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?”

Porous and Buffered Personalities

February 26, 2012

A friend of mine tells this story: As a young boy in the 1950s he was struck down with pneumonia. His family lived in a small town that had neither a hospital nor a doctor. His father had a job that had taken him away from the family for that week. His mother was home alone with no phone and no car. Frightened and completely without resources, she came to his sickbed, knelt beside it, pinned a medal of St. Therese of Lisieux to his pajamas, and prayed to St. Therese in words to this effect: “I’m trusting you to make my child better. I’m going to remain kneeling here until his fever breaks.”

Both my friend and his mother eventually fell asleep, he in his sickbed and she kneeling beside it. When they woke, his fever had broken.

My friend shares this story, not to claim some kind of miracle took place (though who is to judge?). He tells it to make different point, namely, how his mother, in a situation of fragility and helplessness, dropped to her knees and turned to God as if by natural instinct and how, today, that kind of a response is no longer our own natural instinct. Very few of us today, faced with this kind of situation, would do what his mother did.

Why not? Because our personalities have changed. Charles Taylor, in an outstanding book, A Secular Age, traces out how, as our world has grown more secular, we have moved more and more from being porous personalities to becoming buffered personalities.

We have a porous personality when our everyday consciousness stands in anxiety and fear before threats that can come to us from nature or elsewhere (illnesses, death, epidemics, storms, droughts, earthquakes, lightening strikes, wars, evil spirits from other worlds, curses from malevolent persons, ill chance, threats of all kinds) for which our main and often only defence is power from the other world (God, angels, saints, dead ancestors, benign spirits, fairies, genies). Our personalities are porous when they are made fragile by threats that only powers beyond us can ultimately appease. All human resources within us and around us are seen as inadequate and helpless in securing our lives. Part of that belief too is that the natural world itself is far from only natural. Instead it is an enchanted world within which, beneath the surface, lurk spirits of all kinds, good and bad; and thus coping with life means not just dealing with the physical things of our world but also with spirits, good and bad, who, hidden inside and behind things, interfere with life and can bless or curse us. I remember as a child sprinkling myself with holy water for safety during lightening storms. I had a porous personality.

A buffered personality, on the other hand, is one within which everyday consciousness lives inside of what Taylor calls “a self-sufficient humanism”. Self-sufficient humanism believes that we are essentially adequate to handle the darkness and the threats within life and that there are no ghosts and spirits, good or bad, lurking beneath the surface of things. There is only what we see and that’s all – and that’s also enough. We don’t need help from another world. In self-sufficient humanism you don’t sprinkle yourself with holy water during lightening storms; you stand securely behind a safe window and enjoy the free fire-works.

And that lack of fear is not necessarily a bad thing. It’s an illusion of course, but, even so, God doesn’t want us to live dominated by fear. The word “Gospel” after all means “good news”, not threat. Jesus came into this world to rid us of false fear.

But, with that being said, the belief that we are self-sufficient is still a dangerous illusion and a crippling immaturity. In the end, we are not safe from lightening and disease, no matter how safe our windows or good our doctors. To think of ourselves as self-sufficient is naïve, an illusion, a living under a pall-of-enchantment. We are not in control. Moreover, there is an immaturity in the belief that we are so much more advanced and freer than were our grandparents who were afraid of lightening and pinned religious medals on sick children. Their fear inspired an important virtue. That virtue may have been conscriptive, but it was real. What was that virtue?

Robert Bellah once looked at how community and religion tend to thrive inside of immigrant communities and challenged us, post-immigrants, to become “inner-immigrants”. That’s also true here. We need to get in touch with our “inner porous self”, namely, our deep down fragility, helplessness, insubstantiality, and lack of self-sufficiency.

And the purpose of that is not to instil fear, but gratitude. It is only when we realize that we are not in control and that our lives and our safety are in the hands of a great and loving power beyond us that we will bend our knees in gratitude, both when we are joyous and when we are afraid.

Thou Shalt Not Kill!

February 20, 2012

An old axiom suggests that the sixth commandment gets all the ink, but the fifth commandment is the one that does us in. This is quite accurate. We are always killing.

Why do I say that? Murder, after all, is a rather infrequent occurrence.

