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.

A Spirituality of Martyrdom

March 30, 2008

Only if we adore something beyond ourselves will we stop adoring ourselves.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin said as much when we wrote that we reach moral maturity on the day that we realize that we really only have one choice in life: Genuflect before something higher or begin to self-destruct.

Simone Weil agreed: Despite being a fierce defendant of independence and private conscience, she makes it clear that the deepest need within the human soul is the need to be obedient to something beyond ourselves. Without this, she states, we inflate and grow silly, even to ourselves.

We know the truth of this through experience. We feel within ourselves a constant, congenital press towards a healthy self-abnegation and the adoration of something higher than ourselves. We only feel good about ourselves when we don’t put ourselves at the centre of the world and we only feel right about what we are doing when we are giving our lives away, when, as Richard Rohr says, our lives are not about ourselves.

From this, we see that we are built for altruism and, ultimately, for martyrdom. Within the secret of life lies a great paradox: We only experience the true meaning of life when we are dying to ourselves and giving life away.

We understand this, for instance, in the truth of the axiom: I defy you to show me a selfish person who is really happy! But there is more to this. In the spirituality of the early Christians, it wasn’t just a question of being unselfish; it was also a question of dying, really dying. They believed that we are intended for martyrdom, that dying as a martyr was the normal way that a Christian was intended to end his or her life. To live out discipleship fully was to die physically as a martyr. That is one of the reasons why the early apostolic community had some problems with the Apostle John, who, unlike the other apostles, did not die a martyr’s death. For some, the fact that he died a natural death made them suspicious of his discipleship.

And this belief, that the ideal way to die as a Christian was through martyrdom, continued through the early years of the church, when indeed many Christians were being martyred. Moreover it continued even after the persecutions stopped and the Roman powers stopped killing Christians. The belief remained that the ideal way to end one’s life was through a martyr’s death. The only thing that changed was how that martyrdom was now conceived. A rich spirituality developed within which martyrdom began to be conceived more metaphorically, as giving out one’s blood, drop-by-drop, through selflessness, through sacrificing one’s hopes and dreams for others, through giving away one’s life through duty, through letting oneself be constantly called our of one’s personal agenda to respond to the needs of others, and even through the emotional crucifixion of celibacy.

We would be happier if we understood this. When we try to live as if our lives are about ourselves, we either end up too full of ourselves or too empty of everything else, inflated or depressed. Put simply, we either end up dying in selflessness on one hill or we end up full of ourselves and self-hatred on some other hill! There’s no neutral space between. The early Christians, with their spirituality of martyrdom, understood this. Only one thing can save us from infantile grandiosity, dangerous self-righteousness, bitterness about life, and aging badly, namely, some form of martyrdom.

There is a reason for this. We are made in God’s image and likeness and, because of this, carry inside of ourselves an immense fire; a fire for love, creativity, glory, greatness, and transcendence. But that deep, restless, insatiable, burning energy is not simply a chaotic one, as Freud believed. It’s a configured energy, an energy arranged in clear, meaningful patterns. We burn with fire, but it’s a fire with meaning, purpose, and direction.

What is its meaning? It is a fire to carry others, feed others, and create delight for them, even as it is an energy to die for them. It is a fire to act as Jesus did and therefore it is a fire for crucifixion, for martyrdom. We are born to live for others and we are born to die for them, with one and the same energy, and we are only happy when we are about the business of doing both.

This longing for martyrdom has various disguises, some lofty and others less so. The desire for martyrdom manifests itself in the desire for heroism, the desire for greatness, the desire to be a great lover, the desire to leave a mark, to be immortal. Underpinning all of these is the desire to take love and meaning to their ultimate, altruistic end, death in sacrifice for others.

This is the deep instinctual pattern written into the soul itself and it posits that real maturity lies in being stretched truly tall, on some cross, in crucifixion.

Seeing the Resurrection

March 23, 2008

God never overpowers, never twists arms, never pushes your face into something so as to take away your freedom. God respects our freedom and is never a coercive force.

And nowhere is this more true than in what is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels assure us that, like his birth, the resurrection was physical, real, not just some alteration inside the consciousness of believers. After the resurrection, we are assured, Jesus’ tomb was empty, people could touch him, he ate food with them, he was not a ghost.

