Somewhere near his 75th birthday, Morris West wrote a series of autobiographical essays entitled, A View from the Ridge. In the Prologue of that book he suggests that at age 75 you need to have only one word left in your spiritual vocabulary, gratitude, and that maturity is attained precisely at that moment when gratitude begins to drown out and cauterize the hurts in your life. As he describes it: Life has served me as it serves everyone, sometimes well and sometimes ill, but I have learned to be grateful for the gifts of it, for the love that began it and the other loves with which I have been so richly endowed.

I agree with West, though it necessary to add that the fruit of that maturity is forgiveness. Just as smoke follows fire, forgiveness follows gratitude. Gratitude ultimately undergirds and fuels all genuine virtue, is the real basis of holiness, and the source of love itself.  And its major fruit is forgiveness. When we are grateful we more easily find the strength to forgive.

Moreover, just as gratitude undergirds genuine virtue, forgiveness undergirds genuine religion and morality. Thus, as we get older, we can trim our spiritual vocabulary down to three words: Forgive, forgive, forgive! To age into and then die with a forgiving heart is the ultimate moral and religious imperative. We shouldn’t delude ourselves on this. All the dogmatic and moral purity in the world does little for us if our hearts are bitter and incapable of forgiveness.

We see this, for instance, in the sad figure of the older brother of the prodigal son.  He stands before his father protesting that he has never wandered, never been unfaithful, and that he has stayed home and done the family’s work. But, and this is the issue, he stands outside the father’s house, unable to enter into joy, celebration, the banquet, the dance. He’s done everything right, but a bitter heart prevents him from entering the father’s house just as much as the lustful wanderings of his younger brother took him out of that same house.  Religious and moral fidelity, when not rooted inside of gratitude and forgiveness, are far from enough. They can leave us just as much outside the father’s house as sin and infidelity. As Jesus teaches forcefully in the Lord’s Prayer, a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven is forgiveness, especially our forgiving those who have hurt us.

But the struggle to forgive others is not easy and may never be trivialized or preached lightly. The struggle to forgive, I suspect, is our greatest psychological, moral, and religious struggle.  It’s not easy to forgive. Most everything inside of us protests. When we have been wronged, when we have suffered an injustice, when someone or something has treated us unfairly, a thousand physical and psychological mechanisms inside of us begin clam-up, shut-down, freeze- over, self-protect, and scream-out in protest, anger, and rage.  Forgiveness is not something we can simply will and make happen. The heart, as Pascal once said, has its reasons. It also has its rhythms, its paranoia, its cold bitter spots, and its need to seal itself off from whatever has wounded it.

Moreover, all of us have been wounded. No one comes to adulthood with his or her heart fully intact. In ways small or traumatic, we have all been treated unjustly, violated, hurt, ignored, not properly honored, and unfairly cast aside. We all carry wounds and, with those wounds, we all carry some angers, some bitterness, and some areas within which we have not forgiven.

The strength of Henri Nouwen’s greatest book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, was precisely to point out both the hidden cold places in our hearts and the mammoth struggle needed to bring warm and forgiveness to those places. So much of the lightness or heaviness in our hearts, most every nuance of our mood, is unconsciously dictated by either the forgiveness or the non-forgiveness inside us. Forgiveness is the deep secret to joy. It is also the ultimate imperative.

Andrew Greeley, writing a review of Frank McCourt’s book, Angela’s Ashes, praised McCourt for being brilliant, but challenged him for being unforgiving with words to this effect: Granted, your life has been unfair. Your father was an alcoholic, your mother didn’t protect you from the effects of that, you grew up in dire poverty, and you suffered a series of mini-injustices under the Irish social services, the Irish church, the Irish educational system, and the Irish weather! So, let me give you some advice: Before you die, forgive! Forgive your father for being an alcoholic, forgive your mother for not protecting you, forgive the church for wherever ways it failed you, forgive Ireland for the poverty, rain, and bad teachers it inflicted on you, forgive yourself for the failures of your own life, and then forgive God because life isn’t fair … so that you don’t die an angry and bitter man because that’s really the ultimate moral imperative.

