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.

The Preciousness and Joy of a Whole Number

October 3, 2011

Today we don’t attach a lot of symbolism to numbers. A few, mostly superstitious, remnants remain from former ages, such as seeing the number seven as lucky and the number thirteen as unlucky. For the most part, for us, numbers are arbitrary.

This hasn’t always been the case. In biblical times, they attached a lot of meaning to certain numbers. For example, in the bible, the numbers forty, ten, twelve, and one hundred are highly symbolic. The number forty, for instance, speaks of the length of time required before something can come to proper fruition, while the numbers ten, twelve, and one hundred speak of a certain wholeness that is required to properly appropriate grace.

Knowing that the ancients invested special meaning in certain numbers is critical to understanding a very challenging, and neglected, story in the Gospels, namely, the parable of the woman with the ten coins (Luke 15, 8-10). Without grasping the symbolism of the numbers, this parable loses its meaning.

Here is the parable as Scripture gives it: A woman had ten coins and lost one. She became extremely anxious and agitated about the loss and began to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, and sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she found the coin and her joy in finding it matched her agitation in losing it. She was delirious with joy, called together her neighbors to share in her joy, and threw a party whose cost far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost.

Why such anxiety and such joy over the loss a coin and the finding of a coin whose value was that of a dime? The answer lies in the symbolism of numbers: In her culture, nine was not a whole number; ten was a whole number. Both the woman’s anxiety on losing the coin and her joy in finding it have little to do with the value of the coin. They have to do with the value of wholeness. A certain wholeness in her life had been fractured and only by finding the coin could it be restored. In essence, this is the parable:

A woman had ten children and these constituted her family. With nine of them, she had a good relationship, but one of her daughters was alienated from her and from the family. Everyone else came regularly to the family table, but this one daughter did not. The woman couldn’t find rest in that situation; she needed her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tried every means to reconcile with her daughter and, one day, in a miracle of miracles, it worked. Her daughter reconciled with her and came back to the family. The family was whole again, everyone was back at table. The woman was overjoyed, withdrew her modest savings from the bank, and threw a lavish party to celebrate the great grace that her family was whole again.

There’s an important lesson here: Like that woman, we are meant to be anxious, not able to rest, lighting lamps and searching, until our families, churches, and communities are again whole and those who will no longer sit at a table with us are back in the fold. Nine is not a whole number … and neither is the number of those who are normally at our family or Eucharistic tables. We need to be constantly uneasy: Who is not at table with us? Who no longer goes to church with us? Who feels uncomfortable worshipping with us? Who will no longer join us in a conversation over morality or politics? And, most importantly, are we comfortable with the fact that so many people can no longer join us at our family, Eucharistic, moral, or political tables?

Sadly, today, too many of us are comfortable in families, churches, and communities that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Good riddance! Love us or leave us! She wasn’t a real Catholic in any case! His views are so narrow and bigoted it’s just as well he isn’t here! We are better off without that kind! There’s more peace this way! We are a purer, more faithful, family or church because of her absence!”

But it’s this attitude and lack of healthy solicitude for wholeness that, perhaps more than any other thing, explains the joylessness and hardness that is so evident everywhere today in our families, churches, and political circles. Unlike Jesus, whose heart ached with God’s universal salvific will and who prayed in tears for those “other sheep who are not of this fold”, and unlike the woman who lost one of her coins and would not sleep until every corner of the house was turned upside down in a frantic search for what was lost, we content ourselves with just nine coins, an incomplete set, instead of setting out solicitously in search of that lost wholeness that would again bring us completeness and joy.

Unconscious Images that Deeply Influence Us

September 25, 2011

Among all the great stories in the world, the most common, best-known, and perennially intriguing, are those that deal with heroes and heroines. These are stories that describe someone, a man or a woman (though most often a man), who has to journey through danger, suffering, opposition, misunderstanding, and humiliation to achieve some noble goal.

