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.

Our Innate Pathological Complexity

June 29, 2008

In her novel, A Map of Glass, Canadian novelist, Jane Urquhart, tells the story of an aging woman who recalls how, as a little girl, she used to steal her father’s stethoscope and play with it. Why?

“I loved the rubber earpieces that shut out the noise of the world. But, even more, I loved the silver bell at the end of the double hose, a bell I could place against my chest in order to listen to the drum, to the pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart.”

The pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart! What a wonderful phrase! It is not a simple thing to be a human being and, in this, we parallel the universe in general.

Science tells us that there is a deep, intelligible pattern evident in the universe as it is unfolding, but that this is only part of the story. Together with this intelligibility there are, at the same time, powerful, wild, unpredictable, chaotic forces that wreak havoc with the design and meaning and make for every kind of random occurrence that seems to make no sense at all. The center holds, but the surface often does not. Small wonder that many philosophers consider ambiguity the fundamental phenomenon in the universe and some scientists argue that there is no pattern or meaning to things at all.

And our lives can seem the same. At a deep level, at least when we are healthy, we generally have an inchoate feeling that ultimately things make sense, that there is a moral underpinning to everything, that love has meaning, and that we are called to give ourselves over in altruism. The center holds, but the surface of life, like nature itself, is often full of powerful, wild, unpredictable, and chaotic forces that threaten to wreak havoc with what is beneath. Our personalities, like the universe, are caught in the tension between deep meaning and wild occurrence that seems to belie what is deeper.

The genius of Henri Nouwen was that he was able to give expression to this. In his diaries, time and again, he would share how complex his heart and feelings were and how saint and sinner would vie with each other inside of him: “I want to be great saint, but I also want to taste everything that sinners get to experience. … No wonder my life is often tiring!” Nouwen left no doubt about his trust in and commitment to the deep things of faith and Christ, but he also left no doubt that our lives are also full of wild, chaotic, random forces that drive us in contrary directions.

The universe isn’t simple and neither, it seems, are we.

Why? Because of the very depth and riches of things, not least our own hearts. God did not make us or the universe simple and without freedom. The universe is not a machine and we are not robots, programmed to act out in a clear, predefined way. The universe resembles more a living organism than it does a machine and we are beings of mysterious depth, ambiguous freedom, and immense complexity and our deepest problems do not stem from the fact that the mechanism isn’t running correctly. Our deepest struggles stem from the fact that we have a certain disquiet inside of us, a madness that, it seems, is evident even in the physical cosmos itself. The center and the surface are often not in harmony, both inside of nature and inside of our hearts. Why?

We need think no further than Augustine’s famous line: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until the rest in you.” In the same way the biblical author, Qoheleth, points to a certain nostalgia for the infinite inside of the human heart, a “timelessness”, and suggests we are torn in many different directions because of this. Plato called this “divine madness” and believed it was what was best inside of us, the force that draws us relentlessly towards higher things. Thomas Aquinas explained human complexity by saying that our congenital unrest comes from the fact that the adequate object of our hearts is being as such. What would satisfy us, he asks? Only everything, he answers! Small wonder that not all parts of us always pull in the same direction.

Blaise Pascal suggested that all of our miseries stem from the fact that none of us can sit still in a room for one hour. He’s right.

There is in us an innate, pathological, fascinating, and holy complexity. Knowing this doesn’t make our lives easier, but, if nothing else, it can introduce us to ourselves so that we no longer need to pretend that our lives our simple and deny that we struggle – physically, morally, sexually, emotionally, intellectually, and spiritually.

Ruth Burrows, the renowned British Carmelite author, begins her autobiography, a wonderfully deep and sensitive book, with the words: “I was born into this world with a tortured sensitivity.” Weren’t we all!

Some Guidelines for Service

June 22, 2008

To try to serve others is to be caught up in many tensions, some that beset from without and others that beset from within. How can we remain energized, effective, and true? Here are some guidelines for the long haul:

Be beyond ideology, be both post-liberal and post-conservative

Have an unlisted ideological number! Refuse to be pre-defined by any ideology of the left or the right. Like Jesus, transcend boundaries, constantly surprise, refuse to be classified. Don’t be liberal and don’t be conservative, be a woman or man of faith and compassion and let that take you down whatever roads it takes you, liberal or conservative.

Strive to incarnate both the kenotic and the triumphant Christ.

Don’t be afraid to be nothing and don’t be afraid to be everything! Christ emptied himself and refused to claim any status or to stand out in terms of public titles, distinctive dress, or in any triumphant display of power. But he is too the Christ who rose triumphant from the tomb and who needs to be proclaimed publicly, with color, pride, and display. He is both the Christ of silent, anonymous witness and the Christ of chanting, public processions. Honor both.

Be for the marginalized, without being marginalized yourself.

Walk a fine tightrope! Take your stand with the marginalized, even as you are known for your sanity and capacity to relate warmly and deeply to every kind of person and group. Be known for your radical stance for the poor even as you are recognized for the wide scope of your embrace.

Lead without being elitist.

Be led by the artist, but listen to the street! Be a leader, an aesthete, an artist, a creative person trying to lead others forward, even as you shun elitism of every sort and ensure that every kind of person is comfortable around you. Be a leader, but with empathy, without disdaining others’ culture, sentiment, or piety.

Be iconoclastic and pious at the same time.

Don’t be afraid to smash idols and don’t be afraid to bow in reverence! The problem is that the pious aren’t liberal and the liberals aren’t pious. Be both, one doesn’t work without the other. Great hearts hold near contradictory principles, lesser ones do not. Help smash the false gods that need to be smashed, even as you are unafraid to kneel often in reverence.

Be equally committed to social justice and to intimacy with Jesus.

Learn to be comfortable leading both a peace march and devotional prayer! Do not choose between justice and Jesus, between committing yourselves to the poor and fostering private intimacy with Jesus. Don’t choose between interiority and action. Dorothy Day didn’t. There’s a lesson there.

Be thoroughly in the world, even as you are rooted elsewhere.

