Many of us today tend to be intimidated by any kind of knowledge that makes scientific claims. Who dares argue with science? Who dares argue with the experts? Very few, and those who do are easily dismissed as backward or ignorant.

And so inside of our lives, objectified expertise generally trumps moral insight or, worse still, is simplistically identified with it. Truth is truth, science has the truth, and science trumps our moral concerns (which can be made to appear parochial and fear-based in the face of scientific claims). Thus the idea is prevalent that we should listen to the scientific experts when it comes to discerning the truth.

But is it really that simple? And who really are the experts? What makes someone an expert? A post-graduate degree? Being a mother who’s raising her family well? Being a respected researcher? Living a good life? Being steady and faithful? There are various kinds of experts.

Moreover there is also the issue of personal integrity and how this relates to “expertise”. What’s to be said for the truth of someone who produces scientific insight but who leads an unhealthy life? Does man or a woman’s personal life affect his or her research and professional expertise?

Many great thinkers – philosophers, theologians, and even scientists – would say that it does. Truth can never be divorced from moral insight since truth and morality are really one at their base. Hence personal integrity or lack of it in any researcher or scholar in some way does color his or her expertise, however imperceptible this might be on the surface. How?

Aristotle, for example, had a concept he called phronesis, which taught that it is impossible to separate the teaching of truth from the practice of virtue. For Aristotle, genuine knowledge, the type that ultimately makes you a better human being, could not issue forth from someone whose intellectual theory and personal moral life were radically out of sync.

Albert Einstein, in effect, said that it is impossible to do research that does not include a lot of me-search. Who we are and what perspective we have on reality will always help determine how we see the world and articulate any theory about it. And who we are and our perspective on reality is always partly shaped and deeply colored by our own moral lives. Our moral lives deeply influence our research because they help shape our eyesight.

The medieval mystic, Hugo of St. Victor, had an axiom for this: Love is the eye! For him, our eyesight is largely shaped by either the love or bitterness that is inside of us at any moment. When I look at the world with love, I see it one way; when I look at the world with bitterness, I see it another way. That’s also true for every researcher. Granted mathematics is beyond emotion, but the realities to which we apply it aren’t.

Finally, and not least, Jesus teaches that we see the world accurately only to the extent that we are pure of heart. When he said this he wasn’t just talking about having purity of heart in order to see straight religiously, he was affirming that purity of heart is a pre-condition in order to see straight in every way, religiously, morally, practically, and scientifically.

What we see through a microscope is partly colored by how we are feeling about life in general and how we are feeling about life in general is deeply colored by how we are living morally.

And so what’s the lesson?

The lesson here is not the one that you sometimes hear in circles of fundamentalist religion, namely, that we should stop listening to scientists, academics, and technological experts and should try to dispute their insights by using scripture. Our task is not to become defensive about the findings of the various professional academies, to stop studying.

Rather, these are the lessons:

First, honor the findings of genuine science and research even if you aren’t always enthralled about their source. All truth has one author, God. Thus God is the source of the bible and God is also the source of science and its findings. Accept truth in all its guises, but be less intimidated by the teachings of those experts who claim scientific objectivity without acknowledging their own limits, their own hidden judgments, and their own biases, particularly when their truth touches questions of health, meaning, morality, and happiness. A good researcher admits elements of me-search, is humble about the truth.

Next, recognize that expertise is a wide charism that issues forth from many circles. There are experts in science, but there are also experts in goodness, in love, in friendship, in kindness, in fidelity, in hope, in peace-making, in courage, in prayer, in honesty, in chastity, in aesthetics, in practical sanity, and in humor.

When you are looking for stars by which to guide your life scan the heavens widely. Don’t lock-in on one narrow corner. There are many stars, each with its own particular expertise in giving off light.

G.K. Chesterton once said that one of the reasons he believed in Christianity was because of its belief in the trinity. If Christianity had been made up by human person, it would not have at its very center a concept that is impossible to grasp or explain: the idea that God exists as one but within in three persons.