These kinds of stories abound everywhere in classical mythology, scripture, epic novels, and in popular movies. The details of the stories vary enormously, but there is a common pattern in them: For noble reasons, the hero or heroine must descend into some underworld of suffering and endure that suffering, usually in the face of fierce misunderstanding and opposition, so as to eventually emerge victorious, a conqueror, a hero, an object of admiration, and as one who now somehow stands above others because of this achievement. As well, very importantly, in these myths and stories the world is better and somehow saved because of this person’s courage and his or her willingness to endure pain, misunderstanding, isolation, and humiliation.

Most commonly, in these stories, the hero or heroine accomplishes some feat in the world, a victory in war or in sports; but, at a deeper level, many of these stories are meant to be understood as journey inside of one’s own psyche and soul. Mythically this is expressed as the quest for the “holy grail”, and ultimately the “holy grail” is something found at the end of an inner journey, namely, a rarified human maturity and sanctity.

In a new book, Nature and the Human Soul, Bill Plotkin reflects on how, today, our understanding of this has become badly distorted; so badly in fact, that, for our culture, the “holy grail” is envisaged as little more than the glory of being a teen-idol.

Here’s how he puts it: In recent decades, pop culture has diminished the mature form of the hero’s journey by confounding it with an egocentric, adolescent caricature. We’re all too familiar with the Hollywood story in which the valorous ‘hero’ or ‘heroine’ – from John Wayne to James Bond, from Superman to Mighty Mouse, from Batgirl to Bionic Woman – risks his or her life, health, or wealth, whether in sports, combat, espionage, or an impossible mission, in order to save the day, the damsel, or the planet and reap the rewards of personal triumph and acclaim. In this immature rendition of the hero’s journey, the protagonist goes forth to cheat death and becomes a ‘man’ or ‘woman’, or flaunts machismo or machismo, more in the manner of a celebrity icon or teen idol than a mature adult. The adolescent hero returns with a few scratches but is essentially unchanged as a person. Although often entertaining, this is Dungeons and Dragons, not a mature hero’s journey.

Both men’s and women’s paths to genuine maturity are distinct from juvenile, usually masculine, heroism. The mature hero endures a descent to the underworld, undergoes a decisive defeat of the adolescent personality (a psychological death or dismemberment) receives a revelation of his true place in the world, and returns humbly to his people, prepared to be of service to his vision. This is equally true of the mature heroine.

The hero’s journey is meant to transform adolescence into adulthood, to turn someone into an Elder, and this is not necessarily achieved by conquering invading aliens, out-muscling the bad guys, or by winning an Academy Award or a championship trophy. Too often these conquests have the opposite effect of deepening egocentricity and locking one even deeper inside of immaturity by reinforcing the adolescent daydream of being the hero or heroine who is set apart and above.

What is needed to kill the adolescent personality is precisely a defeat or a humiliation that cracks open and exposes the immaturity of our adolescent daydreams within which we are always the superstar, the admired idol, the conquering hero, the one who is brighter and stronger than others, and the one who is somehow immune from sickness, death, and the frailties of ordinary humanity. A true hero’s journey, one that transforms us from unhealthy pride and egocentricity to healthy humility and generativity, will always be a paschal journey within which we, like Jesus, drink the chalice of humiliation, albeit without growing bitter or losing hope. A true hero or heroine often looks a lot more like the humble, gentle, soft-spoken grandmother or grandfather (whose every wrinkle tells a story of work, worry, grief, and tears) than he or she looks like the man or woman who is triumphantly and glamorously hoisting a sports trophy or an Academy award.

Inside our culture today, celebrities are the new saints – and the magazines, television programs, and internet sites that photograph their persons and give us intimate details of their lives are, for large parts of our culture, the spiritual reading for our time. That is what it is, both for good and bad; but we need to realize how deeply we are swayed by these images of adolescence rather than of mature humanity.

A Sufficient Creed

September 18, 2011

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very un-Hollywood type of marriage proposal to his fiancé: He was in his mid-forties and had suffered a number of disillusioning heartbreaks, some of which, by his own admission, were his own fault, the result of feelings shifting unexpectedly on his part. Now, in mid-life, struggling not to be disillusioned and cynical about love and romance, he met a woman whom he deeply respected, much admired, and with whom he felt he would like to build a life. But, unsure of himself, he was humble in his proposal.

