RonRolheiser,OMI

The Richness of the Mystery of God

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!

A Meta-Narrative of Consolation

Several years ago, I was at a symposium at which we were discussing the struggle that many young people have today with their faith. One of the participants, a young French Canadian Oblate, offered this perspective:

“I work with university students as a chaplain. They have a zest for life and an energy and color that I can only envy. But inside of all this zest and energy, I notice that they lack hope because they don’t have a meta-narrative. They don’t have a big story, a big vision, that can give them perspective beyond the ups and downs of their everyday lives. When their health, relationships, and lives are going well, they feel happy and full of hope; but the reverse is also true. When things aren’t going well the bottom falls out of their world. They don’t have anything to give them a vision beyond the present moment.”

In essence, what he is describing might be called “the peace that this world can give us.” In his farewell discourse, Jesus contrasts two kinds of peace: a peace that he leaves us and a peace that the world can give us. What is the difference?

The peace that the world can give to us is not a negative or a bad peace. It is real and it is good, but it is fragile and inadequate.

It is fragile because it can easily be taken away from us. Peace, as we experience it ordinarily in our lives, is generally predicated on feeling healthy, loved, and secure. But all of these are fragile. They can change radically with one visit to the doctor, with an unexpected dizzy spell, with sudden chest pains, with the loss of a job, with the rupture of a relationship, with the suicide of a loved one, or with multiple kinds of betrayal that can blindside us. We try mightily to take measures to guarantee health, security, and the trustworthiness of our relationships, but we live with a lot of anxiety, knowing these are always fragile. We live inside an anxious peace.

As well, the peace we experience in our ordinary lives never comes to us without a shadow. As Henri Nouwen puts it, there is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life so that even in our most happy moments there is something missing. In every satisfaction there is an awareness of limitation. In every success there is fear of jealousy. In every friendship there is distance. In every embrace there is loneliness. In this life there is not such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death. The world can give us peace, except it never does this perfectly.

What Jesus offers is a peace that is not fragile, that is already beyond fear and anxiety, that does not depend upon feeling healthy, secure, and loved in this world. What is this peace?

At the last supper and as he was dying, Jesus offered us his gift of peace. And what is this? It is the absolute assurance that we are connected to the source of life in such a way that nothing, absolutely nothing, can ever sever – not bad health, not betrayal by someone, indeed, not even our own sin. We are unconditionally loved and held by the source of life itself and nothing can change that. Nothing can change God’s unconditional love for us.

That’s the meta-narrative we need in order to keep perspective during the ups and downs of our lives. We are like actors in a play. The ending of the story has already been written and it is a happy one. We know that we will triumph in the end, just as we know that we will have some rocky scenes before that ending. If we keep that in mind, we can more patiently bear the seeming death-dealing tragedies that befall us. We are being held unconditionally by the source of life itself, God.

If that is true, and it is, then we have an assurance of life, wholeness, and happiness beyond the loss of youth, the loss of health, the loss of reputation, the betrayal of friends, the suicide of a loved one, and even beyond our own sin and betrayals. In the end, as Julian of Norwich says, all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well.

And we need this assurance. We live with constant anxiety because we sense that our health, security, and relationships are fragile, that our peace can easily disappear. We live too with regrets about our own sins and betrayals. And we live with more than a little uneasiness about broken relationships and loved ones broken by bitterness or suicide. Our peace is fragile and anxious.

We need to more deeply appropriate Jesus’ farewell gift to us: I leave you a peace that no one can take from you: Know that you are loved and held unconditionally.

Living with our own Anger

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.”

Forgiving our Differences

In her the first volume of her autobiography, Under My Skin, Doris Lessing, shares this story: During her marriage to Gottfried Lessing, it became evident to both of them at a point that they were simply incompatible as a married couple and that they would eventually have to seek a divorce. However, for practical reasons, they decided to live together, as friends, until they could both move to England, at which time they would file for a divorce. Their marriage was finished but unexpectedly their friendship began to grow. They had accepted their incompatibility as a fact and as something that didn’t call for resentment from either of them. Why be angry at someone just because she feels and thinks differently than we do?

