Searching for Jesus in the Afternoon of Christianity

March 31, 2025

Where might we experience Jesus today in a world that is seemingly too crowded with its own concerns to allow a space for him?

The renowned spirituality writer Tomas Halik, in a recent book entitled The Afternoon of Christianity, makes this suggestion. As the world makes less and less explicit space for Jesus, we need to search for him more and more in those places where he is “anonymously present”. Halik’s counsel: “Let us search for him ‘by his voice’ like Mary Magdalene; let us search for him in strangers on the road like the disciples on the road to Emmaus; let us search for him in the wounds of the world like the apostle Thomas; let us search for him whenever he passes through the closed doors of fear; let us search for him where he brings the gift of forgiveness and new beginnings.”

The invitation here is to better respond to the signs of the times, given that we are living now in what he calls “the afternoon of Christianity”.

What is the afternoon of Christianity?

He distinguishes three periods in the history of Christianity. He sees the morning of Christianity as the time before 1500 AD, the pre-modern period, the time before secularization. The noonday of Christianity, for him, is the time of secularization and modernity, basically from the 19^th century until our own generation. The afternoon of Christianity, for him, is our time today, the post-modern world, where we are witnessing a breakdown of much of the world as we once knew it with the effects of this on faith and religion. And for Halik, the effect of all of this is that the Christian faith has now outgrown previous forms of religion.

Wow! That’s quite a statement! However, what Halik is proposing is not that the faith is dying, that Christianity is dying, or that the churches are dying. Rather, for him, Christianity today finds itself in a certain cultural homelessness, in a time where so many social structures that once supported it are collapsing, so that the Christian faith is now needing to seek a new shape, a new home, new means of expression, new social and cultural roles, and new allies.

And how will that turn out? We don’t know. But here’s Halik’s hunch: Christianity will not, as many fear, lose its identity and become a non-religious faith. It will not disintegrate into some vague, doctrineless, boundaryless, privatized spirituality. Rather, the hope is that (paradoxically) the very dynamism and diversity that frightens many Christians is the incubation phase of the Christianity of the future.

For him, the challenges that Christianity faces today invite us to bring faith into a new space, like Paul did when he brought Christianity out of the confines of the Judaism of his day. Here is how Halik puts it: “I believe that the Christianity of tomorrow will be above all a community of a new hermeneutic, a new reading, a new and deeper interpretation of the two sources of divine revelation, scripture and tradition, and especially of God’s utterance in the signs of the times.

How is this all to happen? That’s the thesis of the book. Chapter after chapter lays out possibilities of how we might more courageously read the signs of the times and rather than water down any of the substance of the Christian faith, let the signs of the times lead us to a deeper understanding of both scripture and tradition, especially so that we might bring together in better harmony the Christ of cosmic evolution with the Resurrected Jesus; and then recognize that they are both not just present in what is explicit in our Christian faith and worship, they are also anonymously present in the evolution of our culture and society.

Consequently, we need to search for Jesus Christ not just in our scriptures, our churches, our worship services, our catechetical classes, our Sunday schools, and our explicit Christian fellowship, though of course we need to search there. But, like Mary Magdalene, we need to recognize his voice in the caretaker at the cemetery; like the discouraged disciples on the road to Emmaus, when we no longer have the answers, we need to recognize his presence in strangers whose words make our hearts burn inside us; like the doubting Thomas, we need to overcome our doubts about his resurrection by touching his wounds as they are now manifest in the poor and the suffering; like Jesus’ first community who barricaded themselves behind a locked door out of fear, we need to recognize him whenever, inside our huddled fear, something expectedly breathes peace into us; and we need to recognize his presence inside us every time we receive forgiveness and are empowered to begin again. This isn’t a time of dying, it’s a time of kairos, a time when we are being invited to open our eyes in a new way so as to recognize the Christ who is walking with us in some unfamiliar forms.

Melancholy and the Soul

March 24, 2025

Normally none of us likes feeling sad, heavy, or depressed. Generally, we prefer sunshine to darkness, lightheartedness to melancholy. That’s why we tend to do everything we can to distract ourselves from melancholy, to keep heaviness and sadness at bay. Mostly, we run from feelings that sadden or frighten us.

