When the famous historian Christopher Dawson decided to become a Roman Catholic, his aristocratic mother was distressed, not because she had any aversion to Catholic dogma, but because now her son would, in her words, have to “worship with the help”. She was painfully aware that, in church at least, his aristocratic background would no longer set him apart from others or above anyone. At church he would be just an equal among equals because the Eucharist would strip him of his higher social status.

She intuited correctly. The Eucharist, among other things, calls us to justice, to disregard the distinction between rich and poor, noble and peasant, aristocrat and servant, both around the Eucharist table itself and afterwards outside of the church. The Eucharist fulfills what Mary prophesized when she was pregnant with Jesus, namely, that, in Jesus, the mighty would be brought down and that lowly would be raised up. It was this very thing that first drew Dorothy Day to Christianity. She noticed that, at the Eucharist, the rich and the poor knelt side by side, all equal at that moment.

Sadly, we often don’t take this dimension of the Eucharist seriously. There is a common tendency to think that the practice of justice, especially social justice, is an optional part of being a Christian, something mandated by political correctness rather than by the gospels. Generally we don’t see the call to actively reach out to the poor as something from which we cannot exempt ourselves.

But we are wrong in this. In the gospels and in the Christian scriptures in general, the call to reach out to the poor and to help create justice in the world is as non-negotiable as keeping the commandments and going to church. Indeed striving for justice must be part of all authentic worship.

In the New Testament, every tenth line is a direct challenge to reach out to the poor. In Luke’s gospel, we find this in every sixth line. In the Epistle of James, this occurs in every fifth line. The challenge to reach out to the poor and to level the distinction between rich and poor is an integral and non-negotiable part of being a Christian, commanded as strongly as any of the commandments.

And this challenge is contained in the Eucharist itself: The Eucharistic table calls us to justice, to reach out to the poor. How?

First, by definition, the Eucharistic table is a table of social non-distinction, a place where the rich and the poor are called to be together beyond all class and status. At the Eucharist there are to be no rich and no poor, only one equal family praying together in a common humanity. In baptism we are all made equal and for that reason there are no separate worship services for the rich and the poor. Moreover, St. Paul warns us strongly that when we gather for the Eucharist the rich should not receive preferential treatment.

Indeed, the gospels invite us in the opposite direction. When you hold any banquet, they tell us, we should give preferential treatment to the poor. This is especially true for the Eucharist. The poor should be welcomed in a special way. Why?

Because, among other things, the Eucharist commemorates Jesus’ brokenness, his poverty, his body being broken and his blood being poured out. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin expresses this aptly when he suggests that the wine offered at the Eucharist symbolizes precisely the brokenness of the poor: In a sense the true substance to be consecrated each day is the world’s development during that day – the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation succeeds in producing, the wine (blood) what creation causes to be lost in exhaustion and suffering in the course of that effort. The Eucharist offers up the tears and blood of the poor and invites us to help alleviate the conditions that produce tears and blood.

And we do that, as a famous church hymn says, by moving “from worship into service”. We don’t go to the Eucharist only to worship God by expressing our faith and devotion. The Eucharist is not a private devotional prayer, but is rather a communal act of worship which, among other things, calls us to go forth and live out in the world what we celebrate inside of a church, namely, the non-importance of social distinction, the special place that God gives to the tears and blood of the poor, and non-negotiable challenge from God to each of us to work at changing the conditions that cause tears and blood. The Eucharist calls us to love tenderly, but, just as strongly, it calls us to act in justice.

To say that Eucharist calls us to justice and to social justice is not a statement that takes its origin in political correctness. It takes its origin in Jesus who, drawing upon the great prophets of old, assures us that the validity of all worship will ultimately be judged by how it affects “widows, orphans, and strangers.”

Last week I presided at a wedding ceremony. All weddings are special, but this one was particularly special. Why?

The young woman getting married was wonderfully radiant and healthy, but she was a cancer survivor. Five years ago, I used this column to tell a bit of her story. Let me repeat some of that here, updating the chronology slightly:

For twenty-five summers, I taught a summer course at Seattle University. One of the rituals I developed during those summers was to spend the July 4th holiday with some family friends on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle. This family has its own rituals and one of these is that it watches the July-Fourth parade off the front-lawn of one of their friends’ houses.

