Wishful Drinking and Moral Resiliency

March 8, 2009

Daniel Berrigan once suggested, half-jokingly, that if Jesus came back today he would go into every psychologist’s office in the Western World and, using the whips and cords he used on the money-changers in the temple, drive out both the doctors and their clients with the words: “Take up your couch and walk! I’ve given you skin, you don’t need to be that sensitive!” That may be over-stated, but he has a point. Human beings are built to be resilient and resiliency is a moral obligation. We owe our resurrections to each other. Hence, I recommend a book to you.

Sometimes I hesitate to recommend a book or movie because, though overall its thrust may be moral and uplifting, individual parts of it might upset those who see parts rather than essences.

Such is the case with Carrie Fisher’s new book, Wishful Drinking. I recommend it with that cautionary note. Overall it is a moral book, uplifting and hope-filled, even if it sometimes plays fast and loose with certain things. Normally I shun books written by celebrities, particularly Hollywood celebrities, but I make some exceptions and Carrie Fisher is one of those. She has a moral intelligence and a wit that set her apart and she flashes both in this book.

The book is in essence an autobiography, the story of someone who grows up in Hollywood as the child of Debbie Reynolds and Eddie Fisher, with an absent womanizing father and a fairly-absent though loving mother. She achieves worldwide celebrity and becomes an icon by playing Princess Leia in Star Wars, has a failed marriage with Paul Simon, journeys through alcohol and drugs and mental illness, and lands on her feet with enough resilience, empathy, and humor to make us envious.

And she chronicles this with a color and wit that can blind you to her deeper insights into life and its meaning. Like Christina Crawford’s books, Mommy Dearest and Survivor, this too is a story of surviving a Hollywood upbringing, though in Carrie Fisher’s case there is more sympathy for Hollywood than in Crawford’s. Fisher never leaves Hollywood; she just gains enough perspective so that she doesn’t need to leave it.

I say the book is both moral and uplifting despite the fact that, at first glance, her treatment of religion, drugs, and sex can appear to be careless, casual, and amoral. (Note, I say amoral, not immoral, there’s a difference.) So what is moral about the book?

Well, I’m not recommending the amoral parts and, I suspect, Carrie Fisher (who is incapable of writing a line on anything without inserting something witty and light-hearted) wouldn’t recommend those parts either as a moral ideal. She simply tells her story, without suggesting that her views on anything should be a moral compass. But there is something inside of her story that, I submit, should be morally normative, namely, her willingness to take up her couch and walk.

She suffered her share of hard-knocks, as her story makes clear: an absent father, little religious or moral guidance as a child, a dangerous early iconic fame, relational failure, and a bi-polar disorder. Yet where there might be self-pity there is empathy. Where there might be bitterness there is a mellow heart. Where there might be anger there is forgiveness. Where there might be resignation there is resilience. Where there might be despair there is a healthy zest. And where the lights might have gone out there is wonderful buoyancy. That’s morality too, not exactly the way classical moral manuals always explain it, but in a way that Jesus would recognize.

I was struck by the book and recommend it because what you see in her story is the opposite of so much of what we see in the world and in the church today, where everyone too easily takes permission to be bitter and angry and then blames someone else for his or her unhappiness. There is something refreshing and morally challenging in seeing someone with problems who doesn’t need to blame those problems on God, on the church, on her family, on liberals, on conservatives, or on anyone else. It is healthy and moral too to see someone who can keep a sense of humor against all odds because sometimes it is humor, and humor alone, that can deflate our pompous, over-serious egos.

The second question in our old Catechisms was: Why did God make you? The answer: To know, love, and serve Him in this world and to be happy with him in the next. There’s real wisdom in that, but existentially something might be added: Why did God make you? Because he thought you might enjoy it! Carrie Fisher gives us that answer, and it is a moral one.

Jesus once challenged the church-people of his time by saying that it seems that the children of this world are sometimes more astute than are the children of light. Wishful Drinking would suggest that sometimes too they have a better sense of humor!

Our Struggle in Faith – Between Knowing It Is True and Believing it!

March 1, 2009

At the heart of our faith lies the deep truth that we are unconditionally loved by God. We believe that God looks down on our lives and says: You are my beloved child, in you I take delight! We do not doubt that truth of that, we just find it impossible to believe.

Some years ago, at a workshop, a woman came up to me during the break and articulated this in these words: “God loves me unconditionally. I know that’s true, but I how can I make myself believe it? I simply can’t!” She could have been speaking for half of the human race. We know we are loved by God, we can say the words, but how do we make ourselves believe that?

Why? Why is that so difficult to believe?

For many reasons, though mostly because (unless we are extraordinarily blessed) we rarely, if ever, experience unconditional love. Mostly we experience love with conditions, even from those closest to us: Our parents love us better when we do not mess up. Our teachers love us better when we behave and perform well. Our churches love us better when we do not sin. Friends love us better when are successful and not needy. The world loves us better when we are attractive. Our spouses love us better when we do not disappoint them. Mostly, in this world, we have to measure up in some way to be loved.

Moreover many of us too have been wounded by supposed expressions of love that were not love at all but were instead expressions of self-serving manipulation, exploitation, or even positive abuse. Beyond even this, all of us have been cursed and shamed in our enthusiasm by the countless times someone, either through words or through a hateful or judgmental glace, in effect said to us: Who do you think you are? We wither under that and become the walking wounded, unable to believe that we are loved and loveable. So, even when we know that God loves us, how can we make ourselves believe it?

At one level, we do believe it. Deep down, below our wounded parts, the child of God that still inhabits the recesses of our soul knows that it is made in God’s image and likeness and is special, beautiful, and loveable. That is why we so easily become angry and enraged whenever someone violates our dignity or puts us down.

But how do we make ourselves believe that we are unconditionally loved in a way that would make us less insecure in our attitude and our actions? How do we live in a surer confidence that we are unconditionally loved so as to let that radiate in the way we treat others and ourselves?

There are no easy answers. For a wounded soul, like for a wounded body, there are no magic wands for quick easy healings. Biblically, however, there is an image that, while confusing on the surface, addresses this: When God gives Joshua instructions on how to move into the Promised Land he tells him that, once there, he must “kill” everything there, all the men, women, children, and even the animals.

Taken literally, this text is horrible and speaks about everything that God is not. But this is not a literal text but an archetypal one. It is an image, a metaphor. I suspect that someone in an Alcoholics Anonymous program will more easily get its message: Killing all the inhabitants of Canaan means precisely giving away all the bottles in your liquor cabinet – the scotch, the bourbon, the wine, the cognac, the gin, the beer, the vodka, and everything else that’s there. You can’t take the Promised Land and still keep a few “Canaanites” on the side or you will soon lose the Promised Land.

That image also tells us what we must do to enter our true self-image, the deep truth that we are unconditionally loved by God. In great mythical literature we see that, usually, before the great wedding where the young prince and the young princess are to be married so as to live happily ever after, there first has to be an execution: the wicked older brothers and the wicked step-sisters have to be killed off. Why? Because they would eventually come and spoil the wedding.

Who are those wicked older brothers and wicked step-sisters? They are not different people from the young prince or princess getting married. They are their older incarnations. They are also inside of us. They are the inner voices from our past that can, at any given moment, ruin our wedding or our self-image by dragging in our past humiliations and saying: “Who do you think you are? Do you really think that you can marry a prince or princess? Do you really think that you’re loveable? We know you, we know your past, so don’t delude yourself! “

To actually believe that we are unconditionally loved, we first have to kill a few “Canaanites”.