But his rising from the dead was not a brute slap in the face to his critics, a non-negotiable fact that left sceptics with nothing to say. The resurrection didn’t make a big splash. It was not some spectacular event that exploded into the world as the highlight on the evening news. It had the same dynamics as the incarnation itself: After he rose from the dead, Jesus was seen by some, but not by others; understood by some, but not by others. Some got his meaning and it changed their lives, others were indifferent to him, and still others understood what had happened, hardened their hearts against it, and tried to destroy its truth.

Notice how this parallels, almost perfectly, what happened at the birth of Jesus: The baby was real, not a ghost, but he was seen by some, but not by others and the event was understood by some but not by others. Some got its meaning and it changed their lives, others were indifferent and their lives went on as before, while still others (like Herod) sensed its meaning but hardened their hearts against it and tried to destroy the child.

Why the difference? What makes some see the resurrection while others do not? What lets some understand the mystery and embrace it, while others are left in indifference or hatred?

Hugo of St. Victor used to say: Love is the eye! When we look at anything through the eyes of love, we see correctly, understand, and properly appropriate its mystery. The reverse is also true. When we look at anything through eyes that are jaded, cynical, jealous, or bitter, we will not see correctly, will not understand, and will not properly appropriate its mystery.

We see this in how the Gospel of John describes the events of Easter Sunday. Jesus has risen, but, first of all, only the person who is driven by love, Mary Magdala, goes out in search of him. The others remain as they are, locked inside their own worlds. But love seeks out its beloved and Mary Magdala goes out, spices in hand, wanting at least to embalm his dead body. She finds his grave empty and runs back to Peter and the beloved disciple and tells them the tomb is empty. The two race off together, towards the tomb, but the disciple whom Jesus loved out-runs Peter and gets to the tomb first, but he doesn’t enter, he waits for Peter (authority) to go in first.

Peter enters the empty tomb, sees the linens that had covered the body of Jesus, but does not understand. Then the beloved disciple, love, enters. He sees and he does understand. Love grasps the mystery. Love is the eye. It is what lets us see and understand the resurrection.

That is why, after the resurrection, some saw Jesus but others did not. Some understood the resurrection while others did not. Those with the eyes of love saw and understood. Those without the eyes of love either didn’t see anything or were perplexed or upset by what they did see.

There are lots of ways to be blind. I remember an Easter Sunday some years ago when I was a young graduate student in San Francisco. Easter Sunday was late that year and it was a spectacularly beautiful spring day. But on that particular day I was mostly blind to what was around me. I was young, homesick, alone on Easter Sunday, and nursing a huge heartache. That colored everything I was seeing and feeling. It was Easter Sunday, in spring, in high sunshine, but, for what I was seeing, it might as well have been midnight, on Good Friday, in the dead of winter.

Lonely and nursing a heartache, I took a walk to calm my restlessness. At the entrance of a park, I saw a blind beggar holding a sign that read: It’s spring and I’m blind! The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was blind that day, more blind than that beggar, seeing neither spring nor the resurrection. What I was seeing were only those things that reflected what was going on inside my own heart.

Christ is risen, though we might not see him! We don’t always notice spring. The miraculous doesn’t force itself on us. It’s there, there to be seen, but whether we see or not, and what precisely we do see, depends mainly upon what’s going on inside our own hearts.

A Drama of the Heart – Jesus’ Sacrifice

March 16, 2008

It is one thing to love when you feel love around you, when others understand you and are grateful for your person and gifts; it is quite another when everything around you speaks of misunderstanding, jealousy, coldness, and hatred.

It is one thing to maintain your ideals when they are shared by others, when the gospel works for you, when principle works out in practice; it is quite another when it seems you are alone in some ideal and when the gospel appears to be delivering more death than life.

It is one thing to keep your balance when the rhythms of life support it, when there is a healthy give and take to things, when life is fair; it is quite another when things are unfair, when you are unjustly criticized, when everyone else seems to have lost balance, when, like on Good Friday, it gets dark in the middle of the day.

It is one thing to be gracious when those around you are respectful, warm, and fair; it is quite another when everyone seems bitter, disrespectful, jealous, and cold.

