There are a number of old axioms that suggest that virtue and truth lie in the middle, between the two extremes. This was called the “golden mean” and expressed in phrases such as “In medio stat virtus” and “Aurea mediocritas”. 

But its meaning can easily be misunderstood and suggest that virtue and truth are found in the lowest common denominator, in mediocrity. Indeed that’s the literal translation of aurea mediocritas, golden mediocrity. 

What these axioms actually point to however is not some mediocrity that tries to avoid the raw edges of the two extremes by staking out some emaciated center. Rather they tell us that virtue and truth lie in paradox, in carrying the truth of both sides and living inside the tension of that ambiguity. Virtue and truth are not found by choosing “either/or” or in opting for some insipid middle that hasn’t the salt to offend either side. Virtue and truth lie in living out “‘both/and”, namely, in carrying and balancing out the truth that is contained in both extremes. 

And nowhere is this truer than in religious discernment, that is, in the question of how we recognize God’s voice in our lives.  Does God speak in whispers or in thunder? Does God speak in pain or in blessing? Does God call us out of this world or more deeply into it? Does God call us through what is comfortable and familiar or does God call us into foreign lands? Does God disturb or soothe us? Is God recognized in miracles or in helplessness? Does God speak through the rich or through the poor, through the educated or the uneducated?  Does God’s voice frighten us or rid us of fear? Is God’s voice heard more through piety or iconoclasm? Does God ask us to renounce the pleasures of this world or does God ask us to enjoy them

God’s voice is in all of these things. It is heard in paradox:

·        The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and soft tones, even as it is recognized in thunder and storm. God spoke to Elijah in a soft breeze, but to Pharaoh through the plagues.

·        The voice of God is recognized wherever one sees life, joy, health, color, and humor, even as it is recognized wherever one sees dying, suffering, poverty, and a beaten-down spirit. God is equally present on Good Friday and Easter Sunday.

·        The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to what’s higher, to what sets us apart, to what invites us to holiness, even as it calls us to humility, invites us to submerge our individuality into humanity, and rejects everything that denigrates our humanity. The voice of God calls us out of what’s purely human even as it invites us to humbly take our place within humanity.

·        The voice of God is recognized in what appears in our lives as “foreign”, as other, as “stranger”, even as it is recognized in the voice that is most deeply familiar and which beckons us home. God’s voice takes us beyond any language we know even as we recognize in it most deeply our mother tongue.

·        The voice of God is the one that most challenges us, even as it the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us. God’s voice does disturb the comforted and comfort the disturbed, but it also comforts the comforted and disturbs the disturbed.

·        The voice of God enters our lives as the greatest of all powers, even as it forever lies in vulnerability, like a helpless baby in the straw. God’s voice creates the cosmos and keeps it in existence, even as it lies in our world powerless as an infant.

·        The voice of God is heard in privileged way in the poor, even as it beckons us through the voice of the artist and the intellectual. God is in the poor, even as the artist and intellectual help reveal the transcendental properties of God.

·        The voice of God invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear. When God appears in human history, invariably the first words are: “Do not be afraid!” God’s presence is meant to eradicate all fear, even as it invites us to live in “holy fear”, in a reverence and chastity that help create a world within which no one needs to fear anything. 

·        The voice of is recognized inside the gifts of the Holy Spirit, even as it invites us never to deny the complexities of our world and our own lives. 

·        The voice of God is always heard wherever there is genuine enjoyment and gratitude, even as it asks us to deny ourselves, die to ourselves, and relativize all the things of this world.

Of course to accept this is also to accept living with ambiguity, complexity, unknowing, and a whole lot of patience. God’s voice will then no longer be as clear as our fundamentalist instinct would like, but it will be free both to soothe and challenge us as never before. 

There’s an adage that says that an atheist is simply someone who cannot grasp metaphor. Thomas Halik, the Czech writer, would suggest rather that an atheist is someone who cannot be patient enough with God.

There is a lot of truth in that. Patience with God is perhaps our greatest faith struggle. God, it would seem, is never in a hurry and because of that we live with an impatience that can test the strongest faith and the stoutest heart.

