An Invitation to Something Higher

January 20, 2025

What is a sin? Is it a sin to not go to church on Sunday? Is it a sin to cheat on your taxes? Is it a sin to get drunk? Is holding a grudge a sin? Is masturbation a sin? Is infidelity in marriage a sin?

For too long preachers, catechists, Sunday school teachers, church hierarchy, and moral theologians have been too focused on sin. Well, indeed there is sin around, but that should hardly be our focus in terms of understanding what it means to live a moral Christian life. Here we should take our cue from Jesus.

In his Sermon on the Mount (Mattew 5-7) Jesus says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the Law and the prophets; I have come to fulfill them.” What he is saying here is basically this: I have not come to do away with the Ten Commandments; I have come to invite you to something higher.

Unfortunately, we tend to think of living a moral life mostly in terms of keeping the Commandments and avoiding sin. What we call “moral theology” has classically been focused on ethical issues, what’s right and what’s wrong? But that’s not what we hear from Jesus as a moral teacher. His Sermon on the Mount (perhaps the greatest moral code ever written) focuses instead on an invitation to do what’s higher. It assumes we are already living the elementary essentials of morality, the Ten Commandments, and instead invites us to something beyond those essentials, namely, to be the adult in the room who helps the world carry its tension.

Jesus doesn’t offer us moral theology in its classical or popular form. Rather he invites us into an ever-deepening discipleship (which is what moral theology, proper catechesis, and Sunday school are meant to do).

Here’s an example of an invitation that lies at the very heart of the Sermon on the Mount. At one point, Jesus invites us to a “virtue that goes deeper than that of the scribes and the Pharisees.” It’s easy to miss the point here because, almost without exception, we tend to think that Jesus is referring to the hypocrisy of some of the scribes and Pharisees. He isn’t. Most of the scribes and Pharisees were good, honest, sincere people who practiced a high virtue. For them, living a good moral and religious life meant keeping the Ten Commandments (all of them!) and being a man or woman who was scrupulously fair to everyone. It meant being a just person.

So, what’s lacking here? If I am a person who keeps all the Commandments and am fair and just in all my dealings with others, what is lacking in me morally? Why isn’t that enough?

Jesus’ answer to that takes us further than the Ten Commandments and the demands of justice. He invites us to something beyond.

He points out that the demands of justice still permit us to hate our enemies, to curse those who curse us, and to execute murderers (an eye for an eye). He invites us to something beyond that, namely, to love those who hate us, to bless those who curse us, and to forgive those who kill us. That is the essence of moral theology. And note that it comes to us as an invitation, inviting us always to something higher. It’s not concerned about what’s a sin and what isn’t (thou shalt not). Rather, it’s a positive invitation beckoning us to reach higher, to transcend our natural impulses, to be more than someone who just keeps the commandments and avoids sin.

I remember once hearing a lecture from the late Michael Hines in which he offered this image of God as forever inviting us to something higher: Imagine a mother coaxing a toddler to walk. Squatting on the floor in front of the child, an arm’s length away, her fingertips just inches away from the fingertips of the child, she gently coaxes the child to risk taking a step forward; then when the child takes that step, she moves her fingertips back a few inches, and again gently tries to coax the child into risking another step. And so, all the way across the floor.

That’s the image we need for Christian discipleship and moral theology. Our first concern should not be, is this a sin or not? Is it a sin to not go to church on Sunday? Is it a sin to entertain lustful thoughts? Is it sin to hold a grudge?

The question with which we need to challenge ourselves is rather, what am I being invited into? Where do I need to stretch myself toward something higher? Am I loving beyond my natural impulses? And more specifically: Am I loving those who hate me? Am I blessing those who curse me? Am I forgiving murderers?

I have not come to do away with the Ten Commandments; I have come to invite you to something higher – all the way across the floor.

Lies and the Sin Against the Holy Spirit

January 13, 2025

There is nothing as psychologically and morally dangerous as lying, as denying the truth. Jesus warns us that we can commit a sin that is unforgivable which (in his words) is a blaspheme against the Holy Spirit.

What is this sin? Why is it unforgivable? And how is it linked to not telling the truth?

This is the context where Jesus gives us this warning. He had just cast out a demon and some of the people who had witnessed this believed, as a hard religious doctrine, that only someone who came from God could cast out a demon. But they hated Jesus, so seeing him cast out a demon was a very inconvenient truth, so inconvenient in fact that they chose to deny what they had just seen with their own eyes. And so, against everything they knew to be true, they affirmed instead that Jesus had cast out the demon by Beelzebub, the prince of demons. They knew better. They knew that they were denying the truth.

Jesus’ first response was to try to make them see their lie. He appeals to logic, arguing that if Beelzebub, the prince of demons, is casting out demons, then Satan’s house is divided against itself and will eventually fall. But they persist in their lie. It’s then, in that specific context, that Jesus utters his warning about the danger of committing a sin that cannot be forgiven because it blasphemes the Holy Spirit.

In essence, what’s in this warning?

The people whom Jesus addressed had denied a reality that they had just seen with their own eyes because it was too difficult for them to accept its truth. So, they denied its truth, fully aware that they were lying.

Well, the first lie we tell is not so dangerous because we still know we are lying. The danger is that if we persist in that lie and continue to deny (and lie) we can reach a point where we believe the lie, see it as truth, and see truth as falsehood. Perversion is then seen as virtue, and the sin becomes unforgivable, not because forgiveness is withheld, but because we no longer believe we need forgiveness, nor in fact do we want it or remain open to receive it.

Whenever we lie or in any way deny the truth, we begin to warp our conscience and if we persist in this, eventually we will (and this is not too strong a phrase) pervert our soul so that for us falsehood looks like truth, darkness looks like light, and hell looks like heaven.

Hell is never a nasty surprise waiting for a basically honest, happy person. Hell can only be the full flowering of a long, sustained dishonesty where we have denied reality for so long that we now see dishonesty as truth. There isn’t anyone in hell who is repentant and wishing he or she had another chance to live and die in grace. If there is anyone in hell, that person, no matter his or her private misery, is feeling smug and looking with a certain disdain on the naivete of those who are honest, those in heaven.

And how is that a “blaspheme against the Holy Spirit”?

In his letter to the Galatians, St. Paul lays out two fundamental ways we can live our lives. We can live outside of God’s spirit. We do that whenever we are living in infidelity, idolatry, hatred, factionalism, anddishonesty. And lying is what takes us there. Conversely, we live inside God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, whenever we are living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity. And we live inside these whenever we are honest. Thus, whenever we lie, whenever we deny reality, whenever we deny truth, we are (in effect and in reality) stepping outside of God’s spirit, blaspheming that spirit by disdaining it.

Satan is the prince of lies. That’s why the biggest danger in our world is the amount of lies, disinformation, misinformation, and flat-out denial of reality that’s present most everywhere today – whenever, it seems, we don’t find the truth to our liking. There is nothing more destructive and dangerous to the health of our souls, the possibility of creating community among ourselves, the future of our planet, and our own sanity, than the flat-out denial of the truth of something that has happened.

When reality is denied: when a fact of history is rewritten to expunge a painful truth; when you are told that something you witnessed with your own eyes didn’t happen; when someone says, the holocaust didn’t happen; when someone says there never was slavery in this country; or when someone says no kids died at Sandy Hook, that doesn’t just dishonor millions of people, it plays on the sanity of a whole culture.

When something has happened and is subsequently denied, that doesn’t just make a mockery of truth, it plays havoc with our sanity, not least with the one who is telling the lie.

