A Canopy Under Which to Pray

August 21, 2011

Do we ever really understand or master prayer? Yes and no. When we try to pray, sometimes we walk on water and sometimes we sink like a stone. Sometimes we have a deep sense of God’s reality and sometimes we can’t even imagine that God exists. Sometimes we have deep feelings about God’s goodness and love and sometimes we feel only boredom and distraction. Sometimes our eyes fill with tears and sometimes they wander furtively to our wrist-watches to see how much time we still need to spend in prayer. Sometimes we would like to stay in our prayer-place forever and sometimes we wonder we even showed up. Prayer has a huge ebb and flow.

I remember an incident, years back, where a man came to me for spiritual direction. He had been involved for several years in a Charismatic prayer-group and had experienced there powerful religious emotions. But now, to his surprise, those emotions had disappeared. When he tried to pray, he experienced mostly dryness and boredom. He felt that there was something wrong because his fiery emotions had disappeared. Here’s how he expressed it: “Father, you’ve seen my bible, seen how most every line is highlighted with a bright color because the text spoke so deeply to me. Well, right now, I feel like pitching my bible through a window because none of that means anything to me anymore! What’s wrong with me?”

The quick answer could have been: “God is wrong with you!” I pointed him towards the experience of Theresa of Avila who, after a season of deep fervor in prayer, experienced eighteen years of boredom and dryness. Today, I would have him read the journals of Mother Theresa who, like Theresa of Avila, after some initial fervor in prayer, experienced sixty years of dryness.

We nurse a naïve fantasy both about what constitutes prayer and how we might sustain ourselves in it. And what often lies at the center of this misguided notion is the belief that prayer is always meant to be full of fervor, interesting, warm, carrying spiritual insight, and carrying the sense that we are actually praying. Coupled with this notion is the equally misguided notion that the way to sustain feeling and fervor in prayer is through constant novelty and variety or through dogged concentration. Classical writers in spirituality assure us that, while this is often true during the early stages of our prayer lives, when we are neophytes at prayer and in the honeymoon stage of our spiritual lives, it is becomes less and less true the deeper we advance in prayer and spirituality.

Much to the relief and consolation of anyone who has tried to sustain a prayer life over a long period of time, the great mystics tell us that once we are beyond the early, honeymoon, stage of prayer, the single greatest obstacle to sustaining a life of prayer is simple boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is happening. But that doesn’t mean that we are regressing in prayer. It often means the opposite.

Here’s a canopy under which to pray even as we struggle with boredom and the sense that nothing meaningful is happening: Imagine you have an aged mother who is confined to a retirement home. You’re the dutiful daughter or son and, every night after work, for one hour, you stop and spend time with her, helping her with her evening meal, sharing the events of the day, and simply being with her as her daughter or son. I doubt that, save for a rare occasion, you will have many deeply emotive or even interesting conversations with her. On the surface your visits will seem mostly routine, dry, and dutiful. Most days you will be talking about trivial, everyday, things and you will be sneaking the occasional glance at the clock to see when your hour with her will be over. However, if you persevere in these regular visits with her, month after month, year after year, among everyone in the whole world you will grow to know your mother the most deeply and she will grow to you know you most deeply because, as the mystics affirm, at a certain deep level of relationship the real connection between us takes place below the surface of our conversations. We begin to know each other through simple presence.

You can recognize this in its opposite: Notice how your mother relates to your siblings who visit her only very occasionally. During those rare, occasional visits there will be emotions, tears, and conversations beyond the weather and the trivia of everyday life. But that’s because your mother sees these others so rarely.

Prayer is the same. If we pray only occasionally, we might well experience some pretty deep emotions in our prayer. However, if we pray faithfully every day, year in and year out, we can expect little excitement, lots of boredom, regular temptations to look at the clock during prayer … but, a very deep, growing bond with our God.

On Not Bracketing the Essentials during our Moral Battles

August 14, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Prophetic Mantra about the Poor

August 7, 2011

Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor! That’s a quote attributed to James Forbes, an interdenominational pastor in New York City, and it wonderfully captures something that the ancient prophets of Israel underlined many centuries ago.

The great prophets of Israel had coined this mantra: The quality of your faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land. And the quality of justice in the land will always be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” are faring while you are alive. That phrase, “widows, orphans, and strangers”, was code for the three weakest, most-vulnerable, groups in society at the time. For the great prophets of Israel, ultimately we will be judged religiously and morally on the basis of how the poorest of the poor fared while we were alive.

That’s a scary thought which becomes scarier when we see how Jesus strongly endorsed that view. While this needs to be contextualized within Jesus’ message as a whole, we have in Matthew’s Gospel the famous text about the Last Judgment where Jesus tells us that, at the end of day, when we stand before the great King on the day of judgment, we will be asked only one set of questions and they all will have to do with how we treated the poor: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Welcome the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick? Visit prisoners? I doubt that any of us would have the raw courage to preach this, just as it is written in the gospels, from any pulpit today. And yet Jesus meant it. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

Now there’s a whole series of challenges in this.

