“In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we come to understand that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.”

Karl Rahner wrote those words and to not understand them is to risk letting restlessness become a cancer in our lives. What does it mean to be tormented by the insufficiency of everything attainable? How are we tortured by what we cannot have?

We all experience this daily. In fact, for all but a few privileged, peaceful times in our lives, this torment is like an undertow in everything we experience. Beauty makes us restless when it should give us peace. The love we experience with our spouse does not fulfil our longings. The relationships we have within our families seem too petty and domestic to be fulfilling. Our job is inadequate to the dream we have for ourselves. The place where we live seems boring in comparison to other places. We are too restless to sit peacefully at our own tables, sleep peacefully in our own beds, and be at ease in our own skins.

When we feel this way, our lives will forever seem too small for us and we live them in such a way that we are always waiting, waiting for something or somebody to come along and change things so that real life, as we imagine it, might begin.

I remember a story a man once shared with me. He was forty-five years old, had a good marriage, was the father of three healthy children, had a secure, if unexciting job, and lived in a peaceful, if equally unexciting neighborhood. Yet, to use his words, he was never fully inside of his own life. Here’s his confession:

“For most of my life, and especially for the past twenty years, I have been too restless to really live my own life. I have never really accepted what I am – a forty-five- year-old man, working in a grocery store in a small town, married to a good woman, aware that my marriage will never fulfil my deep sexual yearnings, and aware that, despite all my daydreaming, I’m not going anywhere, I will never fulfill my dreams, I will only be here, as I am now, in this small town, in this particular marriage, with these people, in this body, for the rest of my life. I will only grow older, balder, and physically less healthy and attractive. But what’s sad in all of this is that, from every indication, I have a good life. I’m lucky really. I’m healthy, loved, secure, in a good marriage, living in a country of peace and plenty. Yet, inside of myself I’m too restless to ever fully appreciate my own life, my wife, my kids, my job, and the place where I live. I’m always at some other place inside of myself, too restless to really be where I’m at, too restless to live in my own house, too restless to be inside of my own skin.”

That is what the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable feels like in actual life. But Rahner’s insight is more than diagnostic, it is prescriptive too. It points out how we might move beyond that torment, beyond the cancer of restlessness. How do we do that?

Precisely by understanding and accepting that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished. By understanding and accepting that the reason we are tormented is not because we are over-sexed, neurotic, ungrateful persons who are too greedy to be satisfied with this life. Not that. The deep reason is that we are congenitally over-charged and over-built for this earth. Built that way by God. We are infinite spirits living inside a finite world, hearts made for union with everything and everybody but meeting only mortal persons and mortal things. Small wonder we have problems with insatiability, daydreams, loneliness, and restlessness! We are Grand Canyons without a bottom. Nothing, short of union with all that is, can ever fill that void.

To be tormented by restlessness is to be human. Moreover, in accepting that we are human and that therefore, for us, there can be no finished symphony this side of eternity, we can become more easeful in our restlessness. Why? Because we now know that everything comes to us with an undertow of restlessness and inadequacy, and that this is normal and true for everyone.

 As Henri Nouwen once put it: Here, in this world, there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy.  Rather, in every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance.

Peace and restfulness can come to us only when we accept that limitation within the human condition because it is only then that we will stop demanding that life – our spouses, our families, our friends, our jobs, our vocations and vacations – give us something that they cannot give, namely, clear-cut pure joy, full consummation.

Several years ago, I went with another priest to visit a mutual friend. Our friend, a successful businessman, was living on the top floor of a very expensive apartment overlooking the river valley in the city of Edmonton. At one point during our visit, he took us out on his balcony to show us the view. It was spectacular. You could see for miles, the entire river valley and much of the city.

We were in awe and told him so. Thanking us for the compliments, he shared that, sadly, he  seldom came out on the balcony to drink in the view. Here are some of his words: “You know, I should give this place to some poor family who could enjoy it. I could live in a basement apartment since I never have time to enjoy this. I can’t remember when I last came out here to watch a sunset or a sunrise. I’m always too busy, too pressured, too preoccupied. This place is wasted on me. About the only time I come out here is when I have visitors and want to show them the view.”