For the most part, we think of melancholy and her children (sadness, gloom, nostalgia, loneliness, depression, restlessness, regret, feelings of loss, intimations of our own mortality, fear of the dark corners of our minds, and heaviness of soul) as negative. However, these feelings have a positive side and are meant to help put us in touch with our own soul.

Simply put, they help keep us in touch with those parts of our soul to which we are normally not attentive. Our souls are deep and complex, and trying to hear what they are saying involves listening to them inside of every mood within our lives, including, and sometimes especially, when we feel sad and out of sorts. In sadness and melancholy, the soul tells us things to which we are normally deaf. Hence, it’s important to examine the positive side of melancholy.

Unfortunately, today it is common to see sadness and heaviness of soul as a loss of health, as a loss of vitality, as an unhealthy condition; but that normally isn’t the case. For instance, in many medieval and Renaissance medical books, melancholy was seen as a gift to the soul, something that one needed to pass through at key points in life in order to come to more depth and empathy. This, of course, doesn’t refer to clinical depression, which is a true loss of health, but to multiple other depressions that draw us inward and downward.

Why do we need to pass through certain kinds of melancholy in order to come to a deeper maturity?

Thomas Moore, who writes with deep insight on how we need to listen more carefully to the impulses and needs of our souls, offers this insight: “Depression gives us valuable qualities that we need in order to be fully human. It gives us weight when we are too light about our lives. It offers a degree of gravitas. It also ages us so that we grow appropriately and don’t pretend to be younger than we are. It makes us grow up and gives us the range of human emotion and character that we need in order to deal with the seriousness of life. In classic Renaissance images found in old medical texts and collections of remedies, depression is depicted as an old person wearing a broad brimmed hat, in the shadows, holding his head in his hands.”

Milan Kundera, the Czech writer, in his classic novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, echoes what Moore says. His heroine, Teresa, struggles to be at peace with life when it’s not heavy, when there’s too much lightness, sunshine, and frivolity, when life is devoid of the type of anxiety that hints at darkness and mortality. Thus, she always feels the need for gravitas, for some heaviness that signals that life is more than the simple flourishing of good cheer and comfort. For her, lightness equates with superficiality.

In many cultures, and indeed in all the great world religions, periods of melancholy and sadness are considered as necessary paths one must travel in order to deepen one’s understanding and come to empathy. Indeed, isn’t that part of the very essence of undergoing the Paschal Mystery within Christianity? Jesus, himself, when preparing to make the ultimate sacrifice for love, had to painfully accept that there was no path to the joy of Easter Sunday that didn’t involve the heaviness of Good Friday. How can Good Friday be good if melancholy, sadness, and heaviness of soul are signs that there is something wrong with us?

So how might we look at periods of sadness and heaviness in our lives? How might we deal with melancholy and her children?

First off, it’s important to see melancholy (whatever its form) as something normal and potentially healthy in our lives. Heaviness of soul is not necessarily an indication that there is something wrong inside us. Rather, most often, it’s the soul itself crying for our attention, asking to be heard, trying to ground us in some deeper way, and trying, as Moore puts it, to deepen us appropriately.

But for this to happen, we need to resist two opposite temptations, namely, to distract ourselves from the sadness or to indulge in it. We need to give melancholy its proper due, but only that. How do we do that? James Hillman gives us this advice: what to do with heaviness of soul? Put it into a suitcase and carry it with you. Keep it close, but contained; make sure it stays available, but don’t let it take you over.

That’s secular wording which can help us better understand Jesus’ challenge: If you wish to be my disciple, take up your cross every day and follow me.

The Person of Jesus and the Mystery of Christ

March 17, 2025

I was raised a Roman Catholic and essentially inhaled the religious ethos of Roman Catholicism. I went to the seminary, earned theological degrees, and taught theology at a graduate level for a number of years before I ever started making a distinction between ‘Jesus’ and ‘Christ’. For me, they were always one and the same thing, Jesus Christ.

To my mind, Jesus Christ was the second person of the Trinity who took on flesh in the incarnation and is still now our God, our advocate, and our friend in heaven. I didn’t distinguish between Jesus and Christ in terms of whom I was praying to, speaking about, or relating to. Indeed, for many years in my writings, I simply used the words Jesus and Christ interchangeably.

