The Humiliation of Crucifixion

March 28, 2010

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

March 21, 2010

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

March 7, 2010

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

February 28, 2010

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

February 21, 2010

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

February 14, 2010

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

February 7, 2010

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

January 24, 2010

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

January 10, 2010

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

December 27, 2009

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.”

Reasons to Celebrate Christmas

December 20, 2009

For many people the thought of Christmas brings fatigue. It’s not the religious aspect that causes the tiredness, but the overdrawn rituals that surround it: the overly decorated shops, the conscriptive shopping, the lights, the Santas, the Christmas trees, and the carols that begin to echo through our malls already in early November.

And so it is asked: What has all of this, or any of it, got to do with the birth of Jesus? Hasn’t Advent, which is supposed to be a time of preparation for the feast, become an exhausting ordeal that brings us to Christmas day already saturated with what we were supposed to be building up to? Wouldn’t we honor Jesus more if we spend the money we lavish on Christmas on the poor instead? Don’t our Christmas celebrations serve to obliterate our awareness of Jesus’ birth more than highlight it? Valid questions.

Our Christmas celebrations, admittedly, do start too early, are too-commercially driven, do focus too little on anything religious, and do not take the poor sufficiently into account. Too often too they serve to obliterate religious awareness rather than highlight it. And so it is easy to be cynical about the Christmas. It contains too many excesses.

However, with that being conceded, we need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water – and that is more than a pun in this case. Because something is done badly does not mean it should be cancelled. What is called for, I believe, is not the cancellation of the tinsel, the lights, the socials, the food, and the drink that surround Christmas, but a better use of them. There are good reasons to cancel the rituals with which we surround Christmas, but there are even better reasons for keeping them.

What are those reasons? Why continue so many of these rituals when, almost invariably, they degenerate into excess and fatigue?
Because we have a congenital need to celebrate, pure and simple. As human beings we have a healthy, God-given, genetically-encoded need to sometimes make festival, to have carnival, to celebrate an elaborate Sabbath, to park our prudence for a few hours, and to live life as if there wasn’t any reason to pinch our pennies or to be cold to our neighbors. Christmas is Sabbath, the supreme Sabbath.

There are seasons in life, and these should be on a regular cycle, that are meant precisely for enjoyment, for family, for friends, for color, for tinsel, and for good food and good drink, There is even the occasional time for some prudent excess. Jesus gave voice to this when his disciples were scandalized by a woman’s excess in anointing his feet with perfume and kisses.

All cultures, not least those who are economically poor, have times of festival where, explicitly or implicitly, they take seriously the words: The poor you will always have with you, but today it is time to celebrate. Christmas is such a time, meant for festival.

John Shea, in his now-classic book on Christmas, Starlight, tells the story of a family who decided one year to celebrate an alternative Christmas. They did not put up a tree, did not string up any lights, played no carols, and did not exchange gifts. They met for a simple, quiet meal on Christmas day. Asked by friends how it all went over, one family member replied that it “was pleasant”. Another member, perhaps speaking more honestly, stated that it was “an existential abyss”.

There is a God-given pressure inside of us that pushes us to celebrate and instills in us an irrepressible sense that we are not meant for poverty, gloom, and carefully measured-out relationships, but that we are meant ultimately for the feast, the dance, the place of lights and music, and the place where we don’t measure out our pennies and our hearts on the basis of having to survive and pay mortgages. The celebration of festival and carnival, even with their excesses, help teach us that.

Christmas is such a festival. In the end, its celebration is a lesson in faith and hope, even when it isn’t as strong a lesson in prudence.

To make a festival of Christmas, to surround Jesus’ birthday with all the joy, light, music, gift-giving, energy, and warmth we can muster is, strange as this may sound, a prophetic act. It is, or at least it can be, an expression of faith and hope. It’s not the person who says: “It’s rotten, let’s cancel it!” who radiates hope. That can easily be despair masquerading as faith. No. It is the man or woman who, despite the world’s misuse and abuse of these, still strings up the Christmas lights, trims the tree and the turkey, turns up the carols, passes gifts to loved ones, sits down at table with family and friends, and flashes a grin to the world, who is radiating faith, who is saying that we are meant for more than gloom, who is celebrating Jesus’ birth.