One night, lying in their separate beds in the same room, both smoking and unable to sleep, Gottfried said to her: This kind of incompatibility is more of a misfortune than a crime. That’s a mature insight: It’s not a crime or a sin to be incompatible, it’s only unfortunate.

Would that in our daily lives we could appropriate that truth because there is an important emotional, intellectual, moral, and religious challenge contained in it. We spend too much time and energy angry and frustrated with each other over something that basically we cannot control or change. Our differences, however much they may frustrate us and tax our patience at times, are not a crime, a sin, or indeed (most times) even anyone’s fault. We don’t need to blame someone, be angry at someone, or resent someone because he or she is different than we are, no matter how much those differences separate us, frustrate us, and try our patience and understanding.

We shouldn’t blame and resent each other for being different. Yet that is what we invariably do. We resent others, especially those closest to us in our families, in our churches, and in our places of work, because they are different than we are, as if they were to blame for those differences. Funny, how we rarely reverse that and blame ourselves. But generally we blame someone or something. Incompatibility within families, church circles, and professional circles, rarely helps produce respect and friendship, as it did between Gottfried and Doris Lessing. The opposite is true. Our differences generally become a source of division, anger, resentment, bitterness, and recrimination. We positively blame the other person for the incompatibility as if it was a moral fault or a willful separation.

Of course, sometimes, that can be the case. Infidelity or even simple laziness and lack of effort in a relationship can also eat away at harmony and insert insurmountable obstacles to understanding and compatibility. An affair with someone who isn’t your partner can help trigger incompatibility in a marriage pretty quickly. In such a case, it wouldn’t be as true to say: “This is just a misfortune.” There is someone to blame. However most of the differences that separate us are, in the words of Gottfried Lessing, mostly just a misfortune, not a crime.

Who is to blame? Who’s at fault? If anyone is to be blamed, let’s blame nature and God.

We can blame nature for its prodigal character, for its overwhelming abundance, for its staggering variety, for its billions of species, for its bewildering differences within the same species, and for its proclivity to give us novelty and color beyond imagination. We can also blame God for placing us in a universe whose magnitude, diversity, and complexity befuddles both the intellect and the imagination. Our universe is still growing both in size and in variation, with change as it’s only constant.

God and nature, it would appear, do not believe in simplicity, uniformity, blandness, and sameness. We aren’t born into this world off conveyor-belts like cars coming off a factory line. The infinite combination of accidents, circumstance, chance, and providence that conspire to make up our specific and individual DNA is too complex to ever be calculated or even concretely imagined.

But blame isn’t the proper verb here, even if in our frustrations with our differences we feel that we need to blame someone. God and nature shouldn’t be blamed for providing us with so much richness, for setting us into a world with so much color and variety, and for making our own personalities so deep and complex. How boring life would be if we weren’t forever confronted with novelty, variety, and difference. How boring the world would be if everything were the same color, if all flowers were of one kind, and if all personalities were the same as ours. We would pay a high price for the easy peace and understanding that would come from that uniformity.

Gottfried Lessing was an agnostic and a Marxist, not an easy friend to Christianity. But we (who vow ourselves by our baptism to understanding, empathy, forgiveness, and peace-making) should be strongly and healthily challenged by his insight and understanding: It’s not a sin or a crime to be incompatible, it’s only unfortunate!

Science and Religion

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.

Living with Frustration and Tension

Among William Blake’s infamous Proverbs from Hell we find this one: Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.

There are subtle layers of meaning to this, but on the surface it speaks volumes, especially for our generation. Today we are for the most part congenitally unwilling and existentially unable to carry tension for long periods of time, to live with frustration, to accept incompleteness, to be at peace with the circumstances of our lives, to be comfortable inside our own skins, and to live without consummation in the face of sexual desire. Of course, in the end, we do not have a choice. We are not above our humanity and simply have to accept and live with the tensions of incompleteness, but we struggle to do so without bitter impatience, pathological restlessness, and all kinds of compensatory activities.

Emotionally and morally, this is our Achilles heel. Our generation has some wonderful emotional and moral qualities, but patience, chastity, contentment with the limits of circumstance, and the capacity to nobly live out tension are not our strengths. The effects of this can be seen everywhere, not least inside of our struggle to be faithful to our relational commitments.