It is one thing to bless others when they want to receive that blessing, when they hang on to your every word, when they want to be in your company; it is quite another when their very glance speaks of loathing and when they avoid you when you come into a room.

It is one thing to forgive others when that forgiveness seems fair, when it isn’t impossible to swallow the hurt, when the wound dealt you is not mortal; it is quite another to forgive someone when it isn’t fair, when the wound dealt you is mortal, when the life being murdered is your own.

It is one thing to give your life over to family, church, community, and God when you feel loved and supported by them, when they seem worth the sacrifice, when you get a good feeling by doing it; it is quite another thing when you do not feel support, when it doesn’t seem worthwhile, and when you feel no other reason for doing it except truth and principle.

These contrasts capture, in essence, what Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane and on the cross. His passion was a drama of the heart, not an endurance test for his body.

What made Jesus’ sacrifice, his handing himself over, so special?

We have, I think, focused too much on the physical aspects of the crucifixion to the detriment of what was happening more deeply, underneath. Why do I say that? Because none of the gospels emphasize the physical sufferings, nor indeed, in the fears he expresses in conversations before his death, does Jesus. What the gospels and Jesus emphasize is his moral loneliness, the fact that he was alone, betrayed, humiliated, misunderstood, the object of jealousy and crowd hysteria, that he was a stone’s throw away from everyone, that those who loved him were asleep to what was really happening, that he was unanimity-minus-one.

And this moral loneliness, mocked by those outside of it, tempted him against everything he had preached and stood for during his life and ministry. What made his sacrifice so special was not that he died a victim of violence (millions die as victims of violence and their deaths aren’t necessarily special) nor that he refused to use divine power to stop his death (as he himself taught, that would have proved nothing). What made his death so special is that, inside of all the aloneness, darkness, jealousy, misunderstanding, sick crowd hysteria, coldness, and murder, he held out, he gave himself over, without bitterness, without self-pity, holding his ideals intact, gracious, respectful, forgiving, without losing his balance, his meaning, or his message.

That’s the ultimate test and we face it daily in many areas of our lives.

Some years ago, I was participating in a forum debating a book on chastity. The book, written by a woman still in her early twenties, was a very idealistic one and it urged young people to not have sex before marriage, but to keep their virginity as a special gift for their partners in marriage. One of the panellists, a very sincere woman, had this reaction: “I like what this young woman says and when my daughters are in their teens I’ll have them read this book, but what she says makes a lot more sense when you are 20 years old and know what you’re waiting than when your 39 years old and no longer know what you’re waiting for!”

Jesus’ sacrifice was so special because, long after the clock had run out on everything and there seemed no reason left to wait for anything, he still held on, to his ideals, his balance, his gracious, his forgiveness, and his love.

The struggle to do that, to remain faithful, is the real drama inside the death of Jesus and in the end it is a struggle of the heart, not the body.

Inarticulate Loves

March 2, 2008

There is a fine little poem by an American poet, Lee Yung Lee, about a relationship between a father and a son. I read it in church sometimes on Father’s Day. Entitled, A Story, it runs like this:

Sad is the man who is asked for a story
and can’t come up with one.
His five year-old son waits in his lap:
“Not the same story baba!
Not the same one, a new one!”
The man rubs his chin and scratches his ear.
In a room full of books
in a world full of stories
he can recall not one.
And soon he thinks
this boy will give up on his father.
And already the man lives far ahead
he sees the day the boy will go away.
“Don’t go,” he says, “hear the alligator story again.
Hear the angel story one more time.
You love the spider story!
You laugh at that spider.
Let me tell it!”
But the boy is already packing his shirts
he is looking for his keys.
“Are you a god,” the man screams, “that I am mute before you?
Am I a god, that I should never disappoint you?”
But truly the boy is still here.
“Please, baba, a story!”
It is an emotional rather than a logical question.
It is an earthily, not a heavenly one.
And it posits
that a boy’s supplications
and a father’s love
add up to silence.

Lee’s poem is about the inarticulateness of a father before his son. But the poem would read just as well in terms of other relationships: mother-daughter, mother-son, father-daughter, or even wife-husband, or friend-friend. One person’s supplication, a child or adult, and another’s love too often add up to silence and disappointment. In the end, except for rare occasions, we all end up not really finding the words we need to speak to each other in our relationships. We are all inarticulate in love, painfully so.