First: The demand to live lives that reflect justice and real concern for the poor is an integral and non-negotiable part of Christian discipleship. It’s not something that is grounded in some particular ideology which I can buy into or neglect, as long as I am living honestly and prayerfully in my private life. It’s an essential part of the gospel, equal in demand to praying, going to church, and keeping my private moral-life in order. For a Christian, it is not enough just to be pious, good, and church-going. We need too a concrete letter of reference from the poor.

Next: What that mantra of the prophets and Jesus’ teaching on the Last Judgment also teaches is that charity alone is not enough. Charity is a great virtue, integrally part of the greatest virtue of all, love. It may never be downplayed. But charity isn’t necessarily justice. I can be a wonderfully charitable, kind, moral, and generous person in my own life and still be unfairly profiting from an historical, social, political, and economic system that is unduly rewarding me even as it is unfairly burdening and robbing others. The things that I attain honestly through my own hard work and which I am very generous with in terms of sharing with others, can at the same time be the product of a system which is unfair to others. Taking care of “widows, orphans, and strangers” requires not just personal goodness and charity, but requires too that I have the courage to look at how my honest wealth may also be partially the product of a dishonest system. Who loses while I gain?

Finally: The mantra of the prophets and the teachings of Jesus about the Last Judgment should be a challenge to perennially scrutinize myself with the question: Am I actually reaching out to the poor? Do I have real “orphans, widows, and strangers” in my life? Is my commitment to the poor something only in theory, an ideal that I uphold but something that never actually impacts the poor? It is easy to pay lip-service to this ideal and it is even easier to write it into my curriculum vitae so that I look good to others and feel good about myself. However, as Ruth Burrows asks: Does our rhetoric about the poor actually help them or does it just help us feel better about ourselves?

I concede that these are not easy questions and we should be slow to answer them. Sometimes all we can do is admit our helplessness. I was once at a talk given by Gustavo Gutierrez where, after the presentation, a man stood up and, with pained honesty, shared about his own helplessness in reaching out to the poor: What can one person do in the face of all the global issues of injustice that beset us?

Gutierrez acknowledged the complexity of the question and sympathized with the man’s helplessness, but then added: “Minimally, make sure that you always have at least one concrete poor person in your life to who you are specially attending. This will ensure that your commitment will always at least have some concrete flesh!”

A single letter of reference from the poor is better than no letter at all.

Struggling to Understand Suicide

July 24, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A New Challenge

July 17, 2011

When I began writing this column, I shared that occasionally I would do a column that was more exclusively about my personal life. I have tried to limit myself in that and, in the 28 years I have been writing this column, have probably done less than ten pieces whose main focus was my own life. When I have done so, it was almost always to share with readers a major transition in my life.

This column is one of those personal pieces. My personal life is again undergoing a major transition, though this one does not concern a move to a new job or to a new city. It has to do with my health:

In early May I went for a routine colonoscopy and the doctor discovered a cancerous tumor in my colon. The good news was that it was discovered relatively early, before there were symptoms. They scheduled me for surgery in early June and removed the affected area, along with a series of lymph nodes. The operation, while pretty invasive, went well, but some of the lymph nodes had already been affected, meaning that the cancer was not necessarily fully contained in the tumor. I have recovered very well from the surgery, though this took some weeks. An oncologist advised me that prudence dictates that there be a follow-up treatment to the surgery, namely, six months of chemotherapy. He also assured me that the long-term prognosis is good, but that, as with all cancer, nothing is really sure until it’s sure. A cure is most likely, but not assured. I start the chemotherapy treatments in early August and will be facing a certain desert-experience for the next six months.

This is not a plea for sympathy. I share this with you because one shares this with one’s family and you are my family of readers. I will appreciate your prayers, even as I trust you not to deluge me with emails, cards, and letters. What we give to each other inside the mystical body of faith, family, and friendship, need not be announced to be effective.

Where am I with all of this?

Initially, especially before the surgery and subsequent scans revealed more precisely the limit of the cancer, there was understandably a good amount of fear and paranoia. One’s thoughts and fears aren’t easy to control when one’s next visit to the doctor might mean a death-sentence. Eventually though, and not just because the long-term prognosis now appears quite positive, I have begun to find a deep peace within all of this. I trust in God and know that I am in safe hands, irrespective of whatever happens. I also trust the medical professionals with whom I have been dealing. They have been marvelously competent and infinitely gentle. What a grace for us all, the skill of doctors!

But that peace of soul is also predicated on a number of realizations that were only abstract theories for me before this illness. Some things are infinitely more real to me now: I now know existentially that life is fragile, that health is precious, and that it’s to be appreciated rather than taken for granted. I know too existentially that we cannot safeguard our own lives, no matter how carefully we try. Faith and hope are flooding into my life as never before.

So too is love. Family and friends are mostly taken for granted when we are young and strong and under the illusion that death is not really a reality for us. We realize how deep a grace family and friendship are only when we are fully attuned to our own vulnerability; mostly, too, it only then that we actually allow others to love us.

