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.

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.

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.

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

Gil Bailie, Violence Unveiled, wrote those words and they teach a lesson that we would be wise to learn as we debate whether morality is progressing or declining today within secular culture.

What Bailie’s axiom suggests is that history should be written carefully: The past wasn’t all golden and the present isn’t all bad, just as the past wasn’t all bad and the present isn’t all good. Our age, like every other, has brought moral advancements in some areas and moral decline in others. Mostly this is not acknowledged in our debates about morality.

Conservatives too easily idealize the past and demonize the present. In their view, secular culture is generally seen to be morally decadent, soft, hedonistic, shortsighted, and superficial, a fall from a better time, from a golden moral age wherein people believed in God more strongly, were more generous, more community-minded, more committed to church, and more responsible sexually. Conservatives tend to look at certain moral indicators within our culture (abortion, euthanasia, family breakdown, declining church attendance, sexual irresponsibility) and see the whole culture as “a culture of death”.

Liberals too easily do the opposite: They tend to see secular culture precisely as an “enlightenment”, a huge moral advance over many former moral blind-spots, racism, superstition, sexism, narrow fundamentalism, unhealthy fear, and intolerance in the name of God. Secular culture is then seen as possessing the moral high ground and this achievement is itself seen as the result of secular culture shedding the narrowness and restraints of religion. For many liberals, we have stopped burning witches precisely because we have stopped reading scripture, or at least because we have stopped listening to organized religion.

What Bailie’s comment does, among other things, is expose both these views as being too selective in their reading of history.

Conservatives are right in pointing out that secular culture’s too-easy acceptance of abortion, family breakdown, euthanasia, faith without church, pornography, and sex outside of marriage are major moral blind-spots, a regression that does make for a certain “culture of death”. But, as Bailie’s comment also makes clear, that’s not the whole story. The same culture, so blind in some areas, is progressing morally in other areas. It has stopped burning witches. In what way?

Christianity and the cross (which lies at its center) can be compared to a time-released moral-capsule that is dissolving slowly in history. We can trace, historically, some of the more salient moments in this process: It took us, the Christian world, eighteen hundred years to accept, unequivocally, that slavery is wrong, but eventually we learned it. We kept reading scripture long enough. It took us two thousand years, and the last pope, John Paul II, to accept that capital punishment is wrong, but, like slavery, eventually too we learned that. We kept reading scripture long enough. And it has taken us two thousand years and we are still, slowly, learning and accepting more and more of the implications of the gospel in terms of social justice, equality for all, and respect for the integrity of creation.

The good news is that we are, slowly, getting it and it is no accident that, for instance, Holland, the most secularized culture in the world, takes care of its poor better than any other country in the world, has perhaps the highest status for women in the world, and is a culture of high tolerance. These are major moral achievements inside of a culture that is at the same time regressing morally in terms of its acceptance of abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, pornography, and drugs. Moreover, its moral achievements have come about not because Holland or secular culture has stopped reading scripture. What’s best morally inside of secular culture issues forth mostly from its Judeo-Christian roots. Liberalism’s reluctance to admit that stems more from an adolescent grandiosity than from any honest reading of history, akin to a seventeen-year-old who sees only her parents’ faults and is unable to acknowledge that the very moral guns she now has trained on her parents were given to her by those same parents.

What all this highlights is that our moral judgments may not be simple: The past we sometimes idealize, for all its moral strengths (its faith in God, in church, in family, in sacrifice, in self-renunciation, in sexual responsibility) was, because of racism, sexism, and dogmatic intolerance, less of a golden age for some than for others. We once too had our “Taliban” that declared that error had no rights and killed people in the name of God and of purity of doctrine. Conversely, today, our secularized liberal culture, for all its heightened moral sensitivity within the areas of race, gender, justice, tolerance, and the integrity of creation, has its own glaring moral blind-spots in the areas of abortion, end of life issues, church, family values, and sexuality.

And so, no doubt, we need, all of us, to keep on reading scripture.

Carlo Carretto, the renowned spiritual writer, spent many years living alone as a hermit in the Sahara desert. He wrote a number of books from that place of solitude, including one entitled, Letters from the Desert. In that book, he has a message for those of us who live busy lives in the world. “What is God trying to say to us in our busy lives?” He suggests this: “Be patient! Learn to wait – for each other, for love, for happiness, for God!”

Learn to wait! That’s not something we do easily and many of our problems flow from that. We often don’t wait properly for things.

Annie Dillard shares this story about proper waiting: She had been watching a butterfly emerge from its cocoon and was fascinated by the process until she grew impatient with how long it was taking and, to speed things up, took a candle and heated the cocoon, albeit very gently.