How true and how challenging!

There are more ways than one in which our belief system can be unbalanced so as to do harm to God and to the church.

What makes for a healthy, balanced, orthodox faith? The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church defines orthodoxy as “right belief as contrasted to heresy”.  That’s accurate enough, but we tend to think of this in a very one-sided way.

For most people, heresy is conceived of a going too far, as crossing a dogmatic boundary, as stretching Christian truth further than it may be stretched. Orthodoxy, then, means staying within safe perimeters.

This is true in so far as it goes, but it is a one-sided and reductionist understanding of orthodoxy.  Orthodoxy has a double function: It tells you how far you may go, but it also tells you how far you must go.  And it’s the latter part that is often neglected.

Heresies are dangerous, but the danger is two-sided.  Faith beliefs that do not respect proper dogmatic boundaries invariably lead to bad religion and to bad moral practice. Real harm occurs.  Dogmatic boundaries are important. But, equally important, we don’t do God, faith, religion, and the church a favor when our beliefs are narrow, bigoted, legalistic, or intolerant. Atheism is invariably a parasite that feeds off bad theism. Anti-religion is often simply a reaction to bad religion and thus narrowness and intolerance are perhaps more of an enemy to religion than is any transgressed dogmatic boundary.  God, religion, and the churches are, I suspect, more hurt by being associated with the narrowness and intolerance of some believers than they are by any theoretical dogmatic heresy. Right truth, proper faith, and true fidelity to Jesus Christ demand too that our hearts are open and wide enough to radiate the universal love and compassion that Jesus incarnated. Purity of dogma alone doesn’t make us disciples of Jesus.

Suffice it to say that Jesus is clear about this. Anyone who reads the Gospels and misses Jesus’ repeated warnings about legalism, narrowness, and intolerance is reading selectively. Granted, Jesus does warn too about staying within the bounds of proper belief (monotheism and all that this implies) and proper morals (the commandments, love of our enemies, forgiveness), but he stresses too that we can miss the real demands of discipleship by not going far enough in letting ourselves be stretched by his teachings.

True orthodoxy asks us to hold a great tension, between real boundaries beyond which you may not go and real borders and frontiers to which you must go. You may not go too far, but you must also go far enough. And this can be a lonely road. If you carry this tension faithfully, without giving in to either side, you will no doubt find yourself with few allies on either side, that is, too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative for the liberals.

To risk just one example: You see this kind of pained, but more fully Catholic, orthodoxy in a person like Raymond Brown, the renowned biblical scholar, a loyal Roman Catholic thinker who found himself attacked, for opposite reasons, from both sides of the ideological spectrum. He upset liberals because he stopped before they thought that he should and he upset conservatives because he suggested that proper truth and dogma often stretch us beyond some former comfort zones.

And this tension is an innate, healthy disquiet, something we are meant live daily in our lives rather than something we can resolve once and for all. Indeed the deep root of this tension lies right within the human soul itself.  The human soul, as Thomas Aquinas classically put it, has two principles and two functions: The soul is the principle of life, energy, and fire inside of us, even as it is equally the principle of integration, unity, and glue. The soul keeps us energized and on fire, even as it keeps us from dissipating and falling apart. A healthy soul therefore keeps us within healthy boundaries, to prevent us from disintegrating, even as it keeps us on fire, lest we petrify and become too hardened to fully enter life. In that sense, the soul itself is a healthy principle of orthodoxy inside us. It keeps us within real limits even as it pushes us towards new frontiers.

We live always in the face of two opposing dangers: disintegration and petrification. To stay healthy we need to know our limits and we also need to know how far we have to stretch ourselves. The conservative instinct warns us about the former. The liberal instinct warns us about the latter. Both instincts are healthy because both dangers are real.