Slowly through the years this changed and I have begun to distinguish more between Jesus and Christ. It began with a deepened understanding of what the Gospels and St. Paul mean by the reality of Christ as a mystery which, while always having Jesus as its center, is larger than the historical Jesus. This distinction and its importance became clearer to me when I began to have more contact with Evangelicals, both as students and as colleagues.

In faith fellowship with various groups of Evangelicals, I began to see that one of the ecclesial differences between us, Evangelicals and Roman Catholics, is that we, Roman Catholics, while not ignoring Jesus, are very much about Christ, and Evangelicals, while not ignoring Christ, are very much about Jesus.

How we understand the church, how we understand the Eucharist, and how we understand the primary invitation given us in the Gospels are colored by how we perceive ourselves in relationship to Jesus and to Christ.

What’s at stake here?

What’s the difference between saying ‘Jesus’ and saying ‘Christ’? Is there any difference between praying to Jesus and praying to Christ, between relating to Jesus or relating to Christ?

There’s a difference, an important one. Christ is not Jesus’ second name – as in Jack Smith, Susan Parker, or Jesus Christ. While it is correct to use the two names together, as we do commonly in our prayer (We pray through Jesus Christ, Our Lord), there is an important distinction to be made.

Jesus is a person, the second person in the Trinity, the divine person who became incarnate, and the person who calls us to one-to-one intimacy with him. Christ is a mystery of which we are a part. The mystery of Christ includes the person of Jesus but also includes us. We are not part of the body of Jesus, but we are part of the body of Christ.

As Christians we believe that Jesus is the body of Christ, that the Eucharist is the body of Christ, and that we, baptized Christians, are also the body of Christ. Saint Paul states clearly that we, the Christian community, are the body of Christ on earth, just as Jesus and the Eucharist are the body of Christ. And Paul means this literally. We (the Christian community) are not like a body, or some mystical or metaphorical body; nor do we represent or replace Christ’s body. Rather, we are the body of Christ on earth, still giving physical flesh to God on earth.

This has implications for Christian discipleship: Jesus is a person, the person who invites us to one-to-one intimacy with him (which Evangelicals see as the goal of Christian discipleship). Christ is part of a larger mystery which includes Jesus but also includes each of us. In this mystery we are called to intimacy not just with Jesus, but also with each other and with physical creation. In Christ, the goal of Christian discipleship is community of life with Jesus, with each other, and with physical creation (since the mystery of Christ is also cosmic).

At the risk of huge oversimplification, allow me a suggestion: Roman Catholics and Evangelicals can learn from each other on this.

From our Evangelical brothers and sisters, Roman Catholics can learn to focus as much on Jesus as we do on Christ, so that like Evangelicals we might realize more explicitly (as is clear in the Gospel of John) that at the very heart of Christian discipleship lies the invitation to a one-to-one intimacy with a person, Jesus, (and not just with a mystery).

Conversely, Evangelicals can learn from Roman Catholics to focus as much on Christ as on Jesus, with all this implies in terms of defining discipleship more widely than personal intimacy with Jesus and church more widely than simple fellowship. Relating to Christ points to the centrality of the Eucharist as a communal event. As well, it implies seeing Christian discipleship not just as an invitation to intimacy with Jesus, but as an incorporation into an ecclesial body which includes not just Jesus but the community of all believers as well as nature itself.

We can learn from each other to take both Jesus and Christ more seriously.

Casting out Demons Through Silence

March 10, 2025

There is an incident in the Gospels where the disciples of Jesus were unable to cast out a particular demon. When they asked Jesus why, he replied that some demons can only be cast out by prayer. The particular demon he was referring in this instance had rendered a man deaf and mute.

I want to name another demon which seemingly cannot be cast out except by prayer, namely, the demon that forever fractures our personal relationships, families, communities, and churches through misunderstanding and division, making it forever difficult to be in life-giving community with each other.

What particular prayer is needed to cast out this demon? The prayer of a shared silence, akin to a Quaker Silence.

What is a Quaker Silence?

A tiny bit of history first: Quakers are a historically Protestant Christian set of denominations whose members refer to each other as Friends but are generally called Quakers because of a famous statement once made by their founder, George Fox (1624-1691). Legend has it that in the face of some authority figures who were trying to intimidate him, Fox held up his Bible and said: This is the word of God, quake before it!

