The Size of our Hearts

June 26, 2011

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.

Struggling with our Complexity

June 19, 2011

In a book on preaching, entitled, Telling the Truth, Frederick Buechner challenges all preachers and spiritual writers to speak with “awful honesty” about the human struggle, even inside the context of faith. Don’t put an easy sugar-coating on things, he warns:

“Let the preacher tell the truth. Let him make audible the silence of the news of the world with the sound turned off so that in that silence we can hear the tragic truth of the Gospel which is that the world where God is absent is a dark and echoing emptiness; and the comic truth of the Gospel, which is that it is into the depth of this absence that God makes himself present in such unlikely ways and in such unlikely people that old Sarah and Abraham and maybe when the time comes even Pilate and Job … and you and I laugh till the tears run down our cheeks. And finally let him preach this overwhelming of tragedy by comedy, of darkness by light, of the ordinary by the extraordinary, as the tale that is too good not to be true because to dismiss it as untrue is to dismiss along with it the catch of the breath, the beat and lifting of the heart near to or even accompanied by tears, which I believe is the deepest intuition of truth that we have.”

Reading this, I was reminded of some of the preaching in my own parish when I was a young boy. I grew up in a small, sheltered, farming, immigrant community in the heart of the Canadian prairies. Our parish priests, wonderfully sincere men, tended however to preach to us as if we were a group of idyllic families in the TV series, Little House on the Prairies. They would share with us how pleased they were to be ministering to us, simple farm-folk, living uncomplicated lives, far from the problems of those who were living in the big cities.

Even as a young boy, living a sheltered life, this didn’t always digest well. First of all, I didn’t feel very uncomplicated and simple. I harbored a deep restlessness and had more than my own share of heartaches. I felt already then, just as I feel now, that both human life and the human heart have a depth that’s always partially beyond our grasp. Also, wonderful as our community was, it too had its share of breakdowns, suicides, and interpersonal tensions. On the outside, we sometimes looked like little houses on the prairies, but underneath deeper things were always brewing. No one is spared both the wondrous mystery and the confusing pathos of life’s complexity.

Good art is good precisely because it takes that complexity seriously and shines a light into it in a way that doesn’t resolve the tension in too-easy a way. Poor art is invariably sentimental precisely because it does not take that complexity seriously, either by refusing to acknowledge it or by resolving it too easily.

The same holds true for good theology and spirituality. It needs to take seriously the complexity of the human heart. Thomas Aquinas once posed the question: What is the adequate object of the human intellect and will? In contemporary terms, that would be: What would completely satisfy our every aching and longing? His answer: All being, everything, all that is. We would have to know and be somehow affectively connected to everything that is for our restless minds and hearts to come to full peace. Given the impossibility of this in this life, we shouldn’t be naïve as to how habitually restless and complex our lives are going to be.

The great gift of Henri Nouwen’s writings is that they introduce us to the complexity of our own lives and then give us permission to understand that as normal. We aren’t necessarily over-greedy, over-sexed, or over-restless. We are just normal human beings, walking around inside of human skin. That’s what real life feels like! That is also a clear truth inside scripture and the gospels. The scriptures are filled with stories of persons finding God and helping bring about God’s kingdom, even as their own lives are often fraught with mess, confusion, frustration, betrayal, infidelity, and sin. There are no simple human beings, immune to the spiritual, psychological, sexual, and relational complexities that beset us all.

And in the end, that’s a good thing: Among other things it keeps us forever aware, often against our own fear and sloth, that the mystery of life is infinitely bigger than that with which were are most times comfortable. Our pathological complexity presses us ever towards greater light.

Importantly too an awareness and acceptance of the pathological complexity of our own lives can be the place where we finally find the threads of empathy and forgiveness: Life is difficult for everybody. Everyone is hurting. We don’t need to blame someone. We are all beset with the same issues. Understanding and accepting that can help us to forgive each other – and then forgive ourselves.

Meaning and Happiness

June 12, 2011

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.