Coming to Peace with our Lack of Recognition

January 6, 2025

We crave few things as deeply as self-expression and recognition. We have an irrepressible need to express ourselves, be known, recognized, understood, and seen by others as unique, gifted, and significant. A heart that is unknown, unappreciated in its depth, lacking in meaningful self-expression and recognition, is prone to restlessness, frustration, and bitterness. And, truth be told, self-expression is difficult and full self-expression is impossible.

In the end, for most of us, our lives are always smaller than our needs and our dreams, no matter where we live or what we accomplish. In our daydreams each of us would like to be famous, the renowned writer, the graceful ballerina, the admired athlete, the movie star, the cover girl, the renowned scholar, the Nobel Prize winner, the household name; but in the end, most of us remain just another unknown, living among other unknowns, collecting an occasional autograph.

And so, our lives can seem too small for us. We feel ourselves as extraordinary, forever trapped inside the mundane, even as there is something inside us that still seeks expression, that still seeks recognition, and that feels that something precious inside us is living and dying in futility. In truth, seen only from the perspective of this world, much of what is precious, unique and rich, seemingly is living and dying in futility. Only a rare few achieve satisfying self-expression and recognition.

There’s a certain martyrdom in this. Iris Murdoch once said: “Art has its martyrs, not the least of which are those who have preserved their silence.” Lack of self-expression, whether chosen or imposed by circumstances, is a real death; but like all deaths it can be understood and appropriated in very different ways.

If it is accepted unhappily as tragic, it leads to bitterness and a broken spirit. If, however, it is understood and appropriated in faith as an invitation to be a hidden cell inside the Body of Christ and the human family, to anonymously provide sustenance and health to the overall body, it can lead to restfulness, gratitude, and sense of significance that lays the axe to the roots of our frustration, disappointment, depression, and bitterness.

I say this because much of what gives us life and sustains us in our lives has not been provided by the rich and famous, the high achievers, and those to whom history gives credit. As George Eliot points out, we don’t need to do great things that leave a big mark in human history because “the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life and rest in unvisited tombs.”

Well said. History bears this out. I think, for instance, of Therese of Lisieux who lived out her life in obscurity in a little convent tucked away in rural France, who when she died at age twenty-four, was probably known by fewer than one hundred people. In terms of how we assess things in this world she accomplished very little, nothing in terms of outstanding achievement or visible contribution. She entered the convent at age fifteen and spent the years until her early death doing menial things in the laundry, kitchen, and garden inside her obscure convent. The only tangible possession she left behind was a diary, a personal journal with bad spelling, which told the story of her family, her upbringing, and what she experienced during her last months in palliative care as she faced death.

But what she did leave behind is something that has made her a figure who is now renowned around the world, both inside and outside of faith circles. Her little private journal, The Story of a Soul, has touched millions of lives, despite its bad spelling (which had to be corrected by her sisters after her death).

What gives her little journal its unique power to touch hearts is that it chronicles what was happening inside the privacy of her own soul during all those years when she was hidden away and unknown, as child and as a nun. What she records in the story of her soul is that she, fully aware of her own uniqueness and preciousness, could unbegrudgingly give that all over in faith because she trusted that her gifts and talents were working silently (and powerfully) inside a mystical (though real, organic) body, the Body of Christ and of humanity. She understood herself as a cell inside a living body, giving over what was precious and unique inside her for the good of the world.

Anonymity offers us this invitation. There is no greater work of art that one can give to the world.

Jesus said as much. He told us to do our good deeds in secret and not let our left hand (and our neighbors and the world) know what our right hand is doing.

My Top Ten Books For 2024

December 30, 2024

Full disclosure, I don’t read enough. A busy, pressured life affords me only small windows of time to read anything not directly related to my ministry. Nonetheless, I try to be faithful to a discipline I set for myself years ago, namely, to read eight to ten pages every day from a book (magazines and newspapers don’t count). In a year that adds up to several thousand pages.

Among those pages this year, which ten books would I recommend? Here’s my list.

Among books on spirituality, I found each of these meaningful:

Richard Gaillardetz, While I Breathe I hope – A Mystagogy of Dying, edited by Grace Mariette Agoli. This is the book that affected me most this past year. Richard Gaillardez, as you probably know, was a renowned theologian at Boston College who died of cancer in November 2023. These are his reflections during the last months of his life. They show a remarkable faith and an equally remarkable love. He didn’t miss the hour of his death, but gave it away as a gift. This book is part of that gift.

Mark Joseph Williams, Torrent of Grace, A Catholic Survivor’s Healing Journey After Clergy Abuse. A survivor of clerical sexual abuse, Mark Williams comes to grips with this in a way that leads to forgiveness and reconciliation, but only after many years of trauma. He tells his story in a way that doesn’t gratuitously spray guilt around but leaves everyone, not least the institutional church, with a needed challenge. Everyone should read this story of healing.

John Mark Comer, Practicing the Way: Be with Jesus, Become like Him, Do as He Did. John Mark Comer is an Evangelical Christian with wide ecumenical leanings and solid theological insight. This is an excellent book, a practical guide to deepen anyone’s Christian discipleship, irrespective of denomination.

Mirabai Starr, Ordinary Mysticism, Your Life As Sacred Ground. Mirabai Starr is a believer and a mystic, even though she does not formally profess faith in any religion. She gives the phrase I am spiritual but not religious more depth than is ordinarily found there. And because she is not speaking out of any one religion or denomination, her words offer something for anyone of any religion or denomination.

Peter Halldorf, To Love Your Neighbor’s Church As Your Own – A Manifest for Christian Unity. Peter Halldorf is a Lutheran, Evangelical, Eastern Orthodox Christian. This book (which was handed to me by an Eastern Rite Bishop at an ecumenical celebration this past summer) outlines a vision for ecumenism and Christian unity which are more insightful and far-reaching than most anything I have read. This little book is a treasure.
Brian Swimme & Monica DeRaspe-Bolles, The Story of the Noosphere. Perhaps more scientific than spiritual, this very readable book will help you understand both the origins of our universe and how those origins fit seamlessly into a Christian vision.
Raymond E. Brown – Each year during those respective seasons, I reread Raymond Brown’s books on Advent, Christmas, Holy Week, Easter, and Pentecost. Each of these (five books in all) is a small (under 90 pages) volume which is a major scripture course all by itself.

Donna Freitas, Wishful Thinking, How I Lost My Faith and Why I Want to Find It. Known for her books in the area of sexuality, Freitas writes a memoir of her own struggles with faith and how that struggle was compounded by her personal experience of being sexually abused by a priest. What sets this book apart from other memoirs of this sort is the second phrase in her title, Why I Want to Find it.

Among academic books, I recommend this one:

William T. Cavanaugh, The Uses of Idolatry. Charles Taylor in his classic, A Secular Age, speaks of how we now live in an age of disenchantment, wherein we no longer see anything behind empirical reality. For us, he submits, there are no angels, no spirits, no demons, and no gods, only empirical reality. We live with what he calls “buffered personalities,” that is, the world of spirits and demons no longer affects us. The consequence of this is that agnosticism and atheism now become easy options. Cavanaugh disputes that and argues that we are not disenchanted. Rather we are simply re-enchanted with different (empirical) spirits, demons, and gods. Our problem, he believes, is not atheism but idolatry. We simply are worshipping new gods and fearing new demons. This is an interesting read, though not an easy one.

Among novels, it hasn’t been a banner year for me, both because I didn’t find time to read many novels and because I was disappointed with many I did read. But this one stands out:

Anne Michaels, Held. Nominated this year for the Booker Prize, this is Anne Michaels at her literary best, though with a storyline that is not always easy to follow. But Anne Michaels is always worth reading.