Daily we find ourselves sitting across from someone where the situation calls for a new story and we can only stutter. There’s supplication in the other person’s eyes and in the situation itself: Please a new story, not the old one! But that supplication and our best intentions add up to silence. We are mute before each other and so we talk sports scores, shopping, neighborhood gossip, fashion, the weather, the latest T.V. show, anything, except what would need to be spoken.

It begins already when our children sit on our laps as infants and we are unsure of what to say, though perhaps then it is easier to find words to express our love. But it gets harder as they grow up and their persons and lives become complex as they wrestle with restlessness, sexuality, and their need to separate themselves from us. Then we begin to feel unsure and we can’t find the words we need to speak or we find that we cannot speak the words we like to speak. We agonize as we lose our closeness to our children. They begin to push away the old words and we find that, if we keep speaking those words, they push us away with the words.

But their supplication doesn’t go away, they need us more than ever and they need to hear certain things from us. But what? The words we find are not words that they want to hear. All that tension is ultimately a supplication: A new story, not the old one. Tell me a new story!

And the same thing happens too inside of all our close relationships. We come to critical times, a friend is sick in the hospital, a colleague is getting married, someone is moving away, a family member is undergoing a divorce, a friend is losing her job, and, again, we find ourselves painfully inarticulate, searching for words and not finding them. And so, as is evident in so many dreadful toasts at weddings, we avoid speaking to the occasion altogether or we speak words that do anything except honor the occasion.

But we shouldn’t be so hard on ourselves. We aren’t Gods. And if we were as articulate as Lee-Yung Lee we might ask instead: “Are you a god that I should be mute before you? Am I a god, that I should never disappoint you?”

But the supplication still beckons and so we succumb to the temptation to repeat the time-worn stories, the usual bad jokes at the wedding reception, the safe banter that moves things along: “Let’s talk about last night’s game! Let me tell you what happened at work! Have you heard this joke?” But we sense that, figuratively, everyone’s packing to leave: “Don’t go!” we say desperately, “hear the alligator story again!” But they’re all still here, begging for a new story: “Please, baba, a story!”

In the Foreword to The Black Prince, Iris Murdoch writes: “I have known, for long periods, the torture of a life without self-expression.” Nowhere is this torture more felt than when we stand before our loved ones.

The Nature of Faith

February 17, 2008

God made us in his image and likeness and we have never stopped returning the favor.

We are forever creating God in our own image and likeness. We picture God, what we believe God to be and stand for, according to what we imagine God should be like. Sometimes that speaks for what’s best in us and sometimes it does the opposite. In either case, we are usually a long way from the God that Jesus revealed. That is why we often believe in and preach a God who, like us, is jealous, arbitrary, legalistic, unfair, fearful, consumed with protecting himself, vengeful, unforgiving, and violent.

It is no accident that in every age, including our own, the worst violence, bigotry, and murder are usually justified in the name of God, even when this is done in the name of atheism or secularity. Today we see this, most clearly perhaps, in Islamic extremists who explicitly invoke the name and the cause of God as they randomly unleash murder, but, in subtler ways, we see this in every religion and secular ideology. At some point, somewhere, invariably there is divine justification for something that is unjust based upon a “God” who has been shaped according to human imagination, with its very real limits, biases, wounds, and self-protective instincts.

Fortunately, we have innate mechanisms for health and whenever we go wrong something inside reacts. That isn’t just true for our bodies, but too for our souls. Faith has its own inbuilt immune system. We want God on our own terms, but ultimately it doesn’t work. Divine love and divine revelation are pure gifts and the inner dynamics of faith insure that they have to be received as pure gifts or not received at all.

That is why, as we see from Scripture, real revelation, a true in-breaking of God into our lives, always comes as a surprise, as something we could not have anticipated, programmed for ourselves, manipulated, or even imagined. Thus scripture tells us to make a special place in our lives for the unfamiliar, the stranger, the foreigner, the person who is utterly different from us. What’s unfamiliar is what brings us God’s revelation. One of the marks of true revelation is that it stretches us, takes us into new territory, and opens us up to realities we cannot imagine.