Listening to Christ’s Heartbeat

June 5, 2011

The last supper account in John’s gospel gives us a wonderful mystical image. The evangelist describes the beloved disciple as reclining on the breast of Jesus. What’s contained in this image? A number of things:

First, when you put your head upon someone else’s chest, your ear is just above that person’s heart and you are able to hear his or her heartbeat. Hence, in John’s image, we see the beloved disciple with his ear on Jesus’ heart, hearing Jesus’ heartbeat, and from that perspective looking out into the world. This is John’s ultimate image for discipleship: The ideal disciple is the one who is attuned to Christ’s heartbeat and sees the world with that sound in his or her ear.

Then there is a second level to the image: It is an icon of peace, a child at its mother’s breast, contented, satiated, calm, free of tension, not wanting to be anywhere else. This is an image of primal intimacy, of symbiotic oneness, a connection deeper than romantic love.

And for John, it is also a Eucharistic image. What we see in this image of a person with his ear on Jesus’ heart, is how John wants us to imagine ourselves when we are at Eucharist because, ultimately, that is what the Eucharist is, a physical reclining on the breast of Christ. In the Eucharist, Jesus gives us, physically, a breast to lean on, to nurture at, to feel safe and secure at, and from which to see the world.

Finally, this is also an image of how we should touch God and be sustained by him in solitude.

Henri Nouwen once said: “By touching the center of our solitude, we sense that we have been touched by loving hands.” Deep inside each of us, like a brand, there is a place where God has touched, caressed, and kissed us. Long before memory, long before we ever remember touching or loving or kissing anyone or anything, or being touched by anything or anybody in this world, there is a different kind of memory, the memory of being gently touched by loving hands. When our ear is pressed to God’s heart – to the breast of all that is good, true, and beautiful – we hear a certain heartbeat and we remember, remember in some inchoate place, at a level beyond thought, that we were once gently kissed by God.

Archetypally this is what’s deepest within us. There is an ancient legend which holds that when an infant is created God kisses its soul and sings to it. As its guardian angel carries it to earth to join its body, she also sings to it. The legend says that God’s kiss and his song, as well as the song of the angel, remain in that soul forever – to be called up, cherished, shared, and to become the basis of all of our songs.

But to feel that kiss, to hear that song, requires solitude. You do not feel gentleness when inside of you and all around you there is noise, abrasiveness, anger, bitterness, jealousy, competitiveness, and paranoia. The sound of God’s heartbeat is audible only in a certain solitude and in the gentleness it brings. John of the Cross once defined solitude as “bringing the mild into harmony with the mild”. That was his way of saying that we will begin to remember the primordial touch of God when, through solitude, we empty our hearts of all that is not mild, namely, noise, anger, bitterness, and jealousy. When we become mild we will remember that we have been touched by loving hands and, like the beloved disciple, we will then have our ear to the heartbeat of Christ.

Thus, inside each of us there is a church, an oratory, a place of worship, a sanctuary not made by human hands. And it is a gentle place, a virgin place, a holy place, a place where there is no anger, no sense of being cheated, no need to be competitive, and no need to be restless. It is a soft place; but it can be violated, through a giving of oneself that does not respect oneself, and, especially, through lying and rationalizing and the cauterization, warping, and hardening of heart that follows upon that. Conversely, though, it is also a place that can remain inviolate, sacred, and untouched, even when abused and violated.

It is in that place, entered into through solitude and gentleness of spirit, that we have a privileged access to God because that is the place where God has already touched us and where we, however dimly, remember that.

We were once touched by hands far gentler and more loving than our own. The memory of that touch is a brand – warm, dark, gentle. To enter that memory is to lean on the breast of Christ, just as the beloved apostle did at the last supper. From that place, with our ear on Christ’s heart, we have the truest perspective on our world.

Simplifying our Spiritual Vocabulary

May 29, 2011

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!