How do we understand the trinity? We don’t! God, by definition, is ineffable, beyond conceptualization, beyond imagination, beyond language. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God.

This is already evident in the history of religion. From the very beginning, humans have always had an experience of God and have worshipped God. However, from the very beginning too, humans have also had the sense that God is too rich and too-beyond any one set of categories to be captured in any human conception. Hence most ancient peoples were polytheistic. They believed in many gods and goddess. They experienced divine energy and the need to celebrate divine energy in many different areas of their lives and had gods and goddesses to accommodate that. Thus they had gods and goddesses for every longing and every circumstance, from war, through growing crops, through sex, through understanding why your father wouldn’t bless you, there was a god or goddess to whom you could turn.

Sometimes they believed in one supreme god who ultimately ruled over lesser gods and goddesses, but they sensed that divine energy was too rich a reality to be contained in a single being. They believed too that sometimes the gods were at war with each other. As well, their gods and goddesses often times messed around within human lives, making special deals with humans, having affairs with them, and sometimes even having children with them.

Many of the most powerful myths ever told arose out of the experience of God’s overwhelming richness and the ancient peoples’ incapacity to conceptualize God and God’s activity in any singular way. Whatever else might be said about polytheism and ancient myths about the gods and goddesses, ancient religious practices and the incredible canon of mythology that these produced speak of how rich, untamed, and beyond simplistic imagination and language is the human experience of God. The ancients believed that their experience pointed to the existence of many deities.

And then a massive shift took place: Judaism, soon followed by Christianity and Islam, introduced the strong, clear, doctrinaire idea that there is only one God. Now all divine power and energy was seen as coming from a single source, monotheism, YHWH, the Father of Jesus, Allah. There were no other gods or goddesses.

But from the time of Jesus’ resurrection onwards, Christians began to struggle with simple monotheism. They believed that there is still only one God, but their experience of God demanded that they believe that this God was somehow “three”. Stated simply, when Jesus rose from the dead Christians immediately began to attribute divinity to him, yet without identifying him as God the Father. Jesus was understood to be God, but somehow different from God the Father. Moreover, inside of their experience, they sensed still a third divine energy which they couldn’t fully identify with either Jesus or God the Father, the Holy Spirit.

This experience left them in a curious and sometimes perplexed state: They were monotheists, God alone was God. Yet, Jesus too was God, as was the Holy Spirit. Their experience of grace and God’s action in the world was at odds with their simplistic conception of monotheism.

God was one and yet God was somehow three. How to fit this together? It took Christianity three hundred years to finally arrive at a formula that somehow honored the richness of the Christian experience of God. The Council of Nicea in 325 gave us the creedal formula we profess today: There is one God in three persons; except they wrote that formula in Greek and the words there state literally that God is one substance in three subsistent relations.

That formula isn’t meant to give us perfect clarity. No formula can ever capture the reality of God because God is too rich to ever be captured, even half adequately, in imagination, thought, and word. The God that atheism rejects is precisely a conceptualized God, a God captured in a picture. In the end, atheism is less faithful to human experience than was polytheism which more rightly sensed deity, gods and goddesses, hidden under every rock.

To what does this call us?

To humility. All of us, believers and atheists, need to be more humble in our language about God. The idea of God needs to stretch, not shrink, the human imagination. Our actual experience of God, just as for ancient polytheism, is forever eating away at all simplistic conceptions of God. Thank God, for the complexity of the doctrine of the Trinity!

Several years ago, William Young wrote a novel which was both much-read and much-debated. Entitled “The Shack”, it told the story of a man whose young daughter had been kidnapped and brutally murdered. The man, struggling with a bitter anger, is invited by mysterious note to come alone to the shack within which his daughter had been murdered. Expecting to find the murderer there, he prepares himself for brutal struggle. But he meets God in the shack instead.