Live in a tortured complexity! Love the world, love its pagan beauty, let it take your breath away, even as you root your heart in something deeper so that the realities of faith also take your breath away. Carry the tension between having a hopeless love for the world and a hopeless love for things beyond it. Love the world as you would a lover with some quirks of character and weaknesses that cause you pain. Pray a lot. Cry occasionally. Sneak off to a church as needed and walk in the sun regularly. The church has secrets worth knowing, and the world is also beautiful.

Ponder, in the biblical sense, by carrying the tension inside the community.

Eat the tension around you! Mary pondered, not by thinking deep intellectual thoughts but by holding, carrying, and transforming tension so as not to give it back in kind. Like Jesus, she helped take sin and tension away by absorbing it, like a water-filter that keeps the impurities, toxins, and dirt inside of itself and gives back only pure water. Be a tension-absorber inside all the communities wherein you live. Absorb the bitterness, the anger, the hardness, the group hysteria, the lack of reconciliation, as a water-filter might. Then drink wine with a friend to rid yourself of your own toxins.

Help incarnate a deeper maturity.

Go into dark places, but don’t sin! Stand up for the God-given freedom we enjoy, even as you model and show others how that freedom can be carried in a way that never abuses it. Like Jesus, who went into the singles-bars of his time (except he didn’t sin), walk in great freedom, go into dark places, but go there not to assert human autonomy but to take God’s light there.

Make love to the song!

Forget about yourself and how others react to you! A bad singer on stage makes love to himself; a more mature singer makes love to his audience; a really mature singer makes love to the song. Service is the same. Forget about yourself, your image, your need to prove yourself, and eventually forget about your audience too so that you and your song are not about yourself or about your people, but about God.

Father’s Day

June 15, 2008

Father’s Day. What do you celebrate if you lost your father a long time ago?

My father died 38 years ago, I was twenty-two and just beginning to appreciate what an adult relationship to a father could mean. But he died, at age 62, and our family felt his death as a wound that rubbed raw for three months until our mother, even younger than my father, also died. We went numb after that.

But time heals and now, all those years later, everything about my father, including his death, feels warm and gives off a blessing. The same holds true for my mother. There’s a warmth where once there was a wound.

So mostly I don’t miss my father, at least not in the way we normally miss someone we love. I don’t need him in a certain way any more. In the few years that I had him he gave me what he needed to give me and now I know that no matter what I’m doing, good or bad, he is aware of it. That’s frightening too and I wonder if he blinks sometimes as he sees my life.

Remembering him today, on Father’s Day, I realize, more than ever, that I was lucky. He was a good father, and in ways not so immediately evident.

Jesus was once speaking in a crowd when a woman raised her voice and complimented his mother by saying: “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breast the nursed you!” Jesus didn’t deny that he had a wonderful mother, but added that his mother was wonderful not so much in that she had given him biological birth but especially in that she had given him birth to deeper life. The same could be said about my father. His fatherhood was more than biological.

The externals of his life weren’t extraordinary, though he tended to have a pretty full plate. Besides being a farmer, he was involved deeply in church and community. He worked for much of his life for his favorite political party, was a councillor for the local municipality for many years, and sat occasionally on both the local hospital and school boards. Once he ran for public office, for Reeve of the local municipality (something akin to being a rural mayor) and he lost. It was a tough blow for him. I remember the disappointment in him, even while he was trying to put on a brave face. What hurt was not so much the fact of losing, he didn’t much want the job anyway, but the fact of knowing that the local community preferred someone else to him. There’s pride in us all.

Beyond that, he managed a local baseball team for many years. He loved that but, given local politics, that too was sometimes more of a political joggling act (whose sons got to play and whose didn’t) than a welcome distraction to the everyday grind. But from that I inherited a lifelong love for baseball and would love to have had the chance to go to a major league game sometime with my father.

But what made him outstanding as a father was his personal integrity and his stubborn, uncompromising moral edge. For my father, there were no excuses for moral compromise, for compensating just because you were tired, or confused, or in an over-tempting situation. He issued no exemptions, to you or to himself. The real effort of life, for him, was to measure up, in faith and in moral behavior. It didn’t help to protest that you were human after all and couldn’t be expected to be perfect. His answer: “It’s no great thing being human. Everyone is that! I want someone to show me something that’s divine!”

He made it clear to us, to all of his children, that our lives were not our own, that we were given a vocation from God and that vocation is to give our lives away, even if that means hard sacrifice. I haven’t always lived that perfectly, but his voice inside of me has pushed me always in that direction.

He was a strong, stubborn moral voice, one from which you didn’t easily walk away. But he never bullied, grew nasty or violent, or over-pressured. The pressure came from whom and what he was and, from that, I inherited, I think, more than I wanted. In that moral stubbornness, he was too a reticent man, he didn’t dance easily or with much fluidity. I sense that now in my own life, in my body, in my bones, in my hesitancies, in my over self-consciousness at times, and in my failure sometimes to be able to abandon myself healthily to life.

But that’s who he was and that’s who I am, for better and for worse. He was my father and I carry a lot of his DNA, both the biological and the other.

And, thirty-eight years after his death, I walk in gratitude for that DNA, with both its strengths and its inhibitions.

Chastity And the Enchantment of Life

June 8, 2008

More than a generation ago, already before the sexual revolution, Nobel-prize winning novelist and philosopher, Albert Camus, had written: Chastity alone is connected with personal progress. There is a time when moving beyond it is a victory, when it is released from its moral imperatives. But this quickly turns to defeat afterwards.

What does he mean by those words?

Whatever they mean, they are not understood by our generation. Today’s world, with few exceptions, considers the move beyond chastity as anything but a defeat. For it, this is progress, a sophistication, a liberation from a past ignorance, an eating of the forbidden fruit that is more of an entry into Eden than an expulsion from it. Today, in Western culture, chastity is generally seen as naiveté, timidity, frigidity, lack of nerve, being uptight, as an innocence to be pitied.

