Father’s Day

June 17, 2012

Each year we celebrate “Father’s Day”, a day on which we’re asked to get in touch with the gratitude we should feel towards our own fathers. For some of us this is easy, we had good fathers; but for many it’s difficult: How do you feel gratitude if your father was someone who was mostly absent or abusive?

Sadly, our world has too many absent and abusive fathers. Because of this, many of us go through life struggling, however unconsciously, with the capacity to find a healthy balance between freedom and discipline in our lives. Instead we are forever vacillating between being too hard on ourselves or too easy on ourselves. Moreover, if we had an absent or abusive father, we tend to go through life always unconsciously seeking something that has been withheld from us, namely, our father’s approval. This leaves us inhibited, often angry, and hungering for a father.

Father-hunger, the hunger to be affirmed and blessed by our own fathers or by someone who represents him, is today perhaps the deepest hunger in the world, especially among men. Not enough people have been affirmed and blessed by their own fathers or the father figures in their lives.

What is a father? Anthropologists tell us that the archetypal father is meant to have these qualities: He is meant to order, carry, feed, and bless his family. What does this entail?

First of all, he is meant to be a principle of order rather than disorder. A good father lives in such a way that his family feels safe and secure when he’s around. A bad father, through absence, non-reliability, or by being abusive, makes the family feel unsafe. For example, we see how a father can be a principle of disorder in a situation where he is unfaithful, is an alcoholic, or is nursing some other addiction. His behavior then will be unpredictable and his children will be forever guessing as to whether he will come home or not – and what kind of mood he will be in if he does come home. Slowly the unpredictability will wear on his children to the point where they will feel their father as a principle of disorder, of chaos. Conversely, a good father, even if his family considers him boring and unexciting, will make his family feel safe and secure.

Next, a good father carries his family rather than asks them to carry him. A good father is an adult, an elder, not a fellow-sibling or a child (in his behavior) forever demanding that the family carry him. A good father does not make his own problems and concerns, his own tiredness and heartaches, the center of family’s attention. Rather he relates beyond his own tiredness and heartaches so as to make the focus of attention the heartaches and headaches of his family.

Beyond this, a good father feeds his family rather than feeds off of them. A good father does not demand, however subtly and unconsciously, that his children bring meaning, satisfaction, and glory into his own life. Rather he is more concerned that his children and his family find meaning, satisfaction, and happiness in their own lives. Good parents feed their children; bad parents feed off of them.

Finally, a good father affirms and admires his children rather than demand that they affirm and admire him. A good father expresses to his children his pride in them as opposed to being threatened by their talents and achievements. He doesn’t demand that his children express their pride in him. Daniel Berrigan, in a mature autobiography written late in his life, shares how he had to struggle with various issues his entire life, particularly with authority, because of the absence of a blessing from his own father. He shares, for example, how he would be afraid to share with his father the good news that he had just published a book because he feared his father’s jealousy. After sharing this, he asks his readers: Is it any wonder that he has been leery and suspicious of every authority figure during his entire adult life? The absence of a father’s blessing leaves us with a constriction of the heart.

Perhaps an image can be helpful here: When a cow gives birth, her calf comes out of her womb severely constricted, rigid, bound-up in a glue-like afterbirth. But nature has taken this into account and given the mother the proper instinct. She immediately turns round and licks that constriction off her calf. A soon as she’s finished, the calf stands up, tests its legs, and begins to walk on its own.

As humans, we are born into the same condition. We also come into this life constricted, except that for us this isn’t so much a physical thing. It’s a much deeper and more complex constriction – and our parents are meant to remove it by ordering, carrying, feeding, and blessing us. No father does this perfectly, but if your father did it even half-adequately, express your gratitude and count our blessings!

Moving Beyond Bad Habits

June 10, 2012

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 Always Something!"

June 3, 2012

A friend of mine jokingly says that when she dies she wants this epitaph on her gravestone: There was always something!

And there always is! All of us appreciate her frustration. Invariably, there’s always something, big or small, that casts a shadow and somehow keeps us from fully entering the present moment and appreciating its richness. There is always some anxiety, some worry about something that we should have done or should be doing, some unpaid bill, some concern about what we need to face tomorrow, some lingering heartache, some concern about our health or the health of another, some hurt that is still burning, or some longing for someone who is absent that mitigates our joy. There’s always something, some loss, some hurt, some anxiety, some bitterness, some jealousy, some obsession, or some headache, that is forever draining the present moment of its joy.

Henri Nouwen once gave a very simple, poignant expression to this: “Our life,” he writes. “is a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, there is distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness.” There’s always something!

Jesus had his own way of expressing this. There is an incident recorded in the Gospels wherein Peter approaches Jesus and asks him what reward a disciple will receive for following him. Jesus replies that anyone who gives up father, mother, spouse, children, house, or land in order to be his disciple will receive these back (mothers, spouses, children, houses, lands) one hundred times over. But then he adds a rather unwelcome clause: “though not without tribulation”. There will always be something – some stress, some jealousy, some persecution – which can wipe out both the recognition and the enjoyment of the hundredfold. In effect, what Jesus is saying is that we can have everything – and enjoy nothing! Why? Because there will always be something impaling itself into the present moment that can cause us to lose perspective and thus lose the richness and joy inside of our own lives.

In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus specifies what that something often is, namely, jealousy. We can have everything and enjoy nothing because we are jealous of what other people have. How true. How often do we denigrate our own lives and talents, failing to see and savor their richness, because we would like to be someone else, someone rich and famous, someone set apart. Our lives are rich, but we are not content within them because we would want what someone else has.