There are different meanings to the precept thou shalt not kill. On the surface, it is clear. Murder is wrong. Jesus, however, in the Sermon on the Mount, points out that this commandment, understood more fully, does not just forbid the external act of killing, it also forbids killing others in our thoughts and attitudes: “You have heard it said, ‘You shall not murder …’ but I say to you that if you are even angry with a brother or sister, you are liable to judgment.“

Henri Nouwen once said that nobody is shot with a bullet who is not first shot with a word – and nobody is shot with a word who is not first shot with a thought. Killing is not just a brute external act; it is, in its more common form, a subtle internal thing. All of us break the fifth commandment in countless ways.

We do it in the negative and suspicious judgments we make about each other: “He thinks he’s so clever!” “She always thinks she’s better than others!” “He’s a sham, everything he does is for show!” “She’s so proud of herself, but she should be staying home and taking care of her own children!” “I know his angle, he’s a selfish person who’s using other people for his own glory!” Daily, hourly, almost every minute of our lives, we are making judgments like this and, in them, we are killing those around us, shooting them through the heart just as surely as if we were doing it with a gun. What breaks the fifth commandment is not just the brute act of murder, or even the physical acts of bullying or abuse. Paranoia, false suspicion, harsh judgment, cynicism, and negativity, be it in word or attitude, also kill.

Thus, for example, in our envy of others we kill their spontaneity; in our criticism of others we kill their enthusiasm; in our neglect of our own children and in our refusal to bless them with our affirmation, we help kill their capacity to love others; with our suspicions we kill trust; with our cynicism we kill the capacity of the community to build; in our broken commitments we kill relationships; in our infidelities we kill the bond that makes for family; in our laziness we kill creativity; in our abuse of food, alcohol, and drugs we kill our own bodies; in our excesses we kill enjoyment; and in our constant habit of first depreciating before appreciating, we kill the very goodness with which God surrounded creation, we kill the original blessing of God. In the harsh thoughts we have we kill each others’ capacity to be free and joyous. Small wonder that death, sadness, harshness, coldness, fear, suspicion, and joylessness are most everywhere.

An image can be helpful here: Most of us shrink in horror from the word necrophilia, the perverse practice of making love to dead bodies. It is incomprehensible to us. How could someone actually do this? Yet, in very subtle forms, this is what we do when, in our paranoia, suspicion, envy, and woundedness we kill enthusiasm, kill freedom, and kill life in the ways just described. When I am so cynical that my main wish is to see things destroyed rather than built up, I am preferring death to life; when the first mode of my entry into community is to criticize rather than to look for the good, I am preferring death to life; and when my habitual thoughts of others are suspicious and judgmental, I am likewise preferring death to life. In all these ways, I break the fifth commandment.

Thou shalt not kill! The older we get the more that commandment, among all others, takes on prominence. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychologist suggests that, from mid-life onwards, the great struggle for all humans is the struggle to not give way to bitterness, resentment, self-pity, and all the negativity and harsh judgments that flow from that. That is another way of saying that the real struggle for adults is with the fifth commandment. Jesus, in dialogue with the Scribes and Pharisees, says essentially the same thing. His issue with them, as with the Older Brother of the Prodigal Son, is with fifth commandment. In their attitudes, they were forever killing others.

Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not negate the goodness of creation by preferring death to life! Do not silence a heartbeat – not just with a gun, but also not with harsh words, paranoid thoughts, suspicious judgments, empty cynicism, broken commitments, and blessings that are never given.

A Christian Attitude Regarding the Salvation of Non-Christians

February 19, 2012

As Christians we are asked to carry a very real tension in terms of how we understand thesalvation of non-Christians because we have two seemingly conflicting teachings within our scriptures and our tradition.

One the one hand, Jesus reveals a God who is forever just and fair and who unequivocally wills the salvation of everyone. On the other hand, Jesus tells us that he, and he alone, is the way, the truth, and the life, and that no one goes to God except through him. And through 2000 years of history, Christians have always taken those words to mean essentially what they say. So where does that leave us? How do we take seriously both the universal salvific will of God and the belief that everyone needs to be saved through Christ?

There are no easy answers, though radical conservatives and radical liberals are both tempted to think so. We are asked to carry that tension without being able to fully resolve it. So here, as a suggestion, are ten principles to help us carry the tension:

1. Given our theology of God we may not believe that God favors some people to the detriment of others.

2. Given our theology of God we must believe that the whole of humankind has never lacked Divine Providence.

3. Given our theology of God we should be hesitant in judging others and should allow, both for others and for ourselves, the possibility of “invincible ignorance.”