This, in essence, was his proposal: I’d like to ask you to marry me, but, I need to put my cards on the table: I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose my confidence in my understanding of love. And so, I’ll be honest: I can’t promise that I will always be in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity!

That’s not exactly the type of marriage proposal we see in our romantic movies and novels, predicated, as they are, on the naïve belief that the passion and excitement we initially experience when we fall in love will remain that way forever. But this is a mature proposal, one that doesn’t naively promise something that’s impossible to deliver.

But, beyond pointing us towards a more mature understanding of love, this is also a rich image for faith and how it works. Faith too, in the end, is more about fidelity in action than about fervor in feelings. Allow me an example:

When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a 30-day retreat. His aim was precisely to try to acquire a more affective faith, one that he would feel with fervor and which would seep warmly through his heart. He suffered from what he self-described, as a “stoic” faith, a gut-sense of God’s reality and love, but one which didn’t translate much into any warm feelings of security about God’s existence and love. By his own admission, he lacked affectivity, fire, emotion, and warmth about his faith. And that’s what he went in search of.

He returned from the retreat still stoic, but changed nonetheless: “I never got what I asked for, “he said, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, but I learned too that this is okay! I don’t necessarily have to have warm and imaginative feelings about my faith. I don’t need to be full of passion and fire. I only need to be faithful in my actions, to not betray what I believe in. Now faith, for me, means that I need to live my life in charity, respect, patience, chastity, and generosity to others. I just need to do it; I don’t need to feel it.”

Faith and love are too easily identified with warm feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of the mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in 15 seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, but not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Hence, unromantic as it is, I like the stoic approach that is expressed in the marriage-proposal of my friend, particularly as it applies to faith. For some of us, faith will never be, other than for short periods of time, something that fires our emotions and fills us with warm fire. We’ve already experienced how ephemeral that fire can be.

Hence, like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, others, and ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise that I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others’ and God’s cause in this world. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can live in the firm resolve to never betray what I believe in!

That’s a sufficient creed.

Some Personal Mini-Creeds

September 11, 2011

We are all familiar with the Nicene and the Apostles’ creeds, the two great faith-summaries that anchor our faith. Without them, eventually we would drift off the path and lose our way. Creeds anchor us.

But the great creeds are like huge rivers that need smaller tributaries to bring their waters into various places. Thus, we also need mini-creeds, short, pithy truth-statements that anchor us morally and spiritually. We all, no doubt, have our own favorite mini-creeds. Here are some of mine:

· Love is better than anger. Hope is better than fear. Optimism is better than despair. So let us be loving, hopeful and optimistic. Jack Layton, leader of the New Democratic Party of Canada, in a letter to the people of Canada, just before dying of cancer.

· The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds deeply than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your wounds to your head or your heart. Henri Nouwen, journaling while working through a clinical depression.

· When something hard happens to you, you have two choices in how to deal with it. You can get bitter, or better. Donald Miller, challenging young people to a higher ethic.

· When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always. Mohandas K. Gandhi, asserting his belief in the ultimate triumph of truth and goodness.

· Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as it is from our standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by a final act of love, which is forgiveness. Reinholt Niebuhr, on the complexities of sanctity.

· This is how we grow: by being defeated decisively by constantly great things. Rainer Marie Rilke suggesting that a defeat by the other world is better than a victory in this one.

· Our faith begins at the very point where atheists suppose that it must end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power of the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists. Jurgen Moltmann on the dark night of faith and the cross.

· There comes a time in one’s life where the question is no longer: What can I still do to remain productive and to make a contribution in this world? Rather the question becomes: How can I live now so that when I die my death will be an optimal blessing for my loved ones, for the church, and for the world? Henri Nouwen on the difference between giving our lives away and giving our deaths away.

· Don’t be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy. Rainer Marie Rilke writing to a friend grieving the death of a loved one.

· Love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting that we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. Novelist Anne Michaels on empathy.

· In this life there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. Henri Nouwen on how we live now, “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears”.

· Wake up lovers; it is time to start the journey! We’ve seen enough of this world; it is time to see another. Rumi, suggesting that mostly we are asleep to the other world and to the deeper things of this one.

· Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut more deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or even divine ingredients can. Hafiz, Fourteenth Century, Sufi Mystic poet.

· To reach satisfaction in all, desire satisfaction in nothing. To come to possess all, desire the possession of nothing. To arrive at being all, desire to be nothing. To come to the knowledge of all, desire the knowledge of nothing. To come to enjoy what you have not, you must go by a way in which you enjoy not. To come to the possession you have not, you must go by a way in which you possess not. To come to what you are not, you must go by a way in which you are not. John of the Cross on finding life by giving it away.

Christ as Cosmic

September 4, 2011

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in one of his dialogues with the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in Rome, was once asked: “What are you trying to do?” His answer was something to this effect: I’m trying to write a Christology that is large enough to include the full Christ because Christ isn’t just a divine savior sent to save people; Christ is also a structure within the physical universe, a path of salvation for the earth itself.

What is meant by this? How is Christ a structure within physical creation?

Perhaps the most neglected part of our understanding of Christ, though clearly taught in scripture, is the concept that the mystery of Christ is larger than what we see visibly in the life of Jesus and in the life of the historical Christian churches. Christ is already part of physical creation itself and is integral to that creation. We see this expressed, for example, in the Epistle to the Colossians:

Describing the reality of Christ, the author writes: He is the image of the invisible God, the first-born of all creation, for in him all things were created in heaven and on earth; everything visible and everything invisible … all things were created through him and for him. He exists before all things and in him all things hold together … (Colossians 1, 15-18)

As well, in the Epistle to the Romans, St. Paul tells us that just as human persons groan within our mortal limits and ache for immortality, so too does all of physical creation. The earth too longs for salvation. And the mystery of Christ is its path to immortality, just as it is our path to that same end.

The mystery of Christ is wider, deeper, and more encompassing than what can be seen simply within the visible life of Jesus and the visible history of the Christian churches. Granted, what we see visibly in the life of Jesus and the history of the Christian churches is something very precious and very privileged. The Christian churches are (like Mary, the Mother of Jesus) the place where God visibly, concretely, tangibly, and historically enters this world. But, as scripture and Christian theology affirm, the mystery of Christ is more encompassing than what we can see visibly and historically. It also includes what the Epistle to the Colossians teaches, namely, that physical creation itself was somehow created through Christ, that Christ is what holds it together, and that Christ is what gives it an eternal future. The mystery of Christ is not just about saving us, the people on this planet, it is also about saving the planet itself.

Incorporating this into our understanding has huge consequences both in how we understand our planet, earth, and how we understand other religions:

If all things were created through Christ and for Christ, then our planet, earth, and all of physical creation have value in themselves and not just in relation to us. The earth too is God’s child, not self-conscious as we are, but with its own proper rights and right to respect. Simply put, the earth is not just a stage for us to play on. It too is part of the mystery of Christ and the mystery of salvation. We must respect it for its own sake, and not just because our health depends upon its health. The deep roots for any eco-theology lie deeper than in the practical concern for a continued supply of healthy air, water, and food. Nature too is inside the mystery of Christ.

There are huge implications from this for how we view other religions. As Christians we must take seriously Jesus’ teaching that Christ is the (only) way to salvation and that nobody goes to the Father except through Christ. So where does that leave non-Christians and other persons of sincere heart, given that at any given time two-thirds of the world is not relating to the historical Jesus or the Christian churches?

Unless we understand the mystery of Christ as deeper and wider than what we can see visibly and historically, this quandary will invariably lead us to either abandon Jesus’ teaching about being normative or lead us into an exclusivity that goes against God’s universal will for salvation. If, by the mystery of Christ, we mean only the visible Jesus and the visible church, then we are caught in a dilemma with no answer. If, however, by the mystery of Christ, we also mean the mystery of God becoming incarnate inside of physical creation, beginning already in the original creation, continuing there as the soul that binds the whole of physical creation together, and being there as both the energy that lures creation towards its Creator and the consummation of that creation, then all things have to do with Christ, whether they realize it or not, and all authentic worship leads to the Father, whether we can see this or not.