There is a rich literature today, both within religious and secular circles, that tries to challenge us to not let our anxieties, heartaches, jealousies, and worries block us from entering fully into the present moment. Most of that literature is good since it formulates the right challenge. Sometimes, however, some of these authors give us the impression that, if you focus your attention and work hard at a few techniques, this is an easy thing to do. It’s not! Entering into the present moment, truly entering it without being waylaid by our own heartaches and headaches, is one of the most difficult psychological and spiritual tasks in all of life.

Our lives are rich, and that is true for all of us, not just for the rich and famous. At the height of his fame, the poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, received a letter from a young man, complaining that he wanted to be a poet but was handicapped because he lived in a small town where nothing exciting or noteworthy ever happened. Rilke wrote back to him and telling him that if his life seemed poor to him than he probably wasn’t a poet after all because he couldn’t pick up the riches of his own life. Every person’s experience is the stuff of poetry. There are no lives that aren’t rich; but most of us are blocked from entering into the richness of our own lives and can never appreciate the hundredfold … because there’s always something.

The challenge is to be present to the richness inside of our own lives, and that means learning to celebrate the temporary, the imperfect. That means learning how to go to the great banquet that lies at the heart of life, even while our lives are not yet fully healthy and complete. And part of that means accepting too how difficult this is, enjoying the times when we do get there, forgiving ourselves for mostly falling short, and having an epitaph engraved for ourselves that reads: There was always something!

A Crack in our Pitcher

May 27, 2012

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.

Sun, Storms, Wilderness, Deserts, and Spirituality

May 20, 2012

A number of years ago, accompanied by an excellent Jesuit director, I did a 30-day retreat using the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius. In the third week of that retreat there’s a meditation on Jesus’ agony in the garden. I did the meditation to the best of my abilities and met with my director to discuss the result. He wasn’t satisfied and asked me to repeat the exercise. I did, reported back to him, and found him again dissatisfied. I was at a loss to grasp exactly what he wanted me to achieve through that meditation, though obviously I was missing something. He kept trying to explain to me that Ignatius had a concept wherein one was supposed to take the material of a meditation and “apply it to the senses” and I was somehow not getting that part.

Eventually he asked me this question: “When doing this meditation, have you been sitting comfortably inside an air-conditioned chapel?” My answer was yes. “Well,” this wise Jesuit replied, “no wonder you aren’t able to properly apply this to your senses. How can you really feel what Jesus felt in his agony in garden when you are sitting warm, snug, secure, and comfortable in an air-conditioned room?” His advice was that I redo the exercise, but do it late in the evening, outside, in the dark, cold, subject to nature’s elements, and perhaps even a little afraid of what I might meet physically out there.

He made a good point, not just for my struggle with this particular spiritual exercise but about one of the major deficiencies within contemporary spirituality. Simply put: Our prayer and spiritual quests are not enough connected to nature. For all of our good intentions and hard work, we are too-platonic, too much trying to have our souls transformed while our bodies sit warm, safe, and uninvolved. The physical elements of nature and our own bodies play too small a role in our efforts to grow spiritually.

This is the major critique that Bill Plotkin, an important new voice in spirituality, makes of what he sees happening in much of Christian spirituality today. From our church programs, to what happens in our retreat centers, to the spiritual quests people more deliberately pursue, Plotkin sees too little connection to nature, to the sun, to storms, to the wilderness, and to the desert that Jesus himself sought out.

Plotkin, who doesn’t work out of an explicitly Christian perspective but is sympathetic to it, runs a wilderness center out of which he directs people who are searching spiritually. One of the things that his center offers is a wilderness quest. People are offered the option of going out into the wilderness for some days alone, taking very little to protect themselves from what they might meet there. While sensible precautions are taken and prudence isn’t irresponsibly bracketed, the people doing these quests nonetheless often find themselves pretty vulnerable to the elements and battling a good amount of fear.

And the quests are effective mainly because of that. Real transformation often happens and it is very much attributed to the battle that the one doing the quest had to wage in the face of fear and the physical elements. Plotkin’s book, Soulcraft, contains a number of powerful testimonies of people who share how what they experienced in the wilderness – real exposure and real fear – led to real transformation in their lives. For something to be real it has to be real!

Jesus knew that and went on his own “wilderness quest”, 40 days alone in the desert where, as the Gospels tell us, he did his own battle with “the wild beasts”. We read accounts in the Gospels too of how he spent whole nights outside, alone, praying. It’s no accident that his struggle to give his life over takes place in a garden and not in an air-conditioned church. Beautiful church buildings have power to transform but so too do the sun, storms, the wilderness, and the desert. It’s good to seek out both places, and lately Christian spirituality has been too negligent of the latter.

And it not just the things in nature that batter us and cause us fear to which we need to expose ourselves. Nature also waters the earth. There are few things in life that can induce the joy we can experience by drinking in nature. As the Canticle of Daniel (3,57-88) so wonderfully celebrates it, many things in nature nurture the soul and fill it with life: the sun, the moon, the stars, winds, fire and heat, cold and chill, dew and rain, ice and snow, light and darkness, lightening and clouds, mountains and hills, seas and rivers, plants and animals. Each of these can trigger special memories and special joys, if we stay awake to them.

We need to let nature touch more of our bodies and our souls, both for our spiritual health and for our health in general. For something to be real it has to be real!

The New Evangelization

May 13, 2012

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.