4. Given our theology of God we may not believe that God has somehow deemed as illegitimate and unworthy of salvation the sincere hearts and sincere prayers of billions of people because their hearts and prayers were not explicitly Christian.

5. Given our theology of God we may not believe that, at any given time in history, the vast majority of humanity is being excluded from salvation because they have no explicit link to Jesus or the Christian churches.

6. Given our theology of God we may not believe that a purely external, historical connection to Christianity is more important to our intimacy with God and the salvation of our souls than are gratitude, warmth, humility, willingness to reconcile, and openness of heart.

7. Given our theology of God it is wise to believe that compassion of heart and the gifts of the Holy Spirit within a person trump all externals in terms of our connection to God.

8. Given our theology of God and our Christian tradition, we are asked to believe these truths, namely:

– That the full mystery of Christ is larger than what can be perceived within historical Christianity There is, as the old catechisms affirmed, not just a “visible Christ” but also an “invisible Christ”.

– That all good things have God as their author and that therefore everything that is good, including what is good inside other religions, comes from God. The same holds true for what all that is good, true, and beautiful within secular culture.

– That God is revealed in multiple ways within nature, within human reason, within human conscience, and within our lives.

– That Christ is a structure within physical creation and that physical creation itself was made through Christ and bears his imprint in its structure and design.

– That non-Christians can be saints.

– That the visible Christian Community is tangible grace and tangible salvation: It offers salvation, here and now, in the flesh, albeit imperfectly. It is the final state already present so that, at least ideally, within it one can find explicitly the aid, the support, the affirmation, the challenge, the revelation, the wisdom, and the celebration needed to come to the fullness of life.

– That the visible Christian community tells a person of his/her birthright and helps him/her to appropriate more fully that birthright, i.e., as daughter or son of God and as brother or sister with all the sincere.

– That the visible Christian community is a privileged instrument of mediation and salvation. It has been asked by Jesus to preach salvation, explicitly, to all the earth. It has a special place and responsibility (as did Mary, Jesus’ Mother) in bringing to completeness God’s universal salvific will. Through it “all the nations of the earth will be blessed.”

9. Given our theology of God, our Scriptures, and Christian tradition, we have two ultimate options apposite to how we might understand the salvation of non-Christians: A theologically agnostic one (Don’t speculate on this, leave it to God) or a nuanced Christian one which posits various distinctions within baptism (“baptism by desire” “baptism by blood”) or within different ways of being inside the mystery of Christ (Anonymous Christianity, the mystery of Christ as being larger than historical Christianity, a visible and an invisible Christ).

10. Given our theology of God it is perhaps healthiest to critically step back into the beauty and richness of mystery and believe, in the words of Kenneth Cragg, that: “It takes a whole world to understand a whole Christ.”

In Gratitude

February 12, 2012

As a columnist, I’ve always harbored a certain paranoia about being overly-personal or exhibitionistic in my writing or in thinking that my own emotional ups and downs are of interest to others. I’ve tried to respect that fear. Occasionally, however, circumstance dictates that I do write something more personal. This is such an occasion.

I want to express my gratitude for all the prayers and support that I have received during these past seven months while undergoing treatments for cancer. That desert-journey has finally ended, and with a good result. A month ago, I finished my last chemotherapy treatment and, two weeks ago, after a battery of medical tests, was pronounced “cancer-free”. To God, family, friends, colleagues, and to the many of you who have supported me in prayer: Thank you!

John Updike, in a poem entitled, Fever, once wrote about what illness might teach us:

I have brought back a good message from the land of 102 degrees:

God exists. I had seriously doubted it before;

but the bedposts spoke of it with utmost confidence,

the threads in my blanket took it for granted,

the tree outside the window dismissed all complaints,

and I have not slept so justly for years.

It is hard, now, to convey how emblematically appearances sat

upon the membranes of my consciousness; but it is truth long known,

that some secrets are hidden from health.

Indeed some secrets are hidden from health! What secrets did I learn from my loss of health?

