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.

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.”

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!

In a marvelous book, The Force of Character, James Hillman shares this story: As a young man, sitting around one afternoon and listening to an old uncle telling stories, he got irritated when his uncle began telling a story that he had told many times before: “You’ve already told that story,” Hillman complained. “I like telling it!” his uncle shot back, and then muttered under his breath, “and what on earth is wrong with telling it again!”

At the time, his uncle’s retort served only to further irritate Hillman. Only later, when his understanding of life and character deepened, did Hillman appreciate why his uncle had a need to tell and retell the same story: “He knew the joy of the groove!” And what a joy, what a gift, is the groove!

We don’t just nurture others and ourselves with freshness and novelty. These are perennially in short supply and generally not accessible. If we only talked with each other when we had something new or interesting to share there would be mostly silence around our tables. There would also be a lot less irony, humour, and wit in our conversations. We don’t just nurture each other through novelty and by being interesting, we also, and importantly, nurture family life, our friendship circles, and our workplaces by working and reworking to death old stories, old jokes, and old anecdotes, until that repetition becomes it own story, its own humour, and its own anecdote. Hillman names this brilliantly: He calls it the joy of the groove.

Hillman goes on to offer a rather serious philosophical reflection on this, one which sheds light on the value of ritual repetition. He quotes Gilles Deleuze, a French philosopher, who once pointed out that repetition can be a way of celebrating something by highlighting its character: By carrying the first time to the nth power, repetition artfully glorifies. Repetition magnifies an event by commemorating its originality; this repetition differs from reproduction, which succeeds only in making each repetition a weaker echo, a paler print, with less and less power of the original.

To this, Hellman adds a little doxology in praise of repetition: Nothing is more tedious than practicing your scales or mumbling your beads. Yet the accomplishments of art, the efficacy of prayer, the beauty of ritual, and the force of character depend on petty repetitions any instant of which, taken for itself alone, is utterly useless.

Many of us know exactly what this means. We have siblings, friends, and acquaintances that entertain and irritate us by mercilessly repeating old stories, old jokes, and old anecdotes over and over until this very repetition becomes its own story and takes on its own character. They work the groove. Sometimes this irritates us and we want to protest, but, as was the case with Hillman, eventually we come to appreciate what that brings into the circle of family life, friendship, and community, namely, a needed sustenance, a color, a wit, a character, and a peculiar idiosyncrasy that becomes a story onto itself. We don’t live on novelty alone, but on every retold story that highlights the irony and color within our daily lives.

My own family has been irritatingly famous for this, a quality that I am not always proud of but which generally I appreciate. We are a family that loves the joy of the groove. At our family gatherings and dinner tables, year after year, many of the same stories and jokes get told over and over again. And they aren’t always received with appreciation. Not infrequently there is a raised eyebrow (“My God, he’s not going to tell that one again!”) or, like the young Hillman, a raised complaint (“You’ve told that story before!”) But, overall, there is the enjoyment of the groove, of old irony, old wit, of an old insight being enjoyed again, in a fresh new way, both by the one retelling it and by those listening. At our table, what’s old and tedious nurtures and carries family life as much what’s new and interesting, sometimes more so because the retelling of old anecdotes and stories helps highlight our own particular history and character.

We lost a loved brother this summer and, at his vigil, his three children, now grown adults, offered a moving tribute. Among other things, they highlighted his solicitude for them as a father, his commitment to his church, his strong commitment to justice issues (ecology, native rights, women’s rights), and his sense of humor, particularly his need to repeat a punch-line over and over again, as if it somehow wasn’t heard the first time: “You couldn’t escape!”, they pointed out, “he repeated it over and over again until he was sure you got it!”

But that isn’t the real reason we repeat a punch-line. We repeat a punch-line for the same reason that Hillman’s uncle was driven to retell that same story: We like saying it! We like the feel of the groove. Moreover, eventually, beyond their initial irritation, so others do too.

I was raised to be cautious, physically and morally: “Be careful! Don’t make a mistake! Be safe! Don’t do anything for which you’ll be sorry!” I inhaled those words, literally, through my years of childhood, my years of seminary training, and through most of my years in the priesthood.

In fact they were the last words that my father, one of the truly moral men I have known, spoke to me. He was dying of cancer in a hospital and as my brother and I left for the night, not knowing that he would die before morning, he cautioned us: “Be careful!” He was referring to our driving on icy winter roads. But this caution marked his character, his moral sensitivity, and his healthy solicitude for us, his children, and it was meant morally: “Be careful! Be safe!” This was his habitual warning.