God and Violence

May 22, 2011

God is non-violent. God does not prescribe violence. Violence should never be rationalized in God’s name. That is clear in Christian revelation.

But that immediately poses the question: What about the violence in scripture that is attributed to God or to God’s direct orders?

Doesn’t God, in anger, wipe out the entire human race, save for Noah and his family? Doesn’t God ask Abraham to kill Isaac on an altar of sacrifice? Doesn’t Moses have to talk God out of destroying Israel because God is angry? Didn’t God give an order to Israel to kill everybody and everything (men, women, children, and even the animals) as she entered the Promised Land? Didn’t the Mosaic Law, attributed to God, prescribe stoning women to death for adultery? Didn’t Jesus kick over the tables of the money-changers in anger? And what about all the wars and capital punishment that have been done in God’s name through the centuries? What about extremist Islam today, killing thousands of people in God’s name? God, it seems, has prescribed and sanctioned a lot of violence and killing from ancient time right down until today. How do we explain all the violence attributed to God?

Two things need to be kept in mind:

First: Whenever scripture speaks about God as being offended, as getting angry, as wanting to wreak vengeance on his enemies, or as demanding that we kill somebody in his name, it is speaking anthropomorphically, that is, it is taking our own thoughts, feelings, and reactions and projecting them into God. We get angry, God doesn’t. Our hearts crave vengeance, God’s heart doesn’t. We demand that murderers be executed, God doesn’t. Scripture contains a lot of anthropomorphisms that make for a bad and a dangerous theology if read and understood literally. To read parts of scripture literally is to turn God into a tribal God in competition with other gods.

When scripture says that we experience God’s wrath when we sin, it doesn’t want us to believe that God actually gets angry and punishes us. There’s no need. The punishment is innate, inherent in the sin itself. When we sin it is our own actions that punish us (the way excessive use of alcohol dehydrates the brain and the dehydration causes a headache). We may feel that the punishment as coming from God, from God’s anger, from God’s wrath, but it is nature’s wrath and our own that we are feeling. God has no need to extrinsically punish sin because sin already punishes itself. Nature is so constructed. There is a law of karma. Sin is its own punishment.

But at the level of feeling, this is felt as if God is punishing us. However, as Jesus shows in forgiving his own killers and forgiving everyone who betrayed him, God forgives sin. God has no need for vengeance or for a justice that extracts a pound of flesh for a pound of sin. Nature already does that. Indeed, given a proper understanding of God’s nature and transcendence, it is presumptuous on our part to even believe that we can “offend” God.

More important still, the biblical texts that attribute violence to God are also archetypal, namely, they are texts that teach us things about the deep rhythms of the human heart but are not meant to be taken literally. Taken literally, they are often the very antithesis of the revelation of God.

But still what do we do with the biblical texts that prescribe violence to God? For instance, how can we interpret God’s ordering Israel to kill all the Canaanites as she entered the Promised Land?

In archetypal stories, killing is metaphorical not literal. It’s about a death inside the heart. God’s command to kill all the inhabitants of Canaan is simply a hard metaphor for what Jesus refers to when he says that you have to put new wine into new wineskins so that the new wine will not burst the old skins.

Anyone who has gone through a 12-step addiction program knows what it means to have to kill all the Canaanites. To move into the promised land of sobriety and remain there, something hard and cruel needs to happen that can’t happen through half-measures: To move into the promised land of sobriety, you have to clean out (“kill”) your entire liquor cabinet, all the “Canaanites”: All the beer, scotch, bourbon, rum, vodka, wine, cognac, and brandy, every ounce of alcohol has to go. If you allow yourself even one drink you will eventually lose your sobriety.

Virtually every text in the bible which ascribes violence to God or puts into his mouth a command to do violence needs to be read in that same way. The violence and killing are metaphorical, even as the text is asking the heart to do something which cannot be a half-measure.

Walter Brueggemann once commented that “God is in recovery from all the violence that has been attributed to him and done in his name.” It’s time that the churches entered the same recovery process.