What follows is wonderfully warm and theologically fertile portrayal of the trinity. But the wonderfully open, warm, embracing, nurturing, all-forgiving God that William Young’s character meets does have one, hard, non-negotiable condition for getting to heaven: He has to forgive, not just his daughter’s murderer, but everyone, absolutely everyone, if he is to ultimately join the community of the blessed. He can go to heaven, but not if he continues to carry his anger.

Whatever ecclesial deficiencies Young’s critics have accused him of, he is dead right and powerfully challenging on this central point, letting go of anger and bitterness is a non-negotiable condition for going to heaven. Indeed, I’m convinced that there comes a point in our lives where we need only three words in our spiritual vocabulary: Forgive, forgive, forgive. Morris West, in a short autobiographical essay that he wrote to celebrate his 75th birthday, phrases this more positively. He states that, upon arriving on your 75th birthday, you should only have one phrase left in your vocabulary: Thank you!

Gratitude is the opposite of anger and we have too little gratitude in our lives. We are generally more angry than grateful. Moreover, to the extent that we even admit that we are angry, we tend to rationalize this by either dogma or cause: “I’m angry, but with cause! Mine is a righteous anger, like Jesus’ when he upset the tables of the money-changers in the temple!” “Sure I’m angry, but why shouldn’t I be, given how the conservatives have killed the openness of the past generation, re-entrenched a new intolerance into both the church and this country, and have no conscience for the poor!” “Sure I’m angry, but why shouldn’t I be, given what the liberals are doing to this church and this country! Just look at abortion and gay marriage!”

We should be cautious in flattering ourselves in this way: Unlike Jesus crying over Jerusalem, our tears are generally not warm tears of love and sadness over division and misunderstanding. Our tears, when there are tears are all, are generally cold tears of bitterness and anger at the sense of having been wronged or of having to live in our churches and our society with people whom we consider ill-willed, lazy, small-minded, or just plain ignorant. We are more like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing mostly the right things, outwardly faithful in our religious and moral duties, but shackled with bitterness and a deep-down anger that makes it hard, or even impossible, for us to enter the dance, to let go, to forgive.

Too few of us admit that we carry a lot of anger inside of us, that there are places in us that are bitter and resentful, and that there are still certain persons, incidents, and events in our lives that we haven’t forgiven.

As well, to camouflage our anger we like to make a public display of our generosity and goodness. We tend to make a show to family and friends of how nice we are by praising someone lavishly and then, almost in the same sentence, call someone else a name, slander someone, or speak viciously or sarcastically about someone. This proclivity to divide others into either “angels” or “demons” is a sure indication of anger inside of us. We make a display of praising certain people (a display meant more to publicly exhibit how nice we are than to highlight someone else’s virtues) and then bitterly complain about how awful some other people are and how we are forever surrounded with idiots. Both the praise and the complaint testify to the same thing, we are living with anger.

Honesty and humility should eventually bring us to admit this. We all carry some angers and we should not deceive ourselves on this. We need courage and honesty to face up to this.

Perhaps we could take a lesson from groups like Alcoholics Anonymous and introduce ourselves to each other, or at least to our confessors, in this way:

“My name is Ron, and I’m an angry person. I rationalize this by telling myself and others that my anger is justified, that I’m like Jesus, kicking over the tables of the money-changers to cleanse God’s house. But I have come to realize that this is self-deception, simply a way rationalizing my own hurt. As I get older, I realize that I’m like the older brother of the prodigal son; I am standing outside the circle of warmth and community. But, the good news is that I’m in recovery.”

In certain circles it is believed that science trumps religion. The idea is simple and uncompromising: Religion cannot stand up to science. The hard facts of science ultimately render faith untenable. Coupled with this is the idea that faith and religion sustain themselves by naiveté and lack of courage, that is, if one ever looked at the hard facts with enough intellectual courage, he or she would be forced to admit that faith and religion go against the evidence of science.

Ironically, this conception finds itself most at home within the most arrogant circles of science and the most fundamentalist circles of religion. These groups may hate each other but they have this in common, both believe that science and religion are incompatible.