Jesus once said something that might be paraphrased this way: What does it profit you if you gain the whole world and are forever too much in a hurry and too pressured to enjoy it.

When Jesus talks about gaining the whole world and suffering the loss of your own soul, he isn’t first of all referring to having a bad moral life, dying in sin, and going to hell. That’s the more radical warning in his message. We can lose our soul in other ways, even while we are good, dedicated, moral people. The man whose story I just shared is indeed a very good, dedicated, moral, and kind man. But he is, by his own humble admission, struggling to be a soulful person, to be more inside the richness of his own life because when you live under constant pressure and are perennially forced to hurry, it isn’t easy to get up in the morning and say: “This is the day that the Lord has made, let us be glad and rejoice in it.” We are more likely to say: “Lord, just get me through this day!”

As well, when Jesus tells us that it’s difficult for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of Heaven, he isn’t just referring to material riches, money, and affluence, though these are contained in the warning. The problem can also be a rich agenda, a job or a passion that so consumes us that we rarely take the time (or even think of taking the time) to enjoy the beauty of a sunset or the fact that we are healthy and have the privilege of having a rich agenda.

Full disclosure, this is one of my struggles. During all my years in ministry, I have always been blessed with a rich agenda, important work, work that I love. But, when I’m honest, I need to admit that during these years I have been too hurried and over pressured to watch many sunsets (unless, like my friend, I was pointing out their beauty to a visitor).

I have tried to break out of this by conscripting myself to regular times of quiet prayer, regular walks, retreats, and several weeks of vacation each year. That has helped, no doubt, but I’m still too much of an addict, pressured and hurried almost all the time, longing for space for quiet, for prayer, for sunsets, for a hike in a park, for a glass of wine or scotch, for a contemplative cigar. And I recognize an irony here: I’m hurrying and tiring myself out in order to carve out some time to relax!

I’m no Thomas Merton, but I take consolation in the fact that he, a monk in a monastery, was often too busy and pressured to find solitude. In search of that, he spent the last few years of his life in hermitage, away from the main monastery except for Eucharist and the Office of the Church each day. Then, when he found solitude, he was surprised at how different it was from the way he had imagined it. Here’s how he describes it in his diary:

Today I am in solitude because at this moment “it is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is no need to make an assertion about my life, especially so about it as mine …  I must learn to live so as to forget program and artifice.”

And to check out the sunset from my balcony!

When we are rich, busy, pressured, and preoccupied, it’s hard to taste one’s own coffee.

One of the great religious stories in history is the biblical story of the Exodus, the story of a people being set free from slavery, passing miraculously through the Red Sea, and finding themselves standing in freedom, on a new shore.

Most of us are familiar with this story. A nation of people, Israel, was living under the burden of slavery in Egypt for many years. During all those years, they prayed for liberation, but for more than four hundred years none came.

Then God acted. God sent a man, Moses, to confront the Pharaoh who was enslaving the Israelites and when the Pharaoh resisted, God sent a series of plagues which eventually forced the Pharaoh to release the people from slavery and allow them to leave.

Moses began to lead the Israelites out of Egypt, but as they were leaving, the Pharaoh changed his mind and with his armies began to pursue them, catching them just as they found themselves trapped on the shore of the Red Sea, unable to go forward.

It is then that God performs the great miracle upon which the Jewish faith is grounded. He miraculously parts the water and lets the people walk through the sea on dry ground. Then, as the Egyptian armies pursue them, the waters flow back and drown the entire army, so that those fleeing slavery now stand free of their oppressors, on a new shore.

Both Christians and Jews believe that this miracle actually happened historically and is one of the two great foundational miracles God has worked in history. For Christians, the other great foundational miracle is the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. The Jewish faith depends on the truth of the miracle at the Red Sea and the Christian faith depends on the truth of the resurrection of Jesus.

Moreover, both Judaism and Christianity say these great miracles (which happened historically only once, in one time and place) are intended for all time and all places and can be participated in through ritual (in a way that is real, albeit outside of history).