A salient example of this can be seen in the debate surrounding AIDS and teenage pregnancy. In this discussion, the argument for chastity is generally seen as naive, impractical, narrow, religious (as if chastity was a religious concept), old-fashioned, and even dangerous. Conversely, those who argue on the basis of safe-sex (as if that wasn’t an oxymoron) claim the high ground, intellectual, moral, and practical. The same holds true today in virtually the entire discussion around sexuality. Chastity is given little place and little respect. At best, it is seen as an impractical ideal, at worst, as something to be pitied or ridiculed. This is not progress. Why?

Because, in the end, chastity is partially the key to everything: joy, family, love, community, and even the full enjoyment of sex. When a society is chaste, family can happen; when a family is chaste, it will find joy in its everyday life; when lovers are chaste, they will experience the full ecstasy of sex; when a church is chaste, it will experience the Holy Spirit. The reverse is also true. Chaos, joylessness, division, erotic numbness, and hardness of heart are generally a fault in chastity. To say this, though, implies a certain understanding of chastity. What is chastity?

Generally we identify chastity with a certain sexual reticence or simply with celibacy. This is too narrow. To be chaste does not mean that one does not have sex, nor does it imply that one is a prude. My parents were two of the most chaste persons I ever met, yet they obviously enjoyed sex, of which a large family and a warm vivacious bond between them gave ample evidence.

Chastity, at its root, is not primarily even a sexual concept, though given the power and urgency of sex, faults in chastity often are within the area of sexuality. Chastity has to do with all experiencing. It is about the appropriateness and maturity of any experience, sex included. Chastity is reverence and all sin, in the end, is irreverence.

To be chaste is to experience people, things, places, entertainment, the phases of one’s life, life’s opportunities, and sex, in a way that does not violate them or ourselves. Chastity means to experience things reverently, so that the experience of them leaves both them and ourselves more, not less, integrated. Thus, I am chaste when I relate to others in a way that does not violate their moral, psychological, emotional, sexual, or aesthetic contours. I am chaste when I do not let irreverence or impatience ruin what is gift, when I let life, others, and sex, be fully what they are. Conversely, I lack chastity when I transgress boundaries prematurely or irreverently, or when I violate anything so as to somehow reduce its full gift.

Chastity is respect and reverence. The fruits of that are integration, gratitude, and joy. Lack of chastity is irreverence. The fruits of that are disintegration, bitterness, and cynicism (all infallible signs of the lack of chastity).

Allan Bloom, the famed educator, speaking purely as a secular observer, without any religious angle whatsoever, already twenty years ago affirmed that lack of chastity in our culture, particularly among the young, is perhaps the deepest cause of unhappiness and flatness in our lives. He submits that lack of chastity has, paradoxically, robbed us of deep passion and rendered us erotically lame. We have, he asserts, experienced too much, too soon. We have sophisticated ourselves into boredom and unhappiness. We have been to too many places and done too many things before we were ready for them. The result is that we have stripped life, romance, love, and sex of their mysteries and their capacity to enchant us. We have, through lack of chastity, de-sacralized our experience and robbed it of its capacity to enchant the soul.

He’s right, and the re-enchantment of our souls will be predicated on reinstating a proper chastity into our lives

Our generation suffers too much from boredom, disrespect, emotional chaos, lack of family, sexual irresponsibility, despondency, cynicism, and lack of delight. We need to be slower in denigrating chastity and more honest in assessing what constitutes victory and what constitutes defeat in our lives.

Our Inner Garment

June 1, 2008

Many things divide us: language, race, ethnicity, gender, religion, politics, ideology, culture, personal history, temperament, private wounds, moral judgments. It is hard, in the face of all this, to see people who are different from us as brothers and sisters, as equally important citizens of this world, and as loved and valued by God in the same way we are.

And so we often live in a certain distrust of each other. Sadly too we often demonize each other, seeing danger where there is only difference. We then either actively oppose someone or simply steer clear of him or her and caution our loved ones to stay clear as well.

Consequently we live in a world in which various groups stay away from each other: liberals and conservatives, Protestants and Catholics, Jews and Arabs, Arabs and Christians, Muslims and Buddhists, black and white races, pro-life and pro-choice groups, feminists and traditionalists, among others.

What we fail to realize is that these differences are really our outer garments, things that in the end are accidental and incidental to our real selves. What’s meant by this?

We wear more than physical clothing to cover our naked selves; we cover our nakedness too with a specific ethnicity, language, religious identity, culture, political affiliation, ideology, set of moral judgements, and a whole gamut of private wounds and indignation. These are in essence our outer garments.

But we also possess a deeper inner garment. Our real substance, identity, and capacity to act with larger hearts, lies underneath. What lies beneath our outer garments?

In the Gospel of John, at the Last Supper when he is describing Jesus washing the feet of his disciples, (in a carefully worded passage) John uses these words: “Jesus knowing that the Father had put everything into his hands, and that he had come from God and was returning to God, got up from the table, took off his outer garments and, taking a towel, wrapped it around his waist; he then poured water into a basin and began to wash his disciples’ feet and to wipe them with the towel he was wearing.” (John 13, 2-5)

When John is describing Jesus “taking off his outer garment” he means more than just the stripping off of some physical clothing, some outer sash that might have gotten in the way of his stooping down and washing someone’s feet. In order to let go of the pride that blocks all human beings from stooping down to wash the feet of someone different than oneself, Jesus had to strip off a lot of outer things (pride, moral judgments, superiority, ideology, and personal dignity) so as to wear only his inner garment.

What was his inner garment? As John poetically describes it, his inner garment was precisely his knowledge that he had come from God, was going back to God, and that therefore all things were possible for him, including his washing the feet of someone whom he already knew had betrayed him.

That is also our true inner garment, the reality that lies deeper beneath our race, gender, religion, language, politics, ideology, and personal history (with all its wounds and false pride). What is most real is that deep down, beneath these other, outer, things we nurse the dark memory, the imprint, the brand of love and truth, the inchoate knowledge that, like Jesus, we too have come from God, are returning to God, and therefore are capable of doing anything, including loving and washing the feet of someone very different from ourselves. Our inner garment is the image and likeness of God inside of us.