And that is why we sometimes experience dark nights of the soul in our faith and religious beliefs. What happens is that our religious securities, including our imaginative sense of God’s existence, disappear and we are left not just with a new and surprising (to us) insecurity in terms of our religious belief but, more painfully still, the incapacity to imagine with any certainty the existence and nature of God. Our inner powers to feel, imagine, and sense God’s existence dry up and leave us in a certain “agnosticism”.

Mystics call this a dark night of the soul and assure us of two things: First, that God doesn’t disappear, but rather what disappears is our former (self-interested) way of knowing and holding onto God. Second, that our religious securities need to disappear precisely because they have too much of us wrapped up inside of them. The agnosticism we feel (and agnostic means to not know) is a healthy unknowing, an unknowing that opens us up to a purer and a deeper way of experiencing God. Essentially what a dark night of the soul does is clear away false debris, false securities, and the manipulative images of God that we created for ourselves.

When C.S. Lewis was struggling with his decision to become a Christian, one of his major hesitancies came from the fact that he was unable to imagine for himself the mystery of redemption, how Jesus’ death could have a saving effect upon others. One of the turning points in his decision to become a Christian came as the result of challenge from .J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings. Hearing Lewis express his doubt, Tolkien simply said: “That is a poverty of imagination on your part!” Nothing could be more true. God, and the great mysteries, are indeed beyond our imaginations and sometimes when we try to imagine them we experience an agnosticism precisely because we end up meeting ourselves rather than the true God. And we shouldn’t believe in ourselves!

Paul Tillich once defined real religion as what we attain when, in our religious quest, we attune ourselves to a reality and a consciousness that is beyond our own, as opposed to touching what is highest inside of ourselves or highest within the collective ideals of humanity. In real religion we meet God, not ourselves.

But we struggle mightily to attune ourselves to real religion, to stop forming God in our own image and likeness. And that is why faith is often felt as a darkness rather than as a light, as a yearning rather than as a certainty, and as a feeling of painful absence rather than as a sense of joyful presence.

Jesus and Justice

February 10, 2008

Jesus and justice – rarely do we bring them together as the gospels do.

Somehow we find it hard to bring together the Jesus who is so uncompromising in the area of private prayer and integrity, who says we delude ourselves if we think we are following him but are not praying or keeping the commandments, with the Jesus who tells us unequivocally that at the last judgment there will only be one test as to whether we will go to heaven or not, namely, how we responded to the poor during our lifetime. The Jesus who invites us into personal piety and church doctrine is the same Jesus who tells us that nobody will get to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

But we have always had some special mentors who helped show us how this might be done. Dorothy Day comes to mind, as do a number of others: Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, Mother Theresa, Jean Vanier, William Stringfellow. Dorothy Day perhaps best exemplifies this; she was equally comfortable leading the rosary or leading the peace march.

One of the persons who as been a special mentor to me, since I never had the privilege of meeting Dorothy Day, is Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners – a magazine, a peace movement, and a spirituality. Wallis, a lay man, is an evangelical with deep catholic and ecumenical sympathies who, as a young man in the 1960s got kicked out of his own white evangelical church for standing up for justice during the race-riots in Detroit. In the forty years since he has lost neither his idealism nor his commitment to Jesus. Moreover, like Dorothy Day, he resists the temptation to bracket half of the gospel and opt for either private morality or social justice. For him, it is always both and that is why you find him leading both peace rallies and prayer rallies. Just in the past year, among other things, I have heard him speak at a Roman Catholic Religious Education convention and seen him lead a nationally-televised debate between the leading presidential candidates running for the 2008 election.

Four years ago, he wrote a remarkable book entitled, God’s Politics – Why the Right Gets it Wrong and the Left Doesn’t Get It. Sensing that a number of things have shifted since, he has just published a new book, The Great Awakening, Reviving Faith and Politics in a Post-Religious Right America. His new book is very hope-filled. In his view, what has changed, and changed for the better, are two things: The Left has awoken more to Jesus, even as the Right, particularly the Evangelical Right, has awoken more to justice. As a result, we are beginning to find more common ground because both sides are moving to higher ground.