Ten years ago, sitting on that lawn, waiting for the parade, I was introduced to the youngest daughter in that family. She was a senior in high school and a member of their state-winning basketball team, but she was also suffering from cancer and the debilitating chemotherapy treatments that were being used to combat it. Just 18 years old, weighing less than 80 pounds, she sat wrapped in a blanket on a warm summer day, quiet and melancholy, while her friends, healthy and robust, drank beer and celebrated life. Things didn’t look good then. The long-range prognosis was iffy, at best, and her body and spirit didn’t belie that, though friends and family did. She was surrounded on every side by attention, affection, and concern. She was very ill, but she was loved.

I got to know her that day and more in the months and years that followed. Her family and others prayed hard for her, storming heaven for a cure. Those prayers, along with the medical treatments, eventually did their work. She hung on against the odds, slowly improved, and after many months emerged healthy, whole again, back to normal, except once you’ve stared death in the face “normal” is never quite the same again.

When she eventually picked up the pieces of her former life, she knew that while things were the same again they were also very, very different. In the wake of such an experience, ordinary life is no longer something you take for granted, there’s a deeper joy in all things ordinary and a new horizon, wisdom, maturity, and purpose that wasn’t there before. God writes straight with crooked lines and sometimes cancer, terrible as it is, gives more than it takes.

Her new health is more than physical. It’s also a thing of the soul, a moral tan, a depth, a wisdom. Asked in a public interview if, given the choice, she would give the illness back so as to have the life she could have had without it, she replied: “No, I wouldn’t give it back. Through it I learned about love.” The love she experienced when she was ill taught her that there are worse tragedies in life than getting cancer.

John Powell once wrote a remarkable little book entitled, Unconditional Love, the story of Tommy, a former student of his who died of cancer at age twenty-four. Shortly before he died, Tommy came to Powell and thanked him for a precious insight he had once drawn from one of his classes. Powell had told the class: There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young isn’t one of them. It’s tragic to die and not have loved and it’s just as tragic to die and not have expressed your love to those around you.

Doctors who research on the human brain tell us that we only use about 10% of our radical brain capacity. Most of our brain cells never get activated, both because we don’t need them (they exist for wisdom rather than utility) and because we don’t know how to access them. The same doctors too tell us that, paradoxically, two things do help us access them: the experience of love and the experience of tragedy. Deep love and deep pain, together, deepen a soul in a way that nothing else can. That explains why Therese of Lisieux was a doctor of the soul at age 24. It also explains the wisdom that this young woman now lives out of, gently challenges her friends with, and radiates to the world.

Ten years ago, a young girl had her youth and dreams stolen from her by a brain tumor. There was pain, disappointment, depression, some bitterness, scant hope. Everyone seemed luckier than she did. That was then. Today, a radiant young woman, a gifted special-needs teacher, Katie Chamberlin-Malloy, is on her honeymoon, happy, wise, planning life, having learned at a young age what most of us will only learn when we die, namely, that ordinary life is best seen against a bigger horizon, that life is deeper and more joy filled when it isn’t taken for granted, and that love is more important even than health and life itself – and that all fairy tales do end in a wedding.

Perhaps the reality that is hardest of all to accept in life is the unalterable fact that everything that is precious to us will, in some way, eventually be taken away. Our kids grow up and leave home, friends move away, loved ones die, we lose our health, and eventually we die too. Moreover even what is precious to us in terms of our faith and values suffers in the same way: things change, thoughts and feelings shift, rock foundations that once anchored us unassailably give way, doubt creeps in, the bottom falls out, and we are left wondering what we really believe in and what really can be trusted.

Happily this is only half the equation: Everything we lose is eventually given back to us, and in a deeper way. Our kids become wonderful adults who begin to parent us, new bonds of friendship form across distance, we reconnect in a deeper and more permanent way to our loved ones who have died, we find something deeper and more permanent than physical health, death opens us up to the infinite, and the bottom falling out of old beliefs sends us free-falling to a place where we land on bedrock, on a foundation so secure that it can never be shaken again.

We see the pattern for this in scripture in the story of the Jewish community and the Babylonian exile. This is the background:

After arriving in Palestine (“the Promised Land”) it took a number of generations to establish control over the land, unite all the various tribes into one nation, and build a temple in Jerusalem as center for worship. The great kings, David and Solomon, accomplished this and the people were left with a great sense of security, both political and religious. They felt strong, especially religiously. God had promised them a land, and now they had a land; God had promised them a king, and now they had a king; and God had promised them a temple, and now they had a temple. They saw in those three realities: land, king, and temple, sure proof of God’s existence and God’s providence for them. God’s promises were empirically verifiable.

