Priestly and Affective Prayer

June 7, 2009

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.

Mystical Images for Our Religious Quest

May 24, 2009

There are few things as powerful as a poetic image. The nation with the best poets will ultimately triumph because poetry is more powerful than armies. An army can beat a nation into submission, but only a poetic image can change a people’s vision.

That’s not an exaggeration. To offer a small example: Centuries ago, Leonardo da Vinci painted a picture of the Last Supper. No historian in the world would suggest that the actual Last Supper of Jesus looked anything like da Vinci’s painting, but his image of the Last Supper has so branded and stamped itself into our universal consciousness that today we cannot not picture the Last Supper, except as he painted it.

With this in mind, I want to highlight two images from the Gospel of John, mystical images that we would do well to brand into our consciousness, like a da Vinci painting. They are images for the religious quest, for true pilgrimage, for discipleship.

Unlike the other Gospels, where Mary, the mother of Jesus, is presented as the ideal disciple, John’s Gospel gives Mary a different role, that of being Eve, the mother of all creation. It then gives us two powerful images of discipleship, one male and one female: The Beloved Disciple and Mary of Magdala.

The Beloved Disciple, whom we commonly, though perhaps naively, identify with John himself, offers one image of what means to be a disciple of Jesus. John presents this figure in various guises, but all have this in common: The Beloved Disciple has a unique intimacy with Jesus. Perhaps the single most powerful picture of this is that of the Beloved Disciple reclining at the Last Supper with his head on Jesus’ breast.

What is contained in this image? This is a mystical image, of intimacy and of listening. Simply put, the image is this: If you place your ear on someone’s chest, you can hear that person’s heartbeat. The Beloved Disciple, then, is the person who is so intimate with Jesus that he or she hears his heartbeat and, from that perspective, looks out at the world. To be a disciple of Jesus is to have your ear attuned to his heartbeat as you gaze out into the world. For John, if you do this, you will always be at the right places, will always have the right perspective, and will always have the courage to do the right thing. You will also be driven by love.

And this, to be driven by love, is John’s other mystical image for discipleship, the figure of Mary of Magdala.

John presents her as the restless, driven figure from the Song of Songs, a woman unable to sleep until she finds her soul mate. And, like the image of the Beloved Disciple reclining on Jesus’ breast, it is an image of a unique intimacy.

To help grasp the strength of this image, it is helpful to first read the Song of Songs. Its early chapters, speaking through a woman’s voice, present us with an image of an inconsummate, driven lover whose yearning for her soul mate relativizes everything else in her life. She has only one thing on her mind and in her heart, to find the one who can still her moral loneliness:

On my bed at night I sought my beloved, sought him but could not find him.

So I got up and went into the city; in the streets and in the squares, seeking my beloved.

I sought but could not find him!

I came upon the watchmen, those who go on their rounds in the city:

“Have you seen my beloved?”

Barely had I passed them when I found my beloved

I caught him, and would not let him go, not until I had brought him to my mother’s house and to the very room and the bed where my mother had conceived me.

There are no images more intimate than these. And, for John, true discipleship is driven by precisely such yearning, both in terms of its earthy intensity and in terms of the depth of intimacy it desires.

But we rarely think like this religiously. Such language strikes us almost as sacrilegious, unfit for pious ears. The quest for God and the hunger for this kind of consummation form different categories, two distinct worlds, inside of us. Our quest for discipleship and religion is emotionally all but completely divorced from our yearning to find a soul mate, divorced from our sexuality, and divorced from our fantasies, whatever they are, of what ultimately makes for consummation. For us, religion and our psycho-sexual world rarely, if ever, intersect at that level. Religion is understood as a duty we do, a categorical imperative that in our better moments we recognize as important, but it isn’t something that drives us out on a Sunday morning, as it did Mary of Magdala, to restlessly prowl gardens, which we tend to call churches, looking for a God to fill an emptiness that we consider only emotional, psychological, and sexual.

The Anatomy of Sacrifice

May 17, 2009

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.

Creativity as One Answer to Violence

May 10, 2009

In his novel, Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje creates a character named Ananda. Ananda’s wife had been murdered in the civil war in Sri Lanka and Ananda is trying to save himself from insanity and suicide in the face of this. How does he retain his sanity? Through art, creativity, by creating something.

Near the end of the story, Ondaatje has him refurbishing a smashed statue of a Buddha. Ananda deliberately changes the eyes of the statue to make them look like the eyes of a human being, not of a god: He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. This is what he felt: As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, specters of retaliation.  

We are either creative or we give ourselves over to some kind of brutality. Either we become artists of some kind or we become demons. For Ondaatje, this is our only choice. Is he right?