The initial diagnosis of cancer caught me by surprise and for a time left me mostly numb and frightened. But, after having surgery and having the projected treatment (six months of chemotherapy) and the projected long-term prognosis (good chance for a cure) explained to me, I prayerfully laid out a number of conversion-steps that I hoped this illness and its bitter treatment would conscriptively impose on me. I resolved to make this time of treatment a grace in my life: I would slow down my life, not just during treatment but forever afterwards. I would learn to be more patient. I would be rigorously faithful to a daily practice of contemplative prayer. I would no longer take life, love, friendship, and health for granted, but would finally, after years of failed resolutions, begin to live more inside of the wonder of God and life and not have my energy so absorbed by the demands of work and agenda.

What happened? Old habits die hard, even under the pressure of illness. After six months of treatments, on my better days, I sense some modest improvement. Some of my resolutions have borne fruit, but I’m still a long ways from the ideals that I had set for myself. My old habits have been quick to reassert their grip on my life.

But life is what happens to you while you are planning your life, so too conversion. Having cancer taught me some lessons other than the ones I’d planned. Most important among these was this: Like everyone else in this world, I’ve always wanted joy in my life – friendship, love, celebration. But, and this has been the big handicap in finding these, I have always (however unconsciously) felt that the joy and celebration I so longed for could only come my way when I was finally free from all anxiety, emotional tension, pressure, overwork, illness, frustration, and stress of all kinds. We nurse this strange fantasy that it is only after all our bills are paid, our health is perfect, all tensions within our families and friendships are resolved, and we are in a peaceful, leisured space that can finally fully enter life and enjoy it. In the meantime, we put our lives on hold as we perpetually gear up, get ready, and wait for that perfect moment to arrive where we can finally rejoice within life.

While undergoing cancer treatments I learned something. When I first started the treatments I began marking a calendar – day one, day two, day three – consciously putting my life on hold, putting myself into a posture of waiting, marking away the days until, in my fantasy, the treatments ended and I could live life again. But, strangely, as the days unfolded, to my own surprise, I found that I was living through one of the richer and happier periods in my life. Inside of the tiredness, nausea, and neuropathy, I was finding a rich enjoyment in friendships, colleagues, work, and (on days when I could actually taste them) food and drink. The six months within which I was undergoing cancer treatment, turned out to be, to my own surprise, six happy and deeply meaningful months.

As John Shea puts it: Life includes suffering. When you are spending all your energies to only rejoice in that part of life that does not include suffering, you will not enter into life because you will be dominated by fear and exclusion and not faith. Cancer taught me this lesson and, for that and your prayers, I am most grateful.

On Mourning and Dancing

February 5, 2012

Henri Nouwen used to publish some of his diaries under the title, On Mourning and Dancing. The title was wholly appropriate since those diaries chronicled much of his own struggle to give public expression to what was bubbling up inside of him and, at the same time, respect a highly sensitive self-consciousness and reticence that made him hesitate to publicly express those same feelings. And so his writings are a rare expression of both inner freedom and inner fear. His thoughts and feelings are sometimes tortured, but that’s what makes them rich. It’s not always easy to find that delicate balance between healthy self-expression and unhealthy exhibitionism, even if you are Henri Nouwen – or perhaps especially if you are Henri Nouwen.

The struggle to find a way to express oneself freely and deeply and yet not cross the line into unhealthy exhibitionism is tough task for everyone. You see it done well in rare cases, Jesus and a number of great people like Mother Theresa. They can be great without being grandiose and can give public expression to what’s most intimate within them without making you cringe or feel uncomfortable or embarrassed for them. But that’s a rare talent; check out any dance floor.

How someone dances is often an indication of the kind of balance he or she has been able to achieve on this. Sometimes you see a healthy dancer who exhibits no inhibiting self-consciousness and, at the same time, no excessive self-focus or self-abandonment. A healthy dancer’s movements have an easy, natural flow that draws your eyes and attention to the dance and not to the dancer. Moreover, even in the dance, a healthy dancer is still recognizably the person you know and not some impersonal, anonymous energy that is acting out in a dance. But it’s hard to dance well.

More often than not someone’s dance step is colored by his or her inner struggle and by where his or her internal compass has been set: Too self-aware, too cautious, too fearful, and we see a dance-step that is reticent, halting, and apologetic. Conversely, too little self-awareness and we see a dance-step that’s free and uninhibited but which manifests an unhealthy exhibitionism. Sometimes our dance step reveals too little, just as sometimes our dance step reveals too much and we cross a line where self-expression becomes acting out and people see an unhealthy narcissism and self-abandonment in our dance step and are embarrassed for us.