The Power of Powerlessness

May 6, 2012

There are different kinds of power and different kinds of authority. There is military power, muscle power, political power, economic power, moral power, charismatic power, and psychological power, among other things. There are different kinds of authority too: We can be bitterly forced into acquiescing to certain demands or we can be gently persuaded into accepting them. Power and authority are not all of a kind.

Imagine four persons in a room: The first is a powerful dictator who rules a country. His word commands armies and his shifting moods intimidate subordinates. He wields a brutal power. Next to him sits a gifted athlete at the peak of his physical prowess, a man whose quickness and strength have few equals. His skills are a graceful power for which he is much admired and envied. The third person is a rock star whose music and charisma can electrify an audience and fill a room with a soulful energy. Her face is on billboards and she is a household name. That’s still another kind of power. Finally, we have too in the room a newborn, a baby, lying in its crib, seemingly without any power or strength whatsoever, unable to even ask for what it needs. Which of these is ultimately the most powerful?

The irony is that the baby ultimately wields the greatest power. The athlete could crush it, the dictator could kill it, and the rock star could out-glow it in sheer dynamism, but the baby has a different kind of power. It can touch hearts in a way that a dictator, an athlete, or a rock star cannot. Its innocent, wordless presence, without physical strength, can transform a room and a heart in a way that guns, muscle, and charisma cannot. We watch our language and actions around a baby, less so around athletes and rock stars. The powerlessness of a baby touches us at a deeper moral place.

And this is the way we find and experience God’s power here on earth, sometimes to our great frustration, and this is the way that Jesus was deemed powerful during his lifetime. The entire Gospels make this clear, from beginning to end. Jesus was born as a baby, powerless, and he died hanging helplessly on a cross with bystanders mocking his powerlessness. Yet both his birth and his death manifest the kind of power upon which we can ultimately build our lives.

The Gospels describe Jesus’ power and authority in exactly this way. In Greek, the original language of the Gospels, we find three words for power or authority. We easily recognize the first two: energy and dynamic. There is a power in energy, in physical health and muscle, just as there is a power in being dynamic, in dynamite, in having the power to generate energy; but when the Gospels speak of Jesus as “having great power” and as having a power beyond that of other religious figures, they do not use the words energetic or dynamic. They use a third word, EXOUSIA, which might be best rendered as VULNERABILITY. Jesus’ real power was rooted in a certain vulnerability, like the powerlessness of a child.

This isn’t an easy concept to grasp since our idea of power is normally rooted in the opposite, namely, the notion that power lies in the ability to overwhelm, not underwhelm, others. And yet we understand this, at least somewhat, in our experience of babies, who can overpower us precisely by their powerlessness. Around a baby, as most every mother and father has learned, we not only watch our language and try not to have bitter arguments; we also try to be better, more loving persons. Metaphorically, a baby has the power to do an exorcism. It can cast out the demons of self-absorption and selfishness in us. That’s why Jesus could cast out certain demons that others could not.

And that’s how God’s power forever lies within our world and within our lives, asking for our patience. Christ, as Annie Dillard says, is always found in our lives just as he was originally found, a helpless baby in the straw who must be picked up and nurtured into maturity. But we are forever wanting something else, namely, a God who would come and clean up the world and satisfy our thirst for justice by showing some raw muscle power and banging some heads here and now. We are impatient with quiet, moral power that demands infinite patience and a long-term perspective. We want a hero, someone with the blazing guns of a Hollywood superhero but the heart of a Mother Theresa. The guns of the world blasting away evil, that’s what we want from our God, not the power of a baby lying mute and helpless against the cruel powers of our time. Like the Israelites facing the Philistines, we are reluctant to send a shepherd boy against an ironclad giant. We want divine power in iron, muscles, guns, and charisma.

But that’s not the way intimacy, peace, and God are found.

An Earthy View of the Communion of Saints

April 29, 2012

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.

To Live In The Light

April 22, 2012

Several years ago, I was approached by man who asked me to be his spiritual director. He was in his mid-forties and almost everything about him radiated a certain health. As we sat down to talk, I mentioned that he seemed to be in a very good space. He smiled and replied that, yes, this was so, but it hadn’t always been so. His happiness had its own history … and its own pre-history. Here’s how he told his story:

“I haven’t always been in a good space in my life; in fact, it’s been a long struggle to get where I am today. For more than 20 years, from the time I left high school until three years ago, I struggled with two addictions: alcohol and sex. I had them enough under control that I could essentially hide them from my family, my friends, and my colleagues. As well I never acted out in very dangerous ways. I was addicted, but still had good control in my life. The problem was that I was living a double life – showing one life to my family and friends and living another life secretly (alcohol, pornography, and pick-up bars) on the side. I never once missed a day of work and was always able to function at a high level professionally, but my life slowly began to fixate around my addictions – hiding them, lying about my activities, fiercely protecting my privacy, resentment towards anything or anybody who stood between me and my addictions, and daily anxiety, scheming about where I would go at night. I functioned decently within my work and my relationships, but my mind, heart, and real attention were focused on something else, my addictions, my next hit.

I’m not sure what the exact trigger was since there were a number of things that hit me at a point (my father’s death, a couple of near escapes in terms of being discovered, some real shame, some graced moments of clarity when I sensed both my hypocrisy and the dead-end road I was on), but three years ago I went on a retreat to a monastery and had the courage to have a long talk with the Abbott. He suggested that I go into two recovery programs, one to deal with alcohol and the other to deal with sex. I took his advice and all I can say is that it has completely turned my life around. I’ve been “sober” now for three years and the best way that I can describe it is that now “I see color again”. Nothing feels as great as honesty! I have never been this happy! I’m now living in the light!”