In Judaism, the algebra runs this way: in parting the Red Sea and letting the Israelites escape, God performs a miracle, physically altering reality. However, even though historically only one generation of people actually walked through the Red Sea, this is a miracle that goes beyond time, place, history, and normal metaphysics. It is timeless and can be participated in by subsequent generations.

How? Through ritual, through ritually commemorating that original miracle through the Passover supper.

When religious Jews celebrate the Passover supper, they believe that they aren’t just remembering something that happened once when God parted the waters of the Red Sea; they believe that each of them, all these centuries later, is actually walking through the Red Sea. They aren’t just remembering a historical event; they are actively participating in that event.

How can this be explained? How can we explain how an event can exist outside of time and space? We can’t. Miracles, by definition, don’t have an explicable phenomenology. That’s why they are called miracles. Hence, we can’t explain either the historical parting of the waters, nor the availability of that event outside of time.

Christians believe the same thing about Jesus’ exodus through death to resurrection. We believe that this happened once historically, for real, in an event that miraculously altered the earth’s normal physics. And, like our Jewish sisters and brothers, we also believe that this one-time event, Jesus’ death and resurrection, can be participated in, for real, through ritual, namely, by the ritual commemorating of it through the scriptures and especially through the celebration of the Eucharist.

For Christians, this is the specific function of the Eucharistic prayer at a Eucharistic celebration. The Eucharistic prayer (the Canon) is not just a prayer to make Christ present in the bread and the wine; it is also a prayer to make the event of Jesus’ death and resurrection present for us to participate in. Just as Judaism believes that at a Passover supper those present are actually walking through a miraculous passage God created for them to walk through on route to a new freedom, so too as Christians we believe that at the Eucharist we also are really (actually) walking through the miraculous passage from death to life that Jesus created through his journey from death to resurrection.

And, in this there’s an invitation to all who participate in the Eucharist: as the Eucharistic prayer is being prayed, ask yourself: what forces are enslaving me? What pharaoh is keeping me in bondage? A bad self-image? Paranoia? Fear? A certain wound? Trauma? An addiction? Can I journey with Christ to a new place that’s free of this slavery? The miracle of Jesus’ resurrection, like the Exodus, happened once historically, but it is also outside of time and place and available to us as a way to leave behind the pharaohs that enslave us, so as to arrive in freedom, on a new shore.

Some years ago, an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, was fair. Mostly he asked a lot of hard, necessary questions. Looking at the various sexual scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic priesthood in the past years, Bruni suggested that it was time to re-examine celibacy with an honest and courageous eye and ask whether its downside outweighs its potential benefits. Bruni, himself, didn’t weigh-in definitively on the question; he only pointed out that celibacy, as a vowed lifestyle, runs more risks than are normally admitted. Near the end of his column, he wrote: “Celibate culture runs the risk of stunting [sexual] development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?”

That’s not an irreverent question. It’s a necessary one. We need the courage to face the question: is celibacy, in fact, abnormal to the human condition? Does it run the risk of stunting sexual development?

Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what celibacy was like. I suspect his answer will come as a surprise to pious ears because he virtually endorses Bruni’s position. His response: “Celibacy is hell! You live in a loneliness that God himself condemned when he said: ‘It is not good to be alone!’” However, that being admitted, Merton immediately went on to say that just because celibacy is not the normal human condition doesn’t mean it cannot be wonderfully generative and fruitful, and that perhaps its unique fruitfulness is tied to how extraordinary and abnormal it is.

What Merton is saying, in essence, is that celibacy is abnormal and dooms you to live in a state not willed by the Creator; but, despite and perhaps because of that abnormality, it can be particularly generative, both for the one living it and for those around him or her.

I know this to be true, as do countless others, because I have been deeply nurtured, as a Christian and as a human being, by the lives of vowed celibates, by numerous priests, sisters, and brothers whose lives have touched my own and whose “abnormality” served precisely to make them wonderfully fruitful.

