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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A comedian recently quipped that today’s information technologies have effectively rendered a number of things obsolete, most notably phone-books and human courtesy. That’s also true for human rest.

Today’s information technologies (the internet, email, software programs like Facebook, mobile phones, IPhones, pocket computers, and the like) have made us the most informed, efficient, and communicative people ever. We now have the capability, all day, every day, of accessing world events, world news, whole libraries of information, and detailed accounts of what our families and friends are doing at any moment. That’s the positive side of the equation.

Less wonderful is what this is doing to our lives, how it is changing our expectations, and robbing us of the simple capacity to stop, shut off the machines, and rest. As we get wrapped up more and more in mobile phones, texting, email, Facebook, and the internet in general, we are beginning to live with the expectation that we must be attentive all the time to everything that’s happening in the world and within the lives of our families and friends. The spoken and unspoken expectation is that we be available always – and so too others. We used to send each other notes and letters and expect a reply within days, weeks, or months. Now the expectation for a reply is minutes or hours, and we feel impatient with others when this expectation is not met and guilty inside of ourselves when we can’t meet it.

And so we are, daily, becoming more enslaved to and more compulsive in our use of mobile phones and the internet. For many of us it is now existentially impossible to take off a day, let alone several weeks off, and be on a genuine holiday or vacation. Rather the pressure is on us to constantly check for texts, emails, phone messages, and the like; and the expectation from our families, friends, and colleagues is precisely that we are checking these regularly. The sin-du-jour is to be, at any time, unavailable, unreachable, or non-communicative.

But the rhythm of time as God designed it is meant to give us, regularly, weekly, some time off the wheel, some “Sabbath-time” when ordinary life, ordinary pressures, ordinary work, and ordinary expectations are bracketed and we give ourselves permission to stop, to shut things down, and to rest. Today, nowhere is this more appropriate and urgent than in regards to our use of phones, notebooks, and computers. They, more than anything else, constitute regular time, servile work, and the occupations and preoccupations from which the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath ask us to refrain.

I know a woman who works for her church, as does her husband. Since they are both in ministry, they need to work on Sunday mornings and often into the afternoon as well. So they begin celebrating the Sabbath late afternoon on Sunday. Here is how she describes what they do: We start our celebration of the Sabbath at 4:00 PM (1600 hours) on Sunday and we begin it symbolically by unplugging our computers, turning off our mobile phones, disconnecting our house phone, and turning off every information gadget that we own. For the next 29 hours we don’t receive any calls and we don’t make any. We are on a cyber-fast, non-contactable, off the wheel, unavailable. At 9:00 PM (2100 hours) on Monday night we end our Sabbath we began it, symbolically: We break our cyber-fast and fire up again our phones and our computers and begin answering our messages. We get back on the wheel for another week. Sometimes making ourselves unavailable like this irritates our families and friends, but if we are to celebrate Sabbath, given our pressured lives, this pulling away is the most important single thing that we have to do. It’s either that – or working 7 days a week!

When I was young both our churches and our culture still took the concept of Sabbath (for Christians, especially the idea of not working on Sunday) more seriously. A popular question was always: What are you allowed to do on a Sunday and what are you not allowed to do? Mostly this focused on different kinds of physical labor: May you work in your garden on a Sunday? May you harvest your apples tree on a Sunday? Today, I worry less about gardening or picking apples on a Sunday. The more important issue is: Can we step off the treadmill of phones and computers on Sundays and be genuinely available to celebrate Sabbath?

Sabbath, as Wayne Muller tells us, is time off the wheel, time when we take our hand from the plough and let God and the earth care of things, while we drink, if only for a few moments, for the fountain of rest and delight. Today that plough looks a lot like a mobile phone or a computer.

Centuries ago, the mystic poet, Rumi, wrote: I have lived too long where I can be reached!” Haven’t we all!

The great Jewish prophets, the forerunners of Jesus, coined a mantra which ran something like this: 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 be judged by how “widows, orphans, and strangers” (biblical code for the three most vulnerable groups in society) fared while you were alive.

Jesus wouldn’t disagree. When he describes the last judgment at the end of Matthew’s Gospel, he tells us that this judgment will not be, first of all, about right doctrine, good theology, church attendance, or even personal piety and sexual morality, but about how we treated the poor. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. Jesus and the great biblical prophets make that clear.

This has also been made clear in the social encyclicals of the Roman Catholic church during the past 150 years, most recently in the social encyclicals of John Paul II. We see this as well in the prophetic traditions within all the Christian churches and in some of the great individual Christians who have touched our lives during this past century: Mother Theresa, Dorothy Day, Oscar Romero, Thomas Merton, Martin Luther King, William Stringfellow, and Catherine Doherty, among others. We also see this challenge in our own generation in the work and writings of persons such as Bishop Tutu, Nelson Mandela, Jean Vanier, Henri Nouwen, Daniel Berrigan, Bryan Hehir, and Jim Wallis.

Granted, this challenge to justice doesn’t negate other religious and moral obligations, but it does remain always as a fundamental, non-negotiable, principle: We are going to be judged by how the most vulnerable groups (“widows, orphans, and strangers”) fared while we were alive and practicing our faith. The challenge is a strong one.

Sometimes it’s helpful to sing our truths, both so that rhyme and rhythm can etch the words more indelibly into our consciousness and that the chant itself can help increase our courage and resolve. Here are some justice hymns:

– We need to be on fire again because our hope is no longer an easy one.

We live in a culture of despair where Pentecost can no longer be taken for granted.