It is only if we realize this that our world can really change because it is only then that liberals and conservatives, pro-life and pro-choice, Catholics and Protestants, Jews and Arabs, Arabs and Christians, black people and white people, men and women, and people wounded in different ways can begin to stop demonizing each other, begin to reach across to each other, begin to feel sympathy for each other, and begin, together, to build for a common good beyond our wounds and differences.

Sometimes in our better moments we already do that. Unfortunately, generally to have one of our better moments it usually takes a great sadness, a tragedy, or a death. Mostly it is only in the face of mutual helplessness and sorrow, at funeral, that we are capable of forgetting our differences, putting away our outer garments, and seeing each other as brothers and sisters.

It seems it has never been much different. In the biblical story of Job, we see that it is only when Job is completely down and out, when he is shorn of every outer thing that he can cling to, that he finally sheds his outer garment and utters the timeless line: “Naked I came from mother’s womb, and naked I go back!”

We need to be careful what kind of clothing we put on so that the pain of Job is not required to remove it.

The Many Faces of the Eucharist

May 25, 2008

Christians argue a lot about the Eucharist. What does it mean? What should it be called? How often should it be celebrated? Who should be allowed to fully participate?

There are lots of views on the Eucharist:

For some it is a meal, for others it is a sacrifice
For some it is a ritual act, sacred and set apart, for others it is a community gathering, the more mess and kids there the better.
For some it is a deep personal prayer, for others it is a communal worship for the world.
For some its very essence is a coming together, a communion, of those united in a single denominational faith, while for others part of its essence is its reaching out, its innate imperative to wash the feet of those who are different from ourselves.
For some it is a celebration of sorrow, a making present of Christ’s suffering and the thus place where we can break down, for others it is the place to celebrate joy and sing alleluia.
For some it is a ritual remembrance, a making present of the historical events of Jesus’ dying, rising, ascending, and sending the Holy Spirit, for others it is a celebration of God’s presence with us today.
For some it is a celebration of the Last Supper, something to be done less frequently, for others it is God’s daily feeding of his people with a new manna, Christ’s body, and is something to be done every day.
For some it is a celebration of reconciliation, a ritual that forgives and unites, for others unity and reconciliation are pre-conditions for its proper celebration.
For some it is a vigil act, a gathering that is essentially about waiting for something else or someone else to appear, for others it is a celebration of something that is already present that is asking to be received and recognized.
For some it is understood to make present the real, physical body of Christ, for others it is understood to make Christ present in a real but spiritual way.
Some call it the Lord’s Supper, others call it the Eucharist, others call it the Mass.
Some celebrate it once a year, some celebrate it four times a year, some celebrate it every Sunday, and some celebrate it every day.

Who’s right? In truth, the Eucharist is all of these things, and more. It is like a finely-cut diamond twirling in the sun, every turn giving off a different sparkle. It is multi-valent, carrying different layers of meaning, some of them in paradoxical tension with others. There is, even in scripture, no one theology of the Eucharist, but instead there are various complementary theologies of the Eucharist.

For instance, we already see variations among the apostolic communities as to how they understood the Eucharist, what it should be called, and how often it should be celebrated. Some early communities called it the Lord’s Supper, connected its meaning very much to the commemoration of the Last Supper, and celebrated it less frequently. Whereas the apostolic community that formed around John connected its theology and practice very much to the concept of God feeding his people daily with manna and they celebrated it every day, given that we need sustenance daily.

As well, we see some of its paradoxical elements right within its central symbols, bread and the wine: Both are paradoxical: Bread is both is symbol of joy, togetherness, health, and achievement (the smell of fresh bread and the primal beauty of a loaf of bread) even as it is made up of broken kernels of wheat who had to be crushed in their individuality and be baked in fire to become that bread. Wine is both a festive drink, the drink of celebration, of wedding, even as it is crushed grapes and represents the blood of Jesus and the blood and suffering of all that is crushed in our world and in our lives.

How does one put this all together? That depends upon how one defines that.

During my theological training, I took three major courses on the Eucharist and, afterwards, decided that I didn’t understand the Eucharist. But the fault was not in courses, which were excellent. The fault, which is not a fault at all but a marvel, lies in the richness of the Eucharist itself. In the end, it defies not just theology professors, but metaphysics, phenomenology, and language itself. There is no adequate explanation of the Eucharist for the same reason that, in the end, there is no adequate explanation for love, for embrace, and for the reception of life and spirit through touch. Certain realities take us beyond language because that is there very purpose. They do what words cannot do. They also are beyond what we can neatly nail down in our understanding.

And that is true of the Eucharist. Any attempt to nail down its full meaning will forever come up short because it will always eventually get up and walk away with the nail!

A Saint and Compassion Fatigue

May 18, 2008

There is a story told about Saint Vincent de Paul. Perhaps it’s partly myth, but its challenge is real nonetheless.

Vincent once gave an instruction to his religious community that sounded something like this: “When the demands of life seem unfair to you, when you are exhausted and have to pull yourself out of bed yet another time to do some act of service, do it gladly, without counting the cost and without self-pity, for if you persevere in serving others, in giving yourself to the poor, if you persevere to the point of completely spending yourself, perhaps someday the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive you. For it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is also a lot easier!”

That might sound curious. Why do the poor need to forgive us? For what do we need to be forgiven? Shouldn’t we feel good about serving others?

All of us, I suspect, have a pretty good sense of what he means. We all know that there is a certain humiliation in needing to receive, just as there is a certain pride in being able to give. The things we often complain about are really our greatest blessings: What is worse than being too busy? Having nothing to do. What is more painful than having to give away something we own? Having nothing to give away. What is harder than being dragged out of bed to minister to someone in need? Being the person who is in bed and who needs someone to help him or her. What is harder than being brought to our knees by the demands of those around us for our time and energy? Being on our knees asking someone else for his or her time and energy. It is more blessed to be able to give than to receive, and it is easier. But there’s more.

There is a certain divine power, literally, in being able to give. The one who gives gets to be God, or, at very least, to feel like God. That’s not an overstatement. God is the source of all that is, the source of all gift. When we are in a position to give, we mediate divine power and we get to feel that power. Whenever we act like God we get to feel like God.