And all of this is offered under St. Augustine’s famous dictum: Concerning taste there should be no disputes.

Christ’s Birth in Bethlehem – Soothing or Disturbing?

December 23, 2024

I’ve never been fully comfortable with some of my friends who send out Christmas cards with messages like: May the Peace of Christ Disturb You! Can’t we have one day a year to be happy and celebrate without having our already unhappy selves shaken with more guilt? Isn’t Christmas a time when we can enjoy being children again? Moreover, as Karl Rahner once said, isn’t Christmas a time when God gives us permission to be happy? So why not?

Well, it’s complex. Christmas is a time when God gives us permission to be happy, when the voice of God says: Comfort my people. Be comforted! Speak words of comfort!

But Christmas is also a time that highlights the sad truth that when God was born in our world two thousand years ago, there wasn’t room for that birth in all the normal homes and places of the day. There was no room for him at the inn. Peoples’ busy lives and practical concerns kept them from offering him a place to be born. That hasn’t changed. So, there are also good reasons to be disturbed.

But first, the comfort: A number of years ago, I participated in a large diocesan synod. At one point the animator in charge had us divide into small groups and each group was asked the question: What’s the single most-important message the church needs to say to the world right now?

The groups reported back and each group named some important spiritual or moral challenge: “We need to challenge our society toward more justice!” “We need to challenge the world to have real faith and not confuse God’s word with its own wishes.” “We need to challenge our world toward a more responsible sexual ethos.” Wonderful, needed challenges, all of them. But no group came back and said: “We need to speak to the world of God’s consolation!”

Granted, there is injustice, violence, racism, sexism, greed, selfishness, sexual irresponsibility, and self-serving faith around; but most adults in our world are also living in pain, anxiety, disappointment, loss, depression, and unresolved guilt. Everywhere you look, you see heavy hearts. Moreover, many people living with hurt and disappointment do not see God and the church as an answer to their pain but rather as somehow part of its cause.

So, in preaching God’s word, our churches need to assure the world of God’s love, God’s concern, and God’s forgiveness. Perhaps before doing anything else, God’s word is meant to comfort us; indeed, to be the ultimate source of all comfort. Only when the world knows God’s consolation will it be more open to accept the concomitant challenge.

And prominent in that challenge is to make room for Christ at the inn, namely, to open our hearts, our homes, and our world as places where Christ can come and live, no matter how inconvenient that may be. From the safe distance of two thousand years, we too easily make a scathing judgment on the people at the time of Jesus’ birth for not knowing what Mary and Joseph were carrying and for not making a place for Jesus to be born. How could they be so blind?

But that same judgment can still be made of us. We aren’t exactly making room in our own inns.

When a new person is born into this world, he or she takes a space where before there was no one. Sometimes that new person is warmly welcomed and a loving space is created and everyone around is happy for this new invasion. But that isn’t always the case; sometimes, as was the case with Jesus, there is no space created for the new person and his or her presence is not welcomed.

We see this today (and this will constitute a judgment on our generation) in the reluctance, almost all over the world, to welcome new immigrants, to make room for them at the inn. If Christ is in the poor, in the stranger, and the Gospels assure us that he is, then Christ is surely in the immigrant. Today there are over fifty million refugees in the world, people whom no one will welcome. Why not?

We are not bad people and are capable most times of being wonderfully generous. But letting this flood of immigrants enter our lives would disturb us. Our lives would have to change. We would lose some of our present comforts, some of our old familiarities, and some of our securities.

We are not bad people, neither were those innkeepers two thousand years ago who, not knowing what they were dealing with, in inculpable ignorance, turned Mary and Joseph away. I’ve always nursed a secret sympathy for them. Maybe because I am still, also in ignorance, doing exactly what they did. My comfort and security often have me say, No room at the inn.

The skewed circumstances of Christ’s birth, if understood, cannot but disturb. May they also bring deep consolation.

Searching for a Womb to Birth a Messiah

December 16, 2024

“People are always impatient, but God is never in a hurry!” Nikos Kazantzakis wrote those words and they highlight an important truth. We need to be patient, infinitely patient, with God. We need to let things unfold in their proper time, God’s time.

Looking at religious history through the centuries, we cannot help but be struck by the fact that God seemingly takes his time in the face of our impatience. Our scriptures are often a record of frustrated desire, of non-fulfillment, and of human impatience. It is more the exception when God intervenes directly and decisively to resolve a particular human tension. We are always longing for a messiah to take away our pain and to avenge oppression, but mostly those prayers seem to fall on deaf ears.

Thus, we see in scripture the constant, painful cry: Come, Lord, come! Save us! How much longer must we wait? When, Lord, when?

We are forever impatient, but God refuses to be hurried. Why? Why is God, seemingly, so slow to act? Is God callous to our suffering? Why is God so patient, so slow-moving, when we are suffering so deeply? Why is God so excruciatingly slow to act in the face of human impatience?

There’s a line in Jewish apocrypha literature, which metaphorically helps answer this question: Every tear brings the Messiah closer! There is, it would seem, an intrinsic connection between frustration and the possibility of a messiah being born. Messiahs can only be born after a long period of human yearning. Why?

Human birth already sheds some light on that. Gestation cannot be hurried and there is an organic connection between the pain a mother experiences in childbirth and the delivery of a new life. That’s also true of Jesus’ birth. It presupposes a gestation process that cannot be rushed. Tears, pain, and a long season of prayer are needed to create the conditions for the kind of pregnancy that births a messiah into our world. Why? Because a certain kind of love and life can be born only after a long-suffering patience has created the correct space, a virginal womb, within which the sublime can be born. The sublime is invariably predicated on a previous sublimation.

A couple of metaphors can help us understand this.

John of the Cross, in trying to explicate how a person can come to be inflamed with altruistic love, uses the image of a log bursting into flame in a fireplace. When a green log is placed in a fire, it doesn’t start to burn immediately. It first needs to be dried out. Thus, for a long time, it just sizzles in the fire, its greenness and dampness slowly drying out. Only when it reaches kindling temperature can it ignite and burst into flame.

Speaking metaphorically, before a log can burst into flame, it needs to pass through a certain advent, a certain drying out, a period of frustration and yearning. So too, the dynamics of how a special kind of love is born in our lives. We can ignite into this kind of love only when we, separate, green, damp logs, have sizzled sufficiently in the fire of unfulfilled desire.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin offers a second metaphor: He speaks of something he calls “the raising of our psychic temperature.” In a chemistry laboratory you can place two elements in the same test tube and not get fusion. The elements remain separate, refusing to unite. It is only after they are heated to a higher temperature that they unite. We’re no different. Often it’s only when our psychic temperature has been raised sufficiently that there’s fusion, that is, it’s only when unrequited longing has raised our soul’s temperature that we can move towards reconciliation and union.

In brief, sometimes we must be brought to a psychic fever through frustration and pain before we are willing to let go of our selfishness and let ourselves be drawn into community.

Thomas Halik once suggested that an atheist is simply another word for someone who doesn’t have enough patience with God. He’s right. God is never in a hurry, and for good reason. Messiahs can only be gestated inside a particular kind of womb, namely, one within which there’s enough patience and willingness to wait, so as to let things happen on God’s terms, not ours.