Chastity and Christmas

December 13, 2009

Scripture and Christian tradition emphasize that Jesus could only be born out of a chaste womb, just as Christian Spirituality emphasizes he can only come to full bloom inside of a chaste heart. Why? Why this emphasis on chastity?

Chastity needs to be properly understood. For too long we have had an overly-narrow and mostly false concept of chastity. Chastity is too commonly identified with sexual abstinence and sexuality is then seen as something that, in itself, militates against chastity and spirituality. But chastity is not the same thing as celibacy; indeed it is not even, first and foremost, a sexual concept. Someone can be chaste but not celibate, just as someone can be celibate but not chaste. My parents were not celibate, they gave birth to a large family, but they were wonderfully chaste persons. The reverse can also be true. Someone can be celibate but far from chaste.

What is chastity? We are chaste when we stand before the world, others, and God in a way which allows them to be fully themselves without letting our own impatience, selfishness, or unwillingness to remain in tension violate their reality and their natural unfolding. What is meant by that?

Allow me to present three images for this:

• In her book, Holy The Firm, Annie Dillard shares this story: One evening, alone in her cabin, she was watching a moth slowly emerge from its cocoon. The process was fascinating but interminably slow. At a point she lost patience and needed to get on to other things, so she picked up a candle and applied a little heat to the process. It worked. The added heat sped up the process and the moth emerged more quickly from its cocoon, but, since a natural process had been interfered with and unnaturally rushed, the moth emerged with ill-formed wings which didn’t allow it to fly properly. A fault in chastity led to stunted growth.

• The movie, Sense and Sensibility, based on Jane Austen’s classic novel, presents its leading character, a woman played by Emma Thompson, as someone who is asked to carry an extremely painful tension for a long time, one having to do with unrequited and unconsummated love. She has no one with whom she can really share her pain and her circumstance requires her to carry on as if she was not carrying this pain. She carries that tension for a long time, sublimating her pain into a graciousness that she extends even to the very persons who are the source of her tension. Only after a long time is the tension is finally resolved and her forbearance in not forcing an earlier, premature resolution, her willingness to carry the tension to term, helps bring about deeper life for everyone, not least for herself. This is the essence of chastity.

• After the Italian, spiritual writer, Carlo Carretto, had spend a number of years living as a hermit in the Sahara desert, he was asked what message he would give to the world if someone asked him the question: What, in your solitude and prayer, do you hear God saying to those of us who are living active lives in the world? Carretto replied: God is saying: learn to wait, learn to wait for everything – for love, for fulfillment, for consummation, for God! Learning to wait, giving God and life the space to unfold as they need to, is the very essence of chastity.

In a number of his books, Nikos Kazantzakis, both fondly and bitterly, makes this assertion: God, it seems, is never in a hurry, while we are always in a hurry. He’s right: Life unfolds according to its own innate rhythms which try our patience and it will not let themselves be rushed, except at a cost. Life and love demand both the time and the space within which to unfold according to their own internal dictates. Whenever, because of impatience, selfishness, or our unwillingness to stay inside a tension, we short-circuit that process we, in slight or deep ways, violate their reality.

Chastity is the virtue that invites us to live in patience, to wait, to respect what’s other, and to carry tension long enough so that the other can truly be other and gift can unfold precisely as gift.

The word sublime takes its root in the word sublimation. Nothing can be sublime unless there is first sublimation. Nobody gives birth to a baby without a long period of gestation, nobody writes a doctoral thesis in two hours, nobody creates an artistic masterpiece without long hours of sweat and labor, and nobody becomes a heroic individual without carrying unbearable tension. Cinderella only got to go to the ball after she had spent sufficient time in the ashes. Jesus only got to the glory and freedom of Easter Sunday by first sweating blood in the garden.