But, just when they were most complacent inside of that security, the Assyrians came and conquered the land, deported all the people to Babylon, killed the king, and knocked down the temple to its last stone. With that, the loss of land, king, and temple, the bottom fell out of their world, religiously and literally. Everything that had once anchored their security had been taken away from them and they felt exiled not just from their homeland but also from their God and their religion. If God’s presence was assured in land, king, and temple, and these have been taken from us, where is God? How to you continue to believe, trust, and live in joy when all that once anchored these has been taken from you?

God’s answer was this: You will find me again, when you search for me in a deeper way, with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul. God gives us that same answer today whenever we feel betrayed, orphaned, and disoriented in this same way.

And this is the deep lesson: In terms of our faith and values, everything that isn’t God, be it ever so true and wonderful, will eventually be taken away from us. Why? They aren’t God. They might serve wonderfully for a time as icons, but icons held too tightly or held too long become idols from which we need to be purged.

This is true even for what is most precious to us religiously – scripture, the creeds of our faith, the church itself, great saints, great moral mentors. In the end, wonderful as they are, they aren’t God. They can be wonderful vehicles towards God, icons, PowerPoint presentations about God, but they aren’t God and always eventually, somehow a needed iconoclasm will occur and we will, not without deep pain and disillusionment, learn this through bitter experience. All good spiritual literature, including scripture itself, makes this clear.

Icons help lead to God, idols help block access to God. An idol is simply an icon that has been held on to for too long. And so there is a purifying dynamic written into the DNA of faith itself: We are given certain things to hang onto for a time, a certain language, certain rituals, certain creeds and dogmas, a certain understanding of our faith, holy men and women as models, spiritual literature that nourishes us, and, not least, a certain inner sense of trust and security that all of this is good, is right, and is in some way God.

And this is good, for awhile. But the day comes, usually occasioned by deep pain and loss, where the bottom falls out and we go into a free-fall where, no matter what we try to grasp onto will not hold us until eventually we land on something solid, bedrock, God himself.

Prayer is classically defined as lifting mind and heart to God. That’s a good definition, but it needs an important qualification.

There are two essential kinds of prayer: Something we call liturgical prayer, the public prayer of the church, and something we call private or devotional prayer. Unfortunately we often confuse the two.

For example, five hundred people might be sitting in meditation together in a church or praying the rosary together at a shrine and this is still private or devotional prayer. Conversely, someone might be praying the Office of the Church alone at home in an armchair or a priest might be celebrating the Eucharist alone at a kitchen table and this is public, liturgical prayer. The distinction, as we see from these examples, is not dependent upon the number of people participating, or whether the prayer is taking place in a church, or even whether the prayer is being prayed in a group or privately. The distinction is based upon something else. What?

Perhaps a change of names might help us understand the distinction: Liturgical, public prayer might more aptly be called priestly prayer, while private and devotional prayer might better be termed affective prayer.

What is priestly prayer? It is the prayer of Christ through the church for the world. Our Christian belief is that Christ is still gathering us together around his word and is still offering an eternal act of love for the world. As an extension of that we believe that whenever we meet together, in a church or elsewhere, to gather around the scriptures or to celebrate the Eucharist we are entering into that prayer and sacrifice of Christ. This is liturgical prayer; it’s Christ’s prayer, not ours. We pray liturgically whenever we gather to celebrate the scriptures, the sacraments, or when we pray, in community or privately, something that is called the Prayer of the Church or the Office of the Church (Lauds and Vespers).

And this kind of prayer is not restricted to the ordained clergy. We are all priests by virtue of our baptism and part of the implicit covenant we make with the community at our baptism is the commitment, when we reach adulthood, to pray habitually for the world through the liturgical prayer of the church.

What needs also to be highlighted here, since we easily miss this aspect, is that the church’s liturgical prayer is for the world, not for itself. The church, in this world, does not exist for its own sake, but as an instrument of salvation for the world. Its function is to save the world, not itself. In liturgical prayer we pray with Christ, through the church, but for the world.