Entering Lent

February 22, 2009

Sometimes the etymology of a word can be helpful. Linguistically, lent is derived from an old English word meaning springtime. In Latin, lente means slowly. Etymologically, then, lent points to the coming of spring and it invites us to slow down our lives so as to be able to take stock of ourselves.

That does capture some of the traditional meaning, though the popular mindset. It understands lent mostly as a season within which we are asked to fast from certain normal, healthy pleasures so as to better ready ourselves for the feast of Easter.

One of the images for this is the biblical idea of the Desert. Jesus, we are told, in order to prepare for his public ministry, went into the desert for forty days and forty nights during which time he fasted and, as the Gospel of Mark tells us, was put to the test by Satan, was with the wild animals, and was looked after by the angels.

Lent has always been understood as a time of us to imitate this, to metaphorically spend forty days in the desert like Jesus, unprotected by normal nourishment so as to have to face “Satan” and the “wild animals” and see whether the “angels” will indeed come and look after us when we reach that point where we can no longer look after ourselves.

For us, “Satan” and “wild animals” refer particularly to the chaos inside of us that normally we either deny or simply refuse to face – our paranoia, our anger, our jealousies, our distance from others, our fantasies, our grandiosity, our addictions, our unresolved hurts, our sexual complexity, our incapacity to really pray, our faith doubts, and our moral secrets. The normal food that we eat, distracted ordinary life, works to shield us from the deeper chaos that lurks beneath the surface of our lives.

Lent invites us to stop eating whatever protects us from having to face the desert that is inside of us. It invites us to feel our smallness, to feel our vulnerability, to feel our fears, and to open ourselves up the chaos of the desert so that we can finally give the angels a chance to feed us. That’s the Christian ideal of lent, to face one’s chaos.

To supplement this, I would like to offer three rich mythical images, each of which helps explain one aspect of lent and fasting:

In every culture, there are ancient stories, myths, which teach that all of us, at times, have to sit in the ashes. We all know, for example, the story of Cinderella. The name itself literally means, the little girl (puella) who sits in the ashes (cinders). The moral of the story is clear: Before you get to be beautiful, before you get to marry the prince or princess, before you get to go to the great feast, you must first spend some lonely time in the ashes, humbled, smudged, tending to duty and the unglamorous, waiting. Lent is that season, a time to sit in the ashes. It is not incidental that we begin lent by marking our foreheads with ashes.

The second mythical image is that of sitting under Saturn, of being a child of Saturn. The ancients believed that Saturn was the star of sadness, of heaviness, of melancholy. Accordingly they weren’t always taken aback when someone fell under its spell, namely, when someone felt sad or depressed. Indeed they believed that everyone had to spend certain seasons of his or her life being a child of Saturn, that is, sitting in heaviness, sitting in sadness, waiting patiently while some important inner thing worked itself out inside the soul. Sometimes elders or saints would put themselves voluntarily under Saturn, namely, like Jesus going into the desert, they would sit in a self-induced heaviness, in the hope that this melancholy would be means to reach some new depth of soul. That too is the function of lent.

Finally there is the rich image, found in some ancient mythologies, of letting our tears reconnect us with the flow of the water of life, of letting our tears reconnect us to the origins of life. Tears, as we know, are salt-water. That is not without deep significance. The oceans too are salt water and, as we know too, all life takes its origins there. Hence, we get the mystic and poetic idea that tears reconnect us to the origins of life, that tears regenerate us, that tears cleanse us in a life-giving way, and that tears deepen the soul by letting it literally taste the origins of life. Given the truth of that, and we have all experienced its truth, tears too are a desert to be entered into as a Lenten practice, a vehicle to reach new depths of soul.

The need for lent is experienced everywhere: Without sublimation we can never attain what is sublime. To truly enter a feast there must first be a fast. To come properly to Easter there must first be a time of desert, ashes, heaviness, and tears.

Fidelity – Our Greatest Gift to Others

February 8, 2009

After the funeral of Martin Luther King, one of the newsmen covering the event stopped to talk to an old man standing at the edges of the cemetery. The reporter asked him: “What did this man mean to you? Why was he special to you?” The old man, through tears, answered simply: “He was a great man because he was faithful. He believed in us when we had stopped believing in ourselves, he stayed with us even when we weren’t worth staying with!”

That is a testimony to a life well-lived. If, at your funeral, someone says that of you, then you have lived your life well, even if there had been many times in your life when things weren’t going well. What this old man defines so accurately in his testimony to Martin Luther King is what faith means. To be full of faith means precisely to be faithful. That is more than a play on words.

In the end, faith is not simply the good, secure feeling that God exists. Faith is a commitment to a way of living beyond good and secure feelings. To have faith means to sometimes live our lives independent of whatever feelings may come. Ultimately faith is not in the head or the heart but in the action of a sustained commitment. Faith is fidelity, nothing more but nothing less.

And, perhaps more than anything else, that gift is what is needed today in our families, in our churches, and in our world in general. The greatest gift we can give to those around us is the promise of fidelity, the simple promise to stay around, to not to leave when things get difficult, to not walk away because we feel disappointed or hurt, to stay even when we don’t feel wanted or valued, to stay even when our personalities and visions clash, to stay through thick and thin.

Too often what happens is that, in our commitments, we subtly blackmail each other: We commit ourselves inside of family, church, community, and friendship but with the unspoken condition: I will stay with you as long as you don’t seriously disappointment or hurt me. But if you do, I will move on!

No family, friendship, church, or community can survive on this premise because it is simply impossible to live or work with each other for any length of time without seriously disappointing and hurting each other.

Inside of any relationship – marriage, family, friendship, church community, or even a collegial relationship at a workplace – we can never promise that we won’t disappoint others, that we won’t ever mess-up, that our personalities won’t clash, or that we won’t sometimes hurt others through insensitivity, selfishness, and weakness. We can’t promise that we will always be good. We can only promise that we will always be there!

And, in the end, that promise is enough because if we stay and don’t blackmail each other by walking away when there is disappointment and hurt, then the disappointments and the hurts can be worked through and redeemed by a faith and love that stay for the long haul. When there is fidelity within a relationship, eventually the hurts and misunderstandings wash clean and even bitterness turns to love.

Many is the man or woman who, on celebrating the anniversary of a marriage or the commitment to religious life, priesthood, friendship, or work at a certain job, looks back and no longer feels the countless hurts, rejections, misunderstandings, and bitter moments, that were also part of that journey. These are washed clean by something deeper that has grown up because of fidelity, namely trust and respect.

You sometimes see this, wonderfully, in the mutual, begrudging respect that eventually develops between two people who, while both sincere and committed, are for years at odds because of differences in personality, politics, religion, or history. The simple fact of having to deal with each other over many years eventually leads to a rich understanding and a respect beyond differences.

This also holds true for prayer. All the great spiritual writers give only one ultimate rule for prayer and that rule has nothing to do with method, style, or content. It is simply this: Show up! Don’t ever give up! Don’t ever stop going to prayer! As long as you persevere in going to prayer, eventually God will break through. Don’t ever stop trying! That’s true for all of our relationships.

The greatest gift that we have to give is the promise of fidelity, the promise that we will keep trying, that we won’t walk away simply because we got hurt or because we felt unwanted or not properly valued.

We are all weak, wounded, sinful, and easily hurt. Inside of our marriages, families, churches, friendships, and places of work, we cannot promise that we won’t disappoint each other and, worse still, that we won’t hurt each other. But we can promise that we won’t walk away because of disappointment and hurt. That’s all we can promise – and that’s enough!