The Other Side of Orthodoxy

May 15, 2011

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.

Mothers’ Day

May 8, 2011

For many years, I’ve had a bias against Mothers’ Day. I’m not against the concept, it’s a private grudge. My own mother died 40 years ago and my ignoring of Mothers’ Day has been payback to the universe for that perceived injustice: Let the world celebrate, but count me out!

But time heals and occasionally makes us wiser. Now, on Mothers’ Day, I’m always conscious of my own mother and find good reasons to celebrate. You don’t have to be alive to nurture someone, and such is the case with my mother. Jesus told us that we receive someone’s spirit more purely after they have left us and I know that’s true. Forty years after her death, I am more conscious of who my mother was and what she gave me than I was during all the years of my childhood when she was alive and her motherhood embraced me tangibly.

What my siblings and I are now conscious of, more clearly than when she was alive, is that we drew a long-straw. We had a good mother. It’s as simple as that. In everything that was essential, she gave us what’s important: security, protection, a sense of being wanted, a sense of being precious, adequate food, adequate clothing, the underlying sense that life is good, and, most of all, the sense that we are in the hands always of a God who is trustworthy.

None of this, of course, came perfectly. My mother wasn’t God. She had real limits and so did the energy and the resources she drew upon to nurture us. We were a large family and were chronically strapped economically. We had enough, but just, just enough. There were never any extras. That was also true for the attention and the affection she could give out to us individually. She didn’t have the time, energy, or luxury to dote on any of us individually, even as none of us ever doubted that we were getting as much from her as if each of us had been an only child. But still, all of us felt her limits and live with the effects of that today.

But her chronic over-extension was also her special gift: Like Jesus she multiplied the loaves and the fishes. Somehow she always found enough of everything, food, clothing, educational supplies, an extra cake or ribbon or whatever for a special occasion. Somehow we always had what we needed, just as somehow she made our family table stretch enough to feed anyone – neighbor, teacher, priest, salesman, or uncle-down-on-his luck – who happened to be around near mealtime. She believed something most of us don’t, namely, that when you are with the Bread of Life you always have the resources you need, no matter how meager they appear. She trusted that there would always be enough, and there always was.

And she complemented my father perfectly. You couldn’t have ordered a better marriage from either Hollywood or a Catholic dating service. They found each other, soulmates, at a parish picnic and their affection and respect for each other was what, perhaps more than anything else, gave us, their children, an inchoate sense of safety, stability, and faith. My father was the moral compass, she was the heart; but they could reverse those roles and she could offer the moral challenge while he provided the sensitivity. Either way, they did it together and by the time they died, leaving behind a family that felt too young to be on its own, they had given us what they needed to, all the basic tools to build our own lives and to live with some buoyancy and joy.

She died of pancreatitis and a broken heart, just three months after she had nursed my dad through a year-long, losing battle with cancer. As my dad lay dying, one of my brothers and I took her to a shop to buy a dress for the funeral. She splurged and bought the most expensive dress she’d ever purchased. When she tried on the dress the sales clerk told her: “You look terrific in that dress! I hope you enjoy wearing it!” She wore it just twice, once to her husband’s funeral and once to her own. The irony of the salesclerk’s comment hasn’t been lost.

For whatever reason, she disliked her name, Mathilda. Her woman friends shortened it to Tilly, which she disliked even more. I’m not sure what my dad called her in the privacy of their intimacy, but I suspect it wasn’t either of those names.

Anthropologists tell us that our mothers are our symbiotic link to life. They have to let us know that the universe wants us, that we’re loveable simply for whom we are, that love doesn’t have to be earned. My mother was too busy sometimes to nurture each of her children individually with that sense that we were unique, beautiful, and precious; but she mothered us in such a way that life itself and the God who grounds life, give us that precious gift.

The Gift that was Henri Nouwen

May 1, 2011

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.

