Dark Nights of Faith in Our Lives

October 26, 2008

When the memoirs of Mother Teresa were published they revealed that for the last 50 years of her life she had struggled painfully to feel God’s presence in her life. Her critics felt a certain glee: Underneath it all, they now believed, she was an agnostic, doubting the existence of God. Her devotees were confused: How could this happen to her? How could a woman of such exceptional generosity and seeming faith not be secure in her sense of God’s existence and providence?

What underlies both reactions is a failure to understand an experience as old as faith itself, that of being inside a dark night of the soul. Looking at Mother Teresa through the eyes of Christian mysticism the better question might be: How could she not experience what she experienced? She was an extraordinary woman, a spiritual athlete, someone who had given her entire freedom over to God; might we not expect this to happen to her? Wouldn’t you expect her to experience a dark night of the soul?

What is a dark night of the soul? A dark night of the soul is an experience where our felt-sense of God dries up and disappears. At the level of feeling, thought, and imagination, we are unable to conjure up any sense of security or warm feelings about the presence of God in our lives. We feel agnostic, even atheistic, because we can no longer imagine the existence of God. God seems non-existence, absent, dead, a fantasy of wishful thinking.

But notice that this takes place at the level of the imagination and feelings. God doesn’t disappear or cease to exist. What disappears are our former feelings about God and our capacity to imagine God’s existence.

God exists, independent of our feelings. Sometimes our heads and hearts are in tune with that and we feel its reality with fervor. Other times our heads and hearts cannot attune themselves to the think, imagine, and feel the existence of a God who ineffable, unimaginable, and Other (by definition) and we experience precisely a certain absence, depression, or void when we try to imagine God’s existence and love.

We should expect this in our lives; Jesus experienced dark nights of the soul. Just before he died on the cross, he cried out in anguish, expressing feelings of being abandoned by God. But inside this seeming agnosticism something beyond his feelings and imagination held him steady and enabled him to give himself over in trust to Someone whom he could no longer imagine as existing. This wasn’t doubt, it was real faith. Faith begins exactly where atheism assumes it ends.

If this happened to Jesus, should we be surprised that it happened to Mother Teresa. Henri Nouwen tells how shocked and surprised he was at the deathbed of his mother, a woman of extraordinary faith, when she began to express anguish and feelings of abandonment by God: “How can this be happening to my mother?” Later, upon reflection, it made sense. His mother had prayed every day of her adult life to die like Jesus. God simply took her prayer and her offer seriously.

Understood correctly a dark night is not a failure in faith but a failure in our imagination: Imagine sitting down to pray one day and having the sure sense that God is real, more real in fact than anything else. At that moment, your faith feels secure both in your head and in your heart. Then imagine a different scene: You are lying in bed, in the dark, one night and, with every ounce of sincerity, intelligence, and will-power, you try to imagine and feel God’s existence and come up empty and dry. You are haunted by the fear: “I don’t believe! Deep down I’m an atheist!” Does this mean that in the one instance you had strong faith and in the next you had weak faith?

Not necessarily. In the first instance you had a strong imagination and in the second you had a weak one. In one instance, you were able to imagine the existence of God and the other you weren’t. Neither determines whether God exists or not. Dark nights of faith have to do with feelings and the imagination and not with God’s reality or presence to us.

Why are dark nights of faith given to us? Why does God seemingly sometimes withdraw his presence? Always to make us let go of something that, while it may have been good for awhile, an icon, is now causing some kind of idolatry in our lives.

Whenever we cry out in faith and ask God why he isn’t more deeply present to our sincerity, God’s answer is always the same one he gives in Scripture, time and time again: You will find me again when you search for me with your whole heart, your whole mind, and your whole soul, that is, when you let go of all the things that, right now, in your mind and heart you have mistaken for God!”

Evangelizing the Religious Imagination

October 19, 2008

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.

Beset By Weakness

October 12, 2008

Some years ago, Michael Buckley, a Jesuit theologian of exceptional insight, delivered a homily at the first mass of a young man who had just been ordained. His approach was paradoxical. Instead of asking the young man: “Are you strong enough to be a priest?” he asked him: “Are you weak enough to be a priest?”

That’s a curious reversal that needs to be understood: The “weakness” to which he is challenging this young man (and the rest of us) is not the weakness of moral failure or sin, but the weakness that Scripture attributes to Jesus when it says that he was “beset by weakness” in every way, except sin.

How was Jesus weak and how are we meant to be weak?

