British writer, A.S. Byatt, is perhaps the foremost novelist in the English language today. She will, no doubt, one day be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature.

Her newest novel, The Children’s Book, like all her novels, is dense, challenging, and not easy to read. And it is a difficult read not just because it is long (over 600 pages) and generously mixes history, art, architecture, politics, economics, oppression, ideology, mythology, love, sex, abuse, and family life, but also because it 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. Byatt, like all great writers, unsettles and stretches the mind.

And what’s to be said about this unsettling? Is it healthy? If we are Christians with clearly defined beliefs about life, morality, sexuality, and family, is it healthy to expose ourselves to this kind of unsettling? Shouldn’t we be reading things that bolster our faith and morals? Why walk deliberately into an intellectual and moral lion’s den?

Because, I believe, the lion’s den holds a partial key to mature faith and morality.

A mature faith is a tested faith and any set of moral principles worthy of our genuflection must not shy away from life’s real complexities. It is important that we be given solid roots and nurturing in the tenets of our faith and moral principles; but to come to maturity, we must also be stretched and made to walk through desert places which, especially at first, can seem chaotic, unsettling, and threatening. Paradoxically there is a nurturing in the unsettling. If our minds and hearts are open, we can find in those unsettling spaces some rich and important things that will widen and enrich us both in our humanity and in our faith and morals.

Here is how Byatt herself describes this in The Children’s Book: Philip Warren, one of her characters, an aspiring young artist, has lived a very sheltered life and lacks even a basic education.  Taken to Paris by some rich patrons, he finds himself, a raw uneducated youth, inside the Rodin Pavilion, staring at the works of this great master. What he sees blows apart his world, but he senses something else too:

Vast forms of sculpted flesh and muscles loomed. Delicate frozen female faces emerged from rough stone, or retrieved into it. Everywhere was appalling energy – writhing, striving, pursuing, fleeing, clasping, howling, staring. Philip’s first instinct was to turn and run. This was too much. It was so strong that it would destroy him – how could he make little trellis-men and modest jars, in the face of this skilled whirlwind of making? And yet the contrary impulse was there, too. This was so good, the only response to it was to make something. He thought with his fingers and eyes together. He needed desperately to run his hands over haunches and lips, toes and strands of carved hair, so as to feel out how they had been done.

There is a lesson here, I believe: We must be careful of what we let into our lives. Sometimes energy can be so powerful that it destroys us, or eats away at our faith and morals. A healthy soul keeps us glued together and too much exposure to the wild can cause it to unravel.  But the reverse is just as true: We cannot safeguard our faith and morals by shutting ourselves off safely in a room that cuts us off from thought and art, a room within which great artists and secular writers are seen as threats.

Studying philosophy as a seminarian, I had two kinds of professors: One kind told me that, as seminarians, we were to read great minds like Kant, Hegel, Feuerbach, Durkheim, and Marx only so that we could disprove them. The second kind gave a different advice: “Take for granted that because these are great minds they have something to teach you, something that will much help you, even inside your faith. Be careful, but be open!”

Caution, but openness, is indeed the key: All kingdoms need to be protected. To believe otherwise is to be naïve. There are dangers in simply opening ourselves naively and indiscriminately to everything and anything that is colorful, full of energy, or bursting with life. Sometimes its sheer power can overwhelm us. In Western society today it is not for lack of exposure to energy that we have a problem. To the contrary, too often today people lack for something they can hang on to morally and religiously.

But sometimes in our church circles, the opposite is true. We are too fearful of energy, especially as it finds expression in art and literature. Goethe once wrote: The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers. It can be unsettling to read books like A.S. Byatt’s, The Children’s Book, but perhaps, long range in our lives, it will be more unsettling if we do not.

Does God love some people more than others? Does God have favorites?

This is an old, disputed question with centuries of history: Is there a chosen race? Are some people predestined for heaven or hell? Does God love the poor more than the rich? Does God love sinners more than the righteous? Does God love virgins more than married persons? On the surface at least, it would seem that scripture suggests that God loves some people more than others. But is this true?