The experiment worked, but it was a mistake in the long run. The butterfly emerged more quickly; however, because adding heat violated something within the natural process, the butterfly was born with wings too weak to fly. Haste and prematurity had stunted and deformed a natural process. Some things can’t be rushed.

Dillard understood immediately what had gone wrong. A certain chastity had been violated. Impatience had triggered an irreverence that had interfered with and damaged the natural order of things. In essence, the Christmas gift had been opened too early; the bride had been slept with before the wedding; a process that needed an allotted period of time had been short-circuited. There hadn’t been enough advent.

Advent means waiting. Among other things, it celebrates the idea that the messiah must be born from a virgin. Why? Is sex something unworthy of God? If Jesus had been born in a natural way, would that somehow have given him less dignity? This is a dark underside in some spiritualities, but Jesus’ birth from a virgin has nothing to do with that.

Scripture and Christian tradition emphasize that Jesus was born of a virgin to underscore the fact that he had no human father and also to teach an important truth, namely, that in order for something sublime to be born there must, first, be a proper chastity, a proper time of waiting, a season of advent. Why?

The answer lies in properly understanding chastity. Chastity is not, first of all, something to do with sex. Chastity has to do with how we experience reality in general, all experience. To be chaste is to have proper reverence – towards God, towards each other, towards nature, towards ourselves, towards reality in general, and towards sex.

Lack of chastity is irreverence, in any area of life, sex included. And reverence is a lot about proper waiting. We can see this by looking at its opposite: To lack chastity, to be irreverent, is to be impatient, selfish, callous, immature, undisciplined, or boorish in any way so that our actions deprive someone else of his or her full uniqueness, dignity, and preciousness. And we do this every time we short-circuit waiting.

Thus, it is understandable why the prime analogate for chastity is proper reverence in the area of sex. Sex, because it so deeply affects the soul, speaks most loudly about chastity or lack of it. Sex is only chaste when it is not short-circuited by impatience, selfishness, or lack of respect. Sadly, because sex is so powerful, these things are often short-circuited. We violate chastity in sex whenever there is prematurity, unfair pressure, subtle manipulation, crass force, taking without giving, posturing an intimacy we don’t mean, lack of respect for previous commitments, disregard for the wider relationships of family and community, or failure to respect long-range happiness and health. Annie Dillard’s metaphor basically captures it: There is a fault in our chastity when we put a candle to the cocoon so as to unnaturally rush the process.

Chastity is about proper waiting and waiting is about patience in carrying the tensions and frustrations we suffer as we live the unfinished symphony that constitutes our lives.

There are some wonderful refrains in apocalyptic literature around the importance of waiting. Before the messiah can be conceived, gestated, and given birth to, there must always be a proper time of waiting, a necessary advent, a certain quota of suffering, which alone can create the proper virginal space within which the messiah can be born: “God is never in a hurry!” “Every tear brings the messiah closer!” “It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth!”

All of these phrases say the same thing: What’s sublime depends upon there first having been some sublimation; a feast can only happen after there has first been some fasting; love can only be a gift if the gift is fully respected; and (as Carretto so poignantly puts it) we must learn to wait – for God, for love, for the bride, and for Christmas.

We all nurse a secret dream of glory. We daydream that in some way we will stand out and be recognized. And so we fantasize about great achievements that will set us apart from others and make us famous. The daydreams vary but, inside them, always we are at the center – the most admired person in the room, the one scoring the winning goal, the ballerina star, the actor picking up the Academy award, the author writing the best-seller, the intellectual winning the Nobel Prize, or even just the one in the circle who tells the best story.

What we are chasing in all this is notice, appreciation, uniqueness, and adulation so that we can be duly recognized and loved. We want the light to be shining on us.

And this isn’t all bad or unhealthy. We are built to stand in the spotlight. Our own reality is massively (sometimes oppressively) real to us and scientists today tell us that the universe has no single center but that everywhere and every person is its center. And so it is not a big secret that each of us feels ourselves at the center and wants to be recognized as being there. We nurse a secret dream of glory and, partly, this is healthy.

What’s less healthy in our daydreams is how we envision that glory. In our fantasies, glory almost always consists in being famous, in standing out, in achieving a success that makes others envious, in somehow being the best-looking or the brightest or the most talented person in the room. In our fantasy, glory means having the power to actuate ourselves in ways that set us above others, even if that is for a good motive. For instance, some of our fantasies are daydreams of goodness, of being powerful enough to squash evil. Indeed, that was the messianic fantasy. Before Jesus was born, good-hearted and religious people prayed for a Messiah to come and, in their fantasy, that Messiah was generally envisaged as a worldly superstar, a person with a superior heart and superior muscles, a Messiah who would reveal the superiority of God by out-muscling the bad.