The German poet, Goethe, once wrote: The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers. This is true in our personal lives and it’s true in Christian orthodoxy. There is danger in bad dogma but there is equal danger in not radiating, with sufficient compassion and understanding, God’s universal will for the salvation of all peoples.

Henri Nouwen was perhaps most popular spiritual writer of the late 20th century and his popularity endures today. More than seven million of his books have been sold world-wide and they have been translated into 30 languages. Fifteen years after his death, all but one of his books remain in print.

Many things account for his popularity, beyond the depth and learning he brought to his writings. He was very instrumental in helping dispel the suspicion that had long existed in Protestant and Evangelical circles towards spirituality, which was identified in the popular mind as something more exclusively Roman Catholic and as something on the fringes of ordinary life. Both his teaching and his writing, helped make spirituality something mainstream within Roman Catholicism, within Christianity in general, and within secular society itself. For example, USA Secretary of State, Hilary Clinton, has stated that his book, The Return of the Prodigal Son, is the book that has had the largest impact on her life.

He wrote as a psychologist and a priest, but his writings also flowed from who he was as a man. And he was complex man, torn always between the saint inside of him who had given his life to God and the man inside of him who, chronically obsessed with human love and its earthy yearnings, wanted to take his life back. He was fond of quoting Soren Kierkegaard who said that a saint is someone who can “will the one thing”, even as he admitted how much he struggled to do that. He did will to be a saint, but he willed other things as well: “I want to be a saint,” he once wrote, “but I also want to experience all the sensations that sinners experience.”  He confessed in his writings how much restlessness this brought into his life and how sometimes he was incapable of being fully in control of his own life.

In the end, he was a saint, but always one-in-progress. He never fit the pious profile of a saint, even as he was always recognized as a man from God bringing us more than ordinary grace and insight. And the fact that he never hid is weaknesses from his readers helped account for his stunning popularity. His readers identified with him because he shared so honestly his struggles. He related his weaknesses to his struggles in prayer and, in that, many readers found themselves looking into a mirror.  Like many others, when I first read Henri Nouwen, I had a sense of being introduced to myself.

And he worked at his craft, with diligence and deliberation. Nouwen would write and rewrite his books, sometimes five times over, in an effort to make them simpler. What he sought was a language of the heart. Originally trained as a psychologist, his early writings exhibit some of the language of the classroom. However as he developed as a writer and a mentor of the soul, he began more and more to purge his writings of technical and academic terms and strove to become radically simple, without being simplistic; to carry deep sentiment, without being sentimental; to be self-revealing, without being exhibitionist; to be deeply personal, yet profoundly universal; and to be sensitive to human weakness, even as he strove to challenge to what’s more sublime.

Few writers, religious or secular, have influenced me as deeply as Henri Nouwen. I know better than to try to imitate him, recognizing that what is imitative is never creative and what is creative is never imitative. Where I do try to emulate him is in his simplicity, in his rewriting things over and over in order try to make them simpler, without being simplistic. Like him, I believe that there’s a language of the heart (that each generation has to create anew) that bypasses the divide between academics and the street and which has the power to speak directly to everyone, regardless of background and training. Jesus managed it. Nouwen sought to speak and write with that kind of directness. He didn’t do it perfectly, nobody does, but he did do it more effectively than most. He recognized too that this is a craft that must be worked at, akin to learning language.  

I dedicated my book, The Holy Longing, to him, with this tribute: He was our generation’s Kierkegaard. He helped us to pray while not knowing how to pray, to rest while feeling restless, to be at peace while tempted, to feel safe while still anxious, to be surrounded by light while still in darkness, and to love while still in doubt.

If you are occasionally tortured by your own complexity, even as your deepest desire is to “will the one thing”, perhaps you can find a mentor and a patron saint in Henri Nouwen. He calls us beyond ourselves, even as he respects how complex and difficult that journey is. He shows us how to move towards God, even as we are still torn by our own earthly attachments.