Moreover, this particular abnormality can have its own attraction. I once served as a spiritual director to a young man who was discerning whether to join our order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate or to propose marriage to a young woman. It was an agonizing decision for him; he wanted both. And his discernment, while perhaps somewhat overly romantic in terms of his fantasy of both options, was at the same time uncommonly mature.  Here (in words to this effect) is how he described his dilemma:

I grew up in a rural area and was the oldest in my family. When I was fifteen years old, one evening just before supper, my dad, still a young man, had a heart attack. There were no ambulances to call. We bundled him up in the car and my mother sat in the back seat with him and held him, while I, a scared teenager, drove the car on route to the hospital some 15 miles away. My dad died before we reached the hospital. As tragic as this was, there was an element of beauty in it. My dad died in my mother’s arms. That tragic beauty branded my soul. In my mind, in my fantasy, that’s how I want to die – in the arms of my wife. Given the grip of that fantasy, my major hesitation about entering the Oblates and moving towards priesthood is celibacy. If I become a priest, I won’t die in human arms. I’ll die as celibates do – held in faith but not held in human arms.

But one day in trying to discern all of this, I saw another picture: Jesus didn’t die in the arms of a spouse; he died lonely and alone. I’ve always had a thing about the loneliness of celibates and have always been drawn to people like Soren Kierkegaard, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan, who didn’t die in the arms of a spouse. There’s a real beauty in their way of dying too!

Bruni is right in warning that celibacy is abnormal and fraught with dangers. It does run the risk of stunting sexual development and especially of downplaying a biblically mandated fundamental human connection, namely, the fundamental anthropological dogma contained in the story of God creating our first parents and his pronouncement that it is not good (and dangerous) to be alone! 

Celibacy does consign one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned, but it is also the loneliness within which Jesus gave himself over to us in a death that is perhaps the most generative expression of love in human history.

In a section of her poem The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver describes her feelings as she stands by the gravesite of her father and mother. She reflects on how both their virtues and faults influenced her life. Then she ends the reflection with these words:

            I give them – one, two, three, four – the kiss of courtesy,

                        of sweet thanks.

            May they sleep well. May they soften.

            But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

            I will not give them the responsibility for my life.      

What shapes our souls? How much is mystery? How much is genetics? How much is the influence of others? How much is our own responsibility? For instance, when I reflect on what helped shape my own soul, the influence of my parents looms large.

Part of me is my mother. She was a sensitive person, someone who sometimes couldn’t say no when it was called for. So, she often found herself over stretched and tired. Today some would say that she didn’t keep proper boundaries. She had sixteen children. Her critics can rest their case.

She was a generous person, always giving things away. As a child I was sometimes angry with her for that. I didn’t want a generous mother. I wanted things. What she wanted was harmony in her family. I remember her coming to tears one Saturday morning as she was cleaning the house and trying to keep peace and order in a family that, on that particular day, was given over to disorder and arguments. She told us how disappointed she was that our family wasn’t like the Holy Family.

We weren’t the Holy Family and she was sometimes frustrated, not so much with us as with the plain inadequacy of life. Beyond this, she was a happy person, more naturally buoyant in spirit than my father. She danced more easily than he, laughed more spontaneously, and was an easier touch for us as kids. She took life less reflectively than he, though not as unreflectively as we naively supposed. During one period of her life, she kept a diary and it testified to the fact that she’d thought more deeply about things than we’d supposed.

Her deepest longing was for a true home and here she got lucky. She met my father. From soon after they met until they day he died, they became soulmates in every sense of that word. She didn’t have to tell him her secrets or share with him her frustrations, and neither he in reverse. They understood each other without having to explain themselves. In all my years of growing up, I cannot ever recall them having a single misunderstanding or even being angry with each other.

My father died of cancer and she, who had been strong until his death, died three months later of pancreatitis and a loneliness nobody could cure. Today some would look at that and say she was a co-dependent. But she would laugh and tell you that she got what she wanted from life. She died of missing my father, died happy. There’s something to be envied in that.

I’m her son and when I contemplate these things, my own soul becomes less of a mystery, as do my struggles, my faults, my longings, and my strengths. I even understand why I’m tired a lot!

