Soul-Chained to Things Beyond Us

July 1, 2007

In his novel, Clowns of God, Morris West suggests that there are deep reasons why we are so incurably restless: “The fact is that we live only in communion – not only with our present, but with the past and future as well. We are haunted by a whole poetry of living, by lullabies half-remembered and sounds of train whistles in the night and the scent of lavender in a summer garden. We are haunted by grief, too, and fear, and images of childhood terror and the macabre dissolution of age.”

Living, at least living with a certain restfulness and peace of soul, is not as simple as we think. We shouldn’t be so surprised at our perpetual disquiet and pathological restlessness for we are haunted, as West puts it, by a whole poetry of living that doesn’t allow us to be easily inside the present moment. Too many things that have nothing to do with the present moment constantly invade our consciousness. We are, in the words of Toni Morrison, “soul-chained” to things beyond us. Our hearts sense things, remember things, and connect to things in ways that we do not necessarily want and these half-remembered, half-thought, and half-felt feelings forever keep us from being comfortably inside our own skins. They bring the past and future into our present and they chain our hearts to worlds beyond us.

We feel this most clearly and painfully whenever we suffer a heartache or an obsession for someone we love but can’t have. Whenever that happens, as we know, the ache in our hearts makes for a heaviness, an emptiness, and a restlessness that robs us of virtually all of the joy we might experience at a given moment. There are so many times when we have every practical reason to be happy and content, but, because of a heartache, simply cannot give ourselves over to the moment or be content inside of its simple joys. Our heartache, coming from somewhere beyond, colors everything with its restlessness.

And it isn’t just romantic heartaches that do that to us. We suffer through obsessions of all kinds. Memories, regrets, hurts, intuitions, nostalgia, and daydreams of all sorts, are forever impaling themselves inside of us and leaving us deeply restless. Karl Jung once said that energy isn’t always friendly. Whenever we have a heartache, a regret, or an obsession that spoils our day and leaves us too restless to sleep at night we experience what he meant.

This is both good and bad: Some of the things we are chained to produce pain and restlessness in ways that rob us of sunshine, freedom, and sleep. Often, when we are restless, the thoughts and feelings that have invaded us are unwanted. We wish we could be free of them in order to enjoy our lives, without these thoughts and feelings roaming around inside of us like ghosts inside a haunted house. But, painful as this can be, we really wouldn’t want the opposite.

If we could ever be content simply with the pleasures contained in a given moment, like a contented animal munching grass in the sun, we would, by that same token, reduce ourselves from human to animal. What makes our souls different from the souls of animals is precisely the fact that our souls are infinite in their depth, infinite in their yearnings, and therefore infinite too in the realities to which they are chained. Our restlessness is, in fact, a sign of our humanity.

Sometimes of course this wears us down and we get to so weary and tired that we want only to numb ourselves against those things that over-stimulate our souls from beyond. This numbing ourselves to depth can be healthy for a while, as a convalescent space, but in the end we need to be haunted from beyond. The ghosts that haunt us bring with them depth, spirit, and meaning.

Morris West tells us that we are always haunted by things beyond us, but he adds: “I am sure that it is in this domain of our daily dreaming that the Holy Spirit establishes his own communion with us. This is how the gift is given which we call grace: the sudden illumination, the sharp regret that leads to penitence or forgiveness, the opening of the heart to the risk of love.”

What haunts us from beyond is also what drives us beyond simple, animal, satisfaction and opens us to other worlds.

In her novel, Love, Nobel-prize winning novelist, Toni Morrison describes a young boy who is falling rather hopelessly in love with a woman who is incapable of reciprocating that love. This, she suggests, will surely lead to heartbreak and ruin: “God help the boy,” she laments, “if he got soul-chained to a woman he couldn’t trust.”

We all know the pain and heartbreak of that! But the reverse is probably worse: God help any of us if we become so dulled, calloused, or self-protective that we are no longer soul-chained to worlds beyond us.”

Sustaining a Prayer Life

June 24, 2007

It’s hard to sustain a regular life of prayer. Why? Why is it so difficult to pray regularly?

Some reasons are obvious: over-busyness, tiredness and too many demands on our time, constant distraction, spiritual laziness, worship services that bore us, and methods of prayer that leave us flat and inattentive.

But there is another reason too, suggested by monks and mystics. The problem we have in sustaining prayer, they say, is often grounded in the false notion that prayer needs to be interesting, exciting, intense, and full of energy all the time. But that is impossible, nothing is meant to be exciting all the time, including prayer and church services, and nobody has the energy to always be alert, attentive, intense, and actively engaged all the time.