Each year on Good Friday the Passion of Jesus Christ according to John is read aloud in our churches. John’s Gospel, as we know, was written later than the other Gospels, perhaps some seventy years after Jesus died, and those years gave John plenty of time to reflect upon Jesus’ death and highlight a number of aspects that are not as evident in the other Gospels. What are those special aspects?

John’s narrative of Jesus’ death highlights his trial. The bulk of John’s account focuses on Jesus’ trial and the eventual judgment that he be put to death. But it is ingeniously written. John writes up the trial of Jesus in such a way that, while Jesus is the one being tried, everyone else is on trial except Jesus. Pilate is on trial, the Jewish authorities are on trial, Jesus apostles and disciples are on trial, the crowds watching are on trial, and we who are hearing the story are on trial. Jesus, alone, is not on trial, even as his trial is judging everyone else. Hence when Pilate asks Jesus: What is truth? Jesus’ silence puts Pilate on trial by throwing Pilate back on his own silence, the truth of himself. It’s the same for the rest of us.

Next, John emphasizes Jesus’ divinity in his passion account. John’s Gospel, was we know, emphasizes Jesus’ pre-existence with God and his divinity rather than his humanity.  This shines through in his narrative:  The Jesus being crucified in John’s Gospel is always in control. He is unafraid, shows no weaknesses, carries his own cross, dies in serenity, and is buried like a king (with a staggering amount of myrrh and aloes, wrapped in clothes saturated with aromatic oils). John’s Jesus does not need any Simon of Cyrene to carry his cross, nor does he cry out in agony and abandonment. John writes up the Passion of Christ from the point of view of Jesus’ divinity. 

John then employs some powerful images to help score these points:

He has Judas and the soldiers arrive to arrest Jesus carrying “lanterns and torches”. He intends strong irony here: Jesus is the light of the world and so the irony should not be missed in the fact that those opposing him come to him guiding themselves by artificial, flimsy lighting – lanterns and torches. This suggests, among other things, that they prefer darkness to light and that they know that what they are doing can only be done at night because it would be shamefully exposed in the full light of day. The powers that oppose God need the cover of darkness and artificial light.

Next, at the end of the trial, Pilate brings Jesus out to the crowd and asks them whether or not they want to accept him as their king.  They respond by saying: “We have no king, but Caesar!” Historically for a Jewish believer to say this at the time of Jesus would have been in effect a renunciation of his or her messianic hopes. That is true for us too: Every time we do not recognize the power of God in the one who is being crucified we are renouncing our own messianic hope and admitting that the powers of this world are, for us, the deepest reality.

Further, John’s passion narrative emphasizes that Jesus was sentenced to death precisely at noon, the very hour on the eve of Passover when the temple priests would begin to slaughter the paschal lambs. The inference is clear: Jesus is the real lamb who dies for sin. 

Finally, In John’s account of the passion, after Jesus dies, soldiers come and pierce his side with a lance. Immediately blood and water flow out. This is a rich image: First of all, it symbolizes birth. When baby is born, blood and water accompany the delivery.  For John, Jesus’ death is the birth of something new in our lives. What?

Christians have sometimes been too quick to take this image to infer the sacraments of Baptism and Eucharist, with the outflow of blood symbolizing the Eucharist and the outflow of water symbolizing Baptism. That may indeed be valid but there is, first, something more primal in that image: Blood symbolizes the flow of life inside us. Water both quenches thirst and washes dirt from our bodies. What John wants to say with this image is that those who witnessed the death of Jesus immediately recognized too that the kind of love which Jesus manifested in dying in this way created a new energy and freedom in their own lives. They felt both an energy and a cleansing, blood and water, flowing from Jesus’ death.  In essence, they felt a power flowing out of his death into their lives that allowed them to live with less fear, with less guilt, with more joy, and with more meaning. That is still true for us today.

John’s Passion account puts us all on trial and renders a verdict that frees us from our deepest bondage.