We’re called to live in the light, but we tend to have an overly romantic idea of what that should mean. We tend to think that to live in the light means that there should be a kind of special sunshine inside of us, a divine glow in our conscience, a sunny joy inside us that makes us constantly want to praise God, an ambience of sacredness surrounding our attitude. But that’s unreal. What does it mean to live in the light?

To live in the light means to live in honesty, pure and simple, to be transparent, to not have part of us hidden as a dark secret.

All conversion and recovery programs worthy of the name are based on bringing us to this type of honesty. We move towards spiritual health precisely by flushing out our sickest secrets and bringing them into the light. Sobriety is more about living in honesty and transparency than it is about living without a certain chemical, gambling, or sexual habit. It’s the hiding of something, the lying, the dishonesty, the deception, the resentment we harbor towards those who stand between us and our addiction, that does the real damage to us and to those we love.

Spiritual health lies in honesty and transparency and so we live in the light when we are willing to lay every part of our lives open to examination by those who need to trust us.

· To live in the light is to be able always to tell our loves ones where we are and what we are doing.

· To live in the light is not have to worry if someone traces what websites we have visited.

· To live in the light is to not be anxious if someone in the family finds our files unlocked.

· To live in the light is to be able to let those we live with listen to what’s inside our cell-phones, see what’s inside our emails, and know who’s on our speed-dial.

· To live in the light is to have a confessor and to be able to tell that person what we struggle with, without having to hide anything.

To live in the light is to live in such a way that, for those who know us, our lives are an open book.

The Ten Major Faith Struggles Of Our Age

April 15, 2012

Sometimes the simple act of naming something can be immensely helpful. Before we can put a name on something we stand more helpless before its effects, not really knowing what’s happening to us.

Many of us, for example, are familiar with the book, The Future Church: How Ten Trends are Revolutionizing the Catholic Church, by John Allen. The things he names in this book, even when they don’t affect us directly, still help shape us for the better. As journalist who travels the world as the Vatican analyst for both CNN television and the National Catholic Reporter, John Allen is able to provide us with a wider, global perspective on church issues than is generally afforded to those of us whose vision is more emotionally mired in our own local and national issues. Heartaches at home can make us blind to the wider concerns of the planet; just as seeing the concerns and pains of others first-hand can put our own concerns and pain into a healthier perspective. John Allen’s global frame of reference, as outlined in the mega-trends he names in his book, helps us keep our own ecclesial concerns in a healthier perspective.

So here is my own attempt to name some things: Several years ago in an interview, John Allen asked me to draw up a list of what I considered to be the ten major faith and church struggles of our time. I took this as a healthy challenge and the list that follows, no doubt less global in perspective than Allen’s ten trends (My vision, I fear, speaks more for Western and secularized cultures than for the world at large), is my own attempt to name the key faith and ecclesial struggles we deal with today.

What are the ten major faith and church struggles of our time, at least as manifest within the more highly secularized parts of our world?

1) The struggle with the atheism of our everyday consciousness, that is, the struggle to have a vital sense of God within a secular culture which, for good and for bad, is the most powerful narcotic ever perpetrated on this planet … the struggle to be conscious of God outside of church and explicit religious activity.

2) The struggle to live in torn, divided, and highly-polarized communities, as wounded persons ourselves, and carry that tension without resentment and without giving it back in kind … the struggle inside of our own wounded selves to be healers and peace-makers rather than ourselves contributing to the tension.

3) The struggle to live, love, and forgive beyond the infectious ideologies that we daily inhale, that is, the struggle for true sincerity, to genuinely know and follow our own hearts and minds beyond what is prescribed to us by the right and the left … the struggle to be neither liberal or conservative but rather men and women of true compassion.

4) The struggle to carry our sexuality without undue frigidity and without irresponsibility, the struggle for a healthy sexuality that can both properly revere and properly delight in this great power … the struggle to carry our sexuality in such a way so as to radiate both chastity and passion.

5) The struggle for interiority and prayer inside of a culture that in its thirst for information and distraction constitutes a virtual conspiracy against depth and solitude, the eclipse of silence in our world … the struggle to move our eyes beyond our digital screens towards a deeper horizon.

6) The struggle to deal healthily with “the dragon” of personal grandiosity, ambition, and pathological restlessness, inside of a culture that daily over-stimulates them, the struggle to healthily cope with both affirmation and rejection … the struggle inside of a restless and over-stimulated environment to habitually find the delicate balance between depression and inflation.

7) The struggle to not be motivated by paranoia, fear, narrowness, and over-protectionism in the face of terrorism and overpowering complexity … the struggle to not let our need for clarity and security trump compassion and truth.

8) The struggle with moral loneliness inside a religious, cultural, political, and moral Diaspora … the struggle to find soul mate who meet us and sleep with us inside our moral center.

9) The struggle to link faith to justice … the struggle to get a letter of reference from the poor, to institutionally connect the gospel to the streets, to remain on the side of the poor.

10) The struggle for community and church, the struggle inside a culture of excessive individuality to find the healthy line between individuality and community, spirituality and ecclesiology … the struggle as adult children of the Enlightenment to be both mature and committed, spiritual and ecclesial.

What’s the value in a list of this sort? It’s important to name things and to name them properly; although, admittedly, simply naming a disease doesn’t of itself bring about a cure. However, as James Hillman used to quip, a symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.