We must refuse to make the Holy Spirit a piece of private property, but a spirit that matters. (Mary Jo Leddy)

– Looking at a picture of our Lord on the Cross, I was struck by the blood flowing from one of his divine hands. I felt a pang of great sorrow when thinking this blood is falling on the ground without anyone’s hastening to gather it up. I was resolved to remain in spirit at the foot of the Cross and to receive its dew. I shall spend my life gathering it up. (Therese of Lisieux)

– The wages of work is cash.

The wages of cash is want of more cash.

The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.

The wages of vicious competition is – the world we live in. (D.H. Lawrence)

– There are Seven Social Sins:

Politics without principle

Wealth without work

Commerce without morality

Pleasure without conscience

Education without character

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice (Mohandas Gandhi)

– Strength without compassion is violence

Compassion without justice is sentiment

Justice without love is Marxism

And … love without justice is baloney! (Cardinal Sin)

– We are not, but could be.

We don’t speak languages, but dialects.

We don’t have religions, but superstitions.

We don’t create art, but handicrafts.

We don’t have a culture, but folklore.

We are not human beings, but human resources.

We do not have face, but arms.

We do not have names, but numbers.

We do not appear in the history of the world, but in the police blotter of the local paper.

The nobodies, who are not worth the bullets that kill them. (Edward Galeano, The Nobodies)

– In the world’s schema of things, survival of the fittest is the rule.

In God’s schema, survival of the weakest is the rule. (Alphonse Keuter)

– It is not possible to create a world in which no innocent people suffer, but it is possible to create a world in which fewer innocent people suffer. (Bryan Hehir)

– We don’t want your money; we can steal that from you when we need it. We need you to lead us back to God, and to give us jobs. (A Gang leader to a group of church and business leader)

– Lost is a place, too. (Christina Crawford)

– You could say that, if you are walking down the roads of life these days, and looking for a piece of God or for some spirit by which to guide your life, you should be looking down. For is God is going to be found these days, it’s going to be small things. It’s going to be close to the ground. It may even be below the ground. Looking for God, these days requires the willingness to investigate the small, to descend. To look down. To look down. To look down. (Aztec poem)

To live a chaste life is not easy, not just for celibates, but for everyone. Even when our actions are all in line, it is still hard to live with a chaste heart, a chaste attitude, and chaste fantasies. Purity of heart and intention is very difficult.

Why? Chastity is difficult because we are so incurably sexual in every pore of our being. And that is not a bad thing. It’s God’s gift. Far from being something dirty and antithetical to our spiritual lives, sexuality is God’s great gift, God’s holy fire, inside us. And so the longing for consummation is a conscious or inchoate coloring underlying most every action in our lives.

And so it is hard to pray for chastity because to pray for it, seemingly, is to pray that sexual yearning and sexual energy should lessen within us or disappear altogether. And who wants to live an asexual and neutered life? No healthy person wants this. Thus, if you are healthy, it is hard to put your heart into praying for chastity because, deep down, nobody wants to be asexual.

But the problem is not with chastity but with our understanding of it. To be chaste does not mean that we become asexual (though spirituality has forever struggled to not make that equation). Chastity is not about denying our sexuality but about properly channeling it. To be chaste is to be pure of heart. That’s the biblical notion of chastity. Jesus does not ask us to pray for chastity, he asks us to pray for “purity of heart”: Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God. They also channel their sexuality properly.

What is purity of heart? To be pure of heart is to relate to others and the world in a way that respects and honors the full dignity, value, and destiny of every person and everything. To be pure of heart is to see others as God sees them. Purity of heart would have us loving others with their good (and not our own) in mind. Karl Rahner suggests that we are pure of heart when we see others against an infinite horizon, namely, inside of a vision that sees the other’s dignity, individuality, life, dreams, and sexuality within the biggest ambiance of all, God’s eternal plan. Purity of heart is purity of intention and full respect in love.

When we understand chastity in this way we can more easily pray for it. In this understanding we are not praying to have our sexual energies deadened, we are praying instead to remain fully red-blooded but with our sexual energies, intentions, and daydreams properly channeled. We are praying too for the kind of maturity, human and sexual, that fully respects others. In essence, we are praying for a deeper respect, a deeper maturity, and a more life-giving love.

And this is a much-needed prayer in our lives because sexuality is so powerful that even inside of a marriage relationship sexuality can still have an intentionality that is not wide enough.  Charles Taylor, in his book, A Secular Age, argues the point that sex too-easily loses the big picture and becomes narrow in its focus, a point that is often missed in our understanding of it:  “I am not trying to be condescending about our ancestors, because I think that there is a real tension involved in trying to combine in one life sexual fulfillment and piety. This is only in fact one of the points at which a more general tension, between human flourishing in general and dedication to God, makes itself felt. That this tension should be particularly evident in the sexual domain is readily understandable. Intense and profound sexual fulfillment focuses us powerfully on the exchange within the couple; it strongly attaches us possessively to what is privately shared. … It is not for nothing that the early monks and hermits saw sexual renunciation as opening the way to the wider love of God … [And] that there is a tension between fulfillment and piety should not surprise us in a world distorted by sin, that is separated from God. But we have to avoid turning this into a constitutive incompatibility.”  Unfortunately that is forever what both the secular world and Christian spirituality (without a proper understanding of chastity) struggle not to do.

Given the power of sexuality inside us, and given the power of our human drives and yearnings in general, it is not easy to live a chaste life. It is even more difficult, and rare, to have a chaste spirit, a chaste heart, chaste daydreams, and chaste intentions. Our hearts want what they want and pressure us to ignore the consequences. We can easily feel a certain repugnance to praying for chastity. But that is largely because we do not understand chastity properly: It is not a deadening of the heart, a stripping away of our sexuality, but a deeper maturity that lets our sexual energies flow out in a more life-giving way.