In one of James Carroll’s early novels, he offers this poignant image: A young man is in the delivery room watching his wife give birth to their baby. The delivery is a difficult one and she is in danger of dying. As he stands watching, he is deeply conflicted: He loves his wife, is holding her hand, and is frantically praying that she not die. Yet the impending birth of their child and the danger of his wife’s death conspire to make him acutely aware that, deep in his heart, he has not forgiven her for once being unfaithful to him. He has expressed his forgiveness to her but he realizes now, at this moment of extreme crisis, that in his heart he still has not been able to let go of the hurt and that he has not truly forgiven her.

As his wife hovers between life and death, he sees in her face a great tension, a struggle to give birth to someone even as she desperately struggles not to die. Her agony accentuates the deeper lines in her face and he sees there a dual struggle, to give birth and to not die.

Seeing this, he is able to forgive her in his heart. What moves him is not simple pity but an empathy born of special insight. His wife’s struggle to give birth, while wrestling to stay alive, highlighted by the agony of her situation, is like a light shining on her whole life helping to explain everything, including her infidelity. 

And it’s the same for all of us: The deepest instinct inside each of us is the instinct to stay alive, to not petrify, to not unravel, to struggle against every obstacle so as to stay alive. Closely tied to that is a congenital pressure, at every level of body and soul, to give birth, to perpetuate our own seed, to leave behind some child that’s ours, to create an artifact, to co-create something with God. That dual pressure ultimately undergirds most everything we do, inchoately coloring our every motivation and forming the deep context out of which we act. It’s what invites us to virtue and tempts us to sin. The struggle to stay alive and to give birth is at the base of both our heroism and our infidelities.

And it shows in our faces. It shapes the deeper contours of our countenance. Our faces ultimately reveal who we are, both at the surface and at our depth.

That can be a frightening thought: It’s not consoling to know that, in the end, we cannot hide our pettiness, greed, lust, self-centeredness, anger, bitterness, nor even how dull and bland we are. It shows through, physically.  As Jean-Paul Sartre once affirmed, we create our own faces and, after age 40, what we are underneath, our virtue and sin, begin to trump our genetic endowment in terms of what people see in our faces. People begin to see who we are. And it isn’t the fat cells or the wrinkles that are the most telling. Selfishness, conceit, and bitterness are no longer cute, after forty!

Oscar Wilde, in “A Picture of Dorian Gray”, makes this point very powerfully, His hero, Dorian, a young man of stunning good looks, has his portrait painted by a master artist who produces a masterpiece. Everyone is taken by its beauty. But, and this is the catch, the portrait is painted when Dorian is young, innocent, and of gentle and good heart. His face in the portrait is beautiful because of these qualities, not just because of his extraordinary good-looks. This becomes clear later, when Wilde, in a twist that smacks of something between magic and a bargain with the devil, has the portrait of Dorian’s face change so that as Dorian grows vain, lustful, arrogant, and cruel the painting changes and begins to show his vanity, lust, arrogance, and cruelty. Dorian hides the painting and only occasionally, in either a fit of remorse or of utter cynicism, looks at it. And he sees in his changing face the state of his soul.

And this is true for all of us. Our changing faces reveal the state of our souls. But this is not as frightening as it may seem. Unless through long years of dishonesty we have so perverted ourselves so as to commit what the Gospels call the unforgiveable sin against the Holy Spirit, our deepest beauty-lines remain intact. Beneath our aging genetics, beneath our fat cells and wrinkles, beneath the greed and self-preoccupation that sin has painted into our faces, beneath the bitterness put there by every rejections we’ve endured, beneath the facade that tries to hide our weaknesses and infidelities, and underneath even our virtues and quiet martyrdom, there lies the tension that James Carroll’s young man saw in his wife as she struggled to give birth to their child even as she struggled not to die.

That struggle forms the deepest contour of the human face. Seeing it can give birth to forgiveness.