That is a very hopeful development which, after the deep political and ecclesial divisions of the past years, is opening up some wonderful new possibilities. What possibilities? Let me have Wallis speak for himself:

Given these new developments, how both the Left and Right have awoken more deeply to a new reality … It is possible to call for personal responsibility and social responsibility at the same time. It is possible to preserve the environment and turn back the threats against our fragile planet while also promoting the kind of economic growth that can lift people out of poverty. It is possible to love one’s country while admitting its mistakes, holding it to higher standards, and insisting that God’s blessings are not only bestowed on one nation. It is possible to take the reality of evil and the existence of enemies very seriously, but also to see the ‘logs in our own eye’ and prefer the skills of conflict resolution and the requirements of justice to the habit of war. All these things are indeed possible, and could unite the best instincts of principled conservatism and progressive liberalism while balancing the values of both freedom and community.

Given all of this, he suggests that it is possible too to be pro-life, to believe that abortion is always a moral tragedy, without isolating those who are making desperate choices, just as it is possible to be strongly pro-family, defend the sanctity of marriage, without denigrating those whose lives are different. And perhaps most important of all, it is possible then to let a passionate commitment to faith and justice not lead to sectarian warfare but to respectful dialogue and action for both Jesus and justice beyond just our own church, our own political party, and our own ideology.

To that end, Wallis suggests seven principles of engagement for Christian political involvement in the world: 1. God hates injustice. 2. The kingdom of God is a new order. 3. The church is an alternative community. 4. The kingdom of God transforms the world by addressing the specifics of injustice. 5. The church is the conscience of the state, holding it accountable for upholding justice and restraining its violence. 6. Take a global perspective. 7. Seek the common good.

Images for Lent

February 3, 2008

What is the meaning of lent? Why do we set aside forty days each year to voluntarily give up some legitimate enjoyments so as to prepare for Easter?

The need for lent is written right into our DNA. Perhaps a look at some of images for lent can help make this clearer.

Religiously the richest image we have for lent is the image of the desert, of Jesus going into there voluntarily to fast and pray. Scripture tells us that Jesus went into the desert for forty days and, while there, he ate nothing. This doesn’t necessarily mean that, literally, he took no food or water during that time, but rather that he deprived himself of all physical supports (including food, water, enjoyments, distractions) that protected him from feeling, full force, his vulnerability, dependence, and need to surrender in deeper trust to God. And in doing this, we are told, he found himself hungry and consequently vulnerable to temptations from the devil – but also, by that same token, more open to God.

The desert, by taking away the securities and protections of ordinary life, strips us bare and leaves us naked, both before God and the devil. This brings us face-to-face with our own chaos. That’s an image for lent.

But we have some wonderfully rich anthropological images for lent as well. Let me briefly mention three of them.

In virtually every culture there is, somewhere, the concept of having “to sit in the ashes for a time” as a necessary preparation for some deep joy or fulfillment.

We see this, for example, in the story of Cinderella. The name itself, Cinderella, holds the key: It is derived from two words: Cinders, meaning ashes; and Puella, the Latin word for young girl. Etymologically, Cinderella means the eternal girl who sits in the ashes, with the further idea being that, before she, or anyone else, gets to put on the royal clothes, go to the ball, and dance with the prince, she must first spend some time sitting in the ashes, tasting some emptiness, feeling some powerlessness, and trusting that this deprivation and humiliation is necessary to help bring about the maturity needed to do the royal dance.

There is a similar concept inside some North American Native cultures, where it is accepted that, in everyone’s life, there will come a season where he or she will have to spend some time sitting in the ashes. For example, in some tribes, when they used to live communally in long- houses, the fires for heating and warmth were kept in the center of the house so that a partially open roof could function as a chimney. Ashes would, of course, accumulate around the fires and occasionally someone from the community would, for a period of time, simply sit in the ashes, quiet, withdrawn from ordinary activities, and take little food or water. Eventually a day would come when he or she would get up, wash off the ashes, and resume normal activities. Nobody asked why. It was taken for granted that this person was working through something, a depression or crisis of some sort, and needed that space, that quiet, that withdrawal, to work through some inner chaos and demons. In short, he or she was seen to need a lenten season.