Life, as we can all attest to, is not without its bitter frustrations and crushing heartaches. We all live with a lot of pain and unresolved tensions.  Who among us doesn’t experience regularly the pain of sickness, various kinds of personal and professional failure, some kind of humiliation, the inadequacy of self-expression, the soul searing losses of loved ones, every kind of frustrated longing, and the nagging pain of life’s inadequacy? In this life, there’s no such a thing as a clear cut, pure joy; rather everything comes with shadow. We do in fact live inside a certain valley of tears.

We are built for happiness, but pure happiness never quite finds us. Neither, it would seem, does justice.  Jesus promised that the meek would inherit the earth, but mostly it doesn’t seem that way. The arrogant among us often believe that. There’s an infamous Ziggy cartoon which shows him praying to God in these words: I just want to let you know that the meek are still getting clobbered down here! Often that appears to be the case. So where is God? Where is the truth in Jesus’ promise about the meek inheriting the earth? In the face of long standing global injustice we either live in a long-suffering patience with God or we come to believe that neither God’s promises nor God’s existence hold true.

When Jesus was dying on the cross, some onlookers were taunting him and challenging his message with the words: If you are the Son of God, let him rescue you! In essence: If God is real and your message is true, prove it right now! And God let Jesus die! The same held true for Jesus himself in the face of the death of Lazarus. In essence, he was being challenged:  If you possess God’s power in this world and you love this man, why don’t you save him from dying? Jesus let Lazarus die! And the first community of disciples, immediately after the Ascension, painfully struggled with the same question:  Jesus is God and he loves us – so why does he let us die?

Each of us asks that question in our own way because what we want is a God who rescues us, who intervenes actively for justice and goodness in this world, who acts visibly now in this life, and who doesn’t let us get sick and die. None of us want a God who asks us to live in a life-long patience, predicated on the promise that in the end, whenever that will be, love and justice will prevail, all tears will be dried, and all will finally be well. We want life, love, justice, and consummation now, not in some distant future and only after a lifetime of heartache. God, as an old Jewish axiom puts it, is never in a hurry!

And so we live with a lot of expressed and unexpressed impatience with God. Atheists, it would seem, at a certain point just give up on playing the game and, in essence, say the words: I’ve seen enough; I’ve waited enough; and it’s not enough! I will no longer wait for God! But if atheism is just another way of saying I will no longer wait for God then the opposite is also true: Faith is just another way of saying: I will wait for God. If atheism is impatience, faith is patience.

The Italian spiritual writer, Carlo Carretto, after spending more than 20 years in solitude as a monk in the Sahara desert, was asked what single thing he felt that he heard God most say to him inside of the long, deep silence. What, he was asked, do you hear God saying to the world? His answer: God is asking us to wait, to be patient!

Why the need for such great patience?  Does God want to test us? Does God want to see if we indeed have a faith that is worthy of a great reward? No. God has no need to play such a game, and neither do we. It’s not that God wants to test our patience. The need for patience arises out of the rhythms innate within life itself and within love itself. They need to unfold, as do flowers and pregnancies, according to their own innate rhythms and within their own good time. They cannot be rushed, no matter how great our impatience or how great our discomfort.

And neither can God be rushed because it is God’s timetable that protects us from perpetually stunting life and love by drawing them through the birth canal prematurely.

Every year I write an article on suicide because so many people have to live with the pain of losing a loved one in this way. I rarely go for even a week without receiving a letter, an email, or a phone call from someone who has just lost a family member to suicide. In virtually every case, there is a corresponding sorrow that there really isn’t a lot of material out there, religious or secular, to help console those left bereaved. A friend of mine, who through some very dark years has had to work through the pain of losing her husband to suicide, plans one day to write a book to try to offer consolation to those left behind. There is a desperate need for just such a book.

When someone close to us dies by suicide we live with a pain that includes confusion (“Why?”), guilt (“What might we still have done?”), misunderstanding (“This is the ultimate form of despair”) and, if we are believers, deep religious anxiety as well (“How does God treat such a person? What’s to be his or her eternal destiny?”)