Those words are now part of my genetic make-up. You inherit more than simple biology from your father, especially if you are lucky enough to have one who was uncompromisingly moral. And that caution has served me well. I’m grateful for it. I’ve made it through more than half a century essentially intact, physically and morally. No small gift.

But that caution sometimes brings with it other things for which I am less grateful. One can be intact, but so cautious and timid that fear rather than love becomes the compass for one’s life. The occupational hazard in always being scrupulously safe is that one can easily end up like the older brother of the prodigal son, that is, rigidly faithful in all things, but judgmental, jealous, and bitter of heart, dogmatically and morally uncompromising, while envying the amoral and being too paralyzed internally to truly dance. Sometimes a long, practiced caution in our actions makes for a heart that is more cautious than generous, more envious than affirming, and more judgmental than forgiving. Sometimes too it makes for a heart that understands love and forgiveness as things that must be merited rather than freely given and received. Too often too it results in a heart that is secretly gleeful when things go wrong for those who aren’t living as we are. That isn’t always the case, but it can easily be, and, speaking frankly and humbly, it has sometimes been the case in my own life.

The German poet, Goethe, once wrote: The dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers. For some people perhaps the reverse warning might be more appropriate. But for those of us who were raised to be good and religious persons there is a disturbing truth in Goethe’s words.

Are we living too safely? Do we have the courage to look at our inhibitions, jealousies, and religiously-sanctioned angers with real honesty? Are our lives driven more by fear than by love? Can we enter the dance without judgment and bitterness? Do others perceive us as rigid? When is the last time we could truly forgive someone who hurt us? Are our lives really about love and generosity rather than fear and self-protection?

The danger in living too safely is that sometimes when we think we are defending life we are really defending the poverty of our own lives, sometimes when we think we are defending virtue we are really defending our inhibitions and fears, and sometimes when we think we are speaking for God’s healthy concern for the world we are, like the older brother of the prodigal son, really speaking of our own hidden jealousy.

The hero of the movie, Chariots of Fire, Eric Liddell, a wonderfully moral young man, was an Olympic runner who because of religious sensibilities refused to run an Olympic race on Sunday, even though he was heavily favored to win the gold medal. It would be easy to judge his action as stemming from moral and religious rigidity. In somebody else’s case that might be true. It wasn’t for Eric Liddell. Why? Because he wasn’t driven by fear or rigidity. He was driven by love. “When I run,” he famously said, “I feel God’s pleasure.”

Sometimes I ask myself that same question in relation to my religious and moral inhibitions: Does God take pleasure in my caution? Does God take pleasure in my sacrifices? Does God take pleasure in my anxieties about the world’s moral failings? Or is the Father standing with me, outside the celebration, pleading with me, as he once pleaded with the older brother of the prodigal son, to let up a little and come inside and join the dance?

I am grateful for my upbringing, despite the congenital reticence with which it has left me. It’s good to be careful. It’s a responsible and loving way to live. But I am growing more honest about its dangers. I am pretty intact much of the time, but sometimes I’m more fearful than generous, more self-protective than loving, more jealous than healthily solicitous. Sometimes caution doesn’t leave me with a big heart. Safety too has its dangers.

We sometimes forget that Jesus was born in a barn, not a church, and that the God of the Incarnation is as much about kitchen tables as ecclesial altars. God is as much domestic as monastic. This is important to keep in mind as we try to understand the Eucharist. The Eucharist is the body of Christ, a continuation of the Incarnation, and, like Jesus’ birth, is meant to bring the divine into concrete, everyday life.

Hence, among its other things, the Eucharist is meant simply to be a family meal, a community celebration, a place, like our kitchen tables and living rooms, where we come together to be with each other, to share ordinary life, to celebrate special events with each other, to console and cry with each other when life is full of heartaches, and to be together simply for the sake of being together.

It is not good for the man to be alone. God spoke those words just before creating Eve, and he meant them not just about Adam, the first man, but about every man, woman, child, and creature forever. Nothing is an island, not even a molecule or an atom. Everything is meant to be in relationship. The Eucharist honours that.

When Jesus gave us the Eucharist, he intended it to be a ritual that invites us to come together as a family in every circumstance of our lives. In faith, just as in nature, we are meant to come together with others when we are happy and when we are sad, when the occasion is festive and when the occasion is mundane, when we celebrate new life and when we bury loved ones, when we give ourselves to each other in marriage and when we need reconciliation, when our energy is high and when our energy is low, when we feel the need for each other and when we want distance from others, and when we have no other reason to be together other than the fact that our nature invites us there.