For the Quakers, particularly early on, their common prayer consisted mainly in sitting together in community in silence, waiting for God to speak to them. They would sit together in silence, waiting on God’s power to come and give them something that they could not give themselves, namely, real community with each other beyond the divisions that separated them. Though they sat individually, their prayer was radically communal. They were sitting as one body, waiting together for God to give them a unity they could not give themselves.

Might this be a practice that we, Christians of every denomination, could practice today in the light of the helplessness we feel in the face of division everywhere (in our families, in our churches, and in our countries)? Given that, as Christians, we are at root one community inside the Body of Christ, a single organic body where physical distance does not really separate us, might we begin as a regular prayer practice to sit with each other in a Quaker Silence, one community, sitting in silence, waiting together, waiting for God to come and give us community that we are powerless to give ourselves?

Practically, how might this be done? Here’s a suggestion: each day set aside a time to sit in silence, alone or ideally with others, for a set period of time (fifteen to twenty minutes) where the intent, unlike in private meditation, is not first of all to nurture your personal intimacy with God, but rather to sit together in community with everyone inside the Body of Christ (and with all sincere persons everywhere) asking God to come and give us communion beyond division.

This could also be a powerful ritual in marriage and in family life. Perhaps one of the most healing therapies inside of a marriage might be for a couple to sit together regularly in a silence, asking God to give them something that they cannot give themselves, namely, an understanding of each other beyond the tensions of everyday life. I remember as a child, praying the rosary together as a family each evening and that ritual having the effect of a Quaker Silence. It calmed the tensions that had built up during the day and left us feeling more peaceful as a family.

I use the term Quaker Silence, but there are various forms of meditation and contemplation which have the same intentionality. For example, the founder of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate (the religious order I belong to), Saint Eugene de Mazenod, left us a prayer practice he called Oraison. This is its intention: as Oblates we are meant to live together in community, but we are a worldwide congregation scattered over sixty countries around the world. How can we be in community with each other across distance?

Through the practice of Oraison. Saint Eugene asked us to set aside a half hour each day to sit in a silence that is intended to be a time when we are not just in communion with God but are also intentionally in communion with all Oblates around the world. Akin to a Quaker Silence, it is a prayer wherein each person sits alone, in silence, but in community, asking God to form one community across all distances and differences. When Jesus says some demons are only cast out by prayer, he means it. And perhaps the demon to which this most particularly refers is the demon of misunderstanding and division. We all know how powerless we are to cast it out. Sitting in a communal silence, asking God to do something for us beyond our powerlessness, can exorcise the demon of misunderstanding and division.

Dark Nights of the Heart

March 3, 2025

There are times when our world unravels. Who hasn’t had the feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense anymore! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the Gospels, he talks about how the world as we experience it will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart; we experience the end of the world as we’ve known it.

However, in this upheaval, Jesus assures us that one thing remains sure: God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and in our disillusionment we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent, and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down, we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish, and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they express it as if God were actively turning our world upside down and deliberately causing all the heartache to purge and cleanse us.

The great Spanish mystic John of the Cross puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervor and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervor, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security inside our relationships, our prayer, and our work (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity). This is a gift from God and is meant to be enjoyed. But John tells us, at a certain point, God takes away the pleasure and consolation and we experience a certain dark night in that where we once felt fire, passion, consolation, and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion, and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world. These are part of God’s plan and God’s way of drawing us forward. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become a problem because we can get hung up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful; but, on a honeymoon, too often we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we are often more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still partly about ourselves rather than purely about the person we think we love. Sadly, that is why many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much still seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have fewer heartaches if we understood that. Also, before we are purified by disillusionment, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, often say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that most everything we sense as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately than before.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to love, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness, and beyond self-interested love that can masquerade as altruism. Clarity in eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after heartbreak, and real love comes after the honeymoon has passed.

Love and Faith as Fidelity

February 24, 2025

Several years ago, a friend of mine made a very unromantic type of marriage proposal to his fiancé. He was in his mid-forties and had suffered several disillusioning heartbreaks, some of which by his own admission were his fault, the result of feelings shifting unexpectedly on his part. Now, in mid-life, struggling not to be disillusioned about love and romance, he met a woman whom he much respected, much admired, and with whom he felt he would like to build a life. But, unsure of himself, he was humble in his proposal.