Sometimes we don’t pray regularly precisely because we simply cannot find within ourselves the energy, time, intensity, and appetite for active participation that we think prayer is demanding of us. But prayer respects that, even if spiritual authors and liturgists often don’t.

Prayer is meant to respect the natural rhythms of our energy. Praying is like eating and, as we know from experience, you don’t always want a banquet. If you tried to have a banquet every day, you would soon find coming to the table burdensome and would look for every excuse to escape, to sneak off for a quick sandwich by yourself.

Eating has a natural rhythm: banquets and quick snacks, rich meals and simple sandwiches, high times with linen serviettes and low times with paper napkins, meals which take a whole evening and meals which you eat on the run. And the two depend upon each other: You can only have high season if you mostly have ordinary time.

Healthy eating habits respect our natural rhythms: our time, energy, tiredness, the season, the hour, our boredom, our taste.

Prayer should be the same, but this isn’t generally respected. Too often we are left with this impression: All prayer should be high celebration, upbeat, with high energy. The more variety the better. Longer is better than shorter. Time and tiredness should never be a consideration. During prayer, nobody should ever look at a wristwatch. People at a prayer service need not be told how long the service will last. The solution to boredom and lack of energy is more variety and imagination.

No wonder we are often lack the energy to pray and want to avoid church services.

Monks have secrets worth knowing. They know that if you pray regularly boredom and lack of energy will soon begin to wear you down. The answer then is not so much new prayer forms and more variety, but rhythm, routine, and established ritual. For monks, the key to sustaining a daily life of prayer is not so much variety, novelty, and the call for higher energy, but rather a reliance on the expected, the familiar, the repetitious, the ritual, the clearly defined. What’s needed is a clearly delineated prayer form which gives you a clear durational expectancy and does not demand of you an energy that you cannot muster on a given day.

There are times of course for high celebration, for variety and novelty, for spontaneity, and for long celebrations. There are also times, and these are meant to predominate just as they do in our eating habits, for ordinary time, for low season, for prayer that respects our energy-level, work pressures, and time constraints.

It is no accident, I suspect, that more people used to attend daily church services when these were shorter, simpler, less demanding in terms of energy expenditure, and gave people attending a clear expectation as to how long they would last. The same holds true for other prayers, the office of the church and basically all common prayer. What clear, simple, and brief rituals provide is precisely prayer that depends upon something beyond our own energy. The rituals carry us, our tiredness, our lack of energy, our inattentiveness, our indifference, and even our occasional distaste. They keep us praying even when we are too tired to muster up our own energy.

There is much to be commended in stressing that prayer, particularly liturgy, should demand of us real energy, real participation, and real celebration. It is meant to be demanding, but sometimes, I fear, we misunderstand what it is asking of us and sometimes too, I think, we are working too hard at it and are not letting the rituals themselves work hard enough

Dietrich Bonhoeffer had a little mantra he would sometimes use when he was preaching to a young couple on their wedding day. He would tell them: “Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love will sustain your marriage. It won’t. But your marriage can sustain your love!”

That’s true too for prayer. We think that good intention and energy will sustain our rituals of prayer, but they can’t. Rather our rituals of prayer can sustain our good will and our energy.

Don’t Worship Your Emotions

June 17, 2007

Every major spiritual tradition offers this challenge: Don’t worship your emotions!

Don’t love only when you can feel natural sympathy. Don’t love only when you can feel good and clean about it. Don’t let your moral decisions be dictated by your emotions, even when they seem to operating at their highest level.

What’s at issue here? Fuller maturity and what’s highest in Christian discipleship. When Jesus tells us that all the commandments can be boiled down to a single one, love, he adds a caveat: Love, as I have loved you.

How did he love? He continued to love, forgive, and give his life even when those he was loving were destroying him. That’s the challenge, but it isn’t easy. Why not?

If you were bullied as a child, laughed at, humiliated, and shamed before your friends and classmates, it isn’t easy (no matter how much you have grown and matured) to feel sympathy for the bully who, as you have learned since, was only acting out the abuse he had received from someone else, probably from his own father. It’s more natural to continue to hate him and rejoice that his later life is as laden with problems and unhappiness as were his school days.

If you are a woman who has been hit by a man, perhaps even by your own spouse, and made to feel the helplessness and humiliation of that, it is hard, emotionally impossible perhaps, to feel real empathy for the plight of men (let alone for the man who struck you) just because you now know that men are more wounded than women, that their suicide rates are infinitely higher, and that they struggle much more than women to express themselves, to give and to receive love, and to enjoy life’s simple joys.