Affective prayer has a different intent. Though it has many forms, meditation, centering prayer, praying the rosary, devotional prayers of all kinds, it has a single aim, to draw us and our loved ones into deeper intimacy with Christ. In the end, no matter its particular form, all non-liturgical prayer ultimately aims at personal intimacy with God and is, ultimately too, private, even when it is done publicly or in a large group. All private and devotional prayer can be defined in this way: It is prayer that tries, in myriad ways, to open us or our loved ones up in such a way that we can hear God say to us: “I love you!”

It is important to know this distinction when we go to pray: Which kind of prayer are we entering? To confuse the two is to risk doing both badly. For example, the person who feels frustrated because the liturgical ritual and interaction of a congregation inside a church service are felt as a hindrance and distraction to the private devotional prayers she would like to saying is confusing the two forms of prayer and is consequently doing both badly. The function of liturgical prayer is not first of all devotional.

Or sometimes the confusion leads someone to abandon one form of liturgical prayer altogether. I know a man who after years of praying the Office of the Church is substituting his own private prayer in its place because he doesn’t find the ritual prayers personally meaningful. His private meditations now might well be wonderful affective prayer, but he is no longer praying the priestly prayer of Christ when he is praying in this way. We see this sometimes too in well-intentioned, but badly planned, churches services where what is intended to be a liturgical service ends up being a guided private meditation, however well-done and powerful, which neither uses scripture nor prays for the world.

Churches themselves struggle with this. Roman Catholics, Anglicans, Episcopalians, and main-line Protestant churches have a strong liturgical tradition, sometimes to the detriment of affective prayer. Evangelical and Pentecostal churches, on the other hand, have a strong focus on affective prayer, sometimes to the point of neglecting almost entirely liturgical prayer.

We would probably all do ourselves a favor by having two prayer shawls, each embroidered separately: Priestly Prayer and Affective Prayer.

What do we mean when we say that we make a sacrifice? I have sacrificed my career for my children! I sacrifice a lot for my job! Love demands that we make many sacrifices! Sometimes we must sacrifice life itself for the sake of integrity! Christ sacrificed himself for our sins! The Eucharist is a sacrifice!

From what is common in all these expressions we can extract Webster’s definition of a sacrifice: The surrender of something of value for the sake of something else.

That is a good definition, but it contains more than first meets the eye, as is evident when we look at the concept of sacrifice in the Jewish and Christian scriptures. Take, for example, the famous story where Abraham is asked to sacrifice his son, Isaac. What is ultimately behind God’s invitation to Abraham to sacrifice Isaac on an altar?

These are the outer elements of the story: Abraham has longed for a son for many years. Finally, after the situation was humanly hopeless, Sarah conceives and he is given a son, Isaac, who is the described as Abraham’s “only one”, his “precious one”. But then God invites Abraham to take Isaac and offer him in sacrifice. Abraham, with a heavy heart, agrees to the request and sets off with Isaac, carrying wood, fire, and a knife, all the while having to answer his son’s curiosity about why they were not bringing a victim for the sacrifice.

When they arrive at the place of sacrifice, Abraham gathers the wood, lights the fire, binds Isaac, and then raises the knife to kill him. But God intervenes, stops the sacrifice, and gives Abraham a ram instead to offer. The story ends with Abraham walking back to his own land together with Isaac. What is the deep lesson inside this story?

At one level, the lesson is that God does not want human sacrifice, but there is a deeper, more intimate, inner lesson that teaches us something about the innate need inside of us to offer sacrifice. Simply put, the lesson is this: In order for something to be received as a gift it must be received twice. What is implied here?

A gift, by definition, is something that is not deserved but given freely. What is our first impulse when we are given a gift? Our instinctual response is: “I can’t take this! I don’t deserve this!” In essence, that gesture, that healthy instinctual response, is an attempt to give the gift back to its giver. But, of course, the giver refuses to take the gift back and re-gives it to us with the assurance: “But I want you to have this!” When we receive it the second time, it is now more properly ours because, by trying to give it back, we healthily recognized that it was a gift, unmerited, undeserved.

That is the exact set of dynamics within the story of Abraham offering to sacrifice Isaac. Isaac comes to him as the greatest, most-undeserved, gift of his life. His willingness to sacrifice him parallels the instinctual gesture: “I don’t deserve this! I cannot accept this!” He offers the gift back to its giver. But the giver, Love itself, stops the gesture and gives the gift the second time. Now Abraham can receive Isaac, without guilt, as gift. When they are walking back home, Isaac is now Abraham’s son in a way that he never was before. Abraham had to receive the gift twice by sacrificing it the first time.

