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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!