The question is hard to answer because partly it’s a false one. Generally whenever we set up these kinds of oppositions (Does God love this person more than that person?) we are formatting the issue in a wrong way:

For example, when Jesus tells us that there is more joy in heaven over the conversion of one sinner who has strayed than over ninety-nine others who seemingly have no need of repentance, he is not affirming that God loves sinners more deeply than righteous persons. For Jesus, speaking in this specific context, there are no righteous persons. There are only sinners (people who feel their need for conversion) and self-righteous persons (people who are sinners and have not yet acknowledged their need for repentance). Conversion, at least in this particular context, is not a precondition to the Christian life. It is the Christian life. There are no righteous persons, only sinners, and the Christian journey is always a journey of conversion, a returning to the fold. We open ourselves to receive the love of God whenever we are conscious of that. God does favor sinners, but that includes all of us.

The same is true regarding whether God loves the poor more than the rich. Jesus tells, seemingly without equivocation, that God has a preferential love for the poor, but does that mean that God loves the rich less?

Again, we must be careful in how we contrast these categories: poor versus rich. What’s being affirmed is not that God loves us better when we are poor than when we are rich. Rather the idea is that God loves us in our poverty – and that we more easily let ourselves be loved and more easily express gratitude when we acknowledge our poverty. For Jesus, there are only two kinds of persons: Those who are poor and those who are not yet in touch with their own poverty. And it’s not that God prefers us to be poor and loves us better when we are poor. Rather it’s when we are poor and in touch with our poverty that we more easily invite in love, both that of God and that of others. God does favor the poor, but, if we truly know our own condition, that’s all of us.

The same principle needs to be applied to questions surrounding holiness and sexuality. Does God love us better when we are sexually inconsummate than when we are not?

The Gospels emphasize that Jesus was born from a virgin womb, that he was buried in virgin tomb, and that we are invited to have a virginal heart. Because of this, inside of Christian spirituality as well as in the spiritual traditions of all the great world religions, there has always been a stream of thought that suggests that God somehow blesses the celibate life more than the non-celibate life, that virginity is the preferred spiritual state. Does God love us more when we are virgins?

Again, we must be careful in how we contrast the categories: virgin and non-virgin. What’s being taught is the God loves what is virginal inside of us. The contrast is not between those who sleep alone and those who don’t, but between those who protect what is virginal inside of themselves and those who don’t, and between those who can sweat blood so as to carry the tension of living without consummation (of all kinds) and those who cannot. It’s when we protect what is virginal inside us and when we don’t short-circuit life’s proper innate rhythms because of our tensions that we open ourselves up more to receive love, God’s love and human love. God does favor virgins, but, if we live our lives with the proper reverence and patience, that includes all of us.

The same thing might be said about Jesus’ holding up little children as an ideal. He is not teaching that God loves children more than adults. The contrast is not between little children and grown-ups, but between those who, like little children, know their need for help and those who because of pride or wound no longer admit their need for God and others. It’s when we admit the deep truth that we are not self-sufficient that we open ourselves up, preferentially, to be loved by God and others. God does favor those who are childlike, but, hopefully, that includes all of us.

Does God play favorites? Yes, but not between and among different persons, but between and among different states inside our own souls.

Several years ago, I was counseling a young man whose struggles with loneliness seemed to be the reverse of the norm. Instead of trying to escape it, he worried about losing it. He was in his early twenties, in love with a wonderful young woman, but was conflicted about marrying her because he feared that getting married might interfere with his loneliness and, in his words, make him “a shallower person with less to give to God and the world.” 

“I walk into a room,” he said, “and automatically look around for a sad face, for someone whose look suggests that there’s more to life than partying and the latest celebrity news.” There’s a danger in simplistically identifying heaviness with depth, but that wasn’t true for him.

 “Two images do battle within me,” he said. “When I was fifteen, my dad died. We lived in the country and he had a heart attack. We bundled him into the car and my mother was with him in the back seat, holding him as I was driving the car, fifteen years old, and scared. He died on the way to the hospital, but he died in my mother’s arms. Sad as this was, there was something of beauty in it. I have always felt that this is the way I would like to die, held by someone I love. But, while that image draws me strongly to marriage, I also look at how Jesus died, alone, abandoned, inside of no one’s arms, in an embrace only of something beyond, and I’m drawn to that too. There’s nobility in that which I don’t want to let go of. That too can be a good way to die.”

