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.

Books That Have Found Me In 2011

January 1, 2012

Since time is always at a premium, I try to be selective in what I read. As well, I like to keep my diet wide, reading novels, books on spirituality, theological treatises, biographies, and essays on psychological and anthropological issues.

How do I select a book? I read reviews, get tips from colleagues, receive books as gifts, and occasionally browse in bookstores, but what I actually end up reading is often more the result of a conspiracy of accidents than of a studied choice. Books that we need to read have a way of finding us.

What books of note found me this year?

Among novels:

· Jonathan Franzen’s, Freedom, is a John-Updike type of commentary on contemporary culture. It’s an easy read, but packs good emotional intelligence.

· Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray, is stunning both in language and content. A classic that deserves to be read. In a culture that tends to prize good looks and looking good above most everything else, Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Gray contains some inconvenient warnings.

· Cormac McCarthy’s, The Road, is a witness to the raw drive to stay alive. This isn’t John Steinbeck’s, The Grapes of Wrath, but it touches some of the same places inside us.

· Wally Lamb’s, The Hour I First Believed, is 200 pages too long, but, like all of Lamb’s books, is deeply insightful apposite to our struggle to forgive and reconcile. Lamb’s central character is invariably someone out of touch with his own anger who is eventually brought to his knees in a way that redemptively exposes his anger to himself.

· Par Lagerkvist’s, Barabbas, is a very imaginative take on what happens to Barabbas after Jesus’ crucifixion.

· Oscar Casares, Brownsville Stories, and Amigoland: Warm, emotionally insightful, good stories, with special appeal to anyone living near the borders of Mexico.

· Michael Ondaatje’s, The Cat’s Table, is one of the best reviewed novels of 2011, deservedly so.

· Pascal Mercier’s, Night Train to Lisbon, is your novel, if you’re looking for an intellectual hit.

Among spirituality and theological treatises:

· Judy Cannato, Radical Amazement: Insights and hints about getting into the present moment and seeing the hidden depth within life.

· John Shea, On Earth as it is in Heaven, The Spiritual Wisdom of the Gospels for Christian Preachers and Teachers: If you are dissatisfied with the homily you listen to every Sunday, buy these commentaries on the Sunday readings.

· Michael Paul Gallagher, Faith Maps, The Religious Explorers from Newman to Joseph Ratzinger: A mature apologetics for those seeking to articulate reasons for their hope.

· Frederick Buechner, Telling the Truth – The Gospel as Tragedy, Comedy, and Fairy Tale: A great piece of writing on the power of language and the language of the Gospels.

· Rob Bell’s, Sex God, Exploring the Endless Connections Between Sexuality and Spirituality, and Love Wins, A Book about Heaven, Hell, and the Fate of every Person who Ever Lived, come from the pen of a young minister who writes with extraordinary balance, good insight, and an equal feel for both the Gospel and the culture.

Biography:

· Two of the most powerful books I read in 2011: Bush Dweller, Essays in Memory of Father James Gray OSB, Edited by Donald Ward, and Joan Didion, Blue Nights: Both powerful stories; the first about a Hermit who meets and counsels the world from his hut, and the second about a woman struggling to find life in the face of a number of bitter deaths.

Treatises, theological and anthropological:

· Michael Kirwan’s, Discovering Girard, is a lay-person’s introduction to the insights of the renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard.

· Bill Plotkin, Nature and the Human Soul, Cultivating Wholeness and Community in a Fragmented World: As with previous books, Plotkin pushes the edges of mainline spirituality, calling always for a much deeper role for nature.

· Dale Schlitt, Generosity and Gratitude, A Philosophical Psalm: A philosopher with an expertise on Hegel, gives us this wonderful, 136-page, poem on gratitude, showing that the genuine insights of abstract philosophy can be as God-filled as the Psalms.

Varia:

· John S. Porter’s, The Glass Art of Sarah Hall, is a spectacularly beautiful book replete with photos that belongs on every coffee table and in every library.

· David Servan-Schreiber, Anti-Cancer, A New Way of Life. This book was handed to me at the cancer clinic just as I was beginning chemotherapy and, among the many books on cancer I have perused these past months, I found this one to be the most challenging and helpful.

These are books that have touched me, but, as St. Augustine once famously said: Concerning taste, we should not have disputes! Read at your own risk!

Praying So As To See God’s Glory Inside Of Humanity

December 18, 2011

[Last in a four part Advent series on Prayer]

Familiarity breeds contempt. It also blocks the mystery of Christmas by breeding a view of the life that cannot see divinity within humanity.

Yet all of us are hopelessly prone to see most-everything in an over-familiar way, namely, in a way that sees little or nothing of the deep richness and divinity that is shimmering everywhere under the surface. G.K. Chesterton, reflecting on this, once declared that one of the deep secrets of life is to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Alan Jones calls this a process of unlearning what’s familiar.