The Resurrection as Vindicating Human Fidelity and God’s Silence

April 24, 2011

Theologians sometimes try to simply the meaning of the resurrection by packaging its essence into one sentence: In the resurrection, God vindicated Jesus, his life, his message, and his fidelity. What does that mean?

Jesus entered our world preaching faith, love, and forgiveness but the world didn’t accept that. Instead it crucified him and, in that crucifixion, seemingly shamed his message. We see this most clearly on the cross when Jesus is taunted, mocked, and challenged: If you are the son of God, come down from there! If your message is true, let the God verify that right now! If your fidelity is more than plain stubbornness and human ignorance then why are you dying in shame?

And what was God’s response to those taunts? Nothing, no commentary, no defense, no apologia, no counter-challenge, just silence. Jesus dies in silence. Neither he nor the God he believed in tried to fill that excruciating void with any consoling words or explanations challenging people to look at the bigger picture or to look at the brighter side of things. None of that. Just silence.

Jesus died in silence, inside God’s silence and inside the world’s incomprehension. And we can let ourselves be humbly scandalized by that silence, just as we can let ourselves be perpetually scandalized by the seeming triumph of evil, pain, and suffering in our world. God’s silence can forever scandalize us: in the Jewish holocaust, in ethnic genocides, in brutal and senseless wars, in the earthquakes and tsunamis which kill thousands of people and devastate whole countries, in the deaths of countless people taken out of this life by cancer and by violence, in how unfair life can be sometimes, and in the casual manner that those without conscience can rape whole areas of life seemingly without consequence. Where is God in all of this? What’s God’s answer?

God’s answer is in the resurrection, in the resurrection of Jesus and in the perennial resurrection of goodness within life itself. But resurrection is not necessarily rescue. God doesn’t necessarily rescue us from the effects of evil, or even from death. Evil does what it does, natural disasters are what they are, and those without conscience can rape even as they feed off life’s sacred fire. God doesn’t intervene. The parting of the Red Sea isn’t a weekly occurrence. God lets his loved ones suffer and die, just as Jesus let his dear friend, Lazarus, die and God let Jesus die. God redeems, raises us up afterwards, in a deeper more lasting vindication. And the truth of that statement can even be tested empirically.

Despite every appearance sometimes, in the end, love does triumph over hatred. Peace does triumph over chaos. Forgiveness does triumph over bitterness. Hope does triumph over cynicism. Fidelity does triumph over despair. Virtue does triumph over sin. Conscience does triumph over callousness. Life does triumph over death. And good does triumph over evil, always. Mohandas K. Gandhi once wrote: “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 seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.”

The resurrection, most forcibly, makes that point. God has the last word. The resurrection of Jesus is that last word. From the ashes of shame, of seeming defeat, failure, and death, a new, deeper, and eternal life perennially bursts forth. Our faith begins at the very point where it seems it might end, in God’s seeming silence at Jesus’ death.

And what does this ask of us?

First of all, simply that we trust its truth. The resurrection of Jesus asks us to believe what Gandhi affirmed, namely, that in the end evil will not have the last word. It will fall. Good will eventually triumph.

More deeply, it asks us to roll the dice of our lives on that trust and that truth: What Jesus taught is true: Virtue is not naïve, even when it is shamed. Sin and cynicism are naïve, even when they appear to triumph. Those who genuflect before God and others in conscience will find meaning and joy, even when they are deprived of the world’s pleasures. Those who drink in and manipulate sacred energy without conscience will not find meaning and life, even when they taste pleasure. Those who live in honesty, no matter the cost, will find freedom. Those who lie and rationalize will find themselves imprisoned in self-hate. Those who live in trust will find love. God’s silence can be trusted, even when we die inside of it.

We can live in faith, love, forgiveness, conscience, and fidelity in spite of everything that suggests that they aren’t true. They will bring us to what is deepest inside of life and love because God vindicates virtue. God vindicates love. God vindicates conscience. God vindicates forgiveness. God vindicates fidelity. God vindicated Jesus and will vindicate us if we remain faithful as Jesus did.