That is why the Messiah can only be born from a chaste womb and come to life fully only inside of a chaste heart. Christmas allows for no shortcuts.

Joseph and Christmas

December 6, 2009

There are countless persons, basilicas, churches, shrines, seminaries, convents, and even towns and cities named after St. Joseph. My native country, Canada, has him as its patron.

Who exactly is this Joseph? He is that quiet figure prominently named in the Christmas story as the husband of Mary and the stepfather of Jesus, and then basically is never mentioned again. The pious conception of him is that of an older man, a safe protector to Mary, a carpenter by trade, chaste and holy, humble and quiet, the perfect patron for manual laborers and anonymous virtue, humility incarnate.

But what do we really know about him?

In the Gospel of Matthew the annunciation of Jesus’ conception is given to Joseph rather than to Mary: Before they came together, Mary was found to be with child by the Holy Spirit. Joseph, her husband, being an upright man and unwilling to shame her, had decided to divorce her quietly, when an angel appeared to him in a dream and told him not to be afraid to take Mary as his wife, that the child in her had been conceived through the Holy Spirit.

What can we learn from this text?

Partly it is symbolic: The Joseph of the Christmas story is clearly reminiscent of the Joseph of the Exodus story, he too has a dream, he too goes to Egypt, and he too saves the family. Likewise King Herod is clearly the counterpart of the Egyptian Pharaoh; both feel threatened and both kill the Hebrew male children only to have God protect the life of the one who is to save the people.

But, after that, the Joseph of the Christmas story writes his own history: He is presented to us as an “upright” man, a designation that scholars say implies that he has conformed himself to the Law of God, the supreme Jewish standard of holiness. In every way he is blameless, a paradigm of goodness, which he demonstrates in the Christmas story by refusing to expose Mary to shame, even as he decides to divorce her quietly.

What actually happened here?

The background, in so far as we can reconstruct it, to the relationship between Joseph and Mary would have been this: The marriage custom at the time was that a young woman, essentially at the age of puberty, would be given to a man, usually several years her senior, in an arranged marriage by her parents. They would be betrothed, technically married, but would not yet live together or begin sexual relations for several more years. The Jewish law was especially strict as to the couple remaining celibate while in the betrothal period. During this time, the young woman would continue to live with her parents and the young man would go about setting up a house and an occupation so as to be able to support his wife once they began to live together.

Joseph and Mary were at this stage of their relationship, legally married but not yet living together, when Mary became pregnant. Joseph, knowing that the child was not his, had a dilemma: If he wasn’t the father, who was? In order to save his own reputation, he could have demanded a public inquiry and, indeed, had Mary been accused of adultery, it might have meant her death. However, he decided to “divorce her quietly”, that is, to avoid a public inquiry which would leave her in an awkward and vulnerable situation.

Then, after receiving revelation in a dream, he agrees to take her home as his wife and to name the child as his own. Partly we understand the significance of that, he spares Mary embarrassment, he names the child as his own, and he provides an accepted physical, social, and religious place for the child to be born and raised. But he does something else that is not so evident: He shows how a person can be a pious believer, deeply faithful to everything within his religious tradition, and yet at the same time be open to a mystery beyond both his human and religious understanding.

And this was exactly the problem for any Christians, including Matthew himself, at the time the Gospels were written: They were pious Jews who didn’t know how to integrate Christ into their religious framework. What does one do when God breaks into one’s life in new, previously unimaginable ways? How does one deal with an impossible conception? Here’s how Raymond Brown puts it: The hero of Matthew’s infancy story is Joseph, a very sensitive Jewish observer of the Law. … In Joseph, the evangelist was portraying what he thought a Jew [a true pious believer] should be and probably what he himself was.