Whatever the wording, the challenge is the same: We need to learn the secret of seeing the extraordinary inside of the ordinary, of seeing divinity shimmering inside of humanity, and of seeing haloes around familiar faces.

Thomas Merton, in perhaps his most-famous text, shares how he once had a quasi-mystical experience of this in the most ordinary of circumstances. He had been living in a Trappist monastery outside of Louisville, Kentucky, for nearly 20 years and one day needed to go into Louisville for a medical appointment. He was standing at the intersection of 4th and Walnut Streets, when suddenly the ordinary changed into the extraordinary. Everyone around him began to shimmer with a deep, divine radiance. They were all walking around, he wrote, “shining like the sun.” And he adds: “Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts where neither sin nor desire nor self-knowledge can reach, the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only they could all see themselves as they really are. If only we could see each other that way all the time. There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed…I suppose the big problem would be that we would fall down and worship each other.”

This kind of vision, seeing the world as transfigured with haloes around familiar faces, is ultimately the meaning of Christmas, the meaning of the incarnation, and the mystery of God walking around in human flesh. Christmas is not so much a celebration of Jesus’ birthday as it is a celebration of the continued birth of God into human flesh, the continuation of the divine making itself manifest in the ordinary; God, a helpless baby in a barn.

But to have this vision we need to pray. Prayer is our major safeguard against the familiarity that breeds contempt and is one of the few ways in which we can begin to see with the deeper eyes of the heart. Prayer is a lifting of our minds and hearts to God, but it is also the way, sometimes the only way, we can purify and deepen our vision. Merton’s experience on the corner of 4th and Walnut in Louisville was very much predicated on years and years of prayer.

Christmas is only seen by the pure of heart or in those moments when we are pure of heart. But when it is seen it is glorious

John Shea, in an extraordinary Christmas-poem, invites us to keep our eyes open for the manifestation of the divine within the human. The invitation within Christmas is to see the sacred within our barns, the body of Christ on and around our kitchen tables, and haloes around familiar faces:

Even at Christmas, when haloes are pre-tested by focus groups for inclusion in mass-market campaigns, they are hard to see. … Seeing haloes is more than a lucky sighting. It entails the advent skill of sustaining attention, the simple act, as [Annie] Dillard found out, of looking up.

This is how haloes are seen, by looking into largeness, by tucking smallness into the folds of infinity.

I do not know this by contemplating shimmering trees. Rather there was a woman, busy at Christmas table, and I looked up to catch a rim of radiance etching her face, to notice the curves of light sliding along her shape. She out-glowed the candles. … When this happens, I do not get overly excited. I merely allow love to be renewed, for that is the mission of haloes, the reason they are given to us.

Nor do I try to freeze the frame. Haloes suffer time, even as they show us what is beyond time.

But when haloes fade, they do not abruptly vanish, abandoning us to the sorrow of lesser light.

They recede, as Gabriel departed Mary, leaving us pregnant.

Familiarity breeds contempt. That’s an archetypal flaw within human nature. And this, perhaps more than anything else, prevents us from entering the mystery of Christmas, from seeing God’s radiance shimmering under the surface of what’s familiar to us.

Jesus once asked his disciples to join him in prayer and, as they prayed, he and everything around him was transfigured and began to glow with a divine radiance. He invites each of us into that particular prayer.

Prayer as Seeking God’s Guidance

December 11, 2011

[Third in a four part Advent series on Prayer]

In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day tells of a very difficult time in her life. She had just converted to Christianity, after a long period of atheism, and then given birth to her daughter. During her season of atheism, she had fallen in love with a man who had fathered her child; and she and this man, atheists disillusioned with main-stream society, had made a pact never to marry, as statement against the conventions of society.

But her conversion to Christianity had turned that world upside down. The father of her child had given her an ultimatum; if she had their child baptized he would end their relationship. Dorothy chose to baptize the child, but paid a heavy price. She deeply loved this man and suffered greatly at their breakup. Moreover, given that her conversion took her out of all her former circles, it left her with more than a missing soul mate. It left her too without a job, without support for her child, and without her former purpose in life. She felt painfully alone and lost.

And this drove her to her knees, literally. One day she took a train to Washington, D.C., from New York and spent the day praying at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. And, as she shares in her autobiography, her prayer that day was shamelessly direct, humble, and clear. Essentially she told God, again and again, that she was lost, that she needed a clear direction for her life, and that she needed that direction now, not in some distant future. And, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, she prayed that prayer over and over again.

She took a train home that evening and as she walked up to her apartment, a man, Peter Maurin, was sitting on the steps. He invited her to start the Catholic Worker. The rest is history.

Our prayers aren’t always answered that swiftly and directly, but they are always answered, as Jesus assures us, because God does not withhold the Holy Spirit from those who ask for it. If we pray for guidance and support, it will be given us.