The Healing Embrace of the Eucharist

February 1, 2009

There are different kinds of loneliness and different kinds of intimacy. We ache in many places.

When I was a young priest, newly ordained and barely beyond the loneliness of adolescence, certain words at the Eucharist touched me deeply. I was a young and lonely and words about being drawn together inside one body and one spirit would incite feelings in me to do with my own loneliness. To become one body in Christ triggered, in me, an image of an embrace that would put an end to my personal loneliness, my endless aching, and my sexual separateness. Unity in Christ, as I fantasized it then, meant overcoming my own loneliness.

And that is a valid understanding. The Eucharist is an embrace meant to take away personal loneliness, but, as we get older, a deeper kind of loneliness can and should begin to obsess us. This deeper loneliness makes us aware how torn and divided is our world and everything and everyone in it. There is a global loneliness that dwarfs private pain.

How separate and divided is our world! We look around us, watch the world news, watch the local news, look at our places of work, our social circles, and even our churches, and we see tension and division everywhere. We are far from being one body and one spirit. So many things, it seems, work to divide us: history, circumstance, background, temperament, ideology, geography, creed, color, and gender. And then there are our personal wounds, jealousies, self-interest, and sin. The world, like a lonely adolescent, aches too in its separateness. We live in a world deeply, deeply divided.

And the older I get, the more I despair that there can be a simple solution, or perhaps even a human solution at all, to our divisions. Life slowly teaches us that it is naive to believe that all we need is simple optimism, good-will, and an unfailing belief that love will conquer. Love can and will conquer, but it doesn’t happen like in a Hollywood picture, where two people who really have no business ever being together fall in love and despite having nothing in common, despite being deeply wounded, despite being immature and selfish, and despite having no shared faith or values, are able to rise above all their differences to sustained embrace and ecstasy, simply because love conquers all.

At a certain point, we know that real life doesn’t work like that, unless we die in that initial embrace as did Romeo and Juliet. Our differences eventually have their say, both inside of our personal relationships and inside the relationships between countries, cultures, ethnic groups, and religions. At a certain point our differences, like a cancer that cannot be stopped, begin to make themselves felt and we feel helpless to overcome that.

But this isn’t despair. It’s health. As anyone who has ever fought an addiction knows, the beginning of a return to health lies in the admission of helplessness. It’s only when we admit that we can’t help ourselves that we can be helped. We see in the gospels where so many times, immediately after finally grasping a teaching of Jesus, the apostles react with the words: “If that’s true, then it’s impossible for us, then there’s nothing we can do!” Jesus welcomes that response (because in that admission we open ourselves to help) and replies: “It is impossible for you, but nothing is impossible for God!”

Our prayers for unity and intimacy become effective precisely when they issue from this feeling of helplessness, when we ask God to do something for us that we have despaired of doing for ourselves.

We see an example of this within Quaker communities when people gather and simply sit with each other in silence, asking God to do for them what they cannot do for themselves, namely, give themselves harmony and unity. The silence is an admission of helplessness, of having given up on the naïve notion that we, as human beings, will ever finally find the right words and the right actions to bring about a unity that has forever evaded us.

The Eucharist is such a prayer of helplessness, a prayer for God to give us a unity we cannot give to ourselves. It is not incidental that Jesus instituted it in the hour of his most intense loneliness, when he realized that all the words he had spoken hadn’t been enough and that he had no more words to give. When he felt most helpless, he gave us the prayer of helplessness, the Eucharist.

Our generation, like every generation before it, senses its helplessness and intuits its need for a messiah from beyond. We cannot heal ourselves and we cannot find the key to overcome our wounds and divisions all on our own. So we must turn our helplessness into a Quaker-silence, a Eucharistic prayer, that asks God to come and do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, create community. And we must go to Eucharist for this same reason.

Maturity – Being Cool or Being Vulnerable?

January 25, 2009

All of us struggle to project a certain image of ourselves. No matter the effort, no matter the hidden cost, when we walk into our place of work or into our circle of friends we want to project an image of calm, poise, and easy accomplishment; especially we never want to show signs of weakness, of being needy or lonely, of being ruffled and not perfectly in control.

Our society has a word for that, cool, and many of us consciously try to project exactly that. From the clothes we wear, to our choice of sunglasses, to a carefully a practiced public countenance, we walk out into public trying to say: “Look at me. I’m successful, I’m healthy, I’m attractive, I’m at ease, I’m not lonely, I don’t have great anxieties in my life, I’m happy, my life isn’t a big struggle, all of my problems are manageable, my life isn’t teetering on any brink, and it doesn’t take an extraordinary effort for me to do all this. I manage this with ease!”

And that is not without its virtue. Its opposites are emotional exhibitionism and hysteria. We are meant to be in control of our own lives, to not to impose our neediness unfairly on others, to carry ourselves in a way so as to radiate health.

However, much as we admire this kind of strength and much as we would like to project it in our own lives, habitual calm and poise can also be a sign of immaturity, of lacking sensitivity and depth. One of the marks of maturity and compassion is an inability to protect oneself from certain kinds of pain, the inability precisely to always be cool and composed.

Why? Because, by definition, sensitivity and empathy leave us vulnerable to pain, to loneliness, and to a certain helplessness and weakness. The more sensitive that we are, the less cool we will be. It is not a mark of either maturity or depth to walk blithely inside of brokenness and feel it so little that our lives are never really bothered by it. Insensitive people, it would seem, sleep more easily at night because they have no great anxieties, particularly about how their actions may have affected anyone else.

The American, Jesuit scholar, Michael Buckley, puts this well in a now-famous essay: He compares Jesus to Socrates in terms of simple human excellence and, surprising to the naïve observer, Jesus doesn’t seem to measure up to Socrates in many ways.

Here’s how Buckley puts it: Socrates went to his death with calmness and poise. He accepted the judgment of the court, discoursed on the alternatives suggested by death and on the dialectical indications of immortality, found no cause for fear, drank the poison, and died. Jesus – how much to the contrary. Jesus was almost hysterical with terror and fear; “with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death.” He looked repeatedly to his friends for comfort and prayed for escape from death and found neither.

I once thought that this was because Socrates and Jesus suffered different deaths, the one so much more terrible than the other, the pain and agony of the cross so overshadowing the release of the hemlock. But now I think that this explanation, though correct as far as it runs, is superficial and secondary. Now I believe that Jesus was a more profoundly weak man than Socrates, more liable to physical pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, more affected by love and hate. Socrates never wept over Athens. Socrates never expressed sorrow or pain over the betrayal of friends. He was possessed and integral, never overextended, convinced that the just person could never suffer genuine hurt. And for this reason, Socrates – one of the greatest and most heroic people who ever existed, a paradigm of what humanity can achieve within the individual – was a philosopher. And for the same reason, Jesus of Nazareth was a priest – ambiguous, suffering, mysterious, and salvific.

John of the Cross, in his classic manual, The Ascent to Mount Carmel, lays out a series of steps for entering more deeply into Christian discipleship. The first step is to get to know Christ more deeply by reflecting on his life. The second step is to begin to more actively imitate Christ by striving more deliberately to imitate his motivation. And once this is done, he says, we judge whether our efforts are leading us more deeply into discipleship or more deeply into self-delusion by, among other things, this criterion: Is more pain beginning to flow into our lives or are we better skilled than ever in protecting ourselves against it? Like Jesus, are we now more prone to weep over Jerusalem as opposed to showing Jerusalem just how far above its pains we really are? Are we now more vulnerable or more cool?

