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. 

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.

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.

Today, both within society and the churches, we are finding it ever more difficult to resolve our differences because our conversations are shot-through with non-civility, name-calling, character-assassination, and disrespect.

What’s particularly worrying is that we are doing this in the name of truth, cause, the gospel, and Jesus. We are giving ourselves permission to hate, demonize, and disrespect each other in God’s name. Our cause seems so important to us that, consciously or unconsciously, we give ourselves permission to bracket some of the essentials of Christian charity, namely, respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness.

This is wrong: No cause allows me to exempt myself from fundamental charity, even if I see myself as a “warrior for truth”. There is a gospel imperative to fight for truth and ultimately we all need to be prophets who fight for what is right; but even war has its ethics. Even in war (perhaps especially in war) disrespect may never be rationalized on the basis of claiming that God is on our side. Indeed, if God is on our side we should radiating respect for others.

Respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness are non-negotiable essentials within Christian charity. They are also part and parcel of all that’s noble within humanity. Whenever we step outside of these, as we often do today in our discourse with those who are not of our political or ecclesial mindset, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that the high cause we think we are serving justifies this fundamental lapse in our humanity and charity. Whenever our words or our actions show disrespect we are not serving Jesus or truth, no matter how high the canopy under which we put our reasoning. Rather we are serving some ideology or, worse still, working out some personal angers and pathologies.

Some years ago at a theological college at which I was teaching we had a student who was so obsessed with defending Catholic orthodoxy that he became such a negative presence in every classroom that none of the faculty wanted to teach a class within which he was enrolled. Eventually the situation became so intolerable that the faculty, after considerable and pained discernment, asked the dean of the faculty to ask him to leave the college. Immediately after his expulsion he wrote a letter to his bishop complaining that our college had expelled him because he “was too conservative and too orthodox” to fit into our ethos. He copied the dean with the letter. The dean wrote his own letter to the young man’s bishop, telling the bishop that the college had asked him to leave, not because he was too conservative and orthodox … but because he lacked basic courtesy and respect for others.

The example here is one of a conservative pathology, but liberals do this just as well. Neither side should delude itself: Whenever we lack basic respect and basic manners the real issue is never orthodoxy or cause, but bad health.

We live in bitter, highly-polarized, times both inside of society and inside of our churches. The causes are real and what’s at stake is critical: war, injustice, abortion, poverty, the ecology, racism, immigration, multi-culturalism, the economy, democratic principles, law and order, freedom of speech, proper authority, proper dogma, proper ecumenism, legitimacy within ministry, Christians relating to other religions, and the proper freedoms and limitations within secularity itself. All of these are, in the end, life and death issues which, precisely because of their importance, are invariably emotionally-inflamed. Anyone who has any real concern for the world and the church and their future will sometimes find himself or herself at odds with others, sometimes bitterly so, over some of these issues.

And the perennial temptation, especially when the issue at stake is critical one, is to bracket the essentials (respect, graciousness, love, and forgiveness) on the basis of cause and, in essence, fall into a way of thinking that says: This issue is so important that I need not be respectful, gracious, and loving. I may demonize my opponent, assassinate his character, name-call, and use everything in my power, perhaps even violence, to have my truth win out. Because I am right and this is so important, I can bracket basic respect!

What’s wrong with that? Beyond deluding ourselves that lack of charity and respect may be justified in the name of the gospel, all that’s best within our humanity and all that’s best within Christian principle call for the exact opposite: The urgency of a situation and the bitterness already inherent within it call for more, not less, care in our rhetoric and in the actions we undertake. The more we encounter anger, hatred, disrespect, demonizing, name-calling, refusals for real a conversation, and spoken and unspoken threats, the more we are called to bear-down on the essentials of charity: respect, graciousness, forgiveness, openness, and the offer of a true, mutual conversation. Why? Because in the end, we don’t win moral battles by beating someone, we win them by winning someone over.

Recently a friend attended the funeral of a man who had taken his own life. At the end of the service the deceased man’s brother spoke to the congregation. After highlighting his brother’s generosity and sensitivity and sharing some anecdotes that helped celebrate his life he went on to say something about the manner of his death. Here, in effect, are his words:

When someone is stricken with cancer, one of three things can happen: Sometimes doctors can treat the disease and, in essence, cure it. Sometimes the medical professionals cannot cure the disease but can control it enough so that the person suffering from cancer can live with the disease for the rest of his or her life. Sometimes, however, the cancer is of a kind that cannot be treated. All the medicine and treatments in the world are powerless and the person dies.