We have made life-long commitment in marriage very difficult because we find it hard to accept that any marriage, no matter how good, cannot take away our loneliness. We have desacralized sexuality and severed its link to marriage because we are unable accept sex as limited to a marriage commitment. We have basically rendered consecrated celibacy existentially impossible because no one, we feel, can be expected to carry sexual tension for a lifetime. And, most painful of all, we have sown a deep restlessness inside of ourselves because, in our incapacity to accept the incompleteness of our lives, we torture ourselves with the thought that we are missing out on life, that we should not have to live with so much incompleteness, and that the full symphony for which we so deeply long should already be ours.

And the fault is not entirely our own. Much of it lies with those who were supposed to prepare us for life and did not give us the emotional and psychological tools to more naturally and nobly accept life’s innate frustrations and the conscriptive asceticism that brings with it. More simply, too many of us were not taught that life is hard, that we have to spend most of it waiting in one kind of frustration or other, and that this is the natural state of things. Too many of us were given a false set of expectations. We were given the impression that indeed we could have it all, clear-cut joy without a shadow and full intimacy without frustration or distance.

Worse still, many of us were not given the simple, basic permission to live in frustration, that is, to feel okay about ourselves and about our lives even when for the most part we are frustrated. We were not given permission to accept that frustration is natural, the normal state of things, and that it is okay to accept ourselves and our lives as they are and find joy and happiness inside of them, in spite of the frustrations.

I’m still part of the generation whose moral and religious elders gave us this permission. I got this from my parents who, deeply schooled in the concept of original sin, understood themselves as “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears”. This, rather stoic, perspective which believes that on this side of eternity all joy comes with a shadow, did not make them morbid. The opposite, it gave them permission to accept the limits of their lives and the circumstances of their lives and, paradoxically, find joy in the imperfect precisely because they were not expecting the perfect. They understood that it is normal to be frustrated, to not have everything you want, to have to live in incompleteness, and to accept that in this life we will experience more hunger than satiation.

Most of us will have to learn this the hard way, through bitter experience, through tears, and through a lot of restlessness from which we might be spared if we already knew that hunger, not satiation, is what is normal. As Karl Rahner famously puts it: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we finally learn that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished.

Wisdom and maturity invariably do find us and life eventually turns each of us into an ascetic. We may kick against the goad for a while, like a child kicking against a mother’s restraining arms, but eventually we tire, stop wailing, and accept the restraints, though not always peacefully. But it can be peaceful, if we accept that frustration is normal.

And so I would amend Blake’s proverb: Better to murder an infant in its cradle … unless you give that child a realistic set of expectations with which to deal with unrequited desire and frustration.

The Humiliation of Crucifixion

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.

Tortured Complexity

I was born into this world with a tortured complexity. For long time I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish. Ruth Burrows, the renowned Carmelite writer, begins her autobiography with those words and, like the famous words with which St. Augustine opens his Confessions, they too set the tone for a very mature spiritual reflection.

I was browsing in a bookstore one day, glancing at titles and examining whatever looked interesting, when I read that line in Burrows’ book. Instantly, I was drawn to the book and a number of thoughts ran through me: This will be someone who understands life, who won’t be so simplistic and pious so as to require me to step outside of my own skin in order to be spiritual and religious! This will be someone who helps me accept the complexity of my own life and yet shows me how I might still will the one thing! I wasn’t disappointed.  Burrows is an exceptional spiritual and religious writer.

I had already sensed the same motif in Henri Nouwen. He too was honest in admitting his own tortured experience and in naming the near-contradictory proclivities that pull us in different directions inside our own hearts.

Life isn’t simple: We want the right things, but we want the wrong things too. We are drawn towards generosity but drawn towards selfishness too. We like to be honest, but we find it easy to rationalize and not tell the truth. One part of us wants to be humble and not stand out, even as another part of us is prideful and wants to be recognized.  We would like to pray but are drawn towards entertainment instead. We crave depth of soul but crave too the pleasure of sensuality.  We want to give ourselves away in sacrifice, but we want too to experience the pleasures of life. A deep part of us wants to kneel in reverence even as another part of us is cynical and resistant. We crave both purity and promiscuity. We are drawn both towards the things of God and towards the things of earth.  It is not easy, as Kierkegaard once said, to will the one thing.