The Passion of Jesus According to John

April 16, 2011

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.

The Unquiet Frontiers of our Lives

April 10, 2011

Few books have garnered as much respect during the past five years as has Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age.

That respect is well-deserved. Given secularity’s convoluted history, there isn’t any one, normative study that traces out its evolution; but, if there was, Taylor’s analysis might apply for the distinction. Deeply versed in history, philosophy, literature, theology, and spirituality, Taylor has a deep well within which to dip to make his analysis. Few scholars, to my mind, bring so wide and deep a scholarship to the area of history and faith. Taylor confesses that he is, personally, a man of faith, but strives insofar as this is possible for anyone, believer or agnostic, to not let his own beliefs color his research. Few commentators, even those critical of the book, accuse him of that. He is generally as objective as the evening news, reporting what happened without either trumpeting or bemoaning it.

And what he traces out is the big story of how we moved historically from a culture and a consciousness within which it was virtually impossible not to be believe in God to the situation within which we find ourselves today, namely, where belief in God is merely one option among others and indeed often not the dominant one. Until the full-flowering of modernity (and, for many of us personally that has really just happened in the past two generations) we lived with what Taylor calls a “porous” rather than a “buffered” consciousness. A porous consciousness is more naturally mystical. A buffered consciousness is what Karl Rahner had in mind when he said we would soon reach a time when someone would either be a mystic or a non-believer.

A porous consciousness is porous precisely in its incapacity to protect itself against spirits and angels, demons and superstition, against good religion and bad religion. We don’t have to go far back to remember when we used to sign ourselves with the cross and holy water during a lightning storm. The other world, however it was understood, could bring us to our knees. We didn’t always like how the supernatural could leak through our defenses but we were pretty helpless in preventing it.

A buffered consciousness is precisely one that is buffered against angels and demons, against good religion and bad religion, leaking through. Today rather than being frightened by a lightning storm, we enjoy the free fireworks, feeling quite safe and secure behind our modern glass windows. We are much more buffered against the other world and how it can break through in our consciousness. This makes secular consciousness (an awareness that, for the most part, doesn’t feel any conscious need to connect its existence, sustenance, meaning, and striving for happiness to anything beyond itself and the world) a genuine option for us and makes faith more a choice than a given.

But, as Leonard Cohen famously writes: There is a crack in everything. That’s how the light gets in. There is too a crack in our buffered, secular consciousness. Taylor calls this “the unquiet frontiers of modernity”. There are certain things against which we cannot buffer ourselves, and not just loss, depression, and fear of death. These can, and do, sometimes shake the secure foundations of our lives and drive us to our knees in helplessness. But we can be driven to our knees too for the opposite reasons: Love, beauty, hope, and joy can also break through our buffered shell and break us open to a meaning beyond what this world has to offer. There is disquiet and fragility on both frontiers, on those which threaten and frighten us and on those which beckon us towards deeper hopes.

Here’s how Taylor puts it: The sense that there is something more presses in. Great numbers of people feel it: in moments of reflection about their life; in moments of relaxation in nature; in moments of bereavement and loss; and quite wildly and unpredictably. Our age is very far from settling in to a comfortable unbelief. Although many individuals do so, and more still seem to on the outside, the unrest continues to surface. Could it ever be otherwise?

The secular age is schizophrenic, or better, deeply cross-pressed. People seem at a safe distance from religion; and yet they are very moved to know that there are dedicated believers, like Mother Teresa. The unbelieving world, well used to disliking Pius XII, was bowled over by John XXIII. A Pope just had to sound like Christian, and many immemorial resistances melted. It’s as though many people who don’t want to follow want nevertheless to hear the message of Christ, want it to be proclaimed out there. The paradox was evident in the response to the late Pope. Many people were inspired by John Paul’s public peripatetic preaching, about love, about world peace, about international economic justice. They are thrilled that these things are being said.

God may not always seem evident in our world, but in our deepest fears and hopes we still have his calling card.