Buckley explains this by comparing Jesus to Socrates in terms of human excellence (as this is often judged). Here is his comparison:

There is a classic comparison running through contemporary philosophy between Socrates and Christ, a judgement between them in human excellence. Socrates went to his death with calmness and poise. He accepted the judgement 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 an escape from death, and he found neither. Finally he established control over himself and moved into his death in silence and lonely isolation, even into the terrible interior suffering of the hidden divinity, the absence of God.

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 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 and 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 has 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.

Jesus was weak in that his sensitivity and love prevented him from protecting himself against pain. Because he loved deeply he felt things deeply, both joy and pain. Sensitive people suffer more than others because their sensitivity leaves them vulnerable and unable to seal themselves off against pain – their own, that of their loved ones, and that of the world. As Iris Murdoch once put it, “A common soldier dies without fear, whereas Jesus died afraid.” That shouldn’t surprise us. Sensitivity leaves you open to pain.

When we are insensitive we sleep well, even when others are suffering and we may have contributed to that; when we are insensitive we have less fear, especially of hurting others; and when we are insensitive we are, from many points of view, stronger because we are more able to insulate ourselves against pain and humiliation. In the arena of athletics, we admire the player who can absorb a hard hit without apparent effect. To be hard and tough is admirable. That isn’t as true in the arena of the soul.

John of the Cross, the great doctor of mysticism, uses the question – How vulnerable and weak are we? – as an important criterion to judge whether or not we are on the right path in following Christ.

We enter more deeply into life, he submits, when we try to imitate the motivation of Christ. But how do we know whether we are doing that or are simply deluding ourselves?

His answer: We know whether or not we are imitating Christ or simply rationalizing our own desires by what begins to flow into our lives. If I am truly imitating Christ, I can expect to experience in my life the things that Jesus experienced in his, namely, a certain vulnerability that leaves me existentially incapable of protecting myself against certain kinds of pain. When I am genuinely imitating Christ, I will find myself “weak” in the same ways that Jesus was weak – more liable to physical pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, more affected by love and hate, more pained over the state of things, more overextended, more prone to humiliation.

Proper sensitivity lays bare the heart and leaves it vulnerable. That doesn’t always make you look good, but that’s okay. The best people in the world don’t always look good!

Reading the Signs of the Times

October 5, 2008

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.

Struggling with our Own Inadequacy

September 28, 2008

It is hard to measure up. In our lucid moments we admit this. Rarely is there a day when we could not echo these words by Anna Blaman:

I realized that it was simply impossible for a human being to be and remain good or pure. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, it left another in the cold. No day and no hour go by without my being guilty of inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done, except being inadequate, which we are good at because that is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else. Every day and every hour brings with it its weight of moral guilt, as regards my work and my relations with others. I am constantly catching myself out in my human failings and, in spite of their being implied in my human imperfection, I am conscious of a sort of check. And this means that my human shortcomings are also my human guilt. It sounds strange that we should be guilty where we can do nothing about it. But even where there is no set purpose, no deliberate intention, we have a conviction of our own shortcomings, and of consensual guilt, a guilt which shows itself all too clearly in the consequences of what we have done or left undone.

Henri Nouwen occasionally expressed similar feelings: There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations. A gnawing sense of being unfulfilled underlies our filled lives.

When we are in touch with ourselves, we can relate to these words, these expressions of inadequacy. At the end of the day, we cannot measure up and cannot not disappoint others and ourselves. Generally the fault is not that we are not sincere or that we do not put out the effort. The fault is that we are human. We have limited resources, get tired, experience feelings we cannot control, have only 24 hours in our day, have too many demands on us, have wounds and weaknesses that shackle us, and thus know exactly what St. Paul meant when he said: Woe, to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do, I cannot do; and the evil I want to avoid, I end up doing!

That may sound negative, neurotic, and stoic, and it can be those things, but, appropriated properly, it can generate hope and renewed energy in our lives. To be human is to be inadequate, by definition. Only God is adequate and the rest of us can safely say to ourselves: Fear not you are inadequate! But a God who made us this way surely gives us the slack, the forgiveness, and the grace we need to work with this. Personally, I take consolation from the gospel parable of the ten bridesmaids who, while waiting for the bridegroom, all fell asleep, wise and the foolish alike. Even the wise were too human and too weak to stay awake the whole time. Nobody does it perfectly and accepting this, our congenital inadequacy, can bring us to a healthy humility and perhaps even to a healthy humor about it.

