Building an Ark

February 20, 2011

If you can keep your head when all about you

Are losing theirs and blaming it on you.

You will recognize these words as the opening lines of Rudyard Kipling’s famous poem, If, and they, as much as any scriptural commentary, provide the key to understand the story of Noah and the Ark.

What is the meaning of this story? Are we really to believe that at a certain time in history the whole earth was flooded and that one man, Noah, had the foresight to build a boat on which he had placed a male and female of every living species on earth so as to save them from extinction? Clearly the story is not to be taken literally, as a concrete event in the history of this planet. Like a number of other biblical stories of the origins of history, it is not an historical video-tape of what happened but is rather a story of the human heart, a story which is truer than true in that it happens again and again inside of our lives. And how does it happen? What is the meaning of the story of Noah and the Ark?

The story might be recast this way: Every so often there comes a time in history when there is so little vision, faith, idealism, decency, and charity left on this planet that there is a real danger that the world itself will sink, will drown, and revert to a chaos that will kill everything that’s precious. But one person, despite all that is going on around him or her, will keep his or her eyes on what’s higher, keep faith intact, protect life, and refuse to compromise charity and decency. Eventually the earth will drown in chaos, but because of this one person’s vision, idealism, faith, decency, and charity, a pocket of life, that still contains all that is precious, will be preserved and given a new chance to grow.

Noah’s Ark is a boat of faith, vision, idealism, decency, and charity. These virtues give us the capacity to float above the chaos that drowns things. Moreover, our decency, charity, faith, and vision contain within themselves all that’s precious and that needs to be protected and given a continued chance for life.

And there are different ways to build this ark. Here’s one:

Daniel Berrigan is fond of issuing this warning: Beware, beware, or the culture will swallow you whole! It’s easy to be swallowed whole and drowned by our culture. It is that kind of a narcotic. Recognizing this, at a point in his life, Daniel Berrigan chose to work full-time in a hospice for the dying. His motives were mixed: On the one hand, he sincerely wanted to help dying patients in any way he could, physically and spiritually. On the other hand, he wanted to work with the dying because he recognized that they, the dying, precisely because they no longer have a meaningful place inside the culture and the future, could give him a privileged perspective on our culture and on our world. Simply put: When you see your culture and your world through the eyes of someone who is dying, things take on a very different perspective and a lot of what fires ordinary life (tiring our bodies, minds, and heart in its pursuit) is now exposed as secondary and as not worthy of all the attention and energy it is given.

For Daniel Berrigan, building an ark, meant attending to the dying so as to be given the faith and perspective to not drown in our culture.

And so we might paraphrase Rudyard Kipling this way:

If you can keep your faith when all about you they are losing theirs, but are comfortable in the feeling that there is strength in numbers, that everyone else is following suit, that so many million people can’t be wrong;

If you can keep giving others respect when all about you this is seen as weakness, and disrespect is held as strength and passion for truth;

If you can remain courteous and retain your manners when all about you courtesy is seen as quaint, and crassness and crudity are paraded as sophistication;

If you can live in tension when all about you there is compromise because it is judged that it is better to let the devil take tomorrow than to live in tension today;

If you can refuse to settle for second-best when all about you it is accepted that this is all that life will offer;

If you can combine chastity and passion when all about you this is judged as naïve and impossible;

If you can make room for Sabbath amidst the pressures of life when all about you those pressures have begun to dictate all of life;

And, if you can bear down even more in charity and forgiveness, loving and forgiving those who hate you, when all about you they are advocating hate for hate;

Then, just as surely as Noah, you will have built an Ark!

Straining for Sabbath amidst the Demands of Phones and Computers

February 13, 2011

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!

Tormenting the Cat

February 6, 2011

Eighty-five years ago, G. K. Chesterton looked at his society and saw some things that disturbed him. Here’s his comment:

There comes an hour in the afternoon when the child is tired of ‘pretending’; when he is weary of being a robber or a noble savage. It is then that he torments the cat. There comes a time in the routine of an ordered civilization when the man is tired at playing at mythology and pretending that a tree is a maiden or that the moon made love to a man. The effect of this staleness is the same everywhere; it is seen in all drug-taking and dram-drinking and every form of the tendency to increase the dose. Men seek stranger sins or more startling obscenities as stimulants to their jaded sense. They seek after mad religions for the same reason. They try to stab their nerves to life, if it were with the knives of the priests of Baal. They are walking in their sleep and try to wake themselves up with nightmares.

Ah, the genius of Chesterton! I read this passage years ago and have never forgotten it. Even if one doesn’t fully agree with his assessment, nobody can argue with his expression. Moreover it doesn’t strain the imagination to see evidence of what he is expressing inside of our own culture today. Salient examples abound: The illegal drug trade is one of the biggest industries in the world, internet pornography is the biggest addiction in the world, excessive use of alcohol is everywhere, high-profile athletes and entertainers brag that they have slept with thousands of people, even as they go in and out of rehab regularly, celebrities show up at parties carrying briefcases full of cocaine, and drug dealers already find a market among our elementary school students. Evidently many of us today are also trying to stab our nerves to life by constantly increasing the dosage.

But we need not look at the lives of rich and the famous to see this. None of us are immune. We just do this more subtly. Take, for example, our addictive struggle with information technology. It’s not that the internet and the myriad of programs, phones, pads, gadgets, and games that are linked to it are bad. They aren’t. In fact we are a very lucky generation to have such instant and constant access to information and to each other. Ever smarter phones, better internet programs, and things such as Facebook are not the problem. Our problem is in handling them in a non-addictive way, both in how we respond to the pressure to constantly buy ever-newer, faster, flashy, and more capable technologies, and in our inability to not let them control our lives. We too perpetually tire of what we have and seek somehow to increase the dosage to stab our nerves into life.

Whenever that happens we begin to lose control of our lives and find ourselves on a dangerous treadmill upon which we begin to lose any sense of real enjoyment in life.

