The Struggle to Bless

October 21, 2007

At workshop recently, as we were discussing the tension that often exists today between younger and older clergy, a middle-aged priest said: “I’d like to bless the younger priests, but they don’t want my blessing! They see me as a burnt-out middle-aged ideologue and everything in their attitude and body language tells me that they simply want me to disappear and give them space!”

Many is the parent who feels exactly that way as they stand before a sixteen year old, the mother before her own adolescent daughter; the father before his teenage son. That’s also true for many others: the teacher before her adolescent students, the priest or minister in the face of a less-than-appreciative congregation, the coach before his players, and the policeman before a paranoid and belligerent young man. It’s not easy to bless someone who, seemingly, does not want your blessing, before whom it would seem a flat-out lie to say what God said to Jesus at his baptism: “In you I take delight!”

It would seem that many of the young do not want our blessing. But is this so?

Not really. We must distinguish between the various levels at which we want something. On the surface, clearly, young persons often do not want the blessing of their parents, elders, teachers, and clergy. But that is the surface; they have deeper wants and needs.

Someone once said that a true missionary is someone who goes where he or she is not wanted, but is needed; and leaves when he or she is wanted, but not needed. That is true too for parenting, teaching, coaching, and ministry. We should not identity what someone wants at the surface of his or her life with that which they need and want at a deeper level.

Young people may not overtly want the blessing of their elders, but they desperately need it. Later on, after they have matured, they will want that blessing but, paradoxically, then they will no longer need it to the same extent. We should not be put off by the surface of things, where youth, naturally, push elders away and give the impression we have nothing to offer them. They desperately need our blessing.

And what does it mean to bless someone?

We see the prototype for blessing at the beginning of both the Old and New Testaments. The bible opens with the creation story and, there, we see that at the end of each day God looks at the world and pronounces it as good. Jesus’ ministry begins with his baptism and, there, we are told, the heavens opened and God looked at him and said: “You are my blessed one in whom I take delight!” We bless others whenever we look at them in this same way.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer once defined a blessing as “a visible, perceptible, effective, proximity of God.” He is right, but what does that mean?

To bless someone, literally, means to speak well of him or her. More deeply, that means to see someone’s energy and honor it as a source of joy and delight rather than as an intrusion or a threat. To bless a young person is to look at him or her and, without exploitation of any kind, give back to him or her an appreciative gaze that says his or her life and actions are a source of delight and joy for us rather than a threat and irritation.

But this can be very hard to do, especially inside of the same gender, when a young person’s life can seem precisely a threat to our status, popularity, and security, and especially when that life, in ways benign and belligerent, tells us that our own time is past. It is not easy then to say: “In you I take delight!”

But that is when it is most important to say it! When the young people in our lives give us the impression that they neither want nor need our blessing is precisely the time when, ironically, they probably need it the most. Their very aloofness is partly a symptom of the lack of blessing in their lives and a plea for that blessing.

We need to give that blessing. When we bless the young, especially when it seems that they do not want our blessing, we help lift a congenital constriction off of their hearts, like a mother cow that has just given birth to a calf turning around and licking the glue-like constricting afterbirth off of her young. And we need to do it, too, to lift a certain depression within our own hearts. God blesses. When we act like God we will get to feel like God – and God is never depressed.

Turning Sixty

October 14, 2007

Well, I’ve beaten the odds When I was 27 years old, I attended a symposium on death and dying. One of the things we did was fill in a long questionnaire which was then run through a computer and the result told you when, statistically, you should expect to die. A computer told me that would die at age 59.

That was based upon a number of things: My dad died at 62, my mum died in her mid-fifties, I’m a priest and celibate (a shorter life-projection than for married men), and I’m in a high stress occupation. The statistical projection was that I would die before the age of 60. But, I had my 60th birthday yesterday and arrived there with enough energy to raise a toast to the future. I’ve beaten the odds!

But it gave me cause for reflection. What to say on your 60th birthday?

A couple of years before he died, the novelist, Morris West, wrote a remarkable autobiographical piece he called, A View From the Ridge. I like what he says in the preface of that book: Once you reach a certain age, he suggests, there should be only one phrase left in your vocabulary: Thank-you! With every birthday, gratitude should deepen until it colors every aspect life. I’m not sure that I’m there, but at least I know where I should be going.

Reading Morris West’s autobiography, reminded me of a conversation I had with the Irish theologian, Pat Collins, on a train in New Jersey a couple of summers ago. Heading for the same conference, we found ourselves sharing a seat on a train and Pat, robust in health, made this observation: “I love living and I hope still to live for a long time, but if I died today it would be okay. I’d be okay – because I’m loved. I know people who love me, and that’s enough.” That’s a wonderful realization. Yesterday was my 60th birthday and, like Pat Collins, I’d still like to live for a long time, but if I died tomorrow, I’d be okay, because I too know people who love me. I didn’t always feel that way, about dying, or about being loved, when I was younger.

And what have I learned over sixty years?

Luck has been with me and, among other things, I have been given the opportunity to study under some first-rate scholars and mentors who occasionally were also saints. Literature, both secular and sacred, as well has been a rich well from which I have been able to drink and thirty-five years of priesthood and ministry have too, at least I hope, taught me some of life’s real lessons.

So what have I learned?

First, that there is a God, though not everything we do in his name honors that. Bertrand Russell, in a famous debate with Frederick Copleston, once stated: “If the universe makes sense, then there is a God!” The universe does make sense, though not always on the surface of things. But deep down things make sense, especially morally, and we know that whenever we don’t lie to ourselves. There’s a law of karma, operative at every level of things that lets us know that the air we breathe out is the air that we will re-inhale. There is an ultimate justice in everything.

Second, the mystery of God, the universe, and human life are far, far bigger than we have ever imagined and can ever imagine. The older we get, the more we know how little we understand, how far beyond us is the great mystery, and how we need, as John of the Cross says, “to begin to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.” When we are little children and we ask our mothers where the sun goes at night, the best answer they can give is that it goes down behind the trees to take a rest. Later we learn about stars and planets and the big-bang theory and we graph it all out on PowerPoint. We need that sophistication. But there comes a time again, beyond Einstein, Stephen Hawking, PowerPoint, and sixty years of age, when perhaps the best language of all is, again, the language of children, where the sun takes a sleep behind the trees. This is especially true about God and the great dogmas of our faith. God is ineffable and all of our language about God is more inadequate than adequate and the great dogmas of our faith are more items of the heart and gut than objects of the intellect.

And one last bit: We need more and more to trust love and surrender, to let go of ourselves, especially of our pride, our wounds, our hurts, our mistakes, our past, and our weaknesses, to give ourselves over to forgiveness. Morris West said that, at a certain age, it should come down to one word: “Thanks!” He’s right, but to say that one word and mean it we need three other words: “Forgiveness, forgiveness, forgiveness!”

David and Goliath

October 7, 2007

There’s no substitute for imagination. Without good images to provide us with vision, the world overpowers us and leaves us feeling small and helpless. Unless our symbols are working, fate can never be turned into destiny.

This is especially true regarding how we, as persons of faith, stand before a world that can often be cold, loveless, unjust, and hard. If you’re a sensitive person it‘s easy to feel overwhelmed by your own powerlessness and seeming insignificance. What can you do? The powers of the world are so huge and universal while you are so small and limited.