Seeing Spring and Easter

April 8, 2012

In my mid-20s, I spent a year as a student at the University of San Francisco. I had just been ordained a priest and was finishing off a graduate degree in theology. Easter Sunday that year was a gorgeous, sunny, spring day, but it didn’t find me in a sunny mood. I was a long way from home, away from my family and my community, homesick, and alone. Virtually all the friends that I had developed during that year of studies, other graduate students in theology, were gone, celebrating Easter with their own families. I was homesick and alone and, beyond that, I nursed the usual heartaches and obsessions of the young and restless. My mood was far from spring and Easter.

I went for a walk that afternoon and the spring air, the sun, and the fact that it was Easter did little to cheer me up, if anything they helped catalyze a deeper sense of aloneness. But there are different ways of waking up. As Leonard Cohen says, there’s a crack in everything and that’s where the light gets in. I needed a little awakening and it was provided. At a point, I saw a beggar sitting at the entrance to a park with a sign in front of him that read: It’s springtime and I am blind! The irony wasn’t lost on me: I was as blind as he was! With what I was seeing it might as well have been Good Friday, and raining and cold. Sunshine, spring, and Easter were being wasted on me.

It was a moment of grace, and I have recalled that encounter many times since, but it didn’t alter my mood at the time. I continued my walk, restless as before, and eventually went home for dinner. During that year of studies, I was a live-in chaplain at a convent that had a youth hostel attached to it and the rule of the house was that the chaplain was to eat by himself, in his own private dining room. So, even though that wasn’t exactly what a doctor would order for a restless and homesick young man, I had a private dinner that Easter Sunday.

But the resurrection did arrive for me on that Easter Sunday, albeit a bit late in the day: Two other graduate students and I had made plans to meet on the beach at nightfall, light a large fire, and celebrate our own version of the Easter vigil. So, just before dark, I caught a bus to the beach and met my friends (a nun and priest). We lit a large bonfire (still legal in those days), sat around it for several hours, and ended up confessing to each other that we’d each had a miserable Easter. That fire did for us what the blessing of the fire the evening before at the Easter vigil hadn’t done. It renewed in us a sense of the energy and newness that lie at the heart of life. As we watched the fire and talked, of everything and nothing, my mood began to shift, my restlessness quieted, and the heaviness lifted. I began to sense spring and Easter.

In John’s Gospel account of the resurrection, he tells the story of how on morning of the first Easter the Beloved Disciple runs to the tomb where Jesus has been buried and peers into it. He sees that it is empty and that all that’s left there are the clothes, neatly folded, within which Jesus’ body had been wrapped. And, because he is a disciple who sees with the eyes of love, he understands what this all means, he grasps the resurrection and knows that Jesus has risen. He sees spring. He understands with his eyes.

Hugo of St. Victor once famously said: Love is the eye. When we see with love we not only see straight and clearly we also see depth and meaning. The reverse is also true. It is not for some arbitrary reason that after Jesus rose from the dead some could see him and others could not. Love is the eye. Those searching for life through the eyes of love, like Mary of Magdala searching for Jesus in the Garden on Easter Sunday morning, see spring and the resurrection. Any other kind of eye, and we’re blind in springtime.

When I took my walk that Easter afternoon all those years ago in San Francisco, I wasn’t exactly Mary of Magdala looking for Jesus in a garden, nor the Beloved Disciple fired by love running off to look into the tomb of Jesus. In my youthful restlessness I was looking for myself, and meeting only my anxious self. And that’s a kind of blindness.

Without the eyes of love we’re blind, to both spring and the resurrection. I learned that theological lesson, not in a church or a classroom but on a lonely, restless Easter Sunday in San Francisco when I ran into a blind beggar and then went home and ate an Easter dinner alone.

A Stone’s Throw Away From Everybody

April 1, 2012

Truth finds us in different ways. Sometimes we learn what something means, not in a classroom but in a hospital.

Several years ago, I was visiting a man dying of cancer in a hospital room. He was dying well, though nobody dies easy. He felt a deep loneliness, even as he was surrounded by people who loved him deeply. Here’s how he described it: “I have a wonderful wife and children, and lots of family and friends. Someone is holding my hand almost every minute, but … I’m a stone’s throw away from everyone. I’m dying and they’re not. I’m inside of something into which they can’t reach. It’s awfully lonely, dying.”

He had borrowed his salient phrase from Luke’s Gospel where we are told that on the night before his death Jesus went to the Garden of Gethsemane with his disciples. There he invited them to pray with him as he struggled to find strength to face his death; but, as Luke cryptically adds, while he sweated blood, he was “a stone’s throw away” from them.

How far is a stone’s throw? It’s distance enough to leave you in a place where no one can reach you. Just as we come out of the womb alone, we leave this earth alone. Jesus, like the man whom I just described, also faced his death knowing that he was loved by others but also knowing that in the face of death he was entering a place where he was deeply and utterly alone.

And this emphasis on aloneness is in fact one of the major points within the Passion narratives. In describing Jesus’ death, perhaps more than anything else, the Gospels want us to focus in on his aloneness, his abandonment, his being a stone’s throw away from everyone.

Many of us, I am sure, have seen the famous film by Mel Gibson, The Passion of the Christ. While the film is, no doubt, a worthy piece of art, it is more distracting than beneficial in terms of helping us understand Jesus’ passion. Why? Because the film so strongly emphasizes the physical suffering of Jesus, which is precisely what the Gospel accounts don’t do. Rather the Gospels deliberately understate what Jesus had to endure physically because they want us to focus on something else, namely, his moral and emotional suffering, particularly his sense of abandonment, his aloneness, the absence at the most crucial time in his life of any deep human support, intensified by the seeming absence of God. In his loneliest hour Jesus was without any human soul mate and without divine consolation. He was, in the words of Gil Bailie, unanimity-minus-one. There is no deeper sense of abandonment.