In essence what Joseph teaches us is how to live in loving fidelity to all that we cling to humanly and religiously, even as we are open to a mystery of God that takes us beyond all the categories of our religious practice and imagination.

Isn’t that one of the ongoing challenges of Christmas?

Prayer with an Infallible Guarantee

November 29, 2009

There are several places in the gospels where Jesus assures us that if we ask for something in his name we are guaranteed to receive it.

In Matthew’s gospel, for example, he says: Ask and you shall receive, because everyone who asks receives. In John’s gospel he promises us that if you ask anything in my name, the Father will grant it.

Why doesn’t this always work? Sometimes we pray for something, pray for it in Jesus’ name, and our request isn’t granted. Sometimes we literally storm heaven with our prayers and heaven seems shut against them. Did Jesus make an idle promise when he assured us that God would give us anything we ask for, if we ask in his name?

Spiritual writers and apologists have offered a number of answers to this question: Maybe our prayer wasn’t answered because we asked for the wrong thing. A loving mother wouldn’t give her unknowing child a knife to play with, would she? Or perhaps our prayer was answered, but at a deeper level and only in time will we understand that answer. C.S. Lewis once quipped that we will spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers of ours that he didn’t answer!

There’s merit in all these answers, though they are not the answers that Jesus used. Indeed, when he promised us that our prayers would be answered, he didn’t add that it is on the condition that we ask for the right thing. He invited us to ask for anything in his name. He didn’t specify that it be the right thing. So why aren’t our prayers always answered?

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, a renowned scripture scholar, suggests that in Matthew’s gospel, as well as in much of the rest of the New Testament, prayer of petition is linked to concrete charitable action within the community. Hence to pray truly for someone involves also reaching out concretely to help that person. To pray truly for justice and peace involves working actively for justice and peace. When we pray “through Christ” we pray not just through the resurrected Christ in heaven but also through the “body of Christ” on earth, ourselves. We need to be involved in helping answer our own prayers. Thus when our prayer doesn’t seem to be answered it might mean that we, Christ’s body on earth, have not been enough involved in trying to answer our own prayer, that we haven’t in fact prayed “through Christ”.

Karl Rahner, in commenting on Jesus’ promise in John’s gospel that anything we ask for in his name will be given us, offers us this reflection:

To ask for something in Jesus’ name does not mean that we invoke him verbally and then desire whatever our turbulent, divided heart or our appetite, our wretched mania for everything and anything, happens to hanker for. No, asking in Jesus’ name means entering into him, living by him, being one with him in love and faith. If he is in us by faith, in love, in grace, in his Spirit, then our petition arises from the centre of our being, which is himself, and if all our petition and desire is gathered up and fused in him and his Spirit, then the Father hears us. Then our petition becomes simple and straightforward, harmonious, sober, and unpretentious. Then what St. Paul says in the letter to the Romans applies to us: We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us, praying the one prayer, “Abba! Father!” He longs for that from which the Spirit and Jesus himself have proceeded: he longs for God, he asks God for God, on our behalf he asks of God. Everything is included and contained in this prayer. …. [If we pray in this way] we shall see that God really answers our prayer, in one way or another. Then we shall no longer feel this “one way or the other” is a feeble excuse offered by the pious, and the Gospel, for unanswered prayer. No. Our prayer is answered, but precisely because it is prayer in Jesus’ name; and what we ultimately pray for is for the Lord to grow in our lives, to fill our existence with himself, to triumph, to gather into one our scattered life, the thousand and one desires of which we are made. … To pray in Jesus’ name is to have one’s prayer answered, to receive God and God’s blessing, and then, even amid tears, even in pain, even in indigence, even when it seems that one has still not been heard, the heart rests in God, and that-while we are still here on pilgrimage, far from the Lord-is perfect joy.

Until we have prayed like this, Jesus can truthfully say to us: “Up to now, you have not asked for anything in my name. You may have tried to, you may have meant to, but you have not yet made me the strength and burden of your prayer.”

