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.

“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.

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.

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.

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.

A novel is meant to be, first of all, a work of art. That is why it is always risky to try to use a novel to try to promote, however subtly, any political or religious idea. Apologetics, of any kind, usually does not make for good literature, irrespective of how good the cause might be.

William Young, in a recent, best-selling novel, The Shack, (Windblown Media, Los Angeles, 2007) takes that risk. The son of missionary parents, Young has written a novel which invites its reader to meet God, not just in the abstract, but specifically in how God is revealed in Christianity, as Trinity, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

Without wanting to give away too much of the plot, here is the main story line: Mack, his hero, suffers a great personal tragedy that leaves him religiously numb, with a lot of unresolved questions. Through a series of circumstances, he ends up spending a weekend within which he is privileged to have heart-to-heart conversations with the Father, Jesus, and the Holy Spirit. In those conversations, some of the heart of humanity and the heart of God are laid open.

The book has been both highly praised and severely criticized across denominational lines. Its critics struggle with its audacity (What nerve for a mere human to attempt to speak for God!) and for the way it in which it conceives of God (as too gentle and non-demanding).

Personally, I do not agree with its critics. In my view, this is an excellent book that presents a wonderfully positive and healthy theology of God. I heartily recommend it.

I should perhaps qualify that with this comment: I read for essence more than for detail. No doubt there are parts of this book that would need more qualification, more theological nuance, but that is true for all theology, especially when it speaks about the ineffable, God. It took the apostolic community and the early church some 300 years to agree upon even a few basic concepts about God. So, no doubt, anyone who risks 250 pages in trying to give this a contemporary interpretation will not always and everywhere be perfect, nor to everyone’s theological taste. But this effort has to be judged in its essence, not on the basis of some detail that might need more nuance. The book is not perfect, but it is excellent overall.

What Young gives us in The Shack is a very healthy theology of God and an insight into the Trinitarian nature of God. Like Pope Benedict’s first Encyclical, this book might too be entitled: God is Love. It is a good corrective to many popular and intellectual images of God that conceive of God as cold, distant, impersonal, and needlessly judgmental. The God that you meet in The Shack is personal, warm-hearted, invitational, loving, understanding, with a sense of humor; and He is closer to the God that Jesus preached, the God who embraces the weakness of the prodigal son and the anger of his older brother, who washes the feet of his servants, and who lets his sun shine on the bad as well as the good, than is the God that is often met in popular theology and ecclesiology. The God you meet in The Shack will walk with you, no matter what your journey, and, like the God of Jesus, wants more than anything else that we forgive each other. Judgment, this God says, is not about punishment or destruction, but about setting things right and ultimately about reconciliation and forgiveness.

How does the God we meet in The Shack answer the question of evil? Pretty much like Jesus at the death of Lazarus, when he is asked: Where is God when bad things happen to good people? God, Jesus tells us there, does not necessarily rescue us from suffering and death. Rather He enters into them with us and ultimately, though not immediately, redeems them.

Asked if he could have prevented Mack’s daughter’s death, God answers: Yes. First, by not creating at all. … Or secondly, I could have chosen to actively interfere in her circumstance. The first was never a consideration and the latter was not an option for purposes you cannot possibly understand now.

So what is God’s answer to the problem of evil? The God we meet in The Shack replies: At this point all I have to offer you as an answer is my love and goodness, and my relationship with you; essentially what Jesus offers us in the Gospels, not an intellectual answer but a relationship.

The real task of evangelization today is very much that of trying to evangelize the imagination, of trying to put healthy, life-giving images of God into the popular imagination. We have libraries full of scriptural and theological books that are solid and orthodox. These are important because without a solid grounding we soon go astray, but they need to be supplemented. By what? By attempts like this one by William Young which try to evangelize the popular imagination.

There is a story told about the Russian poet, Anna Akhmatova. During the Stalin purges, she was standing one morning outside a prison along with some other women, all of whom were trying to deliver letters and packages to their loved ones inside. Their waiting was made more painful because they were not even sure whether their loved ones were still alive and by the fact that the guards made them wait needlessly for hours simply to assert their authority. But, if they wanted to get messages to their loved ones, they had no other option but to wait.

On this particular morning, another woman recognized the poet, approached her, and asked: “Can you describe this?” Akhmatova replied: “I can,” and a smile passed between the two women.

What had happened? Why did these women, caught up in the madness of a dictator, exchange a smile? Because to describe something, to simply name something properly, in some way already sets you above it. To name something is to be somehow transcendent to it, not fully imprisoned by it, free of it in some way, even if, like Stalin, it has you under its yoke. To name something properly can be prophetic, a defiant act, an act of freedom. Indeed that is what prophets do. They don’t foretell the future, they name the present properly – often times in a way that exposes its faithlessness and injustice.

Nearly fifteen years ago, David Tracy wrote a book entitled, On Naming the Present Moment. In it, with an objectivity that most of us can only envy, he tried to name, philosophically, the present moment within secular culture so as to highlight what is best both inside of liberal and conservative biases. His essay was hope-filled and gave us direction in the same way that a trip to a good doctor gives us hope and direction concerning our health. Good diagnostics is the prerequisite for good prescription, just as bad diagnostics, bad naming, leads to either bad or useless prescription. Today, both in the church and in the world, there is, I feel, a lot of sloppy naming. We need, both for better diagnostics and better prophecy, to name our present faith moment more accurately. A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t know where it belongs.