One of the reasons why we don’t often find a good Christian apologetics today is because so many of our best theologians write at such a level of academia that their thoughts are not really accessible to the ordinary person in the pews. Apologists like C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton are rare. We have great thinkers in theology today, but unfortunately many of them cannot be profitably read outside of academic settings.

With this as a background, I would like to recommend a very helpful book, Faith-Maps, just published by Michael Paul Gallagher, a Jesuit professor at the Gregorian University in Rome. Gallagher has a background in literature which keeps him sensitive to the kind of language which can speak to the popular mind and still remain the language of depth and soul. That’s the gift he brings to this book.

What Gallagher does in Faith-Maps is take ten major Christian thinkers (John Henry Newman, Maurice Blondel, Karl Rahner, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Bernard Lonergan, Flannery O’Connor, Dorothee Soelle, Charles Taylor, Pieranglo Sequeri, and Pope Benedict XVI) and write a brief chapter on each of them within which he explains, in lay terms, the kernel of their major insight. Moreover he does this with a certain apologetic intent, that is, to have each of them deliver a short, clear challenge to our generation, especially as pertains to our struggle with faith and with church. And in doing this, Gallagher proves himself a both a gifted and an unbiased teacher: He lays out the central concepts of these thinkers in a way that, for the most part at least, is accessible to the non-professional and in a way that doesn’t fall into either liberal or conservative bias.

I heartily recommend the book for all who want to familiarize themselves with these great thinkers and who are willing to let themselves be stretched a bit intellectually. I recommend it particularly to anyone who is struggling intellectually with his or her faith. This is a book on adult apologetics.

Allow me just one example of Gallagher’s genius in his selection of thinker, theme, and challenge: In outlining some of the major themes in the thinking of Han Urs von Balthasar he writes:

“Modern thinking has been dominated by the ‘turn of the subject’. Insofar as Balthasar tried to purify the excesses of this school and to initiate a ‘return to the object’, his work questions deeply-rooted assumptions in the culture around us and even in our personal living of faith. Under the influence of my literary training (a parallel to Balthasar) and then in the cultural revolution that religious life experienced in the 1960s and 1970s, my spirituality certainly became more subjective. Quietly, a whole tradition of asceticism was set aside, not only in the sense of abandoning external austerities, but of allowing self-fulfillment to replace self-sacrifice as a core value. Our generation discovered self-expression and affectivity. All this was exciting and worthwhile, and yet, on reflection, in danger of being one-sided. Almost imperceptibly we came to live a new set of priorities, where the subjective aspect of religion became stronger than the objective. Even prayer was often judged in terms of experience (initially a positive revaluing of a neglected dimension). ‘How do I feel’ became a litmus paper for growth. “

If I recognize how this new sensibility influenced spirituality, the reading of Balthasar raises awkward but important questions. His emphasis on ‘objectivity’ invites me to make room for adoration and for obedient reverence of God. This breaks the magnifying glass of subjectivism. His language of faith reminds me that the glory of God is greater than any possible response of mine. The glory that shines in the face of Christ is indeed a call to ‘humanity fully alive’ (to echo Iranaeus) but that glory goes beyond self-measured fullness, because it is the radiance of the Crucified Jesus as Risen Lord. It stands over against me rather as a great work of art, that moves me, but is always itself, not dependent on me for its power and beauty. In Balthasar’s words (in one of his numerous evocations of the experience of art as a parallel for the experience of faith): ‘the originality of a work of art’ can only be perceived ‘by the impression it gives of complete inevitability with perfect freedom, overwhelming the beholder, and making one say: it could only have been thus.’

A good apologetic has to make deep thought accessible, though without dumbing-it-down. It has to make things simple without being simplistic. Academic theologians generally struggle with the accessibility part of the equation, while popular spiritual writers, catechists, and preachers struggle with retaining the depth. Not many people can do both. Michael Paul Gallagher does both in this book. Faith-Maps reaches into the deep wells of ten major thinkers, extracts some of their gold, displays it in a way that makes it more visible to the untrained eye, challenges us to understand our faith more deeply, and gives us a rich arsenal of concepts with which to do that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I work and move within church circles and find that most of the people I meet there are honest, committed, and for the most part radiate their faith positively. Most church-goers aren’t hypocrites. What I do find disturbing within church circles though is that too many of us can be bitter, angry, mean-spirited, and judgmental, especially in terms of the very values that we hold most dear.

