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.

“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?

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.

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.

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.

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.