Yet, the irony is that our very gifts and strengths, if not given over with the proper attitude, can easily make others feel inferior. It is important to understand this so that we are more careful to not serve others in ways that demean them. It is not automatic, nor easy, to give a gift in a way that does not shame the recipient. Vincent de Paul’s counsel highlights this caution.

But there’s a second lesson here as well. Vincent de Paul meant this too as an antidote to self-pity. For anyone who is in a giving role (a parent, a minister, a teacher, a nurse, a social worker, an advocate for justice, a philanthropist, a politician) there is the temptation to fall into self-pity: “Look all I am doing! I do all this for others, but nobody is doing anything for me! I am so tired! Is there no end to this? Am I the only one who cares? This is asking more of me than is fair! I have my own problems that I should tend to!”

It is easy, especially when one is tired and frustrated by lack of support, to lose heart, be begin to feel sorry for oneself, and to eventually feel that we are being unfairly used by others, that we are being asked to give more than our share.

That is very common. Care-givers often feel victimized by those to whom they are giving of themselves. We’ve even coined some terms for this: “Compassion fatigue”, “Compassion burnout.” Not surprisingly, many good people resent the demands of the poor: the welfare system, the push by various groups for their rights, the pressure for more immigration, the drain that the sick put on the energy and money of our society, the cost of repairing the damage done by youthful vandals, and so on. The temptation is to give up and give in; give up on going the extra mile and give in to the temptation to resign and take care of ourselves.

And so Vincent de Paul’s counsel should be told and retold: If we do not continue to serve the poor, despite our tiredness and self-pity, the poor will never find it in their hearts to forgive us. We need to remember that it is more blessed to give than to receive, and it is also easier.

Portraits of Vincent de Paul show him with a strong, warm face, a face that everywhere suggests a comfortable friendliness. He looks like a man you would want over for dinner. But if you had him over for dinner, you might want to make sure that you didn’t complain about the unfairness of life.

The Secret of a Monk’s Cell

May 11, 2008

Monks have secrets worth knowing, though sometimes the value of a certain secret isn’t immediately evident.

One such secret concerns the monk’s cell and the importance that classical spiritual writers attached to a monk staying inside his cell. For instance, Abba Moses, one of the great Desert fathers, would counsel his monks: “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything.” Other Desert fathers coined lines like: “Go, eat, drink, sleep, do no work, only do not leave your cell.” Or, “Don’t pray at all, just stay in your cell.” Thomas a Kempis, in The Imitation of Christ, famously wrote: “Every time you leave your cell, you come back less a man.”

Advice like this will probably strike us as unbalanced, unhealthily monastic, unhealthily ascetical, unhealthily other-worldly, or as simply unhealthy. At very least, it will strike us as having little or nothing to do with our own normal, busy, involved, red-blooded lives. What can advice like that possibly offer us? Aren’t we supposed to be in community with others?

Properly understood, the advice to stay in our cell and let it teach us everything offers some of the spiritual wisdom of the ages, of the masters. Staying inside our cell is one of the keys within the spiritual and human journey. But that needs to be understood in context.

This advice is being given to monks, to professional contemplatives, to persons living inside a monastic enclosure, to persons whose very vocation it is to live in solitude, to persons whose primary duty of state it is to pray in silence. In such a context, the word “cell” becomes a code-word that encapsulates the entire vocation and duties of state of a monk. Thus when Abba Moses says, “Go, sit in your cell, and your cell will teach you everything” he is, in effect, counselling due diligence and fidelity. Do what you came here to do! To remain in one’s cell is synonymous with fidelity.

And that’s sound spiritual advice for everyone, not just monks. Our “cell” is another word for our primary set of responsibilities, for our duties of state, for due diligence and fidelity inside of our vocations, relationships, marriages, families, churches, and communities. To “leave one’s cell” is to neglect our responsibilities or to be unfaithful. To let “our cell teach us everything” is to have faith that if we remain faithful inside of our moral values and our proper commitments then virtue and fidelity will themselves teach us what we need to know to come to maturity and sanctity.

Understood in that way, Thomas a Kempis’ warning that every time we leave our cell we come back less as persons becomes a practical warning: “Every time we flirt with infidelity and every time we neglect our responsibilities, we are less for that.” Akin, I think, to what the Gospels mean when they say that immediately after Peter betrayed Jesus “he went outside”. In monastic terms, he left his cell.

Inside of Christian spirituality and inside of the spiritualities of all the great world religions there is the common set of principles around this theme: Be attentive to your legitimate responsibilities, to your duties of state. Do cheerfully and faithfully what duty asks of you and that will teach you what you need to know to come to God. Fidelity to the demands of your life can be a deep form of prayer. Fidelity demands that you sweat blood sometimes; don’t leave your commitments just because they are difficult or the grass seems greener on the other side. And especially there is the principle: “Don’t be unfaithful! Fidelity to what God has called you to is ultimate virtue. The one who perseveres to the end will be saved.”

Our “monk’s cell” then is our marriage, our home, our nexus of relationships, our work, our private set of burdens and tensions, our truth, our virtue, and our personal integrity. The day’s duties are “your cell”. The spiritual task is to remain inside of that, to let them teach you, to let them be a form of prayer, to not flirt with what’s outside of them, and to make fidelity to them your vocation. Stay inside your cell!

After Martin Luther King’s funeral as the television cameras were pulling away from the cemetery, one of the news crews spotted on an old man, standing by himself at the edges of the crowd, crying and praying. Live television loves real tears and so a microphone and camera were soon thrust inside this man’s private grief: “Why are you sad? What did Martin Luther King mean to you?” they asked him.

His answer: “The man we are burying today was a great man because he was faithful, he believed in us even when we stopped believing in ourselves, and he stayed with us even when we weren’t worth staying with!”

Had he been a Desert Father or Thomas a Kempis, he might have simply said: “He was a great man – he stayed inside his cell!”

The Mystery of Giving and Receiving Spirit

May 4, 2008

There are different ways to be present or absent to each other.

For example, when Jesus is saying farewell to his disciples he tries to explain to them some of the deep paradoxes inside the mystery of presence and absence.