And then a good part of me is my father. There’s a lot in me that can be explained by my genes. My father didn’t dance easily, though he was a deeply affectionate man. Dancing was too public for him. He preferred to express affection in private. He loved my mother, his family, and most everyone, but his way was not to trumpet this in public. There was a reticence here that could sometimes look like coldness, but you had to read his actions and his eyes. They told a different story. He had an abhorrence of all exhibitionism, hated long ceremonies, and loathed cheap public displays of anything. He also disliked excess in anything. His was the way of moderation, proper restraint in everything. Our family likes to quip that moderation was his only excess.

He was the stubborn uncompromising moral principle in my upbringing. He agonized over all that was not right in the world and his patience didn’t always meet the test. I feared his eyes at those times when I disappointed him. I also feared, and still do, ever disappointing him. He was one of the most moral people I’ve ever met and he had a sixth sense that was nearly infallible. He knew right from wrong in a way I couldn’t doubt. He instructed me on that – often against my protests. If I end up in hell, I can’t plead ignorance. My father equipped me, faith-wise and morally, for life. But I have the faults that come with that too, his faults, compounded by my own.

So much of us, our strengths and weaknesses, take root in our upbringing – but still, we are responsible for our own lives.

One of the great tragedies in all literature is the biblical story of Saul. Saul makes Hamlet look like a Disney character. Hamlet, at least, had good reasons for the disaster that befell him. Saul, given the gifts with which he started, should have fared better, much better.

His story begins with the announcement that in all of Israel none measured up to him in height, strength, goodness, or acclaim. A natural leader, a prince among his peers, his extraordinary character was recognized and proclaimed by the people. The beginning of his story is the stuff of fairy tales. And so, it goes on, for a while.

But, at a point, things begin to sour. That point was the arrival on the scene of David – a younger, more handsome, more gifted, and more acclaimed man. Jealousy sets in and envy slowly turns Saul’s soul to poison. Looking at David, he sees only a popularity that eclipses his own, not another man’s goodness, nor indeed how that goodness can be a gift to the people. He grows bitter, petty, cold, tries to kill David, and eventually dies by his own hand, an angry man who has fallen far from the goodness of his youth.

What happened here? How does someone who has so much goodness, talent, power, and blessing, grow into an angry, petty man who kills himself out of disappointment? How does this happen?

The late Margaret Laurence, in a brilliant, dark novel, The Stone Angel, gives us an interesting description of exactly how this can happen. Her main character, Hagar Shipley, parallels somewhat the biblical Saul.

Hagar’s story begins like his: She is young, good, and full of potential. What’s to become of such a beautiful, bright, talented, young woman? Sadly, not much at all. She drifts into everything: adulthood, an unhappy marriage, and into a deep unrecognized disappointment that eventually leaves her slovenly, frigid, bitter, and without energy or ambition. What’s as remarkable as it is sad, is that she doesn’t recognize any of this as happening to her. In her mind, she remains always the young, good, gracious, popular, attractive young girl she was in high school. She doesn’t notice how small her world has become, how few friends are around, how little she admires anything or anyone, or even how physically unkempt she has let herself become.

Her awakening is sudden and cruel. One winter day, shabbily dressed in an old parka, she rings the doorbell of a house to which she is delivering eggs. A young child answers the door, sees Hagar, and Hagar overhears the child tell her mother: “That horrible, old egg-woman is at the door!” The penny drops.

Stunned, she leaves the house and finds her way to a public bathroom where she puts on all the lights and studies her face in a mirror. What looks back is a face she doesn’t recognize, someone pathetically at odds with whom she imagines herself to be. She sees in fact the horrible, old egg-woman that the child saw at the door rather than young, gracious, attractive, big-hearted woman she still imagines herself to be. How can this happen? she asks herself. How can we, imperceptible to ourselves, grow into someone we don’t even recognize?

To a greater or lesser degree, this happens to us all. It’s not easy to age, to absorb the death of   much of what we dreamed for ourselves and to watch the young take over and receive the popularity and acclaim that once were ours. Like Saul, we can easily fill with a jealousy and an anger to which we are blind and, like Hagar, do not notice inside ourselves. Others, of course, do notice.