Certain kinds of emotional depression work the same way: Sometimes they can be treated so that, in effect, the person is cured. Sometimes they cannot ever really be cured, but they can be treated in such a way that the person can live with the disease for his or her whole life. And sometimes, just as with certain kinds of cancer, the disease is untreatable, unstoppable, no intervention by anyone or anything can halt its advance. Eventually it kills the person and there is nothing anyone can do. My brother’s depression was of that kind, the terminal kind.

This can be helpful, I believe, for any of us who have suffered the loss of a loved one to suicide. All death unsettles us, but suicide leaves us with a very particular series of emotional, moral, and religious scars. It brings with it an ache, a chaos, a darkness, and a stigma that has to be experienced to be believed. Sometimes we deny it, but it’s always there, irrespective of our religious and moral beliefs. Indeed, as part of its darkness and stigma, suicide not only takes our loved ones away from us, it also takes away our true memory of them. The gift that they brought into our lives is now no longer celebrated. We never again speak with pride about their lives. Their pictures come off the wall, photos of them get buried deep inside drawers that we never open again, their names are less and less mentioned in conversation, and of the manner of their death we rarely speak. Suicide takes our loved ones away from us in more ways than we sometimes admit.

And there is no easy answer for how to reverse that, though a better understanding of suicide can be a start.

Not all suicides are of the same kind. Some suicides come about because the person is too arrogant and too hard-of-heart to want to live in this world. But that, I submit, is the exception not the norm. Most suicides, certainly all the cases that I have known, come about for the opposite reason, namely, the person is too bruised and over-sensitive to have the resiliency needed to continue to cope with life. In these cases, and that is the vast majority of suicides, the cause of death can pretty accurately be termed as cancer, emotional cancer. Just as with physical cancer, the person dying of suicide is taken out of this life against his or her will. Death by suicide is the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Thus, its patterns are the same as those of cancer, strokes, and heart attacks. Death can happen suddenly or it can be the end-product of a long struggle that slowly wears a person down. Either way, it’s involuntary.

As human beings we are neither pure angels nor pure animals, but are always both body and soul, one psycho-somatic whole. And either part can break down.

This can be helpful in understanding suicide, though a better understanding will not necessarily mean that the darkness and stigma that surround it will simply go away. We will still feel many of the same things we felt before in the face of suicide: We will still feel awful. We will still feel conflicted and be given over to guilt-feelings and second-guessing. We will still feel uneasy about how this person died and will still feel a certain dis-ease in talking about the manner of his or her death. We will still feel a certain hesitancy in celebrating that person’s life in the manner we would have had the death been by natural causes. We will still go to our own graves with a black hole in our hearts. The pain of a suicide leaves its own indelible mark on the soul.

But at a different level of understanding something  else will break through that will help us better deal with all those conflicted feelings, namely, empathy for and understanding of someone whose emotional immune system has broken down. And that understanding will also bring with it the concomitant consolation that God’s empathy and understanding far exceeds our own.

I’ve lived and worked within academic circles for most of my adult life, studying in various universities, teaching within university circles, and having university professors as close friends and colleagues. What’s that world like? What kind of folks inhabit academic circles?

Perhaps my experience is atypical because most of the scholars under whom I studied and most of the theologians and other scholars who have been my colleagues became professors and university lecturers in function of ministry, as a vocation, rather than as a career.  Thus, instead of struggling with faith and church, they were driven to become academics in function of their faith and church commitments. In some ways, professors in theology schools and schools of ministry aren’t typical of academic circles.

But an academic is an academic and graduate and post-graduate studies, whatever the motivation for doing them, have some of the same effect on people. And so I suspect that the circles I have been part of, in the end, are more typical than atypical. And what is typical?

 Academics, scholars, and university professors, like any segment of society, are a complex mix: In university circles you will find some of the most humble, gracious, faith-filled, and genuinely good people you will ever meet; just as you will also find some of the most arrogant, self-absorbed, amoral, and cynical people in the world. The academic world looks like the rest of the world.

Given that truth, I have long been haunted by a saying of Jesus that, often times, the deep secrets of life and of faith are hidden from the learned and the clever and revealed instead to children, to those of a less-complex mind.  I don’t doubt the truth of this; I wonder why.

Why? Clearly intelligence and learning are good things. Intelligence is the gift from God that sets us apart from animals and access to learning is a precious right given us by God. Indeed, ignorance and lack of education are things every healthy society and every healthy individual strive to overcome.  Scripture praises both wisdom and intelligence and the health of any church is partly predicated on having a vigorous intellectual stream within it. Every time in history that the church has let popular piety, however sincere, trump sound theology it has paid a high price. The Reformation arose out of just that and one of the first things that the Council of Trent mandated for Roman Catholics was that its priests be better trained intellectually.