What’s wrong with that notion? Good science and good religion both suggest the opposite. Many respected scientists have religious faith and see no incompatibility between what they see through their empirical research and what they profess in their churches. Conversely many deeply religious people know, trust, and respect the insights of science and see nothing there that frightens them in terms of what they hold dear religiously. What’s best in science affirms clearly and humbly that what we can say about the world through empirical research in no way rules out or weighs against what can be said about the world through the prism of faith and religion. What’s best in religion returns the favor. Good religion cedes science its proper place, just as good science cedes faith its proper place.

Moreover, the idea that science trumps religion is generally based upon a misreading of the seeming conflict between the two. Charles Taylor, in his mammoth work, A Secular Age, suggests that people mostly abandon religion in the name of science not because science is more believable than religion (though that is what they may believe). Rather what they are abandoning is a “whole package”, one whole way of understanding God, of understanding the world, of understanding meaning, and of understanding our relationship to our religious past. They aren’t simply exchanging naiveté (religion) for maturity (science). They are exchanging one whole way of viewing life for another. And both options take faith.

What’s meant by this? Quite simply that it is as much of an act of faith to believe that God doesn’t exist as it is to believe that God does exist and to assert that one doesn’t believe because of science involves a lot of things that have little to do with science.

To say: I believe or I don’t believe involves a lot of things not derived from empirical evidence. What things?

First of all, a certain concept of God. Most atheism is, as Michael Buckley asserts, a parasite off bad theism. The God that most atheists reject should indeed be rejected since that God holds little in common with the God of Jesus Christ. The same holds true for many people who reject religion. What’s being rejected is self-serving religion, not true religion.

Then there is the question of how we conceive of God’s ways. Scripture assures us that “God’s ways are not our ways”, a truth Roman Catholics have tried to express philosophically with the notion of the analogy of Being and Protestants have tried to safeguard through emphasis on God’s otherness. When religion is rejected in the name of science, invariably the religion that is being rejected does not safeguard God’s otherness and has, however unintentionally, reduced God to something that can be grasped through human categories. Stripped of genuine divinity and mystery, such a God will inevitably not stand the test of hard human questioning.

Next, humility and arrogance also play into the tension between science and religion and their proclivity to reject each other. Unhealthy arrogance and unhealthy humility feed off each other to create illicit dichotomies that force people into false choices.

As well, faith and doubt are tied to moral integrity. Scripture tells us that we can only see God through purity of heart. Hence our moral lives will either help clarify or muddy our awareness of God. Sin affects our eyesight, as does virtue. Arrogance is an obstacle to genuflection, sin to a vision of God. This is a sensitive point. Doubt and unbelief may not simplistically be equated with arrogance, insincerity, or a bad moral life. All of us know wonderful persons who struggle with unbelief. Yet this still needs to be in the equation. All of us too know persons who are too proud and arrogant to see straight.

Finally there is also the question of our relationship to our religious past. When faith and religion are seen as childish and naïve more things go into that judgment than have to do with empirical evidence. In virtually every case, that judgment is colored and weighted by how one feels about his or her religious past.

Science doesn’t trump religion and religion doesn’t trump science since one God is author of all that is good, both inside of science and inside of religion.

When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn’t, for the most part, cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that is generally more feared than physical pain. When he asked God if it was really necessary to die in this way he was referring to more than death through capital punishment.

Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind. It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well.

It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.

But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.

We have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have, as Jurgens Moltmann put it, surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.

Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS, and diseases such as Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s, Huntington’s, and other such sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.

Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the gospels say, “necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory?”

Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn’t easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience:

Ask yourself this question with courage and honesty: What experiences in my life have made me deep? In virtually every case, I will venture to say, experiences that have deepened you will be incidences that you feel some shame in acknowledging, a powerlessness from which you were unable to protect yourself, an abuse from which you could not defend yourself, an inadequacy of body or mind that has left you vulnerable, an humiliating incident that once happened to you, or some mistake you made which publicly exposed your lack of strength in some area. All of us, like Jesus, have also been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And we have depth of soul to just that extent.