Antoine Vergote, the famed Belgium psychologist, had a mantra which read: Excess is a substitute for genuine enjoyment. We go to excess in things because we can no longer enjoy them simply. It’s when we no longer enjoy our food that we overeat; it’s when we no longer enjoy a drink that we drink to excess; it’s when we no longer enjoy a simple party that we let things get out of hand; it’s when we can no longer enjoy a simple game that we need extreme sports, and it’s when we no longer simply enjoy the taste of chocolate that we try to eat all the chocolate in the world. The same principle holds true, even more strongly, for the enjoyment of sex.

Moreover excess isn’t just a substitute for enjoyment; it’s also the very thing that drains all enjoyment from our lives. Every recovering addict will tell us that. When excess enters, enjoyment departs, as does freedom. Compulsion sets in. Now we begin to seek a thing not because it will bring us enjoyment, but because we are driven to have it. Excess is a substitute for enjoyment and because it doesn’t bring genuine enjoyment it pushes us on to further excess, to something more extreme, in the hope that the enjoyment we are seeking will eventually be induced. That’s what Chesterton’s metaphors – tormenting the cat and stabbing our nerves back into life – express.

The answer? A simpler life. But that is easier said than done. We live with constant pressure, from without and from within, to see more, consume more, buy more, and drink in more of life. The pressure to increase the dosage is constant and unrelenting. But this is precisely where a deliberate, willful, and hard asceticism is demanded of us. To quote Mary Jo Leddy, we must, at some point say this, mean it, and live it: It’s enough. I have enough. I am enough. Life is enough. I need to gratefully enjoy what I have.

Some Hymns for Justice

January 30, 2011

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)

Rolling the Dice on the Gospel

January 23, 2011

They hadn’t understood about the loaves! The Gospels use those words to describe the crowd that Jesus had miraculously fed with five barley loaves and two fish. They ate, but they didn’t understand. What didn’t they understand?

This is the story: Jesus had been preaching to a large crowd, several thousand people. But they were in a remote place and, after a time, the people had been without food for a long time. They were hungry, so famished in fact that they lacked the strength to return to their own towns and villages. The disciples approached Jesus and asked him whether they should go into the neighboring towns and buy food for the crowd. Jesus told them instead to feed the people themselves. They protested that they had too little food, almost none. Jesus asked them what they in fact did have. Their answer: “Only five barley loaves and two fish.” And this came with a question: What good is that among so many? The equation is hopeless: so little food, so many people.

And so Jesus asked them to bring the loaves and fish to him. He blessed the food and asked the disciples to distribute it among the hungry thousands. We know the rest of the story: They set out the food; everyone ate as much as he or she wanted, and they gathered up twelve baskets of scraps left over afterwards. And the crowd was impressed, so much in fact that the next day they followed Jesus around the lake, hoping for another such feeding. Jesus, for his part, was saddened by their lack of understanding: They hadn’t understood about the loaves.

What hadn’t they understood? Two things:

First: When the disciples initially approach Jesus and ask him whether they should go into the neighboring towns and buy bread, their question betrays that they are unaware that they are with the bread of life. They are in the presence of that which is the object of all the world’s hungers and which, in its bounty, is unlimited and infinite. Yet they want to go off and buy food elsewhere. The lesson: When you are with the bread of life there is no need to go off to buy food, or anything else, elsewhere! You have all the resources you need to feed every kind of hunger. The disciples’ wanting to go off to buy food elsewhere betrays their lack of awareness of this. They didn’t’ see the incongruity, the irony, in their request: Jesus is the bread of life, food for the life of the world, and they ask him if they should go off elsewhere to buy what is needed to feed the crowds.

The second thing they didn’t understand was the meaning of the equation: so little food, so many people. A few small loaves of bread and a few fish are hopelessly inadequate to feed a crowd of thousands. It goes against common sense to put such a pathetically meager fare before so many people. How can five loaves and two fish feed a crowd of thousands?

Sometimes well-meaning homilists have tried to explain what might have happened by suggesting that Jesus’ invitation to share drew out from the people the privately guarded resources of food that each had brought and, when everyone shared what he or she had, all were fed and there was food to spare. Such a homily has its own good lesson, but the point of the story is precisely the hopelessness of the equation. In essence, the resources of the Gospel always seem hopelessly dwarfed by the world’s power, the world’s hunger, the world’s sin, and the resources that the world itself seems to offer.

Five loaves and two fish set out to feed a crowd of thousands is the Gospel equivalent of the famous story in the Jewish scriptures of the young shepherd boy, David, standing before the giant, Goliath: A young boy, barefoot, holding a boy’s plaything, a slingshot, standing before a giant, a trained soldier, clothed in iron, with a sword-bearer carrying his weapons, is also a hopeless equation: So little power against so much strength. But the young boy triumphs because God is on his side. It’s the same with the loaves and the fish.

What do we need to understand about the loaves? We need to understand that we are with the bread of life, everything we need to feed the world we already have. We don’t need to go anywhere to buy anything. We have the resources already; though on the surface those resources will always look over-matched, hopeless, dwarfed, nonsensical, wishful thinking. On the surface, invariably, we will look like David before Goliath, puny and pathetic, not up to the task of defeating a giant or feeding a hungry, greedy world.

The challenge is to roll the dice on the reality of the Gospel. The Gospel works! It is adequate to the task, both of feeding the world and defeating the giant. It only needs to be trusted

Chastity As Purity Of Heart And Intention

January 15, 2011

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.

Books That Have Crossed my Path in 2010

January 2, 2011

There’s some rhyme and reason to how I select my reading material. I check reviews, I try to be alert to what gets mentioned when friends and colleagues talk literature, and I deliberately set myself a diet that balances spiritual books, novels, intellectual essays, and select biographies. Nonetheless, invariably, some of the best books I read each year are stumbled upon by accident. I ascribe to the theory that the book you’re supposed to be reading at a given time finds you.

What books found me this year? Here are some that stood out:

Among the novels I’ve read:

• Sebastian Barry’s, The Secret Scripture, is a brilliant piece of writing. It takes time for the tension to build, but it’s worth the wait and the language is art.

• Barbara Kingsolver’s, The Lacuna, is in the mode of several of Kingsolver’s other books, fictionalized history, with Kingsolver’s genius as a story teller everywhere evident.

