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!

After his wife died, Jacques Maritain published her journals. In the preface to that book, Raissa’s Journal, he talks about her death, brought on by a stroke, and then gives this commentary:

“But there is still something else, which is not easy to express and which, nevertheless, I want very much to add. This concerns God’s mode of action. At a moment when everything collapsed for both of us, and which was followed by four agonizing months, Raissa was walled up in herself by a sudden attack of aphasia. Whatever progress she made during several weeks by sheer force of intelligence and will, all deep communication remained cut off. And subsequently, after a relapse, she could barely articulate words. In the supreme battle in which she was engaged, no one here on earth could help her, myself no more than anyone else. She preserved the peace of her soul, her full lucidity, her humor, her concern for her friends, the fear of being a trouble to others, and her marvelous smile (that unforgettable smile with which she said thank-you to Pere Riquet after Extreme Unction) and the extraordinary light of her wonderful eyes. To everyone who came near her, she invariably gave (and with what astonishing silent generosity during her last two days when she could only breathe out her love) some sort of impalpable gift which emanated from the mystery in which she was enclosed, And throughout that time she was being implacably destroyed, as if by the blows of an axe, by that God who loved her in his terrible fashion, and whose love is only ‘sweet’ in the eyes of saints, or of those who do not know what they are talking about.”

God’s love is sweet only to those who are already saints and to those who do not know what they are talking about. That is true not just of God’s love, but of all love.

Love isn’t easy, except in our daydreams. We do not even need to look at the superficiality of the cheaper romantic novels or movies to see the truth of that. It suffices to go to church regularly: I go to mass every day and I go there with good people – who are sincere, committed, honest, and full of faith. But they (along with myself) are also human and thus, as we stand together in a circle of faith, we are not always the idyllic picture of harmony and love of which our church hymns speak. We may be gathered in faith, but we are human and we cannot but feel certain things in each other’s presence: jealousy, irritation, hurt, paranoia, distrust, the sense of not being fully valued. And so beneath our rhetoric of love we also feel tension, distance, and even hostility sometimes. We sing brave songs that proclaim how open our hearts are and how we welcome everyone into this space, but invariably there are parts of us that don’t quite mean those words, at least as they apply to some people.

And this isn’t an anomaly; it’s true for all congregations, of every gathering, except those where everyone is already fully a saint. Love, this side of eternity, is not easy, at least not if we try to actually embrace everyone and not just our own kind.

The older we get, the more we sense what love actually demands. It isn’t easy to say the words “I love you” and actually back that up.

What does it mean to love someone? I’m pretty cautious now about what kind of words I put around that. Maybe I would use just two words, fidelity and respect. Love means keeping your word, staying with a relationship and not walking away. And love means fully respecting someone else, not violating anyone’s freedom, and positively blessing and helping others to grow according to their own internal dictates. What we actually feel when we do those things is sometimes less than warm, but love, as we know, is not a question of feeling but of fidelity.

And partly that is gift, something from beyond us, from a God who can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, namely, remain together inside of family and community. In the end, that is what church and Eucharist are meant to do:

On the night before he died, Jesus sat down with his disciples and what he found there was what we too find whenever we go to church, a sincere bunch of people struggling to not let the jealousies, irritations, self-preoccupations, and wounds of life drive them apart. We come to church and to the Eucharist to ask God to do for us what we cannot do for ourselves, love each other.

Maritain is right: Love is only sweet for those who are already saints and for those who are dangerously naive. Since we are neither, it’s good to be humble, admit our struggle, and to go to those places that can do for us what we cannot do for ourselves.

We didn’t stop burning witches because we stopped reading scripture. We stopped burning witches because we kept on reading scripture.

Gil Bailie, author of Violence Unveiled, wrote those words and they express a truth too easily ignored today. Neither liberals nor conservatives generally want to read history accurately. The former want to think that we stopped burning witches precisely because we did stop reading scripture, whereas the latter want to forget that we once did burn witches and justified it in God’s name. There is an important truth in this.

Rene Girard once wrote that the cross of Christ is the most revolutionary moral event ever in human history and its implications are still slowly unfolding within human consciousness. What Girard means, among other things, is that some of the deeper spiritual and moral elements that are contained in the cross are like medicine in a time-release capsule. They are dissolving slowly within history and we are gradually absorbing their meaning. Simply put, it is taking us many centuries to understand more fully what is contained in the revelation of the cross.

For example: It took the universal church more than 1500 years to understand that we may not use force and violence to spread the gospel or to silence those who do not agree with us. It took all the churches more than1800 years to understand and accept that slavery was wrong; It took all the churches nearly 2000 years (and Pope John Paul II) to understand and accept that capital punishment is wrong. And it has taken all the churches more than 2000 years to understand and accept somewhat more fully the equality of women.

But, in spite of how long it took to realize some of this, there is progress, slow, measurable, irreversible. We are, at some crucial places, understanding the gospel more deeply today. We need only look at what is happening today within certain extremist circles of Islam to see where (in some ways) we once were and how far we have progressed from there. We too, like Al-Qaeda, had our own period of history wherein we believed that error had no rights and that violence and killing could be justified in God’s name. Today, happily, within all the Christian churches, that is becoming harder to justify, irrespective as to whether that killing is abortion, euthanasia, capital punishment, or pre-emptive war

Understanding this can be very helpful for a number of reasons:

First, because it is honest. We all struggle with wanting to rewrite history so that it fits our own theories. In terms of the moral unfolding of the gospel, conservatives like to believe that ancient and medieval times were a golden age for Christianity, and in some ways they were. But they are slow to admit that this golden age was more golden for some than for others. Those centuries were also a time when the church (at least for a large part) believed in slavery and in the use of violence to further gospel aims. The Inquisition was real, brutal, and not golden in any way. Liberals, while not slow to point this out, are much slower to accept that core of the moral, social, and even technological progress within the secularized world arose out of Judeo and Christian roots. Liberals too easily believe that we stopped burning witches and developed democracy because we stopped reading scripture. But Bailie is right and his insight calls us to honesty.