But depth of soul comes in very different modes. Humiliation makes us deep, but we can be deep in character, understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness or we can be deep in anger, bitterness, revenge-seeking, and murder. Jesus’ crucifixion stretched his heart and made it huge in empathy, graciousness, and forgiveness. But it doesn’t always work that way. Many of our worst mass-murderers have also experienced deep humiliation and it too has stretched their hearts, except in their case it has made them deep in bitterness, callousness, and murder.

Several summers ago, I was at a conference at the University of Notre Dame where the Holy Cross community had gathered to prepare itself for the Beatification of its founder. Reflecting upon the spirituality of their founder, one Holy Cross member offered this challenge to his community: If you live inside of any family for any length of the time, at some point that family will wound you and wound you deeply. But, and this is the point, how you handle that wound, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of your life!

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. That pain stretched his heart to a great depth. But that new space did not fill in with bitterness and anger. It filled in instead with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we have yet to fully understand.

We are all familiar with a refrain that echoes through many of our Christian prayers and songs, an antiphon of hope addressed to God:  Grant that we may be one with all the saints in singing your praises!

But we have an over-pious notion of what that would look like. We picture ourselves, one day, in heaven, in a choir with Mary, Jesus’ mother, with the great biblical figures of old, with the apostles and all the saints, singing praises to God, all the while feeling lucky to be there, given our moral and spiritual inferiority to these great spiritual figures. We picture ourselves spending eternity feeling grateful for having made a team whose talent level should have excluded us.

But that is a fantasy, pure and simple, mostly simple. What would it mean to be among the saints singing God’s praises?

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in the way we live our lives; when, like them, our lives are transparent, honest, grounded in personal integrity, with no skeletons in our closet. Being one with the saints in singing God’s praises is less about singing songs in our churches than it is about living honest lives outside of them.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we radiate God’s wide compassion; when we, like God, let our love embrace beyond race, creed, gender, religion, ideology, and differences of every kind.  We are one with the saints in praising God when our heart, like God’s heart, is a house with many rooms. Being one with the saints in singing God’s praises means being compassionate as God is compassionate, it means letting our sun shine on the bad as well as the good and letting our empathy embrace too those whose ideas oppose us.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we tend to “widows, orphans, and strangers’, when we reach out to those most vulnerable, when we feed the hungry, give drink to the thirsty, visit the sick and imprisoned, when we work for justice. Being one with the saints in singing God’s praises means reversing nature’s proclivity for the survival of the fittest and working instead to enable the opposite, the survival of the weakest.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we work for peace, when in both our personal lives and our politics we strive to radiate God’s non-violence, when we refuse the temptation to try to end a cruel violence by a morally superior one.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises whenever we forgive each other, particularly when that forgiveness meets a bitterness that does not seem worthy of the gift. We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we absorb hatred, anger, violence, and murder itself and, like Jesus, not give back in kind, when we forgive our enemies.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, like them, we give away our time, talents, and our very lives in self-sacrifice without counting the cost, when we live altruistically, accepting that our own personal fulfillment is not the first aim of our lives.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in a healthy self-effacement, when we dethrone ourselves as the center of the universe, when we take the lower place without resentment, when the conversation need no longer be about us.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we are one with them in prayer, when, like them, we regularly lift our eyes upward beyond the horizon of the present world to ground ourselves in a reality beyond this world.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in patience and endurance, when we accept without bitterness that all symphonies must remain unfinished and that we must live in inconsummation, when we live among the frustrations of this life without murmuring so that life can unfold in God’s good time.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when we live in hope, when we ground our vision and our energies in the promise of God and in the power that God revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, like Julian of Norwich, we live in the belief that, irrespective of any present darkness, the ending of our story is already written, that in the end all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises when, rather than living inside of envy, resentment, bitterness, vengeance, impatience, anger, factionalism, idolatry, and sexual impatience, we live instead inside charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, and chastity.