In Scripture, we see many salient examples of people who, like Dorothy Day, seek out God’s guidance in prayer, especially so when they are alone and afraid as they stand before some major upheaval or impending suffering in their lives. We see this, for example, in Moses who when lost in the desert and facing a revolt from his own people climbs Mount Horeb to ask for God’s counsel. And we see it in Jesus who also climbs Mount Horeb to pray and who spends whole nights in prayer, struggling to find both the guidance and the courage he needs for his mission.

Looking at the prayer of Moses, Jesus, Dorothy Day, and countless other women and men who have prayed for guidance from God, we see that their prayer, especially when they feel most alone and desperate, is marked by three things: honesty, directness, and humility. They lift their own minds and hearts to God, not someone else’s. They share their aloneness and fears with shameless honestly. There is no pretense, no rationalization, no hiding of weaknesses. They pour out their fears, their inadequacy, their temptations, and their confusion, as do children, begging for someone’s hand to help them.

There’s an interesting parallel to this inside some of our classical fairy tales where the figure of God often appears in the form of an angel, a fairy, a fox, or a horse. Invariably those who approach that God-figure with over-confidence, arrogance, or pretense, are denied all counsel and all magic. Conversely those who approach the God-figure in humility and admit that they are lost in their search are awarded with counsel and magic. There’s an important prayer-lesson in that.

All of us, at different times in our lives, find ourselves alone, lost, confused, and tempted towards a road that will not lead to life. At such times we need to approach God with a prayer that is shamelessly honest, direct, and humble. Like Dorothy Day, we need to raise our true fears and insecurities to God, praying, over and over again: “I’m afraid! I feel so alone and isolated in this! I don’t want to do this! I’m completely inadequate! I haven’t any strength left! I’m full of anger! I’m bitter at so many things! I hate some of the places where my Christian morality has led me! I’m jealous of others who don’t have my moral inhibitions! I’m tempted in ways that I’m ashamed to speak of! I need more support than you’ve been giving me! Send me someone or send me something! If you want me to continue on this road you’ve got to give me more help! I need this now!”

And then we need to wait, in patience, in advent. Perhaps no Peter Maurin will appear on our doorstep that night, but, with desert-helplessness having done its work, an angel will come to strengthen us.

Praying So As Not To Lose Heart

December 4, 2011

[Second of a four part Advent Series]

One of the reasons we need to pray is so that we don’t lose heart. We all do sometimes. We lose heart whenever frustration, tiredness, fear, and helplessness in the face of life’s humiliations conspire together to paralyze our energies, deaden our resiliency, drain our courage, and leave us feeling weak in depression.

Poet Jill Alexander Essbaum, gives us a poignant example of this in her poem, Easter. Reflecting on the joy that Easter should bring into our lives, she shares that Easter can instead be a season of defeat for us because its celebration of joy can highlight the shortcomings of our own lives and leave us with the feeling that: Everyone I’ve ever loved lives happily just past my able reach.

And this feeling can drive us to our knees, in bitterness or prayer; hopefully prayer.

There are many examples in scripture of men and women being driven to mountaintops or to their knees in prayer because they are paralyzed by fear, discouragement, or loneliness. For our purposes, I will highlight two, highly illustrative, examples of this.

We see an example of praying so as not to lose heart in the prophet, Elijah, when he is being threatened because of his prophetic message. Elijah had been a true and a courageous prophet, but at one point in his ministry he became dangerously disconsolate. His own people had ceased listening to his message, he had witnessed some of his fellow prophets being martyred, and his message had deeply upset Jezebel, the most powerful woman in the kingdom, who had now sent out men to kill him. To flee Jezebel, Elijah climbed up Mount Horeb. However as he retreated into a cave, he was confronted by God’s voice, asking him what he was doing there. Elijah confessed his discouragement, his fear of losing his life, and his loss of heart. Having confessed his fears, Elijah retreated into the darkness of the cave, to sit paralyzed in his own fear and depression. But God, through the sound of a gentle breeze, lured him out to the mouth of the cave where Elijah again confessed his depression and fear; but this time in the form of a prayer. And, through that prayer, he regained his strength of heart and came down the mountain ready to face his ministry and all its dangers with renewed energy and courage.

When all of his own strength had dried up, Elijah approached God with his weaknesses and that movement renewed his heart.

We see the same thing in Jesus when, facing his passion and death, he prays in the Garden of Gethsemane. It’s the low-point of Jesus’ life and ministry: The people have stopped listening to him, the religious authorities are conspiring with the civil authorities to have him killed, those few, his inner circle of disciples, who are still listening to his message, are not understanding it, and he feels utterly alone, “a stone’s throw away from everyone”. So as not to lose heart, he drops to his knees in prayer, a prayer so intense that he “sweats blood’, but that prayer eventually ends in consolation, with “an angel from heaven coming down to strengthen him”. He brings his beaten-down, misunderstood, fearful, and painfully isolated heart to prayer, and he is strengthened, given all the sustenance he needs to regain his courage.