He feared losing his loneliness even as he healthily yearned for intimacy. He couldn’t fully explain why he was attracted to the loneliness of Jesus on the cross, except that he sensed that this was somehow a noble thing, something of depth, and something that would give him depth and nobility.

Others have been at this place before him, Jesus among them. For example, as a young man, Soren Kierkegaard renounced marriage for the same reason my young friend feared it. Rightly or wrongly, he felt that what he had to give to the world was rooted inside the pain of his own loneliness and could only issue forth from that center and, if he was less lonely, he would have less to give. Was he right?

The fruitfulness of his life, namely, the many people (Henri Nouwen among them) who drew healing and strength from his writing, attests to the truth of his intuition.  By their fruits you shall know them! Kierkegaard is the patron saint of the lonely. But, like my young friend, he was also conflicted by what this did to him. Too few people understood and this immersed him in “the sadness of having understood something true – and then seeing oneself misunderstood.” He confessed too that he lived the curse “of never to be allowed to let anyone deeply and inwardly join themselves to me.” Thomas Merton, commenting on the same thing, once said that the absence of married intimacy in his life constituted “a fault in my chastity.”  This kind of depth comes at a price.

Why, despite such an obvious downside, are the Kierkegaards of our world drawn to loneliness in the belief that it holds the key to depth, empathy, and wisdom? What does loneliness do for us?

What loneliness does for us, especially very intense loneliness, is destabilize the ego and make it too fragile to sustain us in the normal way. What happens then is that we begin to unravel, feel ourselves become unglued, become aware of our smallness, and know in the roots of our being that we need to connect to something larger than ourselves to survive. But that’s a very painful experience and we tend to flee from it.

However, and this is a great paradox, this experience of intense loneliness is one of the privileged ways of finding the deep answer to our quest for identity and meaning. Because it destabilizes the ego and disorients us, loneliness puts us in touch with what lays below the ego, namely, the soul, our deepest self. The image and likeness of God lies in there, as do our most noble and divine energies. That’s the truth behind the belief that in loneliness there is depth.

 And so the lesson is this, whether married or single: Don’t run from loneliness. Don’t see it as your enemy. Don’t look for another person to cure your loneliness.  See loneliness as a privileged avenue to depth and empathy. 

 Here’s the advice of the ancient Persian poet, Hafiz:

 
                                                       Don’t surrender your loneliness

                                                       So quickly.

                                                       Let it cut more deep.

                                                       Let it ferment and season you

                                                       As few human

                                                       Or even divine ingredients can.

                                                       Something missing in my heart tonight

                                                       Has made my eyes so soft,

                                                       My voice

                                                       So tender,

                                                       My need of God

                                                       Absolutely

                                                       Clear.

As a young man, Nikos Kazantzakis, the famous Greek writer, contemplated becoming a monk and once spent a summer touring monasteries. Years later, writing on the experience, he recounts a marvelous conversation he had with an elderly monk, Fr. Makarios.

At one point, he asked the old monk: “Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” The old priest sighed and replied: “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength. … I wrestle with God.” “With God!”  Kazantzakis exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?”   “I hope to lose, my child,” the old man replied, “My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.”

Among other things, this story highlights the fact that our spiritual struggles change as we age and go through life. The struggles of youth are not necessarily the struggles of mid-life and beyond. Maturity is developmental. Different things are asked of us as we move through life. This is also true for spirituality and discipleship.

How does our spiritual life change and demand new things from us as we grow?

Drawing upon the insights of John of the Cross, I would submit that there are three fundamental stages to our spiritual lives, three levels of discipleship:

The first level, which John of the Cross calls the dark night of the senses, might aptly be called Essential Discipleship. In essence, this is the struggle to get our lives together. This struggle begins really at birth but becomes more our own individual struggle when we reach puberty and begin to be driven by powerful inner forces to separate ourselves from our families so as to create a life and a home of our own. During this time we struggle to find ourselves, to get our lives together, to create a new home for ourselves. This can take years and might never be achieved. Indeed, for most everyone, some elements of this struggle will continue throughout their entire lifetime.