We are one with the saints in singing God’s praises only when we live our lives as they lived theirs.

Almost all spiritualities have a special place for deserts, wilderness, and other such places where we are unprotected and in danger from untamed nature, wild beasts, and threatening spirits. This concept has deep roots inside both ancient religions and the human psyche itself.

In ancient Babylon, for example, wild, uncultivated terrain was seen as something that was unfinished by God and which still participated in the formless chaos and godlessness of pre-creation. It was seen both as unfinished and as a place where dangerous forces lurked, beasts and devils. Thus when people took possession of wild, uncultivated land, it was understood that certain religious rites had to be performed which, in essence, claimed the land for God, for civilization, and for safety. For ancient Babylon, a cultivated garden was a safe and sacred place whereas an uncultivated desert was dangerous and in some dark way in opposition to God.

Similar ideas were present too in other cultures which saw wilderness as a place inhibited by satyrs, centaurs, trolls, and evil spirits. Myths and folklore abound with these images.  Medieval Europe, as seen in our fairytales, added the idea of “deep and dark forests” to this concept.  These too were seen as uncultivated, dangerous places, places where bad spirits or evil persons might capture you or as places within which you might hopelessly lose your way. Deep, dark forests were not places you were to venture into without proper guidance.

But it was also understood that these wild places were not meant to lie forever untouched by us and God.  The idea was present inside of Christian spirituality that we, men and women of faith, were meant to help God finish creation by taming these wilds, exorcizing the bad spirits there, and turning the wilderness into a garden. And so Christianity developed the idea that men and women armed in a special way with divine light and protection, monks and nuns, could and should go into these uncultivated places and turn the unsafe wilderness into a safe garden. Among other reasons, this was why medieval monks and nuns often chose uncultivated places to start up their monasteries and convents.

This fear of wild, uncultivated regions was also partly behind the church’s fear of inquiry into and exploration of outer space. Galileo knew this first-hand. The church had been warning: Stay away from certain dark places.

In subtle ways both this concept and its concomitant fears are still with us. What frightens us today is not untamed geography (which we now see as inviting peace and quiet). Rather for many of us, the untamed, the wilderness, is now visualized more as a gang-infested area within a city, crack houses, singles’ bars. Strip-clubs, red-light areas. These are understood as lying outside our cultivated lives, split off from the safety of home and religion, godless places, dangerous, a wilderness. 

But what frightens us still more, are the untamed and uncultivated deserts within our own hearts, the unexplored and dark areas inside of us. Like the ancients, we are frightened of what might lie in hiding there, how vulnerable we might be if we entered there, what wild beasts and demons might prey on us there, and whether a chaotic vortex might not swallow us up should we ever venture there. We too fear unexplored places; except our fear is not for our physical safety, but for our sanity and our sanctity. 
And this fear is not without its wisdom. It is wise to not be naïve. For centuries parents told their children frightening fairytales about evil things lurking in dark forests, looking to devour little children or bake them in ovens. These stories were not told to children to give them nightmares but rather warn them not to be naïve about whom or what they met. Not everyone can be trusted and it is wise, particularly when you are young, vulnerable, and unarmed, to stay together, to stay away from dark places, and to be safe.
Nonetheless our Christian faith invites us to go into those areas, face the wild beasts that dwell there, and turn those dangerous regions into cultivated land, into safe gardens. After all that is what Jesus did: He went into every dark place, from the singles’ bars of his time into death and hell itself, and took God’s light and grace there. But he wasn’t naïve. He heeded the advice of the old fairytales and didn’t venture there alone. He entered those underworlds with his hand safely inside his Father’s, not walking alone.

Faith is meant rid us of fear, including fear of the wild beasts and demons that lurk inside the deserts of own minds, hearts, and energies. We are meant to turn those wild, dark areas into safe gardens.  But we should heed both our own instincts and the instinct behind the old fairytales: Never venture into the dark woods naively and alone! Make sure you are armed with a sturdy creed and that you are walking hand-in-hand with your Father.