But it should bring us to something more: prayer, especially the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is, among other things, a vigil of waiting. When Jesus instituted the Eucharist he told the disciples to keep celebrating it until he returned again. A biblical scholar, Gerhard Lofink, puts it this way: The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities imminently awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in Eucharist, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ to return.

I try to celebrate Eucharist every day. I do this because I am a priest and part of the covenant a priest makes with the church at his ordination is to pray the priestly prayer of Jesus, the Eucharist and the Liturgy of the Hours, regularly for the world. But I do it too, more personally, for another reason: The older I get, the less confident, in some ways, I am becoming. I don’t always know whether I’m following Christ properly or even know exactly what it means to follow Christ, and so I stake my faith on an invitation that Jesus left us on the night before he died: To break bread and drink wine in his memory and to trust that this, if all else is uncertain, is what we should be doing while we wait for him to return.

On the Shores of Babylon

September 21, 2008

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!

The Problem of Suffering and Evil

September 14, 2008

How can there be an all-loving and an all-powerful God if there is so much suffering and evil in our world?

Perhaps that is the most difficult religious question of all time. Why does God not act in the face of suffering? Why do bad things happen with seemingly no response from God? In a famous book, After Auschwitz, Richard Rubenstein asks how it is even possible for a Jew to believe in God after the holocaust. How can we believe in God in the face of God’s seeming inaction in the face of suffering and evil?

There have been countless attempts to answer this question, not least inside the tortured experience of those who are suffering. There have also been many attempts at offering some kind of acceptable theoretical explanation.

For example, Harold Kushner (When Bad Things Happen to Good People), writing as a Jewish rabbi, tries to answer the question by defending God’s love and goodness at the expense of his power. Essentially, God would help us if He could, Kushner believes, but God isn’t all-powerful. Innocent suffering exists not because God cannot stop it.

Inside of Christian theology, Peter Kreeft, C.S. Lewis, and Teilhard de Chardin, among others, have written insightful books on this question. Christians believe that what is ultimately at stake is human freedom and God’s respect for it. God gives us freedom and (unlike most everyone else) refuses to violate it, even when it would seem beneficial to do so. That leaves us in a lot of pain at times, but, as Jesus reveals, God is not so much a rescuing God as a redeeming one. God does not protect us from pain, but instead enters it and ultimately redeems it. That might sound simplistic in the face of real death and evil, but it is not. We see a powerful illustration of this in Jesus’ reaction to the death of Lazarus. In essence, this is how the Gospels tell that story:

The sisters of Lazarus, Martha and Mary, send a message to Jesus telling him that “the man you love” is gravely ill. Curiously though Jesus does not immediately rush off to see Lazarus. Instead he stays where he is for two more days, until Lazarus is dead, and then sets off to see him. When he arrives near the house, he is met by Martha who says to him: “If you had been here, my brother would not have died!” Basically her question is: “Where were you? Why didn’t you come and heal him?” Jesus does not answer her question but instead assures her that Lazarus will live in some deeper way.

Martha then goes and calls her sister, Mary. When Mary arrives she repeats the identical words to Jesus that Martha had spoken: “If you had been here my brother would not have died!” However, coming out of Mary’s mouth, these words mean something else, something deeper. Mary is asking the universal, timeless question about suffering and God’s seeming absence. Her query (“Where were you when my brother died?”) asks that question for everyone: Where is God when innocent people suffer? Where was God during the holocaust? Where is God when anyone’s brother dies?

But, curiously, Jesus does not engage the question in theory; instead he becomes distressed and asks: “Where have you put him?” And when they offer to show him, he begins to weep. His answer to suffering: He enters into peoples’ helplessness and pain. Afterwards, he raises Lazarus from the dead.

And what we see here will occur in the same way between Jesus and his Father. The Father does not save Jesus from death on the cross even when he is jeered and mocked there. Instead the Father allows him to die on the cross and then raises him up afterwards.

The lesson in both these deaths and raisings might be put this way: The God we believe in doesn’t necessarily intervene and rescue us from suffering and death (although we are invited to pray for that). Instead he redeems our suffering afterwards.

God’s seeming indifference to suffering is not so much a mystery that leaves the mind befuddled as a mystery that makes sense only if you give yourself over in a certain level of trust. Forgiveness and faith work the same. You have to roll the dice in trust. Nothing else can give you an answer.

And I do not say this glibly. I know too many people who have been hurt, brutally and unfairly, in ways that make it difficult for them to accept that there is an all-powerful God who cares.