In essence, this was his proposal: I’d like to ask you to marry me but I need to put my cards on the table. I don’t pretend to know what love means. There was a time in my life when I thought I did, but I’ve seen my own feelings and the feelings of others shift too often in ways that have made me lose confidence in my understanding of love. So, I’ll be honest, I can’t promise that I will always feel in love with you. But I can promise that I’ll always be faithful, that I’ll always treat you with respect, that I’ll always do everything in my power to be there for you to help further your own dreams, and that I’ll always be an honest partner in trying to build a life together. I can’t guarantee how I will always feel, but I can promise that I won’t betray you in infidelity.

That’s not exactly the type of marriage proposal we see in our romantic movies and novels, predicated as they mostly are on the naïve belief that the passion and excitement we initially experience when we fall in love will remain that way forever. His is a mature proposal, one that doesn’t naively promise something it can’t deliver.

Moreover, beyond pointing us toward a more mature understanding of love, this is also a good image for how faith works. Faith too, in the end, is more about fidelity in our actions than it is about fervor in our feelings. Here’s an example.

When I was in the seminary, a classmate of mine set off one summer to make a thirty-day retreat. His aim was to try to acquire a faith that he would feel with more fervor, which would more affectively warm his heart. He suffered from what he described as a “stoic” faith, a gut-sense of God’s reality and love, but one which didn’t much translate into warm feelings of security about God’s existence and love. By his own admission, he lacked affectivity, fire, emotion, and warmth about his faith and he went off in search of that.

He returned from the retreat still stoic, though changed nonetheless: “I never got what I asked for,” he said, “but I got something else. I learned to accept that my faith might always be stoic, and I learned too that this is okay. I don’t necessarily have to have warm and imaginative feelings about my faith. I don’t need to be full of emotion and fire. I only need to be faithful in my actions, to not betray what I believe in. Faith for me now means that I need to live my life in charity, respect, patience, chastity, and generosity. I just need to do it; I don’t need to always feel it.”

Faith and love are too easily identified with emotional feelings, passion, fervor, affectivity, and romantic fire. And those feelings are part of love’s mystery, a part we are meant to embrace and enjoy. But, wonderful as these feelings can be, they are, as experience shows, fragile and ephemeral. Our world can change in fifteen seconds because we can fall in or out of love in that time. Passionate and romantic feelings are part of love and faith, though not the deepest part, and not a part over which we have much emotional control.

Thus, unromantic though it is, I like the stoic approach that’s expressed in the marriage proposal of my friend, particularly as it applies to faith. For some of us, faith will never be, other than for short periods of time, something that fires our emotions and fills us with warmth. We know how ephemeral feelings can be.

Like my colleague with the “stoic” faith, some of us might have to settle for a faith that says to God, to others, and to ourselves: I can’t guarantee how I will feel on any given day. I can’t promise I will always have emotional passion about my faith, but I can promise I’ll always be faithful, I’ll always act with respect, and I will always do everything in my power, as far as my human weakness allows, to help others and God.

Love and faith are shown more in fidelity than in feelings. We can’t guarantee how we will always feel, but we can live in the firm resolve to never betray what we believe in!

Our Struggle with Love

February 17, 2025

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and its heart more fully to the poor. Initially the congregation responded with enthusiasm and a number of programs were introduced to invite people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street-people, to come to their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen, and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of the congregation began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe anymore! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get! This is too messy to continue!”

But the minister held his ground, pointing out that their expectations were naïve, that what they were experiencing was precisely part of the cost of reaching out to the poor, and that Jesus assures us that loving is unsafe and messy, not just in reaching out to the poor but in reaching out to anyone.

We like to think of ourselves as gracious and loving, but, truth be told, that’s often predicated on a naïve notion of love. We struggle to love as Jesus invites us to love, namely, to love each other as I have loved you. The last clause in the sentence contains the real challenge: Jesus doesn’t say, love each other according to the spontaneous reactions of your heart; nor, love each other as society defines love. Rather, love each other as I have loved you.