And this, our struggle to dance well, mirrors another tension inside us, namely, the struggle between depression and inflation, between feeling too-high or feeling too-low. Just as a healthy dance step is not easy to achieve so too is a healthy psyche, one within which our energies flow freely but without unhealthy narcissism or exhibitionism. The problem is that we are forever being pulled up or down, over-stimulated in our grandiosity or undervalued in being. Both can leave us less than steady.

Only the most mature and secure of us are not unduly swayed in our moods and our actions by the affirmations and rejections we meet in our daily lives. Inside of our families, our friendships, our places of work, our churches, and even inside of many of our simple impersonal interactions with others in public life, we are constantly meeting either affirmation or rejection of some kind (a smile, a thank you, a compliment, a warm pat on the back, a recognition of a job well done, some other gesture of love, or, conversely, a coldness, a put-down, an insult, a criticism, a slight, a snub). Whenever this happens we are powerless to protect ourselves against how this infects our psyche and our emotions. Lots of affirmation and we can easily find ourselves too full of ourselves and too empty of God and others. Too much coldness and rejection and we can easily find ourselves too empty of ourselves and of God’s wonderful energy inside us.

I say this with empathy. Life is hard for everyone, particularly if you are trying to live in way that respects others even as you try to honor your own energies. If you are healthily sensitive it will always be a struggle: How do you properly honor, act out, and celebrate your own more-exuberant energies in ways that fully respect others and don’t cross any moral or aesthetic lines? Not an easy formula. Too little allowance for exuberance and you will find yourself overly-reticent, tongue-tied, frustrated, sterile, and dealing with a lot of anger; too much unchecked exuberance and you will act out in ways that embarrass you and embarrass others.

And so we should accept this struggle as a given and not be too hard on others and ourselves. We’re human and so we need to forgive each other and ourselves for being uptight and halting in our dance steps, even as we forgive others and ourselves for the acting-out we’ve done on those same dance-floors. There are very few free, fully healthy, persons in this world. Nobody dances perfectly.

Other Sheep Not Of Our Flock

January 29, 2012

I grew up with strong, conservative, Roman Catholic roots: the Baltimore Catechism, the Latin mass, daily rosary, daily mass if possible, and a rich stream of devotional practices. And that’s a gift for which I’m deeply grateful.

But that wonderful grounding also brought with it a distrust of all religious things not Roman Catholic. I was taught that the Roman Catholic Church was the only true church and the only road to heaven; so much so that we were strongly discouraged and tacitly forbidden to participate in any Protestant church services. In fairness to that catechesis, we didn’t believe that Protestants and other religious communities were doomed to eternal perdition, but we struggled mightily to articulate how this might take place. Among other things, we postulated a place we called Limbo, where sincere, non-Roman Catholics with good souls might spend eternity, happy but without God.

But as T.S. Eliot once wrote, “home is where we start from”. And home is a good place to start from in terms of how we as faith communities, divided from each other, might better understand each other and each church’s own particular relationship to Christ.

And often times the impetus for that comes not as much from biblical and theological insights as it does from an ecumenism of life. As we interact with each other we begin to sense that the question of who has access to God and Christ is infinitely more complex than can be captured in any theological formula. In John’s Gospel (10, 16), Jesus says: I have other sheep too, that are not of this sheepfold. I must bring them also. They will listen to my voice, and there will be one flock and one shepherd.

I’ve learned the truth of that statement through personal experience. Within my nearly forty years in ministry I have met, befriended, and become a faith-companion to men and women from every type of denomination and religion: Protestants, Episcopalians, Anglicans, Evangelicals, Unitarians, small free Churches of all kinds, Jehovah Witnesses, Hindus, Moslems, and Buddhists. In all of these denominations and religious communities, I have met men and women of deep faith and outstanding charity.

And this has caused me to ask myself the question that Jesus once asked those who approached him and told him that his mother and family were outside the circle he was talking to, asking for him: “Who is my mother? And who are my brethren? And he stretched forth his hand toward his disciples, and said, Behold my mother and my brethren! For whosoever does the will of my Father which is in heaven, is my brother, and sister, and mother. (Matthew 12:46-50)

We tend to believe that “blood is thicker than water” and so we sometimes defend our own families, ethnic groups, countries, and churches, even when they do wrong things. What Jesus affirms is that “faith is thicker than blood” and, even more deeply, that faith is also thicker than denominational or religious affiliation.