• Toni Morrison, A Mercy. Morrison has already won the Nobel Prize for literature and this book, like her others, shows why. Not always an easy read, she never is, but many of her paragraphs are constructed like paintings to be looked at again and again.

• A.S. Byatt, The Children’s Book. Byatt is perhaps the foremost novelist in the English language today and will, no doubt, one day win the Nobel Prize for literature. The Children’s Book, like all her novels, is dense and not easy to read, not just because it is over 600 pages long, but because it mixes history, art, architecture, politics, economics, oppression, ideology, mythology, love, sex, abuse, and family life in a way that unsettles a settled mind. Life, as she lays it out, doesn’t move along clear, easily defined moral lines. Any easy concept of history, morality, family, or sex, will unravel as you read her.

• Don DeLillo, Point Omega. If you want a textbook on postmodernism, this is your book.

• Colm Toibin, Brooklyn. A story of a young woman emigrating from Ireland to New York a generation ago. This story has been told before, but not always as warmly as Toibin tells it.

• Jane Urquhart, Sanctuary Line. I’ve never read a Jane Urquhart book that’s disappointed me and this one doesn’t either, though it did for awhile. A slow, plodding diary of young woman, it saves its major tension and revelations until the end and, then, Urquhart’s gift as a story-teller breaks through.

Among the books of essays:

• Mary Gordon, Circling My Mother. A brilliant series of essays about her mother from one of America’s best novelists. Perhaps my favorite read this whole year.

• Donald Miller, A Million Miles in a Thousand Years. A wonderful apologetics for faith and for a desire for something beyond the simple sweetening of life. Recommended to parents to give you your college-age kids.

• Sue Monk Kidd, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. A very, very challenging account of why a woman of deep faith and Christian commitment, and a gifted writer, has left the church.

Among the spiritual books I’ve read this year, two stand out:

• W.H. Vanstone, The Structure of Waiting. A truly brilliant, deep study of the Passion of Jesus and what it can teach us about waiting. This book deeply influenced Henri Nouwen.

• Bill Plotkin, Soulcraft, Crossing into the Mysteries of Nature and Psyche. Written from a naturalist rather than a faith perspective, this book might be disturbing to some, but contains many psychological insights (and testimonies about inner transformation) that can, I believe, be very helpful in understanding how the soul journeys.

Finally, a couple of biographies and autobiographies:

• Doris Lessing Under My Skin, Volume One of my Autobiography, to 1949, and. Walking in the Shade, 1949-1962, Volume Two of my Autobiography. The first two volumes of Lessing’s autobiography are written as befits a Nobel Prize winner: They not only tell Lessing’s story, they also give the reader a feel for English and African culture and politics during nearly half a century. An adult “Diary-of-Anne-Frank”.

• Don Brophy, Catherine of Sienna, A Passionate Life. If you know next to nothing about Catherine of Sienna, and I didn’t when I purchased this book, this is a good place to start. It’s the most recent biography of a truly exceptional woman.

• Lorna Crozier, Small Beneath the Sky. I may be biased because the author is from Saskatchewan (my roots as well) and sets her story there, but this is a good piece of writing which, among other things, shows how the prairies help shape a soul.

• Nora Ephron, I Remember Nothing and Other Reflections. The author of When Harry Met Sally is approaching seventy and offers a very witty account of growing older. Beyond the wit and the fine writing, this book is a wonderful challenge to our innate grandiosity that likes to mask itself as seriousness.
De gustibus non est disputantum.

The Rich Meaning of Christmas

December 19, 2010

What does Christmas mean? Christmas is like a perfectly-cut diamond twirling in the sun, giving off an array of sparkles. Here are just some of its meanings:

• A four-year-old child woke up one night frightened, convinced that there were all kinds of spooks and monsters in her room. In terror she fled to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother took her back to her room and, after soothing her fears, assured her that it was safe there: “You don’t need to be afraid. After I leave, you won’t be alone in the room. God will be here with you!” “I know that God will be here,” the child protested, “but I need someone in this room who has some skin.” The word was made flesh and dwelt among us. John 1, 14

• God is not found in monasteries, but in our homes. Wherever you find husband and wife, that’s where you find God; wherever children and petty cares and cooking and arguments and reconciliation are, that’s where God is too. The God I’m telling about, the domestic one, not the monastic one, that’s the real God. Nikos Kazantzakis

• Every year of life waxes and wanes. Every stage of life comes and goes. Every facet of life is born and then dies. Every good moment is doomed to become only a memory. Every perfect period of living slips through our fingers and disappears. Every hope dims and every possibility turns eventually to dry clay. Until Christmas comes again. Then we are called at the deepest, most subconscious, least cognizant level to begin to live again. Christmas brings us all back to the crib of life to start over again: aware of what has gone before, conscious that nothing can last, but full of hope that this time, finally, we can learn what it takes to live well, grow to full stature of soul and spirit, and get it right. Joan Chittister

• After a mother has smiled for a long time at her child, the child will begin to smile back; she has awakened love in its heart, and in awakening love in its heart, she awakes also recognition. In the same way, God awakes Himself before us as love. Love radiates from God and instills the light of love in our hearts. Hans Urs Von Balthasar

• At Christmas, through his grace-filled birth, God says to the world: “I am there. I am with you. I am your life. … Do not be afraid to be happy. For ever since I wept, joy is the standard of living that is really more suitable than the anxiety and grief of those who think they have no hope. … This reality, this incomparable wonder of my almighty love, I have sheltered safely in the cold stable of your world. I am there. I no longer go away from this world. Even if you do not see me. I am there. It is Christmas. Light the candles! They have more right to exist than all the darkness. It is Christmas. Christmas lasts forever.” Karl Rahner

• Even at Christmas, when halos are pre-tested by focus groups for inclusion in mass market campaigns, they are hard to see. … This is how halos are seen, by looking up into largeness, by tucking smallness into folds of infinity. I do not know this by contemplating shimmering trees. Rather there was a woman, busy at the Christmas table, and I looked up to catch a rim of radiance etching her face, to notice curves of light sliding along her shape. She out-glowed the candles. All the noise of the room left my ears and silence sharpened my sight. When this happens, I do not get overly excited. I merely allow love to be renewed, for that is the mission of haloes, the reason they are given to us. … But when haloes fade, they do not abruptly vanish, abandoning us to the lesser light. They recede, as Gabriel departed from Mary, leaving us pregnant. John Shea.