Intelligence and learning are good things. God did not give us intelligence and then ask us not to use it. Naiveté is not a virtue and should never be confused with innocence. So why is being “intelligent and clever” something that can work against our understanding of the deeper secrets within life and faith?

The fault is not with intelligence and learning, both good things in themselves, but in what they can inadvertently do to us. Intelligence and learning often have the unintended effect of undermining what’s childlike in us, that is, the very strength that they bring into our lives can allow us to unconsciously claim a superiority and have us believe that, given our intelligence, we have both the need and the right to isolate ourselves from others in ways that the natural neediness of children does not permit them to do. Children are not self-sufficient even though they fiercely want to be. They need others and they know it. Consequently they more naturally reach out and take someone’s hand. They don’t have the luxury of self-sufficiency.

When we are “learned and the clever” we can more easily forget that we need others and consequently don’t as naturally reach for another’s hand as does a child. It’s easier for us to isolate ourselves. When we are less aware of our contingency we more easily lose sight of the things to which God and life are inviting us. The very strength that intelligence and learning bring into our lives can instill in us a false sense of self-sufficiency that can make us want to separate ourselves in unhealthy ways from others and understand ourselves as superior In some way.  And superiority never enters a room alone, but always brings along a number of her children: arrogance, disdain, boredom, cynicism. All of these are occupational hazards for the “learned and the clever” and none of these helps unlock any of life’s deep secrets.

But we must be careful not to misread the lesson. Faith does not ask us to not stretch our minds. Neither ignorance nor naiveté serve faith. Faith not only doesn’t fear the hard questions it invites us to ask them. The depths of infinity are never threatened by finite intelligence. And so it’s never a bad thing to become learned and sophisticated; it’s only a bad thing is we remain there. The task is to become post-sophisticated, that is, to remain full of intelligence and learning even as we put on again to the mindset of a child.

It’s common, particularly among religious commentators, to describe the human heart as small, narrow, and petty: How small-hearted and petty we are!

I find this distressing because religious thinkers especially should know better. We are not created by God and put in this earth with small, narrow, and petty hearts. The opposite is true. God puts us into this world with huge hearts, hearts as deep as the Grand Canyon. The human heart in itself, when not closed off by fear, wound, and paranoia, is the antithesis of pettiness. The human heart, as Augustine describes it, is not fulfilled by anything less than infinity itself. There’s nothing small about the human heart.

But then why do we so often find ourselves relating to the world, to each other, and to God, in fact with hearts that are small, narrow, and petty?

The problem is not the size or the natural dynamics of the human heart, but what the heart tends to do when it is wounded, fearful, disrespected, paranoid, or self-deluded by greed and selfishness.  It’s then that it closes itself to its own depth and greatness and becomes narrow, petty, fearful, and selfish. But that behavior is anomalous, not the human heart at either its normal or its best. At its normal and at its best, the human heart is huge, generous, noble, and self-sacrificing.

The early Church Fathers had a simple way of expressing our struggle here. They taught that each of us has two hearts, two souls:

In each person, they affirmed, there is a small, petty heart, a pusilla anima. This is the heart that we operate out of when we are not at our best. This is the heart within which we feel our wounds and our distance from others. This is the heart within which are chronically irritated and angry, the heart within which we feel the unfairness of life, the heart within which we sense others as a threat, the heart within which we feel envy and bitterness, and the heart within which greed, lust, and selfishness break through. This too is the heart that wants to set itself apart from and above others.  And this is the heart that is most often described by religious thinkers when they describe human nature as small and petty.

But the Church Fathers taught that inside of each of us there was also another heart, a magna anima, a huge, deep, big, generous, and noble heart. This is the heart we operate out of when we are at our best. This is the heart within which we feel empathy and compassion. This is the heart within which we are enflamed with noble ideals. This is the heart where we inchoately feel God’s presence in faith and hope and are able to move out to others in charity and forgiveness. Inside each of us, sadly often buried under suffocating wounds that keep if far from the surface, lies the heart of a saint, bursting to get out.

Thus on any given day, and at any given moment, we can feel like Mother Teresa or like a bitter terrorist. We can feel ready to give our lives in martyrdom or we can feel ready to welcome the sensation of sin. We can feel like the noble Don Quixote, enflamed with idealism, or we can feel like a despairing cynic, content to settle for whatever short-range compensation and pleasure life can give rather than believing in deeper, more life-giving possibilities for ourselves and others. Everything depends upon which heart we are connected to at a given moment.