A Nun’s Story

November 22, 2009

When we think of a saint we tend to think only of someone who has been officially canonized by the church, but I have a few patron saints who have not been formally canonized.

One of these is a former teacher of mine who died five years ago. Her name was Sister Shirley Christopher, an Ursuline nun. I was fortunate enough to have had her as my homeroom teacher for three years of high school. She taught History, English, French, and Religion and was an extraordinary teacher, both in talent and in dedication, and she influenced me more deeply than any other teacher whom I have ever met inside a classroom.

She taught the content of her courses with wonderful clarity, but that was only part of her giftedness. She taught us how to learn, how to study, how to outline materials, how to memorize the parts of a French verb, how to teach, how to inspire a student, how to give yourself over as a teacher in a both a personal and professional way, and, most important, how to fix your life on what is important.

Her influence in my life is incalculable. After leaving high school, I went on to seminary and college, then to graduate school, to post-graduate school, and then became a teacher myself. In all the classrooms I have been in since, I haven’t met anyone who taught as clearly as Sr. Shirley. Moreover, the methods she taught me, way back in 9th grade, served me well right through my PhD studies and my doctoral dissertation. I did my research for and outlined my doctoral thesis using her method. Today I teach using her pedagogy. She knew PowerPoint long before it was invented.

However, back in high school when I sat in her classroom, I was too young to have much sense of what all this must have been costing her. She was just my teacher; I didn’t give much thought to her life, never for a moment thinking of what this might be asking of her: She was a gifted educator, but was spending the prime years of her life teaching in one of the most isolated, rural areas of Saskatchewan’s prairies. Our high school, long since disappeared, wasn’t exactly the place where academic careers were launched, nurtured, or discovered. We had access to her exceptional talent only because she was a nun, vowed to serving the poor, to teaching in areas like ours.

Moreover, as a high-school student, I had virtually no sense of what this might have been costing her in terms of her personal life, as a nun and as a woman. What’s it like to sacrifice husband, children, and family in order to do this? What’s it like to live within the strict community enclosures of pre-Vatican II religious life? What’s it like to live with five or six other women inside of convent in a very isolated rural community where everyone treats you with a respect that also includes a radical distancing from you? What’s it like to approach menopause and not have children?

As her student, I was only beginning to have a sense of the complexity of life and of how even the deepest faith doesn’t necessarily take away your humanity with all its fiery needs and how inside of even the most dedicated nun there remains a woman who, every day, would want to take back from God what the nun gave over.

Whatever the cost, she paid it, and did so without ever losing her graciousness, her intelligence, her faith, and her sense that personal ambition is secondary to serving others.

I left high school at graduation and never saw her again until many years later. She was semi-retired by then, had grown grey, and had put aside her religious habit for simple lay clothing, but she was wonderfully happy, much happier than when I had known her as a teacher. She looked like an elder now, a magus, a wisdom figure, Sophia in an aging body. But she radiated the kind of peace that comes when we are enviably beyond the painful neediness of youth. She was a celibate, a nun, old enough now to have her own grandchildren, but, even without them, a fulfilled woman, happy, without the need to make some assertion with her life.

I visited her several months before her death, when she was already in palliative care. I told her what she meant to me and thanked her for her dedication. And she was ever the teacher I’d studied under 40 years before: gracious, professional, dedicated, self-effacing: “I just did my best.”

When the military in El Salvador threatened Archbishop Romero with death, he responded by saying: “If you kill me, I will rise within the Salvadorian people.” Sister Shirley Christopher OSU died on November 19, 2004, but she is alive still in many of us, her former students, who were blessed to have had so talented and selfless a teacher. Her life goes on.