• Some of the Church Fathers compared Jesus to a singer with a strong voice and a perfect pitch who joins a discordant choir and completely transforms it. It is not that Jesus gave us a different set of songs to sing, but helped us instead to perform our standard repertoire in an entirely new and more beautiful way. Richard McBrien

• The incarnation does not mean that God saves us from the pains of this life. It means that God-is-with-us. For the Christian, just as for everyone else, there will be cold, lonely seasons, seasons of sickness, seasons of frustration, and a season within which we will die. Christmas does not give us a ladder to climb out of the human condition. It gives us a drill that lets us burrow into heart of everything that is and, there, find it shimmering with divinity. Avery Dulles

• Looking for God these days requires the willingness to investigate the small. Aztec Poem.

No Room in the Inn

December 12, 2010

Mary gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

In the Christmas story, we have always vilified and demonized the innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away, leaving them no choice for shelter except a stable. And the lesson we took from this was the need for greater hospitality in our lives, the need to not be so busy and preoccupied that there is “no room in the inn”, that is, that there is no place in our busy lives for a messiah to be born, for Christmas to happen.

There is some truth in this, but scholars suggest that there is a deeper lesson in Jesus having to be born in a stable because there was no room for him in the inn. What is being stressed is not so much lack of hospitality by an innkeeper, but rather the fact that Jesus was born outside of a city, outside of what is comfortable, outside of glamour and fame, outside of being recognized by the rich and the powerful, and beyond notice by the everyday world. Jesus was born in anonymity, poor, outside of all notice, except for family and God.

Being rejected by the city also foreshadowed his death. Jesus’ earthly life will end as it began. He will be a stranger, an outsider, crucified outside the city just as he was born outside the city.

Thomas Merton once gave a wonderful commentary on this: Into this world, this demented inn, in which there is absolutely no room for Him at all, Christ has come uninvited. But because He cannot be at home in it, because He is out of place in it, and yet must be in it, His place is with those others for whom there is no room. His place is with those who do not belong, who are rejected by power because they are regarded as weak, those who are discredited, who are denied status as persons, who are tortured, bombed, and exterminated. With those for whom there is no room, Christ is present in the world. He is mysteriously present in those for whom there seems to be nothing but the world at its worst.

Jesus was born into this world unnoticed, outside the city, and outside of all persons and events that seemed important at the time. Two thousand years later, we recognize the importance of that birth, but, at the time, virtually no one did. Understanding what is implied in that can help give perspective to those of us who, in our lives, forever, feel like we are outsiders, unknowns, anonymous, small-time, small-town, persons who are incidental to the big action and the big picture. Our photo and our story will never appear in TIME or PEOPLE magazine. Our names will never be up in lights and we are destined to live and die in basic anonymity, not known by anyone outside of our own small circles.

Most of us will live lives of quiet obscurity, in rural areas, in small towns, and in the unknown parts of our cities, watching the big events of our world from the outside and seeing always someone other than ourselves as being at the center. We ourselves, it seems, will remain forever unknown, and our talents and contribution will not be recognized by anyone, perhaps not even our own families. There will never be room for us in the inn. We will live, work, and give birth to life and to our children in much humbler places.

And, perhaps most painful of all, we will suffer the frustration of being unable to manifest our talents and gifts to the world, but will instead find that the deep symphonies and melodies that live within us will never find satisfying expression in the outside world. Our dreams and our deepest riches will never find an earthly stage. There will never be room in the inn, it seems, for what is best within us. Our deepest riches, like Jesus’ birth in our world, will be consigned to the fringes, to the martyrdom of inadequate self- expression, as Iris Murdoch once called this. Art too has its martyrs and there is no pain greater than the inadequacy of self-expression.

Mary gave birth to the Christ in a stable because there was no room for them in the inn. This is a comment on more than just the busyness and inhospitality of some ancient innkeeper. It is a comment upon what, in fact, lies deepest within human life. In essence, what it says is that it is not those who sit at the center of things, the powerful, the rich, the famous, the government leaders, the entertainment celebrities, the corporate heads, the scholars and academics, who ultimately sit at the center of life. What deepest and most meaningful inside of life lies in anonymity, unnoticed by the powerful, tenderly swaddled in faith, outside the city.

Longing, Desire, and the Face of God

December 5, 2010

“Like a deer yearns for flowing streams, so my soul yearns for you my God.” “My soul keeps vigil for you in the night.”

We’ve all heard these lines, prayed them, and in our more reflective moments tried to mean them; but, mostly, our hearts have belied those words. We haven’t really, at least not in our more conscious thoughts and feelings, longed for God with any real intensity and in our beds at night our souls are generally keeping vigil for someone other than God. But, for this, we need not apologize.

We are human beings, not angels, and nature and instinct conspire to direct our gaze and our desire towards this earth. It is persons and things of this earth for which our hearts long with intensity. Moreover, our longings are wide and promiscuous. We ache for a lot of things, though are most intense longings mostly have to do with yearning for a soulmate and with emotional and sexual consummation.

Those desires, at first glance at least, generally do not appear as holy or God-directed. Indeed, they seem the opposite. What we long for with deep intensity and what our souls keep vigil for in the night is, most times, someone or something much more earthy and erotic than what we associate with God. For example, when we see someone hauntingly beautiful or when we experience strong sexual attraction, what are we feeling inside of ourselves in the face of that radiance? For whom is our soul keeping vigilance at that moment? For what are we longing?

We dare not associate what we are feeling at those times with the holy sentiments we express in our psalms and prayers. And we are the poorer for that, religiously and humanly. First of all, that desire, far from being unhealthy, is in fact a sign of health. Beauty is meant to be honored; we are meant to feel that powerful attraction and pull, including its sexual component. Beauty, of course, is also meant to be respected and not violated. Our capacity to honor beauty is a sign of health and our capacity to not violate that beauty is a test of that health, though that’s not the point here.

