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.

What defines true religion? What ultimately constitutes true worship? How do we know that we aren’t rationalizing our own selves and calling it religion? How do we know that we aren’t creating God in our own image and likeness and using religion for our own purposes?

Paul Tillich once distinguished between what he termed: Pseudo-religion, Quasi-religion, and True-religion. He defined them this way:

Pseudo-religion uses explicit religious language and sometimes even intends it in its real sense, but ultimately it doesn’t open someone up to anything beyond what is highest within the individual self. In the end, it recycles human consciousness and doesn’t open us up to the transcendent, to air beyond us. It uses the word “God”, but its “God” doesn’t take us beyond what is highest inside of ourselves. “God” is a higher power, an ideal, and a power beyond mundane consciousness, but “God” is not a transcendent power, a real person capable of parting the Red Sea or raising the body of Jesus. Nonetheless this “God” can be wonderfully positive in challenging us to what’s highest inside of ourselves. It makes for a religion of positive thinking.

Quasi-religion doesn’t use explicit religious language, but takes its adherents beyond what is highest inside of a person to what is highest inside of humanity itself. Many ideologies are quasi-religions. They demand that we sacrifice ourselves for something higher. Our own personal dreams are less important than the larger dream of humanity itself. Thus, an ideology such as Marxism, Greenpeace, or Feminism can demand that we sacrifice our own dreams and even our lives for the common good. While not using explicit religious language and sometimes even being explicitly atheistic, quasi-religion attains some of the qualities of true-religion, namely, it pushes its adherents to altruism, self-sacrifice, and purpose beyond idiosyncratic preference.

True-Religion might or might not use explicit religious language but, either way, it opens up its adherents to a vision and a reality beyond what is highest inside of the individual person and highest within the collective ideal of humanity itself. It opens us up to the transcendent, to a God who is real, beyond us, relates to us, and who asks very real things of us in terms of a response. True-religion, unlike its counterparts, does not recycle air that is already within our reality. In a manner of speaking, it brings in air from the outside, from beyond. The God it relates to is not a power already within the consciousness of a person or within the consciousness of humanity itself.

But how do we know if we have attained that? How do we know if our own religious practice is real, quasi, or pseudo?
Jesus answered this by saying: “By their fruits you will know them.” The authenticity of our religious practice should not be judged, as is commonly the case, by any of these criteria: Simple sincerity (“He’s so convinced and sincere!”), religious passion (“He’s on fire with God!”), dogmatic vigilance and purity (“He has such a passion for truth!”), commitment to justice (“He is so committed to the poor!”) faithful religious practice (“He has never missed church in his life!”), or even self-sacrifice (“He is willing to die for this!”). Any of these qualities can be present in a person and his or her religious practice might still not be true. Imbalance, fanaticism, and flat-out hatred can sometimes produce these qualities or be unhealthily mixed in with them. The older brother of the prodigal son never left his father’s house and never did a thing wrong, but he was still unable to enter his father’s joy.

How do we judge true religion?

Perhaps there isn’t a simpler or clearer formula than the one St. Paul gives in the 5th chapter of his Epistle to the Galatians. He tells us that there are two spirits we can live by, the spirit of world (the “Sarx”) and God’s Holy Spirit.

The spirit of the world is marked by envy, anger, bitterness, gossip, factionalism, slander, idolatry, sexual misconduct, and arrogance; whereas the God’s spirit, the Holy Spirit, is characterized by charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, constancy, mildness, fidelity, chastity. Simply put, when our daily lives are characterized by envy, anger, bitterness, factionalism, slander, sexual misconduct, and arrogance, we should not delude ourselves into thinking that we are living in God’s spirit, irrespective of the purity of our religious practice or commitment to a cause. We are living in God’s spirit only when our lives show charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, constancy, mildness, fidelity, and chastity. Living these qualities is true religion, nothing more and nothing less. We know we are breathing air beyond our own only when these qualities show forth in our lives.

Though we might delude ourselves and fool others for awhile with a religious practice that is something less than life in the spirit as Paul defines it, anything less that the real thing will ultimately have us standing, bitter and envious, outside the Father’s joy.

Be compassionate as your heavenly Father is compassionate. Jesus challenged us with those words and there is more in them than first meets the eye. How is God compassionate?

Jesus defines this for us: God, he says, lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good. God’s love doesn’t discriminate, it simply embraces everything. Like the sun it doesn’t shine selectively, shedding its warmth on the vegetables because they are good and refusing its warmth to the weeds because they are bad. It just shines and everything, irrespective of its condition, receives its warmth.

That’s a stunning truth: God loves us when we are good and God loves us when we are bad. God loves the saints in heaven and God loves the devils in hell equally. They just respond differently. The father of the prodigal son and the older brother loves both, one in his weakness and the other in his bitterness, and his embrace is not contingent upon their conversion. He loves them even inside their distance from him.

And we are asked to love in the same way.

How do we do that? First of all, it poses this question: If God loves us equally when we are bad and when we are good, then why be good? This is an interesting question, though not a deep one. Love, understood properly, is never a reward for being good. Instead goodness is always a consequence of having been loved. We aren’t loved because we are good, but hopefully we become good because we experience love.

But how do we, like God, embrace indiscriminately? How do we let our love shine on the bad as well as the good, without saying that nothing matters, that it is okay to live in any way and do anything? How do we love as God loves and still hold true to who we are and what are values are?

We do so by holding our personal and moral ground in a gracious and loving way. And, for this, we have Jesus’ example. He embraced everyone, sinners and saints alike, without ever suggesting that sin and virtue aren’t important. Indeed, a truly loving embrace suggests the reverse.