If that is true then our invitation to others in terms of moving towards nobleness of heart will be most effective when, rather than emphasizing their faults and narrowness, we instead invite them to try to access what is best, highest, within themselves. 

And this is not a simple variation on the axiom that you attract more bees with honey than with vinegar. It’s a variation on the dynamics of repentance and healing as the great mystic, John of the Cross, describes them. For him, the most effective way to move towards healing is not by focusing on the moral and spiritual areas within which we particularly struggle. For him, we heal and grow and eventually “cauterize” our faults by fanning the flames of what is already virtuous, best, inside us. As we fan our virtues to full-flame, those fires eventually burn out our selfishness and our wounds. Our virtues, when fanned to full-flame, leave no room inside us for pettiness and small-heartedness.  Fanning what’s highest in us eventually moves us more and more towards living out of our big hearts rather than petty hearts.

Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named correctly. Nowhere is this more important than in how we name both the size and the struggles of the human heart. We are not petty souls who occasionally do noble things. We are rather noble souls who, sadly, occasionally do petty things.

Am I happy? Is my life a happy one? Am happy inside my marriage? Am I happy with my family? Am I happy in my job? Am I happy with my church? Am I happy inside my own skin?

Are these good questions to ask ourselves? No. They’re questions with which to torture ourselves. When we face our lives honestly this kind of question about happiness is more likely to bring tears to our eyes than solace to our souls because, no matter how well our lives are going, none of us live perfectly fulfilled lives. Always there are unfulfilled dreams. Always there are areas of frustration. Always there are tensions. Always there are deeper hungers that are being stifled. And always, as Karl Rahner so poignantly puts it, we are suffering the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable as we are learning that here in this life there is no finished symphony.  Are lives are always lived in quiet desperation. A lot of times it is not easy to feel happy.

But we are asking the wrong questions. The question should not be: Am I happy? Rather the questions should be: Is my life meaningful? Is there meaning in my life? Is there meaning in my marriage? Is there meaning in my family? Is there meaning in my job? Is there meaning inside my church? We need to ask the deep questions about our lives in terms of meaning rather than in terms of happiness because, for the most part, we have a false, over-idealized, and unrealistic concept of happiness.

We tend to equate happiness with two things, pleasure and lack of tension. Hence we fantasize that for us to be happy we would need to be in a situation within which we would be free of all the tensions that normally flood into our lives from: pressure, tiredness, interpersonal friction, physical pain, financial worry, disappointment in our jobs, frustration with our churches, frustration with our favorite sports teams, and every other headache and heartache that can appear. Happiness, as it is superficially conceived of, means perfect health, perfectly fulfilled relationships, a perfect job, no anxiety or tension in life, no disappointments, and the time and money to enjoy the good life.

But that isn’t what constitutes happiness. Meaning is what constitutes happiness and meaning isn’t contingent upon pain and tension being absent from our lives:  Imagine if someone had come up to Jesus as he was dying on the cross and asked him the question: Are you happy up there? His answer, I am sure, would have been unequivocal: “No! And today in particular I am not happy!” However, the perspective is quite different if, while on the cross, Jesus would have been asked this question: “Is there meaning in what you are doing up there?” There can be deep meaning in something even if there isn’t happiness in the way we superficially conceive of that.

We more easily grasp this when we reflect back on various periods of our lives. Looking back, from the perspective of where we are today, we see that sometimes certain periods of our lives that were fraught with all kinds of struggles and within which had to make do with very little were indeed very happy times. We look back on them now with fondness and warmth. They were meaningful times and our present perspective washes back through time and purges the pain and highlights the joy. Conversely, we can also look back on certain periods of our lives when there may have been pleasure in our lives but that phase of our lives now appears clearly as an unhappy time. We look back at it with a certain heaviness and regret. What seemed like light then seems like a time of darkness now.

C.S. Lewis taught that happiness and unhappiness color backwards: If our lives end up happy, we realize that we have always been happy even through the trying times, just as if our lives end up unhappy we realize that we have always been unhappy, even during the pleasurable periods of our lives. Where we end up ultimately in terms of meaning will determine whether our lives have been happy or unhappy. Many people, including Jesus, suffered great pain but lived happy lives. Sadly, the reverse is also true. Happiness has a lot more to do with meaning than with pleasure.

In his autobiography, Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis tells his readers that his journey to Christianity was not an easy one. By his own admission, he was “the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” But one of the things that ultimately brought him around to the Christianity was precisely the realization that meaning trumps our normal conception of happiness. He came to understand, he writes, that the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man and God’s compulsion is our liberation.

Money can’t buy happiness. It can buy pleasure, but, as life itself eventually teaches us, pleasure is not necessarily happiness.