And, for the most part, we struggle to do that.

We struggle to love our enemies, to turn the other cheek and to reach across to embrace those who hate us. We struggle to pray for those who oppose us.
We struggle to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who murder our loved ones. We struggle to ask God to forgive the people who are hurting us. We struggle to believe, like Jesus, that they are not really cognizant of what they are doing.
We struggle to be big-hearted and take the high road when we’ve been slighted or ignored, and we struggle then to let understanding and empathy replace bitterness and our urge to withdraw. We struggle to let go of grudges.
We struggle to be vulnerable, to risk humiliation and rejection in our offers of love. We struggle to give up our fear of being misunderstood, of not looking good, of not appearing strong and in control. We struggle to set out barefooted, to love without security in our pockets.
We struggle to open our hearts enough to imitate Jesus’ universal, non-discriminating embrace, to stretch our hearts to see everyone as brother or sister, regardless of race, color, or religion. We struggle to stop nursing the silent secret that our own lives and the lives of our loved ones are more precious than those of others.
We struggle to make a preferential option for the poor, to bring the poor to our tables, to abandon our propensity to prefer the attractive and the influential.
We struggle to sacrifice ourselves to the point of losing everything for the sake of others, to actually lay down our lives for our friends – and indeed for our enemies. We struggle to be willing to die for people who oppose us and are trying to crucify us.
We struggle to love with purity of heart, to not subtly seek ourselves within our relationships. We struggle to live chastely, to fully respect and not violate someone else.
We struggle to walk in patience, giving others the full space they need to relate to us according to their own inner dictates. We struggle to sweat blood in order to be faithful. We struggle to wait in proper patience, in God’s good time, for God’s judgment on right and wrong.
We struggle to resist our natural urge to judge others, to not impute motives. We struggle to leave judgment to God.
Finally, not least, we struggle to love and forgive our own selves, knowing that no mistake we make stands between us and God. We struggle to trust that God’s love is enough and that we are forever held inside God’s infinite mercy.

Yes, love is a struggle.

After his wife Raissa died, Jacques Maritain edited a book of her journals. In the Preface to that book, he describes her struggle with the illness that eventually killed her. Severely debilitated and unable to speak, she struggled mightily in her last days. Her suffering both tested and matured Maritain’s own faith. Mightily sobered by seeing his wife’s sufferings, he wrote: “Only two kinds of people think that love is easy: saints, who through long years of self-sacrifice have made a habit of virtue, and naïve persons who don’t know what they’re talking about.”

He’s right. Only saints and those who are naïve think love is easy.

Our Restless Selves

February 10, 2025

During the last years of his life, Thomas Merton lived in a hermitage outside a monastery, hoping to find more solitude in his life. But solitude is an illusive thing and he found it was forever escaping him.

Then one morning he sensed that for a moment he had found it. However, what he experienced was a surprise to him. Solitude, it turns out, is not some altered state of consciousness or some heightened sense of God and the transcendent in our lives. Solitude, as he experienced it, was simply being peacefully inside your own skin, gratefully aware of and peacefully breathing in the immense richness inside your own life. Solitude consists in sleeping in intimacy with your own experience, at peace there, aware of its riches and wonder.

But that’s not easy. It’s rare. Rarely do we find ourselves at peace with the present moment inside us. Why? Because that’s the way we are built. We are overcharged for this world. When God put us into this world, as the author of the Book of Ecclesiastes tells us, God put “timelessness” into our hearts and because of that we don’t make easy peace with our lives.

We read this, for example, in the famous passage about the rhythm of the seasons in the Book of Ecclesiastes. There is a time and a season for everything, we are told: A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to gather in what is planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal … and so the text goes on. Then, after listing this natural rhythm of time and the seasons, the author ends with these words: God has made everything suitable for its own time but has put timelessness into the human heart so that human beings are out of sync with the rhythms of the seasons from beginning to end.

The Hebrew word used here to express “timelessness” is Olam, a word suggesting “eternity” and “transcendence”. Some English translations put it this way: God has put a sense of past and future into our hearts. Perhaps that captures it best in terms of how we generally experience this in our lives. We know from experience how difficult it is to be at peace inside the present moment because the past and the future won’t leave us alone. They are forever coloring the present.