Every tear brings the Messiah closer. This isn’t an unfathomable mystery. Ideally, every frustration should make us more ready to love. Ideally, every tear should make us more ready to forgive. Ideally, every heartache should make us more ready to let go of some of our separateness. Ideally, every unfulfilled longing should lead us into a deeper and more sincere prayer. And ideally, all of our pained impatience for a consummation that forever eludes us should make us feverish enough to burst into love’s flame. As another aphorism in Jewish apocrypha literature poetically states: It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth!

From Saints to Celebrities: Our Evolution in Admiration and Imitation

December 9, 2024

When I was a young boy growing up in a Catholic community, the catechesis of the time tried to inspire the hearts of the young with stories of martyrs, saints, and other people who lived out high ideals in terms of virtue and faith. I remember one story in particular which inspired me, the story of a third-century Christian martyr, St. Tarcisius.

As legend (or truth) has it, Tarcisius was a twelve-year-old acolyte during the time of the early Christian persecutions. At that time, Christians in Rome were celebrating the Eucharist in secret in the catacombs. After those secret masses, a deacon or an acolyte would carry the Eucharistic species, the Blessed Sacrament, to the sick and to prisoners. One day, after one of those secret masses, young Tarcisius was carrying the Blessed Sacrament enroute to a prison when he was accosted by a mob. He refused to hand over the Blessed Sacrament, protected it with his own body, and was beaten to death as a result.

As a twelve-year-old boy, that story inflamed my romantic imagination. I yearned for that kind of ideal in my life. In my young imagination, Tarcisius was the kind of hero that I wanted to be.

We’ve come a long way since then, both in our culture and in our churches. We are no longer moved much romantically by either the saints of old or the saints of today. Yes, we still make an official place for them in our churches and in our abstract ideals, but we are now, in effect, moved much more by the lives of the rich, the famous, the beautiful, our pop stars, our professional athletes, the physically gifted, and the intellectually gifted. They now inflame our imaginations, draw our admiration, and it’s them we want to be like.

In the early nineteenth century, Alban Butler, an English convert, collected stories of the lives of the saints and eventually set them together in twelve volume set, famously known as Butler’s Lives of the Saints. For nearly two hundred years, these books inspired Christians, young and old. No longer.

Today, Butler’s Lives of the Saints has effectively been replaced by multiple magazines, podcasts, and websites which chronicle the lives of the rich and famous and stare out at us from our phones, our laptops, and from every newsstand and grocery store checkout line.

In effect, we have moved: from St. Tarcisius to Justin Bieber; from Therese of Lisieux to Taylor Swift; from Thomas Aquinas to Tom Brady; from St. Monica to Meryl Streep; from St. Augustine to Mark Zuckerberg; from Julian of Norwich to Oprah; and from the first African American saint, St. Martin de Porres, to Lebron James. It’s these people who now inflame our romantic imagination and whom we would most want to be like.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that these people are bad or that there’s anything wrong with admiring them. Indeed, we owe them some admiration because all beauty and talent take their origin in God who is the author of all good things. From a saint’s virtue to a movie star’s physical beauty, to an athlete’s grace, there’s only one author at the origin of it all, God.

Thomas Aquinas once rightly pointed out that to withhold a compliment from someone who deserves it is a sin because we are withholding food that someone else needs to live on. Beauty, talent, and grace need to be recognized and acknowledged. Admiration is not the issue. Rather, the issue is that while we need to admire and acknowledge talent, grace, and beauty, these do not in themselves radiate virtue and saintliness. We shouldn’t automatically identify human grace with moral virtue, though that’s the temptation today.

As well, a weakness in our churches today is that while we have vastly refined and upgraded our intellectual imagination and now have better and healthier theological and biblical studies, we struggle to touch hearts. While we have more power to satisfy the intellect, we struggle to touch the heart, that is, we struggle to get people to fall in love with their faith and especially with their churches. We struggle to inflame their romantic imagination, as we once did by invoking the lives of the saints.

Where might we go with all of this? Can we find saints again who inflame our ideals? Can the fine work on hagiography (on the lives of the saints and other moral giants) being done today by Robert Ellsberg become the new Butler’s Lives of the Saints? Can secular biographies of some moral giants in our own age draw our imitation? Can the life of a Dag Hammarskjold become for us a moral and faith inspiration? Is there a new Therese of Lisieux out there? Today, more than ever, we need inspiring stories about women and men, young and old, who have lived out heroic virtue. We need moral exemplars, moral mentors. Otherwise, we cheat ourselves by simplistically identifying human grace with moral virtue.

Vows We Don’t Choose

December 2, 2024

As a member of a religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, I chose to make four religious vows: poverty, chastity, obedience, and perseverance. I did this freely, with no other compulsion than a strong inner sense that this was being asked of me. That freedom to make vows with no outside pressures, is a luxury millions of men and women don’t have. On their part, they take these same vows (albeit in a different modality) because they are compelled by circumstance to do so. In effect, these are vows that someone else makes for them.

William Wordsworth once gave this poetic expression:

My heart was full; I made no vows, but vows

Were then made for me; bond unknown to me

Was given, that I should be, else sinning greatly.

Most of us, I suspect, have known people for which this is true, that is, persons who without ever formally professing religious vows, lived out their own version of obedience, celibacy, poverty, and perseverance. For most of their lives, circumstances conscripted them and in effect took away their freedom so that they were never able to make their own choices about where to go in life, about educational opportunities, about where to live, about what job to have, and (not least) about whether to marry or not. Rather they spend their adult years existentially unfree, bound by circumstance and duty, sacrificing their own dreams and plans in order to serve others.

Many of us still know people who because of circumstances like poverty, the death of a parent, a family situation, or personal illness have had vows made for them. Several of my older brothers fall into that category. But, and this is the point, even though those vows are not made explicitly or publicly, they are consecrated vows, sacred in the biblical sense.

What does it mean to be consecrated? What is consecration?

Sadly, today we have turned this word into a “church word”, and we speak of consecrated buildings (churches), consecrated cups (chalices), and consecrated persons (ministers in our churches and vowed religious). Why do we speak of them as consecrated? The answer lies in the original meaning of what it means to be consecrated.

To be consecrated simply means to be “set aside” – though not first of all for church purposes. Rather, imagine this scenario: You have just left work and are driving home when you come upon the scene of an accident. You are not in the accident but are first to arrive there. At that moment you lose your freedom. You are no longer free to simply drive off. People are injured and you are there! You are conscripted and have to respond simply because you are there. At that moment you become a consecrated person, consecrated by circumstance, by need. At that moment, in Wordsworth’s words, certain vows are made for you.

There’s an interesting parallel to the situation Moses finds himself in when God asks him to be the person to lead the Israelites out of slavery. Moses does not want the job, nor does he volunteer for it. He gives God various excuses as to why he isn’t the right person, and ends up by asking God, “Why me? Why not my brother?” In essence, God’s answer is this: “Because you saw the oppression of the people. Because you’ve seen it, you’re no longer free. You’re like the first person at the scene of an accident.”

That’s what it means to be consecrated, to be called, to have a vocation. While you remain radically free (you can drive away from the accident) you are no longer existentially or morally free – else, as Wordsworth says, you should sin gravely. Your choice is not whether to get on with life or to stay and help? Your only question is: what’s my responsibility here? Circumstance has made a vow for you.

It can be helpful to understand vocation, vows, and consecration through this lens. I once chose freely to give myself over to a vocation which asked me to publicly make a set of vows, that is, to live in a certain simplicity, to forego marriage and having my own family, to make myself available for the service of others, and to persevere in that for the rest of my life. Several of my own siblings (and millions of women and men) have done the same thing, without the recognition and communal support that comes with public vows. They too lived consecrated lives, though without public recognition.