But, for most of us, as this is happening, we remain still good and generous people, except that we are more caustic, cynical, and judgmental than we once were. We remain good people, but whine too much, feel too sorry for ourselves, and curse more than bless those who have replaced us in youth, popularity, and status.

Hence, one of the pre-eminent human and spiritual tasks in the second-half of life is precisely to recognize this jealousy, this ugliness, inside ourselves and to come back again to the love and freshness of our youth, to revirginize, to come to a second naivete, and to begin again to give others, especially the young, the gaze of admiration.

At the beginning of the Book of Revelations, the author, speaking in God’s voice, has this advice for us, at least for those of us who are beyond the bloom of youth: “I’ve seen how hard you work. I recognize your generosity and all the good work you do. But I have this against you – you have less love in you now than when you were young! Go back and look from where you have fallen!”

We might want to hear those words from scripture before we overhear them from some young girl telling her mother that a bitter, ugly, old person is at the door.

We live this life “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears.” This was part of a prayer my parents prayed every day of their adult lives, as did many others in their generation. In the light of contemporary sensitivities (and one-sided spiritualities) this might sound morbid. Are we to understand our lives as time of grieving in a world that cannot deliver happiness? Is this really what God wants of us?

Taken without nuance, this can indeed be morbid. God didn’t put us into this world to suffer in order to go to heaven. No. God is a good parent. Good parents bring children into this world with the intent that they should flourish and find happiness. So why might our Christian faith ask us to understand ourselves as mourning and weeping in a valley of tears?

For my parents, that phrase brought a certain consolation, namely, that their lives didn’t have to deliver the full symphony, heaven right now. It gave them sacred permission to accept that in life there will be disappointments, suffering, poverty, sickness, loss, frustrated dreams, heartbreak, misunderstanding, and death. They never over-expected and understood that it is normal to experience pain and disappointment. Paradoxically, by accepting this limitation, they were able to give themselves permission to thoroughly enjoy life’s good moments without guilt.

My fear is that we are not equipping ourselves nor the next generation with the tools needed to undergo frustration, disappointment, and heartbreak without breaking down in faith (and sometimes too in psyche and body). Today, for the most part, our normal expectation is that we shouldn’t be finding ourselves mourning and weeping, but rather that life should be delivering a full symphony. We no longer feel that we have sacred permission to be weeping.

The spirituality we breathe in today from our churches, theologians, and spiritual writers has many strong points (just as the one my parents breathed in had its weaknesses). However, to my mind, for the most part spiritualities today do not leave sufficient space for grieving, a lacuna shared by most of the secular world.

We are not making enough space for grief, either in our churches or in our lives. We are not giving people the tools they need to handle frustration, loss, and heartbreak, nor how to grieve when they are beset by them. Outside of our funeral rituals, we make very little room for grief. Worse still, we tend to give the impression that there is something wrong in our lives if there are tears. What’s the place and value of grieving?

First, as Karl Rahner poetically explains, it is a way of accepting that in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that here in this life there is no finished symphony. Grieving is also, as Rachel Naomi Remen writes, a critical way of self-care. Not to grieve, she submits, is a denial of our own wholeness. People burn out because they don’t grieve. British novelist Anita Brookner repeats a particular refrain in several of her books. Commenting on marriage, she suggests that the first task in a marriage is for the couple to console each other for the fact that they cannot not disappoint each other.”  

My parents had not read Karl Rahner, Rachel Naomi Remen, or Anita Brookner, but in their daily prayer they reminded themselves that in this life there is no finished symphony, that grieving is healthy self-care, and that it’s consoling to accept that neither of them could ever be quite enough for the other since only God can provide that.

What do we need to grieve? Our human condition and all that comes with it, namely,  impermanence, the loss of our youth, the loss of a youthful body, wounds, betrayals, frustrated dreams, heartbreaks, the loss of loved ones, the death of our honeymoons, the perennial flow through our lives of people, places, and institutions and then disappearing, our incapacity to not be disappointing to others, the loss of our health, and our eventual deaths, that’s what we need to grieve.