Whenever we feel discouraged in this way, a helpful image can be the biblical picture of David standing before Goliath. It‘s an archetypal image of how, invariably, good stands before evil, justice before violence, sensitivity before brute indifference, and tenderness before iron David standing before Goliath is the perennial image for how good and evil face off with each other in the struggle for life and death and how, in that struggle, what is good, just, and tender always looks hopelessly overmatched.

Here’s the image:

At one point in her history, Israel, who here represents God’s cause, is in battle against the Philistines who (as the word “philistine” still connotes) represent brutality, lack of justice, lack of feeling, lack of goodness, and lack of God. Their champion is a giant, Goliath, a brute of unparalleled strength who, in the picture presented, has no feelings, no sensitivity, no goodness. He walks onto the battlefield clothed in iron, seemingly inanimate, sneering, arrogant, disdainful of all opposition. Beside him stands his armour-bearer, also clothed in iron.

On the other side, stands Israel, intimidated in the face of this brute strength, knowing that, among them, nobody who can fight Goliath on his own terms.

So they change the terms! Instead of taking their strongest man, clothing him in iron, and sending him out against Goliath, they send a young boy, David, with no armour at all. He goes out barefoot, with only a slingshot, more a boy’s toy than a weapon of war.

And he cuts a pathetic figure. He walks onto the battlefield as a naive child, unsophisticated in war, someone not to be taken seriously. That is also how Goliath sees him – “Am I a dog that you come out against me with sticks? You’re not an opponent even worth fighting. This is a joke! Come over here and I will cut off your head and feed it to the birds!” Godless forces do not exactly cower when truth marches out to do battle against them.

But we know the outcome. David reaches into his shepherd’s pouch, takes out his slingshot, inserts a smooth pebble, and his first shot penetrates the skull of the giant. He then cuts off Goliath’s head with his own sword. A boy fells a giant; the toy of a child overpowers the weapons of war; what’s naive defeats what’s sophisticated; and sensitivity proves more powerful than iron.

There’s a lesson in this:

That image, David before Goliath, the child before the giant, depicts how anyone who is a true defender of God’s cause invariably stands before the world – hopelessly overmatched, looking naive, a child before an adult, bare skin against iron, a joke, someone not to be taken seriously. But victory belongs to the child. It’s the giant that’s vulnerable, it’s iron that won’t hold up, providing of course that the child has some smooth pebbles inside his or her shepherd’s pouch.

What’s a shepherd’s pouch and what’s inside of it that can fell a giant?

When David reached into his shepherd’s pouch and took out a slingshot and a pebble, you can be sure that this was not the first time he had done this. As a shepherd, in the fields by himself, he would have spent countless lonely hours practising with his slingshot, searching for just the right pebbles, and then palming those pebbles to know their exact feel, to give them the feel of his hand, to really make them his own. When he walked out to face Goliath his weapons may have looked pathetic in comparison to his opponent’s steel and iron, but he knew their exact feel, they were an extension of himself. And in that is the lesson.

Long before we walk onto any battlefield to confront what opposes God, love, truth, and feeling, we too need to spend countless lonely hours palming and polishing what’s in our shepherd’s pouch – prayer, sacraments, our traditions, and especially our charity and respect. These are David’s pebbles, our weapons against Goliath. We need, through many lonely hours, to palm them, press them, and give them the smell and feel of our own skin. Then, when we fling them at the giant, they will penetrate the iron and hardness that stand in the way of God.

We won’t always have spectacular results, like David. We won’t always save the world or our own nation, but at least we will save our own sanity.

Lost is a Place Too

September 30, 2007

Several years ago, I met a young man who was working through a very difficult time in his life.

He had graduated with a degree in business ten years before, worked successfully in a job for awhile, but then decided that the corporate world was not for him. He quit his job a bit naively without a definite plan for his future, lived on his savings until they were gone, and then went into a painful free-fall where he found himself living out of his car, in friends’ houses, or at the mercy and good-will of whoever would take him in. The few dollars he now earned from dish-washing were spent on tuition, for courses in literature and theology.

But his free-fall wasn’t just economic. It was emotional as well. His self-image, his confidence, and his relationships all took a massive beating. Family and friends were less than sympathetic and understanding. Their eyes, if not their words, spoke of their disappointment in him – the once handsome, successful, young man, now going nowhere. He had left is job with idealistic dreams of becoming a writer, but now lacked all self-confidence. He told me one day: “The hardest thing has been dealing with my own father, who had always been so proud of me. Now there is disappointment in him every time he looks at me. Recently he told me, ‘You look shabby!’ He didn’t have to add: ‘I’m ashamed of you!’ and I didn’t have to say: ‘I feel shabby!’‘

But right after saying this with real sadness in his voice, his voice suddenly became stronger and he added: “As painful as this, I have one consolation: I’m growing up! I was a spoiled, rich kid, with no tools to handle frustration. This pain is eventually going to turn me into something else. I would have had to fall apart this way sometime anyway to ever grow up; so, better it happen now when I’m still young. I look at my friends who aren’t going through any of this, and I don’t envy them. They will eventually have to go through something like this too!”

I had a sense of what he meant because something very similar happened in my own life, except that I did envy my friends who weren’t as depressed as I was.

During the summer when I was fourteen, my inner world collapsed. It began with the suicide of a neighbor. A young man whose health and body I envied went out one night and hung himself. Then another young man from our small farming community was killed in an industrial accident, and the summer ended with a classmate, a close friend, dying in a horse-back riding accident. I served as an altar-server at each of their funerals. My outside world stayed the same, but inside, not unlike the young man whose story I just shared, things were dark, spinning, scary. I was in a free-fall. The specter of death suddenly colored my whole world and, even though I was only fourteen years old, I was now an old man inside. A certain youthfulness and joie de vivre slipped away from me for good. It truly was a summer of my discontent. I envied everyone who wasn’t as depressed as I was. I felt myself the saddest 14 year-old in the world.

But, as all that pain, disillusionment, and loss of self-confidence was seeping into my life, something else was seeping in too, a deeper faith, a deeper vision of things, an acceptance of my vulnerability and mortality, and a sense of my vocation. I’m a priest today because of that summer. It remains still the most painful, insecure, depressed period of my life. But it remains too the time of deepest growth. Purgatory on earth, I had it when I was fourteen.

Many of us associate Christina Crawford, with the famous biography, Mommy Dearest, a book within which she shares what it was like to be the adopted and emotionally abused daughter of Joan Crawford. It’s a story worth reading and I heartily recommend her follow-up book, a further biographical work entitled, Survivor. In it she chronicles her journey out of Hollywood and into spirituality and religion. And that journey, like the one of the young man whose story I just shared, involved deep pain and soul-shattering disillusionment. Her story tells us what a dark night of the soul can look like. At one point, when things were at their darkest, she states that she was “completely lost”, but adds: “Lost is a place too!”

She’s right! Lost is a place too! And a very important one, humanly and spiritually.

Sometimes when the world is falling apart and we are haunted by the question: What is wrong? The real answer is that there is nothing wrong. The necessary storm has finally arrived and it is a good thing too because our falling apart is the only thing that can break down and transform that spoiled, rich, self-centered kid that is inside us all.