St. Paul agrees: In his Epistle to the Galatians, he asks the question: Who is living inside the Holy Spirit? Who really has genuine faith? His answer: Those whose lives manifest charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness, and chastity. The presence of these virtues manifests faith and Christ. Conversely, he warns that we shouldn’t delude ourselves when our lives manifest, among other things, adultery, hatred, factionalism, strife, and envy. Our real brothers and sisters in faith are those whose lives manifest charity rather than selfishness, love rather than hatred, large hearts rather than selective sympathies, gentleness rather than hardness, and kindness rather than mean-spiritedness. Virtue trumps denominational identity.

I will always be a Roman Catholic, just as I will always be a member of my biological family, the Rolheisers, and my religious community, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. I’ve been baptized into these families and baptism, as the old catechisms rightly teach, leaves an indelible mark on our souls. These will always be my families; but they may not be my only loyalty. I have other families too, not of these sheepfolds: non-Roman Catholics, non-Rolheisers, non-Oblates. And I don’t love the Roman Catholic Church, my biological family, or the Oblates of Mary Immaculate any less because of this. Paradoxically, I love them more.

When Jesus asks the question: “Who is mother and brother and sister to me?” he answers that whoever does the will of God is his true mother, true brother, and true sister. But, as the Gospels writers have at that point already strongly emphasized, his biological mother, Mary, was the first person who fit that description. Hence, he is not denigrating his mother, but re-establishing her worth and importance at a higher place.

The same should be true for us in our relationship to the faith families into which we have been baptized, even as we open up our hearts more and more to embrace those others who are not of our fold. Faith is thicker than blood – and thicker even than religious affiliation.

Mosquito Bites

January 22, 2012

When grace enters, there is no choice – humans must dance.

W.H. Auden wrote those words and, beautiful as they sound, I wish they were true. When grace enters a room we should begin to dance but, sadly, more often than not we let some little thing, some minor mosquito bite, blind us to grace’s presence.

I say this with sympathy, not cynicism. We all know how mosquitoes can ruin a picnic. Here’s an example: You are celebrating your birthday in your back yard, having a picnic with family and friends. The weather is perfect, the sun is warm, the mood is mellow, and everything around and within you is an invitation to be joyful and grateful. This is “Sabbath” in the biblical sense: You are celebrating life, your birthday. You are healthy, surrounded by family and friends who love you, enjoying leisure, time off the wheel of work, all with good food and good drink. Grace has entered and everything is wonderful, except for one thing, mosquitoes. As dusk begins to take hold they discreetly begin to infiltrate, inflicting a bite here and a bite there until eventually most everyone loses his or her focus and is preoccupied with keeping exposed parts of their flesh under vigilance. Eventually most of the good cheer and the gratitude evaporate and irritation at the mosquitoes effectively ends any inclination to dance. The picnic is brought down by a series of little bites!

We could all recount a hundred kinds of incidences of this sort. Given the complexity and contingency within our everyday lives, mosquitoes of some type are invariably present. There is some rain on every parade, some irritation in virtually every situation in life, and some element challenging pure grace within almost every moment of life. Life rarely comes to us pure, free from all shadow. That’s why former spiritualities said that we are “living in this valley of tears”. In our lives we never experience a moment of clear-cut, pure, joy. Everything comes with a shadow, a mosquito at the picnic.

And so it is not always easy to dance, even in the clear presence of grace. Mosquito bites can easily cause us to lose perspective, to lose the big picture, the one that would have us see and celebrate grace, even in the face of some minor irritation. A minor irritation can make us lose sight of a huge grace.

Today there is a rich spiritual and psychological literature that challenges us to try to live more fully inside the present moment and not let our heartaches about the past or our anxieties about tomorrow cheat us out of the riches of today. But, as we as know, that is easier said than done. Elements from our past – half-remembered lullabies from childhood, an almost–forgotten face, a past love, an humiliation on the playground deep in our past, a misstep that still haunts us, and thousand other things from our past – impale themselves into our present. And the future, as well, colors our present as we anxiously worry about an impending decision, the meeting we must have tomorrow, what the doctor is going to tell us at our next visit, and how will meet our next mortgage bill. The present moment never comes to us pure.