If you have been sexually abused it is understandably impossible, at least at one level to feel compassion for pedophiles and sexual predators of any kind, even once you know that every victimizer was himself first victimized and that this wound is the cause of his deep sickness and that the stigma of that sickness is the new leprosy in our society.

And if your emotions are normal it is hard to be opposed to the death penalty when the person awaiting the sentence is unrepentant, rationalizing, hard, and is blaming everyone else for his problems. It’s easier to oppose the death penalty for someone whose heart is repentant and tearful and who wants only to make amends to the family of his victim.

But that’s the stretch! That’s precisely what we are invited to when scripture says: “Sing a new song!”
What is our old song and what is wrong with it?

Our old song is the song we naturally sing, even at our best, when we let our emotions, our natural instincts, and our bruised and needy egos dictate our sympathies. When we do this, we give out our love and empathy only when our emotions, naturally protective and wounded, allow us to, namely, whenever we can feel clean, good, and cathartic in loving and forgiving. That is why it is so difficult for us to have a consistent ethic of life within which we are as solicitous to save the life of a guilty murderer as we are to save the life of an innocent unborn child.

We struggle with this because emotion rather than our discipleship is dictating our sympathies. We are naturally loving and empathic, but in a very restricted way, namely, we give out our love and empathy only when we can feel good about it, that is, when it is clean, wanted, respected, and appreciated. We can love, forgive, and bless someone who wants to be loved, forgiven, and blessed by us, but, we find it existentially impossible to do the same when that person has hurt us, hates us, blames us, and wants us dead.

But that’s precisely what Christian discipleship and full human maturity call us to, namely, to be able to have real empathy, forgiveness, and love for those who have hurt us, humiliated us, blame us for their unhappiness, remain unrepentant, and, in essence, curse us.

A couple of years ago, when all the negative publicity about sexual abuse among clergy was at high fever, a very sincere, good-hearted, Catholic man said to me: “I’ll never give another penny to the Catholic Church! I will not have any of my money supporting a pedophile!”

That’s nature speaking, but it’s a long way from the love and understanding that Jesus preached. In essence, what this sincere man is doing is worshipping his emotions by saying: “I can give my love and support when I can feel good about it, but I can’t give my love and support when I can’t feel good about it, no matter that a pedophile suffers from the most unglamorous of all diseases.

But love calls us to more than that and, in order to get to that higher level, we must stop worshipping our emotions.

Celebrating Life inside the Communion of Saints

June 10, 2007

Recently I led a memorial service for a friend who had died four years ago. Everyone who came to this service had also been at his funeral. Why another memorial service four years later? This is the background:

My friend had been diagnosed with a particularly aggressive type of cancer and was told by his doctors that his only chance for survival was to undergo a bone-marrow transplant which given his age, mid-fifties, was a high risk. His chances, the doctors told him, were one in three. But that was his only real option.

The day before he went into the hospital to begin the transplant procedure he gathered a number of family and friends around him to say goodbye, should this indeed be the end. We gathered at noon, had a simple lunch, took a short walk with him, huddled together while he took a needed siesta to gather his strength, and then took him to a chapel where we celebrated the Eucharist and gave him the anointing of the sick. We then went to his favorite restaurant for a long supper, a “last supper”, at which he ate all his favorite foods and was able to express his gratitude and love for us and we were able to do the same for him. It was a great evening and we used every ritual we knew, earthly and sacramental, to try to make this farewell special.

The doctors were accurate in their predictions. He didn’t make it. He died in recovery and so our supper with him was indeed a “last supper”.

We had a large funeral for him, laid him to rest according to his wishes in an unmarked grave in small rural cemetery within which there were only one or two other graves, and we all went home.

In the years that followed we prayed daily for him and then, after four years, some of us who had been at that original farewell decided to come together again in the same chapel and the same restaurant. But to do what? Why repeat a farewell we had already done? Why were we doing this?

Because basically all of us, either at some inchoate place in our hearts or at some more explicit place in our faith, believe in the communion of saints, namely, that our loved ones who have died are still in relationship to us and that this relationship continues to change and grow even after we are separated by death. And, given the truth of that, we realized too that, at a time, a further kind of letting go was being asked of us. What is meant by this?

In the late 1970s, a Virginian writer, Sheldon Vanauken, wrote a book entitled, A Severe Mercy. It tells the story of love, of death, and of relating beyond death. As a young man still in his early twenties, he was blessed to find his soul mate, a woman he affectionately calls Davey. Their love almost overpowered them in its singularity and yet, through it, they found God – and they also found C.S. Lewis (who became their spiritual director and mentor). But their earthly love was to be short-lived. Still in her mid-twenties, Davey was stricken with cancer and died. Vanauken was disconsolate, beyond grief, in a darkness that had him contemplating suicide. Fortunately, he had C.S. Lewis as a spiritual guide.