Restlessness on a Friday Night

September 23, 2007

Driving me to the airport this summer, my youngest brother told me a story: One Friday afternoon, he and some co-workers were talking about what they would be doing that evening, the beginning of the weekend. Several co-workers shared how they had plans to meet various friends and hit some of the more trendy night-spots in the city. My brother, happily married for twenty years, rather timidly shared that he and his wife planned simply to order in some pizza and watch movie together.

“That must sound rather boring to you!” He volunteered. “Not at all,” said one of the single women in his office. “We are doing all the things we do (restaurants, nightclubs, and a certain social scene) only that sometime, and God-willing, sooner rather than later, we can be where you are now, content to be at home of a Friday night, with pizza and a movie and someone to make a home with!”

Perhaps that isn’t true for everyone but it is, I venture to say, true for most of us. What we want at the end of the day, not to mention the end of the week, is home, ease, quiet, rest, someone to be comfortable with, some place to be comfortable in, a home. We want a place where we can be ourselves and where we don’t have to feel the restlessness of thinking that our lives are empty because we are home on a Friday night.

That’s not always easy to find. Fault nature and God: We are born into a home and we get to stay there, without having to hit night-spots on a Friday night, until puberty. Puberty is designed by nature and God to drive us out of our homes. And it does. It hits with certain violence and, even though we get to live at home for another 5-8 years, we are no longer at ease there. Every kind of energy inflames and we become too restless to find easy ease in the things that once satisfied us. We are pushed out, beyond the security and comfort of home, to search for someone and something with which to build a home for ourselves.

And so we enter our more restless years, those years exactly where we can’t sit at home comfortably on a Friday night with pizza and movie. We’re driven out, literally, to search for what can take us back home. So we hit the phone and the night-spots, searching, available, seeing, being seen. For some people, the point behind it all is clear: We are searching for a soul-mate, like the heart-sick lover in the Song of Songs and my brother’s co-worker. For others, it’s more diffusive, inchoate: We’re just restless, looking for action, for the right place to be, the right crowd to be with.

Initially there is no sense of desperation, we are young and the years still stretch endlessly ahead. But eventually a certain panic and desperation set in.. Restlessness can be punishing, a merciless bully, robbing us of the simple capacity to rest.

And we feel it most cruelly on weekends, Friday nights, when it seems everyone in the whole world is doing something exciting except us, and then around holidays (Christmas, Thanksgiving, birthdays) when the season itself seems to demand that we not be alone.

Some years ago, teaching a class at a state-run University, I assigned as reading material Christopher de Vinck’s book, Only the Heart Knows How to Find Them: Precious Memories for a Faithless Time. The book is a series of wonderful, quite idealistic, essays on marriage and family life. The essays articulate precisely the richness of being comfortably at home with a spouse and family on any night, perhaps especially on a Friday night. A young woman, about thirty years of age, walked my office one day with de Vinck’s book in hand and tears in her eyes. She told me: “Father, I’ve lived a hot-blooded youth and have slept my way through a couple of states, always thinking that’s where life is. But, what I really want is what this man has! A home, a spouse, a place of that kind of comfort!”

A place of comfort! God-willing, may we all eventually find exactly that. Perhaps you are one of the lucky ones who have already found it, in a soul-mate who has taken you home. But it can also be found in vocation, in a service, in a faith, in an ideal, in friends, inside of ourselves in a deeper confidence that lets us feel complete and worthwhile even when we are home alone on a Friday night, and especially in a God, who is our ultimate soul-mate and with whom, with or without trendy night-spots or pizza and a movie, we are always at home.

Henri Nouwen used to say: “We are not restful persons who occasionally get restless; but rather restless persons who occasionally find rest.” That’s true for all of us, this side of eternity, perhaps especially on a Friday night.

A Crisis of Faith or of the Imagination?

September 16, 2007

J. R. Tolkien, author of Lord of the Rings, was one of the key persons who helped C.S. Lewis accept Christianity. As a man of considerable imagination he was not one to easily denigrate this faculty. Yet he knew its limits. One night, after hours of listening to Lewis object to certain aspects of the faith, Tolkien suggested to him that his resistance was not so much a question of belief as it was of imagination: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part.”

There is something very important in that statement. Imagination isn’t faith. For example:

Some of the intimate letters of Mother Teresa, recently published for the first time, would seem to indicate that she suffered painful doubts in terms of believing in the existence of God. She shares, again and again, how she can no longer imagine God’s existence and the pain that she feels about that. A simplistic judgment can then be made that she ceased believing in God, that she lost her faith. Is this true?

Looked at superficially, it might appear so, at least in that she was unable to imagine that God exists. But such a judgment is too simple. We need to understand the depth of Tolkien’s comment to C. S. Lewis. Her struggles were much more with her imagination and its incapacity to give her an imaginative picture of God’s existence than they were with the actual belief that God exists. Why? Because every action in her life gives us the indication that, as she aged, her faith grew deeper rather than weaker.

But how do we know this? How is our inability to imagine God’s existence different than atheism? Consider these two scenes:

Imagine yourself lying in bed some night: You have just had a very good time of prayer and are flooded with feelings and images about God. You have strong, clear feelings that God exists. On that particular evening you have no faith doubts; you can feel the existence of God.

Now, imagine another night, a darker one. You wake up from a fitful sleep and are overwhelmed by the sense that you don’t believe in God. You try to convince yourself that you still believe, but you cannot. Every attempt to imagine that God exists and to feel his presence comes up empty. You feel an overwhelming emptiness inside because of that feeling. Try as you like, you cannot shake the feeling that you no longer believe. Try as you like, you can no longer regain the solid ground on which you once stood. Try as you like, you can no longer make yourself feel the existence of God.

Does this mean that on one of these nights you have a strong faith and on the other you have a weak one? Not necessarily. It can just as easily mean that on one night you have a strong imagination and on the other you have a weak one. On one the night you can imagine the presence of God and on the other night you cannot imagine it. Imagination isn’t faith.

Daniel Berrigan, in his colorful manner, puts this crassly, but accurately: He was once asked: “Where does your faith live? In the head or in the heart?” Faith, he assures us, is rarely where our heads are at, nor where our hearts are at. In his words: “Your faith is where your ass is at! Where are you living? What are you doing?” Our commitments, our actions, our charity, and our morality ultimately determine whether we believe or not.

Passing strange but strangely true, the posterior is invariably a better indication of where we stand with faith and belief than are the head and the heart. We know this from experience: We all have had the experience of being inside of certain commitments (marriage, family, church) where, at times, our heads and our hearts are not there, but we are there! The head tells us this doesn’t make sense; the heart lacks the proper warm feelings to keep us there; but we remain there, held by something deeper, something beyond what we can explain or feel. This is where faith lives and this is what faith means.

Mother Teresa, for long periods of time, suffered anguish inside of her head and heart every time she tried to imagine the existence of God; yet by every indication she lived her whole life in function of God’s existence. Her problem was with the limits and poverty of the human imagination. Simply put, she couldn’t picture how God exists.

But nobody can because the finite can never picture the infinite, though it can sense it and know it in ways beyond what the head can imagine and the heart can feel.

Not being able to imagine God’s existence is not the same thing as not believing. Our actions are always a more accurate indication of faith than are any feelings about God on a given day.

Mother Teresa’s Faith

September 9, 2007

A recent book on Mother Teresa, Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light, makes public a huge volume of her intimate correspondence and in it we see what looks like a very intense, fifty-year, struggle with faith and belief.