He tells them that it is better for them that he goes away because, unless he does, he will be unable to send them his spirit. He assures them too that the heaviness and grief they will feel at his leaving is really the pain of giving birth and that this heartache will eventually turn warm and nurturing and bring them a joy that no one can ever take from them.

That is the language of Ascension and Pentecost, not just as it pertains to Jesus leaving this earth and sending his spirit, but it is also as it pertains to the mystery of giving and receiving spirit in all our goodbyes.

Among other things, it points to that perplexing experience we have where we can only fully understand and appreciate others after they go away, just as others can only fully understand us and let themselves be fully blessed by us after we go away. Like Jesus, we can only really send our spirits after we go away.

We experience this everywhere in life: A grown child has to leave home before her parents can fully understand and appreciate her for who she really is. There comes a day in a young person’s life when she stands before her parents and, in whatever way, says the words: “It is better for you that I go away! Unless I go you will never really know who I am. You will have some heartache now, but that pain will eventually become warm because I will come back to you in a deeper way.” Parents say the same thing to their children when they are dying.

We only really grasp the essence of another after he or she has gone away. When someone leaves us physically, we are given the chance to receive his or her presence in a deeper way.

And the pain and heartache we feel in the farewell are birth-pangs, the stretching that comes with giving new birth. When someone we love has to leave us (to go on a trip, to begin a new life, or to depart from us through death) initially that will feel painful, sometimes excruciatingly so. But when that leaving is necessitated by duty or by life itself then, no matter how hard it is, even if it is death itself that takes away our loved one, eventually he or she will come back to us in a deeper way, in a presence that is warm, nurturing, and immune to the fragility of normal relationships.

Many of us, I suspect, have experienced this in the death of someone whom we loved deeply. For me, this happened at the death of my parents. My mother and father died three months apart, when I was twenty-three years old. They were young, too young to die in my view, but death took them anyway, against my will and against theirs. Initially, their death was experienced as very painful, as bitter. My siblings and I wanted their presence in the same way as we had always had it, physical, tangible, bodily, real.

Eventually the pain of their leaving left us and we sensed that our parents were still with us, with all that was best in them, our mum and dad still, except that now their presence was deeper and less fragile than it had been when they were physically with us. They were with us now, real and nurturing, in a way that nobody and nothing can ever take away.

Our presence to each other physically, in touch, sight, and speech is no doubt the deepest wonder of in all of life, sometimes the only thing we can appreciate as real. But wonderful as that is, it is always limited and fragile. It depends upon being physically connected in some way and it is fragile in that separation (physical or emotional) can easily take someone away from us. With everyone we love and who loves us (parents, spouse, children, friends, acquaintances, colleagues), we are always just one trip, misunderstanding, accident, or heart attack away from losing their physical presence.

This was the exact heartache and fear that the disciples felt as Jesus was saying goodbye to them and that is the heartache and fear we all feel in our relationships. We can easily lose each other.

But there is a presence that cannot be taken away, that does not suffer from this fragility, that is, the spirit that comes back to us whenever, because of the some inner dictates of love and life, our loved ones have to leave us or we have to leave our loved ones. A spirit returns and it is deep and permanent and leaves a warm, joyous, and real presence that nobody can ever take from us.

Hatred and the Gospel

April 27, 2008

There is a popular theme within Christian apologetics that goes something like this: Christianity is the most hated of all religions and that is a certain proof of its truth. The logic works this way: If we are so unfairly hated, we must be doing something right. Truth and innocence draw hatred. Jesus was hated, and so are we!

We need to be careful with that because, among other things, today, thanks to certain radical fundamentalists claiming to be Muslim, Islam is probably the most hated of all religions, and hated not because of what is true and best inside of it. Not only innocence and truth draw hatred. Being hated is not always a good sign or an indication that you (alone among the unfaithful) are holding to the real truth. It may be that you have made a vow of alienation rather than of love. Both eventually make you hated.

Being hated is only a criterion of carrying the truth if you have made a vow of love. Jesus wasn’t trying to be divisive and unpopular, he was trying to speak his truth in ways that precisely didn’t alienate and didn’t provoke hatred. But that isn’t always possible. He was trying to love others, purely and in the truth, but it eventually made him an object of hatred.

That isn’t surprising.

There is a certain proclivity within human nature to hate innocence and goodness. We see this illustrated in many books and movies. Notice how in so many stories that depict the struggle between good and evil, invariably, the bad will eventually train its sights on and fixate on what is its opposite, innocence and goodness. In most every dramatic epic, eventually the guns of the bad guys will end up trained upon the most innocent and loving person in town. It’s the saint who invariably bears the brunt of wound and hurt inside of a community. It is the saint who eventually is the scapegoat. It happened to Jesus. It happens to all goodness; by its stripes we are healed.

Why?

Because such is the anatomy of hatred. Hatred is a perverse form of love, love’s grief. It’s what love becomes when, because of wound and circumstance, it cannot be warm and reciprocal. Rollo May once famously stated that hatred is not the opposite of love. Indifference is. Hatred might instead be described as cold, wounded, frustrated, and grieving love, love gone sour. You can’t conjure-up a powerful hatred for someone unless at some level you first love him or her. When love is wounded and frustrated, the tears it provokes can be warm and cleansing, but they can also be bitter and cold. Cold grief. Hatred with its children, jealousy, bitterness, murderous feelings.

That’s part of the anatomy of love and that’s why love can so quickly turn into hatred and why most murders are domestic. When love breaks down what follows is rarely indifference (a parting in good friendship). What follows is often hatred, bitterness, coldness. Affairs mostly grow sour, not indifferent, and the same is, sadly, true of love in almost all its aspects.

What’s to be learned from this?

That hatred needs to be understood, whether it’s at a personal level or at the level of whole civilizations hating each other. Hatred is not the opposite of love. It is a perverse form of love, cold grief, bitter disaffection, that needs not to be met in kind, with a reciprocal form of coldness, but with warmth and forgiveness, tough as these are in the face of their opposite.