The point here is that, consciously and unconsciously, we understand these powerful earthy and erotic attractions as taking us away from God and as something we need to give up in order to move closer to God. Our desire for God and our more earthy and sexual desires are perceived as competitors, incompatible, demanding that we renounce one for the other. That misconception, more than we imagine, hurts us.

Why? Because everything that is beautiful and attractive, however earthy and sexual, is contained inside of God. God is the creator of all that is beautiful, attractive, colorful, sexual, witty, brilliant, and intelligent. All that we are attracted to on this earth, including the beauty that allures us sexually, is found inside of God and our attraction and longing for it here on earth is, in the end, a longing for God. Our souls need to keep vigil at a deeper level.

This is what many of the saints and mystics intuited when they felt such intensity in their longing for union with God. All that is beautiful and attractive is found inside of God and is found there in a form that exceeds our experience of it here. The saints and mystics rightly intuited that God is more interesting, more beautiful, and more sexual than anyone or anything here on earth. Hence their longing for God could indeed be compared to a thirsty deer longing for a drink from a cool stream.

We experience the same longing and the same intensity, except we never associate those feelings with God, though we should. The ache that we feel within ourselves in an obsession, in a powerful sexual desire, and in the face of stunning beauty is, ultimately, a yearning for God because everything we desire, be it ever so human, fleshly, or sexual, is inside of God, the author of all that is good. Our souls too thirst for God and they keep vigil for God at night, even though mostly we are unaware of it.

But we never really understand this. If we did, we would, like the saints and mystics of old, become obsessed with God, instead of being obsessed only with what we find attractive here on earth. Some of us are obsessed with beauty, some of us are obsessed with finding a soulmate, some of us are obsessed with sex, some of us are obsessed with truth, some of us are obsessed with justice, and some of us are obsessed with the energy, color, and pleasures of this world. But very few of us are obsessed, or even much interested, in God who is the author of beauty, sexuality, intimacy, truth, justice, energy, color, and pleasure.

Why aren’t we more interested in the One of which these things are only a pale reflection?

Virgin Birth

November 29, 2010

Christian tradition has always emphasized that Jesus was born of a virgin. The Messiah could only come forth from a virgin’s womb. The main reason for this emphasis of course is to highlight that Jesus did not have a human father and that his conception was from the Holy Spirit.

But there is often a secondary emphasis as well, less-founded in scripture. Too common within that notion is the idea that Jesus was born from a virgin because somehow sexuality is impure, that it is too base and earthy to have a connection to such a sacred event. The holy must be kept separate from what is base. Jesus wasn’t just born of a virgin because he did not have a human father; he was also born of a virgin because his birth demanded a purity that, by definition, rules out sex. Our concept of the virgin birth has been infiltrated by a piety which, for all kinds of reasons, cannot accord sexuality to the holy.

What’s wrong with this? Beyond denigrating the God-given goodness of sexuality, it misses one of the major aspects of revelation within the virgin birth. There is a moral challenge within the virgin birth, something which invites imitation rather than admiration.

Christian tradition emphasizes a virgin birth (just as it emphasizes a virgin burial, a virgin tomb to parallel the virgin womb) not because it judges that sexuality is too impure and earthy to produce something holy. Rather, beyond wanting to emphasize that Jesus had no human father, the Christian tradition wants to emphasize what kind of heart and soul is needed to create the space wherein something divine can be born. What is at issue is not celibacy rather than sex, but patience rather than impatience, reverence rather than irreverence, respect rather than disrespect, and accepting to live in tension rather than capitulating and compensating in the face of unrequited desire. A virgin’s heart lets love unfold according to its own dictates rather than manipulating it. A virgin’s heart lets gift be gift rather than somehow, however subtly, raping it. A virgin’s heart accepts the pain of inconsummation rather than sleeping with the bride before the wedding. That, in the end, is what constitutes virginal space, the space within which God can be born.

Thirty years ago, trying to express this, I wrote poem entitled, Virgin Birth. Today I blush at the youthful idealism in that poem; but, on my better days, I take counsel from the young man who wrote those lines:

Virgin Birth

The perennial paradox, peculiar to this Father and Son

Specialists in confounding human wisdom withdrawn from wonder.

A virgin gives birth, not to sterility, but to a Messiah.

What has virginity to do with giving birth? Nothing!

When wisdom wastes words wandering towards a truth that will not set us free.

Virginity and inconsummation: Incomplete heart and flesh,

wrestle with a God who has no flesh

who won’t let flesh meet flesh

ache, awaiting completeness

to stave off sterility, truly the unforgivable sin against the spirit of life.

But sterility becomes pregnant with yearning for the spirit that sleeps with God at night and

impregnates with messianic spirit those patient enough to yearn and sweat lonely tears

rather than ruin gift

with impatience.

Only virgins’ wombs bring forth messiahs because they alone live in advent

waiting a delaying bridegroom

late, hopelessly beyond the eleventh hour.

Still the virgin’s womb waits

Refusing all counterfeit lovers and impatience

which demand flesh on flesh and

a divine Kingdom on human terms.

Messiahs are only born

in virginity’s space

within virginity’s patience

which let God be God and

love be gift.

Why a virgin’s womb for a Messiah’s birth? Why an obsession with purity within the Christian tradition? Because, as we all know only too well, our lives are full of most everything that is not virginal or pure: impatience, disrespect, irreverence, manipulation, cynicism, grandiosity; and, as we all know too, within this matrix no messiah can be gestated.

Dealing with Loss, Grief, and Obsessions

November 21, 2010

What can we say in the face of deep loss, inconsolable grief, or unrequited obsessions?

As a graduate student in Louvain, I once posed that question to the renowned psychologist, Antoine Vergote: “When you lose a loved one, either through death or because that person dies to you in some other way, what can you do? What can you say to help someone in that situation?”

His answer was cautious, words to this effect: “When someone is grieving a deep loss, there is a period of time when psychology finds itself rather helpless. The pain of death or the pain of losing a deep relationship can trigger a paralysis that is not easy to reach into and dissolve. Psychology admits its limits here. Sometimes I think that the poets and novelists are of more use in this than is psychology. But, even there, they can offer some insight but I am not sure anyone can do much to take away the pain. There are some things in life before which we simply stand helpless.”