It was Henri Nouwen who first highlighted this, commenting with sadness that many of the really angry, bitter, and ideologically-driven people he knew he had met inside of church circles and places of ministry.  Within church circles, it sometimes seems, everyone is angry about something.  Moreover, within church circles, it is all too easy to rationalize our anger in the name of prophecy, as a healthy passion for truth and morals.

The logic works this way: Because I am sincerely concerned about an important moral, ecclesial, or justice issue, I can excuse a certain amount of neurosis, anger, elitism, and negative judgment, because I can rationalize that my cause, dogmatic or moral, is so important that it justifies my mean spirit: I need to be this angry and harsh because this is such an important truth!

And so we justify our anger by giving it a prophetic cloak, believing that we are warriors for God, truth, and morals when, in fact, we are mostly just struggling with our own wounds, insecurities, and fears. Hence we often look at others, even whole churches made up of sincere persons trying to live the gospel, and instead of seeing brothers and sisters struggling, like us, to follow Jesus, we see  “people in error”, “dangerous relativists”, “new age pagans”, “religious flakes”, and in our more generous moments, “poor misguided souls”.  But never do we look at what this kind of judgment is saying about us, about our own health of soul and our own following of Jesus.

Don’t get me wrong: Truth is not relative, moral issues are important, and right truth and proper morals, like kingdoms under perpetual siege, need to be defended. Not all moral judgments are created equal, neither are all churches.

But the truth of that doesn’t trump everything else or give us an excuse to rationalize our anger. We must defend truth, defend those who cannot defend themselves, and be solid in the traditions of our own churches. But right truth and right morals don’t necessarily make us disciples of Jesus. What does?

What makes us genuine disciples of Jesus is living inside his Spirit, the Holy Spirit, and this is not something abstract and vague. If one were searching for a single formula to determine who is Christian and who isn’t, one might look at the Epistle to the Galatians, Chapter 5. In it, St. Paul tells us that we can live according to either the spirit of the flesh or the Holy Spirit. 

We live according to the spirit of the flesh when we live in anger, bitterness, judgment of our neighbor, factionalism, and non-forgiveness.  When these things characterize our lives we shouldn’t delude ourselves and think that we are living inside of the Holy Spirit.

Conversely, we live inside of the Holy Spirit when our lives are characterized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, constancy, faith, gentleness, and chastity. If these do not characterize our lives, we should not nurse the illusion that we are inside of God’s Spirit, irrespective of our passion for truth, dogma, or justice.

This may be a cruel thing to say, and perhaps more cruel not to say, but I sometimes see more charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, and gentleness among persons who are Unitarian, New Age, or Baha’i (and are often judged by other churches as being wishy-washy and as not standing for anything) than I see among those of us who do stand up so strongly for certain ecclesial and moral issues but are often mean-spirited and bitter inside of our convictions. Given the choice of whom I’d like as a neighbor or, more deeply, the choice of whom I want to spend eternity with, I am sometimes pretty conflicted about the choice: Who is my real faith companion?  The angry zealot at war for Jesus or cause?  Or the more gentle soul who is branded wishy-washy or “new age”? At the end of the day, who is the real Christian?

We need, I believe, to be more self-critical in regards to our anger, harsh judgments, mean-spirit, exclusiveness, and disdain for other ecclesial and moral paths.  As T.S. Eliot once said: The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. We may have truth and right morals on our side. But our anger and harsh judgments towards those who don’t share our truth and morals may well have us standing outside the Father’s house, like the older brother of the prodigal son, bitter both at God’s mercy and at those who are receiving that mercy.