We create difficulties for ourselves when we admit this, but even more difficulties when we don’t.

How do we live our spiritual and religious lives as if things were simple when, like Burrows, what we are experiencing is a tortured complexity?  How do we make ourselves feel the right things when we are, in honesty, feeling a lot of other things? How do we make ourselves feel pious when so much inside of us wants to rise up in rebellion?  How do we deny the fact that our sexuality frequently colors the purity of our relationships? How do we assert that we feel loving when what we are feeling is anger and resentment? How do we honestly say that what we are doing for others is really other-centered when much of it is coming out of our own ambition? How do we deny that we are frequently jealous of others? How do we deny that we sometimes have near-blasphemous feelings of irreverence? How do we deny that so many of our actions arise out of our own stubborn and wounded pride? And how do we pretend that, right at the heart of where we should feel faith and prayer, we often feel boredom, disinterest, and an inner deadness?

But to feel this way does not, of itself, make us unspiritual or non-religious.  Feelings of impiety, anger, ambition, greed, jealousy, sexual temptation, irreverence, and boredom only prove that we are human and emotionally healthy.  The very essence of a good spirituality is that it must meet us precisely within this complexity.  Serving God in this world does not require that we step outside of ourselves or that we deny our own experience.  It only asks that we integrate our experience in a way so as to make it life-giving for others and for ourselves.

Thomas Aquinas once wrote that the adequate object of the intellect and will is all being. I first read that when I was a 19-year-old seminarian studying philosophy and I remember how liberating it was when I first understood what this meant.  I was being introduced to myself, to my own tortured complexity. What, Thomas Aquinas asks, would it take to fully satisfy the longings inside us? His answer: Everything! So we need not be surprised that we are sometimes pathologically restless and out-of-sorts during our lifetime here.

And there’s a sad irony in all this: So many people who want to be honest to their own experience distance themselves from religion precisely because they feel that religion makes things too simple, that it doesn’t understand, and especially that it can’t honor their experience.  For many people, religion, all of it, is too simplistic to respect human experience because it doesn’t take into account our tortured complexity.  But the irony is that, ultimately, it is the only place where we are fully understood.

On Being One with the Saints in Praising God

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.

Taking Pain to the Heart

Writing in his journal during a time of bitter heartbreak, Henri Nouwen wrote these words: The great challenge is living your wounds through instead of thinking them through. It is better to cry than to worry, better to feel your wounds than to understand them, better to let them enter into your silence than to talk about them. The choice you face constantly is whether you are taking your wounds to your head or your heart.

Part of us understands exactly what he is saying here, even as another part of us congenitally resists his advice: There’s place in us that doesn’t want to cry, doesn’t want to feel our hurt, doesn’t want to take our pain to a place of silence, and doesn’t want to take our wounds to our heart. And so instead, in our heartaches and wounds, we grow anxious and obsessive, we struggle to understand, we talk endlessly to others, and we try to sort things out with our heads rather than letting ourselves simply feel them with our hearts.

And that isn’t always a bad thing. Nouwen’s counsel, for all its wisdom, needs some qualification: It is important that we also take our wounds to our heads. Our hearts and heads need to be in sync. But what Nouwen points to here is something that he, a man blessed with an extraordinary sensitivity to the things of the heart, learned only through crushing heartache and breakdown, namely, that we more easily take things to the head than to the heart, even when we think we aren’t doing this.

The way we take pain to our heads and block healing tears in our hearts is by denial, by rationalization, by blaming, by not simply and honestly admitting and owning our own pain, our own helplessness, our own weakness, and our own inadequacy.

And we all have plenty of occasions to do this: The more alive and sensitive we are the more we will experience excruciating heartaches. The more honest we are the more we will be aware of our own limits and inadequacies. And the more generous and pure we are the more we will be aware of our own sin and betrayals.
And so Nouwen’s counsel contains a healthy challenge: When we are brought to our knees by heartache and pain, we shouldn’t try to deny that pain, deny its bitter strength, or deny our helplessness in dealing with it. To do so is to risk becoming hard and bitter. But if we give our deep pains and heartaches their honest due they will induce the kind of tears that soften and stretch the heart. It is helpful to remember that tears are salt-water, of one substance with the waters of the original oceans from which we sprung. Tears connect us to our origins and allow the primal water of life to again flow through us.