And, in that, Jesus is contrasted with his apostles. At that very moment, they too are discouraged, lonely, and fearful. But they are asleep while he prays, and their sleep, as the gospels hint, is something more than physical. They are, we are told, “asleep out of sheer sorrow”. In essence, they are too depressed to be awake to the full strength of their own lives. This loss of heart has them paralyzed in fear and when they finally do act they act in ways contrary to what Jesus had taught them. They attempt violence and then flee. They couldn’t face impending suffering as Jesus did because they didn’t pray as he did. They lost heart.

No matter who we are or how rich and blessed our lives may be, it is impossible to go through life without, at times, feeling bitterly misunderstood, becoming deeply disconsolate, succumbing to a paralyzing tiredness, and simply losing heart. We are human and, like Jesus, we will have days when we feel “a stone’s throw away from everyone”. And what’s paralyzed inside of us is what’s highest in us: our capacity to forgive, our capacity to radiate huge, generous hearts, our capacity for empathy and understanding, our capacity for joy, and our capacity for courage. Frightened and discouraged, like Elijah, we retreat into the inner darkness of a cave.

But in moments like this, we might understand ourselves this way: Like Elijah, we are in the darkness of a cave, paralyzed by loss of heart; but God is at the mouth of the cave, a gentle breeze, luring us back out where everyone we love will be back within our reach.

Prayer as Seeking Depth

November 28, 2011

[First in of a four-part Advent series on Prayer]

In our more reflective moments we sense the importance of prayer; yet, we struggle to pray. Sustained, deep prayer doesn’t come easy for us. Why?

First of all, we struggle to make time for prayer. Prayer doesn’t accomplish anything practical for us, it’s a waste of time in terms of tending to the pressures and tasks of daily life, and so we hesitate to go there. Coupled with this, we find it hard to trust that prayer actually works and brings about something real in our lives. Beyond that, we struggle to concentrate when we try to pray. Once we do settle in to pray, we soon feel ourselves overwhelmed by daydreams, unfinished conversations, half-forgotten melodies, heartaches, agendas, and the impending tasks that face us as soon as we get up from our place of prayer. Finally, we struggle to pray because we really don’t know how to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we generally lack the confidence to believe that our own particular way of praying, with all its distractions and missteps, is prayer in the deep sense.

One of the places we can turn for help is the Gospel of Luke. More so than any of the other Gospels, his is the Gospel of prayer. In Luke’s Gospel there are more descriptions of Jesus in prayer than in all the other Gospels combined. Luke gives us glimpses of Jesus praying in virtually every kind of situation: He prays when he joy-filled, he prays when he is in agony, he prays with others around him, and he prays when he is alone at night, withdrawn from all human contact. He prays high on a mountain, on a sacred place, and he prays on the level plane, where ordinary life happens. In Luke’s Gospel, Jesus prays a lot.

And the lesson isn’t lost on his disciples. They sense that Jesus’ real depth and power are drawn from his prayer. They know that what makes him so special, so unlike any other religious figure, is that he is linked at some deep place to a power outside of this world. And they want this for themselves. That’s why they approach Jesus and ask him: “Lord, teach us to pray!”

But we must be careful not to misunderstand what constituted their attraction and what they were asking for when they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray. They sensed that what Jesus drew from the depth of his prayer was not, first of all, his power to do miracles or to silence his enemies with some kind of superior intelligence. What impressed them and what they wanted too for their own lives was the depth and graciousness of his soul.

The power they admired and wanted was Jesus’ power to love and forgive his enemies rather than embarrass and crush them. What they wanted was Jesus’ power to transform a room, not by some miraculous deed, but by a disarming innocence and vulnerability that, like a baby’s presence, has everyone solicitously guarding his or her behavior and language. What they wanted was his power to renounce life in self-sacrifice, even while retaining the enviable capacity to enjoy the pleasures of life without guilt. What they wanted was Jesus’ power to be big-hearted, to love beyond his own tribe, and to love poor and rich alike, to live inside of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity, despite everything within life that militates against these virtues. What they wanted was Jesus’ depth and graciousness of soul.

And they recognized that this power did not come from within himself, but from a source outside him. They saw that he connected to a deep source through prayer, through constantly lifting to God what was on his mind and in his heart. They saw it and they wanted that depth-connection too, for themselves. So they asked Jesus to teach them how to pray.

Ultimately, we too want Jesus’ depth and graciousness in our own lives. Like Jesus’ disciples, we also know that we can only attain this through prayer, through accessing a power that lies inside the deepest deep of our souls and beyond our souls. We know too that the route to that depth lies in journeying inward, in silence, through both the pain and the quiet, the chaos and the peace, that come to us when we still ourselves to pray.