The past haunts us with half-forgotten lullabies and melodies that trigger memories about love found and lost, about wounds that have never healed, and with inchoate feelings of nostalgia, regret, and wanting to cling to something that once was. The past is forever sowing restlessness into the present moment.

And the future? It impales itself into the present as well, looming as promise and threat, forever demanding our attention, forever sowing anxiety into our lives, and forever stripping us of the capacity to simply rest inside the present.

The present is forever colored by obsessions, heartaches, headaches, and anxieties that have little to do with people we are actually sitting with at table.

Philosophers and poets have given various names to this. Plato called it “a madness that comes from the gods”; Hindu poets have called it “a nostalgia for the infinite”; Shakespeare speaks of “immortal longings”, and Augustine, in perhaps the most famous naming of them all, called it an incurable restlessness that God has put into the human heart to keep it from finding a home in something less than the infinite and eternal – “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.”

And so, it’s rare to be peacefully present to our own lives, restful inside of our own skins. But this “torment”, as T.S. Eliot, once named it, has a God-given intentionality, a divine purpose.

Henri Nouwen, in a remarkable passage both names the struggle and its purpose: “Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.”

Our restless hearts keep us from falling asleep to the divine fire inside us.

Jesus and The Poor

February 3, 2025

I grew up a second-generation immigrant in the outback of the Western Canadian prairies. Our family was poor economically, subsistence farmers, with the necessities but seldom with much more. My father and mother were charitable to a fault and tried to instill that in us. However, given our own poverty, understandably we did not have much of a vision in terms of social justice. We were the poor.

Growing up in this way can deeply ingrain certain instincts and attitudes inside you, some good, some bad. Positively, you grow to believe that you need to work hard, that nothing is given to you free, that you need to take care of yourself, and everyone else should do the same. Ironically, that very ethos can blind you to some major truths regarding the poor.

I can testify to this. It took me many years, work that took me over many borders, some firsthand encounters with people who didn’t have the basic necessities of life, and countless hours in theology classrooms before I even became aware of some of the basic biblical and Christian truths regarding the poor.

Now I am struggling to live them, but at least I accept that they are non-negotiable for a Christian, irrespective of denomination or political persuasion. In brief, as a Christian, we are given a non-negotiable mandate to reach out to the poor in compassion and justice. Moreover, this mandate is just as non-negotiable as keeping the commandments, as is clear most everywhere in Scripture.

Here is the essence of that mandate …

The great Jewish prophets 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” (biblical code for the weakest and most vulnerable groups in a society) are doing while you are alive.
Jesus not only ratifies this; he deepens it, identifying his very person with the poor. (“Whatsoever you do to the least of my people, you do to me.”). He tells us that we will be judged for eternal life on the basis of how we treated the poor.
Moreover, in both Testaments in the Bible, this is particularly true regarding how we treatforeigners, strangers, and immigrants. How we treat them is how we are in fact treating Jesus.
Note that Jesus defines his mission with these words: I have come to bring good news to the poor. Hence, any teaching, preaching, or government policy that is not good news for the poor may not cloak itself with either Jesus or the Gospel.

As well, most of us have been raised to believe that we have the right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through legitimate inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been enshrined in the laws of democratic countries, and we generally believe that it is morally sanctioned by the Christianity. It is not, as we can see from these truths in Scripture:

God loves everyone. There are no favorite ones or privileged ones in God’s eyes, and

God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. Thus, created goods should flow fairly to all.

Wealth and possessions must be understood as ours to steward rather than to possess absolutely.
No person or nation may have a surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.
All people are obliged to come to the relief of the poor.
The condemnation of injustice is a non-negotiable aspect of our discipleship.
In all situations where there is injustice, unfairness, oppression, grinding poverty, God is not neutral. Rather God wants action against everything and everyone who deals injustice and death.

These principles are strong, so strong in fact that it is easy to believe that Jesus can’t really be asking this of us. Indeed, if taken seriously, these principles would radically disrupt our lives and the social order. It would no longer be business as usual.

To take just one example: there are nearly forty-five million refugees in our world today, most of them looking to cross a border into a new country. Is it realistic for any country today, in biblical terms, “to welcome the stranger”, to simply open its borders and welcome anyone who wants to cross? That’s simply not realistic or socially expedient regarding what it would mean practically in terms of our comfort and security.