In affirming this, I do not exclude married persons, except to say that, in marriage, like me, they made public vows and thus receive a certain recognition and communal support that comes with that; albeit their vows, save for celibacy, are the same.

All of us are perennially at the scene of an accident, unfree to drive away, conscripted, bound by vows that are made for us. It’s called having a vocation.

Heaven Isn’t the Same for Everyone

November 25, 2024

Daniel Berrigan once said: Before you get serious about Jesus, think carefully about how good you are going to look on wood!

That’s a needed caution because Jesus warned us that if we follow him, pain will flow into our lives and we will join him on the cross.

What exactly does that mean? Is pain laid on a disciple as some kind of test? Does Jesus need his followers to feel the pains he experienced? Does God want the followers of Jesus to undergo pain to help pay the price of sin? Why does accepting to carry the cross with Jesus bring pain into our lives?

It’s interesting to note that the great mystic John of the Cross uses this, the inflow of pain into our lives, as a major criterion for discerning whether or not we are authentically following Jesus. For John, you know you are following Jesus when pain begins to flow into your life. Why? Does God lay special pain on those who take Christ seriously?

No. God doesn’t apportion special pain on those who take Christ seriously. The pain that flows into our lives if we take Christ seriously doesn’t come from God. It flows into us because of a deeper openness, a deeper sensitivity, and a new depth on our part. The algebra works this way: By authentically opening ourselves up to Christ we cease being overly self-protective, become more vulnerable and more sensitive, so that life, all of it, can flow into us more freely and more deeply.

And part of what now flows into us is pain: the pain of others, the pain of mother earth, the pain of our own inadequacy and lack of altruism, and the pain caused by the effect of sin everywhere. This pain will now enter us more deeply and we will feel it in a way we never did before because previously we protected ourselves against it through insensitivity and self-focus.

Happily, this has a flip side: Just as pain will now flow into our lives more freely and more deeply, so too will meaning and happiness. Once we stop protecting ourselves through self-absorption, both pain and happiness can now flow more freely and more deeply into our hearts and we can begin to breathe out of a deeper part of ourselves.

Freud once commented that sometimes things can be best understood by examining their opposites. That’s partially the case here. The opposite of someone who opens herself to pain, who opens herself to the pain of the cross, is a person who is callous and insensitive (in slang, someone “who is thick as a plank!”). Such a person won’t feel a lot of pain – but won’t feel much of anything else either.

A number of implications flow from this.

First, God doesn’t lay pain on us when we become followers of Jesus and immerse ourselves more deeply in the mystery of Christ and the cross. The pain that ensues is intrinsic to the cross and is felt simply because we have now ceased protecting ourselves and are letting life, all of it, flow into us more freely and more deeply. Happily, the pain is more than offset by the new meaning and happiness that are now also felt.

Second, experiencing the pain that flows intrinsically from discipleship and the cross is, as John of the Cross wisely puts it, one of the major criteria that separates the real Gospel from the Prosperity Gospel. When the pain of the cross flows into our lives, we know that we are not feather-bedding our own self-interest in the name of the Gospel.

Third, it’s worth it to be sensitive! Freud once said that neurosis (unhealthy anxiety) is the disease of the normal person. What he didn’t say, but might have, is that the antithesis of anxiety (healthy and unhealthy) is brute insensitivity, to be thick as a plank and thus protected from pain – but also protected from deeper meaning, love, intimacy, and community.

If you are a sensitive person (perhaps even an over-sensitive one, prone to depression and anxiety of all sorts) take consolation in that your very struggle indicates that you are not a calloused insensitive person, not a moral boor.

Finally, one of the implications of this is that heaven isn’t the same for everyone. Just as pain can be shallow or deep, so too can meaning and happiness. To the degree that we open our hearts to depth, to that same degree deep meaning and happiness can flow into us. A closed heart makes for shallow meaning. A heart partially open makes for some deep meaning, but not full meaning. Whereas the heart that is fully open makes for the deepest meaning.

There are different depths to meaning and happiness here on earth and, I suspect, that will be true too in the next life. So, the invitation from Jesus is to accept the pain that comes from the wood of the cross rather than being thick as a plank!

The Tower of Babel

November 18, 2024

The opening pages of the Bible offer us a series of stories set at the beginning of history which are meant to explain why the world today is as it is. The Adam and Eve story about original sin is one of those stories. There are others. These stories, because they use imagery that might make them sound like fairy tales, can seem total fantasy to us, but they are stories that are truer than true. They happened. They happened to the first man and woman on this planet, and they continue to happen today in a way that affects every man and woman throughout history. They are stories of the heart, not meant to be taken literally, but carrying lessons for the heart.

One of these “in the beginning”, foundational, archetypal, stories is the story of the Tower of Babel. In street language, it goes like this: In the beginning (before time was like it is now) there was a town called Babel which decided it would make a name for itself by building a tower so impressive that all the other towns would have to admire it. They began building the tower, but something strange happened. As they were building it, they suddenly all began to speak different languages, were no longer able to understand each other, and scattered around the world, each now speaking in a language incomprehensible to everyone else.

What’s the lesson? Is this meant to explain the origin of the different languages of the world? No, rather it is meant to explain the deep, seemingly irreconcilable misunderstandings among us. Why do we forever misunderstand each other? What’s at the origin of this?

There are multiple ways this story can be used to shed light on the divisions in our world today. Here’s one: Writing in The Atlantic last year, social psychologist Jonathan Haidt suggested that there is perhaps no better metaphor to explain the divisions among us today than the Tower of Babel. His argument runs this way: Social media, the very thing that was meant to connect us not only to our friends and families but to people from around the globe, has in fact led to a radical fragmentation of our society and to the shattering of all that had seemed solid, the scattering of people who had been a community. Take America, for example; while we might still be speaking the same language, social media and cable news echo chambers have supplied us with different sets of facts, values, and visions that make actual conversation increasingly impossible.

As the recent tensions around the US Presidential elections made evident, as a society we no longer speak the same language in that we can no longer understand each other on virtually every key issue – global warming, immigration, poverty, gender, health, abortion, the place of religion in the public sphere, whose side truth is on, and, most important of all, what truth is. We no longer share any common truths. Rather, we all have our own truth, our own individual language. As the popular saying goes, I have done my own research! I don’t trust science. I don’t trust any mainstream truths. I have my own sources.

And those sources are many, too many to count! Hundreds of television channels, countless podcasts and millions of persons feeding us their idiosyncratic version of things on social media so that now there is skepticism about any fact or truth. This is dividing us at every level: family, neighborhood, church, country, and world. We are all now speaking different languages and, like the original inhabitants of Babel, are being scattered around the world.

In the light of this, it is noteworthy how the original Pentecost is described in scripture. The Acts of the Apostles describes Pentecost, the coming of the Holy Spirit, as an event which reverses what happened at the Tower of Babel. At the Tower of Babel, the languages (the “tongues”) of the earth divided and scattered. At Pentecost, the Holy Spirit descends on each person as a “tongue of fire” so that, to everyone’s great surprise, everyone now understands everyone one else in his or her own language.

Again, what is being described here is not about literal human languages – where at Pentecost everyone suddenly understood Greek or Latin. Rather everyone now understood everyone else in his or her own language. All languages became one language.

What is that common language? It’s neither Greek nor Latin nor English nor French nor Spanish nor Yiddish nor Chinese nor Arabic, nor any other of the world’s spoken languages. Neither is it the less-than-fully-compassionate language of the conservatives or the liberals. It is, as Jesus and our scriptures make clear, the language of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, faith, and chastity.