But sometimes the only answer to the question of suffering and evil is the one Jesus gave to Mary and Martha – shared helplessness, shared distress, and shared tears, with no attempt to try to explain God’s seeming absence, but rather a trusting that, because God is all-loving and all-powerful, in the end all will be well and our pain will someday be redeemed in God’s embrace.

The Struggle to Love

September 7, 2008

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.

Honesty as Sobriety

August 31, 2008

You are as sick as your sickest secret!

That’s a popular aphorism in recovery circles and it speaks a deep truth. If we have to hide something then we aren’t well, at least if the blemishes we are hiding are moral rather than physical. A recovering alcoholic once told me: “Sobriety is only 10% about alcohol or a drug; it’s 90% about honesty. You can drink, if you can do it honestly.” Indeed you can do anything, if you can do it honestly.

That’s an interesting moral principle: You can do anything if you don’t have to lie about it.

There are exceptions to this of course if people have hardened their spirits or are otherwise so morally insensitive that they are not ashamed to openly admit or even flaunt duplicity. But the principle is sufficient as a moral guide for basically anyone walking in grace. Simply put, you can do anything as long as you can be honest about it.

But that covers a lot of ground. Could you cheat someone, be sexually unfaithful, slander someone, or commit a sin of any kind and feel comfortable in sharing that openly with those who are closest to you? The need to hide some action from others is a strong moral nudging. If we are walking (at least essentially) in grace we don’t need any other commandment: We can do anything as long as we don’t have to lie about it.

And there is another insight in this. When we do something wrong and then cover it up and lie, it is not so much the particular thing that we did wrong that harms us, it’s the lying about it afterwards that does the real damage. We are all weak, we all fall, we all commit sin. God understands this and it is not so much the sin itself that harms us. What causes the real harm is lying, covering up, sneaking around, not being transparent, living a double life. Why? Because the human spirit is not made to live in dishonesty and duplicity. When we do wrong, we either have to stop doing what we are doing or, at least in honesty and contrition own our weakness, or our spirits will automatically begin to harden and to warp. Such is the anatomy of the soul; it can not tolerate moral duplicity for long without hardening and warping.

Indeed that is how the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit, the one infamous sin that cannot be forgiven, can happen. It begins with lying, rationalization, cover-up, and dishonesty. When we sustain a lie for any length of time, we begin to warp our own insides and the sin can become unforgivable not because God doesn’t want to forgive but because we no longer see any need to be forgiven. Lying, especially to ourselves, hardens and corrupts the spirit. That’s why Satan is called the prince of lies rather than the prince of weakness. That’s also what is contained in Martin Luther’s famous axiom: Sin bravely! The invitation, in Luther, is not that we should have the courage to sin without flinching, but that, if we do sin, we should have the courage of honesty so as not to lie or rationalize about it after the fact.

One of the qualities that endeared Henri Nouwen to the world was precisely his honesty about his own weaknesses and his refusal to pretend he was anything other than what he was: a sincere, weak man struggling to live his life in honesty. For example, there were seasons in his life when he wouldn’t go on the road alone to give talks and conferences. Partly his reason for this had to do with his sense of community and his desire to bring a core member from his community along with him. Part of his reason though was more humble. He was also honest enough not to always fully trust himself to travel alone. The presence of family and community around us can be a powerful moral watchdog on our behavior. Nouwen was humble and honest enough to admit that sometimes he needed this in his life. Too often we lack that kind of humility and honesty and consequently have things to hide, little or big secrets which we keep hidden and which keep us from full moral health.

When he was falsely accused of sexual abuse, Cardinal Joseph Bernardin was able to stand before the world and say, with credibility: “Everyone who knows me also knows that this accusation is false because my life is an open book.” Everyone who knew him believed him precisely because of the transparency evident in his life, the radical sobriety manifest in his person.

Sobriety is ultimately not about alcohol or some drug. It’s about honesty and transparency. And, like honesty and transparency, it is not all or nothing, but has degrees. We are all sober according to more or less, according to the degree that our lives are an open book with nothing hidden in the closet.

The Gospel Unfolding in History

August 24, 2008

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.

The Heart of a Child

August 17, 2008

Unless you change and become like little children you will not enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

How can we do that? How do we unlearn sophistication, undo the fact that we are adults? What kind of recessive journey can revirginize a heart?