The Eucharist invites us to gather as family. The very essence of family life is sharing with others both the special and the ordinary moments of life. Families gather together to celebrate occasions: Birthdays, weddings, graduations, transitions, illnesses, wakes, and funerals. At these times the atmosphere is more charged, the energy is higher, and there is a clearer sense that this is an occasion that merits our coming together.

But families that sustain themselves also gather regularly, ideally daily, irrespective of whether there is a special occasion or not. They don’t just gather when the energy is good, when everyone is at his or her best, when nobody is bored or angry, and when some occasion merits the effort. They come together regularly, despite tedium, boredom, low energy, busyness, distractions, and interpersonal tensions because they recognize, however inchoately, that family life is as much about sharing the mundane, the distracted, the sports scores, and the tensions of life, as it is about sharing special and joyous moments. The weekday supper of hotdogs and beans, wolfed-down in 20 minutes with the conversation going no deeper than the sports scores, is not exactly the same stuff as the fare of the Christmas dinner or the conversation that takes place at a wedding or a funeral, but it is equally as important in creating family and keeping a family together. Families are for everyday, just as they are for special occasions. So too is the Eucharist.

For a variety of reasons, we have been slow to take this aspect of the Eucharist seriously. Perhaps this is because its other dimensions seem more sacred. Our reluctance to accept this is evident in the simple criticism that is made of people who go to church principally because of its social aspect: “She doesn’t go to church to pray! She just goes for the socializing, for the chance to talk with others!” That is always voiced as a negative when, in fact, it a good reason, among others, to go the Eucharist. The ritual of the Eucharist was given to us because we are social in our very make-up. To go to church to socialize is reason enough to be there.

I wish I had known that as child when I went to church on special feast days, like Christmas or Easter, and heard the priest using the word “celebration” to describe our Eucharistic gathering and never, not even for a second, connecting that with the much-anticipated family dinner we would be having once we got home from church. I wish too that people would know this when they stay away from church because of boredom or anger or because they feel their presence there is only social and not an act of prayer.

One of the reasons we go to church is to pray, but we go there too for the same reason we go to the family table every evening. It’s good to be there, no matter what!

Before Henri Nouwen wrote the book that became his signature work, Return of the Prodigal Son, he went to The Hermitage museum in Russia and sat for whole days contemplating Rembrandt’s famous painting on the return of the prodigal son. He was given permission to bring a chair into the museum and he would sit for hours, studying the painting from various angles and letting it speak to him in his varying moods. The result was one of the finest commentaries ever written on both Rembrandt’s painting and on the meaning of that famous parable in the gospels.

What Henri Nouwen did with Rembrandt’s painting is what we need to do with a lot of the classical language of scripture, the creeds, and dogma. The language there is more iconic than literal, more the language of metaphor than of ordinary life, deep image rather than video-taped history. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t true or that it’s “Alice-in-Wonderland” mythology. It is deeply true, so true that we hang our very lives on its truth. But it is meant to studied, contemplated, meditated, knelt-before and prayed-with, rather than taken literally.

Allow me an example: Consider the language and image surrounding the death of Jesus as paying the price for our sins.

Scripture, our creeds, and our Christian tradition have a certain language around this. Among other things, we say: “He paid the price for our sins. We are saved by his blood. He paid the debt of sin. We are washed clean in his blood, the blood of the lamb. He is the Lamb of God who takes away our sins. He restored us to life, after our death in Adam’s sin. He conquered death, once and for all. By his stripes we were healed. He offered an eternal sacrifice to God. He is our victim. He opened the gates of heaven. He stripped the principalities and Satan of their power. He descended into hell.”

Accepting the truth of this language is one thing, explaining in within the categories and language of ordinary life is something else. About Jesus’ death, we have a language but we don’t have a vocabulary. We know its meaning, but we can never adequately explain it.

What exactly do we mean by these statements? How does Jesus’ death save me from being accountable for my sins? How does his death vicariously substitute for human shortcoming, including our own, through the centuries? Why does God need someone to suffer that agonizingly in order to forgive me? How does Jesus’ death open the gates of heaven? Why had they been closed? What does it mean that, in his death, Jesus descended into hell?

Literal explanations come up short here. The words are more like an icon, an artifact that highlights form to bring out essence. The language of scripture, the creeds, and our dogmas put us in touch with something that we can know but struggle to conceptualize and explain. It is meant to be grasped at levels beyond the just the intellect. It is a language to be contemplated and knelt-before more than a language to be understood literally.