This is the only language which can bridge the misunderstandings and differences among us – and when we are speaking it, we will not be trying to build a tower to impress anyone.

Lighter Thoughts on a Heavy Subject

November 11, 2024

Some years ago, a friend was facing the birth of her first child. While happy that she was soon to be a mother, she confessed openly her fears about the actual birth process, the pain, the dangers, the unknown. But she consoled herself with the thought that hundreds of millions of women have experienced giving birth and managed it. Surely, she felt she could manage it too.

I sometimes take those words and apply them to the prospect of dying. Death is the most daunting, unsettling, and heaviest topic there is, our occasional false bravado notwithstanding. When we say that we are not afraid of dying, mostly we’re whistling in the dark and, even there, the tune comes out easier when our own death remains still an abstract idea, something in the indefinite future. Full disclosure, my own thoughts about dying no doubt fit that description, whistling in the dark. But why not? Surely whistling in the dark is better than torturing ourselves with unnecessary fear.

And so, I employ my friend’s methodology for steeling her courage in the face of having to give birth and face that unknown. Simply put, millions and millions of people have managed the process of dying, so I should be able to manage it too! Moreover, unlike giving birth to a child, which affects less than half the human race, in the case of dying, everyone, including myself, is going to have to manage it. A hundred years from now, everyone reading these words will have had to manage his or her death.

So, here’s a way to look at our own death: Billions and billions of people have managed this, men, women, children, even babies. Some were old, some were young; some were prepared, some were not; some welcomed it, some met it with bitter resistance; some died from natural causes, some died through violence; some died surrounded by love, some died alone without any human love surrounding them; some died peacefully, some died crying out in fear; some died at a ripe old age, some died in the prime of their youth; some suffered for years from a seemingly meaningless dementia with those around them wondering why God and nature seemed cruel in keeping them alive; others in robust physical health with seemingly everything to live for, took their own lives; some died full of faith and hope, and some died feeling only darkness and despair; some died breathing out gratitude, and some died breathing out resentment; some died in the embrace of religion and their churches, some died completely outside of that embrace; and some died like Mother Teresa, while others died like Hitler. But every one of them somehow managed it, the great unknown, the greatest of all unknowns. It seems it can be managed.

Moreover, nobody has come back from the other world with horror stories about dying which suggests that all our horror movies about being tormented after death and ghosts and haunted houses are pure fiction, through and through.

Most people, I suspect, have the same experience that I have when I think about the dead, particularly about persons I have known who have died. The initial grief and sadness of their loss eventually wears off and is replaced by an inchoate sense that it’s alright, that they are alright, and that death has in some strange way washed things clean. In the end, we have a pretty good feeling about our dead loved ones and about the dead in general, even if their departure from this earth was far from ideal, as for instance if they died angry, or through immaturity, or because they committed a crime, or by suicide. Somehow it eventually all washes clean and what remains is the inchoate sense, a solid intuition, that wherever they are now, they are in better and safer hands than our own.

When I was a young seminarian we once had to translate Cicero’s treatise on aging and dying from Latin into English. I was nineteen years old at the time, but was very taken by Cicero’s thoughts on why we shouldn’t fear death. He was a renowned stoic; but, in the end, his lack of fear of dying was a little like my friend’s approach to giving birth, that is, given how universal it is, we should be able to manage it!

I’ve long since lost my undergraduate notes on Cicero, so I looked up the treatise on the Internet recently. Here’s a nugget from that treatise: “Death should be held of no account! For clearly the impact of death is negligible if it utterly annihilates the soul, or even desirable, if it conducts the soul to some place where it is to live forever. What, then, shall I fear, if after death I am destined to be either not unhappy or happy?”

Our faith tells us that, given the love and benevolence of the God we believe in, only the second option, happiness, awaits us. And we already intuit that.

Bread and Wine

November 4, 2024

At the Last Supper when Jesus instituted the Eucharist he chose to use two elements, bread and wine. The images are now so deeply ingrained in our consciousness that we never stop to ask, why bread and wine? Among all the things Jesus might have chosen, why these two? What do they carry in themselves that make them particularly apt to give expression to the body and blood of Christ? What, more particularly, does each represent?

As they are used in the Eucharist, bread and wine symbolize very different aspects of our lives, of our world, and of Jesus’ life.

Bread. What is bread? What did it represent for Jesus at that first Eucharist? A loaf of bread is made up of many kernels of wheat which when ground up lose their separate identity and become a single loaf. In the Eucharist, the bread represents us, many individuals, now together as one body, the Body of Christ. But it also represents a particular aspect of our lives, namely, our lives insofar as we are joyous, healthy, in community with each other, and thriving as God’s children. The smell of fresh bread speaks of life. So does the bread at the Eucharist. It becomes the bread of the world’s achievements and holds up for God’s blessing all that is young, healthy, creative, and bursting with life.

Metaphorically, the bread celebrates the Galilean period in Jesus’ life and in our own lives – the time of youth, of miracles, of walking on water, of raising people from the dead, of the joyous energy of life, of falling in love, and of the birth of new life.

The wine. What did it represent for Jesus and what does it represent in the Eucharist? Wine is made from crushed grapes and represents blood. And as the blood of Christ, it represents all that is broken, fragile, not whole, sick, suffering, and dying in the world. It is the wine of the world’s mortality and inadequacy, the blood of all is crushed as the world’s achievements take place.

Metaphorically, the wine commemorates the Jerusalem period of Jesus’ life and that period in our own lives – the time of misunderstanding, of being the victim, of mental anguish, of physical anguish, of being ostracized, of the loneliness of dying when others can’t help us.

And the two together make for one balanced whole, life in all its aspects. In effect, when the presider at a Eucharist holds up the bread and wine, this what is being said: Lord, what I hold up for you today is all that is in this world, both of joy and suffering – the bread of the world’s achievements and the blood of all that’s crushed as those achievements take place. I offer you everything that is healthy and thriving in our world – the joy at our tables, the joy of children, the hopeful dreams of the young, the satisfaction of achievement, and everything that’s creative and bursting with life, even as I offer you all that is weak, feeble, aged, crushed, sick, dying, and victimized. I offer to you all the pagan beauties, pleasures, and joys of this life, even as I stand with you under the cross, affirming that the one who is excluded from earthly pleasure is the cornerstone of the community. I offer you the strong, along with the weak and gentle of heart, asking you to bless both and stretch my heart so that it can, like you, hold and bless everything that is. I offer you both the wonders and the pains of this world, your world.

Spirituality might take some lessons from this. Too often spiritualities are one-sided and need balance.

On the one hand, a spirituality can center itself too one-sidedly on human thriving to the neglect of human inadequacy: suffering, sin, mortality, and of Jesus’ invitation to take up his cross. It celebrates only youth, health, prosperity, and goodness – and presents a Jesus who offers us a Prosperity Gospel rather than a Whole Gospel.

Conversely, a spirituality can center itself too one-sidedly on human inadequacy: sin, mortality, asceticism, and the renunciation of pleasure. It celebrates the old but not the young, the sick but not the healthy, the poor but not the prosperous, the dying but not the living, and the next world but not this one. This strips the Gospel of its wholeness and presents a Jesus who is an unhealthy ascetic and frowns on natural human happiness.

The bread and wine in the Eucharist give voice to all aspects of life. In the words of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, the words of consecration at a Eucharist in essence read like this: “Over every living thing which is to spring up, to grow, to flower, to ripen during this day, I say again the words: ‘This is my body’. And over every death-force which waits in readiness to corrode, to wither, to cut down, I speak again your words which express the supreme mystery of faith: ‘This is my blood.’”