Iris Murdoch once wrote: A common soldier dies without fear, but Jesus died afraid.” There’s a lesson in that.

Carrying Our Solitude at a High Level

January 18, 2009

In an autobiographical novel, My First Loves, Czech writer, Ivan Klima, shares how as a young man he struggled with a particular ambivalence. At one level, he wanted to be as free as his friends to act out sexually, but another part of him made him reticent to do that. This left him with the question: Was his hesitancy rooted in an unhealthy timidity or in a noble desire, a desire to carry his solitude at a high level. In the end, he decided it was the latter.

To carry one’s solitude at a high level is not easy to do, especially inside a culture where most everything invites us take a path of less resistance. Our society, like the one within which Klima was raised, mostly invites us in the opposite direction, to take the road more travelled. Even among people with faith, the idea is prevalent that it is not worth the cost, if the cost is high, to hold out, to retain a high ideal. Rather our culture suggests: Sooner lower your standards than live in pain. Sooner let your soul endure an indignity than end up being alone. Sooner sell yourself short than be lonely.

I recently received a letter from a woman who expressed frustration in finding support, even among her church friends, for living out a high ideal. Here is how she expresses this: “It’s been seven years now that I have lived widowhood, bringing me to lots of desolation and loneliness. I recall comments that were made to me shortly after my husband died, by good Christian friends: ‘You’ll marry again.’ ‘Why get married, just live with someone.’ ‘Why live with someone, just have the occasional Saturday night sleep over.’ This attitude is very prevalent in my age group. And yet I never hear spiritual writers comment on this. You have a large audience. Could you?”

Her letter goes on to help spell out what that ideal is: “There is something amazing and wonderful that widows, male and female, can bring to the world that is not happening at the moment. Everyone is promoting performance and good looks, from medical intervention for sexual dysfunction, to glamorous lifestyles traveling, to being in beautiful homes (always young, good-looking, always in pairs), to anti-aging interventions of all kinds from face-lifts, cellulite reduction, etc. We need another voice! Where do we hear of the joys of surrendering to a life larger than ours, to entering the barren landscape of breaking bodies and minds, where the spirit can finally fly free, unencumbered, through cracks and wrinkles? “

Perhaps it’s not as much that we have lost the ideal as that we have personally despaired that it can be there for us. In the end, we all still want to guard the dignity of our souls and we all still seek someone to meet and honor us there, with full respect for who we are. But, as one journalist reviewing a book on chastity recently put it, that ideal makes more sense when you’re young and still have dreams of what you’re waiting for than it does when you’re in midlife and have long given up hope that what’s best will ever happen for you. She speaks for our culture which believes, as the popular song puts it, that even a bad love is better than (what seems to be) no love at all. But, as Doris Lessing once put it: There is only one real sin and that is calling second-best by anything other than what it really is, second-best!

A lot of people struggle with this. Here’s how another woman, also a widow, writes: “And with deepest respect and honor we may have to call upon our courage to walk away from anything and everything that does not resonate with our soul’s truth as we struggle to know ourselves in the deepest ways. And if in the end we stand alone with the presence of God perhaps that is the way it was always meant to be. In other words, I’m setting my limits and it’s mighty lonely!”

That’s a pretty accurate description of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane. The gospels, in describing his passion, never dwell on the physical pain (the scourging and the nails) but focus instead on his moral loneliness, his radical aloneness, on what it felt like being “unanimity-minus-one”. And this, his refusal to compromise, was his great gift to us. He paid the price, in blood and loneliness, of entering that barren landscape of broken bodies and minds so as to carry solitude at a high level. Despite every kind of pain, humiliation, and loneliness he refused to comprise his ideals. And it left him mighty lonely.

Inside of everything that’s best in us, we hear an invitation to join him there: To live in pain rather than lower our standards, to risk being alone rather than compromise who we really are, and to be lonely, mighty lonely even, rather than to sell ourselves short.

Our Struggle to Celebrate

January 11, 2009

It’s hard to celebrate properly. We want to, but we don’t know how.

Mostly we celebrate badly because our idea of celebration is to overdo things. We try to celebrate by taking ordinary things (eating, drinking, singing, telling stories, playing) to excess. Celebration, for many of us, means over-eating, over-drinking, loud socializing, drunken singing, and staying at parties into the wee hours of morning, all in the hope that somehow in all that excess we will achieve celebration (whatever that means). But, for all our frenzied effort, there is precious little genuine enjoyment.

Occasionally we do succeed and genuinely celebrate. At those times we feel ourselves more deeply joined to others, widened, made larger, made more aware, made more playful, and sense more deeply the love and joy that lie at the heart of life. But that rarely happens and it never happens when we are in frenzy. Too often our celebrations are followed by a hangover (of one kind or another). Why?

The reasons for this are complex, deep, and mostly hidden from us.

Perhaps the primary reason why we find it so difficult to genuinely celebrate is that we seem to lack the capacity to simply enjoy things, to take life, pleasure, love, and enjoyment as a gift from God, pure and simple. It’s not that we lack the capacity for to do this, it’s more that this capacity in us is generally buried under a mound of guilt. What this means is that often we cannot enjoy legitimate pleasure because somehow, however unconsciously, we sense what is articulated in the ancient myths, namely, that in enjoying pleasure we are somehow stealing something from God.

We tend to blame religion for this, but this neurosis is universal, as much outside of religious circles as inside of them. Somehow, in the name of the divine, most everyone feels guilt in pleasure.

And because of this, we tend to alternate between rebellious enjoyment (“pleasure we steal from God”) and joyless duty (a dutiful life, but without genuine pleasure and enjoyment). We never seem to be able to genuinely celebrate. I say genuinely because, paradoxically, our incapacity to enjoy is the very thing that pushes us into pseudo-celebration, hedonism, and an unhealthy pursuit of pleasure.

Simply put, because we struggle to enjoy ourselves simply we pursue enjoyment too much and substitute excess for enjoyment.

And this often leads to a dangerous confusion wherein we substitute pleasure for enjoyment, excess for ecstasy, and the obliteration of consciousness for heightened awareness. The champagne-soaked athletes celebrating a major victory and the mindless frenzy of a Mardi gras give us all the video footage we need to understand this. But excess isn’t enjoyment, nor is obliterated consciousness heightened awareness. They are weak, unsatisfying substitutes.

The very purpose of celebration is to heighten and intensify the meaning of something (a birthday, a wedding, a major achievement, a victory, a graduation, the birth of a child, the beginning or ending of a year). These events demand to be shared, heightened, widened, trumpeted. We have a congenital need to celebrate and this is very healthy.

What does it mean to celebrate something? To celebrate an occasion is to heighten it, share it, savor it, enlarge it. We also celebrate in order to link ourselves more fully to others, to be playful, to intensify a feeling, to bring ourselves to ecstasy, and, more commonly, just to rest and unwind. But because of our incapacity to enjoy something simply we often try to create that enjoyment through excess and seek the ecstasy of heightened self-awareness in the obliteration of our consciousness.

Small wonder we often trudge home with a hangover, emptier, more tired, more alone. A hangover is an infallible sign that somewhere we missed a signpost.

But we must continue to try. Christ came and declared a wedding, a feast, a celebration, at the heart of life. He shocked people as much by the way he enjoyed his life as by the way he gave it up. In the end, he was rejected as much for his message of enjoyment as for his message of asceticism. That is still true today. We tend to read the gospels selectively so as to ignore Jesus’ positive challenge to enjoy without guilt.