What needs to be said about suicide? At the risk of repeating what I have been writing year after year:

First, that it’s a disease, something that in most cases takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, that we, the loved ones who remain, should not spend undue time and energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with a purely physical disease, we can love someone and still not be able to save him or her from death. God too loved this person and, like us, could not interfere with his or her freedom. Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets our loved one on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, goes through locked doors, descends into hell, and breathes out peace where we can’t. Most people who die by suicide will awake on the other side to find Christ standing inside their locked doors, inside the heart of their chaos, breathing out peace and gently saying: “Peace be with you!”

But I also receive a lot of very critical letters every year suggesting that I am making light of suicide by seeming to lessen its ultimate taboo and thus making it easier for people to do the act:  Wasn’t it G.K. Chesterton himself who said that, by killing yourself, you insult every flower on earth? What’s about this?

Chesterton is correct, when suicide is indeed a despairing act within which one kills oneself. But in most suicides, I suspect, this is not the case because there is huge distinction between falling victim to suicide and killing oneself.

In suicide, a person, through illness of whatever sort, is taken out of life against his or her will. Many of us have known loved ones who died by suicide and we know that in almost every case that person was someone who was the antithesis of the egoist, the narcissist, the over-proud, hardened, unbending person who refuses, through pride, to take his or her place in the humble and broken scheme of things. Usually it’s the opposite. The person who dies by suicide has cancerous problems precisely because he or she is too sensitive, too wounded, too raw, and too bruised to possess the necessary toughness needed to absorb life’s many blows. I remember comment I once heard at a funeral. We had just buried a young man who, suffering from clinical depression, had committed suicide. The priest had preached badly, hinting that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault and that suicide was always the ultimate act of despair. At the reception afterwards a neighbor of the man who had died came up and expressed his displeasure at the priest’s remarks: “There a lot of people in the world who should kill themselves, but they never will! But this man is the last person who should have killed himself; he was the most sensitive person I’ve ever met!” Too true.

Killing yourself is something different. It’s how some of the Hitlers pass out of this life. Hitler, in fact, did kill himself. In such a case, the person is not too sensitive, too self effacing, and too bruised to touch others and be touched. The opposite. The person is too proud to accept his or her place in a world that, at the end of the day, demands humility of everyone.

There is an infinite distance between an act done out of weakness and one done out of strength. Likewise there is an absolute distinction between being too bruised to continue to touch life and being too proud to continue to take one’s place within it. Only the latter makes a moral statement, insults the flowers, and challenges the mercy of God.

Mysticism is an exotic word. Few of us connect mysticism with ordinary experience, especially with our own experience. Mysticism is generally seen as an exotic thing, a paranormal thing, a special kind of consciousness given only to the most elite within the spiritual life, something for spiritual athletes, or for the weird, visions and altered states of consciousness, snakes and ladders in the spiritual life.

But mysticism isn’t extraordinary, paranormal, or weird, but an important, ordinary experience given to us all.

What is mysticism? The British Carmelite, Ruth Burrows, defines it this way: Mysticism is being touched by God in a way that is deeper than language, thought, imagination, and feeling. It’s knowing God and ourselves beyond explicit thought and feeling.

But how is this possible? How do we know something beyond our capacity to speak about it, imagine it, or even clearly feel it?

Perhaps a description of a life-changing experience from her life by Ruth Burrows can be helpful here. In her autobiography, Before the Living God, she shares this incident: As a young woman in her late teens, she was sitting in chapel one day. She wasn’t there for a particularly prayerful purpose, but had been consigned there as a punishment for acting out at a class retreat. As she sat alone in that chapel she had a mystical experience, not that an angel appeared to her or that she has some special vision or some altered state of consciousness. The opposite: Sitting in that chapel she had a moment of rare, simple, and privileged clarity, a deep grounding in herself and in reality, where, for that moment, she was in touch with what was deepest and most true inside her and with what is deepest and most true inside of reality. And, in that, she knew, beyond the explicitness of words, imagination, and feeling, something of the reality of God and something of her own truest being. The experience changed her life. In that moment, she knew what she had to do and, against much of her own temperament, she became a contemplative nun – and eventually, of course, a woman whose spiritual insight has helped mentor many of us.

C.S. Lewis, sharing about his own conversion to Christianity, describes something similar, though in his case the experience was a longer, protracted one which crystallized in a moment of privileged clarity that had him, for that moment, in touch with what was deepest and most true inside of him and inside of reality itself.