The Roots of Forgiveness

April 3, 2011

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.

Loving our Enemies

March 27, 2011

Lorenzo Rosebaugh, an Oblate colleague shot to death in Guatemala two years ago, used to share at Oblate gatherings some advice that Daniel Berrigan once gave him. Lorenzo, contemplating an act of civil disobedience to protest the Vietnam war, was told by Berrigan: If you can’t do this without becoming bitter, then don’t do it! Do it only if you can do it with a mellow heart! Do it only if you can be sure you won’t end up hating those who arrest you!

That’s hard to do; but, in the end, it’s the ultimate challenge, namely, to not hate those who oppose us, to not hate our enemies, to continue to have gracious and forgiving hearts in the face of misunderstanding, bitter opposition, jealousy, anger, hatred, positive mistreatment, and even the threat of death.

And to be a disciple of Jesus means that, at some point, we will be hated. We will make enemies. It happened to Jesus and he assured us that it will happen to us.

But he also left us the ultimate example of how we need to respond to our enemies. When scripture tells us that Jesus saved the people from their sins, it doesn’t just mean that in offering his death to his father as a sacrifice in one eternal act he took away our sins. It also points to his way of living and how, as he demonstrated, forgiving and loving one’s enemies take away sin, by absorbing it. Jesus’ great act of love, as Kierkegaard once said, is meant to be imitated not just admired.

But how do we do this? It seems that we don’t know how to love our enemies, that we don’t have the strength to forgive. We preach it as an ideal and naively believe that we are doing it. But, for the most part, we aren’t. We really don’t love and forgive those who oppose us. Too often we are distrustful, disrespectful, bitter, demonizing, and (metaphorically speaking) murderous towards each other. If there is much love and forgiveness of enemies in our lives, it’s far from evident, both in our world and in our churches. As Ronald Knox once said, as Christians, we have never really taken seriously Jesus’ challenge to love our enemies and to turn the other cheek.

I say this sympathetically. We need help. The old saying is true: To err is human, to forgive is divine. So how do we start?

We might start by both acknowledging our failure and admitting our helplessness, individually and as churches. We aren’t very loving and forgiving in the face of opposition! Next, we need to highlight this inadequacy and the importance of this failure in our preaching and teaching. Loving our enemies is the real moral and religious litmus test! We don’t have a right to call anyone a “cafeteria Christian” or a compromised follower of Christ unless, first of all, we, ourselves, are persons who are gracious, respectful, loving, and forgiving in the face of anyone who opposes us. Let’s start, all of us, from this humble place of admittance: We aren’t very much like Jesus in the face of opposition.

Then, perhaps most important of all, we need to seek each other’s help, akin to the dynamics of an Alcoholics’ Anonymous meeting. Alone we haven’t the strength to love those who hate us. We need grace and community, God’s power and others’ support, to retain the most difficult of all sobrieties, that is, to walk within a steady strength that enables us to remain warm, gracious, forgiving, loving, and joyful in the face of misunderstanding, jealousy, opposition, bitterness, threat, and murder.

Speaking personally, I consider this to be the greatest challenge of my life, morally and humanly. How to love an enemy: How do I not let a jealous glance freeze my heart? How do I not let a bitter word ruin my day? How do I not demonize others when they oppose me? How do I remain sympathetic when I’m misunderstood? How do I remain warm in the face of bitterness? How do I not give in to paranoia when I feel threatened? How do I forgive someone who doesn’t want my forgiveness? How do stop myself from slamming the door of my heart in the face of coldness and rejection? How do I forgive others when my own heart is bitter in self-pity? How do I really love and forgive as Jesus did?

I often wonder how Jesus did it. How did he retain peace of mind, warmth in his heart, graciousness in his speech, joy in his life, resiliency in his efforts, the capacity to be grateful, and a sense of humor in the face of misunderstanding, jealousy, hatred, and death threats?