But, as we see from the Gospels, real glory doesn’t consist in out-muscling the bad, or anyone else. When Jesus was being crucified, he was offered precisely the challenge to prove that he was special by doing some spectacular gesture that would leave all of his detractors stunned and helpless: “If you are the Son of God, prove it, come down off the cross! Save yourself!”

But, with a subtlety that’s easy to miss, the Gospels teach a very different lesson: On the cross, Jesus proves that he is powerful beyond measure, not by doing some spectacular physical act that leaves everyone around him helpless to make any protest, but in a spectacular act of the heart wherein he forgives those who are mocking and killing him. Divine kingship is manifest in forgiveness, not in muscle.

That is real glory, and that is the one thing of which we really should be envious, namely, the compassion and forgiveness that Jesus manifested in the face of jealousy, hatred, and murder.

We see this illustrated in the Gospels in the incident where James and John come to Jesus and ask him to give them the seats of glory at his side. Jesus takes their request seriously and does not, on that occasion, caution them against pride. Rather he asks them: “Can you drink from the cup [of suffering] that I shall drink?” In naiveté, they answer: “We can!” Jesus replies: “The cup that I shall drink you shall drink, but as for the seats [of glory] at my right hand or left, these are not mine to give.”

What Jesus is saying, in effect, is this: You will taste suffering, everyone will, and that suffering will make you deep. But, it won’t necessarily make you deep in the right way. Suffering can make you deep in compassion and forgiveness, but it can also make you deep in bitterness and anger. However only compassion and forgiveness bring glory into your lives.

Jesus defines glory very differently than we do. Real glory, for him, is not the glory of winning a gold medal, of being a champion, of winning an Oscar, or of being an object of envy because of our looks or our achievements. Glory consists in being deep in compassion, forgiveness, and graciousness – and these are not often spawned by worldly success, by being better-looking, brighter, richer, or better muscled than those around us.

We all nurse the secret dream of glory. Partly this is healthy, a sign that we are emotionally well. However, this is something that needs to grow and mature inside of us. Our secret dream of glory is meant to mature so that eventually we will begin, more and more, to envision ourselves as standing out, not by talent, looks, muscles, and speed, but by the depth of our compassion and the quality of our forgiveness.

We are rarely at our best. Too often what shows forth in our lives is not what’s best in us: love, generosity, a big heart. More often than not, our lives radiate irritation, pettiness, and a small heart.

Too often, we find ourselves consumed by petty irritations, conflicts, frustrations, and angers. Each of these might be small in itself but, cumulatively, they take the sunshine and delight out of our lives, like mosquitoes spoiling a picnic. Then, instead of feeling grateful, gracious, and magnanimous, we feel paranoid, fearful, and irritable and we end up acting out of a cold, irritated, paranoid part of ourselves rather than out of our real selves.

Why do we do that? Because we are asleep to who and what we really are, asleep in a double way:

When St. Luke describes Jesus’ agony in the garden, he tells us that after Jesus had undergone a powerful drama, sweating blood so as to give his life over in love, he turned to his disciples (who were supposed to be watching and praying with him) and found them asleep. However he uses a curious expression to describe why they were asleep. They were asleep, he says, not because they were tired and it was late, but they were asleep “out of sheer sorrow”.

That says a couple of things: First, that the disciples are asleep out of depression. Depression is what is preventing them from seeing straight. But they are also asleep to what is deepest inside of them, namely, that they carry the image and likeness of God. Jesus was not asleep to that and, because of this awareness, was able precisely to be big of heart.

As Christians we believe that what ultimately defines us and gives us our dignity is the image and likeness of God inside us. This is our deepest identity, our real self. Inside each of us there is a piece of divinity, a god or goddess, a person who carries an inviolable dignity, with a heart as big as God’s.

And that great dignity is not meant to be a source of wrongful pride and a justification for making an unhealthy assertion with our lives. Sadly, too often it does and a rather simple commentary on the state of our planet might be to say that this is what things look like when you have six billion people walking around with each one of them thinking himself or herself as God.

But our great dignity, the Imago Dei inside each of us, is meant rather to be a center from which we can draw vision, grace, and strength to act in a way that, ironically, precisely helps us to swallow our pride.

We see this in Jesus. In a famous text, St. John tells us that at the last supper, Jesus got up from the table and began to wash the feet of his disciples, against their protests. That gesture, washing someone else’s feet, has classically been preached on as an act of humility. It was that, but in the context of the Gospel of John, it is something more. It was a particular kind of humility, one that requires having a huge, huge heart and swallowing a lot of pride. When Jesus washes his disciples feet in John’s Gospel and tells us he is setting an example for us to imitate, he is inviting us to have the strength to bend down in understanding and wash the feet of those whom, for all kinds of reasons, we would rather not have anything to do with. It is akin to having Pro-Life and Pro-Choice, strident conservatives and strident liberals, fundamentalists and atheists, wash each others’ feet. Normally we don’t have the strength to do that, there is too much pride and desire for righteousness at stake.