Describing in his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, the moment when he first knelt down in the acceptance of Christianity, he shares that, for him, the moment was far from ecstatic. Rather, he knelt down as “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” But he knelt because, as he describes it: “I had come to realize that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man and God’s compulsion is our liberation.”

How does Lewis understand God’s compulsion? In much the same way the same way as Ruth Burrows understands her mystical experience, namely, as a moment of simple clarity within which one touches and comes to realize what’s is deepest and truest inside of oneself and inside of reality itself and, in that clarity, knows what one has to do – as opposed to what one’s intellect might think it wise to do or what one’s heart affectively wants to do. Lewis became a Christian because he was in touch with this experience inside his mystical center and it told him what he had to do.

And what makes up our mystical center? Bernard Lonergan called it the brand of the first principles – oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty – inside the human soul.  Henri Nouwen called it “first love”, namely, the dark memory of once having been loved and caressed by hands far gentler than any we have ever met in this world, the unconscious memory of having been with God before we were born. Some mystics call it the inchoate memory of God’s kiss as he puts our souls into our bodies.

Most of us don’t have a name for this, but we speak of something as “ringing true” or as “not ringing true” to us. But to what does something ring true or false? Do we carry some kind of “bell” inside of us? In fact we do. We can call it our conscience, our deepest center, our moral center, the center that tells us what we have to do, or that place inside us where we long for a soul mate, but we all know that there is a place inside of us, one that we touch in our most sincere moments, where we know the brand of the first principles, inchoately remember God’s kiss, and know what we need to do to be true to who we are.

When we are in touch with this deep center and act out of its nudges and imperatives we, like Ruth Burrows and C.S. Lewis, are living a mystically-driven life.

We all have our faults, weaknesses, places where we short-circuit morally, dark spots, secret and not-so-secret addictions. When we’re honest, we know how universally true are St. Paul’s words when he writes: “The good thing I want to do, I never do; the evil thing that I do not want to do – that is what I do.” None of us are whole, saints through and through. There’s always something we are struggling with: anger, bitterness, vengefulness, selfishness, laziness, or lack of self-control (major or minor) with sex, food, drink, or entertainment.

And for most of us, experience has taught us that the bad habits we have are very difficult to break. Indeed, many times we cannot even find the heart to want to break them, so deep have they become engrained in us. We bring the same things to our confessor year after year, just as we break the same New Year’s resolutions year after year. And each year we tell our doctor that this year will finally be the year that we lose weight, exercise more, and stick to a healthier diet. Somehow it never works because our habits, as Aristotle said, become our second nature – and nature is not easily changed.

So how do we change? How do we move beyond deeply engrained bad habits?

John of the Cross, the Spanish mystic, suggests two paths that can be helpful. Both take seriously our human weakness and the unyielding strength of a bad habit inside us

His first advice is this: It is very hard to root out a bad habit by trying to attack it directly. When we do this we often end up unhealthily focused on the habit itself, discouraged by its intransigence, and in danger of worsening its effect in our lives. The better strategy is to “cauterize” our bad habits (his words) by focusing on what is good in our lives and growing our virtues to the point where they “burn out” our bad habits.

That’s more than a pious metaphor; it’s a strategy for health. It works this way: Imagine, for example, that you are struggling with pettiness and anger whenever you feel slighted. Every sincere resolution in the world has not been able to stop you from giving in to that inclination and your confessor or spiritual director, instead of having you focus on breaking that habit, has you focus instead on further developing one of your moral strengths; for example, your generosity. The more you grow in generosity, the more too will your heart grow in size and goodness until you reach a point in your life where there simply won’t be room in your life for pettiness and childish sulking. Your generosity will eventually cauterize your pettiness. The same strategy can be helpful for every one of our faults and addictions.

John’s second counsel is this: Try to set the instinct that lies behind your bad habit into a higher love. What’s meant by that?

We begin to set an instinct behind a bad habit into a higher love by asking ourselves the question: Why?  Why, ultimately, am I drawn this way? Why, ultimately, am I feeling this vengefulness, this pettiness, this anger, this lust, this laziness, or this need to eat or drink excessively? In what, ultimately, is this propensity rooted?