Let’s take an example: Imagine that your college-age daughter comes home for a weekend, along with her boyfriend. You already know that they are living together, but the awkward question still arises: Do you challenge them to sleep in separate rooms while they are at your house? You do and your answer is clear, you tell your daughter, gently but unequivocally, that while they are under your roof and unmarried they will sleep in separate rooms. She objects: “That’s hypocritical, my values aren’t the same as yours, and I don’t believe this is wrong in any way!”

Your response is the non-discriminating, discriminating embrace of Jesus: You hug your daughter and tell her that you love her, that you know that she is already sleeping with her boyfriend, but that she may not do so in your house, under your roof. Everything inside of your body language, your embrace, and your person, will clearly tell her two things: “I love you, you’re my daughter, I will always love you no matter what. But I don’t agree with you on this matter. “

Your embrace doesn’t say, “I agree with you!”, it simply says, “I love you!” and the affirmation of your love, even as you hold your personal and moral ground will, perhaps more than anything else you can offer her, invite her to reflect upon your moral ground and why you hold certain things so deeply.

This kind of embrace which radiates a wide compassion and understanding even as it holds your moral ground is needed not just in families and friendships, but in every area of life – church, moral, ideological, and aesthetic. Catholics and Protestants, Evangelicals and Unitarians, Christians and Jews, Jews and Muslims, Christians and Muslims, Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, liberals and conservatives, people who have different views on marriage and sexuality, people with classical tastes and people with popular tastes, all must find enough compassion and empathy to be able to embrace in a way that expresses love and understanding even as the embrace does not say that differences are of no importance.

There is a time to stand up for what we believe in, a time to be prophetic, a time to draw a line in the sand, a time to point out differences and the consequences of that, and a time to stand in strong opposition to values and forces that threaten what we hold dear. But there is also a time to embrace across differences, to recognize that we can love and respect each other even when we don’t hold the same values, when what is common to us eclipses our differences.

There is a time to be compassionate as God is compassionate, to let our sun shine indiscriminately, on both the vegetables and the weeds without denying which is which.

On the evening of May 18th, five priests driving north from Guatemala City for a community meeting were stopped by masked gunmen. After robbing the priests of their belongings, they opened fire, killing Fr. Lawrence (Lorenzo) Rosebaugh, an American priest, and seriously wounding Fr. Jean Claude Nowama, a Congolese priest.

This item on the news hit close to home, not just because the victims were priests, but because they were all members of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the community to which I belong, and the man who was killed was someone whom I knew well and deeply admired.

Mircea Eliade warned communities to not botch its deaths. Our community does not want to botch this one. Lorenzo Rosebaugh was no ordinary man and no ordinary priest. He was a special gift to the world, to the church, to our community, and especially to the poor for whom he gave his life.

Fr. Lorenzo was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1935, but grew up in St. Louis. He entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1955 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1963. Always in love with the poor and driven by a passion for justice, Lorenzo was strongly influenced by Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. For this, he paid a price.

In 1968, in protest of the Vietnam war, he burned some draft files. This landed him in prison for two years. In 1975, he hitchhiked to Brazil and for the next several years lived on the streets of Recife, without a rectory or an address, celebrating the Eucharist with the street people and helping them find food each day. This aroused the suspicion of the authorities and he was arrested, imprisoned, and beaten. Given the political climate in Brazil at the time he would, no doubt, have disappeared had there not been international pressure for his release. Indeed it was only after Rosalyn Carter visited there that he was released. She met with him afterwards and he made the most of the opportunity, asking her to intervene on behalf of prison conditions in Brazil.

In the 1980s, a near-deadly bout of hepatitis forced him to return to the United States for treatment, but he was soon active again. In 1983 he was arrested for sabotaging a public address system at Fort Benning and playing Archbishop Romero’s last homily through it. For this action, he spent another 18 months in prison.

From there, he moved to the Catholic Worker in New York, then on to El Salvador to live again with the poor, and, after a long retreat at our Oblate Motherhouse in France and some time in St. Louis to tend to his dying mother and write a memoir, he moved to Guatemala where he ministered to the poor until his death last month.

He authored a book about his experiences: “To Wisdom through Failure: A Journey of Compassion, Resistance and Hope”. I had the privilege of writing the Foreword for this book, a disarmingly honest account of his inner journey through all of this. Among other things, I said this:

Daniel Berrigan once said: A prophet does not make a vow of alienation, but a vow of love. This is what Lorenzo did. He made a vow of love and it has taken him over some pretty rough roads, mostly alone, mostly on foot, landed him in prison, left his body beaten and showing the wear and tear of it, but it has left him in the end – happy, mellow, gentle, faithful, honest, and wonderfully grateful. Our religious community was founded to serve the poor and our founder challenged us to learn the language of the poor. We all try to do that, but only a few have the charism and heart to actually get down and dirty, right on the streets where the poorest of the poor look for food, for a bed, for consolation, for dignity, and for God. Lorenzo learned the language of the poor, became their friend, their advocate, and their priest and we are proud of him!

At his funeral, his provincial superior described him as “partly John the Baptist, partly Francis of Assisi”. That’s exactly how the poor saw him.

Lorenzo didn’t like to talk about himself, but at our Motherhouse in France one night he shared this story: “Before I first went to prison for civil disobedience, I did a retreat with Daniel Berrigan. He told us: ‘If you can’t do this without growing angry and bitter – then don’t do it!’ I prayed the whole night before my first arrest, both because I was scared and because I knew I needed God’s help not to grow angry and bitter!”

And he never did grow angry or bitter. Always gentle in spirit and baptized by the poor, I suspect that even in his final moments when an unthinking gunman was senselessly ending his life, he, like Jesus, had an empathic sense of why this was happening: “Forgive them; they know not what they do!”