And yet the challenge remains, an important and healthy challenge: Don’t let the mosquito bites within life blind you to the larger presence of grace! One of my favorite spiritual writers, David Steidl-Rast articulates this challenge very strongly, though he does it by emphasizing the positive. Here’s an example from his writings: “You think this is just another day in your life. It’s not just another day; it’s the one day that is given to you today. It’s given to you; it’s a gift. It’s the only gift that you have right now, and the only appropriate response is gratefulness. If you do nothing else but to cultivate that response to the great gift that this unique day is, if you learn to respond as if it were the first day of your life and very last day, then you will have spent this day very well.”

But that is a grace that does not come easily, it must be fervently prayed for. Mosquitoes will inevitably make their presence known at every picnic in our lives. That’s a given. The challenge is to not lose sight of the larger presence of grace because of minor irritations.

And it helps to keep one’s sense of humor about this: I was trying to untie my shoe lace yesterday, a simple, rote act that I’ve performed blindly thousands of times. I tugged on a lace and, given how shoes are tied, it should be impossible for the laces not to open. But somehow a knot appeared instead! How can this happen? The answer lies in a simple, age-old, philosophical axiom: In the world of irritation there are no impossibilities, no limits of finitude, only infinite potentialities.

Small wonder humans don’t always dance when grace enters.

Chastity As Purity Of Heart And Intention

January 15, 2012

To live a chaste life is not easy, not just for celibates, but for everyone. Even when our actions are all in line, it is still hard to live with a chaste heart, a chaste attitude, and chaste fantasies. Purity of heart and intention is very difficult.

Why? Chastity is difficult because we are so incurably sexual in every pore of our being. And that is not a bad thing. It’s God’s gift. Far from being something dirty and antithetical to our spiritual lives, sexuality is God’s great gift, God’s holy fire, inside us. And so the longing for consummation is a conscious or inchoate coloring underlying most every action in our lives.

And so it is hard to pray for chastity because to pray for it, seemingly, is to pray that sexual yearning and sexual energy should lessen within us or disappear altogether. And who wants to live an asexual and neutered life? No healthy person wants this. Thus, if you are healthy, it is hard to put your heart into praying for chastity because, deep down, nobody wants to be asexual.

But the problem is not with chastity but with our understanding of it. To be chaste does not mean that we become asexual (though spirituality has forever struggled to not make that equation). Chastity is not about denying our sexuality but about properly channeling it. To be chaste is to be pure of heart. That’s the biblical notion of chastity. Jesus does not ask us to pray for chastity, he asks us to pray for “purity of heart”: Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God. They also channel their sexuality properly.

What is purity of heart? To be pure of heart is to relate to others and the world in a way that respects and honors the full dignity, value, and destiny of every person and everything. To be pure of heart is to see others as God sees them. Purity of heart would have us loving others with their good (and not our own) in mind. Karl Rahner suggests that we are pure of heart when we see others against an infinite horizon, namely, inside of a vision that sees the other’s dignity, individuality, life, dreams, and sexuality within the biggest ambiance of all, God’s eternal plan. Purity of heart is purity of intention and full respect in love.

When we understand chastity in this way we can more easily pray for it. In this understanding we are not praying to have our sexual energies deadened, we are praying instead to remain fully red-blooded but with our sexual energies, intentions, and daydreams properly channeled. We are praying too for the kind of maturity, human and sexual, that fully respects others. In essence, we are praying for a deeper respect, a deeper maturity, and a more life-giving love.

And this is a much-needed prayer in our lives because sexuality is so powerful that even inside of a marriage relationship sexuality can still have an intentionality that is not wide enough. Charles Taylor, in his book, A Secular Age, argues the point that sex too-easily loses the big picture and becomes narrow in its focus, a point that is often missed in our understanding of it: “I am not trying to be condescending about our ancestors, because I think that there is a real tension involved in trying to combine in one life sexual fulfillment and piety. This is only in fact one of the points at which a more general tension, between human flourishing in general and dedication to God, makes itself felt. That this tension should be particularly evident in the sexual domain is readily understandable. Intense and profound sexual fulfillment focuses us powerfully on the exchange within the couple; it strongly attaches us possessively to what is privately shared. … It is not for nothing that the early monks and hermits saw sexual renunciation as opening the way to the wider love of God … [And] that there is a tension between fulfillment and piety should not surprise us in a world distorted by sin, that is separated from God. But we have to avoid turning this into a constitutive incompatibility.” Unfortunately that is forever what both the secular world and Christian spirituality (without a proper understanding of chastity) struggle not to do.