And in that lies our problem: Because we are never challenged religiously and in the name of Jesus, to enjoy, deeply and without guilt, the very human pleasures of our lives, our healthy, God-given, need for pleasure and enjoyment tends to go underground. We still seek pleasure and enjoyment, but now we split them off from what is religious and holy and “steal them from God” rather than enjoy them simply and religiously. That is one of the main reasons why we substitute excess for enjoyment and an obliterated consciousness for heightened awareness.

God has given us permission to enjoy life and its pleasures. That truth too needs to be a central part of our religious teaching. Pleasure is God’s gift, not the forbidden fruit.

Doing the Right Thing Because it is the Right Thing

January 4, 2009

“Have you ever done something simply on principle, because it was the right thing to do, knowing that you couldn’t explain it to anyone, without there even being a good feeling attached to your act?”

Karl Rahner wrote that and then added: “If you have done this, you have experienced God, perhaps without knowing it.”

Jesus would agree, so much so that he makes this both the central tenet of religion and the overriding criterion for salvation.

We see this explicitly in the famous text in the gospels where Jesus tells us that whatsoever you do to the poor here on earth you do to him. For Jesus, to give something to a poor person is to give something to God, and to neglect a poor person is to neglect God.

There’s an important background to this teaching. They had been asking Jesus: “What will be the test? What will be the ultimate criterion for judgment as to whether or not someone enters into the kingdom of heaven or not? His answer surprised them. They had expected that the final judgment would revolve around issues of religious belonging, religious practice, correct observance, and moral codes. Instead they got this answer: “When the Son of Man comes in his glory and all the angels with him, he will sit on his throne in heavenly glory. All the nations will be gathered before him, and he will separate the people one from another as a shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He will put the sheep on his right and the goats on his left.”

And what, according to Jesus, will be the basis for the separation? Only this: Did you feed the hungry? Give drink to the thirsty? Invite in the stranger? Clothe the naked? Visit the sick and imprisoned? Because when you do these things to the hungry, to the thirsty, to strangers, to the sick, and to the imprisoned, you do them to God, and vice versa.

And immediately there was confusion among those who heard these words. Both those who did what was asked and those who didn’t were equally befuddled and lodged the same protest: When? When did we see you hungry? When did we see you thirsty? When did we see you naked, or a stranger, or sick, or in prison and serve you or not serve you? When did we see you, God, and do this to you?”

Both are caught off guard and both ask seemingly the same question, but their protests are in fact very different: The first group, those who had measured up, are pleasantly surprised. What they say to Jesus is essentially this: “We didn’t know it was you! We were just doing what was right!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In serving them, you were meeting me!”

The second group, those who hadn’t measured up, is rudely shocked. Their protest, in effect, is this: “If we had only known! If we had known that it was you inside the poor we would have responded. We just didn’t know!” And Jesus answers: “It doesn’t matter! In not serving them, you were avoiding me!”

What’s the lesson? The more obvious one of course is the challenge that is already contained in the famous mantra of the prophets who had stated unequivocally that the quality of our faith will be judged by the quality of justice in the land and that the quality of justice will be judged by how the most vulnerable groups in society (widows, orphans, and strangers) fare while we are alive. The Jewish prophets had already taught us that serving the poor is a non-negotiable, integral part of religion, that nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor. But Jesus adds something: God doesn’t just have a preferential option for the poor, God is inside the poor.

But there’s another lesson too, subtle but important: In this gospel story, neither those who served God in the poor nor those who didn’t serve God in poor knew what they were doing.

The first group, who did respond, did so simply because it was the right thing to do. They didn’t know that God was hidden inside the poor. The second group, who didn’t respond, didn’t reach out because they didn’t realize that God was inside the poor. Neither knew that God was there and that is the lesson:

A mature disciple doesn’t calculate or make distinctions as to whether God is inside of a certain situation or not, whether a person seems worth it or not, whether a person is a Christian or not, or whether a person appears to be a good person or not, before reaching out in service. A mature disciple serves whoever is in need, independent of those considerations.

The last temptation that is the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason. T.S. Eliot said that. Jesus would add that doing the right thing is reason enough.

What have you read lately that’s interesting?

December 28, 2008

“What have you read lately that’s interesting?” Since readers of this column sometimes ask me this question, I want to highlight some of the more interesting novels I have read this past year. I will focus on novels (with one exception, a book of essays by a novelist) because most of us look for guidance in the area of contemporary literature which, like contemporary music, is a rich mine-field, full of golden nuggets, but mixed too with a lot of dirt.

Since my undergraduate years, I have always had a good novel within reach and this has been an important complement to my reading in theology and spirituality. There are certain insights into the soul that you only get from good literature. When I was doing my doctoral studies, I was lucky enough to sit in on some classes by Antoine Vergote, the renowned psychologist. Not infrequently, especially when we were examining particularly complex issues to do with obsessions, jealousy, and emotional depression, he would refer us to various novelists and their insights into these issues.

Through the years, I’ve developed a list of contemporary novelists whose books I buy on sight. I try to read a select number of classic and modern-classic writers too, but, as you know, the classics require a bit more concentration, sometimes more than one can muster on an airplane.

My list of favorites is heavily weighted by British women: Iris Murdock, Anne Byatt, Doris Lessing, Anita Brookner, Susan Howatch, to name a few. American and Canadian women feature highly too: Toni Morrison, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Annie Dillard, Jane Urquhart, Marilynne Robinson, Barbara Kingsolver, Mary Gordon, Margaret Atwood. The men? Michael Ondaatje, Milan Kundera, John Irving, John Updike, Khaled Hosseini, John MaGahern, Guy Vanderhaeghe, James Carroll, Don DeLillo, Philip Roth, Chaim Potok, and (yes) Andrew Greeley for his ability to tell a story.

What were my favorite novels this past year? Whether great literature or not, these are the novels that touched me:

• Khaled Hosseini, Kite Runner, touches you deeply with sadness and hope and tells a painful story sensitively, without undue sentimentality. It also gives you some insight into the various factions within the Islamic world.

• Michael Ondaatje, Divisadero, stands out by its writing. The story doesn’t stand out, the writing does. This is art, the best writing I’ve read this year. I was sorry to see last page.

• Mary Doria Russell, The Sparrow, is a stunning read, if not always an easy one. A futuristic novel, Russell posits the discovery of a new planet containing self-reflective life and she has the Jesuits send a mission team there. I’m not sure her vision of future space ships will check out, but her insights into love and ecclesiology are extraordinary.

• Annie Dillard, The Maytrees, has little action except that which takes place inside the human heart wherein she highlights the anatomy of forgiveness and redemption. A tough, worthwhile read.

• Kent Haruf, Plainsong and Evensong, two novels with one story. These are wonderfully crafted, warm-hearted, but with enough of a dark side to avoid sentimentality, Haruf reminds me of the Irish novelist, John MaGahern. His characters have the same warmth, become real inside of you in the same way, and become people you would like to meet, not just read about.

• William Young, The Shack, is novel about loss, bitterness, forgiveness, and God. Young may not always and everywhere please people with what he says about religion and the churches, but the concept of God that emerges from this book is both wonderfully healthy and biblical.