But, for most people, there comes a time when this is essentially achieved, when there is a sense of being at home again, when the major questions of life are no longer: Who am I? What will I do with my life? Who loves me? Who will marry me? Where should I live? What should I do?  At some point, most of us find a place beyond these questions:  We have a home, a career, a marriage partner or some peace without one, a vocation, a meaning, a good reason to get up every morning, and a place to return to at night. We have found our way home again.

We then enter the second level of discipleship which John of the Cross calls Proficiency and which we might call Generative Discipleship. In essence, this is the struggle to give our lives away. Our main concern now is not so much about what to do with our lives but how to give them away so as to make the world a better place. These are our generative years and they are meant to stretch from the time we land in a vocation, a career, and a home, until our retirement years.  And our major questions during these years need to be altruistic ones: How do I give myself over more generously and more purely? How do I remain faithful? How do I sustain myself in my commitments? How do I give my life away?

But those are not yet the ultimate questions: At some point, if we are blessed with health and life beyond retirement, a still deeper question begins to arise in us, one which invites us to a third stage of discipleship. As Henri Nouwen puts it: At a certain point in our lives the question is no longer: “What can I still do so that my life makes a contribution?” But: “How can I now live so that when I die my death will be an optimal blessing to my family, the church, and the world?”

John of the Cross calls this stage the dark night of the spirit. We might call it, Radical Discipleship because at this stage we are not so much struggling with how to give our lives away but with how to give our deaths away. Our question now becomes: How do live the last years of my life so that when I die my death will bless my loved ones just as my life once did?  How do I live out my remaining years so that when I die “blood and water” will, metaphorically, flow from my dead body as they once flowed from Jesus’ dead body?

Too little within our spiritualities challenges us to look at this last stage of life: How do we die for others? However, as Goethe puts it in his poem, The Holy Longing, life itself will eventually force us to contemplate whether or not we want to become “insane for the light”.

How do you stay positive, preach hope, and remain loving and big-hearted in the face of opposition, misunderstanding, hostility, and hatred?

This is what Jesus did and that particular quality of his life and teaching constitutes perhaps the greatest personal and moral challenge to all of us who try to follow him. How do you remain loving in the face of hatred? How do you remain empathic in the face of misunderstanding? How do you continue to be warm and gracious in the face of hostility? How do you love your enemies when they want to kill you?

Virtually every instinct inside us works against us here.  Our natural instincts are mostly self-protective, paranoid even, antithetical to self-abnegation and forgiveness. Our innate sense of justice demands an eye for an eye, a giving back in kind, hatred for hatred, distrust for distrust, murder for murder. And this isn’t just true for the big things, our struggle to remain loving in the face of death threats. We struggle to remain loving even in the face of irritation.

How do we handle opposition, misunderstanding, hostility, and hatred?

Sometimes our response is paralysis. We get so intimidated by opposition, misunderstanding, and hatred that we retreat and go underground. We retain our ideals but no longer practice them in the presence of those who oppose us. We continue to speak love and understanding, but not to our enemies (whom we don’t exactly hate, but whom we now stay away from).

Sometimes our response is the exact opposite, namely, in the face of opposition we develop a skin that’s so thick that we don’t need to care about what others think of us: Let them think whatever they want! They can like it or lump it! The problem with a thick skin is that our capacity to go on saying the right words and doing the right actions is partially based upon a certain blindness and insensitivity. In our mind, we don’t have a problem. Others do.

This insensitivity sometimes takes a more subtle form, condescension.  This happens when we believe that we are big-hearted enough to love those who oppose and hate us, even as our empathy and love are predicated on a certain elitism, namely, on the feeling that we are so morally and religiously superior to those who hate us that we can love them in their ignorance: Poor, ignorant people! If only they knew better! This is not love but a superiority-complex masquerading as empathy and concern. That’s not how Jesus treated those who hated him.

How did he treat them? In the face of hatred and being put to death by his enemies, Jesus wasn’t intimidated, nor did he become thick-skinned or condescending. What did he do? He rooted himself more deeply in his own deepest identity and, inside of that, found the power to continue to be warmed-hearted, loving, and forgiving in the face of hatred and murder. How so?