Given the power of sexuality inside us, and given the power of our human drives and yearnings in general, it is not easy to live a chaste life. It is even more difficult, and rare, to have a chaste spirit, a chaste heart, chaste daydreams, and chaste intentions. Our hearts want what they want and pressure us to ignore the consequences. We can easily feel a certain repugnance to praying for chastity. But that is largely because we do not understand chastity properly: It is not a deadening of the heart, a stripping away of our sexuality, but a deeper maturity that lets our sexual energies flow out in a more life-giving way.

A Haunting Equation

January 8, 2012

In her novel, Final Payments, Mary Gordon articulates an equation that has long influenced Christian spirituality, both for good and for bad.

Her heroine, Isabel, is a young woman within whom a strong Catholic background, an overly-strict father, and a natural depth of soul conspire together to leave her overly-reticent and overly-reflective, looking at life from the outside, too self-aware and too reflective in general to enter spontaneously into a dance or trust any kind of gaiety

One night she goes to a party of college students but almost immediately feels out of place inside the giddiness, youthful bravado, drinking, and dancing. So she falls back into an old habit: “I would look among the faces of the students for a face that I could love. I would look for something original, something attesting in the shape of the chin or the eyes, something that suggested the belief that there was residual pain that could not be touched by legislation. But they all looked so relentlessly happy and healthy that they did not interest me. I realized that I was looking for someone who was sad, and I was angry at myself for making the equation, my father’s equation, the Church’s equation, between suffering and value.”

That equation between suffering and value has a long-standing history within spirituality and has strongly influenced us both positively and negatively. It has also, I must confess, generally been my own equation. Like Mary Gordon’s Isabel, I too tend to look around the room at a party for a sad face, with the belief that sadness is a sign of depth, of substance, of weightiness. Occasionally I have been right and a face carrying sadness did indeed issue forth from a deep interiority, but I have also often been wrong. Sometimes that sadness is merely an indication of depression, timidity, and unacknowledged anger. As well, I have also met people who were strongly extroverted in manifesting their happiness and joy and who, underneath, had real depth of soul and were anything but superficial.

But still the equation haunts me, as it has haunted Christian spirituality throughout the centuries. We have perennially tended to equate suffering and sadness with value and depth. I remember my Novice Master challenging us with the notion that there is no recorded incident in scripture of Jesus laughing; the idea being that all of Jesus’ depth took its root inside his suffering. Laughter and lightness of heart are to be seen as superficial. That helped reinforce a notion that was deeply branded into me as a child, growing up in an immigrant Catholic family and community. We were virtually catechized with the expression: After the laughter, come the tears! The idea was clear: Laughter is superficial and ultimately only an attempt to keep reality and sadness at bay. Sadness is what’s real, so don’t be too taken in by partying and laughing it up.

What’s to be said about all of this? Clearly, there is truth in the equation. Any good psychologist, spiritual director, or mentor of soul, will tell you that, most often, real growth and maturity of soul are triggered by deep suffering and pain in our lives. It’s not so much that God doesn’t speak as clearly to us in our joys and successes, but we tend not to be listening in those moments. Suffering gets our attention. As C.S. Lewis once said, pain is God’s microphone to a deaf world. There is, undeniably, a connection between suffering and depth of soul.

But we must be careful not to read too much into this. When we look at Jesus, and many other wonderfully healthy people, we see that depth of soul is also connected to the joyous and celebratory moments of life. Jesus scandalized people equally in both his capacity to enter into suffering and renounce worldly joys and in his capacity to thoroughly enjoy the moment, as is evident in the incident where a woman anoints his feet with a very expensive perfume. His depth of soul arose both from his suffering and from his joy. And his gratitude, I suspect, arose more out of the latter than the former.

In his novel, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the Czech writer, Milan Kundera, weighs the equation: What is of more value, heaviness or lightness? His answer: heaviness can crush us, but lightness can be unbearable:

“The heaviest of burdens crushes us, we sink beneath it, it pins us to the ground. But … the heavier the burden, the closer our lives come to the earth, the more real and truthful they become. Conversely, the absolute absence of a burden causes man to be lighter than air, to soar into the heights, take leave of the earth and his earthly being, and become only half real, his movements as free as they are insignificant.”

What then shall we choose? Weight or lightness? … That is the question. The only certainty is: the lightness/weight opposition is the most mysterious, most ambiguous of all.”

Truly it is.