• Marilynne Robinson, Home. Robinson won wide acclaim for her previous novels, most recently for Gilead. Critics were less complimentary about this book, but I disagree. This is a story that works at several levels. Among other things, it is the biblical story of prodigal son and the compassionate father, except Robinson’s version is messier and emotionally more complex than the Gospel story. She treats the complexities of faith, love, loneliness, loss, forgiveness, not to mention happiness, with some of the nuances they deserve (and seldom get). It is because of books like this that my psychologist-professor told us to read more novels.

• Barbara Kingsolver, Small Wonder. Essays rather than a novel, this book helps you to get know Kingsolver, the woman behind the novels. The essays are mostly autobiographical, but they are also sensitive commentaries on terrorism, global warming, living simply, raising kids, handling adulation and hatred, science and religion, family life, and gardening. And Kingsolver’s exceptional writing skills are ever present. This is art rather than journalism.

There is of course always a subjective element in assessing literature and your tastes might not agree with mine. Moreover, and I say this upfront, I tend to read more for essence than for detail so sometimes I don’t pick up on certain details the rub sensitive nerves in other people. So I can’t guarantee you’ll like these books, I can only say that I did.

Reflections on a New Year’s Eve

December 21, 2008

When I was a child, New Year’s Day was very special. Our family always had a big celebration, complete with a number of rituals.

The rituals began already on New Year’s Eve. We didn’t go out that evening, but stayed in and celebrated together as a family. Everyone stayed up until midnight and, just before twelve, whatever else we were doing was stopped and my father would lead us in a brief prayer.

This prayer never strayed far from a basic theme: My father thanked God for the year that had just passed, for, in the words of his generation, “the graces that we had received.” He thanked God for having protected us, that we were still alive and together in faith and in family. Then he would, very simply, ask for God’s blessing and protection for the coming year. Finally, exactly at midnight, when the old year ended and the new one began, we would sing together the hymn, Holy God We Praise Thy Name. After this there would follow the “Happy New Year” greetings, the hugs, handshakes, drinks and the food.

New Year’s Day, itself, was, after church, given up mostly to visiting and receiving friends. At the door of each house, everyone was expected to greet each other with a formal New Year’s greeting (about 10 lines in length, in German) that had to be memorized and recited, even if you no longer knew German. After this ritual greeting, you were given food, a drink, sweets, and (if you were a child) some money. When you finally completed the round of houses and returned home, you were loaded with treats and money and so, of course, as a child this was a day that rivaled Christmas.

My parents have now been dead for over 36 years. Within those 36 years most of these rituals have died. Mobility, the death of most of my parents’ generation, the breakdown of the immigrant sociology of our district, and the natural changes that the passing of time brings, has made for an almost altogether new situation in our old district and in the world at large. Few persons still do the old rituals, and the heart has gone out of them. About the only real continuity lies with the drinks, that ritual survives the changes of time and the breakdown of any sociology. My own family has regrouped around new rituals, but the description and prescription of these is not my purpose here since this is reminiscence, not a homily.

As I get older, what I remember most about those New Year’s celebrations, what lies inside of me as a set of sturdy roots that I use to steady myself and to draw a certain sustenance from, is that New Year’s Eve prayer by my dad at midnight and the singing of Holy God We Praise Thy Name. Our new rituals still include that.
Socrates once said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” That could be recast to say: A blessing that is unasked for, unrecognized, and for which thanks is not given, is at best only a half-blessing.

When my father prayed his end-of-the-year prayer in which he thanked God that we were all still alive and within which he asked for God’s providence and protection for the coming year, Socrates would have been proud. My father was not living the unexamined life, nor was he neglecting Christ’s request that we ask for blessings and the Holy Spirit.

The end of one year and the beginning of a new year are a naturally reflective time. Anthropology wonderfully conspires with spirituality in almost forcibly highlighting a significant transition. Our society rightly makes a big deal out of New Year’s Eve and New Year’s Day.

If you come to the end of a year and are still alive, then you haven’t had a bad year. If you are still within the family of faith, then you’ve had a good year, irrespective of personal sickness, economic misfortune, lost relationships, or any other tragedy. Moreover, if there’s gratitude in your heart and you can ask God for providence and protection for the coming year, you’ve entered that year on the right note. If you can follow this by expressing sincere love and best wishes for those around you (the words and embraces that say “Happy New Year”) well, that’s all a human being can do to welcome a new year properly.

2008, I suspect, was for all of us a year of mixed blessing. It had its cold bitter moments and more than enough heartaches and headaches. But, for all of us too, I am sure, it had its joys and its newness, its extraordinary blessings and providence. Each of us, in our more lucid moments, knows exactly how many bullets we dodged. If we are still alive and we still have faith, it was a good year. It deserves to be celebrated with expressions of gratitude, affection, and a doxology… and even with another old ritual, drinks!

The Checkered Origins of Grace

December 7, 2008

God writes straight with crooked lines. We know that expression, though we rarely apply it to sacred history or to the birth of Jesus. We should. The Christmas story is written with some pretty crooked lines.

The renowned biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, writes up a particularly insightful piece on the origins of Jesus as described in Matthew’s gospel, where Matthew, in a text we like to ignore, traces the lineage of Jesus from Abraham to Mary. What Matthew reveals in his list of people begetting other people is, as Brown highlights, quite a checkered story. Jesus’ family tree contains as many sinners as saints and his origins take their roots too in the crooked lines written by liars, betrayers, adulterers, and murderers. Jesus was pure, but his origins were not.

Matthew begins his story of the origins of Jesus with Abraham, who fathers Isaac and then sends his other son, Ishmael, and his mother packing, off into the desert, to be rid of them. Not quite what you would expect from the great patriarch. How can that be fair and how can that be justified? Then Jacob steals his older brother’s blessing from Isaac (just as Israel itself earlier had seized the land of Canaan from a people who had a prior claim). Next, among all the sons of Jacob, Joseph is clearly the most worthy, but he is not the one who gets chosen. Judah, who had sold Joseph into slavery out of jealousy and then impregnated his own daughter-in-law, taking her to be a prostitute, is the one who gets chosen. It is fair to ask the question, why Judah?

Then Matthew lists the names of fourteen kings who are part of the genetic origins of Jesus. Of those fourteen, only two, Hezekiah and Josiah, were considered faithful to God as judged by the Book of Kings. The rest, in Brown’s words, were “adulterers, murderers, incompetents, power-seekers, and harem-wastrels.” And then there is David, the great king, from whose lineage the gospels proudly proclaim that Jesus descends. Admittedly, David was a great man, humanly and spiritually; he united the community, built the temple, and wrote the psalms, but he was also an adulterer who covered sin by murder.

Finally there is the question of which women are named as significant in Jesus’ lineage. Instead of naming Sarah, Rebekah, and Rachel, Matthew names instead: Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, and Bathsheba, before finally naming Mary, as Jesus’ mother. A curious selection: Tamar was a Canaanite woman who, because she had been left childless by two of Judah’s sons, disguised herself as a prostitute and seduced Judah himself. Rahab was a real prostitute, though her kindness protected Israel’s spies during the conquest of the promised land. Ruth, like Tamar, was foreigner, and Bathsheba, as we know, was the woman David seduced before he had her husband killed. The scandal of their affair and the death of their illegitimate child didn’t prevent her from scheming to insure that one of her children became heir to the throne. Each of these women had marital issues that contained elements of irregularity or scandal and yet each was able to be an instrument in God’s birth on this planet. Clearly Matthew highlights their names to set the stage for Mary, whose pregnancy is also irregular, since Jesus had no human father.