That is the essence of sacrifice: To properly receive anything, including life itself, requires that we recognize it precisely as gift, as something undeserved. And to do that requires sacrifice, a willingness to give some or the entire gift back to its giver.

We see this as the dynamic underlying the ritual of ancient sacrifice. For example: A farmer would harvest a crop. But, before he or his family would eat a even mouthful of it, he would take some of it (the “first-fruits”) and offer it back to God in the form of a sacrifice, usually by burning it so that that the smoke rising up to the heavens would take some of the crop back to God whom the farmer saw as the real giver of that crop. After sacrificing some of it in this way, the farmer and his family could now enjoy the rest of it without guilt because, by trying to give it back to its author, they made themselves more aware that it was gift. They can now enjoy it without guilt precisely because, through sacrifice, they have acknowledged it as gift.

That’s the inner essence of all sacrifice, whether the sacrificing of a career for the sake of our children or Jesus’ sacrifice on the cross. Sacrifice recognizes gift as gift. Like Abraham, it tries to give the gift back to the giver, but the giver stops the sacrifice and gives it back in even a deeper way.

We would enjoy our lives considerably more if we understood that.

A friend of mine likes to explain his religious background this way: “I have powerful conservative roots. I was raised in a very strong conservative, Roman Catholic, immigrant, German, farming family, with all the inhibitions, protectiveness, exclusivity, and reticence that this entailed. It would be hard to find a more strongly conservative religious background than mine. And I’m grateful for that. It’s one of the greatest gift you can be given. Now I’m free for the rest of my life!”

There is something both healthily conservative and healthily liberal in that assessment. The instinct within the liberal wants to push edges, to widen the circle, to move away from narrowness, to be more inclusive, to not always see the other as threat, and to protect the ineffability of God and God’s universal salvific will. Whereas the conservative intuits the necessity of being rooted in truth, in grounding yourself in the essentials, in having proper boundaries, and in not being naive to the fact that everything that’s precious and true will invariably be under attack.

Both protect the soul. The soul, as we know, has two functions which are often in tension with each other. On the one hand, the soul is the source of all energy inside of us, the fire that fuels everything we do. We know the precise moment when the soul leaves a body. All energy ceases. On the other hand, the soul is also the source of unity and integration. It glues us together. Decomposition begins the very second the soul leaves the body. Without the soul, every element goes its own way.

The liberal instinct is mostly about the fire, the conservative instinct is mostly about the glue. The story of the man who was raised in such a strong conservative background and who now feels rooted enough to be more liberal illustrates that both are necessary. There is a time to be liberal and there is a time to be conservative and it is important that we know which time is right both as regards to our own growth and as regards to the growth of others.

Malcolm X once said something to this effect: I have a strong allegiance to both Christ and Muhammad because we need them both. Right now, so many of the men to whom I am trying to minister need the discipline of Allah. Their lives are in such disrepair that they need clear, hard rules of discipline that are spelled out for them without ambiguity. Later on, once they have their lives more in order, they can turn more to the liberal love of Jesus. First we need the discipline of Allah, later the freedom of Jesus.

He understood that there are stages to the spiritual life and that what is needed in one stage will sometimes be very different than what is needed in another. What are the basic stages of the spiritual life?

The gospels, the mystics, and the great spiritual writers, with some variation in how they express this, concur that there are three clear stages to the spiritual journey or, in another way of putting it, three levels of discipleship:

The first level, which might aptly be termed, Essential Discipleship, is the struggle to get our lives together, to achieve basic human maturity (which itself might be defined as the capacity for essential unselfishness, the capacity to put others before ourselves). The second level can be called Generative Discipleship and is the struggle to give our lives away in love, service, and prayer. The third level can be called Radical Discipleship and consists in the struggle to give our deaths away, that is, to leave this earth in such a way that our deaths themselves become our final gift and blessing to our families, churches, and society.

The first stage, Essential Discipleship, is precisely about essentials, about getting our lives together by properly channeling our energies through discipline (the origin of the word, discipleship). By definition, that task is mainly conservative: learning proper teaching so as to have a healthy vision, submitting to rules of behavior that ground us and move us beyond our instinctual selfishness, and being a learner within family and church community. Metaphorically speaking, at this stage we are learning the “discipline of Allah”.