In our more reflective moments, and in our more desperate moments, we feel our need for prayer and try to go to that deep place. But, given our lack of trust and our lack of practice, we struggle to get there. We don’t know how to pray or how to sustain ourselves in prayer.

But in this we are in good company, with Jesus’ disciples. And so a good beginning is to recognize what we need and where it is found. We need to begin with a plea: Lord teach us to pray!

Empathy for the World

November 20, 2011

There’s a story told, more legend perhaps than fact, about a mayor of a large American city in the late 1960s. It wasn’t a good time for his city: It was facing financial bankruptcy, crime rates were spiraling, its public transportation system was no longer safe at night, the river supplying its drinking water was dangerously polluted, the air was rife with racial tension, and there were strikes and street protests almost weekly.

As the story goes, the mayor was flying over the city in a helicopter at rush hour on a Friday afternoon. As the rush-hour bustle and traffic drowned out most everything else, he looked down at what seemed a teeming mess and said to one of his aides: “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was plunger and we could flush this whole mess into the ocean!”

He was being facetious, but I worry that we sometimes subtly think the same thing about our world. Too often we and our churches tend to see the world precisely as a mess, as caught up in mindless trivialization, as self-indulgent, as narcissistic, as short-sighted, as no longer having values that demand self-sacrifice, of worshipping fame, of being addicted to material goods, and of being anti-church and anti-Christian. Indeed, it is common today in our churches to see the world as our enemy.

And, far from feeling heartbroken about it, we feel smug and righteousness as we gleefully witness its downfall: The world is getting what it deserves! Godlessness is its own punishment! That’s what it gets for not listening to us! In this, our attitude is the antithesis of Jesus’ attitude towards the world.

Jesus loved the world. Really? Yes. Is this what the Gospels teach? Yes.

Here’s how the Gospels describe Jesus’ reaction towards the world that rejected him: As Jesus drew near to Jerusalem and saw the city, he wept over it saying: “If you, even you, had only recognized on this day the things that make for peace! But now they are hidden from your eyes.” Jesus sees what happens when people try to live without God, the mess, the pain, the heartbreak, and, far from rejoicing that the world isn’t working, his heart aches with empathy: If only you could see what you’re doing!

Looking at a world that’s breaking down because of its self-absorption, Jesus responds with empathy, not glee; with understanding, not judgment; with heartache, not rubbing salt in the wounds; and with tears, not good riddance.

Loving parents and loving friends understand exactly what Jesus was feeling at the moment when he wept over Jerusalem. What frustrated, heartbroken parent hasn’t looked at a son or daughter caught up in wrong choices and self-destructive behavior and wept inside as the words spontaneously formed: If only you could see what you’re doing! If only I could do something to spare you the damage you’re doing to your life by this blindness! If only you could recognize the things that make for peace! But you can’t see, and it breaks my heart!

The same is true among friends. True friends don’t rejoice and become gleeful when their friends make bad choices and their lives begin to collapse. Instead there are tears, mingled with anxious empathy, with heartache, with pleading, with prayers. Genuine love is empathic and empathy is never gleeful at someone else’s downfall.

We are asked by our Christian faith to have a genuine love for the world. The world isn’t our enemy. It’s our wayward child and our loved friend who is breaking our heart. That can be hard to see and accept when in fact the world is often belligerent and arrogant in its attitude towards us, when it’s angry with us, when it wrongly judges us, and when it scapegoats us. But that’s exactly what suffering children often do to their parents and friends when they make bad choices and suffer the consequences of that. They impute and scapegoat. This can feel very unfair to us, but Jesus attitude towards those who rejected and crucified him invites us to an empathy beyond that.

Kathleen Norris suggests that we look at the world, when it opposes us, in the same way as we look at an angry 17 year-old girl dealing with her parents. At that moment of anger, her parents become a symbolic lightening rod (a safe place) for her to vent her anger and to scapegoat. But absorbing this is a function of adult loving. Good parents don’t respond to the anger of an adolescent child by declaring her their enemy. They respond like Jesus did, by weeping over her.

Moreover a genuine empathy for the world isn’t just predicated on mature sympathy. Mature sympathy is itself predicated on better seeing the world for what it is. The 17 year-old adolescent standing belligerent and angry before her parents isn’t a bad person, she’s just not yet fully grown up.

That’s true too for our world: It’s not a bad place; it’s just far from being a finished and mature one.

Love Beyond Naiveté and Romance

November 13, 2011

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. The congregation initially responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced that actively invited people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen, and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of the congregation began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe anymore! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get! This is too messy to continue!”

But the minister held his ground, pointing out that their expectations were naïve, that what they were experiencing was precisely part of the cost of reaching out to the poor, and that Jesus assures us that loving is unsafe and messy, not just in reaching out to the poor but in reaching out to anyone.