Part of our quandary, I believe, comes from how we think of the heart of a child. When we picture the heart of a child we almost automatically think of innocence. A child’s heart is innocent by nature. Indeed it is stunningly innocent. There are few things in this world that can stop us in our tracks, make a man watch his language, make a woman watch her actions, make all of us watch what we talk about in open conversation, make us regret bad decisions, and make us want to be better persons than the innocence of child. Innocence is a powerful moral light that sears the soul.

But that isn’t exactly what Jesus had in mind when he challenged us to become like little children. We cannot remain children. Childhood is naturally outgrown and adulthood brings with it a bewildering complexity in life in general and in sexuality in particular that is not yet inside the heart of a child. And we don’t choose this. For an adult, life cannot be simple and much of the natural innocence of a child is lost in that fact.

So what does Jesus have in mind when he holds up the heart of a child as an ideal?

He does have a certain innocence in mind, though not the simple innocence of pre-sophistication, of being sheltered from one’s own complexity and that of the world. The innocence that Jesus glorifies in children is the wholeness of not yet being wounded, of still being able to trust, of not yet having one’s heart hardened by sin, wound, and disillusionment. Jesus says as much when he is asked whether divorce is wrong or right. He answers the question not by pronouncing it categorically wrong or right but by giving a deeper reason for its frequency: Divorce happens, Jesus says, because our hearts are no longer as they were “in the beginning”, namely, in that pristine time before Adam and Eve sinned and (in terms of our own lives) in the pristine time before we were wounded. In an unwounded heart, in the heart of a child, divorce is not an option. To acquire the heart of a child is therefore to try to move beyond the things that have wounded and hardened us.

But that is only one aspect of it. The quality of heart, seen in a child, that Jesus most challenges us to imitate is that of acknowledging powerlessness and helplessness. A child is powerless. It cannot provide for itself, feed itself, or take care of itself. For a child, if mum and dad do not get up and make breakfast, there will be no breakfast! A child knows dependence, knows that life comes from beyond itself, that it is not self-providing and self-sufficient.

But we tend to forget this as adults. The adult heart, at least during those years when we are healthy and strong, likes to believe itself to be self-providing, self-sufficient, able to take care of itself: I can provide for myself. The adult heart tends to live the illusion of self-sufficiency and that false notion is at the root of much of the pseudo-sophistication and lack of empathy that isolates us from others.

But how can this be undone? How can we “change and become like little children”?

Nature, God, and circumstance often do it for us. Here is an example: Several years ago, I went to the funeral of a ninety year-old man. While he had always been an honest man, a good man, a family man, and a man of faith, he had also, at least up until the years shortly before his death, been a particularly strong man, fiercely independent, proud of his self-sufficiency, and not infrequently hard on others and cantankerous in his dealings with them. His son, a priest, preached the funeral mass and said this in his homily:

Scripture tells us that the sum of years of a man’s life is seventy, eighty for those who are strong. But my dad lived for ninety years. Why those extra ten years? Well, it’s no mystery: In my dad’s case, God needed ten extra years to mellow him. He wasn’t ready to die at eighty; he was still too strong, too independent, too self-reliant. But the last ten years did their work on him: He lost his wife, his health, much of his independence, his place in society, and his firm grip on life. And that mellowed his soul. He died ready to grasp a stronger hand.

We have a choice: We can do this process deliberately, on purpose (so to speak), or we can fiercely guard our strength and sense of self-sufficiency and wait for nature, God, and circumstance to do it for us.

On Cultivating or Not Cultivating Loneliness

August 10, 2008

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.

Prophecy – Challenge and Comfort

August 3, 2008

A few years ago, at a church conference that I was attending, the participants were divided into discussion groups and each group was asked the question: “What is the most important thing that the church needs to be saying to the world today?”

There were a variety of answers, each stressing a different aspect of the gospels: Conservatives tended to stress the importance of challenging the world towards sounder teaching and of pushing it to pay more attention to the issues of family, marriage, and private morality. Liberals tended to put the stress on social justice and the issues of peace and poverty. Both agreed that the world needs to be challenged in the area of consumption and greed.

The issues of challenge that were named are valid and important, but I had a nagging thought that perhaps we, the churches, need to speak something else to the world before we speak these other challenges or certainly concomitant with them. I also had the nagging impression that, albeit for different reasons, both the liberals and the conservatives were deriving a secret glee from the fact that the world wasn’t working very well, that it was paying a heavy price in terms of sadness, despair, and dissipation for not listening to us, the churches.