As Jesus was being executed he prayed: “Forgive them, they don’t know what they are doing.” Karl Rahner, commenting on this, astutely points out that, in fact, his executioners did know what they were doing! They knew they were crucifying an innocent man. So why does Jesus say they were acting in ignorance?

Their ignorance, as Karl Rahner points out, lay at a deeper level: They were ignorant of how much they were loved, whereas Jesus was not. When the Gospels describe Jesus’ inner state at the Last Supper, they say: “Jesus, knowing that he had come from God and that he was going back to God and that therefore all things were possible for him, got up from the table and took off his outer robe …” 

Jesus was capable of continuing to love and forgive in the face of hatred and murder because, at the very heart of his self-awareness, lay an awareness of who he was, God’s son, and how much he was loved.  He wasn’t thick-skinned or elitist, just in touch with who he was and how much he was loved. From that source he drew his energy and his power to forgive.

We too have access to that same powerful spring of energy. Like Jesus, we too are God’s children and are loved that deeply. Like Jesus, we too can be that forgiving.

Very few things, I believe, are more needed today, in both society and the church, than this capacity for understanding and forgiveness. To continue to offer others genuine love and understanding in the face of opposition and hatred constitutes the ultimate social, political, ecclesial, moral, religious, and human challenge. Sometimes church people try to single out one particular moral issue as the litmus test as to whether or not someone is a true follower of Jesus. If there is to be litmus test, let it be this one:

Can you continue to love those who misunderstand you, who oppose you, who are hostile to you, who hate you, and who threaten you – without being paralyzed, calloused, or condescending?

After Jesus had fed a crowd of more than five thousand with five loaves and two fishes, he asked his apostles to gather up the fragments that were left over, scattered here and there on the ground. They did as he asked and ended up filling twelve baskets with leftovers.

Recently, I attended a series of lectures by Walter Brueggemann. He is widely respected for his biblical scholarship, he feeds crowds from some healthy baskets, but he is perhaps even more deeply regarded because of his concern for the poor and his challenge to us to reach out to them with justice and generosity. After he had fed us, the crowds, here are some of the fragments that were gathered up:

• There is today a real danger of excessive privatization of our faith. The church must advocate too for the public conscience, not just for the private conscience. 
• Jesus before Pontius Pilate turned the question of power into the question of truth. Truth will always erode the chains of power and power will never stop truth. Truth is a spirit that works at bringing the world into harmony with God. 
• Where truth operates you see poverty turn into abundance; death turn into life; war turn into peace; and hunger turn into food.
• In Moses, truth confronts power; in Elijah, truth ignores power; and in Josiah, truth transforms power. 
• You can always recognize a “Pharaoh”: If you’ve seen one, you’ve seen them all! Pharaohs all have bad dreams, accumulate things, need ever larger bins to store their possessions, are permeated with anxiety, and are de-absolutized as soon as God enters the situation. Where do we have bad dreams? 
• A truth-filled God always conspires against Pharaoh. God, eventually, comes to a crisis and redefines it.
• Scripture ultimately speaks of bodily pain and painful slavery. Redemption, just as at the original Exodus, will always begin with a cry of distress and end with a dance of joy. Bodies that hurt must come to voice and that voice must say that this pain is abnormal and shouldn’t be borne any longer. Painful slavery and a truth-filled God will eventually make for you a path through the waters where Pharaoh cannot follow. Therefore we must never allow our pathologies to become normal, nor accept slavery for the security it brings.
• For the most part today, the media reflects the ideology of Pharaoh and yet we willing pipe it in. When we turn off our screens for awhile we begin to feel freer.
• God’s task of transformation is invariably entrusted to reluctant human will and courage.
• The Book of Deuteronomy is one of the greatest social documents ever written, it links faith to public life, to economics, and to justice. It directs faith always to the poor, towards “widows, orphans, and strangers.” Deuteronomy might be the most subversive document in the entire Old Testament. Among other things, it teaches uncompromisingly that laissez-faire economics needs some clear moral checks. In the temptations of Jesus in his dialogue with the devil, he quotes scripture three times and each time it is a passage from Deuteronomy. 
• Deuteronomy keeps reminding us that we once all were slaves and that it is not good to have amnesia. We should not absolutize the present and imagine it has always been this way. All of us should remember where we came from, not least today in our debates about immigration.
• If we do not heed the words of Deuteronomy about taking care of the poor we will have to deal with the scroll of Jeremiah who assures us that the world as we know it will come to and end because it cannot be sustained in its falseness.
• For Jeremiah, to intercede for the poor and needy is to know God.
• The prophetic tradition in scripture reminds us that there are three great virtues: generosity, hospitality, and forgiveness. Conversely our culture invites us to guard possessions, protect ourselves, and hold grudges.
• Our great rationalization: “If I had lived in those early times when the issues were clear, I would have offered myself as a martyr, but today the issues aren’t that clear.”
• The preaching of justice is only going to become more difficult as society is more and more devoured by anxiety. However, if we preach justice and society doesn’t listen, it’s society’s problem. But if we don’t preach justice, it’s our problem. 
• In answer to the question of why God sometimes seems to counsel violence in Scripture: The God of the bible is in recovery for all the violence that has been attributed to him and done in his name. And, inside our churches, we are all in various stages of recovery.
• Our prayers are generally too reverential: We need to pray more like Moses and remind God of what he promised us.
•  We are the only ones in town who know the way out of this crisis!