In the words of Kenneth Cragg: It takes a whole world to understand a whole Christ.

Feeding Off Life’s Sacred Fire

August 27, 2011

See the wise and wicked ones, who feed upon life’s sacred fire. That’s a lyric from a song by Gordon Lightfoot that tries to interpret the struggle going on in the heart of Miguel de Cervantes’ mythical hero, Don Quixote. Goodness separates him from the world, even as he understands that wickedness has the same source.

And there’s perplexing irony in this, both the wise and wicked, saints and sinners, feed off the same, sacred source. The same energy the fuels the dedicated selflessness of the saint who dies for the poor fires the irresponsible acting-out of the movie star who proudly boasts of thousands of sexual conquests. Both feed off the same energy, which, in the end, is sacred. Godliness in this world is just used for very different purposes. But it’s easy to misinterpret this.

For example, one of the major criticisms made of religion and the churches is that they too frequently use God to justify every kind of war and violence. We commonly see terrible violence being fueled by faith and religion, as is the case with extreme Islam today. But Christianity is hardly exempt. In the crusades and the inquisition we have our own history of violence in God’s name and there is more violence than we have the courage to admit still being done today by Christians who draw both their motivation and their energy from their faith. We can protest that, in these cases, the energy is misguided, perverted, or usurped for self-interest, but the point remains the same. It’s still sacred energy, even if it is being perverted.

John Lennon (Imagine) famously suggested that we would move more easily towards love and peace if religion were eliminated (“Nothing to kill or die, and no religion too”). There’s a dangerous naiveté in that, but he’s right in saying that the sacred energy found in religion often works against peace and love in this world. Misguided religious zealots also feed upon life’s sacred fire.

However what this criticism, and many others, do not see is this: Misguided, misused, and perverted religious energy does not witness against God’ existence. The opposite: The very awfulness of its power, its blind grip, its capacity to totally take over someone’s life, and its sick over-confidence, point precisely to its godliness, its awe, its sacredness, and it roots within a reality and energy that dwarfs our own. Sick religion is so powerful precisely because it’s real, not a fantasy. It may be sick, but it’s real. That’s also why religious cults are dangerous. They’re dangerous because they’re real, monstrously so. People often die in cults because the divine fire that its misguided leaders channel is as real as the electricity that burns up a body when someone sticks a knife into high voltage electrical outlet. Religious cults feed upon life’s sacred fire; but tragically they do so without the proper precautions and filters that the great spiritual traditions have taught are necessary in accessing the divine. Cults are naïve to why scripture warns us to approach the divine with care: “No one can see God and live!”

What we see in bad religion is true too in our personal lives. This is sometimes hard to see (and often difficult for religious people to admit) but what’s wild and wicked in the world is also fueled by life’s sacred fire. Our over-restless energies for creativity, sexuality, achievement, enjoyment, and to know and be known within human community, are often used irresponsibly, excessively, narcissistically, manipulatively, and destructively. The wild and wicked ones, those with sufficient nerve and insufficient conscience, often simply take what they want from life, without regard for morality or consequence. And thus our world is often driven by wild, powerful, creative, and erotic forces that can look like the very antithesis of sacred energy.

But, again, the very power, seeming irresistibility, and wildness of this energy is not an indication that our sexual and creative energies are secular and devoid of holiness, or, worse still, at odds with what is holy and sacred within us. The opposite is true: Their power and seeming irresistibility lie precisely in their godliness and sacredness. Their fire is so powerful because it is sacred, divine, God’s energy inside of us.

Scripture tells us that we carry within us the image and likeness of God and that this is really our deepest identity and the source of our deepest energies. But we should not picture God’s image within us as some beautiful, Andrei Rublev-like, icon stamped inside our souls. God is fire, holy energy, infinite creativity, infinite freedom, wildness beyond our imaginations, and an energy that is boundless and fuels everything that is, that lives, that breathes, that searches for meaning, that loves.

Sacred fire fuels all of life and infuses everyone, saint and sinner alike. And God has given us the freedom to use it as we choose, wisely or wickedly. We feed on sacred fire and we become a saint or a hedonist, a peacemaker or a warmonger.