The philosopher, David Hume, once made a distinction between something he called as genuine virtues and something he termed monkish virtues. Genuine virtues, he said, were those qualities inside us that are useful to others and ourselves. Monkish virtues, on the other hand, are qualities that don’t enhance human life, either for society or for the particular person practicing them. As monkish virtues he lists, celibacy, fasting, penance, mortification, self-denial, humility, silence, and solitude. These, he attests, contribute nothing to society and even detract from human welfare. For this reason, he affirms, they are rejected by “men of sense”. For a religious person, this isn’t easy to hear.

But what follows is even harsher. Those practicing monkish virtues pay a stiff price, he says, they are excluded from health and human community: The gloomy, hare-brained enthusiast, after death, may have a place in a calendar, but will scarcely be admitted, when alive, into intimacy and society, except by those who are as delirious and dismal as himself.

As brutal as this may sound, it contains a healthy warning, one with a discernible echo to what Jesus said when he warned us to fast in secret, to do our private prayer in secret, to not put on gloomy faces when we are practicing asceticism, and to make sure our piety is not too evident in public. If Jesus is clear about anything, he’s clear about this.

Why? Why should we avoid all public display of our fasting, ascetical practices, and private prayer?

Partly Jesus’ warning is against hypocrisy and insincerity, but it is more. There is also the question of what we are radiating and of how we are being perceived. When we display asceticism and piety in public, even if we are sincere, what we want to radiate and what is read by others (and not just by the David Humes of our world) are often two different things. We may want to be radiating our faith in God and our commitment to things beyond this life, but what others easily read from our attitude and actions is lack of health, lack of joy, depression, disdain for the ordinary, and a not-so-disguised compensation for missing out on life.

And this is precisely the opposite of what we should be radiating. All monkish virtues (and they are real virtues) are intended to open us to a deeper intimacy with God and so, if our prayer and asceticism are healthy, what we should be radiating is precisely health, joy, love for this world, and sense of how the ordinary pleasures of life are sacramental.

But this isn’t easy to do. We don’t radiate faith in God and health by uncritically accepting or cheerleading the world’s every effort to be happy, nor by flashing a false smile while deep down we are barely managing to keep depression at bay. We radiate faith in God and health by radiating love, peace, and calm. And we can’t do this by radiating a disdain for life or for the way in which ordinary people are seeking happiness in this life.

And that’s a tricky challenge, especially today. In a culture like ours, it is easy to pamper ourselves, to lack any real deep sense of sacrifice, to be so immersed in our lives and ourselves so as to lose all sense of prayer, and to live without any real asceticism, especially emotional asceticism. Among other things, we see this today in our pathological busyness, our inability to sustain lives of private prayer, our growing incapacity to be faithful in our commitments, and in our struggles with addictions of all kinds: food, drink, sex, entertainment, information technology. Internet pornography is already the single biggest addiction in the whole world. Prayer and fasting (at least of the emotional kind) are in short supply. The monkish virtues are more needed today than ever.

But we must practice them without public exhibitionism, without disdaining the good that is God-given in the things of this world, without hinting that our own private sanctity is more important to us and to God than is the common good of this planet, and without suggesting that God doesn’t want us to delight in his creation. Our asceticism and prayer must be real, but they must radiate health, and not be a compensation for not having it.

And that, a health that witnesses to God’s goodness, is exactly what I see in those who practice the monkish virtues in a healthy way. Prayer and fasting, done correctly, radiate health to the world, not disdain. Had David Hume witnessed Jesus’ health and love inside his prayer and asceticism, he would, I suspect, have written differently of monkish virtue.

So we need to take more seriously Jesus’ words that asceticism and private prayer are to be done “in secret”, behind closed doors, so that the face we show in public will radiate health, joy, calm, and love for the good things that God, whom prayer and asceticism brings us closer to, has made.