But there is more: To name something properly is also a form of prayer. Jesus called this, reading the signs of the times. What does he mean by that expression?

What Jesus had in mind was not that so much that we should try to attune ourselves intellectually to all the cultural, psychological, and religious trends of our time. To read the signs of the times, for Jesus, meant trying to read what is happening in our lives, communally and individually, in such a way as to discern the finger of God inside the outer movements of our lives. My parents called this trying to see “divine providence”, namely, trying to hear what God is saying inside the outer events of our lives.

There is a rich biblical background to this. Indeed, in many ways, this is central to the faith of Israel in the Jewish scriptures. For them, nothing happened that was purely an accident. God’s finger was always inside of every event, no matter how secular or accidental it seemed, and the task of faith was to try to read what God was saying inside every event. For example, if Israel lost a war, it wasn’t because the other army had superior soldiers. It was because God was trying to teach her something, there was something she was supposed to learn from this defeat. Likewise, if there was a drought, it wasn’t because there was global warming, it was because, for reasons Israel had to try to discern, God wanted her to live on less that year. For her, nothing was purely accidental, God’s finger was somewhere inside of every event, speaking to her.

James Mackey once defined divine providence as a conspiracy of accidents through which God speaks. That runs close to what John of the Cross meant when he said that the language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. Our task is to read that language, and we read it when we properly name the events of our lives. A proper naming does three things: It is prophetic, it names our faith and our faithlessness, our justice and our injustice; it is diagnostic, it points to the correct prescription to help remedy our ills; and, most importantly, it is a form of prayer, it tries to hear what God is saying inside the outer events of our lives.

Today we tend to name things too much according to our particular ideology, liberal or conservative. This is true both in politics and in the church. The challenge is to be more careful and especially more prayerful. Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly.

Henri Nouwen once remarked that he found it curious that many of the people he knew who were very angry and bitter were people he had met in church circles and places of ministry.

He is not alone in that. Many of us, I suspect, could say the same thing. We often find more anger and whining than joy within church circles because there we can justify anger and disappointment in the name of something sacred.

There is a biblical name for this particular type of anger and whining. This is called being on the shores of Babylon, feeling exiled from your own faith experience.

We are all familiar with the Psalm 137 (popularized in songs) that sings out the lament: By the rivers of Babylon, there we sat and wept, remembering Zion; on the poplars that grew there we hung up our harps. How could we sing a song of the Lord on alien soil? Let my tongue cleave to my mouth, if I remember you not, if I prize not Jerusalem above all my joys!

There is an interesting background to this lament: After Israel had entered the Promised Land, received God’s law, became one kingdom, and built a temple to worship in, she felt politically secure and confident in her faith. Her confidence in faith was very much rooted in possessing three material things: a land, a king, and a temple. God had promised these and God had delivered on that promise. After much struggle they finally had their own land, their own king, and their own temple. These were now the pillars of their faith, their guarantee that God was real and with them. Naively they expected it would stay that way forever.

It was not to be: neighboring Assyria, overtook them, conquered the land, deported the people, killed the king, and knocked the temple down to its last stone. Israel now found herself in exile in Babylon, with no land, no king, no temple; and, seemingly, no reason to continue to have faith in God. Her faith, anchored as it was in land, king, and temple, now seemed empty, a dream gone sour. She felt exiled, not just from her own land but from her own faith. Someone had taken away her land, king, and temple and, with them, seemingly her reason to trust in God.

She was left with some painful questions: How can there be a God, if God promised to be present in a land, a king, and a temple, and these are gone? Moreover, how can we be happy in such a situation? Someone had stolen my faith and my church and I will not be happy about that! The laments of Babylon are in the end a euphemism for whining and anger.

But they echo the bitter, whining poetics we hear today in our own church circles: liberals and conservatives, equally unhappy, each blaming the other for somehow stealing away the other’s church, for ruining something that was dear to them, and for putting them on an unhappy shore. In Roman Catholic circles these laments often pit Vatican II against John Paul II with both sides are equally protesting: How can we be joyous and gracious in this situation! It is no different in Protestant circles. There is lamentation everywhere. We are on the shores of Babylon, unhappy, given over to whining.

What we need to hear in all this is the answer that God gave to Israel when she first expressed that religious unhappiness: Where is God when someone has taken away your land, king, and temple? God’s answer: “You will find me again when you search for me in a deeper way, with your whole heart!”

God is beyond any material land, ruler, or church building. God is also beyond any church council and any pope, no matter how true or great these may in fact be. The dark night of pain and insecurity we experience whenever we feel like we are on the shores of Babylon is the purifying pain that comes with finding out that everything that is religiously precious to us, everything we want to identify with God himself, eventually gets crucified (just as Jesus did) and in the wake of the disillusionment we find ourselves in a free-fall, losing a grip on what once anchored our faith. And we will continue to free-fall until ultimately we lose everything so as to fall right to the bedrock of faith itself, God, solidity beyond all material lands, kings, and temples.

That is the difference between and an icon and an idol. Idolatry forgets that the icon is not God. No matter how true and wonderful an icon might be, there comes a time when it has to be taken away from us. Then we find ourselves on the shores of Babylon, insecure, feeling exiled, unhappy, but hearing this from God: You will find me and your joy again when you search for me in a deeper way, with all your heart, mind, and soul!