A second image is that of being a child of Saturn. In some mythologies, Saturn was thought to be the planet that causes us to feel sadness and despondency. And so if you were a poet, an artist, a philosopher, a writer, or a religious thinker you would want, sometimes, to sit under Saturn, that is, to enter voluntarily into certain inner areas of the soul that ordinarily you might want to avoid precisely because they trigger chaos, sadness, heaviness, and despondency. Part of the idea was also that, occasionally in every person’s life, you would for a time become a child of Saturn, meaning that you would be overcome by a certain sadness and heaviness and would have to cease your normal activities and sit for a time with that, patiently learning some lessons that only a certain sadness could teach you. Again, the idea was that there is some necessary inner work that can only be done in sadness and heaviness and we need sometimes to enter these voluntarily.

Finally, there is yet another rich image in anthropology to can help us understand lent, the image of our own tears as re-connecting us to the flow of life. The image is simple: Our tears are salt water, as is the ocean which is ultimately the origin of all life on this planet. What our tears do is put as back into touch with the physical origins of all life on this planet, salt water. The idea then is that, occasionally, it is good to forsake the joys of life for the salt of tears because only tears can deepen us and help us connect to our origins and grounding.

Lent is meant to do exactly that.

The Domestic and the Monastic

January 27, 2008

“God is more domestic than monastic!”

A novelist, Nikos Kazantzakis, wrote those words but a theologian might have. Christ was born into a family not a monastery.

Not that there is anything wrong with monasteries. Maybe they’re not places where families live but they’re special places, like deserts and shrines, where we can be apart from the ordinary to do some deeper inner work. You can find God too in a monastery, but, ordinarily, God is found wherever there are little children, and families, and kitchen tables, and petty squabbles, and bills to pay, and all those other kinds of things that seem unspiritual.

Carlo Carretto, the renowned spiritual writer, shares how he learned this from experience: A much respected spiritual mentor, he had spent most of his life living by himself as a hermit in the Sahara desert, praying in silence and translating scripture into the Bedouin language. On one of his visits home to Italy, sitting with his mother, he was struck by the fact that she, an earthy practical woman who had raised a large family and who had gone through whole years of her life so preoccupied with the duties of raising her children that she never had any quality time alone, was more of a contemplative than he was, her hermit son, who had spent years alone in solitude trying to block out the distractions of the world so as to pray.

But Carretto didn’t draw a simplistic conclusion from this. Realizing that his mother, who had been so busy and preoccupied for so many years, was more contemplative than he was didn’t suggest that there was something wrong with what he had been doing all those years in the desert. Rather it suggested that there had been something very right about what she had been doing during those years when the constant demands of little children and family left her with no time ever for herself.

Contemplativeness and openness to the presence of God are not as much a question of silence and quiet, important as these are, as they are of being unselfish and beyond self-preoccupation. Contemplativeness is self-forgetfulness. Silence and the desert can help us to forget ourselves, but so too can duty, the demands of family, parenting, job, and vocation. Indeed, the normal road to sanctity (which is unselfishness and gratitude) leads through family, job, unpaid bills, and duty, rather than through a monastery. Monasteries are special places and the monastic vocation is a special calling, not the norm or ideal for everyone.

My parents’ generation had their own way of understanding this. They called this living out one’s “duties of state.” Their idea was simple, practical, and solidly theological: Nobody gets a free ride in life: We are expected to do some work and fulfill a vocation given us from God. Accordingly we should expect that family, church, duty, and work will necessarily consume our primary time and energy up until we retire. But the idea was that this is where God wants us and that this is where we will find sanctity. Sanctity is found by doing the duties that conscriptively unfold before us each day – doing our work, raising kids, taking care of aging parents, paying bills, helping neighbors, serving country, helping with church life.

The formula for sanctity doesn’t need to be searched for; it finds you, in the duties that you find daily in the path of ordinary life. Ordinary life is your monastery. The alarm clock that goes off early each morning to rouse you from sleep and send you off to work is your monastic bell, as is the mortgage you are paying, the aging parents you now need to care for, the demands of your children, and the needs of your neighbors and country. Like the bell at a monastery, they summon you out of your own agenda and self-interest to something larger than yourself, the agenda of the community and God’s cause. Not least, the church bell which summons you to weekly or daily worship is also a monastic bell. God is found in the rhythms of your daily life, at your kitchen table, in your bedroom, in the struggle to pay your bills and meet your responsibilities, and in the summons to go to church.