And it is within that utter aloneness that Jesus has to continue to give himself over in trust, love, forgiveness, and faith. It’s easy to believe in love when we feel loved; to forgive others when they are gracious towards us; and to believe in God when we feel strongly God’s presence. The difficulty, the “test”, comes when human love and divine consolation collapse, when we find ourselves surrounded by misunderstanding, abandonment, distrust, hatred, and doubt, especially at our loneliest hour, just at that moment when life itself is eclipsing. How do we respond then?

Will love, trust, forgiveness, and faith collapse in our hearts when the emotional pillars that normally sustain us collapse? Can we forgive someone who is hurting us when that person believes that we are the problem? Can we continue to love someone who hates us? Can we continue to believe in trust when everywhere around us we are experiencing betrayal? Can we let our hands and hearts be opened, stretched, and nailed to a cross even when we are fearful? Can we continue to have faith in God when every feeling inside us suggests God has abandoned us? Can we still hand over our spirit when we feel absolutely no human or divine support? Where are our hearts when we are “a stone’s throw away” from everyone?

That, and not the capacity to physically endure scourging and nails, was the real test inside of Jesus’ passion. Jesus’ agony in the Garden was not so much an agonizing as to whether he would allow himself to be put to death or whether he would invoke divine power and escape. He recognized that he was going to die. The question for him was rather how he would die: Could he continue to surrender himself to a God and to a truth he had previously known when this now seemed to be belied by everything around him? Could he continue to trust? What kind of spirit would he hand over at the end? Would it be gracious or bitter? Forgiving or vengeful? Loving or hate-filled? Trusting or paranoid? Hope-filled or despairing?

That will be our test too in the end. One day each of us will also have to “give over” his or her spirit. Inside of that unanimity-minus-one, will our hearts be warm or bitter?

Holy And Unholy Fear

March 25, 2012

Not all fear is created equal, at least not religiously. There’s a fear that’s healthy and good, a sign of maturity and love. There’s also a fear that’s bad, that blocks maturity and love. But this needs explanation.

There’s a lot of misunderstanding about fear inside of religious circles, especially around the Scriptural passage that says that the fear of God is the beginning of wisdom. Too often texts like these, as well as religion in general, have been used to instil an unhealthy fear inside of people in the name of God. We need to live in “holy fear”, but holy fear is a very particular kind of fear that should not be confused with fear as we normally understand it.

What is “holy fear”? What kind of fear is healthy? What kind of fear triggers wisdom?

Holy fear is love’s fear, namely, the kind of fear that is inspired by love. It’s a fear based upon reverence and respect for a person or a thing we love. When we genuinely love another person we will live inside of a healthy anxiety, a worry that our actions should never grossly disappoint, disrespect, or violate the other person. We live in holy fear when we are anxious not to betray a trust or disrespect someone. But this is very different from being afraid of somebody or being afraid of being punished.

Bad power and bad authority intimidate and make others afraid of them. God is never that kind of power or authority. God entered our world as a helpless infant and God’s power still takes that same modality. Babies don’t intimidate, even as they inspire holy fear. We watch our words and our actions around babies not because they threaten us, but rather because their very helplessness and innocence inspire an anxiety in us that makes us want to be at our best around them.

The Gospels are meant to inspire that kind of fear. God is Love, a benevolent power, a gracious authority, not someone to be feared. Indeed God is the last person we need to fear. Jesus came to rid us of fear. Virtually every theophany in scripture (an instance where God appears) begins with the words: “Do not be afraid!” What frightens us does not come from God.

In the Jewish scriptures, the Christian Old Testament, King David is revealed as the person who best grasped this. Among all the figures in the Old Testament, including Moses and the great prophets, David is depicted as the figure that best exemplified what it means to walk on this earth in the image and likeness of God, even though at a point he grossly abuses that trust. Despite his great sin, it is to David, not to Moses or the prophets, to whom Jesus attributes his lineage. David is the Christ-figure in the Old Testament. He walked in holy fear of God, and never in an unhealthy fear.

To cite just one salient example: The Book of Kings recounts an incident where David is, one day, returning from battle with his soldiers. His troops are hungry. The only available food is the bread in the temple. David asks for that and is told that it is only to be consumed by the priests in sacred ritual. He answers the priest to this effect: “I’m the King, placed here by God to act responsibly in his name. We don’t ordinarily ask for the temple bread, but this is an exception, a matter of urgency, the soldiers need food, and God would want us to responsibly do this.” And so he took the temple bread and gave it to his soldiers. In the Gospels, Jesus praises this action by David and asks us to imitate it, telling us that we are not made for the Sabbath, but that the Sabbath is made for us.

David understood what is meant by that. He had discerned that God is not so much a law to be obeyed as a gracious presence under which we are asked to creatively live. He feared God, but as one fears someone in love, with a “holy fear”, not a blind, legalistic one.

A young mother once shared this story with me: Her six year-old had just started school. She had taught him to kneel by his bed each night before going to sleep and recite a number of night prayers. One night, shortly after starting school, he hopped into bed without first kneeling in prayer. Surprised by this, she challenged him with the words: “Don’t you pray anymore?” His reply: “No, I don’t. My teacher at school told us that we are not supposed to pray. She said that we’re supposed to talk to God … and tonight I’m tired and have nothing to say!”