Moreover, when we take our pain to our hearts, when we honestly admit our weaknesses and helplessness, God can finally begin to fill us with strength. Why? Because it is only when we are brought to our knees in utter helplessness, only when we finally give up on our own strength, that God can send an angel to strengthen us, like God send an angel to strengthen Jesus during his agony in the garden.

One night, some months before his death, Martin Luther King received a death-threat on the phone. It had happened before but, on this particular night, it left him frightened and weakened to the core. All his fears came down on him at once. Here are his words as to what happened next:

I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me, I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.

“I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership and if stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I have come to the point where I can’t face it alone.” At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.

It is only after the desert has done its work on us, says Trevor Herriot, that an angel can come and strengthen us. That is why it is better to feel our wounds than to understand them and why it is better to cry than to worry.

Turning Inner Chaos into a Peaceful Garden

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 Challenge of Accepting Pleasure without Guilt

Many of us suffer from a certain inchoate guilt. Simply put, we struggle to healthily enjoy pleasure without guilt, to not feel guilty about feeling good, to not be apologetic about our good luck.

Instead we tend, however unconsciously, to associate depth and religion with what’s grey, sad, broken, and melancholy. In the name of depth and religion we are stoic rather than joyous in our acceptance of pleasure. Many of us, I suspect, suffer from an existential incapacity to drink in life’s more earthy pleasures in genuine delight. Instead we always nurse some inchoate guilt feelings about pleasure.

And so we have certain unspoken religious axioms by which we live: If it hurts more, it’s better for you! Beauty is a pagan luxury. The Gospel calls us to an austerity of body and spirit. A truly deep person does not thoroughly enjoy a pleasure, especially a bodily one. Reticence and anxiety in the face of deep pleasure is healthy spiritually. Jesus’ challenge was much more about renunciation than about drinking in deeply the life that God offers us.

But this psychological and religious inhibition exists in all cultures and is not a particularly Christian problem. Too many people blame guilt feelings on their religious training when, in fact, their roots lie far beyond and outside of religion. This isn’t a “Christian neurosis”; it’s a human one. In all cultures and in all religions, most sensitive adults suffer from a certain chronic depression, namely, they find it hard to simply delight in life without at the same time feeling the shadows around that momentary delight.

And so, like the people at table with Jesus on that night when a woman broke an expensive jar of ointment on his feet, cried on his feet, and dried his feet with her hair, pleasure does not sit comfortably with us. Rather, in the face of raw pleasure, we shift about uncomfortably and give reasons why it shouldn’t be happening.

That’s acceptable, but we should not try to rationalize this neurotic reticence in the name of Jesus, Christianity, religion, or depth of soul. We should not confuse Hamlet with Jesus.

In her first novel, Final Payments, Mary Gordon tells the story of a young woman’s struggle with precisely this neurosis, an incapacity to ever delight in life. Suffering through a difficult period of her life, the grayness and joylessness of her life are re-enforced by her own interpretation of Catholic spirituality and especially by a woman she lives with, Margaret, whose austerity, piety, and lack of joy are too easily assumed to be depth of soul and commitment to Christ. One afternoon, after a bitter argument with Margaret, she stumbles out of the room in tears when a major insight breaks through:

It is one of the marvels of a Catholic education that the impulse of a few words can bring whole narratives to light with an immediacy and clarity that are utterly absorbing. ‘The poor you have always with you.’ I knew where Christ had said that: at the house of Martha and Mary. Mary had opened a jar of ointment over Christ’s feet. Spikenard. I remembered. And she wiped his feet with her hair. Judas had rebuked her: he had said that the ointment ought to be sold for the poor. But St. John had noted, Judas had said that only because he kept the purse and was a thief. And Christ had said to Judas, Mary at his feet, her hair spread out around him. ‘The poor you have always with you: but me you have not always.’