One of the great moral struggles of our lives lies precisely in this. When people hate us what spontaneous feeling rise within us? Feelings of coldness and anger, along with the wish, secret and not-so-secret, that their lives will go badly and that, in the ensuing misery, they will be forced to see their error and have to swallow against their will the fact that they are wrong, particularly about us. Hatred wants the other to choke on his or her own error.

But none of that will be productive for those who hate us, or for ourselves. Only if good things begin to happen in the lives of those who hate us, only if they feel the warmth of love and blessing, can their hearts let go of the bitterness, jealousy, and hatred that’s there. Hearts don’t thaw out inside of bitterness and jealousy. They break. It’s not when people are bitter that they admit the error of their ways and the unfairness of their hatred. Hearts begin to see how wrong their hatred is only when the very object of their jealousy and hatred is itself strong enough to not give back in kind, but instead to absorb the hatred for what it is, wounded love, love gone cold when it would want to be warm.

Leo Tolstoy once said: “There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.”

Mystic or Unbeliever

April 20, 2008

A generation ago, Karl Rahner made the statement that there would soon come a time when each of us will either be a mystic or a non-believer.

What’s implied here?

At one level it means that anyone who wants to have faith today will need to be much more inner-directed than in previous generations. Why? Because up until our present generation in the secularized world, by and large, the culture helped carry the faith. We lived in cultures (often immigrant and ethnic subcultures) within which faith and religion were part of the very fabric of life. Faith and church were embedded in the sociology. It took a strong, deviant action not to go to church on Sunday. Today, as we know, the opposite if more true, it takes a strong, inner-anchored act to go to church on Sunday. We live in a moral and ecclesial diaspora and experience a special loneliness that comes with that. We have few outside supports for our faith.

The culture no longer carries the faith and the church. Simply put, we knew how to be believers and church-goers when we were inside communities that helped carry that for us, communities within which most everyone seemed to believe, most everyone went to church, and most everyone had the same set of moral values. Not incidentally, these communities were often immigrant, poor, under-educated, and culturally marginalized. In that type of setting, faith and church work more easily. Why? Because, among other reasons, as Jesus said, it is hard for the rich to enter the kingdom of heaven.

To be committed believers today, to have faith truly inform our lives, requires finding an inner anchor beyond the support and security we find in being part of the cognitive majority wherein we have the comfort of knowing that, since everyone else is doing this, it probably makes sense. Many of us now live in situations where to believe in God and church is to find ourselves without the support of the majority and at times without the support even of those closest to us, spouse, family, friends, colleagues. That’s one of the things that Rahner is referring to when he says we will be either mystics or non-believers.

But what is this deep, inner-anchor that is needed to sustain us? What can give us the support we need?

What can help sustain our faith when we feel like unanimity-minus-one is an inner center of strength, meaning, and affectivity that is rooted in something beyond what the world thinks and what the majority are doing on any given day? There has to be a deeper source than outside affirmation to give us meaning, justification, and energy to continue to do what faith asks of us. What is that source?

In the gospel of John, the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are a question: “What are you looking for?” Essentially everything that Jesus does and teaches in the rest of John’s gospel gives an answer to that question: We are looking for the way, the truth, the life, living water to quench our thirst, bread from heaven to satiate our hunger. But those answers are partially abstract. At the end of the gospel, all of this is crystallized into one image:

On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdala goes out searching for Jesus. She finds him in a garden (the archetypal place where lovers meet) but she doesn’t recognize him. Jesus turns to her and, repeating the question with which the gospel began, asks her: “What are you looking for?” Mary replies that she is looking for the body of the dead Jesus and could he give her any information as to where that body is. And Jesus simply says: “Mary”. He pronounces her name in love. She falls at his feet

In essence, that is the whole gospel: What are we ultimately looking for? What is the end of all desire? What drives us out into gardens to search for love? The desire to hear God pronounce our names in love. To hear God, lovingly say: “Mary”, “Jack”, “Jennifer”, “Walter”.

Several years ago, I made a retreat that began with the director telling us: “I’m only going to try to do one thing with you this week, I’m going to try to teach you how to pray so that sometime (perhaps not this week or perhaps not even this year, but sometime) in prayer, you will open yourself up in such a way that you can hear God say to you – I love you! – because unless that happens you will always be dissatisfied and searching for something to give you a completeness you don’t feel. Nothing will ever be quite right. But once you hear God say those words, you won’t need to do that restless search anymore.”

He’s right. Hearing God pronounce our names in love is the core of mysticism and it is too the anchor we need when we face misunderstanding from without and depression from within, when we feel precisely like unanimity-minus-one

The Kenotic and the Triumphant Christ

April 13, 2008

One of the deeper issues underlying the tension between liberals and conservatives in the church is the tension between the kenotic and the triumphant Christ, the tension between the Christ who empties himself to become a slave and the Christ who rises triumph over death and rules the world.

I remember an incident at our Oblate General Chapter in Rome in 2004 that illustrates this. Our Chapter was concluding and we were trying to write a document for our missionaries around the world. There were people in the room from nearly 70 countries and so our experience was pretty varied. One of the delegates from Western Europe stood up and said something to this effect: “I live in a culture within which there is a lot of anti-clericalism and a lot of resentment towards the church, triggered not just by the sexual abuse crisis but by a history of ecclesial privilege. The only Christ I can preach right now is a kenotic one, a Christ who self-effaces, self-empties, who isn’t in anyone’s face!”

Before he could even sit down, a bevy of other voices, coming from different parts of the world objected, saying the opposite: “We need Christ to be more visible! What our culture needs right now is for us to proclaim the truth and the triumph of Christ! This is not a time to be timid and silent. We need to celebrate and proclaim our faith, proudly and publicly and with color!”

Who’s right?

Both. Scripture gives us both versions of Christ.

On the one hand, scripture proclaims, at its center, the triumph of Christ. Thus our God, as Karl Barth famously used to say, doesn’t need to be apologized for, as if He were a product to be sold. The world does not judge God, God judges the world. God doesn’t need to be soft-soaked or even explained; He only needs to be proclaimed, announced.