The last part of the genealogy contains mostly names of unknown persons, no-names. That too is important since, if unknown persons contributed so significantly to Jesus’ origins, then we too are not too insignificant, unimportant, or anonymous to contribute to the continuation of that story.

God writes straight with crooked lines. Nowhere is this more evident than in the birth of Jesus. There is an important challenge in this. To quote Raymond Brown: If the beginning of the story involved as many sinners as saints, so has the sequence. … The God who wrote the beginning with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness. A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world hearkened and women upon whom the world frowned – this God continues to work with the same mélange.

Perhaps the real challenge in all of this comes to those of us who would want to accept only an idealized portrait of Jesus’ birth, one that has only straight lines, no impurities, no dark colors. But, despite our struggle to digest this, it is important that we do so because what is highlighted by the Gospels in the birth of Jesus throws light on all subsequent Christian history and on our own lives. Grace is pure, but we who mediate it often aren’t. Still God’s love and God’s plan aren’t derailed by our infidelities, sin, and scheming. God’s designs for grace still somehow work and this, Raymond Brown points out, is not a lesson in discouragement, but in encouragement.

The Struggle with Terrorism

November 30, 2008

There’s an old axiom that says that the country with the best poets eventually triumphs. The strength of a people, in the end, lies not in its military power, but in its faith, moral fiber, imagination, and in the vision of its poets, artists, philosophers, and priests.

Never has this been more true, and harder to believe, than today in our struggle with terrorism and the merciless violence it has unleashed all over the planet. To make peace with terrorism, as we are painfully learning, will require more than guns and military might. It is going to require new imagination, new poetry, and a moral stretch to which we are unaccustomed. This is a different kind of enemy, one that seems to grow the more it is crushed.

The novelist, Barbara Kingsolver, in a book of essays entitled Small Wonder, brilliantly describes what we are facing:

This new enemy is not a person or a place, it isn’t a country; it is a pure and fearsome ire as widespread as some raw element like fire. I can’t sensibly declare war on fire, or reasonably pretend that it lives in a secret hideout like some comic-book villain, irrationally waiting while my superhero locates it and then drags it out to the thrill of my applause. We try desperately to personify our enemy in this way, and who can blame us? It’s all we know how to do. Declaring war on a fragile human body and then driving the breath from it – that’s how enmity has been dispatched for all of time, since God was a child and man was even more of one.

But now we are faced with something new: an enemy we can’t kill because it’s a widespread anger so much stronger than physical want that its foot soldiers gladly surrender their lives in its service. We who live in this moment are not its cause – instead, a thousand historic hungers blended together to create it – but we are its chosen target. We threaten this hatred, and it grows. We smash the human vessels that contain it, and it doubles in volume like a magical liquid poison and pours itself into many waiting vessels. We kill its leaders, and they swell to the size of martyrs and heroes, inspiring more martyrs and heroes. This terror now requires of us something that most of us haven’t considered: how to defuse a lethal enemy through some tactic more effective than simply going at it with the biggest stick in hand.

The enemy, in the end, as Kingsolver points out, is not a person, a country, or a religion, but hatred itself. Only hatred can call forth this kind of sickness, indiscriminate murder done in God’s name. Only hatred sees murder as martyrdom. And, as Kingsolver points out, we’re not its cause, but its target. This is not to say that some of the things we have done in history and some of the things we still do today are not to blame for helping produce this (It’s wise to ask the question ‘Why?’ when someone hates us so powerfully) but the kind of hatred that foments murder in God’s name draws upon more sources than those for which we are to blame. Moreover this kind of hatred can’t simply be beaten with guns because it isn’t like fighting an army; it’s like fighting a plague, people die but the disease continues on to infect millions of others.

So what’s to be done? While military strength can never ultimately subdue this, this doesn’t mean that is isn’t necessary to contain it. A disease needs to be contained even while it is being fought. But, at the end of the day, winning this battle will require something beyond guns and bombs. To win, which ultimately means to win over, will require poetry, imagination, and a vision drawn from genuine religion.

Kingsolver, in searching for some vision, draws upon the Greek story of Jason and the Argonauts, Jason finds himself facing a particular kind of dragon which when it is slain and its corpse falls to the ground becomes even more deadly because each of its teeth germinate and instantly produce a new enemy, fully armed. So each time he kills an enemy, the enemy multiplies. He sees the impossibility of his situation, every time he kills something, he has more to fight. Eventually a woman who loves him, Medea, tells him a secret: Hatred only dies when it is turned upon itself. Jason takes her advice, gives up his sword, and instead finds a way to throw a rock cryptically so that it triggers an internal riot within which his enemies fight each other. Later Medea also shows him a way to slip an elixir of contentment into the mouth of sleeping dragons so that they remain peaceful.

Hatred only dies when it is turned upon itself. We are right in trying to contain it, but eventually it can only be defeated from within. In the interim, we need better poetry.

Ad Usam

November 16, 2008

Several years ago a young Benedictine monk shared this story in class.

He lived in a monastery that kept a rather strict rule. Their observance of poverty and obedience required that he ask permission of his Abbot before purchasing anything, even the smallest object. If he wanted to buy a new shirt, he needed the Abbot’s permission. Likewise if he wanted to take some stationary supplies from the storeroom, a pen or some paper, he needed permission. For years, he felt that this was belittling.

“I felt like a child,” he said, “it seemed silly to me that a grown man should have to ask permission to buy a new shirt! I looked at men my own age who were married, raising children, paying for houses, and presidents of companies and I felt that our rule reduced me to a child and I resented it. But eventually his attitude changed: “I came to realize that there is an important spiritual and psychological principle in our rule, in having to ask permission to buy or use something. Ultimately none of us owns anything and nothing comes to us by right. Everything is a gift, including life itself, everything should have to be asked for and nothing should be taken for granted as if it was ours by right. We should be grateful to God just for giving us a little space. Now when I ask permission from the Abbot, I no longer feel like a child. Rather I feel that I am more properly in tune with the way things should be in a gift-oriented universe where nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything as his own. Everyone should have to ask for permission before buying or using anything.”

His story reminded me of an incident in my own life: When I was a novice in our Oblate novitiate, our novice-master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write two Latin words, Ad usam, inside of every book that was given us for our own use. Literally the words translate into “For use”. The idea was that although a book was given to you for your personal use you were never to think that you actually owned it. Real ownership lay elsewhere. You were only a steward of someone else’s property. And this idea was then extended to everything else that you were given for your personal use – your clothes, your sports equipment, things you received from your family, and even your toiletries and toothbrush. You got to use them, but they were not really yours. You had them ad usam.

One of the young men in that novitiate eventually left our community and went on to become a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and one day while I was in his office I picked up one of his medical textbooks. I opened the cover and there were the words: Ad usam. When I asked him about did this he made a comment to this effect: “Even though I no longer belong to a religious order and no longer have the vow of poverty, I still like to live by the principle that our novice-master taught us: In the end, we don’t really own anything. These books aren’t really my own even though I’ve paid for them. They’re mine to use, temporarily. Nothing really belongs to anybody and I try not to forget that.”

Both of these stories can help remind of something that deep down we already know but tend to forget, namely, that what ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and all authentic human relationship is the unalterable truth that everything comes to us as gift so that nothing can ever be owned as ours by right. Life is a gift, breath is a gift, our body is a gift, food is gift, any love given us is a gift, friendship is a gift, our talents are a gift, our toothbrush is a gift, and the shirts, pencils, pens, medical textbooks we use are each of them a gift. We get to have them, ad usam, but we should never nurse the illusion that we own them, that they are ours, that we can claim them by right. Metaphorically there should be an Abbot in each of our lives from whom we should ask for permission to buy or use anything. That would be a recipe for health.