Monks have secrets worth knowing, but so too do families. Carlo Carretto did some deep inner work during all those years of silence, fasting, and prayer in the desert, but so too did his mother, during all those years when the asceticism of being a mother, of being over-busy, and of having to think always of other people’s needs before her own made her fast from so many pleasures that she might have enjoyed and forced her to be self-forgetful and generous.

There are two kinds of monasteries and two kinds of monastic bells. Both are good, as long as they summon us beyond ourselves to the kind of fasting and prayer that makes us put others and God before ourselves.

“Blood and Water Poured Out”

January 20, 2008

Paradox is everywhere: Sometimes the things you think will make you happy end up saddening you and sometimes the very thing that breaks your heart is also the thing that opens it to warmth and gratitude.

Sometimes it’s death itself that pours out life.

We see this in the language that surrounds the death of Jesus in the Gospels. In some of the Gospels, the moment of Jesus’ death brings with it a series of apocalyptic-type cataclysms – the temple veil is ripped, top to bottom, and a series of earthquakes shake the earth, opens graves, and the saints begin to walk around. Among other things, what this says is that Jesus’ death strips away the veil that blocks us from seeing what’s inside of God and, after Jesus’ death, we are to believe that the graves are empty, our loved ones aren’t there, but with Jesus, alive, elsewhere.

John’s Gospel though has a different image: He tells us that after Jesus died, the soldiers came and pierced his side with a sword and “immediately blood and water poured out.” Classically theologians have been quick to read the origin of the sacraments into that, namely, the blood and water refer to Eucharist and Baptism. No doubt that’s true, but there’s something more immediate there.

What are “blood” and “water”? Blood carries life through our bodies. It’s the flow of life. In a manner of speaking, blood is life itself. Water keeps us alive, quenches thirst, and, importantly too, washes us clean. What John is saying when he says that “blood and water” flowed out of the dead body of Jesus is that Jesus died in such a way that his death became for those who loved him and for those of us who continue to love him a source of life, health, and cleansing. After he died, those who loved him, paradoxically, experienced his death not as something that drained life from them and made them feel guilty, but the opposite: As sad and heart-breaking as was his death, those who loved him experienced it as something which gave them deeper life, let them breathe more freely, and freed them from feelings of guilt. That’s an incredible paradox but we are not without parallels within our own experience to help us understand this. We all too have experienced blood and water flowing out at the funeral of someone we’ve loved.

During the past several years, the most genuinely joy-filled occasions I’ve gone to were three particular funerals, each a farewell to a man who died relatively young, the victim of cancer. Two of the men were in the mid-fifties and the other was a young seventy. But in each case, the man had lived, and then died, in a way so as to make his death his final gift to his family and his loved ones.

In each case, all of us who were at the funeral walked out of church deeply sad but, at the same time, strangely more free, more open to life and love, more grateful at some deep level, and more free from that free-floating guilt that can so easily rob our lives of delight. In every case, almost tangibly, blood and water flowed from their casket. That’s not just a metaphor.

We experience this negatively as well: Sometimes someone we know dies and his or her death has the opposite effect. No blood or water flows. Rather that person’s death somehow asphyxiates us, stops our blood, gives us trouble breathing, and we feel guilty about having known this person and about all the things we did, didn’t do, or should have done. A sword has pieced someone’s side, but no blood and water are flowing out.

I remember a conversation with one of those men whose funerals were so joy-filled. Visiting him in palliative care, I asked him if he was afraid of anything. He answered: “No, I’m not afraid of dying, though I’m finding this hard. It’s hard to describe the loneliness of it. I have a very loving family and so many friends and someone is holding my hand almost constantly, but I am deeply alone inside of this. People can love you, but they can’t go into this with you. But I’m only really afraid of one thing, of not doing this with dignity. I want to make this, the way I die, my final act of love for my family. I want to do this right!” He did. We cried at his funeral but we all walked out of the church afterwards more free, more loving, less wrapped in guilt.

Sometimes the very thing that breaks your heart is the thing that most warms it and the very life that is taken from you is what opens up the flow of blood inside of you. Our task, in the end, is to do what this man did, die in such a way that our going away is our final gift to those whom we love.