And there are other deep lessons in this for me: I have been driving my engines hard for a long time, dodging bullets as I overwork and am over-extended. So many times in the past years, in a trance of overwork, I promised God that I would slow my life down, just as soon as this particular task was finished. Indeed, often, explicitly in prayer, I asked God to let me do this slowdown willfully, and not have some health breakdown force it on me. Like the young Augustine, I was praying: “Slow me down, but not yet!” My cancer diagnosis is finally doing for me what I couldn’t do for myself. My prayer now is: Let me receive this gracefully, and as a grace!

One last lesson: Should I land on my feet, healthy and my old self again after the chemotherapy, I hope to have the strength to not return to my old life, grateful to have dodged a bullet and ready for business as usual. Instead, like the one leper who returned to give thanks to Jesus rather than going back to normal living, I am praying that the grace of this visitation will be the alchemy I have long needed to make me turn instead habitually in gratitude towards Jesus and towards the present moment.

Things Hidden from the Learned and the Clever

July 10, 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Internal Battle for our Souls

July 3, 2011

Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject. Aristotle wrote that and it seems to say the obvious, something can’t be light and dark at the same time.

However, in terms of what’s happening inside our souls it seems that contraries can indeed co-exist inside the same subject. At any given moment, inside us, we are a mixture of light and darkness, sincerity and hypocrisy, selflessness and selfishness, virtue and vice, grace and sin, saint and sinner. As Henri Nouwen used to say: We want to be great saints, but we also don’t want to miss out on all the sensations that sinners experience. And so our lives aren’t simple.

We live with both light and darkness side us and for long periods of time, it seems, contraries do co-exist inside us. Our souls are a battleground where selflessness and selfishness, virtue and sin, vie for dominance. But eventually one or the other will begin to dominate and work at weeding out the other. That’s why John of the Cross picks up this philosophical axiom and uses it to teach a key lesson about coming to purity of heart and purity of intention in our lives. Because contraries cannot co-exist inside us, there’s something vital we need to do. What?

We need to pray regularly. Contraries cannot co-exist in us so if we sustain genuine prayer in our lives eventually sincerity will weed out insincerity, selflessness will weed out selfishness, and grace will weed out sin. If we sustain genuine prayer we will never, long-term, fall into moral rationalization. If we sustain genuine prayer in our lives we will never grow so blind to our own sin that we will begin to have morally exempt areas in our lives. Being faithful to prayer will ensure that we will never, long-range, live double lives because what prayer brings into our lives, a genuine presence of God, will not peacefully co-exist with selfishness, sin, rationalization, self-delusion, and hypocrisy. Simply put, at some point in our lives, we will either stop praying or stop our bad behavior. We won’t be able to live with both. Our biggest danger then is to stop praying.

And this advice is eminently practical: We cannot always control how we feel about things. We cannot always control how we will be tempted. And none of us has the strength to never fall into sin. Our incapacity to fully actualize ourselves morally leaves us always short of full sanctity. There are things beyond us.

But there is something that we can control, something beyond the wild horses of emotion and temptation. We are beset by many things, but we can willfully, deliberately, with discipline and resolve, show up regularly to pray. We can make private prayer a regular discipline in our lives. We can commit ourselves to the habit of private prayer. And, if we do that, irrespective of the fact that we will have to work through long periods of dryness and boredom, eventually what that prayer brings into our lives will weed out our bad habits, rationalization, and sins. Two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject. Eventually we will either stop praying or we will give up our sin and rationalization. Nobody can be praying genuinely on a regular basis and be blind to his or her own sinfulness.

Our task then is to sustain private prayer as a habit in our lives, even if we have neither the insight nor the courage to see and address all the double-standards and moral blind-spots in our lives. What comes into our lives through prayer, often more imperceptible than visible, will eventually weed out (“cauterize”, in John of the Cross’ words) both our sin and our rationalizations about it.

This is akin to what Ronald Knox once taught about the Eucharist. For him, the Eucharist is the singular, vital, sustaining ritual within Christian life. Why? Because Knox believed that, as Christians, we have never really lived up to what Christ asked of us. We have never really loved our enemies, turned the other cheek, blessed those who cursed us, lived fully just lives, or forgiven those who hurt us. But we have been, he submits, faithful to Christ in one major way: We have been faithful in celebrating the Eucharist, to that one command.

Just before he left us, Jesus gave us the Eucharist and asked us to continue celebrating it until he returned. For two thousand years, awaiting that return, we’ve been faithful in doing that, no matter how unfaithful we have been in other ways. We have continued to celebrate the Eucharist and, in the end, more than anything else, that has been the one thing that has called us back, again and again, to fidelity.

The habit of private prayer will do the same thing for us. Since two contraries cannot co-exist inside the same subject, eventually either we will stop praying or we will stop sinning and rationalizing. The greatest moral danger in our lives is that we stop praying!

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.