Like King David, he too had discerned what it really means to be God’s child and how God is not so much a law to be obeyed as a gracious presence who desires a mutually loving relationship, one of holy fear.

Searching for God Among Many Voices

March 18, 2012

We are surrounded by many voices. There’s rarely a moment within our waking lives that someone or something isn’t calling out to us and, even in our sleep, dreams and nightmares ask for our attention. And each voice has its own particular cadence and message. Some voices invite us in, promising us life if we do this or that or buy a certain product or idea; others threaten us. Some voices beckon us towards hated, bitterness, and anger, while others challenge is towards love, graciousness, and forgiveness. Some voices tell us that they are playful and humorous, not to be taken seriously, even as others trumpet that they are urgent and weighty, the voice of non-negotiable truth, God’s voice.

Within all of these: Which is the voice of God? How do we recognize God’s voice among and within all of these voices?

That’s not easy to answer. God, as the scriptures tell us, is the author of everything that’s good, whether it bears a religious label or not. Hence, God’s voice is inside of many things that are not explicitly connected to faith and religion, just as God’s voice is also not in everything that masquerades as religious. But how do we discern that?

Jesus leaves us a wonderful metaphor to work with, but it’s precisely only a metaphor: He tells us that he is the “Good Shepherd” and that his sheep will recognize his voice among all other voices. In sharing this metaphor, he is drawing upon a practice that was common among shepherds at the time: At night, for protection and companionship, shepherds would put their flocks together into a common enclosure. They would then separate the sheep in the morning by using their voices. Each shepherd had trained his sheep to be attuned to his voice and his voice only. The shepherd would walk away from the enclosure calling his sheep, often times by their individual names, and they would follow him. His sheep were so attuned to his voice that they would not follow the voice of another shepherd, even if that shepherd tried to trick them (shepherds often did this to try to steal someone else’s sheep) by imitating the voice of their own shepherd. Like a baby who, at a point, will no longer be cuddled by the voice of a babysitter, but wants and needs the voice of the mother, each sheep recognized intimately the voice that was safeguarding them and would not follow another voice.

So too with us: among all the voices that surround and beckon us, how do we discern the unique cadence of God’s voice? Which is the voice of the Good Shepherd?

There’s no easy answer and sometimes the best we can do is to trust our gut-feeling about right and wrong. But we have a number of principles that come to us from Jesus, from scripture, and from the deep wells of our Christian tradition that can help us.

What follows is a series of principles to help us discern God’s voice among the multitude of voices that beckon us. What is the unique cadence of the voice of the Good Shepherd?

· The voice of God is recognized both in whispers and in soft tones, even as it is recognized in thunder and in storm.

· 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, conscriptive poverty, and a beaten-down spirit.

· The voice of God is recognized in what calls us to what’s higher, sets us apart, and invites us to holiness, even as it is recognized in what calls us to humility, submergence into humanity, and in that which refuses to denigrate our 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 beckons us home.

· The voice of God is the one that most challenges and stretches us, even as it the only voice that ultimately soothes and comforts us.

· 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.

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

· The voice of God always invites us to live beyond all fear, even as it inspires holy fear.

· The voice of is heard 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 freely relativize all the things of this world.

The voice of God, it would seem, is forever found in paradox.

Sublimation And The Sublime

March 11, 2012

Celebration is a paradoxical thing, created by a dynamic interplay between anticipation and fulfillment, longing and inconsummation, the ordinary and the special, work and play. Life and love must be celebrated within a certain fast-feast rhythm. Seasons of play most profitably follow seasons of work, seasons of consummation are heightened by seasons of longing, and seasons of intimacy grow out of seasons of solitude. Presence depends upon absence, intimacy upon solitude, play upon work. Even God rested only after working for six days!

We struggle with this today. Many of our feasts fall flat because there hasn’t been a previous fast. In times past, there was generally a long fast leading up to a feast, and then a joyous celebration followed. Today, we’ve reversed that, there is a long celebration leading up to the feast and a fast afterwards.

Take Christmas for example: The season of Advent, in effect, kicks off the Christmas celebration. The parties start, the decorations and lights go up, and the Christmas music begins to play. When Christmas finally arrives, we are already satiated with the delights of the season, tired, saturated with the things of Christmas, ready to move on. By Christmas Day, we’re ready to go back to ordinary life. The Christmas season used to last until February. Now, realistically, it’s over on December 25.

That hasn’t always been the case. Traditionally the build-up was towards the feast, celebration came afterwards. Today the feast is first, the fast comes after. We are poorer for that. Without a previous fast there isn’t much sublimity in the feast.

A colleague of mine likes to say that our society knows how to anticipate an event, but not how to sustain it. That’s only partially true. It’s so much that we do not know how to sustain something; we don’t know how to properly anticipate it. We mix the anticipation with the celebration itself because we find it hard to live in inconsummation and unfulfilled tension without moving towards resolving it. Longing and fasting are not our strong points; neither is feasting. Because we can’t build properly towards a feast, we can’t celebrate it properly either.

Celebration survives on paradox: To feast, we must first fast: to come to true consummation, we must first live in chastity; and to taste specialness, we must first have a sense of what’s ordinary. When fasting, inconsummation, and the ordinary rhythm of life are short-circuited, fatigue of the spirit, boredom, and disappointment replace celebration and we are invariably left with the empty feeling: “That’s all?” But that’s because we have short-circuited a process. Something can only be sublime if, first, there is some sublimation.