But, once this stage is achieved with a certain proficiency, the challenge becomes different. Now the task is to give our lives away – and to give them away ever more deeply and to an ever-widening circle. That’s a more liberal task and it becomes even-more liberal as we move towards that truly great unknown, death, where all that we have grounded ourselves in must be left behind as we are opened to the widest circle of all, cosmic embrace, infinity, and the ineffable mystery of God.

In our discipleship, our spiritual journey, there is an important time to be conservative, just as there is an important time to be liberal. We are not meant to pick one of these over the other.

When we look at all the major world religions we see that they are more similar than dissimilar in how understand the spiritual quest, the path of discipleship and holiness. When we look at Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Native religions, we can draw out these major points of convergence:

• First, in all of them the aim of the spiritual quest is the same, union with God and union with everyone and everything else. There are different disciplines, different understandings of God, and different understandings of life, but all the great spiritual traditions are ultimately seeking the same thing, union with the divine and, through that, peace with one another and with physical creation.

• Second, in all the great spiritual traditions the path to union is understood as coming through compassion. In every great spiritual tradition, what religion ultimately strives to achieve is to form a heart that is properly shaped in compassion and wisdom. Then, and only then, are worship, dogma, and justice done correctly.

• Third, in every great spiritual tradition, the route to compassion and union with God is paradoxical, requiring that somehow we have to lose ourselves to find ourselves, die to come to life, and give so as to receive. In every major spiritual tradition we are taught that we cannot come to joy, delight, and happiness by actively pursuing these. These are always a byproduct of something else, namely, of trying to create joy, delight, and happiness for someone else. Every great spiritual tradition would be at ease with the Prayer of St. Francis: Affirming that in giving we receive, in consoling others we are consoled, and in trying to understand others we are understood.

• Fourth, every great spiritual tradition is clear that spiritual progress requires hard discipline and some painful renunciations, that the road-more-travelled won’t get you home. The gate to heaven is always the narrow one, the one that requires discipline and renunciation. Indeed the word “discipleship” comes from the word “discipline”. When Hinduism and Buddhism speak of different kinds of “yoga” they are simply referring to various forms of discipline (from which we take our reduced sense of the word “yoga”).

• Fifth, every great spiritual tradition tells us that the spiritual quest is a life-long journey with no short-cuts, no quick paths, no hidden secrets, and no appeal to privilege that can short-circuit the discipline and renunciation required. They also tell us that there are no exempt areas within the spiritual life and that there are no moral or psychological areas that we can ignore or write-off as unimportant. No great spiritual tradition lets us chose between personal integrity and social justice, personal holiness or political action. Every one of them tells us that both are non-negotiable.

• Sixth, in every great spiritual tradition consolation and desolation, religious fervor and dark nights of the soul, both have an important role within the spiritual journey. Both provide a necessary, if very different, kind of nurturing. All traditions caution us not to identify progress only with consolation and fervor, just as all of them caution us not to make suffering, desolation, and dark nights an end in themselves.

• Seventh and perhaps surprisingly, all the great spiritual traditions downplay the importance of extraordinary phenomena within the spiritual journey. Visions, altered states of consciousness, mystical trances, ecstasies, miracles, and appearances by persons or forces from the other world, whether benign or malevolent, soothing or frightening, are all downplayed in every major tradition. These can be real and they can mark our lives, but they are not indicative of real growth and progress which, in all great traditions, take place within the ordinary bread-and-butter of life. In every major spiritual tradition, the essential things that God wants us to know are public, available to all, and written down. All traditions make the distinction between public revelation (which is binding for everyone) and private revelations (which can be meaningful but which are not binding for everyone and are not the salient revelation even inside of the life of the person to whom they are given.)

• Eighth, all great spiritual traditions affirm that, while we are on the spiritual path, we will meet great temptations and powerful demons and that these need to be recognized and taken seriously. All of them caution against naiveté, especially naiveté regarding certain innate tendencies within our own make-up and within the dynamics of every crowd.

• Finally, all the major spiritual traditions agree that the spiritual journey will always partly be mystery. Just as the God we meet on this journey is ultimately ineffable, so too is the experience. In the end we will never find adequate words and concepts either to understand or to describe what we experience on the journey. Hence all traditions caution strongly against ever thinking that our grasp of things is adequate, even remotely so.