And until that moment, climbing the dark stairs in a rage to my ugly room, it was a passage I had not understood. It seemed to justify to me the excesses of centuries of fat, tyrannical bankers. But now I understood. What Christ was saying, what he meant, was that the pleasures of that hair, that ointment, must be taken. Because the accidents of death would deprive us soon enough. We must not deprive ourselves, our loved ones, of the luxury of our extravagant affections. We must not try to second-guess death by refusing to love the ones we loved in favor of the anonymous poor.

And it came to me, fumbling in the hallway for the light, that I had been a thief. Like Judas, I had wanted to hide gold, count it in the dead of the night, to parlay it into some safe and murderous investment. It was Margaret’s poverty I wanted to steal, the safety of her inability to inspire love. So that never again would I be found weeping, like Mary, at the tombstone at the break of dawn. … I knew now I must open the jar of ointment. I must open my life. I knew now that I must leave. But I was not ready, I would have to build up my strength.

Authentic religion brings us a double challenge: Be prepared to renounce life – and be prepared to enjoy it!

On Fasting and Praying in Secret

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.

Haiti and the Theodicy Question

Where is God in the countless tragedies that happen in our world? Where is God when bad things happen to good people? Where was God during the Holocaust?

These are timeless questions and, taken together, constitute what is often called the theodicy question, the question of God and human suffering.

Every so often this question hits us with a particular poignancy, as it did last week with the earthquake in Haiti. Somewhere between a quarter of a million and half a million people are dead, thousands are injured, hundreds of thousands are homeless, thousands more now face the possibility of disease from lack of proper water, food, housing, and hygiene, its capital city has been almost completely destroyed, and virtually everyone in the country has lost loved ones. And all of this happened to one of the poorest nations in the world – and to a people who have a deep faith in God.

Where is God in all this? How does one find a faith perspective within which to understand this? Not easily.

When we search scripture for answers, we find that neither the Jewish scriptures nor Jesus try to tackle the question philosophically, namely, in the type of way that Christian and Jewish apologetic writers have tried to answer it. Scripture and Jesus, instead, do two things: First, they place suffering and tragedy into a larger perspective within which God is understood more as redeeming suffering rather than as rescuing us from it. Second, they assure us that God is with us, a fellow-sufferer, in any tragedy.

For example, anyone who follows the daily readings for the church’s liturgy, cannot not have noticed, that on the very day after the earthquake, there was a haunting parallel between what happened in Haiti and what was described in that day’s Epistle taken from the Book of Samuel. Here is an excerpt from the Epistle for the liturgy the day after the earthquake:

So the people went to Shiloh, and brought with them the arc of the covenant of the Lord of hosts, who is enthroned on the cherubim. The two sons of Eli, Hophni and Phinehas, were there with the Ark of the Covenant. When the ark of the covenant of the Lord was brought into the camp, all Israel gave a mighty shout, so that the whole earth resounded. … [And with that faith and confidence, Israel marched into battle, but] … Israel was defeated, and everyone fled, each to his own house. There was a great slaughter and thirty thousand of her foot-soldiers fell. The arc of the covenant was captured; and the two sons of Eli died.

One doesn’t have to strain the imagination to write a haunting parallel:

So the people Haiti practiced their Christian faith with piety and confidence. They went to their churches, received the Eucharist, and lit vigil candles to their God. And they trusted that their God would protect them. But there came a great earthquake. Hundreds of thousands of its people died, its great buildings were all leveled, all its churches were destroyed, its beloved cathedral fell to the ground, and the Archbishop was killed.

So where was God in all of this?

The Book of Samuel doesn’t try to write an apologetics to explain what happened that day when a people who had just celebrated its faith and confidence in God were utterly crushed in battle. It doesn’t try to explain where God was when this happened. It simply continues to tell its story and, eventually, we see how God redeems a tragedy from which he didn’t rescue its victims. It also makes clear that God was with the people of Israel, even as they were being routed.

Jesus gives us essentially the same perspective: When his friend, Lazarus, lay dying, he didn’t rush to his side to rescue him. He waited until Lazarus was dead and only then went to his home. He was met there by the sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, who each asked him the painful question: Where were you when our brother was dying? Why didn’t you come and cure him?

Jesus, for his part, doesn’t meet their question head-on. Instead he simply asks: “Where have you put him?” They answer: “Come, we’ll show you!” They take him to the grave and when Jesus sees the tomb and drinks in their grief, he sits down and begins to cry. He enters and shares their grief. Only afterwards does he raise up the body of his dead friend.