That was, I believe, a wise and realistic answer. The death of a loved one, or even just the pain of an unrequited obsession, can bring us to our knees, literally, and, as the author of Lamentations says, leave us with no other option than to “put our mouths to the dust, and wait!” Sometimes, for a period of time, the pain of loss is so deep and obsessive that no clinic, no therapy, and no religious word of comfort can do much for us.

I remember, twenty-five years ago, sitting with a friend who had, that day, been rejected by his girlfriend. He had proposed marriage to her and had received a clear and definitive refusal. He was shattered, utterly. For some days afterwards he had trouble simply going through the motions of ordinary living, struggling to eat, to sleep, to work. A number of us took turns sitting with him, listening to his grief, trying to distract him by taking him to movies, without really having much effect in terms of drawing him out of his depression and obsession. Eventually, of course, he slowly began to emerge from the grip of that over-concentration and, still further down the road, was able to regain his freedom and resiliency. But there was a time during which we, his friends, could not do anything else for him other than to be with him.

What can anyone say to someone who is in the throes of a deep loss or in the grips of an unrequited emotional obsession? We have our stock expressions which are not without merit: Life must go on. Every morning will bring a new day and eventually time will heal things. Remember too you are not alone; you have family and friends to lean on. Beyond that, you have faith. God will help you through this.

All of that is true, and important, but not particularly consoling or helpful during an overpowering period of grief. I remember writing a series of letters to a woman who had lost her husband to suicide and was totally shattered by that, believing that she would never experience happiness again. Time and time again I repeated the same lines to her: “This will get better – but not right now! Time will heal this, but its rhythm cannot be rushed. You will get better, but it will take time!”

Is there anything practical beyond this that we can offer someone who is in deep grief or in the grip of a bitter emotional obsession?

In 1936, when his sister, Marguerite-Marie, died, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin wrote these words in a letter: “I feel that a great void has opened in my life – or rather in the world around me – a great void of which I shall become increasingly aware. … The only way of making life bearable again is to love and adore that which, beneath everything else, animates and directs it.”

Antoine Vergote suggests that sometimes time, only time, can bring about healing and that in the interim the only real option is to bear the unbearable, to try to get one foot in front of the next, stoically, with patience, holding our pain with as much dignity as we can muster, while waiting for time to eventually work its alchemy, knowing that nothing can short-circuit that process.

But Teilhard suggests there is something that can help make the unbearable bearable, namely, a more conscious, deliberate effort to love and to adore.

How do we do that? Not easily. But we do it when, despite our crippling obsessions, restlessness, frustration, bitterness, and anxiety, we let our generous and noble side be the deepest voice inside of both our sympathies and our actions. When we are driven to our knees by loss and frustration, the best, and only useful, thing we can do is to genuflect in helplessness before a God who can help us and express our affection to anyone who can support us.

Atheism and Belief

November 14, 2010

God’s ways are not our ways! There is more truth to that than we normally think.

God is ineffable. What that means is that God cannot be captured in our thoughts or pictured inside our imaginations. This truth is one of the first things that the church affirms in its understanding of God, defining as a dogma at the Fourth Lateran Council in 1215 that God is so metaphysically different from anything we can know or imagine that all of our concepts and language about God are always more inadequate than adequate. God can be known, but never imagined or captured in a thought.

Why not? Why can we never form a picture of God or speak about God in adequate ways?

Because God is infinite and our minds are finite. Infinity, by definition, can never be circumscribed. That might sound abstract, but it is not. For example: Try to imagine the highest number to which it is possible to count? Instantly you realize that this is an impossible task because numbers are infinite and there is always one more. It is impossible to conceive of a highest number. This is even truer in terms of any imaginative picture we try to form of God and of how we try to imagine God’s existence. God is infinite and infinity cannot be captured or imagined inside of any finite thought.

This is important to understand, not to safeguard some theoretical point, but for our understanding of faith. We tend to identify a weak faith with a weak imagination, just as we tend to identify atheism with the incapacity to imagine the existence of God.

Imagine, for example, two different scenarios in your life: In the first instance, you have just experienced a religious high. Through prayer or some other religious or human experience, you have a strong, imaginative sense of God’s reality. At that particular moment, you feel sure of God’s existence and have an indubitable sense that God is real. Your faith feels strong. You could walk on water! Then imagine different moment: You are lying in your bed, restless, agitated, feeling chaos around you, staring holes into the darkness, unable to imagine the existence of God, and unable to think of yourself as having faith. Try as you might, you cannot conjure up any feeling that God exists. You feel you are an atheist.

Does this mean that in one instance you have a strong faith and in the other you have a weak one? No. What it means is that in one instance you have a strong imagination and in the other you have a weak imagination. Faith in God is not to be confused with the capacity or incapacity to imagine God’s existence. Infinity cannot be circumscribed by the imagination. God can be known, but not pictured. God can be experienced, but not imagined.

Nicholas Lash, in a deeply insightful essay on God and belief, suggests that the God that atheists reject is very often precisely an idol of our imaginations: We need do no more that notice that most of our contemporaries still find it “obvious” that atheism is not only possible, but widespread and that, both intellectually and ethically, it has much to commend it. This might be plausible if being an atheist were a matter of not believing that there exists “a person without a body” who is “eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything” and is “the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.” If, however, by “God” we mean the mystery, announced in Christ, breathing all things out of nothing into peace, then all things have to do with God in every move and fragment of their being, whether they notice this and suppose it to be so or not. Atheism, if it means deciding not to have anything to do with God, is thus self-contradictory and, if successful, self-destructive.

Thomas Aquinas famously wrote that God is self-evident in himself, though not self-evident to us. An Oblate confrere of mine has a less-philosophical way of expressing this. He is fond of saying: “God, as I understand Him, is not very well understood.” That’s true for all of us, in ways much deeper than we imagine.