A Universal Creed

October 28, 2024

Creeds ground us. Within a short formula they summarize the main tenets of our faith and keep us mindful of the truths that anchor us.

As a Christian, I pray two creeds, The Apostles’ Creed and The Nicene Creed. But I also pray another creed which grounds me in some deep truths which are not always sufficiently recognized as inherent in our Christian creeds. This creed, given in the Epistle to the Ephesians, is stunningly brief and simply reads: There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God who is Father of us all.

That’s a lot in a few words! This creed, while Christian, takes in all denominations, all faiths, and all sincere persons everywhere. Everyone on the planet can pray this creed because ultimately there is only one Lord, one faith, one baptism, and one God who created and loves us all.

This has far-reaching consequences for how we understand God, other Christian denominations, other faiths, sincere non-believers, and ourselves. There is only one God, no matter our denomination, particular faith, or no explicit faith at all. The one same God is the loving creator and parent of everyone. And that one God has no favorites, doesn’t dislike certain persons, denominations, or faiths, and never disdains goodness or sincerity, no matter their particular religious or secular cloak.

And these are some of the consequences: First, Jesus assures us that God is the author of all that is good. In addition, as Christians we believe that God has certain transcendental attributes, namely, God is one, true, good, and beautiful. If that is true (and how could it be otherwise?), then everything we see in our world that is integral, true, good, or beautiful, whatever its outward label (Roman Catholic, Protestant, Evangelical, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist, Muslim, New Age, Neo-Pagan, or purely Secular), comes from God and must be honored.

John Muir once challenged Christianity with this question: Why are Christians so reluctant to let animals into their stingy heaven? The creed in the Epistle to the Ephesians asks something similar: Why are Christians so reluctant to let other denominations, other faiths, and good sincere people without explicit faith into our stingy concept of God, Christ, faith, and the church? Why are we afraid of faith fellowship with Christians of other denominations? Why are we afraid of faith fellowship with sincere Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and New Age religious? Why are we afraid of paganism? Why are we afraid of natural sacraments?

There can be good reasons. First, we do need to safeguard precisely the truths expressed in our creeds and not slide into an amorphous syncretism in which everything is relative, where all truths and all religions are equal, and the only dogmatic requirement is that we be nice to each other. Although there is, in fact, something (religious) to be said about being nice to each other, the more important point is that embracing each other in faith fellowship is not saying that all faiths are equal and that one’s particular denomination or faith tradition is unimportant. Rather it is acknowledging (importantly) that, at the end of the day, we are all one family, under one God, and that we need to embrace each other as brothers and sisters. Despite our differences, we all have the same radical creed.

Then too, as Christians, we believe that Christ is the unique mediator between God and ourselves. As Jesus puts it, no one goes to the Father, except through me. If that is true, and as Christians we hold that as dogma, then where does that leave Hindus, Buddhists, Taoists, Jews, Muslims, New Agers, Neo-Pagans, and sincere non-believers? How do they share the kingdom with us Christians since they do not believe in Christ?

As Christians, we have always had answers to that question. The Catholic catechisms of my youth spoke of a “baptism of desire” as a way of entry into the mystery of Christ. Karl Rahner spoke of sincere persons being “anonymous Christians”. Frank de Graeve spoke of a reality he called “Christ-ianity”, as a mystery wider than historical “Christianity”; and Pierre Teilhard de Chardin spoke of Christ as being the final anthropological and cosmological structure within the evolutionary process itself. What all of these are saying is that the mystery of Christ cannot be identified simplistically with the historical Christian churches. The mystery of Christ works through the historical Christian churches but also works, and works widely, outside of our churches and outside the circles of explicit faith.

Christ is God and therefore is found wherever anyone is in the presence of oneness, truth, goodness, and beauty. Kenneth Cragg, after many years as a missionary with the Muslims, suggested that it is going to take all the religions of the world to give full expression to the full Christ.

There is one Lord, one faith, one baptism, one God who is Father of us all – and so we should not be so reluctant to let others, not of our own kind, into our stingy heaven.

A Double Primordial Branding Within

October 21, 2024

From Pierre Teilhard de Chardin we get these words: “Because, my God, though I lack the soul-zeal and the sublime integrity of your saints, I yet have received from you an overwhelming sympathy for all that stirs within the dark mass of matter; because I know myself to be irremediably less a child of heaven and a son of earth.”

These words, like the words that open St. Augustine’s famous Confessions, not only describe a lifelong tension inside its author; they also name the foundational pieces for an entire spirituality. For everyone who is emotionally healthy and honest, there will be a lifelong tension between the attractions of this world and the lure of God. The earth, with its beauties, its pleasures, and its physicality can take our breath away and have us believe that this world is all there is and all that needs to be. Who needs anything further? Isn’t life here on earth enough? Besides, what proof is there for any reality and meaning beyond our lives here?

But even as we are so powerfully, and rightly, drawn to the world and what it offers, another part of us finds itself caught in the embrace and the grip of another reality, the divine, which though more inchoate, is no less unrelenting. It also tells us that it is real, that its reality ultimately offers life, that it needs to be honored, and that it may not be ignored. And, just like the reality of the world, it presents itself both as promise and threat. Sometimes it’s felt as a warm cocoon in which we sense ultimate shelter and sometimes we feel its power as a threatening judgment on our superficiality, mediocrity, and sin. Sometimes it blesses our fixation on earthly life and its pleasures and sometimes it frightens us and relativizes both our world and our lives. We can sometimes shield ourselves from it by distraction or denial; but it stays, maintaining always a powerful tension inside us: we are irremediably children of both heaven and earth; both God and the world ask for our attention.

That’s how it’s meant to be. God made us irremediably physical, fleshy, earth-oriented, with virtually every instinct inside us reaching for the things of this earth. We should not then expect that God wants us to shun this earth, deny its genuine beauty, and attempt to step out of our bodies, our natural instincts, and our physicality to fix our eyes only on the things of heaven. God did not build this world as a testing place, a place where obedience and piety are to be tested against the lure of earthly pleasure, to see if we’re worthy of heaven. This world is its own mystery with its own meaning, a God-given one. It’s not simply a stage upon which we, as humans, play out our individual dramas of salvation and then close the curtain as we leave. It’s a place for all of us, humans, animals, insects, plants, water, rocks, and soil to enjoy a home together.

But that’s the root of a great tension inside us. Unless we deny either our most powerful human instincts or our most powerful religious sensibilities, we will find ourselves forever torn between two worlds, with seemingly conflicting loyalties, caught between the lure of this world and the lure of God.

I know how true this is for my own life. I was born into this world with two incurable loves and have spent my life and ministry caught and torn between the two. I have always loved the pagan world for its honoring of this life and for its celebration of the wonders of the human body and the beauty and pleasure that our five senses bring us. With my pagan brothers and sisters, I too honor the lure of sexuality, the comfort of human community, the delight of humor and irony, and the remarkable gifts given us by the arts and the sciences. But at the same time, I have always found myself in the grip of another reality – the divine, faith, religion. Its reality too has always commanded my attention – and, more importantly, dictated the important choices in my life.

My major choices in life incarnate and radiate a great tension because they’ve tried to be true to a double primordial branding inside me, the pagan and the divine. I can’t deny the reality, lure, and goodness of either of them. It’s for this reason that I can live as a consecrated, life-long celibate, committed to religious ministry, even as I deeply love the pagan world, bless its pleasures, and bless the goodness of sex even as I renounce it. That’s also the reason why I’m chronically making an apology to God for the world’s pagan resistance, even as I’m trying to make an apologia for God to the world. I have torn loyalties.