Where was God when the earthquake hit Haiti?

He was weeping with its people, grieving outside its mass graves, sitting in sadness beside its collapsed buildings. He was there, though he provided no Hollywood or Superman-type rescue. Moreover we can be sure he will redeem what was lost. In God’s time, eventually, not a single life or single dream that died in Haiti will remain unredeemed. In the end, all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

Lessons from the Monastic Cell

Monks have secrets worth knowing. Here’s some advice from the Desert Fathers: Go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything you need to know. Here’s another counsel from Thomas a Kempis’ famous book, The Imitation of Christ: Every time you leave your cell you come back less a person.

On the surface these counsels are directed at monks and cell refers to the private room of a monk, with its small single cot, its single chair, its writing desk, its small basin or sink, and its kneeler. The counsels suggest that there is a lot to be learned by staying inside that space and there are real dangers in stepping outside of it. What can this possibly say to someone who is not a monk or contemplative nun?

These counsels were written for monks but the deep principles underlying them can be extrapolated to shed wisdom on everyone’s life.

What’s the deep wisdom contained in these counsels?
These counsels are not saying, as has sometimes been taught, that a monastic vocation is superior to a lay vocation. Nor are they saying that, if someone is a monk or a professional contemplative, social interaction outside of one’s cell is unhealthy.

Cell, as referred to here, is a metaphor, an image, a place inside of life, rather than someone’s private bedroom. Cell refers to duty, vocation, and commitment.

In essence, this is what’s being said:

Go to your cell and your cell will teach you everything you need to know: Stay inside of your vocation, inside of your commitments, inside your legitimate conscriptive duties, inside of your church, inside of your family, and they will teach you where life is found and what love means. Be faithful to your commitments and what you are ultimately looking for will be found there.

Every time you leave your cell you come back less a person: This is telling us that every time we step outside of our commitments, every time we are unfaithful, every time we walk away from what we should legitimately be doing, we come back less a person for that betrayal.
There’s a rich spirituality in these principles: Stay inside your commitments, be faithful, your place of work is a seminary, your work is a sacrament, your family is a monastery, your home is a sanctuary, stay inside of them, don’t betray them, learn what they are teaching you without constantly looking for life is elsewhere and without constantly believing that God is elsewhere.

Carlo Carretto, the renowned Italian spiritual writer, shares a story to illustrate this: After he had been a monk for more than a quarter of a century and had spent thousands of hours alone in the desert praying, he went to visit his elderly mother. She was a woman who had been so consumed with the duties of raising a large family that for long periods of time, paralleling his years of solitude in the desert, she had been too busy to have any quiet time in her life. He had spent long years in quiet. She has spent long years in activity. Yet, by his admission, she was perhaps more contemplative than he was. Moreover, he suspected that she was more selfless than he and that she possessed a depth of soul that he could, at that stage of his life, only envy.

But the conclusion he drew from that realization was not that there was something wrong with what he had done during those long, monastic years in the desert. Rather there was something very right about what his mother had done in giving herself over so selflessly to her duties as a wife and mother. He had gone to his cell and it has taught him what he needed to know. She had gone to her cell and it had taught her what she needed to know. His was a monk’s cell in the technical sense. Hers was a monastic cell in the wider sense. Both lived monastic lives and both monasteries taught them what they needed to learn.

As well, every small betrayal of his monastic vocation had left him less himself, just as, for his mother, every small betrayal of her duties as wife and mother had left her less herself.

What we have committed ourselves to constitutes a monastic cell. When we are faithful to that, namely, to the duties that come to us from our personal relationships and our place of work, we learn life’s lessons by osmosis. Conversely, whenever we betray our commitments as they pertain to our relationships or to our work we become less than what we are.

We are all monks and it matters not whether we are in a monastery or are in the world as spouses, parents, friends, ministers in the church, teachers, doctors, nurses, laborers, artisans, social workers, bankers, economic advisors, salespersons, politicians, lawyers, mental health workers, contractors, or retirees. Each of us has our cell and that cell can teach us what we need to know.