And how do we grieve? Jesus left us a template for this when he grieved in the garden of Gethsemane. What did he do when, as the Gospels say, he was reduced to “sweating blood” as he faced his own imminent death? He prayed, prayed a prayer that openly and honestly expressed his agony, that recognized his distance from others inside this suffering, which acknowledged his own helplessness to do anything to change the situation, that repeatedly begged God to alter things, but that expressed a trust in God despite the present darkness. That’s the way Jesus wept.

If Jesus wept, so must we. The disciple is never superior to the master. Moreover, we can learn from Jesus that mourning and weeping in our lives do not necessarily mean that there is something wrong. It might well mean that this is where are meant to be.    

We have sacred permission to sometimes be in agony.

What has been given you to carry? Where do the needs and pains of others conscript your freedom? When is freedom mitigated by circumstance? What are the situations that you are born into or meet in life to which you must respond, perhaps even at the cost of your life?  What may you not walk away from?    

These are important questions, not easy to answer. But they are key questions vis-a-vis discerning one’s vocation: what is that special task to which each of us is asked to give over our lives? 

Each of us comes into this world with a God-given vocation. In essence, that’s easy enough to pinpoint. Simply put, we are all asked to love God and love each other. That’s the same for everyone. However, beyond that bald essence, it’s no longer the same for everyone because we are all born into and meet different circumstances in life. We are born into different families, different countries, different times in history, different cultures, different situations of poverty or affluence, different faiths, different kinds of intelligence, different natural aptitudes, and different physical bodies that vary greatly in terms of health, strength, and physical attractiveness. Philosophers call this your “existential” situation. In that, in that particularity, like snowflakes, no two persons are ever the same. And that uniqueness will color and perhaps fundamentally define your vocation and help dictate what will be given you to carry.

Here’s what’s at stake. We are all born free, yes, but many things both conscript and constrict our freedom.

Let me illustrate with a personal example. I was born the twelfth child in a large family. My parents, first-generation immigrant farmers who, during many years of marriage and child-rearing, were unable to fully support our family from the farm alone. We needed some added income. As well, our outback rural community had only an elementary school and any education beyond the eighth grade required leaving home to attend a boarding school, something my parents could not afford.

Because of that, five of my older siblings had to end their education after elementary school, not because they wanted to or because they lacked the desire or intelligence for higher education, but rather because our financial need and the absence of a local high school necessitated that they leave school and take jobs to help support the family. For all of them, particularly for a couple of them, this was a hard sacrifice. Everything in them hungered for more freedom and choice; but, given their circumstances, this was what they were given to carry. And that sacrifice, that giving over of themselves for something beyond themselves, very much defined their vocation and their very persons. A large part of their vocation was to sacrifice many of their own dreams and ambitions for the sake of the family. Among other factors, my own opportunity for an education was largely predicated on their sacrifice.

However, in this, they are not exceptional. Their sacrifice is mirrored in the lives of millions of men and women all over the world: immigrants who need to sacrifice their own ambitions in order to work in the fields or take menial jobs to support their families; young women and men from developing countries who have to leave their families and go abroad to earn money to send back to their families; millions of young people who cannot attend university because of cost; countless women and men who need to sacrifice whole seasons of their lives to take care of an ill or aging parent; and billions of women who have to sacrifice career to raise children. This is what has been given them to carry – and their sacrifice helps constitute the heart of their vocation.

Beyond these things which can conscript our freedom and radically dictate our vocation, there are still other things which either constrict or open our freedom and so help dictate our vocation: having robust physical and mental health as opposed to being physically or mentally fragile; having an athlete’s body as opposed to having a physical disability; being an alpha male or a homecoming queen as opposed to being the one who is bullied and shunned; being temperamentally aggressive as opposed to being temperamentally gentle and accommodating; or being the one who comes from privilege as opposed to being the one who comes from a background without privilege.

Each of these not only helps dictate your vocation, but each also helps to specially equip you for your vocation. If you are on the fragile and wounded side of the equation, your seeming human shortcomings can give you special powers to be a healer for others. Being wounded, you have special powers to become a wounded healer. Conversely, if you are on the privileged side of the equation, that privilege also dictates your vocation and your special gift, namely, you are now the one to whom much is given and consequently from whom much is expected.

What has been given you to carry?