My father died when I was twenty-three, a seminarian, green, still learning about life. It’s hard to lose your father at any age and my grief was compounded by the fact that I had just begun to appreciate him.

Only some time later did I realize that I no longer needed him, though I still badly wanted him. What he had to give me, he had already given. I had his blessing, and that contained who he really was and what ultimately the gift of his life was to me.

I knew that I had his blessing. My life and the direction it had taken pleased him, made him proud. Like God’s voice at the baptism of his Jesus, his too had already communicated to me: You are my son in whom I am well pleased. That’s about as much a person may ask from a father.

And what did he leave me, and the rest of his offspring? Too much to name, but, among other things: He was one of the truly moral persons I have ever known, allowing himself the minimum of moral compromise. He wasn’t a man who bought the line that we are only human and so it’s okay to allow ourselves certain exemptions. He used to famously tell us: “Anyone can show me humanity; I need someone to show me divinity!” He expected you not to fail, to live up to what faith and morality asked of you, to not make excuses. If we, his family, inhaled anything from his presence, it was this moral stubbornness.

Beyond this, he had a steady, almost pathological, sanity. There were no hysterical or psychotic outbursts, no depressions, no lack of steadiness, no having to guess where his soul and psyche might be on a given day. With that steadiness, along with my mother’s supporting presence, he made for us a home that was always a safe cocoon, a boring place sometimes, but always a safe one. When I think of the home I grew up in I think of a safe shelter where you could look at storms outside from a place of warmth and security.

And because we were a large family and his love and attention had to be shared with multiple siblings, I never thought of him as “my” father, but always as “our” father. This, perhaps more than anything else, has helped me grasp the first challenge in the Lord’s Prayer, namely, that God is “Our” Father, Someone we share with others, not a private entity. Moreover his family extended to more than his own children. I learned early not to resent the fact that he couldn’t always be with us, that he had good reasons to be elsewhere: work, community, church, hospital and school boards, political involvements. He was an elder for a wider family than just our own.

Finally, not least, he blessed me and my brothers and sisters with a love for baseball. He managed a local baseball team for a good number of years. This was his particular outlet for freesence, a place where his soul could enjoy some Sabbath.

But blessings never come pure, my father was human, and a man’s greatest strength is also his greatest weakness. In all that moral fiber and rock-solid sanity, there was also a reticence that sometimes didn’t allow him to drink in fully life’s exuberance. Every son watches how his father dances and unconsciously sizes him up against certain things: hesitancy, fluidity, abandon, exhibitionism, false bracketing of sanity, irresponsibility. My father never had much fluidity to his dance, and I have inherited that, something that pains me deeply. There were times, both as a child and as an adult, when, at a given moment, I would have traded my father for a dad who had a more fluid dance-step, for someone with less reticence in the face of life’s exuberance.