Good Books That Found Me This Year

An old adage says that the book you need to read finds you. I believe that, though obviously the book likes a little help from its reader who needs to be combing bookstores, listening to friends, and watching reviews. Then the right series of accidents can conspire to place that book in your hands.

What books found me this year? Here are the ones that touched me most:

Among novels
• Jhumpa Lahiri’s three novels, Unaccustomed Earth, The Namesakes, and Interpreter of Maladies, exhibit great emotional intelligence and help lay bare the anatomy of the heart, marriage, and family life.
• Anne Michaels’, The Winter Vault, is dark story, but the best writing I’ve encountered this year. Prose bordering on poetry.
• Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt’s, Monsieur Ibrahim, is a tiny book, but its second story, the letter of a young boy dying of cancer, is an exceptional read.
• Alice Munro’s, Too Much Happiness, is a collection of short stories that are mostly dark and take strange twists, but Alice Munro has, I believe, no equal in short-story writing. The pages turn themselves.
• Sebastian Barry’s, The Secret Scripture, will tax your patience as you wait for the suspense, but its writing, in line with a long tradition of great Irish pieces in this genre, makes up for its slow pace.
• Joanna Trollope’s, Friday Night, is a lighter, airplane read, but with more emotional intelligence than most books in this category.

Among essays and biography
• David Oliver Relin’s & Greg Mortenson’s, Three Cups of Tea, is the story of a genuine hero who is trying to teach us that the answer to terrorism is education and friendship not war.
• Carrie Fisher’s, Wishful Drinking, is a great piece of wit and an answer to self-pity.
• Robert Moore’s, Facing the Dragon, Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity, finally puts on paper the essential insight of a great thinker.
• Kevin Rafferty’s, Fragments of a Life, is an unpretentious autobiography of a great churchman who uses his own life to write a remarkable chronicle of Roman Catholicism from 1950 – 2008.
• Raymond Brown’s condensed scriptural commentaries for the major seasons of the year: The Crucified Christ in Holy Week; A Risen Christ in Eastertime, A Coming Christ in Advent, are remarkable, readable little books that synthesize for the non-professional scholar the insights of one of the great biblical scholars of our time. They can be reread many times.
• Joan Wickersham’s, The Suicide Index, Putting My Father’s Death in Order, is the memoir of a daughter trying to come to grips with her father’s suicide. Well-written and helpful to anyone who has experienced something similar.
• Trevor Herriot’s, Grass, Sky, Song – Promise and Peril in the World of Grassland Birds, is one of the finest books I’ve read this year. This is a book about birds, but really, more deeply, about life, morality, and our future. Moral challenge written as it should be written.
• Jim Wallis’, The Great Awakening, Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America, articulates signs of hope within our culture, particularly the coming together of two things, justice and faith. According to Wallis, our generation’s Dorothy Day, the Left are finding Jesus and the Right are finding the poor. This bodes well for the future. Wallis at his best, if not always at his briefest.
• Barbara Brown Taylor’s, Leaving Church, A Memoir of Faith, is a remarkable memoir of a woman ministering in the church and facing all the innate complexities of that. A first-rate, mature account that doesn’t blame and doesn’t self-pity. A good read for anyone ministering in the church or involved in a healing profession.
• Barbara Brown Taylor’s, An Altar in the World – A Geography of the Faith, is one of the better books about “getting into the present moment”. She gives some good, balanced directives about how to get into the present moment and, just as importantly, on how to turn that everyday experience into a sacrament.

Heavy Academic Reading
• Charles Taylor’s, A Secular Age, is a huge book, not recommended for airplane reading. The faculty at our school is studying it over the course of this entire year. This is a history of ideas that traces the roots of our secular consciousness both in terms of the disenchantment of our previous consciousness and the positive building of a humanism that can pretend to supplant faith. Very heavy but worth the effort.

I leave you with a sample of Anne Michael’s writing: “Only real love waits while we journey through grief. That is the real trustworthiness between people. In all the epics, in all the stories that have lasted through many lifetimes, it is always the same truth: love must wait for wounds to heal. It is this waiting that we must do for each other, not with a sense of mercy, or in judgment, but as if forgiveness were a rendezvous. How many are willing to wait for another in this way? Very few.”