Barth is a famous Protestant theologian, but that is also the Catholic tradition, with its long, proud history of educational and health institutions, of Corpus Christi processions, the Way of the Cross in public, ashes on our foreheads to begin lent, World Youth days, cathedrals and churches that dominate the landscape, and religious habits and clerical collars to publicly set aside certain persons. All of these speak of the triumphant Christ and suggest that the best response to the issues faced by the church in a secularized culture – indifference, belligerent challenge on sexual issues, anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical feelings fuelled by the sexual abuse crisis, opposition to religious discourse and religious symbols in the public arena, and anger at the church’s authority structure – is not that of disappearing into a self-effacing silence, privatizing even more our beliefs, apologizing for the fact that the world doesn’t understand us, and refusing ever to set our truth strongly in the face of the world.. The answer rather is precisely to publicly, proudly, and with color, celebrate and proclaim our faith.

But that’s half of it. On the other hand, scripture also tells us that God comes into this world as a helpless baby in the straw, unable to feed himself, and he grows into the Christ who refuses all earthly power, glory, trappings, religious dress, and anything else, other than a deep life of prayer and private integrity, that would set him apart from the rest of humanity. The God who is born into this world is also the God who self-effaces and empties himself to become a slave. This is not the God of earthquakes and storms but of gentle breezes, who is cognizant that atheism is always a parasite feeding off bad theism and ecclesial dis-privilege is invariably a reaction to ecclesial privilege. This is a God who, as Carlo Carretto once suggested, would prefer that we postpone all triumphant hand-clapping and victory speeches until much later in the Kingdom and who prefers, in the meantime, that we celebrate the Eucharist in cancer wards and mental hospitals and other places where the passion of Christ is actually being lived out.

Christ is both, a self-emptying and a triumphant God. We need to radiate both. There are times to shout our truth from the rooftops, to march publicly in processions, to proclaim a God who doesn’t need to be apologized for or soft-soaked and to celebrate publicly and colorfully our faith. And there are times too to be self-effacing, to not be in anyone’s face, to radiate a God who was born helpless, an anonymous baby in the straw, empty of all worldly recognition and power.

When should we do one and when the other? That answer has to be found in our own circumstances, in our own temperament, and in our own unique calling and vocation – and in sensible, practical judgement. There is a time to flash a religious symbol and there is a time not to.

But, in either season, it is always the time to be understanding and respectful of those who think differently than we do.

The Struggle to Will-the-One-Thing

April 6, 2008

What makes a saint? One of my favorite definitions comes from Soren Kierkegaard who once famously wrote: “To be a saint is to will the one thing.”

That sounds simple, but, as we know, choosing something in fidelity is one of the hardest things to do in the whole world. Why?

Because as Thomas Aquinas says, every choice is a renunciation. In fact it’s a thousand renunciations. Simply put: If you choose to marry one person, you can’t marry someone else; if you choose to live on one city, you can’t live in another; and if you choose to spend your time and energies in one place, you can’t spend them somewhere else. We can’t have it all!

And yet that’s what we want, we want it all and we are built to have it all.

There’s a story told about Therese of Lisieux in this regard: When she was a girl of seven, one of her older sisters, Leonie, had decided that it was time for her to give up her toys. So she gathered them all into a basket and went into a room where Therese and her sister, Celine, were playing. She told them that each of them could choose one thing from the basket and the rest would be given to an orphanage. Celine choose a colorful ball, but Therese was paralyzed, unable to choose, and at a point simply said: “I choose them all! I want them all!”

Henri Nouwen once described his own struggles in choosing: I want to be a great saint, he wrote, but I also want to experience all the sensations that sinners have; I want to spend long hours in prayer, but I don’t want to miss anything on television; and I want to live in radical simplicity, but I also want to have a comfortable apartment, the freedom to travel, and all the things I need to be a professional scholar and writer. Small wonder my life is trying and tiring! It’s not easy to be single-minded, to be a saint – or to be a human being, for that matter.

I have always prided myself, perhaps arrogantly and to my own detriment, on recognizing that life is complex, that human nature is pathologically layered, and that ambiguity is the fundamental phenomenon within our universe. Our hearts and souls contain more things than we honestly admit. For this reason, I have always leaned towards authors who have tried to honestly face and name this, teachers who haven’t denied or made light of our sexual complexity, and spiritualities that have taken seriously the fact that, given human nature with all its grandiosity, we shouldn’t be so surprised to see in our world a lot of jealousy, breakdown depression, anger, and violence. Even our most intimate relationships aren’t simple. We carry too many complexities, too many wounds, too much grandiosity, so that, as James Hillman puts it, the first function of any family is to help carry the pathologies of its members.

Life isn’t simple and for that we can thank, among other reasons, the very way we are built. We carry inside of us the image and likeness of God. That’s more than a beautiful icon stamped into the soul. It’s a divine fire, a hungry energy, an insatiable appetite, an incessant yearning, a paralysis when we try to make choices. As the author of Ecclesiastes says, God has put eternity inside of us so that we are out of sync with the seasons from beginning to end. We are complicated, not ever satisfied, and, like Therese of Lisieux, don’t like to choose. Instead we want it all! Every spirituality that grasps human nature keeps that in mind.

So where do we go?

Our complexity notwithstanding, in the end, we need to become saints. Leon Bloy (the French philosopher who was so instrumental in helping bring Jacques and Raissa Maritain to the faith) once packed an entire commentary on spirituality and life into a single line: “Ultimately there is only one human sadness, that of not being a saint.” The older we get, the more we realize how true that is and how important is that truth. Real sadness has but a single source

But becoming a saint has a real cost: Hard choice, commitment, single-mindedness, willing the one thing, renouncing whatever stands in the way, sweating blood to remain faithful, and sustaining the emotional, sexual, and spiritual asceticism needed to protect that choice.

We shouldn’t, of course, try to do this simplistically in a way that denies the complexity of our souls and bodies, but we shouldn’t remain paralyzed either in the face that complexity, rationalizing that things are just too complicated and we are just too torn to make a choice.

At some point our procrastinating and the rationalizing have to end, we have to choose, accept the painful renunciations inside that choice, and will the one-thing, God and faithful service of others, because ultimately our sadness comes from the fact that we are not yet saints.