The answer might surprise us. Invariably the deepest root undergirding the propensity for a bad habit is love. The instinct is almost always rooted in love.  Just analyze your daydreams. There we are mostly noble, good, generous, big-hearted, whole – and loving, even when in our actual lives we are sometimes petty, bitter, selfish, self-indulgent, and nursing various addictions. We have these bad attitudes and habits not because we aren’t motivated by love but because, at this particular place, our love is disordered, wounded, bitter, undisciplined, or self-centered. But it’s still love, the best of all energies, the very fire of the image and likeness of God within us.

And so we move to uproot a bad habit in our lives by, first of all, recognizing and honoring the energy that lies beneath it and inflames it.  Then we need to reset this energy into a higher framework of love, a wider, less selfish, more respectful, more-ordered perspective. And that’s a very different thing than denigration or repression of that instinct. When we denigrate or repress an instinct this only increases its power in us and, most often, allows it to wreak even a worse havoc in our lives. Moreover, when we denigrate or repress an instinct that’s undergirding a bad habit we are in fact acting against our own health and we will then struggle, perhaps only unconsciously but without exception, to even find the heart to eradicate that bad habit. Energy must be honored, even as we struggle to discipline it and set into a healthier framework.

So how do we finally break our bad habits? We do so by honoring the energies that enflame them and by reordering those energies into a higher love.

There’s a much-quoted line from Leonard Cohen that suggests that the place where we are broken is also the place where our redemption starts: There is a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in.

That’s true, a major wound is often the place where wisdom flows into our lives and a weakness that habitually overpowers us can keep us aware of our need for grace. But that’s half of the equation. A fault, while keeping us humble, can also keep us in mediocrity and joylessness.  John of the Cross offers us this image by way of an explanation:

If one small crack in a pitcher goes unrepaired, the damage will be enough to cause all the liquid to leak out. … Accordingly, one imperfection leads to another, and these to still more. You will scarcely ever find a person negligent in the conquering of one appetite who will not have many others flowing from the identical weakness and imperfection caused by this one appetite. Such persons, consequently, are ever faltering along the road. We have witnessed many persons, whom God was favoring with much progress in detachment and freedom, fall from happiness and stability in their spiritual exercises and end up losing everything merely because they began to indulge in some slight attachment to conversation and friendship under the appearance of good. For by this attachment they gradually emptied themselves of holy solitude and the spirit and joy of God. All this happened because they did not put a stop to their initial satisfaction and sensitive pleasure, and preserve themselves for God in solitude. (Ascent to Mount Carmel, Book I, Chapter 11).

Although this passage was written more specifically for contemplative monks and nuns and a warning against “attachment to conversation and friendship” will sound strange and unhealthy to us, there’s part of us that understands exactly what he is saying: Our addictions, our infidelities, and our various falls from grace invariably start at that exact spot to which he points his finger, namely, in a certain initial satisfaction and pleasure, a certain flirting and playing with fire, which, while not sinful in itself,  eventually leads us into an emotional and moral quagmire that robs us of peace and happiness and, most damaging of all, forces us to hide things, to lie, and to be less than healthily transparent.

And even when the fault is not big, it still serves to block us from deeper growth and deeper happiness. John has an axiom that says it doesn’t matter in the end whether a bird is attached to the ground by a heavy chain or a light string – it can’t fly in either case. Hence, he cautions us strongly against being comfortable with any of our faults or addictions by rationalizing that this or that fault is not so serious and that we are fundamentally good persons, despite our weakness.  Whether we are held by a heavy chain or a thin thread, we still can’t fly.

If we grow comfortable with an addiction or fault inside us, we will find ourselves impoverished too in another way: it will rob us of real happiness. French philosopher, Leon Bloy, suggests that ultimately there is only one, true, human sadness, that of not being a saint! That may sound like over-pious moralizing, but, just as with the quote from John of the Cross cited above, there’s a part of us that understands exactly what Bloy is saying. Our addictions, our infidelities, and our less-than-healthy indulgences might well bring us some pleasure (though, soon enough, that pleasure turns into a compulsion) but these never bring us joy. They bring sadness. Joy is not the same as pleasure and, indeed, we speak of sad pleasures. There can be a lot of pleasure in our lives even as our hearts are sad and our consciences are heavy.