That is as it should be. The world is meant to take our breath away, even as we genuflect before the author of that breath.

Mature Love or Just Going through the Motions?

October 14, 2024

As a Lutheran priest, Dietrich Bonhoeffer would frequently offer this advice to a couple when he presided at their wedding: Today you are in love and believe your love will sustain your marriage, but it can’t. Let your marriage sustain your love.

Wise words, but what exactly do they mean? Why can’t love sustain a marriage?

What Bonhoeffer is highlighting is that it is naïve to think that feelings will sustain us in love and commitment over the long haul. They can’t, and they wouldn’t. But ritual can. How? By creating a ritual container that can keep us steady inside the roller coaster of emotions and feelings that will beset us in any long-term relationship.

Simply put, we will never sustain a long-term relationship with another person, with God, with prayer, or in selfless service on the basis of good feelings and positive emotions. This side of eternity, our feelings and emotions mostly come and go according to their own dictates and are not given to consistency.

We know the inconsistency of our emotions. One day we feel affectionate toward someone and the next day we feel irritated. The same is true for prayer. One day we feel warm and focused and the next day we feel bored and distracted.

And so, Bonhoeffer suggests we need to sustain ourselves in love and prayer by ritual, that is, by habitual practices that keep us steady and committed within the flux of feelings and emotions.

For example, take a couple in a marriage. They fall in love and commit themselves to love each other and stay with each other for the rest of their lives, and at root they fully intend that. They respect each other, are good to each other, and would die for each other. However, that’s not always true of their emotions. Some days their emotions seemingly belie their love. They are irritated and angry with each other. Yet, their actions toward each other continue to express love and commitment and not their negative feelings. They ritually kiss each other as they leave the house in the morning with the words, “I love you!” Are those words a lie? Are they simply going through the motions? Or is this real love?

The same holds true for love and commitment inside a family. Imagine a mother and a father with two teenage children, a boy of sixteen and a girl of fourteen. As a family they have a rule that they will sit together at dinner for forty minutes every evening, without their cellphones or other such devices. Many evenings when the son or daughter or one of the parents comes to the table (without their cellphone) out of dram duty, bored, dreading the time together, wanting to be somewhere else. But they come because they have made that commitment. Are they simply going through the motions or showing real love?

If Bonhoeffer is right, and I submit he is, they are not just going through the motions, they are expressing mature love. It’s easy to express love and be committed when our feelings are taking us there and holding us there. But those good feelings will not sustain our love and commitment in the long-term. Only fidelity to a commitment and ritual actions that undergird that commitment will keep us from walking away when the good feelings go away.

In our culture today, at most every level, this is not understood. From the person caught up in a culture addicted to feelings, to a good number of therapists, ministers of religion, prayer leaders, spiritual directors, and friends of Job, we hear the line: If you aren’t feeling it, it’s not real; you’re just going through the motions! That’s empty ritual!

Indeed, it can be an empty ritual. As scripture says, we can honor with our lips even as our hearts are far away. However, more often than not it is a mature expression of love because it is now a love that is no longer fueled by self-interest and good feelings. It’s now a love that’s wise and mature enough to account for the human condition in all its inadequacy and complexity and how these color and complicate everything – including the one we love, our own selves, and the reality of human love itself. The book we need on love will not be written by passionate lovers on their honeymoon, just as the book we need on prayer will not be written by a religious neophyte caught up in the first fervor of prayer (nor by most enthusiastic leaders of prayer). The book we need on love will be written by a married couple who, through ritual, have sustained a commitment through the ups and downs of many years. Just as the book we need on prayer will be written by someone who has sustained a life of prayer and church going through seasons and Sundays when sometimes the last thing he or she wanted to do was to pray or go to church.

Refugees, Immigrants, and Jesus

October 7, 2024

On borders everywhere in the world today we find refugees, millions of them. They’re easily demonized, seen as a nuisance, a threat, as invaders, as criminals fleeing justice in their homelands. But mostly they are decent, honest people fleeing poverty, hunger, victimization, and violence. And these reasons for fleeing their homelands strongly suggest that most of them are not criminals.

Irrespective of the fact that most of them are good people, they are still seen most everywhere as a problem. We need to keep them out! They are a threat! Indeed, politicians frequently use the verb invasion to describe their presence on our borders.

What’s to be said about this? Do we just let everyone in? Do we select judiciously among them, letting some in and keeping others out? Do we put up walls and barbed wire to block their entry? What’s to be our response?

These questions need to be examined from two perspectives: pragmatically and biblically.

Pragmatically this is a huge issue. We cannot simply open all borders and let millions of people flood into our countries. That’s unrealistic. On the other hand, we may not justify our reluctance to let refugees into our countries by appealing to the bible, or to Jesus, or to the naïve rationalization that “our” countries are ours and we have a right to be here while others don’t unless we grant them entrance. Why not?

For Christians, there are a number of non-negotiable biblical principles at play here.

First, God made the world for everybody. We are stewards of a property not our own. We don’t own anything, God does, and God made the world for everybody. That’s a principle we too easily ignore when we speak of barring others from entering “our” country. We happen to be stewards here, in a country that belongs to the whole world.

Second, the Bible everywhere, in both testaments of scripture, is clear (and strong) in challenging us to welcome the stranger and the immigrant. This is everywhere present in the Jewish scriptures and is a strong motif at the very heart of Jesus’ message. Indeed, Jesus begins his ministry by telling us that he has come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, pastoral practice, political policy, or action that is not good news for the poor is not the gospel of Jesus Christ, whatever its political or ecclesial expediency. And, if it is not good news for the poor, it may not cloak itself with the Gospel or with Jesus. Hence, any decisions we make vis-à-vis refugees and immigrants should not be antithetical to the fact that the Gospels are about bringing good news to the poor.

Moreover, Jesus makes this even clearer when he identifies the poor with his own person (Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me) and tells us that at the end of the day we will be judged by how we treat the immigrants and refugees (Depart from me because I was a stranger and you didn’t welcome me). There are few texts in scripture as raw and challenging as this one (Matthew 25, 35-40)

Finally, we also find this challenge in scripture: God challenges us to welcome foreigners (immigrants) and share our love, food, and clothing with them because we ourselves were once immigrants (Deuteronomy 10, 18-19). And this isn’t just some abstract biblical axiom, especially for us who live in North America. Except for the Indigenous nations (whom we forcefully displaced) we are all immigrants here and are challenged by our faith never to forget this, not least when dealing with hungry people on our borders. Of course, those of us who have been here for a number of generations can make the moral case that we have been here a long time and are no longer immigrants. But perhaps a more compelling moral case can be made suggesting it can be rather self-serving to close the borders after we ourselves are in.

These are biblical challenges. However, after they are affirmed, we are still left with the practical question; what realistically do we (and many countries around the world) do with the millions and millions of men, women, and children arriving at our border? How do we honor the fact that the land we live in belongs to everyone? How do we honor that fact that, as Christians, we have to think first about the poor? How will we face Jesus in judgment when he asks us why we didn’t welcome him when he was in the guise of a refugee? And how do we honor the fact that almost every one of us is an immigrant, living in a country we forcibly took from someone else?

There are no easy answers to those questions, even while at the end of the day we still need to make some practical political decisions. However, in our pragmatism, in sorting this out, we should never be confused about which side Jesus and the Bible are on.