What, beyond the challenges of truth and justice, should we be speaking to the world? Words of understanding, consolation, comfort. One the major tasks of the churches is to console the world, to comfort its people.

“Comfort, O comfort my people, says your God.” I heard this echo from Isaiah from a wonderful old priest shortly after I was ordained: Working for a summer in one of our Oblate parishes, I was living in the rectory with an elderly priest, a fine, saintly man. He had been ordained for more than 50 years and had, during all those years, been exemplary, honest, faithful, and generous. He was deeply respected. Now, in his late 70s, legally blind, and semi-retired, he celebrated mass every day, heard occasional confessions, and spent most of the rest of his time praying. I was taken by his goodness.

One evening, sitting with him, I asked him: “Father, if you had your life as a priest to live over again, would you do anything different?” I was expecting him to say no, given his obvious goodness and fidelity. His answer surprised me.

“If I had my priesthood to live over again,” he said, “I would be a gentler with people the next time. I would console more and challenge more carefully. I was one of those people who was taught and who deeply believed that only the full truth can set us free, that we owe it to people to challenge them with the truth, in season and out. I believed that and did it for most of the years of my ministry. And I was a good priest, I lived for others and never once betrayed in any real way my vows and my commitment. But now that I am older, I regret some of what I did. I regret that sometimes I was too hard on people! I meant it well, I was sincere, but I think that sometimes I ended up laying added burdens on people when they were already carrying enough pain. If I were just beginning as a priest, I would be gentler, I would spend my energies more trying to lift pain from people. People are in a lot of pain. They need us, first of all, to help them with that!”

He’s right. What the world needs first of all from us, the churches, is comfort, help in lifting and understanding its complexity, its wounds, its anxieties, its raging restlessness, its temptations, and its infidelities and its sin. Like the prodigal son, the world needs first of all to be surprised by unconditional love. Sometime later, and there will be time for that, it will want hard challenge.

And our comfort must be offered not on the basis of what is best inside of human understanding. The comfort we offer rather must be the product of what we ourselves feel when we come to know for ourselves the ineffable, all-empathic, all-embracing, all-forgiving heart of God.

We will comfort the world, and it will be comforted, when we show it that God sees its heart with the eyes of the heart, that God feels for it more than it feels for itself, that God never feels frightened by the assertions of human freedom, that God always opens another door when we close one, that God is not put off by all the times when we are too weak to do what is best, that God understands our complexity, our weaknesses, our anger, our lusts, our jealousies, and our despair, that God never stops loving us even when we put ourselves in hell, and that God descends into all the hells we create, stands in inside of our muddled, wounded, and guilty hearts and breathes out peace.

The Pearl of Great Price and its Cost

July 27, 2008

A woman I know tells this story: She married a man she loved but, early on in the marriage, was too immature to responsibly carry her part of the relationship. One night she went to a party with her husband, drank too much, and left the party with another man. Eventually she sobered up and repentantly found her way home, fully expecting the marital skies to be ripped asunder with anger. But her husband though hurt and shaken by what had happened was calm, philosophical, direct.

When she walked sheepishly into the room he demanded neither an explanation nor an apology. Ultimately, what is there to say? He simply said to her: “I’m going away for a few days so that you can be alone because you need to decide who you are: Are you a married woman or are you something else?” He took a three-day sabbatical from her, she cried, sorted out the question he had put to her, and now, years beyond this painful incident, she is inside a solid marriage and infinitely more aware that the pearl of great price comes precisely at a price.

Every choice is a renunciation. Thomas Aquinas said that and it helps explain why we struggle so painfully to make clear choices. We want the right things, but we want other things too.

Every choice is a series of renunciations: If I marry one person, I cannot marry anyone else; if I live in one place, I cannot live anywhere else; if I choose a certain career, that excludes many other careers; if I have this, then I cannot have that. The list could go on indefinitely. To choose one thing is to renounce others. That’s the nature of choice.

In most areas of our lives we do not feel this so painfully. We choose and there isn’t a lot of sting to the loss. But the area of love is more sensitive. Here we feel the sting of loss more strongly and here we often find it hard to accept the real limits of life. What are those limits? They are the limits that come with being an infinite spirit in a finite world.

We are fired into this world with a madness that comes from the gods and has us believe that we are destined to embrace the cosmos itself. We don’t want something, we want everything. That’s a simple way, though a good one, of saying something that Christianity has always said, namely, that in body and soul we are meant to embrace everyone and we already hunger for that. Perhaps we experience it most clearly in our sexuality, but the hunger is everywhere present in us. Our yearning is wide, our longing is infinite, our urge to embrace is promiscuous. We are infinite in yearning, but, in this life, only get to meet the finite.