Again and again, she describes her religious experience as “dry”, “empty”, “lonely”, “torturous”, “dark”, “devoid of all feeling”. During the last half-century of her life, it seems, she was unable to feel or imagine God’s existence.

Many people have been confused and upset by this. How can this be? How can this woman, a paradigm of faith, have experienced such doubts?

And so some are making that judgment that her faith wasn’t real. Their view is that she lived the life of a saint, but died the death of an atheist. For doctrinaire atheists, her confession of doubt is manna from the abyss. Christopher Hitchens, for example, writes: “She was no more exempt from the realization that religion is a human fabrication than any other person, and that her attempted cure was more and more professions of faith could only have deepened the pit that she dug for herself.”

What’s to be said about all of this? Was Mother Teresa an atheist?

Hardly! In a deeper understanding of faith, her doubts and feelings of abandonment are not only explicable, they’re predictable:

What Mother Teresa underwent is called “a dark night of the soul.” This is what Jesus suffered on the cross when he cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” When he uttered those words, he meant them. At that moment, he felt exactly what Mother Teresa felt so acutely for more than fifty years, namely, the sense that God is absent, that God is dead, that there isn’t any God. But this isn’t the absence of faith or the absence of God, it is rather a deeper presence of God, a presence which, precisely because it goes beyond feeling and imagination, can only be felt as an emptiness, nothingness, absence, non-existence.

But how can this make sense? How can faith feel like doubt? How can God’s deeper presence feel like God’s non-existence? And, perhaps more importantly, why? Why would faith work like this?

The literature around the “dark night of the soul” makes this point: Sometimes when we are unable to induce any kind of feeling that God exists, when we are unable to imagine God’s existence, the reason is because God is now coming into our lives in such a way that we cannot manipulate the experience through ego, narcissism, self-advantage, self-glorification, and self-mirroring. This purifies our experience of God because only when all of our own lights are off can we grasp divine light in its purity. Only when we are completely empty of ourselves inside an experience, when our heads and hearts are pumping dry, can God touch us in a way that makes it impossible for us to inject ourselves into the experience, so that we are worshiping God, not ourselves.

And this is painful. It is experienced precisely as darkness, emptiness, doubt, abandonment. But this is, in fact, “the test” that we pray God to spare us from whenever we pray Matthew’s version of the Lord’s Prayer – “Do not put us to the test.”

Moreover this experience is usually given to those who have the maturity to handle it, spiritual athletes, those who pray for and truly want a searing “purity of heart”, people like Mother Teresa. They ask Jesus to experience and feel everything as he did. He just answers their prayers!

Henri Nouwen, in a book entitled, In Memorium, shares a similar thing about his Mother: She was, he states, the most faith-filled and generous woman he had ever met. So when he stood at her bedside as she was dying he had every right to expect that her death would be a serene witness to a life of deep faith. But what happened, on the surface at least, seemed the exact reverse. She struggled, was seized by doubts, cried out, and died inside a certain darkness. Only later, after prayer and reflection, did this make sense. His mother had prayed her whole life to die like Jesus – and so she did! A common soldier dies without fear, Jesus died afraid.

In a remarkable book, The Crucified God, Jurgens Moltmann writes: “Our faith begins at the point where atheists suppose that it must end. Our faith begins with the bleakness and power which is the night of the cross, abandonment, temptation, and doubt about everything that exists! Our faith must be born where it is abandoned by all tangible reality; it must be born of nothingness, it must taste this nothingness and be given it to taste in a way no philosophy of nihilism can imagine.”

Mother Teresa understood all of this. That is why her seeming doubt did not lead her away from God and her vocation but instead riveted her to it with a depth and purity that, more than anything else, tell us precisely what faith really is.

A Conspiracy Against Interiority

September 2, 2007

Recently I heard an interview on the radio with an American journalist who had just returned to the USA after living for nearly twelve years in Paris. While living there, his son was born. That child, now nearly ten, had been raised outside of popular culture. His parents, both literary types, didn’t own a television set, listened to classical rather than popular music, weren’t attuned to the sports scene, and their interests and spirits didn’t rise and fall with the ups and downs of the celebrity of the day.

And so when they returned to the USA, their son was very much the outsider to pop culture, unfamiliar with the latest pop stars, game shows, and the like. As his dad was explaining all of this, the interviewer asked him: “Has your son held out against American culture?”

The journalist’s answer: “For about two days! Of course, he didn’t hold out, nobody does! Western pop culture, for good and for bad, is the most powerful narcotic that has ever been perpetrated on this planet! Nobody holds out against it.”

Our culture is a powerful narcotic, for good and for bad.

It is important that we first underline that, partly, there’s a good side to this. A narcotic soothes and protects against brute, raw pain. Our culture has within it every kind of thing (from medicine to entertainment) to shield us from pain. That can be good, providing it isn’t a false crutch.

But a narcotic can also be bad, especially when it becomes a way of escaping from reality. Where our culture is particularly dangerous, I feel, is in the way it can perpetually shield us from having to face the deeper issues of life – faith, forgiveness, morality, and mortality. It can, as Jan Walgrave famously said, constitute a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. How?

By keeping us so entertained, so busy, so preoccupied, and so distracted that we lose all focus on the deeper things. We live now in a world of instant and constant communication, of mobile phones and email, of ipods that contain whole libraries of music, of television packages that contain hundreds of channels, of malls and stores that are open 24 hours a day, of restaurants and clubs that stay open all the time, of sounds that never die and lights that never go out. We can be amused, distracted, and catered to for 24 hours a day.

While that has made our lives wonderfully efficient it has also conspired against depth. The danger, as one commentator puts it, is that we are all developing permanent attention deficient disorder. We are attentive to so many things that, ultimately, we aren’t attentive to anything, particularly to what is deepest inside of us.

This isn’t an abstract thing! Typically our day is so full of things (work, noise, pressure, rush) that when we do finally get home at night and have some time when we could shut down all the stimulation, we are so tired and fatigued that what soothes us is precisely something that functions as a narcotic – a sporting event, a game show on television, a mindless sitcom, or anything that can soothe our tensions and relax us enough to sleep. It’s not bad if we do this on a given night, but it is bad when we do it every night.

What happens then is that we never find the space in our lives to touch what’s deepest inside of us and inside of others. Given the power of our culture, we can go along like this for years until something cracks in our lives, a loved one dies, someone breaks our heart, the doctor tells us we have a terminal disease, or some other crisis is powerful enough to suddenly render all the stimulation and entertainment in the world empty. Then we are forced to look into our own depth and that can be a frightening abyss, if we have spend years and years avoiding looking into it.

The poet, Rumi, once wrote: “I have lived too long where I can be reached!” That’s true, I suspect, for most of us. And so we end up as good people, but as people who are not very deep – not bad, just busy; not immoral, just distracted; not lacking in soul, just preoccupied; not disdaining depth, just lacking in practice.

Our culture is a powerful narcotic, for good and for bad. It has the power to shield us from pain, to soothe us in healthy ways. That can be good. Sometimes we need a narcotic. But our culture can also be over-intoxicating, too-absorbing It can swallow us whole. And so we have to know when it is time to unplug the television, turn off the phone, shut down the computer, silence the ipod, lay away the sports page, and resist going out for coffee with a friend, so that, for one moment at least, we are not avoiding making friends with that one part of us that will accompany us into the sunset.