So how could Jesus do it? He could do it because he wasn’t asleep to who and what he was. In a stunning description of what is going on inside of him when he got up and took the basin and towel to do this. John writes: “Jesus, knowing that he had come from God and was returning to God, and that the Father had put everything into his hands, got up from the table and removed his outer garments.” (John 13,3-5).

Jesus took off his outer garments (which symbolize precisely all those things, including our everyday irritations and angers, which block the view of our deeper selves) to show us his deeper reality, namely, the fact that he had come from God and was going back to God. On the strength of that awareness, he could swallow all the pride that he needed to in order to reach out in understanding, forgiveness, and love, beyond wound, irritation, and moral righteousness.

When we are in touch with that fact that we too have “come from God and are going back to God” then, and only then, can we too swallow enough pride to be genuinely loving.

Recently after a lecture, I was confronted by an angry man who accused me of being soft on God’s judgment and justice. Though angry, he was a good man, someone who had given his life in duty to family, church, country, and God.

“I cannot accept what you say,” he muttered bitterly. “There’s so much evil in the world and so many people are suffering from other peoples’ sins that there must be retribution, some justice. Don’t tell me that the people who are doing these things – from molesting children to ignoring all morality – are going to be in heaven when we get there! What would that say about God’s justice?”

I don’t deny the existence of hell, nor of the importance of God’s judgment, but the itch to see other people suffer retribution reveals, I believe, things about ourselves that we might not want to admit.

But at least we’re in good company: The prophet Isaiah was no different. For him it was not enough that the Messiah should usher in heaven for good people. Along with rewards for the good, he felt, there needed to be too a “day of vengeance” on the bad. (Is. 61, 2). Interestingly, in a curious omission, when Jesus quotes this text to define his own ministry, he leaves out the part about vengeance. (Luke 4, 18).

Too many of us today, conservatives and liberals alike, have a need to see punishment befall the wicked. It is not enough that eventually the good should have its day that we should be rewarded. No, the bad must also be punished. Liberals and conservatives might disagree on what constitutes sin and wickedness, but they tend to agree that it must be punished

To my mind, this desire for justice (as we call it) is not always healthy and, in a way, speaks volumes about a certain frustration and bitterness within our own lives. All that worry that somebody might be getting away with something and all that anxiety that God might not be an exacting judge, suggest that we, like the older brother of the prodigal son, might be doing a lot of things right, but are missing something important inside of ourselves. We are dutiful and moral, but bitter underneath and are unable to enter the circle of celebration and the dance. Everything about us is right, except for the lack of real warmth in our hearts.

Julian of Norwich once described God this way: “Completely relaxed and courteous, he himself was the happiness and peace of his dear friends, his beautiful face radiating measureless love like a marvelous symphony.”

That is one of the better descriptions of God written, but it can make for a painful meditation: Too often, for too many of us, far from basking in gratitude in the beautiful symphony of relaxed, measureless love, and infinite forgiveness that make up heaven, we feel instead the bitterness, self-pity, anger, and incapacity to let go and dance that was felt by the older brother of the prodigal son. We are inside the banquet room, amongst all the radiance and joy, but we are unhappy, pouting, waiting for the Father to come and try to coax us beyond our sense of having been cheated. Such is too often the feeling among us, good people: Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we protest our right to despair, to be unhappy, and demand that a reckoning justice one day give us our due by punishing the bad.

Alice Miller, the famous Swiss psychologist, suggests that the primary spiritual task of the second half of life is dealing with this. We need to grieve, she says, or the bitterness and anger that come from our wounds, disappointments, bad choices, and broken dreams will overwhelm us with the sense of life’s unfairness. Her formula for health is simple: Life is unfair. Don’t try to protect yourself from its hurts – You’ve already been hurt! Accept that, grieve it, and move on to rejoin the dance.

In the end, it’s mostly because we are wounded and bitter that we worry about God’s justice, that it might be too lenient, that the bad will not be fully punished. But we should worry less about that and more about our own incapacity to forgive, to let go of our hurts, to take delight in life, to give others the gaze of admiration, to celebrate, and to join in the dance. To be fit for heaven we must let go of bitterness.

Like the older brother, our problem is ultimately not the undeserved and excessive love that is seemingly shown to someone else. Our problem is more that we have never really heard in our hearts the gentle words that the Father spoke to the older brother: “My child, you have always been with me and all I have is yours, but we, you and I, need to be happy and dance because your younger brother was dead and has come back to life!”