While that may be granted, what may not be granted is that our (seemingly) necessary social and political pragmatism in dealing with “the widow, the orphan, and the immigrant” may cloak itself with Jesus and the Bible. It may not. This is antithetical to Jesus. Whether or not this upsets our security and comfort, God is always on the underside of history, on the side of the poor.

Ecumenism: The Imperative for Wholeness Inside the Body of Christ

January 27, 2025

For more than a thousand years, Christians have not experienced the joy of being one family in Christ. Although there were already tensions within the earliest Christian communities, it was not until the year 1054 that there was a formal split, in effect, to establish two formal Christian communities, the Orthodox Church in the East and the Catholic Church in the West. Then, with the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century, there was another split within the Western Church and Christianity fragmented still further. Today there are hundreds of Christian denominations, many of whom, sadly, are not on friendly terms with each other.

Division and misunderstanding are understandable, inevitable, the price of being human. There are no communities without tension and so it is no great scandal that Christians sometimes cannot get along with each other. The scandal rather is that we have become comfortable, even smug, with the fact that we do not get along with each other, no longer hunger for wholeness, and no longer miss each other inside our separate churches.

In almost all our churches today there is little anxiety about those with whom we are not worshiping. For example, teaching Roman Catholic seminarians today, I sense a certain indifference to the issue of ecumenism. For many seminarians today this is not an issue of particular concern. Not to single out Catholic seminarians, this holds true for most of us in all denominations.

But this kind of indifference is inherently unchristian. Oneness was close to the heart of Jesus. He wants all his followers at the same table, as we see in this parable.

A woman has ten coins and loses one. She becomes anxious and agitated and begins to search frantically and relentlessly for the lost coin, lighting lamps, looking under tables, sweeping all the floors in her house. Eventually she finds the coin, is delirious with joy, calls together her neighbors, and throws a party whose cost no doubt far exceeded the value of the coin she had lost. (Luke 15, 8-10)

Why such anxiety and joy over losing and finding a coin whose value was probably that of a dime? Well, what’s at issue is not the value of the coin; it’s something else. In her culture, nine was not considered a whole number; ten was. Both the woman’s anxiety about losing the coin and her joy in finding it had to do with the importance of wholeness. A wholeness in her life that had been fractured and a precious set of relationships was no longer complete.

Indeed, the parable might be recast this way: A woman has ten children. With nine of them, she has a good relationship, but one of her daughters is alienated. Her nine other children come home regularly to the family table, but her alienated daughter does not. The woman cannot rest in that situation, cannot be at peace. She needs her alienated daughter to rejoin them. She tries every means to reconcile with her daughter and then one day, miracle of miracles, it works. Her daughter comes back to the family. Her family is whole again, everyone is back at the table. The woman is overjoyed, withdraws her modest savings, and throws a lavish party to celebrate that reunion.

Christian faith demands that, like that woman, we need to be anxious, dis-eased, figuratively lighting lamps, and searching for ways to make the Church whole again. Nine is not a whole number. Neither is the number of those who are normally inside our respective churches. Roman Catholicism isn’t a whole number. Protestantism isn’t a whole number. The Evangelical Churches aren’t a whole number. The Orthodox Churches aren’t a whole number. No one Christian denomination is a whole number. Together we make up a whole Christian number – and that is still not a whole faithnumber.

And so, we are meant to be anxious around these questions: Who no longer goes to church with us? Who is uncomfortable worshiping with us? How can we be comfortable when so many people are no longer at table with us?

Sadly, today, many of us are comfortable in churches that are far, far from whole. Sometimes, in our less reflective moments, we even rejoice in it: “Those others aren’t real Christians in any case! We’re better off without them, a purer, more faithful church in their absence! We’re the one true remnant!”

But this lack of solicitude for wholeness compromises our following of Jesus as well as our basic human maturity. We are mature, loving people and true followers of Jesus, only when, like Jesus, we are in tears over those “other sheep that are not of this fold”. When, like the woman who lost one of her coins, we cannot sleep until every corner of the house has been turned upside down in a frantic search for what’s been lost. We too need to solicitously search for a lost wholeness – and may not be at peace until it is found.

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!