A good theology of grace, I believe, agrees with him. Why? Because we cannot will ourselves into being good people. We can’t just decide that we will be loving and happy any more so than we can decide never again to be angry, bitter, or jealous. Willpower alone hasn’t got that kind of power. Only an influx into our souls of something that is not anger, bitterness, or jealousy can do that for us. We call this grace and it, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives.

Creativity, both in what it spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.

But is this true? Are artists and creative persons less violent than others? Do we see any special grace operative there? Generally speaking, yes. Whatever their other faults, rarely are artists war-makers. Why? Because violence despoils the very aesthetic order which artists value so much and, more importantly, because creating beauty of any sort helps mellow the spirit inside of the person who is creating it.

Simply put, when we are creative, we get to feel a bit of what God must have felt at the original creation and at the baptism of Jesus, when, looking at the young earth spinning itself out of chaos and the head of Jesus emerging from the waters, there was the spontaneous utterance: “It is good, very good!” “This is my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased.”

Being creative can give us that same feeling. The experience of being creative can help instill in us the gaze of admiration, appreciative consciousness, divine satisfaction.

Obviously too there is a real danger in this. Feeling like God is also the greatest narcotic there is, as many artists and performers and athletes, tragically, have learned. In the experience of creativity, it is all too easy to identify with the energy, to feel that we are God or that art and creativity are themselves divine and an end in themselves. The greater the achievement, the harder it is to properly disassociate ourselves, to not identify ourselves or the artifact with God. Creativity comes fraught with danger. But, that risk notwithstanding, we need, every one of us, to be creative or else we will, as Ondaatje warns, grow bitter and violent in some way.

Moreover we need to understand creativity correctly. We tend to be intimidated by the concept and to see ourselves as not having what it takes to be creative. Why?

Because we tend to identify creativity only with outstanding achievement and public recognition. Whom do we judge to be creative? Only those who have had their songs recorded, their poems published, their dances performed on Broadway, their achievements publicly noted, and their talents talked about on the TV talk shows.

But 99% of creativity hasn’t anything to do with that. Creativity is not ultimately about public recognition or outstanding achievement. It’s about self-expression, about nurturing something into life, and about the satisfaction this brings with it.

Creativity can be as simple (and as wonderful) as gardening, growing flowers, sewing, raising children, baking bread, collecting stamps, keeping a journal, writing secret poems, being a teacher, being cub-scout leader, coaching a team, collecting baseball cards, doing secret dances in the privacy of your own room, fixing old cars, or building a deck off the porch. It doesn’t have to be recognized and you don’t need to get published. You only have to love doing it.

William Stafford, the American poet, suggests that we should all write a poem every morning. How is that possible, someone once asked him, when we don’t feel creative? His reply: “Lower your standards!”

“Publish or perish!” God never gave us that dictum. The academic world did. God’s rules for creativity are different. Jesus expressed them in the parable of the talents: “Be an artificer of some sort or you will surely become a demon!”

There is a Season for Everything

May 3, 2009

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.

Facing the Dragon – Confronting Grandiosity in our Lives

April 26, 2009

Every so often a book comes along that is truly important. I remember ten years ago reading Gil Bailie’s, Violence Unveiled, and sensing that this was a book of major significance. I had that same sense again recently reading Robert L. Moore’s, Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. This is no ordinary book, to be read, enjoyed, and put away. It is a book to be studied many times over.  

Who is Robert L. Moore? He is not a professional theologian and thus is not well-known within popular church circles, though he has had a major impact there through his influence on many who minister within church circles. He is Professor of Psychoanalysis, Culture, and Spirituality at the Chicago Theological Seminary and founder of an Institute for Spirituality in Chicago. What he does in his research and teaching is bring together spirituality, anthropology, history, and psychology so as to create a unique vision within which the human person can be understood, particularly in terms of the human struggle with sin and grace, inflation and depression, violence and greatness.  

I first heard him speak in San Francisco nearly 20 years ago. A former student phoned me one day and announced that he was taking me to hear “an extraordinary thinker”. I went along and wasn’t disappointed. A lot of thinkers are brilliant, but what I heard from Robert Moore contained something else, decades of hard research all tied together in a rare balance. There was no liberal or conservative ideology coloring things, no piety or iconoclasm that was shadow-boxing with its past or with the culture, and no subtle religious or anti-religious bias. I felt like I’d finally found a mentor.  

I soon bought every book and lecture-tape by Moore that I could find and during the next half-dozen years, spent literally hundreds of hours (usually driving) listening to his lectures on tape. I also began to integrate his thought and his structure into my own writings and lectures. Whenever I would introduce students to his thought they would eagerly inquire what books they could read to pursue his ideas further. Unfortunately, at that time, Moore’s books were not as fertile as his oral presentations. That changed with the release of Facing the Dragon: Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity. Now, finally, we have a book that brings together his key insights and does justice to his thinking.  

What, in caption, are those insights?   