All the great religious traditions agree: The road is narrow and hard and there are no short-cuts.

Most of us have been raised to believe that we have right to possess whatever comes to us honestly, either through our own work or through legitimate inheritance. No matter how large that wealth might be, it’s ours as long as we didn’t cheat anyone along the way. By and large, this belief has been enshrined in the laws of democratic countries and we generally believe that it is morally sanctioned by the Christianity.

Partly this is all true, but it needs a lot of qualification. From scripture, through Jesus, through the social teachings of the churches, through papal encyclicals from Leo XIII through John Paul II, the right to private ownership and private wealth is mitigated by a number of moral principles. Let me list a number of those principles (which are taught with the weight of Ordinary Magisterium within Roman Catholicism and the ecclesial equivalent of that in most Protestant churches). For Roman Catholics, I will list the major references to church documents:

• God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. Thus, in justice, created goods should flow fairly to all. All other rights are subordinated to this principle. (Gaudium et Spes 69, Popularum Progressio 22) We do have a right to private ownership and no one may ever deny us of this right (Rerum Novarum 3-5, 14, Quadregesima Anno 44-56, Mater et Magistra 109) but that right is subordinated to the common good, to the fact that goods are intended for everyone. (Laborem Exercens 14) Wealth and possessions must be understood as ours to steward rather than to possess absolutely. (Rerum Novarum 18-19)

• No person (or nation) may have a surplus if others do not have the basic necessities. (Rerum Novarum 19, Quadregesimo Anno 50-51, Mater et Magistra 119-121 & 157-165, Popularum Progressio 230) Thus, no one may appropriate surplus goods solely for his own private use when others lack the bare necessities for life. (Popularum Progressio 23) People are obliged to come to the relief of the poor and if a person is in extreme necessity he has the right to take from the riches of others what he needs. (Gaudium et Spes 69)

• The present economic situation in the world must be redressed. (Popularum Progressio 6,26,32, Gaudium et Spes 66, Octogesimus Adveniens 43, Sollectitudo Rei Socialis 43) Thus the law of supply and demand, free enterprise, competition, the profit motive, and the private ownership of the means of production may not be given complete free reign. They are not absolute rights and are only good within certain limits. (Popularum Progressio 26, Quadragesimo Anno 88, 110)

• In regards to the private ownership of industry and the means of production, two extremes are to be avoided: Unbridled capitalism on the one hand, and complete socialism on the other. (Quadregesimo Anno 46, 55, 111-126)

• Governments must respect the principle of subsidiarity and intervene only when necessary. (Rerum Novarum 28-29, Quadragesimo Anno 79-80, Mater et Magistra 117-152) However when the common good demands it they not only may step in, they are obliged to do so. (Popularum Progressio 24, 33, Mater et Magistra 53, Gaudium et Spes 71) As well certain forms of property should be reserved for the state since they carry with them an opportunity of domination too great to be left to private individuals. (Quadragesimo Anno 114, Mater et Magistra 116)

• Governments may never sacrifice the individual to the collectivity because the individual is prior to civil society and society must be directed towards him or her. (Mater et Magistra 109, Quadragesimo Anno 26)

• Employers must pay wages which allow the worker to live in a “reasonable and frugal comfort” (Rerum Novarum 34) and wages may not simply be a question of what contract a worker will accept. Conversely, workers may not claim that the produce and profits which are not required to repair and replace invested capital belong by right to them (Quadragesimo Anno 55, 114) and they must negotiate their wages with the common good in mind. (Quadragesimo Anno 119, Mater et Magistra 112) As is the case with the employer, it is not just a question of what kind of contract can be extracted.

• Both the workers and the employers have an equal duty to be concerned for the common good. (Laborem Exercens 20)

• And, the condemnation of injustice is part of the ministry of evangelization and is an integral aspect of the Church’s prophetic role. (Sollectitudo Rei Socialis 42)

The church has history on its side in teaching these principles. The failure of Marxism in Eastern Europe highlights precisely that an attempt to create justice for everyone without sufficiently factoring in the place of private profit and private wealth (not to mention God or love) doesn’t lead to prosperity and justice, just as our present economic crisis highlights that an unregulated profit motive doesn’t lead to prosperity and justice either. There is a middle road, and the Church’s social teachings are that road-map.