That’s what makes love difficult. We are over-charged for our own lives. We have divine fire inside us, want everything, yearn for the whole world, and yet, at a point, have to commit to one particular person, at one particular place, and in one very particular life, with all the limits that imposes. Infinite desire limited by a finite choice, such is the nature of real life and love.

Life and love, beyond the abstract and beyond the grandiosity of our own daydreams, involve hard, painful renunciation. But it is precisely that very renunciation that helps us grow up and makes our lives real in a way that our daydreams don’t.

In trying to explain some of the deeper secrets of life, Jesus gives us this parable: The Kingdom of God is like a merchant in search of fine pearls, when he finds a single one of great value, he goes and sells all that he owns and buys that pearl. That, the pearl of great price, the value of love and its cost, is in essence the challenge that young husband put to his wife when he told her to sort out the question: “Are you a married woman or are you something else?” For what are you willing to renounce other things?

What is our own pearl of great price? Are we willing to give up everything in exchange for it? Are we willing to live with its limits? Until we are clear on these questions there is forever the danger that, like the wife who left the party without her husband, we will act out in dangerous and hurtful ways.

Thoreau once said: “The youth gets together materials to build a bridge to the moon or perhaps a palace or a temple … at length the middle-aged man concludes to build a woodshed with them.”

So too in love and life: The child sets out make love to the whole world and the adult eventually concludes to marry a single person, in essence, to build a woodshed. But it’s only in that woodshed where life and love are real in this world.

Our Misconceptions about Suicide

July 20, 2008

Sometimes things need to be said, and said, and said, until they don’t need to be said any more. Margaret Atwood wrote that and its truth is the reason why, each year, I write a column on suicide. We still have too many misconceptions about suicide.

I won’t try to be original in this column, but will simply try to re-state, as clearly as possible, what needs to be said over and over again:

What are our misconceptions about suicide?

First, that suicide is an act of despair. Too common still is the belief that suicide is the ultimate act of despair – culpable and unforgivable. To commit suicide, it is too commonly believed, puts one under the judgement once pronounced on Judas Iscariot: Better to not have been born. Until recently, victims of suicide were often not even buried in church cemeteries.

What is more true is that the propensity for suicide is, in most cases, an illness. We are made up of body and soul. Either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, aneurysms. These are physical sicknesses. But we can suffer these as well in the soul. There are malignancies and aneurysms too of the heart, deadly wounds from which the soul cannot recover. In most cases, suicide, like any terminal illness, takes a person out of life against his or her will. The death is not freely chosen, but is an illness, far from an act of free will. In most instances, suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like a man who throws himself through a window because his clothing is on fire. That’s a tragedy, not an act of despair.

Given the truth of this, we need to give up the notion that suicide puts a person outside the mercy of God. God’s mercy is equal even to suicide. After the resurrection, we see how Christ, more than once, goes through locked doors and breathes forgiveness, love, and peace into hearts that are unable to open themselves because of fear and hurt. God’s mercy and peace can go through walls that we can’t. And, as we know, this side of heaven, sometimes all the love, stretched-out hands, and professional help in the world can no longer reach through to a heart paralysed by fear and illness.

But when we are helpless, God is not. God’s love can descend into hell itself (as we profess in our creed) and breathe peace and reconciliation inside wound, anger, and fear. God’s hands are gentler than ours, God’s compassion is wider than ours, and God’s understanding infinitely surpasses our own. Our wounded loved ones who fall victim to suicide are safe in God’s hands, safer by far than they are in the judgements that issue from our own limited understanding. God is not stymied by locked doors like we are.

In most cases, suicide is an illness and when its victims wake on the other side, they are met by a gentle Christ who stands right inside of their huddled fear and says: “Peace be with you!” As we see in the gospels, God can go through locked doors, breathe out peace in places where we cannot get in, and write straight with even the most crooked of lines.

Finally too there is a misunderstanding about suicide that expresses itself in second-guessing: If only I had done more! If only I had been more attentive this could have been prevented.

Rarely is this the case. Most of the time, we weren’t there when our loved one died for the very reason that this person didn’t want us to be there. He or she picked the time and place precisely with our absence in mind. Suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. That’s part of the anatomy of the disease.