We like to think of ourselves as gracious and loving, but, the truth be told, that is predicated on an overly-naïve and overly-romanticized notion of love. We don’t really love as Jesus invites us to when he says: Love each other as I have loved you! The tail-end of that sentence contains the challenge: Jesus doesn’t say, love each other according to the spontaneous movements of your heart; nor, love each other as society defines love, but rather: Love each other as I have loved you!

And, for the most part, we haven’t done that.

We haven’t loved our enemies, nor turned the other cheek and reached out to embrace those who hate us. We haven’t prayed for those who oppose us.
We haven’t forgiven those who hurt us, nor forgiven those who have murdered our loved ones. We haven’t, in the midst of being hurt, asked God to forgive the very people who are hurting us because they are not really cognizant of what they are doing.
We haven’t been big-hearted and taken the high-road when we’ve been slighted or ignored, nor at those times have we let understanding and empathy replace bitterness and our desire to withdraw. We haven’t let go of our grudges.
We haven’t let ourselves be vulnerable to the point of risking humiliation and rejection in our offers of love. We haven’t given up our fear being misunderstood, of not looking good, of not appearing strong and in control. We haven’t set out barefooted, to love without security in our pockets.
We haven’t opened our hearts enough to imitate Jesus’ universal, non-discriminating embrace, nor have we been able to stretch our hearts to see everyone as brother or sister, regardless of race, color, or religion. We haven’t stopped nursing the silent secret that our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are more precious than those of the rest of the world.
We haven’t made a preferential option for the poor, haven’t brought the poor to our tables, and haven’t yet abandoned our propensity to be with the attractive and the influential.
We haven’t sacrificed ourselves fully to the point of losing everything for the sake of others. We haven’t ever really laid down our lives for our friends – nor, especially, for our enemies. We haven’t been willing to die for the very people who oppose us and are trying to crucify us.
We haven’t loved with pure intention in our hearts, without somehow seeking ourselves within our relationships. We haven’t let our hearts be broken rather than, however subtly, violate someone else.
We haven’t walked in patience, giving others the full space they need to relate to us according to their own inner dictates. We haven’t been willing to patiently sweat blood in order to be faithful. We haven’t waited in patience, in God’s good-time, for God’s judgment on right and wrong.
We haven’t resisted our natural urge to judge others, to not impute motives. We haven’t left judgment to God.
Finally, not least, we haven’t loved and forgiven own selves, knowing that no mistake we make stands between us and God. We haven’t trusted God’s love enough to always begin anew inside of God’s infinite mercy.
We haven’t loved as Jesus loved.

After his wife, Raissa, died, Jacques Maritain edited a book of her journals. In the Preface of that book he describes her struggle with the illness that eventually killed her. Severely debilitated and unable to speak, she struggled mightily in her last days. Her suffering both tested and matured Maritain’s own faith. Mightily sobered by seeing his wife’s sufferings, he wrote: Only two kinds of people think that love is easy: saints, who through long years of self-sacrifice have made a habit of virtue, and naïve persons who don’t know what they’re talking about.

Loneliness – Its Ultimate Agony

November 6, 2011

When I was 22 years old, a seminarian, I was privileged to have a unique kind of desert experience. I sat with my siblings in a palliative care room for several weeks, watching my father die.

My father was young still, sixty-two, and in good health until being struck with pancreatic cancer. He was a man of faith and he brought that to his final struggle. He wasn’t afraid of God, whom he had served all his life, nor of the afterlife, which his faith assured him was to be joy-filled. Yet he couldn’t let go of life easily, struggling almost bitterly at times to surrender. There was a deep sadness inside him, ultimately more soft than bitter, during his last weeks of life. He didn’t want to die.

But his sadness was not rooted in a fear of death, of God, or of the afterlife. His sadness had to do with leaving this world, leaving his wife, his family, his community, his dreams for his retirement years, and with his own enjoyment of life. He was sad at the bitter fact that he was dying while the rest of us and the rest of life were continuing on, without him.

I was reminded of this recently while reading an article in America Magazine by Sidney Callahan within which she shares about her own fear of dying. Here’s the salient part of her text:

But less severe losses also seep into my fear of dying. Intense sadness arises over giving up one’s part in the ongoing drama of one’s daily life and one’s times. The familiar local round and love of one’s own family and people (including my adored dog) strongly bind us to our specific and beautiful world. To have this story interrupted is a painful prospect when we could go on forever. When your life is a blessed Sabbath banquet given by God here and now, leaving your place at the table can be hard – even for a more glorious celebration. In dying we will inevitably be entering into an unimaginable, novel existence, like a fetus being born. Despite the promised wonders in the world to come, I am afraid I identify with the happy, contented fetus in the warm womb who does not want to come out.