The Silence of Life

August 26, 2007

Meister Eckhard once suggested that nothing so much resembles the language of God as does silence.

That challenges us on many levels: What language will we speak in heaven? We don’t know, but if, as scripture tells us, heaven will be where we know and are known perfectly, love and are loved perfectly, and understand and are understood perfectly, I suspect that words will be superfluous. We will speak the language of silence.

So it is wise that, already now, we begin more and more to learn the language of silence, not just for later on, after death, but especially so that already in this life we can begin more to connect ourselves to our deepest roots.

Raimon Panikkar, in a recent book, The Experience of God, makes a distinction between what he calls “the silence of life” and “a life of silence”. They aren’t the same thing. His words, while not always easy to grasp, are deeply insightful and worthy of meditation, so I quote him at length:

“The silence of life is not necessarily identical with a life of silence, like the silent life of desert monks. The life of silence is important to realize our objectives, to plan our actions or develop our relations, but it is not the same as the silence of life. The silence of life is the art of making silent the activities of life that are not life itself in order to reach the pure experience of life itself.

We frequently identify life itself with the activities of life. We identify our being with our feelings, our desires, our will, with everything that we do and everything that we have. We instrumentalize our life while forgetting that it is an end in itself. Plunged into the activities of life, we lose the faculty of listening, and we alienate ourselves from our very source: silence, God.

Silence appears at the moment when we position ourselves at the very source of being.”

He goes on to suggest that our striving to attain the silence of life should not take away from the importance of our everyday activities – eating, working, socializing, healthy recreation. But there must be times when we also practice a healthy life of silence, when our bodies, hearts, and minds must be stilled enough so that, somehow, we can sense what lies beyond our activities and is the source of them, life itself, God.

How do we get there? That is exactly what every spirituality worthy of the name is trying to teach us. While there are many differences in the roads they suggest, there are a number of things upon which they all agree:

First, all the great traditions of prayer tell us that the road is simple, but not easy!

Next, each, in its own way, tells us what Jesus told us, namely, that the road that takes us to genuine depth, to an experience of God, is not so much dependent upon any particular prayer practice, but upon “purity of heart” (Matthew 5, 5), that is, upon a certain moral condition, an unselfishness, that takes us beyond the tyranny and idolatry of the ego.

And, how do we do that?

Every spirituality has it own route, but, again, they all agree on a number of non-negotiable elements:

Any journey that takes you towards God will demand, at a point, some vigorous asceticism, some real fasting, a real purification and a disciplined ordering of the countless, obsessive feelings and desires that act through us. We must break what some spiritual masters call “the tyranny of the ego” and Panikkar calls “the idolatry of the ego”. We will not get in touch with the deep source of our lives if the activities of our life are so consuming and obsessive that we can never find an identity and meaning in something beyond them. That is the ultimate reason behind asceticism and fasting of all kinds, we renounce something, even if it is good, in function of getting in touch with its deeper source, life itself, God.

And this asceticism, through which we are trying to come to the silence of life will require too, at some point, a life of silence, a deliberate, disciplined effort (not to stop thinking and feeling since this is impossible) but to put ourselves in touch with what is beyond our thoughts and feelings at their origins. A Hindu text tells us that God is found in “nourishment”, in what is seen, heard, and understood, but adds immediately that we only experience our activities as bearing God if we also, at times, deliberately halt those activities and go into silence so that we can see what’s behind them

The practices of meditation and contemplation, no matter what particular technique we use, have this precisely as their aim, namely, to practice a little bit “a life of silence” so as to sit for awhile in “the silence of life.”

Nothing so much approximates the language of God as does silence. It’s a language we need to practice.

Our Unfinished Symphony

August 19, 2007

“Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. But this intimate experience in which every bit of life is touched by a bit of death can point us beyond the limits of our existence. It can do so by making us look forward in expectation to that day when our hearts will be filled with perfect joy, a joy that no one shall take away from us.” (Henri Nouwen)

In this life there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy! I want to reiterate those words, coined by Henri Nouwen, in the light of some criticisms that I received to a recent column which quoted Anita Brookner saying that, in marriage, the first duty of each partner is to “console the other for the fact that we cannot not disappoint each other.”

That line provoked a number of critical reactions, ranging from: “Not true!”, “Unduly pessimistic!”, “He should stick to sacred rather than secular sources!” to “I am worried that this can give the wrong signal to young people who are getting married, suggesting that marriage will disappoint them!”

I appreciate the criticism, especially the last point, but feel that the real message was missed. In essence, I wasn’t commenting on marriage, but on life in general, where, sadly, our fantasy of finding some “messiah” to take away all of our loneliness tends to be precisely what makes us too restless to remain happily inside of our commitments, including marriage.

I’m not so worried about sending a bad signal to a young couple contemplating marriage if I tell them that inside of marriage they will not find a panacea for their loneliness. I am more worried that I would be sending them the wrong message if, like our romantic novels and movies, I should give them the impression that the final answer to every loneliness lies in simply finding the right mate. Over-expectation and subsequent disillusionment kills a lot of marriages. If I marry someone because I nurse the fantasy that this other person is the final solution to my loneliness, I am doomed not just to be disappointed but also to place every kind of unrealistic and unjust expectations on my partner. Only God can fully measure up.

St. Augustine began his autobiography with the now-famous line: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you!” Thomas Aquinas taught that “every choice is a renunciation” and that is why commitment, particularly a life-long commitment in marriage, is so difficult. Karl Rahner famously stated: “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we finally learn that here in this life all symphonies must remain unfinished.” And those of us who are old enough remember the haunting line in the old Salve Regina prayer: “To thee to we send up our sighs, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.”

What each of these captures, in essence, is precisely what Nouwen states, that in this life there is not such a thing as clear-cut pure joy and that we will live more peacefully and happily if we can accept that and not put false pressure on life, on our loves ones, and on God, to give us the full symphony right now.

Every day of their lives, my parents prayed words to the effect that, this side of eternity, they were “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears”. It didn’t make them sad, morbid, or stoic. The opposite: It gave them the tools that they needed to accept life’s real limits and the real limits and imperfections within community, church, family, and marriage. They were happier for knowing and accepting that.

My worry is that today we aren’t equipping our own children in the same way. Instead, too often, we are helping them nurse the false expectation that, if they do it right, they can have it all already in this life. All that is needed is to have the right body, the right career, the right city, the right neighborhood, the right friends, the right vacations, and the right soul mate and they can have the full symphony here and now.

It’s not to be had, and Anita Brookner’s maxim that in marriage we “cannot not disappoint each other” simply states, in secular language, that no one, no matter how good, can be God for somebody else.

Understanding Suicide

August 12, 2007

Canadian poet, Margaret Atwood, says that it is not enough to say certain things just once. Some things need to be said, and said, until they don’ need to be said again.

Every year I write a column on suicide and each of those columns usually prompts a flood of mostly grateful letters. The gratitude comes from the fact that those columns suggest that, in most cases, suicide claims its victims in the same way as does a heart attack, a stroke, cancer, or an accident. There is no freedom not to die. Suicide victims are, like victims of sickness and accidents, not responsible for their own deaths and suicide should not be a matter of secrecy, shame, moral judgment, and second-guessing.