In those moments when we are most in touch with ourselves (and generally those are the moments when we most feel our vulnerability and contingency) we sense that truth. The reverse is also true, at moments when we feel strong, in control, and aware of our own power, we tend to forget this truth and cling to the illusion that things are ours by right.

Maybe if we all had to ask permission to buy a new toothbrush or a new item of clothing we would be more aware that everything we think we own is really only ours ad usam.

Old and New Struggles with the Church

November 9, 2008

Today a lot of people are struggling with the church and this is more complex than first meets the eye.

Statistics show that in the last fifty years there hasn’t been a huge drop-off in the number of people who say that they believe in God. Surprisingly too there hasn’t been a huge drop-off in the number of people who name a church or a denomination to which they claim to belong. The huge drop-off has come mostly in one area, actual church-going. People still believe in God and their churches even when they don’t often go to church. They haven’t left their churches; they just aren’t going to them. We aren’t so much post-Christian as we are post-ecclesial. The problem is not so much atheism or even religious affiliation, but participation in the church.

Why? Why does our culture struggle so much with the church?

Liberals like to think that it is because the church has been too slow to change and that it is unhealthily out of step with today’s world. Conservatives like to think the opposite, namely, that people have grown disenchanted with the church because it has changed too much and been too accommodating to the culture. There is some truth in both views, but analysts suggest that there are other reasons, reasons to do with the general breakdown of family and public life.

It is not just church-life and parish-life that are in trouble today. Declining church attendance is paralleled everywhere: Families and neighborhoods are dissipating and breaking down as people guard their privacy and individuality more and more. Civic organizations and clubs are finding it hard to function as they once did and there is simply less of a sense of community everywhere than there once was.

No wonder that our churches are struggling. Churches and parishes are, by definition, communities that are not based upon private intimacy, that is, they are not made up of people who choose to relate to each other on the basis of being like-minded. Rather churches and parishes are, by definition, made up of people who are called together despite their differences to meet around Christ and a set of values that molds them into a community beyond private preference. But that is not easily understood in a culture that believes meaningful community can only be formed on the basis of private choice and a personal need for intimacy. Today we don’t just bowl alone, we also do spirituality alone.

People today tend to treat their churches in the same way as they treat their families, namely, they want them to be there for them, for rites of passage, for special occasions, and for the security of knowing they can be turned if needed, but they don’t want them to interfere much in their actual lives and they want participate in them on their own terms. People no longer feel they need the church. They admit their need for God and for spirituality, but not their need for the church. Hence we have the popular notion that says: I want spirituality but not the church.

Finally, there is too the notion that the church as an institution is too flawed, too fraught with compromise, too narrow, too judgmental, and too hypocritical to be credible, to be the institution that mediates salvation. Jesus is pure, but the church is flawed, goes the logic. Hence, a lot of people choose to relate to the church very selectively and very sporadically.

I have never found a better answer to that than the one given by Carlo Carretto, the Italian spiritual writer, who loved the church deeply but was honest enough to admit its faults. Late in his life, he wrote this ode to the church:

How much I must criticize you, my church, and yet how much I love you! You have made me suffer more than anyone and yet I owe more to you than to anyone. I should like to see you destroyed and yet I need your presence. You have given me much scandal and yet you alone have made me understand holiness. Never in this world have I seen anything more compromised, more false, yet never have I touched anything more pure, more generous or more beautiful. Countless times I have felt like slamming the door of my soul in your face – and yet, every night, I have prayed that I might die in your sure arms! No, I cannot be free of you, for I am one with you, even if not completely you. Then too – where would I go? To build another church? But I could not build one without the same defects, for they are my defects. And again, if I were to build another church, it would be my church, not Christ’s church. No, I am old enough, I know better.

That’s an insight that can help all of us, both those of us who are going to church and those of us who aren’t.

Introverts and Extroverts and the Spiritual Journey

November 2, 2008

Nothing so much approximates the language of God as silence. So writes Meister Eckhard. Among other things this tells us that there is a certain inner work that we can only do by ourselves, alone, in silence. There is a certain depth and interiority that can only be had at a price, silence and solitude. Some things we can only learn alone.

But that’s half of an equation: There is also the axiom: Communities are schools of charity. There is too a certain maturity, health, sanity, and resiliency that can only be had by interacting with others. Certain things can only learned by being with others.

The Christian spiritual tradition has always emphasized both, though rarely at the same time.

On the one hand, spiritual writers have always tended to put an important emphasis on the type of inner work that can only be done in private prayer and contemplation. That is why silence is judged to be so important while on a retreat: “How can you be serious about prayer and conversion unless you are willing to face, in silence, the chaos inside your own heart?” To fear or shun silence generally brings with it the judgment that you are superficial, shallow, fearful of depth, and afraid to be alone with God and yourself. Sometimes this is true. We often do fear being silent and alone because we are afraid of what we might find there. As Thomas Merton puts it, there is a hidden wholeness at the heart of things but, because we are afraid that we might find chaos there instead, we fear being alone and silent long enough to journey to the heart of things. It is far safer on the surface. The emphasis on interiority and silence in classical spiritual writings is trying to ease precisely this fear in us so as to challenge us to a silence and solitude within which we can face ourselves and journey to the heart of things.

On the other hand, Christian spirituality has also always emphasized the social aspect of our lives, family, church-going, and involvement within a community. The social dimension of life too has always been considered a non-negotiable element within a healthy spiritual life. Most of the same writings that emphasize silence and solitude also emphasize being within a family or a community and participating in church life. They warn that there is a real danger in being too private, in being too caught up inside of ourselves, in avoiding community, in being on a private quest without enough concern for the family and community.

Both emphases, taken alone, are one-sided: An emphasis on silence and solitude alone tends to penalize extroverts, just as an emphasis on community and church alone tends to penalize introverts. Too rarely have we struck a healthy balance on this.

Both are necessary and both are necessary within the life of the same person. Simply put, there is a certain inner work that can only be done alone, in silence, just as there is a certain growth and maturity that can be only be reached through long faithful interaction within a family and community. There is a time to be alone, away from others, and there is a time to be with others, away from the private fantasies within our own minds. Being silent and being social do different things for us. If I am alone and silent too much, I will probably develop a certain depth, but I also stand the chance of living too much inside my own fantasies. Conversely, if I am a social-butterfly who shuns silence and aloneness, the danger is that I will end up rather shallow and superficial, uninterested in anything beyond the gossip of the day, but I may well posses a balance, sanity, and resiliency that is less evident in the person more given to silence and solitude.

We need both, silence and socializing, in our lives and pitting one against the other is a false dichotomy. They aren’t in opposition to each other but are both vital components of the same journey towards a community of life with God and each other.

There is a great paradox within the mystery of intimacy and communion, namely, sometimes it is when we are most alone and in silence that we are really most in communion with each other, just as sometimes it is in the midst of a social gathering that we are most alone. Conversely, sometimes it is when we are most social, sharing with others, that we sense most deeply the mystery of God’s ineffable presence, even as it is sometimes when we are most alone and silent in prayer that we feel most strongly that God is absent. This is the great paradox, being alone is meant to lead us into deeper communion with each other and socializing with each other is meant to lead us into a deeper individual union with God.

Introverts and extroverts equally struggle and are equally privileged.