Respect for Each Other in a Polarized Community

November 15, 2009

We live today in a highly polarized world and within highly polarized churches. In this, we are not unique. A certain degree of polarization exists within every community and is normal and healthy. However the bitterness, mean-spirit, and lack of respect that characterizes much of our political, ecclesial, and moral discourse today is not normal and is far from healthy. And we shouldn’t delude ourselves in thinking that it is healthy or, worse yet, in the name of truth or justice or God, try to rationalize our lack of respect for those who think differently than we do. We aren’t holy warriors, just angry people with a highly selective compassion.

Perhaps labels like liberal and conservative don’t accurately name the various tribes we invariably divide into today, but, as an over-generalization, these names still work. We are bitterly divided, liberal from conservative, conservative from liberal, and instead of seeing ourselves as one community caught in a common struggle, we talk rather in terms of “we” and “them”, like warring tribes. There’s no longer a common plural.

More seriously, we are no longer capable of even having a respectful conversation with each other. It is rare today to have a discussion on any sensitive political, moral, or ecclesial issue that does not degenerate into name-calling and disrespect. Empathy, understanding, and compassion have become highly selective, ideological, and one-sided. We listen to and respect only our own kind. Moreover, neither side has a monopoly on this, liberal or conservative. What is sadly manifest too, on both sides, is a certain hypersensitivity, an over-seriousness, a paranoia about the other, an anger, a joylessness, and the lack of a sense of humor.

Conservatives tend to justify this by pointing to the gravity of the issues they are defending: abortion, family life, traditional marriage. These, they point out with all the proper gravity, are serious issues and liberals are so compromised that there really is no room for meaningful talk. The truth being defended is eternal and allows for no compromise, so what’s the purpose of dialogue?

Liberals return the favor: Why discuss something that is rationally self-evident, simply a question of human right, and has long since been enshrined in democratic principle? These issues need not even be discussed. Moreover, in liberal circles, there is all too frequently an intellectual disdain for what is judged to be narrow intolerance stemming from religious fundamentalism. Liberals, despite considerable rhetoric to the contrary, have little genuine desire to have a real conversation about issues like abortion, gay marriage, and family values. For them, just as for the conservatives, these issues already have a clear moral conclusion. Why talk?

Strong convictions are not a fault, but what is distressing is that this unwillingness to be open to respectful dialogue on sensitive issues is generally as prevalent within church circles as it is in political ones.

In church circles we are meant to hold ourselves to a higher standard: to meet viciousness with graciousness, anger with compassion, opposition with understanding, slander with no retaliation, intolerance with patience, and everything and everybody with charity. For the most part, this isn’t happening. Sadly, inside of church circles, our conversation about sensitive issues basically mirrors the harsh and one-sided rhetoric we hear on the more strident talk shows. The results are the same: the converted preach to the converted, hearts harden rather than soften, positions become even more bitter and entrenched, and we drift further apart from each other in our churches and in our politics.

At a time when misunderstanding, anger, intolerance, impatience, lack of respect, and lack of charity are paralyzing our communities and dividing the sincere from the sincere, it is time for us, followers of Jesus called to imitate his wide compassion, to reground ourselves in some fundamentals: respect, charity, understanding, patience, and gentleness towards those who oppose us. It’s time to accept too that we are all in this together, one family within which everyone needs everyone else.

There is no “we” and “them”, there’s only “us”.

Biblical scholar, Ernst Kaseman, once suggested that what’s wrong in both the world and the church is that the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. How true. It’s rare to see the same person leading both the peace-march and the rosary. Liberals are better at one, conservatives at the other. Each has its own models, its Mel Gibsons and Michael Moores, patron saints of piety or justice. What’s needed is a patron saint for both.

Perhaps we might look for that in Dorothy Day, someone whom both sides, liberal and conservative, respect and recognize as a saint and who is soon to be canonized by the church. She was both pious and liberal, a woman equally comfortable leading a peace-march or leading the rosary. She was also able to stand up strongly for truth, for life, and for justice, without bracketing what has to be forever fundamental within all relationships and discourse – charity, respect, wide compassion, and a sense of humor!