For this year’ column, I will not reiterate those same themes, namely, that suicidal depression is usually a terminal disease and is not a free choice that connotes moral and psychological delinquency. Rather I will give a first-hand testimony from William Styron, author of Sophie’s Choice. A victim of suicidal depression he wrote, in 1990, a book entitled, Darkness Visible, A Memoir of Madness, within which he chronicles his own descent into suicidal madness and his helplessness as he spirals into that hell.

Since Styron is sharing, first-hand, the experience of suicidal depression, allow me to quote him extensively:

“The pain of severe depression is quite unimaginable to those who have not suffered it, and it kills in many instances because its anguish can no longer be borne. The prevention of many suicides will continue to be hindered until there is a general awareness of the nature of this pain. … and for the tragic legion who are compelled to destroy themselves there should be no more reproof attached than to the victims of terminal cancer. …

What I had begun to discover is that, mysteriously and in ways that are totally remote from normal experience, the gray drizzle of horror induced by depression takes on the quality of physical pain. But it is not an immediately identifiable pain, like that of a broken limb. It may be more accurate to say that despair, owing to some evil trick played upon the sick brain by the inhabiting psyche, comes to resemble the diabolical discomfort of being imprisoned in a fiercely overheated room. And because no breeze stirs this caldron, because there is no escape from the smothering confinement, it is entirely natural that the victim begins to think ceaselessly of oblivion.”

Styron then describes graphically how the depressed person becomes obsessed with thoughts of oblivion: “any of the artifacts of my house had become potential devices for my own destruction: the attic rafters (and an outside maple or two) a means to hang myself, the garage a place to inhale carbon monoxide, the bathtub a vessel to receive the flow of my opened arteries. The kitchen knives in their drawers had but one purpose for me. Death by heart attack seemed particularly inviting, absolving me as it would of active responsibility, and I had toyed with the idea of self-induced pneumonia-a long, frigid, shirt-sleeved hike though the rainy woods.”

After reading virtually all the literature, medical and psychological, on the issue, Styron suggests the suicidal depression is, in the end, caused by chemical imbalance, despite the fact that other factors (lifestyle, childhood, moral values, memory) contribute. Modern sensitivities, he contends, make us reluctant to use old-fashioned words like madhouse, asylum, insanity, melancholia, lunatic, or madness, but “ever let it be doubted that depression, in its extreme form, is madness. The madness results from an aberrant biochemical process. It has been established with reasonable certainty (after strong resistance from many psychiatrists, and not all that long ago) that such madness is chemically induced amid the neurotransmitters of the brain, probably as a result of systemic stress, which for unknown reasons causes a depletion of the chemicals norespinephrine and serotonin, and the increase of a hormone, cortisal.”

Styron was one of the lucky ones. With his suicide already planned, he drew on some last gleam of sanity and, in that, realized that he could not commit this desecration on himself and his loved ones. He woke his sleeping wife and she drove him to a hospital. In its “safety” and given “seclusion and time” he healed. He lived on to tell this insider’s story.

That insider’s story has a double value: Not only should it help us to understand suicide more deeply and exorcise more of its shameful stigma, but, in helping to expose the anatomy of suicide, Styron gives us better tools to help others (and ourselves) in its prevention.

Beyond that, a proper understanding of suicide should help us all walk more humbly and compassionately in grace and community, resisting the bias of the strong and unreflective who make the unfair judgment that people who are sick want to be that way.

The human heart is exquisitely fragile. Our judgments need to be gentle, our understanding deep, and our forgiveness wide.

Songs of Innocence and Experience

August 5, 2007

One of my favorite writers, Christopher de Vinck, once wrote a series of essays entitled, Songs of Innocence and Experience. Those two words, innocence and experience, don’t easily go together. No matter who we are and not matter how pure our intentions, experience always threatens our innocence, even when we don’t want it to. Each of us has his or her own story on this.

When I was 17 years old and a novice in our Oblate novitiate, while horsing around in a lake with my fellow novices one afternoon, I almost drowned. I had already gone down twice and was unable to call for help. Only luck and the perceptiveness of a fellow novice prevented my death.

I was pretty shook up. When we returned to the novitiate that evening, there was letter waiting from my mother (who wrote every week). It was her usual note, full of motherly concern and of the various details of our family’s life. I was more touched than usual because, as I was reading that letter, I kept thinking how close I had come to never reading it and how my mother and my family would be feeling right now had I drowned.

Re-reading that letter recently triggered a flood of thoughts and emotions. Nearly forty years have passed since that near fatal day, my mother has been dead for more than thirty years, and the years too have changed me. And so my thought was: “Had I died that day, so many years back, what would have died?”

Looking back now at myself at 17, I see a boy of uncommon naiveté, of much innocence, considerable purity, high intention, deep faith, and, happily, lacking much of the complexity and many of the neuroses that I carry today. Much as I hate to admit it, the boy of 17 was somewhat more hospitable and surely more innocent than the man of today

But that comparison itself can be a false romanticism, the catcher-in-the-rye nostalgia of J.D. Salinger’s famous novel. Nobody grows into adulthood with his or her childhood innocence intact. Real virtue and purity of heart are post, not pre, critical, and the task of living is to achieve adulthood, not to remain the puer or puella. That requires a certain death.

A child dies when an adult is born and an adult no longer looks nor feels like a child. As adults, all kinds of wrinkles, blemishes, and stretch marks begin to leave scars, and not just in terms of a sagging body and greying hair. More deeply, complexity, hurt, and moral failure begin more and more to sully our baptismal robes and chill our hearts. Had I died at 17, I would have died less blemished, physically and morally, but I would have died a boy, not man.

And still there is more than simple romantic sentimentalism in longing for the simplicity and purity of one’s youth, despite its naiveté. As we grow more adult and experienced, we progressively lose, in more areas than in just our sexuality, our virginity.

I remember a remark I once read by, Faye Dunaway, the Hollywood actress. Commenting on her ups and downs in Hollywood, she said: “I went through the star machine and became urban, sophisticated, neurotic, cold, and all that. I’d gotten very far from my own heart and soul and who I really was: a little girl called Dorothy Faye from the South.”

Then there’s the tragic, biblical story of Saul who, when he first became the king, was the handsomest, best, most gracious and humble man in Israel, and who slowly and in a way that was imperceptible to himself, filled with a jealousy and bitterness that led him to take his own life.

And there is too a soul-searing admonition in the Book of Revelations where God tells us that he likes most everything about us, except that now, as adults, we “have less love in us than when we were young!” (Revelations 2,4)

For good and for bad, we’ve all come a long ways from the little girl or little boy we once were.

J.D. Salinger once wrote a short story entitled, Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut. It’s the story of two women who had been childhood friends and who meet after many years. They spend an afternoon drinking, reminiscing, and crying to each other about broken relationships, frustrations, and wounded lives. Their dialogue is full of bitterness, gossip, and harsh judgments of others, betraying the type of street-smarts that must have characterized Adam and Eve after they ate the apple and had “their eyes opened.”

At the end of the afternoon, very drunk and tired, one says to the other: Remember when we first came to New York, and I had that dress that I used to wear in high school, and I wore it and everyone laughed at me and said nobody wore a dress like that in New York, and I went home and cried all night? I was a nice girl then, wasn’t I?