Before dismissing this as an immature or less-than-a-holy feeling, we might want to examine Jesus’ own fear of dying. The Gospels present his agony, his “sweating blood”, as a moral drama rather than as a physical one. It’s Jesus in his humanity, as lover, who is sweating his death. The Gospels make this clear. In describing his death they highlight his intense loneliness, his isolation, his being “a stone’s throw away from everyone”, and his feeling of abandonment. The pain he expresses in the Garden isn’t fear about impending physical pain, it’s fear about impending abandonment, about his losing his place at the table, about the moral and emotional isolation of dying, of dying alone, of dying misunderstood, of dying as unanimity-minus-one.

It can be helpful to contemplate this for a number of reasons.

First, a deeper understanding of this can help us recognize and deal more openly with some of our own fears about dying. We need to give ourselves permission to be sad at the thought of death. As well, a deeper understanding of this can help us prepare ourselves for the loneliness we will one day all have to face. As Martin Luther put it: You are going to die alone. You had better believe alone.

Next, a deeper understanding of this can save us from making simplistic judgments about how other people deal with death. Too common is the simplistic belief that if a person has real faith, he or she should be able to let go of life easily and die peacefully. There’s truth in this, but it needs tons of qualification: As Iris Murdoch once wrote: A common soldier dies without fear, Jesus died afraid!” Jesus, as the account of his death in the Gospel of Mark makes clear, did not go through the death-process, the process of letting go, serenely. He faced his death with faith and courage, but he also faced it with deep sadness, intense struggle, near bitterness, and seeming darkness at the center of his faith. Healthy people, people who love life, find it hard to give up their place at this world’s tables. Small wonder that Jesus struggled!

Finally, a deeper understanding of this can, paradoxically, help us to enter life more deeply. Jesus tells us that we must lose our lives in order to find them. Among other things, this means accepting that one day we will lose our place at this world’s tables. And that acceptance can give us a deeper appreciation for the tables of family, community, and enjoyment that we sit at now in this specific and beautiful world.

Life and love are precious, on both sides of eternity. Our fear of losing our place inside of them is a healthy, holy fear.

The Catholic Press Loses a Friend

October 23, 2011

No community should botch its deaths! Those are the words of the famed anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, and I use them here to introduce a tribute to Otto Herschan, a long-time Catholic publisher, who died on July 12 at the age of 84.

For many years he was the publisher and Managing Director of a number of national Catholic weekly newspapers, including the Catholic Herald in England, the Scottish Catholic Observer in Scotland, and the Irish Catholic in Ireland. He brought an interesting background to Catholic journalism.

He was born in Austria and, at age 10, came to England as refugee with his mother just before World War II. His father, who put his wife and Otto on the Orient Express bound for London just before he died, had been an Austrian army officer and in the first chapters of Otto’s autobiography, Holy Smoke, he describes the trials of Catholicism in Austria as it was passing into Nazi control.

Upon arriving in England, Otto was educated by the Benedictines at their school in Herefordshire, Belmont Abbey. After graduating, he worked briefly in accountancy and advertising, before enrolling for a college degree, but lack of funds obliged him to leave after a year. Otto then turned his energy to the theater, joining the Boltons Theatre, the best known of London’s theatrical clubs in the 1940s. He worked there in a number of capacities: scene painter, actor of small parts, and eventually as theater manager, becoming at the tender age of 21 the youngest theater manager in London. But financial troubles forced the Boltons Theatre to close in 1950. He then worked for a time in television, helping found the first commercial TV station in England.

This led him back to the theater where, in 1954 at a fundraising event, he met the chairman for the Catholic Herald who invited him to take over the management of the paper. He protested, saying that he knew nothing about running a newspaper and was told in reply: “That may be a very good start!” He then served as Managing Director of the Catholic Herald for nearly 50 years.

Under his vision and guidance, the Catholic Herald evolved from serving a small, closed constituency within which the purchase of a copy was regarded as an act of piety to become a national and international Catholic weekly that appears on newsstands through the English-speaking world. He recruited talented journalists from the secular press and the Catholic Herald became a feisty and highly sought-after newspaper. As publisher of a number of Catholic newspapers both during and after Vatican II, he was always able to have his newspapers walk that fine tightrope between liberal and conservative ideologies. Invariably his newspapers were considered too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals. Not a bad critique.

As a publisher with a very limited budget, Otto was good at spotting talented young journalists, hiring them to edit his newspapers, and then after a few years giving them his fullest blessing as they moved on to more profitable jobs within the secular press. In this way, he helped launch the career of a number of very good young journalists; but it was a win-win situation for both, the aspiring young editors looking to make a start and for the Catholic press who benefited from their talent. During his years in publishing he also developed life-long friendships with leading church people everywhere, including Archbishop Denis Hurley of South Africa and Cardinal Franz Konig of Vienna.