And that is partly my struggle to receive his full blessing. I’m often reminded of William Blake’s famous line in, Infant Sorrow: “Struggling in my father’s hands.” For me, that means struggling with his inability at times to simply let go and drink in life’s full gift.

But, if there was hesitancy, there was no irresponsibility in his dance, even if sometimes that meant standing outside the dance. I was grieved at his funeral, but proud too, proud for the respect that was poured out for him, for the way he lived his life. There was no judgment that day on his reticence.

As of January 5th this year, my earthly days began to number more than my father’s. I’m older now than he was. But I still live inside his blessing, consciously and unconsciously striving to measure up, to honor what he gave me, my father. And mostly that’s good, though I also have moments when I find myself standing outside of life’s exuberance, reticent, his look on my face, looking with envy at those who have a more fluid dance step – me, ever my father’s son.

Twenty-eight years ago, when I first began writing this column, I wrote a piece that I entitled Binding and Loosing inside the Body of Christ. Among all the things I’ve ever written, I have probably received the most feedback on this.

What is the concept? How can we bind and loose each other inside the Body of Christ? Here are the essential lines:

Imagine you are a parent who has a child who no longer goes to church, no longer prays, no longer observes the church’s moral commandments, no longer respects your faith, and is perhaps even openly agnostic or atheistic. What can you do?

You can continue to pray for them and you can live out your own faith convictions, hoping that the example of your life will have power where your words are ineffectual. You can do that, but you can do more:

You can continue to love and forgive them and insofar as they receive that love and forgiveness they are receiving love and forgiveness from God. Your touch is God’s touch. Since you are part of the Body of Christ, when you touch them Christ is touching them. When you love them Christ is loving them. When you forgive them Christ is forgiving them because your touch is the church’s touch.

Part of the wonder of the incarnation is the astonishing fact that we can do for each other what Jesus did for us. Jesus gives us that power: Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. … Whose sins you forgive they are forgiven.

If you are part of the Body of Christ, when you forgive someone, he or she is forgiven. If you love someone, he or she is being loved by Christ because the Body of Christ is not just the body of Jesus but is also the body of believers. To be touched, loved, and forgiven by a member of the body of believers is to be touched, loved, and forgiven by Christ. Hell is possible only when someone has put himself completely out of the range of love and forgiveness so as to render himself incapable of being loved and forgiven. And this is not so much a question of rejecting explicit religious or moral teaching as it is of rejecting love as it is offered among the community of the sincere. Put more simply:

If someone whom you love strays from the church in terms of faith practice and morality, as long as you continue to love that person and hold him or her in love and forgiveness, he or she is touching the “hem of Christ’s garment”, is being held to the Body of Christ, and is being forgiven by God, irrespective of his or her official external relationship to the church. How?

They are touching the Body of Christ because your touch is Christ’s touch. When you touch someone, unless that person actively rejects your love and forgiveness, he or she is relating to the Body of Christ. And this is true even beyond death: If someone close to you dies in a state which, externally at least, has him or her at odds with the visible church, your love and forgiveness will continue to bind that person to the Body of Christ and will continue to offer forgiveness to that individual, even after death.

G.K. Chesterton once expressed this in a parable: “A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. His business agent went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest also went and argued: ‘He was not really a bad fellow; given time he would have matured. Let him out, please!’ The gate remained stubbornly shut against all their voices. Finally his mother came; she did not beg for his release. Quietly, and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan: ‘Let me in.’ Immediately the great doors swung open upon their hinges. For love goes down through the gates of hell and there redeems the dead.”

In the incarnation, God takes on human flesh: in Jesus, in the Eucharist, and in all who are sincere in faith. The incredible power and mercy that came into our world in Jesus is still with us, at least if we choose to activate it. We are the Body of Christ. What Jesus did for us, we can do for each other. Our love and forgiveness are the cords that connect our loved ones to God, to salvation, and to the community of saints, even when they are no longer walking the path of explicit faith.

Too good to be true? Yes, surely. But how else to describe the mystery of the incarnation!