Some years ago, Time magazine did a cover story on the death of Jesus. Among other things, they interviewed various people and asked them how they understood the blood of Jesus as washing them clean. One of those interviewed was JoAnne Terrell, the author of Power in the Blood? The Cross in the African American Experience. For her, the question of how Jesus’ blood saves us triggered a deep personal search. Sitting in a seminary classroom and studying the death of Jesus, she began having flashbacks: As a young girl she had seen her mother murdered by a boyfriend. She vividly recalled the blood-soaked mattress and her mother’s bloody fingerprints on the wall. And so her search was very much a search “to find the connection between my mom’s story and my story and Jesus’ story.”

For her, the language around the death of Jesus, its blood and heartbreak, became an icon to be contemplated for meaning. Like Henri Nouwen she began moving her chair around to look at it from various angles and to see how it spoke to her in her life-situation, to the blood in her own history. The language of redemptive blood gave meaning and dignity to her mother’s blood.

We cheat ourselves of meaning whenever we treat scripture, the creeds, and the dogmas of our faith as simple statements of history, newspaper accounts in literal language. They have a historicity and they are true, but the language surrounding them is not the language of the daily newspaper. They are anchored in history and we risk our very lives on their truth, but they speak to us more as does an icon than as does yesterday’s newspaper. Their language is meant to be contemplated, knelt-before, and absorbed in the heart as we experience more and more of life’s mysteries.

An atheist, someone once quipped, is just another name for someone who doesn’t grasp metaphor.

The poet, Hafiz, wrote a poem nearly 700 years ago entitled, We Should Talk About This Problem. In it, God addresses a wounded soul:

There is a Beautiful Creature

Living in a hole you have dug …

And I often sing, but still, my dear,

You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone

Who hides inside of you.

That’s God’s feeling, and perhaps ours too, when someone is in a suicidal depression. Few things can so devastate us as the suicide of a loved one. There’s the horrific shock of losing a loved one so suddenly which, just of itself, can bring us to our knees; but, with suicide, there are other soul-wrenching feelings too, confusion, guilt, second-guessing, religious anxiety. Where did we fail this person? What might we still have done? What is this person’s state with God?

What needs to be said about this? First, that suicide is a disease and generally the most misunderstood of all sicknesses. It takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, we, those left behind, need not spend undue energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with any sickness, we can love someone and still not be able to save that person from death. God loved this person too and, like us, could not, this side of eternity, do anything either. Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets this person on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, can go through locked doors and touch what will not allow itself to be touched by us.

Is this making light of suicide? No. Anyone who has ever dealt with either the victim of a suicide before his or her death or with those grieving that death afterwards knows that it is impossible to make light of it. There is no pain like the one suicide inflicts. Nobody who is healthy wants to die and nobody who is healthy seeks to burden his or her loved ones with this kind of pain. And that’s the point: This is only done when someone isn’t healthy. The fact that medication can often prevent suicide should tell us something.

Suicide, in most cases, is an illness not a sin. Nobody, who is healthy, willingly decides to commit suicide and burden his or her loved ones with that death any more than anyone willingly chooses to die of cancer and cause pain. The victim of suicide (in most cases) is a trapped person, caught up in a fiery, private chaos that has its roots both in his or her psyche and in his or her bio-chemistry. Suicide, in most cases, is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, akin to one throwing oneself off a high building because one’s clothing is on fire.

Many of us have known victims of suicide and we know too that in almost every case that person was not full of pride, haughtiness, and the desire to hurt anyone. Generally it’s the opposite. The victim has cancerous problems precisely because he or she is wounded, raw, and too-bruised to have the resiliency needed to deal with life. Those of us who have lost loved ones to suicide know that the problem is not one of strength but of weakness, the person is too-bruised to be touched.

I remember a comment I over-heard at a funeral for a suicide victim. The priest had preached badly, hinting that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault and that suicide is always the ultimate act of despair. At the reception afterwards a neighbour of the victim expressed his displeasure at the priest’s homily: “There are a lot of people in this world who should kill themselves,” he lamented, “but those kind never do! This man is the last person who should have killed himself because he was one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever met!” A book could be written on that statement. Too often it’s the meek who seemly lose the battle in this world.

Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide. God, as Jesus assures us, has a special affection for those of us who are too-bruised and wounded to be touched. Jesus assures us too that God’s love can go through locked doors and into broken places and free up what’s paralyzed and help that which can no longer help itself. God is not blocked when we are. God can reach through.

And so our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide are now inside of God’s embrace, enjoying a freedom they could never quite enjoy here and being healed through a touch that they could never quite accept from us.