Wrestling with God

July 29, 2007

In his memoir, Report to Greco, Nikos Kazantzakis shares this story: As a young man, he spent a summer in a monastery during which he had a series of conversations with an old monk. One day he asked the old monk: “Father, do you still do battle with the devil?” The old monk replied: “No, I used to, when I was younger, but now I have grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me. I leave him alone and he leaves me alone.” “So your life is easy then?” remarked Kazantzakis. “Oh no,” replied the monk, “it’s much worse, now I wrestle with God!”

There’s a lot contained in that remark – “I wrestle with God.” Among other things, it suggests that the struggles in later life can be very different than what we struggle with earlier on. In the normal pattern of things, we spend the first-half of our lives struggling with sensuality, greed, and sexuality, and spend the last half of our lives struggling with anger and forgiveness – and that anger is often, however unconsciously, focused on God. In the end, our real struggle is with God.

But wrestling with God has another aspect. It invites us to a certain kind of prayer. Prayer isn’t meant to be a simple acquiescence to God’s will. It’s meant to be an acquiescence, yes, but a mature acquiescence, come to at the end of a long struggle.

We see this in the prayer of the great figures in scripture: Abraham, Moses, Jesus, the apostles. Abraham argues with God and initially talks him out of destroying Sodom; Moses at first resists his call, protesting that his brother is better suited for the job; the apostles excuse themselves for a long time before finally putting their lives on the line; and Jesus gives himself over in the Garden of Gethsemane only after first begging his Father for a reprieve. As Rabbi Heschel puts it, from Abraham through Jesus we see how the great figures of our faith are not in the habit of easily saying: “Thy will be done!” but often, for a while at least, counter God’s invitation with: “Thy will be changed!”

Struggling with God’s will and offering resistance to what it calls us to can be a bad thing, but it can also be a mature form of prayer. The Book of Genesis describes an incident where Jacob wrestled with a spirit for a whole night and in the morning that spirit turned out to be God. What a perfect icon for prayer! A human being and God, wrestling in the dust of this earth! Doesn’t that accurately describe the human struggle?

We would do well to integrate this, the concept of wrestling with God, into our understanding of faith and prayer. We honor neither ourselves nor the scriptures when we make things too simple. Human will doesn’t bend easily, nor should it, and the heart has complexities that need to be respected, even as we try to rein in its more possessive longings. God, who built us, understands this and is up to the task of wrestling with us and our resistance.

The classical mystics speak of something they call “being bold with God”. This “boldness”, they suggest, comes not at the beginning of the spiritual journey, but more towards the end of it, when, after a long period of fidelity, we are intimate enough with God to precisely be “bold”, as friends who have known each other for a long time have a right to be. That’s a valuable insight: After you have been friends with someone for a long time, you can be comfortable with expressing your needs to him or her and in the context of a long, sustained relationship unquestioning reverence is not necessarily a sign of mature intimacy. Old friends, precisely because they know and trust each other, can risk a boldness in their friendship that younger, less mature, friendship cannot.

That is also true in our relationship with God. God expects that, at some point, we will kick against his will and offer some resistance. But we should lay out our hearts in honesty. Jesus did.

God expects some resistance. As Nikos Kazantzakis puts it:

The struggle between God and humans breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for very long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible persons who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the supreme duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death. The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. The spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear.

Everyday Life as Sacrament

July 22, 2007

For Christians, ultimately the whole world is holy and everything in it, especially the physical, is potential material for sacrament. Our belief is that the universe shows forth God’s glory, that each of us is made in God’s image, that our bodies are temples of the Holy Spirit, that the food we eat is sacramental, and that in our work and in our sexual embrace we are co-creators with God.

That’s a stunning belief, and it separates us from most other religions, where so much of the purpose of religion is to free oneself from the physical, the earth. But in Christianity “the word becomes flesh”, God enters into the physical and thus everything that is physical is potentially sacramental. It’s noteworthy that scripture, in that famous line about God becoming flesh does not simply say that God became a man, a human being. It says more: “God becomes flesh”, physical, earth. Therefore everything physical is potentially a sacrament.

But we struggle with this. Our daily lives are often so distracted, dram, and fixed upon things that seem un-holy that the idea that everything is a sacrament can appear more like wishful thinking than theology. The world doesn’t always show forth the glory of God, what we do with our bodies at times makes us wonder whether we really are temples of the Holy Spirit, the mindless way that we so often eat and drink doesn’t speak much of sacramentality, and the language we use to speak about our work, sex, and our lives in general rarely hints at the fact that we are co-creators with God.

Why? Why aren’t we more habitually alert to the fact that we are standing on holy ground and that are everyday activities come laden with sacrament?

There are many reasons, mostly rooted in the fact that we are human, that life is long, and that it isn’t easy to sustain high symbols, high language, and high ideals in the muck and grime of everyday life. Eating, working, and making love should be holy, but too often we do them more for survival than for any sacramentality and “getting by” is about as a high symbol as we can muster on a weekday. I say this with sympathy. It isn’t easy, day by day, hour by hour, to experience sacrament in the ordinary actions of our lives.

But there’s another reason why we have lost the sense of sacramentality in our lives, namely, we have too little prayer and ritual around our ordinary actions. We too seldom use prayer or ritual to connect our actions – eating, drinking, working, socializing, making love, giving birth to things – to their sacred origins. For example:

Among the Osage Indians, there’s a custom when a child is born, before it is allowed to drink from its mother’s breast, that a holy person, someone “who has talked to the gods”, is brought into the room. This person recites to the newborn the story of the creation of the world and of terrestrial animals. Not until this has been done is the baby given the mother’s breast. Later, when the child is old enough to drink water, the same holy person is brought back, this time to tell the story of creation and the sacred origins of water. Only after hearing this story is the child given water. Then, when the child is old enough to take solid foods, “the person who talked to the gods” is brought in again and this time tells the story of the origins of grains and other foods. The object of this is teach the child that eating is not just a physical thing, but a religious one as well.

My parents and their generation did this too, in their own way: They had their fields and workbenches and bedrooms blessed, they prayed grace before and after every meal, and some of them would go into a church to propose marriage to another. That was their way of telling the story of the sacred origins of water before drinking it.

Today, by and large, we’ve lost both the way of myth of the Osage Indians and the way of piety of my parents. We live, eat, work, and make love without these high symbols. Generally, we don’t connect our food to its sacred origins, don’t consider our work as co-creation with God, don’t bless our workplaces and boardrooms, and would shrink at the very thought of blessing a bedroom where sex takes place.

We are the poorer for that, not just religiously, but humanly. When our everyday activities aren’t sacramental, they soon become flat and we unconsciously compensate for that by increasing the dosage.

I’m not sure where we should go with all of this, since we are drawn neither to the myths or the piety of old, but unless we find prayer and rituals to connect our eating, working, and making love to their sacred origins, ordinary life will remain just that, ordinary life, nothing special, just the muck and grime of slugging along.

Accepting Disappointment in Love

July 15, 2007

In many of her novels, Anita Brookner, almost as a signature to her work, will make this comment: The first task of a couple in marriage is to console each other for the fact that they cannot not disappoint each other. That’s an important insight. Why?