When the prophet, Isaiah, glimpsed God in a vision, all he could do was stammer the words: Holy, holy, holy! Holy is the Lord God of hosts! But we misunderstand his meaning because we take “holy” in its moral sense, that is, as virtue. Isaiah however meant the word in its metaphysical sense, namely, as referring to God’s transcendence, God’s otherness, God’s difference from us, God’s ineffability. In essence, he is saying: Other, completely different, utterly ineffable, is the Lord God of hosts!

Accepting that God is ineffable and that all of our thoughts and imaginative constructs about God are inadequate helps us in two ways: We stop identifying our faith with our imagination, and, more importantly, we stop creating God in our own image and likeness.

Seeking a Confessor

November 7, 2010

Perhaps more than anything else, we are unconsciously seeking a confessor, someone before whom we can open our hearts, be completely transparent, pour out our confusion, and freely admit our sins. Inside our search for a soulmate is the search for a confessor. But a good confessor isn’t easily found. Colm Toibin, in his recent novel, Brooklyn, gives one of the reasons why:

His main character, Eilis, a young woman from Dublin, moves to New York and falls in love with a man named Tony. But, several months into the relationship, Eilis has to return to Ireland because her sister, Rose, has died. Tony, insecure and fearing that Eilis will not return, talks her into marrying him civilly before she leaves.

Back in Dublin, living with her mother, mourning her sister’s death and having to delay her return to New York because of a friend’s wedding, Eilis is pursued by a young man, Jim Farrell, and goes on a number of dates with him without telling him about her American husband. But she is haunted by her lack of disclosure and agonizes about what to do. What she would most love to do is to share her secret with him, pour out her confusion, make him her confessor, and have him help her sort this out, but his innocence makes her hesitate. As Toibin puts it: Could she possibly tell Jim what she had done such a short while earlier in Brooklyn? The only divorced people anyone in the town knew were Elizabeth Taylor and perhaps some other film stars. It might be possible to explain to Jim how she had come to be married, but he was someone who had never lived outside the town. His innocence and his politeness, both of which made him nice to be with, would actually be, she thought, limitations, especially if something as unheard of and out of the question, as far from his experience as divorce, was raised. The best thing to do, she thought, was to put the whole thing out of her mind.

Doris Lessing once made a comment about George Eliot, suggesting that Eliot would have been a better, deeper, writer, had she not been so moral. Innocence, it seems, can be, as both Eilis and Doris Lessing fear, a limitation, something that blocks empathy and insight. But is this true?

There’s a stream of popular thought that strongly suggests that it is. In its crasser forms, you see this in the cynicism in our culture around virginity and innocence, with both being simplistically identified with naiveté and lack of maturity. Indeed, lack of sexual experience is singled out as being the most suspect of all naiveties. Very common is the algebra which equates experience with “having been around” and equates “having been around” with understanding life. Our old catechisms taught that when Adam and Eve ate the forbidden fruit their minds were darkened. Popular thought today emphasizes instead that their eyes were opened, that experience, licit or not, is what widens the mind. From that it is easy to move to the idea that the ideal confessor, the person who understands life, is someone who “has been around”.

But we don’t really believe this. Why? Because what we unconsciously look for in a confessor belies this. In seeking a confessor (not necessarily a confessor in the sacramental sense) we are not looking for another drinking buddy, a partner in crime, someone who will not judge us because his or her life is as is just as confused and messed-up as our own. In seeking a confessor, consciously or unconsciously, we are looking for someone whose understanding and acceptance will take us to another place, beyond our confusion and weakness. Deep down we know that our sin will not be healed by someone else’s sin, but that it needs to meet instead something more innocent, more Godlike, like the embrace of the father of the prodigal son.

But not every kind of innocence meets this test. Eilis’ unwillingness to reveal her struggles before Jim Farrell’s innocence might indeed have been a wise decision. There is an innocence that, because it is deliberately blind at a certain point, is unhealthily immune to complexity. But there is an innocence too, and that is the kind we unconsciously seek out, that does meet the test.

A young seminarian struggling with sexual issues once wrote to Therese of Lisieux seeking her counsel. He hinted at his issues but told her: “If I shared with you what I am really struggling with, I fear that you would be horribly shocked and scandalized and would not write back to me.” Therese wrote back: “If you think that way, then you don’t really know me!”

The Cure d’Ars was a man of stunning simplicity and utter innocence. Yet he was perhaps the most sought-after confessor of his time. We long for just such a confessor, someone before whom we can freely pour out our complexity, but who doesn’t at the same time share our sin.

Subtle Forms of Idolatry

October 31, 2010

In my more reflective moments, I am sometimes forced to ask myself: Am I really interested in God or am I only interested in things about God? Am I more interested in teaching, speaking, and writing about God than I am in actually meeting God, one to one, in prayer and silence? Am I more interested in dealing with things about God and religion than I am in being hidden and silent in God’s presence?

The answers to those questions should be easier and more obvious than they are. On the surface, clearly, it would seem that I am interested in God: I try to pray regularly. I’m a priest who celebrates the Eucharist daily. I’m a theologian and writer who speaks and writes about God all the time. My entire life is spent dealing with the things of God; but, all of that notwithstanding, God isn’t necessarily the actual focus of these activities. The focus can easily be elsewhere.

We might all ask ourselves this question: In our explicit religious activities are we really interested in having a relationship with God and with Jesus, or, if we are honest, are we more interested in good liturgy, good theology, good spirituality, good religious experience, good prayer-quests, good pastoral practices, successful church programs, important moral causes, vital justice issues, and in helping to facilitate religious practice? It’s not that these things aren’t good, they are, but paradoxically they can be the very means by which we avoid having to face the deeper call for an intimate personal relationship with God.

C.S. Lewis is fond of describing our struggle here and he names it for what it often is: idolatry, a giving of ourselves over to something that is merely godly as opposed to a giving of ourselves over to God himself. Here’s how he describes this:

In his book, The Great Divorce, Lewis imagines ten scenes within which someone who has died is met on the other side by an “angel” who tries to coax the newly deceased person to let himself or herself be taken by the hand and led into heaven. The condition for entry into heaven in every instance is singular and simple: You simply have to trust the angel and let yourself be led!