He did it by recognizing that this was, singularly, the most important challenge of his life and mission, and, under the weight of that imperative, by falling on his knees to ask for the help of the One who can do in us what we can’t do for ourselves.

A Contemporary Apologetics

March 20, 2011

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.

Saved by One Man’s Sacrifice

March 13, 2011

We are saved by the death of Jesus! All Christians believe this. This is a central tenet within the Christian faith and the center of almost all Christian iconography. Jesus’ death on a cross changed history forever. Indeed, we measure time by it. The effect of his death so marked the world that, not long after he died, the world began to measure time by him. We are in the year 2011 since Jesus was born.

But how does this work? How can one person’s death ricochet through history, going backwards and forwards in time, being somehow beyond time, so as to effect past, present, and future all at the same time, as if that death was forever happening at the present moment? Is this simply some mystery and metaphysics inside of the Godhead that isn’t meant to be understood within any of our normal categories?

Too often, I believe, the answer we were given was simply this: It’s a mystery. Believe it. You don’t have to understand it.

And there’s wisdom in that. How we are washed clean in the blood of Christ is something we understand more in the gut than in the head. We know its truth, even when we don’t understand it. Indeed we know its truth so deeply that we risk our whole lives on it. I wouldn’t be a minister of the Gospel and a priest today if I didn’t believe that we are saved through the death of Jesus. But how to explain it?

In my quest as a theologian and simply in my search to integrate my Christian faith, I have searched for concepts, imaginative constructs, and a language within which to understand and explain this: How can one man’s death 2000 years ago be an act that saves us today? One of the things that helped me in that quest was a counsel from Edward Schillebeeckx who, in his ground-breaking book on Jesus as the Sacrament of God, stated simply that we have no metaphysics within which to explain this. C.H.Dodd, whom I will quote below, simply states, “there was more here than could be accounted for upon the historical or human level. God was in it” Part of this is mystery.

But, with those limits being admitted, I want to offer here two passages, one from Thomas Keating and the other from C.H. Dodd that, for me at least, have been helpful in trying to understand something which is for a large part ineffable. Keating’s insight is more mystical and poetic, but wonderfully stunning; Dodd’s is more phenomenological, but equally helpful:

Thomas Keating offers his comment in response to a question: Have we ever really understood how we are saved by Jesus’ death more than two millennia ago?

Scripture provides examples of persons who actually had an insight into this – for instance, Mary of Bethany, anointing Jesus at Simon the leper’s house. By breaking the alabaster jar of very expensive perfume over the whole body of Jesus and filling the house with that gorgeous scent, she seems to have intuited what Jesus was about to do on the cross. The authorities were set on killing him. What her lavish gesture symbolized was the deepest meaning of Jesus’ passion and death. The body of Christ is the jar containing the most precious perfume of all time, namely, the Holy Spirit. It was about to be broken open so that the Holy Spirit could be poured out over the whole of humanity – past, present, and to come – with boundless generosity. Until that body had been broken on the cross, the full extent of the gift of God in Christ and its transforming possibilities for the human race could not be known or remotely foreseen.

C.H. Dodd describes how Jesus’ death ricochets through history in these words: There was more here than could be accounted for upon the historical or human level. God was in it. The creative purpose of God is everlastingly at work in this world of his. It meets resistance from the recalcitrant wills of men. If at any point human history should become entirely nonresistant to God, perfectly transparent to his design – then from that point the creative purpose would work with unprecedented power. That is just what the perfect obedience of Jesus affected. Within human nature and human history he established a point of complete nonresistance to the will of God, and complete transparency to his design. As we revert to that moment, it becomes contemporary and we are laid open to the creative energy perpetually working to make man after the image of God. The obedience of Christ is the release of creative power for the perfecting of human life. A decision taken by a great man or woman can alter every aspect of life, for the present and for all that comes after.

Our moral actions all leave a trace, and sometimes if that moral act is equivalent to splitting the atom that effect lasts forever. Jesus’ death split the moral atom.