I am old enough to have known another time. Like our own, that time too had its faults, but it also had some strengths. One of its strengths was its belief, a lived belief, that feasting depends upon prior fasting and that the sublime demands a prior sublimation. I have clear memories of the Lenten seasons of my childhood. How strict that season was then! Fast and renunciation: no weddings, no dances, few parties, few drinks, desserts only on Sundays, and generally less of everything that constitutes specialness and celebration. Churches were draped in purple. The colors were dark and the mood was penitential, but the feast that followed, Easter, was indeed special!

Perhaps this is mostly nostalgia speaking; after all, I was young then, naive and deprived, and able to meet Easter and other celebrations with a hungrier spirit. That may be, but the specialness that surrounded feasts has died for another reason, namely, we do not anticipate them properly anymore. We short-circuit fasting, inconsummation, and the prerequisite longing. Simply put, how can Christmas be special when we arrive at December 25th exhausted from weeks of Christmas parties? How can Easter be special when we’ve treated Lent just like any other season? How, indeed, can anything be sublime when we have lost our capacity for sublimation?

Today the absence of genuine specialness and enjoyment within our lives is due in a large part to the breakdown of this rhythm. In a word, Christmas is no longer special because we’ve celebrated it during Advent, weddings are no longer special because we’ve already slept with the bride, and experiences of all kinds are often flat and unable to excite us because we had them prematurely. Premature experience is bad simply because it is premature, no other reason. To celebrate Christmas during Advent, to celebrate Easter without first fasting, to short-circuit longing in any area, is, like sleeping with the bride before the wedding, a fault in chastity. All premature experience has the effect of draining us of great enthusiasm and great expectations (which can only be built up through sublimation, tension, and painful waiting).

It’s lent. If we use this season to fast, to intensify longing, to raise our psychic temperatures, and to learn what kinds of gestation can develop within the crucible of chastity, then the feast that follows will have a chance of being sublime.

Consecrated by Circumstance and Need

March 4, 2012

We can lose our freedom for different reasons and, sometimes, for the best of reasons.

Imagine this scenario: You are on your way to a restaurant to meet a friend for dinner, a perfectly legitimate agenda, but en route you witness a car accident. Some of the people in the accident are seriously hurt and you are the first to arrive at the scene. At that moment your own agenda, dinner with a friend, is put on hold. You’ve lost your freedom and are, by circumstance and need, conscripted to remain there and help. You phone for an ambulance, you call for the police, and you wait with the injured until help arrives.

During that whole time your freedom is suspended. You are still radically free of course. You could leave the injured to fend for themselves and head off to meet your friend, but you would be abdicating part of your humanity by doing that. Circumstance and need have taken away your existential and moral freedom. They have consecrated you and set you apart just as surely as a bishop’s blessing sets apart a building to be a church. The building didn’t ask to be a church, but it’s now consecrated and no longer free for other usage. So too with us, circumstance can consecrate us and take away our freedom.

In the ordinary mindset, consecration is a word that connotes things to do with church and religion. We understand certain things as consecrated, taken out of the profane world and set aside for sacred, holy service; for example: buildings (churches), persons (priests, deacons, monks, nuns), tables (altars), cups (chalices), clothing (vestments and religious habits). There is some merit in that, but the danger is that we tend to see consecration as a cultic and metaphysical separation rather than as a setting apart for service. Setting aside your freedom in order to stop and help at a traffic accident doesn’t alter your humanity; it just suspends your ordinary activity. It calls you to service because you happen to be there, not because you are more special or holier than anyone else

That was the case with Moses: When God calls him to go to Pharaoh and ask him to set the Israelites free, Moses objects: Why not my brother? He has better leadership skills. I don’t want to do this! Why me? And God answers those objections with the words: Because you have seen their suffering! It’s that simple: God tells Moses that he may not walk away because he has seen the peoples’ suffering. For that reason, he is the consecrated one, the one who is not free to walk away. Circumstance and need have consecrated him.

Our very notion of church draws on this concept. The word Ecclesia comes from two Greek words: “Ek Kaleo”. “Ek” is a preposition meaning, “out of”; and “Kaleo” is verb meaning, “to be called”. To be a member of the church is to be “called out of”. And what we are “called out of” is what our normal agenda would be if we weren’t conscripted by our baptism and by the innate demands of consequent discipleship. Baptism and church membership consecrate us. They call us out and set us apart in the same way that Moses’ having seen the suffering of the Israelites took away his freedom to pursue an ordinary life and in the same way as witnessing a traffic accident on the way to meeting a friend sets aside our dinner plans for that night.

Edward Schillebeeckx once wrote a book within which he tried to explain why Jesus never married. He examined various theories and possible motives and concluded that, ultimately, Jesus never married because “it was existentially impossible” for him to marry. In essence, what Schillebeeckx is saying is that Jesus never married because the universal embrace of his love and magnitude of the world’s wounds and needs simply never left him the freedom to marry, like someone on her way to have dinner with a friend but who has that agenda derailed because she witnesses a traffic accident. Like Moses, he was conscripted by a moral imperative. He didn’t not marry because he judged it holier to be celibate or because he needed some kind of cultic purity for his ministry. He never married because the needs of this world simply suspended ordinary life. He was celibate not by emotional preference or by spiritual superiority, but by moral conscription.

Today the word consecration has lost much of its rich meaning. We have relegated the word to the sacristy and over-loaded it with connotations of purity and cult. That’s unfortunate because both what’s best in our humanity and our faith are forever trying to consecrate us. The needs and wounds of our world are constantly asking us to suspend our radical freedom, to set aside our own agendas, in order to serve.

And, like Moses, we have all seen enough suffering in this world that we should no longer be asking the question: “Why me?”