True joy is something beyond pleasure and can co-exist with renunciation and pain. It is dependent rather on honesty, transparency, and gratitude, the real hallmarks of sanctity. When we are honest in examining our experience we know this truth. If any of us ask ourselves: When have I been most truly happy in my life? The honest answer invariably will be: I have been happiest and most at peace at those times when I have been faithful, honest, fully transparent, when all the goods were on the table, and I had nothing to hide, even if I was less than perfect.

Nobody is perfect, but we must never grow comfortable with our faults and rationalize them because they are not grievous or because we can keep them hidden. If one small crack in a pitcher goes unrepaired, the damage will be enough to cause all the liquid to leak out. The net result will not be that we become bad persons. No. We will remain as we are, good and solid in our mediocrity. But greatness will escape us and we will carry with us always the adult sadness of not being a saint.

Recently a new expression has made its way into our theological and ecclesial vocabulary.  There’s a lot of talk today about the New Evangelization. Indeed the Pope has called for a Synod to meet this year for a month in Rome to try to articulate a vision and strategy for such an endeavor.

What is meant by New Evangelization? In simple terms: Millions of people, particularly in the Western world, are Christian in name, come from Christian backgrounds, are familiar with Christianity, believe that they know and understand Christianity, but no longer practice that faith in a meaningful way. They’ve heard of Christ and the Gospel, even though they may be overrating themselves in their belief that they know and understand what these mean. No matter. Whatever their shortcomings in understanding a faith they no longer practice, they believe that they’ve already been evangelized and that their non-practice is an examined decision. Their attitude toward Christianity, in essence, is: I know what it is. I’ve tried it. And it’s not for me!

And so it no longer makes sense to speak of trying to evangelize such persons in the same way as we intend that term when we are speaking of taking the Gospel to someone for the first time. It’s more accurate precisely to speak of a new evangelization, of an attempt to take the Gospel to individuals and to a culture that have already largely been shaped by it, are in a sense over-familiar with it, but haven’t really in fact examined it. The new evangelization tries to take the Gospel to persons who are already Christian but are no longer practicing as Christians.

How to do that? How do we make the Gospel fresh for those for whom it has become stale? How do we, as G. K. Chesterton put it, help people to look at the familiar until it looks unfamiliar again? How do we try to Christianize someone who is already Christian?

There are no simple answers. It’s not as if we haven’t already been trying to do that for more than a generation. Anxious parents have been trying to do this with their children. Anxious pastors have been trying to do that with their parishioners. Anxious bishops have been trying to do that with their dioceses.  Anxious spiritual writers, including this one, have been trying to do that with their readership. And an anxious church as a whole has been trying to do that with the world. What more might we be doing?

My own view is that we are in for a long, uphill struggle, one that demands faith in the power and truth of what we believe in and a long, difficult patience. Christ, the faith, and the church will survive. They always do. The stone always eventually rolls away from the tomb and Christ always eventually re-emerges, but we too must do our parts. What are those parts?

The vision we need as we try to reach out to evangelize the already evangelized will, I believe, need to include these principles:

1.     We need to clearly name this task, recognize its urgency, and center ourselves in Jesus’ final mandate: Go out to the whole world and make disciples.

2.     We need work at trying to re-inflame the romantic imagination of our faith. We have been better recently at fanning the flames of our theological imagination, but we’ve struggled mightily to get people to fall in love with the faith.

3.     We need to emphasize both catechesis and theology. We need to focus both on those who are trying to learn the essentials of their faith and those who are trying to make intellectual sense of their faith.

4.     We need a multiplicity of approaches.  No one approach reaches everyone. People go where they are fed.

5.     We need to appeal to the idealism of people, particularly that of the young. We need to win people over by linking the Gospel to all that’s best inside them, to let the beauty of the Gospel speak to the beauty inside of people.

6.     We need to evangelize beyond any ideology of the right or the left. We need to move beyond the categories of liberal and conservative to the categories of love, beauty, and truth.

7.     We need to remain widely “Catholic” in our approach. We are not trying to get people to join some small, lean, purist, sectarian group, but to enter a house with many rooms.