Moore asserts, as do our scriptures, that each of us is born with an incurable, innate grandiosity and, because of that, we have larger fantasies and wishes for ourselves than our real life experiences can support. We want, most days, to jump out of our own skins because our lives seem too small for us. But there is an adequate reason: We each have within us the Image and Likeness of God. This is more than just a beautiful icon stamped inside us; it is a fire and an energy that, like God, has no boundaries. We come into this world with the imprint of God stamped in us and that dignity and energy create a godly grandiosity inside us.

And that grandiose energy spawns appetites that are not easily held in check. When we look at the roots of the greed, ambition, addiction, bitterness, rage, violence, and pathological restlessness, we see that there can be no real understanding of these until we first understand that fiery grandiosity inside each of us. Simply put, when you have 6 billion people on small planet and each of those people is secretly nursing a god or goddess inside, then it is no accident that we often have violence and war. All of us carry a dangerous and a pathological pride.

For Moore, the failure to recognize this grandiosity as the root of our struggles constitutes perhaps the most dangerous naiveté of all. The modern fantasy, he writes, believes that we are better off without God and the churches, but that fantasy does not take into account “the rise of the culture of narcissism with its worsening epidemic of pathological grandiosity”

What’s his solution? Humility. But can there be genuine humility, given our innate grandiosity?

Yes, we can attain genuine humility and indeed it is our only hope. But, for him, genuine humility consists in two things: Knowing your limits and getting the help you need. For Moore, it is never a question of: “Am I dangerously proud?” But only a question of: “How do I get the help that I need to deal with my grandiosity?”

For him, that help ultimately lies in a relationship with God which lets us healthily accept and use our divine energies even as it makes clear that we may never identify with those energies. We are not God, albeit we need to use divine energy. Our life-long struggle between depression and inflation is, in essence, a struggle to pray properly.

To ignore this struggle is, as he puts it, to “continue arranging unconsciously our own last rites.”

The Major Points of Convergence within the Great Spiritual Traditions

April 19, 2009

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.

Easter as Opening the Doors of Hell

April 12, 2009

Some years ago a young woman I knew, a university student, fell into a severe depression and attempted suicide. Her family, startled by what had happened, rallied around her. They brought her home and for the next few months tried to provide her with all the best that medicine, psychiatry, the church, and human love could offer. They tried everything, but they couldn’t penetrate the dark hole into which she had descended.

Four months later she killed herself. She had descended into a private hell into which nothing on this side of eternity could any longer enter. She was powerless to open up her own soul for help. I suspect that many of the reasons for her depression were not her fault. She didn’t will herself into that paralysis, circumstance, wound, and bad health put her there. All of us know similar stories.

What’s to be said about this? Does our faith have any answers?

There is a particular line in the Apostles’ Creed which is deeply rooted in the Gospels that does throw light, major light, on this issue. It’s the phrase: He descended to the dead. Or, in some versions: He descended into hell. What is contained in that phrase is, no doubt, the most consoling doctrine in all of religion, Christian or otherwise. What it tells us is that the way Jesus died and rose opened up the gates of death and of hell itself. What does that mean?

This is not a simple teaching. There are different layers of meaning inside of it. At one level, it expresses a Christian belief (which itself needs much explanation) that from the time of the fall of Adam and Eve until Jesus’ death, nobody, no matter how virtuous his or her life might have been, could enter heaven. The gates of heaven were shut and could be opened only by Jesus through his death. There is an ancient Christian homily (now part of the Office of Readings for Holy Saturday) which paints a picture of this as you might see depicted on an icon. It describes both why nobody could go to heaven before Jesus’ descent into the underworld and how Jesus, once there, wakes up Adam and Eve, and leads them through a now open door to heaven. But that’s an icon, not a literal picture.

The Gospels insert this into a wider concept. In the Gospel of Mark, for instance, we see that is important that Jesus goes into every dark, taboo place on this planet and take God’s light and healing there. Thus Jesus goes into morally taboo places, the singles bars of his time. But he also goes into all other dark, taboo places, particularly into sickness and death. And, for first-century Judaism, there was no place more taboo than death itself. The belief was that human beings were created to enjoy God’s presence in this life and not to die. Death was seen as an evil, the consequence of sin, an alienation from God, a place separated from heaven, with no door in between. Hence to say that Jesus “descended to the dead” was the same as saying he “descended into hell”. All of the dead were considered as separated from God.

One of our major beliefs about Jesus is that, by entering death, he precisely entered this underworld, this Sheol, this place of separation and alienation, this “hell”, and, once there, breathed out God’s light and healing in the same way as, in John’s Gospel, he went through doors that were locked by fear and breathed out peace and forgiveness. By going through locked doors and breathing out peace, he both descends into hell and opens up the gates of heaven.