This, of course, may never be an excuse for insensitivity to those around us who are suffering from depression, but it’s a healthy check against false guilt and anxious second-guessing. Many of us have stood at the bedside of someone who is dying and experienced a frustrating helplessness because there was nothing we could do to prevent our loved one from dying. That person died, despite our attentiveness, prayers, and efforts to be helpful. So too, at least generally, with those who die of suicide. Our love, attentiveness, and presence could not stop them from dying, despite our will and effort to the contrary.

The Christian response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the person’s eternal salvation, and anxious self-examination about we did or didn’t do. Suicide is indeed a terrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it is, a sickness, and stop being anxious about both the person’s eternal salvation and our less-than-perfect response to his or her illness.

God redeems everything and, in the end, all manner of being will be well, beyond even suicide.

Bread and Wine

July 6, 2008

Bread and wine are ambiguous, both in life and in the Eucharist.

On the one hand, bread is perhaps our primary symbol for food, health, nourishment, and community: Give us this day our daily bread! Let us break bread together! Bread is a symbol for life and coming together.

Few things speak as wonderfully about life as does the smell of fresh bread. The fragrance of fresh bread is the smell of life itself! Yet there is another story to bread. Out of what is bread made? Kernels of wheat that had to be crushed in their individuality to become something communal, flour, which then had to endure fire to be baked into the substance that gives off the smell of life. As St .Augustine once said in a homily:

“For surely this loaf was not made from one grain of wheat? The grains were separate before they came together to became one loaf. They were joined together by water, after first having been ground (contritionem – the Latin verb he uses here). For if the many kernels are not ground and are not moistened by water, they could not come to this form, that we call a loaf. … And then without fire, there is still not a loaf of bread.” Bread must be baked too in a fierce heat. Bread then speaks of both joy and pain.

Wine too speaks in this double way: On the one hand, it is a festive drink, perhaps our foremost symbol for celebration. Wine has nothing to do with basic nourishment or necessity. It is not a protein needed for health, but an extra that speaks of what lies beyond the hard business of making and sustaining a living. Wine speaks of friendship, community, celebration, joy, recreation, victory. We celebrate everything, not least of all love, with wine.

But, like bread, wine has another side: Of what is wine made? Crushed grapes. Individual grapes are crushed and their very blood becomes the substance out of which ferments this warm, festive drink. No wonder Jesus chose it to represent his blood.

It is helpful to keep this ambiguity in mind whenever we participate in the Eucharist. Bread and wine are held up to be blessed by God and to become the flesh and blood of Christ, and they are held up precisely in their ambiguity.

On the one hand they represent everything in life and in the world that is healthy, young, beautiful, bursting with energy, and full of colour. They represent the goodness of this earth, the joy of human achievements, celebration, festivity, and all that is contained in that original blessing when, after the first creation, God looked at the earth and pronounced it good. The Eucharist too gives off the smell of fresh bread.

But that’s half of it. The Eucharist also holds up, in sacrifice, all that is being crushed, broken, and baked by violence. The wine, fittingly, is also blood. At the Eucharist, we hold up both, the world’s health and its achievements along with its depressions and failures, and ask God to be with us in both. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once put it this way: In a sense the true substance to be consecrated each day is the world’s development during that day – the bread symbolizing appropriately what creation succeeds in producing, the wine (blood) what creation causes to be lost in exhaustion and suffering in the course of that effort.

What we see in the Eucharist, the goodness and joy of life and the pains and shortcomings of that same life, is the same tension that we need to hold up each day within our ordinary lives. How do we do that?

By enjoying life and all its legitimate pleasures without guilt and without ever denigrating them in the name of God, truth, and the poor, even as we go and stand where the Cross of Christ is forever being erected, namely, where the excluded, the poor, the sick, the unattractive, the lonely, the hungry, the crushed, and the bleeding find their place.

We properly live the tension of the Eucharist, the ambiguity of bread and wine, whenever we honour both the smell of fresh bread and the process by which it came to be. What that means is that we must fully honour the beauty of nature, the grace of an athlete, the energy inside music, the power and sacramentality inside sex, the humour inside a good comedian, the vibrant feel of health, and the colour and zest that lie everywhere inside of life itself, even as we are conscious of and in solidarity with all that is being excluded from or victimized by these wonderful energies which ultimately take their origin in God.

In John’s Gospel, water becomes wine and wine becomes blood and blood and water both eventually flow out of the pierced side of Jesus. That happens too in the Eucharist and it happens in our lives. The task is to hold them both in our hands, as happens at Eucharist, and then offer them up to God.