8.     We need to preach both the freedom of the Gospel and its call for an adult maturity. We need to resist preaching a Gospel that threatens or belittles, even as we preach a Gospel that asks for free and mature obedience.

9.     We need today, in an age of instability and too-frequent betrayal, to give a special witness to fidelity.

10.  We need, today more than ever, to bear down on the essentials of respect, charity, and graciousness.  Cause never justifies disrespect.

We need to work at winning over hearts, not hardening them.

In his autobiography Nikos Kazantzakis tells the story behind his famous book, Zorba the Greek. Zorba is partially fiction, partly history.

After trying unsuccessfully to write a book on Nietzsche, Kazantzakis experienced a certain emotional breakdown and returned to his native Crete for some convalescence. While there he met a man of incredible energy and vitality. The Zorba-character in the book is based on this man’s life; never before in his life had Kazantzakis been so taken by the life and energy of another human being. But mortality doesn’t make allowances for that. Zorba eventually died and his death very much disillusioned Kazantzakis: How can such exceptional vitality simply die? And what happens to it, does it simply disappear as if it had never been? What happens at death to all the color, energy, life, love, and humor that a human being has embodied?

Kazantzakis wrote Zorba the Greek as an attempt to give some immortality to the wonderful energy that an exceptional man had embodied. Zorba cannot be dead. It made for a great book and a great movie, but is that really what makes for immortality? Does simply remembering somebody or publicly celebrating his life make him alive? And when someone dies, what does happen to that very unique and wonderful energy, vitality, love, color, and humor that a person embodied during his or her life?

Several days ago, I was at a wake service for a woman whom I had never met. The formal prayer service was followed by a half-dozen eulogies delivered by her family. They were wonderful, warm, witty, colorful, and full of humor. As these stories were told she became alive again to everyone in the church. We all smiled and laughed and the sadness of her leaving was eclipsed for the moment (and partly forever) as the color and vitality of her life were again made alive for us. And we weren’t just remembering her. We were reminding each other that she was still with us.

It’s the same for everyone who dies. They remain with us in more than memory. And it’s not just some purified spirit of theirs, washed clean in death, that remains. Their unique color stays too:  I think, for instance, of my own family. We’ve had to mourn the loss of a number of our members, but we’re not only nurtured by the gift that each person’s life and virtue was for us, we’re still fed by the unique color each of them embodied.  They are still with, as is their color. Our family legends abound about those whom we have lost: stories about my dad’s unique way of combining the Serenity Prayer with Murphy’s Law in an exasperated expression: “Just now!”; about my mother’s incapacity to find a place to begin a story without having to first go back to Genesis – “In the beginning”; about my deceased sister’s love of chocolate and her concomitant love for deflating what was pompous; about my deceased brother’s proclivity to lecture the entire planet on social justice; about my deceased brother-in-law’s love for cooking sausages and laughingly inquiring about the aesthetic condition of your suspenders; and about a deceased Uncle’s habit of lighting up a cigarette and getting a mischievous gleam in his eye as a prelude to telling a thoroughly wicked story. The list could go on and on because the stories of the color in the lives of our deceased loved ones do go on and on.

So what does happen at death to that very unique energy, vitality, color, and humor that a person has embodied? Alfred North Whitehead suggests that it’s immortalized in the “consequent nature” of God. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin assures us that nothing will be lost and everything will be in some way preserved, right down to the lives of our pets. Our Christian doctrine on the Communion of Saints tells that our loved ones are still alive and that someday we will be face to face with them again

I don’t doubt the truth of these assertions, but they can seem pretty abstract when our hearts are saddened and aching at the memory of a loved one who has died. Being alive in our memories is not a sufficient form of immortality and being alive in God’s memory can seem too abstract to bring much consolation. I don’t doubt that our loved ones are alive in God’s “consequent nature” or that they are alive inside the communion of saints, but I believe something more, based on how our memories of their unique color affects and nurtures us here on this side.

I believe that what they so wonderfully and uniquely embodied here on earth is still going on, happening on the other side. I suspect there are more than white clouds, harps, and floating angels in heaven, but that heaven is rife with wit, color, humor, and thoroughly wicked stories because whenever we recall these about our deceased loved ones their memory turns warm and nurturing.