When we are young and hear sadness in love songs, we think that the sadness and disappointment are a prelude to the experience of love. Later we come to realize that the sadness and disappointment ultimately originate not from the fact that love has not taken place, but from the finite, limited character of human love itself. Brookner has it right: The first task in any love is for us to console each other for the limits of our love, for the fact that we cannot not disappoint each other.

Why? Why can’t two persons ever be enough for each other? Why is disappointment part of the experience of every relationship, friendship, and marriage?

Because the very way that we are made precludes ever having, in this life, a oneness of mind, heart, and body that fulfills us in such a way that there is no disappointment. Our longing is simply too wide. We long for the infinite and are built for it and so we wake to life and consciousness with longings as deep as a Grand Canyon without a bottom.

In this life then, outside of rare and very transitory mystical experiences, there is no consummation (sexual, emotional, psychological, or even spiritual) with another person that is so deep and all-embracing so as exclude all distance, shadow, and emptiness. No matter how deep a friendship or a marriage and no matter how good, rich in personality, and deep the other person may be, we always find ourselves somewhat disappointed. In this life, there is no union that fills every emptiness inside of us. Somewhere, we always sleep alone.

In essence, there is no union which fulfills perfectly the Genesis prescription that “two become one flesh.” No matter how close a marriage or a friendship, two can never ultimately become one.

No matter how deep a union, we always remain separate, two persons who cannot really ever, in this life, make just one heart, one mind, and one body. No love or friendship ever fully takes away our separateness. Sometimes sexual electricity or emotional or spiritual affinity can promise such a oneness. But, in the end, it cannot fully deliver it. No matter how deep and powerful a union, ultimately, we remain, and need to remain, captains of our own hearts, minds, and bodies.

This needs to be recognized, not just to help us deal with the disappointment, but especially so that we do not violate each other. What’s implied here?

In this life we are always, to some degree, in exile from each other. We stand alone in some way. Where we feel this most deeply is not in our sexual isolation, but in our moral separateness. What we crave even more deeply than sexual unity is moral affinity, to be truly one heart with another. More than we desire a lover, we desire a kindred spirit, a soul mate. If this is true, then the deepest violations of each other are also not sexual but moral. It’s when we try to be captain of somebody else’s soul (more so even than of his or her body) that we rape someone. And it is our failure to accept that we will always be somehow separate from each other that creates the pressure inside of us to unhealthily try to be captain of someone else’s soul. We violate another’s separateness precisely because we cannot accept the disappointment of love.

Finally, beyond even this, we cannot not be disappointed in love because, in the end, we are all, in some way, limited, inadequate, blemished, dull, and boring. None of us is God. No matter how rich our personalities or attractive our bodies, none of us can indefinitely excite and generate novelty, sexual electricity, and emotional pleasure, within a relationship. A relationship is like a long trip and, as Dan Berrigan puts it, “there’s bound to be some long dull stretches. Don’t travel with someone who expects you to be exciting all the time!”

What’s the lesson in this? Stoicism and cynicism about love and romance? To the contrary:

The recognition that, in love, we cannot not disappoint each other is what makes it possible for us to remain inside of marriage, friendship, celibacy, and respect. It’s when we demand not to be disappointed that we grow angry, make unrealistic demands, and put pressure on each other’s moral and sexual integrity. Conversely, when we recognize the limits of love, when we accept an inevitable separateness, moral loneliness, and disappointment, we can begin to console each other in our friendships and our marriages. In that consolation, since it touches so deeply the core of our souls, we can, in fact, begin to find the threads that can bind us into a oneness of heart beyond disappointment.

Our Three Temptations

July 8, 2007

Cosmologists today tell us that the universe has no single center. Its center is everywhere, every place, every planet, every city, every species, and every person. But we already know this.

Faith tells us that what ultimately defines us and gives us our identity and energy is the image and likeness of God in us. We are God’s blessed ones, masters of creation, special to God and special within creation.

And we know this long before religion tells it. Deep down, whether we admit it or not, we each nurse the secret of being special. And this is not just ego or narcissism but a congenital imprint inside our very souls. Imprinted in the core of our being is the sense that we are not just an accidental, anonymous chips of dust, almost invisible on the evolutionary conveyer-belt, destined to flicker for an instant and then disappear forever. We know we are more. We, literally, feel timelessness, eternity, and immortal meaning inside of ourselves.

In our daily lives that often causes more heartaches than it solves. It is not easy to live out our blessed, special status when, most of the time, everything around us belies that we are special. As much as we experience ourselves as special, we also experience emptiness, anonymity, and dour ordinariness. And so it can be easy, in the end, to believe that we aren’t special at all, but are precisely small, petty spirits, haunted by over-inflated egos.

But, while over-inflated egos do cause their share of heartaches, it is a still an unhealthy temptation to believe that we are not blessed simply because life finds us one-among-six-billion-others, struggling, and seemingly not special in any way. Faith tells the true story: We are, all of us, made in God’s image and likeness, blessed, and our private secret that we are special is in fact the deepest truth.

However that isn’t always easy to believe. Life and circumstance often tire us in ways that tempt us to believe its opposite. It happened to Jesus.

He too was tempted, and there was a particular prelude to his vulnerability:

During his baptism, he had heard his Father say: “You are my blessed son, in whom I take delight!” Those words then formed and defined his self-consciousness. Knowing that he was blessed, Jesus could then look out at the world and say: “Blessed are you when you are poor… and meek … and persecuted.”

But throughout his life Jesus struggled to always believe that. For instance, immediately after his baptism, we are told, the spirit drove him into the desert where he fasted for forty days and forty nights – and afterwards “he was hungry”. Obviously what scripture is describing here is not simply physical hunger. Jesus was empty in ways that made him vulnerable to believe that he was not God’s blessed child. These were his three temptations:

First, the devil tempted him to this effect: “If you are God’s specially blessed one, turn these stones into bread.” In essence, the devil’s taunt was this: “If you believe that you are God’s specially blessed creature, why is your life so empty?” Jesus’ reply, “One doesn’t live on bread alone!” might be rendered: “I can be empty and still be God’s blessed one! Being blessed and special is not dependent upon how full or empty my life is at a given moment!”

The second temptation has to do with human glory and its absence. The devil shows Jesus all the kingdoms of the world and says: “All of these will be yours if you worship me!” The taunt is: “If you’re God’s blessed one, how come you’re a big, fat nobody? Not famous, not known, anonymous.” And Jesus’ reply might be worded this way: “I can be a big nobody and still be God’s blessed one. Blessedness doesn’t depend upon fame, on being a household name!”

The third temptation follows the same lines: The devil takes Jesus to the top of the temple and challenges him to throw himself down to make God catch him since, in faith, it is promised that God won’t let his blessed one “dash his foot against a stone”. Jesus responds that we shouldn’t put God to the test. The temptation and how we should resist it are both contained in his reply. In essence, what Jesus says when the devil challenges him to throw himself off the top of the temple to prove his specialness is this: “I’ll take the stairs down, just like everyone else!” Our blessedness is not predicated on having a VIP elevator, or on having any special privileges that set us apart from others. We are God’s blessed ones, even when we find ourselves riding the city buses.

And it is good to remember, namely, that we are God’s special, blessed sons and daughters, even when we lives seem empty, anonymous, and devoid of any special privileges because then we won’t forever be putting God and our restless hearts to the test, demanding more than ordinary life can give us.