I first met Otto in 1990, when he recruited me to write a column for his newspapers and, in the twenty years since, I have enjoyed a wonderful friendship with him and his wife, Marie. Despite being humble and approachable, he was always a little larger than life. He brought color into a room. He loved life, loved work, deeply loved his wife, and especially loved long, late-night dinners, stoked by good wine, ecclesial talk, banter, humor, and friendship, capped-off with good cigars. Time stopped during these dinners, a glance at your wristwatch was forbidden, and even though you paid a price for it in tiredness the next day, you knew that, during those hours at table together, you were doing what you are supposed to be doing your whole life, just enjoying friendship, love, food, banter, and holy talk together. I will always treasure memories of those dinners in Otto’s various clubs, as well as of a couple of all-day drives through the English countryside in mid-summer, car windows wide-open, pipe and cigar smoke wafting about, and Otto’s eyes surveying the landscape, checking it out for its beauty and for the possibility of it containing a pub.

No community should botch its deaths! And so it’s important to highlight that in Otto Herschan’s passing the church and the world lost a true gentleman, a good friend, a man of wit, and man who, like Jesus, tried to draw people of very persuasion together around a common table of friendship and faith.

God and Sex

October 16, 2011

Our world thinks it understands sex. It doesn’t. Moreover it is beginning to ignore and even disdain how Christianity views sexuality.

And we are paying a price for this, mostly without consciously realizing it: Sex, outside of its proper containers, respect, unconditional commitment, and love, isn’t bringing more joy into our lives, but is leaving us more fragmented and lonely. Part of what’s happening to us is expressed in a haunting line in Leonard Cohen’s song, Famous Blue Raincoat, where a man reminds a friend of the consequences of his having had sex with a woman to whom he was not committed: And you treated some woman to a flake of your life; and when she went home she was nobody’s wife. Casual sex: A flake of our lives. Frivolously given away.

There’s a lot of sex in culture, but it isn’t taking a lot of people home, home to that place where they feel fully respected, unconditionally safe, able to be themselves, comfortable, and confident that the joy of their love-making is making their hearts bigger, softer, more gracious, more joyous.

With this as a background, I would like to recommend a book, Sex God, by Rob Bell. He is pastor of a Christian church in Michigan and does something in this book that has been often tried, but rarely done well. What he does is take seriously the raw power, brute earthiness, and befuddling complexity of sex and sets that into an anthropological, biblical, and Christian perspective that properly honors both the earthiness and the holiness of sex. Unlike many Christian commentators, he accepts, without denial, denigration, or pious encrustment, our sexual complexity. But, unlike most secular commentators who do accept the full impact of our sexual complexity but then lose sight of its deeper meaning, he marries the earthiness and the holiness of sex into a perspective that is at once both earthy and holy. Here are some examples of his insights:

For too many of us, sex is a search for something we’re missing, a restless quest for an unconditional embrace; and so we go from relationship to relationship, looking for this. But, as Bell suggests: Sex is not the search for something that’s missing. It’s the expression of something that’s been found. It’s designed to be the overflow, the culmination of something that a man and a woman have found in each other. It’s a celebration of this living, breathing thing that’s happening between the two of them.

In Bell’s view, sex inside of its proper containers (unconditional commitment, respect, love) is designed to counter the brokenness of our lives and the fragmentation of our world. The ‘oneness’ experienced in sexual embrace is meant to help bring ‘oneness’ into the world: This man and this woman who have given themselves to each other are supposed to give the world a glimpse of hope, a display of what God is like, a bit of echad [oneness] on earth. Is that where the phrase ‘making love’ comes from? An awareness that something mystical happens in sex, that something good and needed is created? Something is added to the world, given to the world. This man and this woman together are in some profoundly mysterious way good for the wellbeing of the whole world.

And Bell is clear on the holiness of sex and how that in fact undergirds its unrelenting grip: In heaven we will be fully known … Which is what people crave in sex, isn’t it? To be known and still loved, still embraced, still accepted. Is sex in its greatest, purest, most joyful and honest expression a glimpse of forever?

Moreover he isn’t starry-eyed and naïve about what the grip of sex can do to us and how it can leave stains of regret on both our innocence and our baptismal robes. He assures us that God knew how powerful sex was going to be and so built in space for some misadventures. He finishes the book with a story of a dream-marriage of an idealistic couple who, a few years later, break-up: I finish with this story because life is messy. Gut wrenching. Risky. Things don’t always turn out well. Sometimes they don’t turn out at all. Sometimes everything falls apart and we wonder if there’s any point to any of it. We’re tempted to shut ourselves off, fortify the walls of our hearts, and forge ahead, promising ourselves that we will never open ourselves up like this again. But we have to believe that we can recover from anything. I have to believe that God can put anything – anyone – back together. I have to believe that the God Jesus invites us to trust is as good as he says he is. Loving …. Forgiving …. Merciful … Full of grace.

The problem with sex is that the churches don’t take passion seriously enough, while the world doesn’t take chastity seriously enough. Healthy sex is predicated on the vibrancy of both, passion and chastity, earthiness and holiness. Rob Bell’s book honors that.