In one of these scenes, Lewis pictures a conversation between one of these angels and a famous artist who has just died. The angel tries to convince the artist to come to heaven, describing to him the stunning beauty of heaven. Initially the artist is excited and eager, contemplating the great paintings he will be able to make, but he grows resistance and angry when he learns that there will be no need for him to paint this beauty once he is in heaven. Instead he will be meant simply to be inside of it and enjoy it. So he refuses to go to heaven, opting instead to remain where he can paint heaven rather than be inside it. He objects to the angel, protesting that, as an artist, art itself is an end, “paint for its own sake.” The angel replies: Ink and catgut and paint were necessary down there [during your earthly life], but they are also dangerous stimulants. Every poet and musician and artist, but for the grace of God, is drawn away from love of the thing he tells, to love of telling till, down in Deep Hell, they cannot be interested in God at all but only in what they say about Him. And … it doesn’t stop at being interested in paint, you know. They sink lower-become interested in their own personalities and then nothing but their own reputations.

What this angel says about poets and musicians and artists needs also to be said about theologians, spiritual writers, priests, bishops, ministers, deacons, liturgists, pastoral workers, social justice advocates, moral protesters of all kinds, retreat directors, spiritual directors, prayer group leaders, and even about those who are actively and eagerly seeking depth of experience in prayer. The danger is always that, like the artist who prefers and needs to paint beauty rather than simply become one with it, we too will make the religious activity we are doing an end in itself rather than keeping our real interest and focus on God.

And the irony is that religious activity, like art, can constitute one of the greater dangers for this kind of idolatry. It’s the gifted preacher, the great theologian, the brilliant liturgist, the hugely popular minister, and the marvelously skilled bishop or administrator who will have the biggest struggle. As Lewis puts it: It’s not out of bad mice or bad fleas you make demons, but out of bad archangels. The false religion of lust is baser than the false religion of mother-love or patriotism or art; but lust is less likely to be made into religion.

Every time we go to pray, go to minister, or go do to anything religious, it’s good to ask ourselves: Who and what, really, is this about?

On Not Running with the Crowd

October 24, 2010

In the Gospels the word “crowd” is nearly always used pejoratively, so much so that nearly every time the word is used you could preface it with the adjective “mindless”.

Crowds don’t have a mind. They are fired and driven by whatever energy, hype, fad, ideology, or hysteria is current. In the Gospels this energy is called “amazement”. We see numerous instances in the Gospels where Jesus says or does something that surprises the crowd and almost invariably this is followed by the phrase, “and the crowd was amazed”. Rarely is this a good thing.

Why? What’s wrong or dangerous about crowd-energy?

Crowd-energy is dangerous because, most times, it is non-reflective. It simply conducts and transmits energy rather than discerning and transforming it. An apt image for crowd-energy, amazement in the biblical sense, is an electrical cord. An electrical cord simply lets energy flow through it. It’s indifferent as to whether that energy is good or destructive. It’s a pure conduit. Whatever flows into it is exactly what flows out of it.

Crowds tend to work in the same way. They let energy flow through them indiscriminately without discerning whether that energy is good or bad. For example, we speak of being caught-up in certain energy. Sometimes this can be good, when crowds are caught-up in an energy that is positive, that helps build community. During the past weeks, for instance, many people in the world were caught up in the rescue of the trapped miners in Chile and that shared energy helped create community across national, ethnic, religious, and political lines. We see crowd-energy too as mostly a positive thing around certain sporting events like the World Cup of Soccer, the World Series of Baseball, or a number of tennis events.

But mostly the energy of a crowd is negative, the energy of ideology, fundamentalism, racism, fad, and hype. Crowd-energy is the energy behind a gang rape. It was also the energy behind the crucifixion of Jesus. It is instructive to look at the crowd before and during the crucifixion. Five days before he was crucified, Jesus entered into Jerusalem and the crowd enthusiastically shouted praise, wanting to make him their king. Five days later, with virtually nothing changed, the same crowd was shouting: “Crucify him! Crucify him!” Crowds are fickle because crowds don’t think. They simply conduct whatever energy is gripping them.

In the incident in the Gospels where a woman is caught in adultery and is brought before Jesus by an over-zealous crowd, we see a perfect example of the dangerous, non-reflective energy of a crowd in contrast to the more reflective energy of an individual. The text tells us that a crowd brought a woman to Jesus and demanded that he morally share their intent to stone her to death. But Jesus, in a now-famous challenge, tells them: “Let the person among you who is without sin cast the first stone.” The response: “They walked away, one by one, beginning with the eldest.” A mindless crowd, caught up in the grip of a moral fever, brings a woman to Jesus. But they walk away as individuals, one by one, no longer inside the grip of that amazement.

Amazement, however, must be sharply distinguished from wonder and awe. Wonder and awe are the antithesis of amazement. In amazement, energy flows through you. In wonder and awe, energy stuns, paralyzes, and holds you. A clever quip from comedian, George Carlin, captures the difference. Explaining why he was congenitally skeptical of most “born-again” persons, Carlin famously quipped: “I distrust born-again people because they talk too much. When I was born I was so stunned I couldn’t talk for two years! When someone has a religious experience that is powerful enough to mute them for a couple of years, I will take them seriously!”

And in that lies the challenge: Beware of the energy that emanates from a crowd. Beware of the latest fad. Beware of hype of all kinds. Beware of the cheerleaders of both the liberals and the conservatives. Beware of any crowd who wants to stone someone to death in God’s name.

Think back to the various crucifixions that you have been involved in and recall how, later, in the sobriety and clarity of some different air, you asked yourself: How could I have been so wrong? So cruel? So stupid? Read accounts in the newspapers and on the internet of young people with decent, good hearts who, caught up in the energy of crowd, cyber-bully someone to the point where he or she commits suicide. Think how, in each case, the various persons responsible eventually walk away, one by one, a lot more sober and reflective than they were when they were caught up on the mindless energy of a crowd.

Then perhaps, more lightly, display some old photos of you showing your various hairstyles and clothing styles throughout the years, and you’ll have all the reminders you need about how fickle and mindless can be the energy of the moment.