And this is not something abstract, a creedal statement to be believed. It is still happening. There are many forms of death, Sheol, the underworld, hell. Suicidal depression, incurable bitterness, a wound so deep it can never heal, helplessness inside of a life-destroying addiction, a beaten and crushed spirit, an alienation too deep and long-standing to be overcome, any of these can leave us huddled in a locked room, in some underworld, in some private hell, too weak to open the doors that lead to love and life. The gates of heaven close for many reasons.

That was the case for the young woman described above who killed herself. She was in Sheol. But, I don’t doubt for a second, when she woke on the other side Christ came through her locked doors, stood gently inside of her private hell, and breathed out peace.

In that ancient homily describing Jesus’ descent into hell, as Jesus wakes up Adam he says to him: I did not create you to be held a prisoner in hell. … Arise, let us leave this place! No doubt this is what Jesus said too to this young woman, and then he opened the gates of heaven for her just as he once opened those same gates for Adam and Eve.

The Church’s Economic-Social Teachings

March 29, 2009

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.

Congenital Jealousy and a Higher Invitation

March 15, 2009

All of you are loving each other and I may be left out! That feeling, that particular fear, according to Robert Moore, lies at the base of jealousy.

That was the fear of Cain, the archetypal biblical character who was the first person to murder his brother out of jealousy. What prompted his jealousy? Whatever it is that lies inside this metaphor: God looked with favor upon Abel and his offering, but God did not look with favor upon Cain and his offering. For whatever reason, it seemed to Cain that everyone else was loving each other and he was left out!

And so, scripture says, jealousy turned him into a killer and, I suspect, the identical dynamic is present every time we see a mass murder like the ones that occurred at Virginia Tech, Columbine, and more recently in Germany and Alabama. The killers are always lonely, dangerously isolated individuals who, no doubt, share with Cain the experience of seeing others’ offering as acceptable and their own as not. Everyone else, it seems, is loving each other and they are being left out.

Moreover, what we see acted out so horrifically in these mass murders often acts itself out inside of us on a smaller stage. Because of jealousy we too are all killers, except when we kill we do not do it with guns. We do it with thoughts and words.

Henri Nouwen once coined this mantra: Anyone shot by a gun is first shot by a word and anyone shot by a word is first shot by a thought. He is right. We murder in our thoughts every time we say inside ourselves: “Who does he think he is! She thinks she’s so clever! He thinks he’s God’s gift to creation! She’s so full of herself!” Who of us has not walked into a meeting, a boardroom, a church assembly, a family dinner, a social situation, or a gathering of some kind and, not unlike the mass murderers at Columbine or Virginia Tech, subtly sprayed bullets of jealous anger around the gathering? When we are wounded like Cain, when it seems like our offering is not being accepted while that of others’ is, when it seems like everyone is loving each other and we are being left out, the spontaneous impulse is to kill in word, thought, and attitude.

What’s to be done? How do we live beyond jealousy and the sense of being left out?

The first thing is to admit our jealousy. It is never a question of whether we suffer from jealousy or not, but only of what we do with our jealousy. We all suffer from jealousy and the bitter and murderous thoughts that it can trigger.

Once we have admitted that we are jealous, we are invited to move on and see our response to jealousy as precisely the greatest moral and spiritual challenge of our lives. That is not over-stated.

When we look at the drama of Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, the drama in which he struggles to give his death over to us as he had been giving his life over, we see that this drama is precisely a drama of love, not a physical one. Unlike Mel Gibson’s film, The Passion of Christ, the gospel accounts of Jesus’ passion and death do not emphasize his physical sufferings, in fact they almost write them out. What they do emphasize rather is his moral and emotional loneliness, his distance from others, his being cut out of the circle of human understanding, and his exclusion from human intimacy. The gospels tell us that he “was a stone’s throw from everyone”, a condition Gil Bailie characterizes as unanimity-minus-one.

As Jesus approached his death, his earthly experience paralleled that of Cain. His offering, it seemed, was not being accepted, either by God or everyone around him. He felt the radical isolation that comes precisely from exclusion, from misunderstanding, from being the object of hatred. The human temptation, surely, must have been towards bitterness, anger, self-pity, and hatred. But his actions are the antithesis of Cain’s and his response to the bitter feelings that surely must have arisen inside of him constitute precisely his real sacrifice and are the great moral challenge he left us:

Surrounded by jealousy, hatred, and misunderstanding, he gives his life over in trust. When everything tempts him toward bitterness, he moves towards graciousness. When everything tempts him toward hatred, he moves towards love. When everything tempts him towards shutting others out, he makes himself still more vulnerable so that others can come in. When all around him there is coldness, paranoia, and curses, he affirms others, blesses them, and affirms warmth and trust. What a person does when love turns sour is the real drama of love. Cain gives us one answer. Jesus gives us another.

What’s our answer in those moments of our lives when we sense that “all of you are loving each other and I may be left out”?

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.