just our own ingenuity and hard work that gave us what we view as our own. The fruits of our labor are also the fruits of other peoples’ labor. We too easily lose sight of that. Here’s how Bill Gates Sr. puts it: “Society has an enormous claim upon the fortunes of the wealthy. This is rooted not only in most religious traditions, but also in an honest accounting of society’s substantial investment in creating fertile ground for wealth-creation. Judaism, Christianity, and Islam all affirm the right of individual ownership and private property, but there are moral limits imposed on absolute private ownership of wealth and property. Each tradition affirms that we are not individuals alone but exist in community – a community that makes claims on us. The notion that ‘it is all mine’ is a violation of these teachings and traditions. Society’s claim on individual accumulated wealth is … rooted in the recognition of society’s direct and indirect investment in the individual’s success. In other words, we didn’t get there on our own.” (Sojourners, January-February, 2003)

Indeed, none of us did! If we remember that we will more easily be generous.

The Ultimate Answer To Violence

August 12, 2012

Last year a French movie was released entitled, “Of Gods and Men” that was described by the New York Times as “perhaps the best movie on Christian commitment ever made.”

Based on a true story it tells how, in 1996, an Islamic terrorist group kidnapped a small community of Trappist monks from their remote monastery in Northern Algeria, held them, and eventually killed them. But the movie is about something deeper than these bare facts. It focuses on how each of the monks, ordinary men with no ambitions for martyrdom, had to accept possible martyrdom. Each had his own struggle, and for several of them it was a mammoth one. The film climaxes with a “Last Supper” scene where the camera locks-in on the face of each monk. Each face manifests both joy and agony in that man’s unconscious realization that he is soon to die and yet how, because of what he has already worked through and accepted within his soul, that death will be a triumph.

At one point in the story, just as it was becoming clear to the monks that the political and military violence surrounding them would at some point invade their monastic enclosure, the movie presents us with a very poignant scene, Military helicopters hover over their little village and their monastery, with their propellers sounding ominously like war-drums. As this war-beat drowns out most every sound, the monks respond by going to their chapel, putting on their monastic robes, linking arms and chanting gentle songs of trust and praise to God, and we are left staring at the contrast: gentle songs of trust in the face of hovering military hardware. Which of these is more powerful?

That scene is paralleled in the Gospels when they describe the birth of Jesus: A world filled with violence, under the hard military fist of the Roman Empire, is looking for an answer from above. And what is God’s response: A helpless baby asleep in the straw. How will this baby ultimately triumph? How do gentleness and meekness inherit the earth?

This may strain the logic somewhat, but Jesus hints at an answer to that question in his response to his disciples when they ask why they do not have the power to cast out certain demons, when Jesus can cast them out. Jesus’ answer is metaphorical but deep. He replies, in essence, that “demons” are cast out not through a superior cultic power, but through a superior moral power, namely, by the power that is created inside someone when he or she sufficiently nurtures a deep private integrity, graciousness, love, innocence, and gentleness, and holds these in fidelity in the face of all temptation, including violence. Nurturing these things inside oneself connects a person to the ultimate source of all Being, the Ultimate Power, the power that Jesus called his “Father”. And this power, and this power alone, ultimately stands; everything else, including the most sophisticated military hardware eventually gives way to age, rust, obsolescence, and death. The helicopters that hovered above those chanting monks now lie in junkyards, the monks’ chant goes on.

That isn’t easy to accept. The perennial temptation is to try to defeat violence with a morally superior violence, the kind we see at the end of cathartic movie where the hero outguns the bad guys by displaying more muscle, firepower, and accuracy than they did. The demon is then cast out by a superior violence. But that is not the way of Jesus or of the Gospels; nor was it the way of those martyred Trappist monks in Algeria.

In the face of impending violence, our first action should not be an attempt to marshal a superior violence. No. Like those martyred monks, we are meant to link arms and sing songs of love and trust. Or, to vary the image, like the three young men in the Book of Daniel, we are meant to sing sacred songs, even as we are walking amid flames seven times hotter than usual.

To accept this response to violence does not, in se, rule out the possibility of morally justified self-defense or the possibility of a just-war. The world is complex, morality is complex, and we are not always at the same place within our lives, within our faith, and within our trust in God. One size doesn’t fit all. And, in “Of Gods and Men”, each monk had to make his own agonizing decision apposite to meeting violence. So too for each of us.

This is not a criterion for all moral decisions about self-defense and war (though, irrespective of circumstance, we should ever live with the maxim that violence always begets more violence) but an invitation, an invitation to begin more to cultivate within ourselves the kind of “prayer and fasting” that casts out all demons, including violence. The invitation is to begin to nurture within a deep private integrity, graciousness, love, innocence, and gentleness, and hold these in fidelity in the face of all temptation, including violence.