Second, the truth that Bailie captures can call us too to patience and hope. We can draw hope from looking at the larger historical picture. We are making moral progress, even if that progress is unfolding with agonizing slowness, sometimes imperceptibly, throughout the centuries. It doesn’t always look like it, but in the end, within all the churches today there is less violence being justified in God’s name than at any other time in history. That is moral progress.

Perhaps that progress isn’t happening fast enough for our own liking, but we can draw hope from the picture that history gives us: We no longer justify slavery, capital punishment, and most forms of inequality and violence in God’s name. No doubt all of us, on the right and on the left, have our frustrations with how slowly one or other moral issue is progressing, but it is helpful to remember that nearly 2 billion people with a two-thousand year history tend to move rather slowly.

Every age of Christianity has had its moral blind-spots, but also its saints. Our age is no exception. And so we have good reason to hope that the gospel will continue to unfold and the meaning of the cross, like medicine in a time-release capsule, will continue to release more deeply its meaning in history, and that all of us, Christian and non-Christian alike, will continue to realize more and more deeply that God plays no favorites, that all people are equal, and that violence of any kind may never be justified in God’s name.

Soren Kierkegaard remains a mentor to many people for a good reason. He touched the soul like a maestro picking up a violin and that master’s touch comes not so much from his intelligence as from his sensitivity. And that sensitivity was carefully cultivated.

Kierkegaard had always been a lonely person, but, as a young man, he made a deliberate, strong decision to remain wedded to that loneliness. He fell in love with a woman and they planned to marry, but eventually, in a decision that would cause him pain and anguish for a long time, Kierkegaard called off the marriage, though he deeply loved the woman. What was his reason? He was afraid that if he let another person into his life in this way it would interfere with his loneliness in a way that would impact on the depth of his understanding and with what he had to share with the world. He chose celibacy for what he felt was a noble reason, a deeper solidarity with the loneliness of the world. He cultivated loneliness as a means of deeper entry into the soul.

And that bore fruit: Countless people, men and women, celibates and married people alike, have drawn understanding and strength from his writings. One of these was Henri Nouwen who used to say that Kierkegaard made his loneliness his gift to the world. What Nouwen experienced in reading Kierkegaard and what many others experience too is the sense of being introduced to yourself, the sense of being understood and validated inside your frightening complexity and aloneness.

But is a decision to cultivate one’s loneliness always a noble thing?

Commenting on why he never married, Kierkegaard once wrote that he lived the curse “of never to be allowed to let anyone deeply and inwardly join themselves to me.” The sadness this produces, he continues, is “the sadness of having understood something true, and then seeing oneself misunderstood.” Unanimity-minus-one. Moral loneliness. Touching truth in a way that separates before it unites.

Many of us, no doubt, can resonate with those words. Somehow we never find our true soul mate in this world, someone to truly join ourselves to deeply and inwardly. But why? Is the fault without or within? Is it that we are never allowed to let anyone into that deep space or is it more that we never allow anyone in there? Is it just bad luck or is the fault inside of us?

We all yearn for someone to join ourselves to, inwardly and deeply, but yearning is one thing, allowing it to happen and paying the price for it is something else: Real intimacy is the most scary and demanding thing on the planet. We resist it as much as we invite it: Why?

Because as much as we want to share our deepest secrets we also want to keep them hidden, as much as we want constant companionship we also want privacy, as much as we want to be vulnerable we also want to protect ourselves; as much as we want to share our lives we also want our own freedom, as much as we want to give ourselves away in selflessness we also want to keep our lives and our possessions for ourselves, and as much as we want the stability of deep commitment we also want the freedom of opportunity. Intimacy demands a certain nakedness but nakedness, by definition, is not self-assured, strong, prideful, able to walk in and out of a room on its own terms, cool, fully self-possessed. Thus we are always ambivalent in our quest for intimacy. We move towards it even as, like Kierkegaard, we push it away.

Sometimes this is healthy: We are meant to carry our loneliness and solitude at a high level, to not sell our souls out too quickly or too cheaply, to not settle for second-best. In the words of Hafiz: Don’t surrender your loneliness so quickly. Let it cut deep. Let it ferment and season you as few human or divine ingredients can. Sometimes loneliness must be cultivated.

But this can also be unhealthy: Sometimes the prison of our own loneliness is self-imposed and comes about mainly because of our unwillingness to give up freedom, private possession, self-protection, and that which is perceived as being cool. It is not so much that we aren’t allowed intimacy (because of circumstance, luck, or handicap) but that we do not allow it because of its real cost. Whenever that is the case, our loneliness, unlike that of Kierkegaard, will not be fruitful, a fertile sadness that is our gift to the world, but will be rather a sterile sadness that drains energy out of the world.

Let’s hope that whatever loneliness we do cultivate is the healthy kind, the kind that softens the heart rather than hardens it, that speaks as does the loneliness of Hafiz: Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, my voice so tender – my need of God, absolutely clear.