After his wife’s death, he had her body cremated and kept the ashes. As well, he carried her wedding ring in his pocket. One night, a couple of years after her death, he was on a ship crossing the Atlantic and he went outside at night, alone with her ashes and her wedding ring, to pray. In his prayer he got a clear signal from her that essentially said: “It’s time for something new. Scatter the ashes lovingly into the ocean. Drop the wedding ring into the sea. Let go of the grief you are carrying! We will be together again in the future, but for now, on this earth, it’s time to move on.”

In essence, that’s the reason we gathered again in memorial for our friend. After four years, we were hearing him say (however we hear these things in our hearts) that it was time to further scatter his ashes, to drop the wedding ring in the ocean, to let go in a further way so that the mystery of a deeper love can continue to grow.

And it was a wonderful, joy-filled evening. We prayed, shared stories, drank wine, but mostly just laughed in gratitude because our lives had been so gifted by this man, William Manfield , whose warmth, love, humor, empathy, faith, and love for the Eucharist, helped make our own lives more bearable, more understandable, more joyous, more faith-filled, and more complete. He wasn’t always Mother Theresa, he had some foibles she didn’t, but, like her, he’s now a saint and a saint with whom we got to celebrate the “last supper”.

Liberals and Conservatives – Their Worst and Their Best

June 3, 2007

Houston Smith, who writes textbooks on world religions, suggests that we should always judge a religion by what’s best in it, not by its more strident expressions. The same is true for ideologies. Liberals and conservatives should be judged by what’s best in them, not by their worst expressions.

With that being said, here’s a little snapshot of both, at their worst and at their best:

At their worst, conservatives are mean-spirited, narrow, and grandiose, seeing every liberalizing tendency as dangerous, godless, an enemy, a tyranny of relativity. With much of the outside world perceived as a threat, strident conservatives live a lot by fear and their primary instinct is to protect, circle the wagons, re-entrench, reduce ambiguity, and have clarity trump everything else. They have one litmus text for morality, abortion. Conservatives, at their worst, move more naturally to exclusion rather than inclusion. God becomes a hammer to defend truth. At their worst, conservatives are prone to use power and authority to shut down discussion and to actively remove those who oppose them. If a conservative doesn’t like you, he or she will try to get you fired! Conservatives, at their worst, are overly serious and grandiose – because they see themselves as the sole guardians of God and truth, and how can such an awesome responsibility be taken lightly?
And liberals return the favor: At their worst, liberals are naive, adolescent, and arrogant. For them, every secular challenge to traditional values and religion is the moral high ground and may itself not be challenged. Secular enlightenment is seen as the exclusive agent in having brought about the liberation of human freedom from superstition and false authority. Secular enlightenment is also seen as being the sole agent in the struggle against racism, sexism, and other forms of inequality and injustice. Its litmus tests for morality are pro-choice and gay marriage. As a young liberal complained recently, at a liberal political convention, you can admit that you have had an abortion or are gay, but you may not admit that you take Jesus seriously. Strident liberals tend to be secular fundamentalists and are unable to see and admit that what’s best inside of their own morality comes out of Judeo-Christian roots. If a liberal doesn’t like you he or she probably won’t try to get you fired but they will try to intimidate and shame you intellectually. God isn’t a hammer with which to defend truth, but God is excluded from public discourse.

But that’s conservatives and liberals at their angry worst, it’s not the place where they should be judged. What are they at their best?

At their best, conservatives keep us aware of some important truths:

First, that energy isn’t friendly and we shouldn’t be naive to that fact. Karl Jung once suggested that it is naive to think that energy is friendly, it isn’t. It’s imperialistic, wreaks havoc with our lives and our relationships, and often beats us up like the playground bully. Taboos exist for a reason and the release of energy is in fact often a slippery slope. Next, conservatives highlight: the truth that every kingdom needs to be protected. From our countries, to our neighborhoods, to our marriages, to our families, to our private relationships, something or someone will invariably encroach on our boundaries and it’s naive to think that what’s precious doesn’t need to be protected. Importantly too, conservatives point out that sexuality is not an exempt area within morality and politics. It too has consequences. Finally, conservatives rightly point out that there are some absolutes. Perhaps we can’t always know what they are and perhaps we sometimes draw our boundaries too tightly and live with too much fear and timidity, but there are absolutes that we cannot ignore without seriously hurting ourselves and our world.

At their best, what do liberals bring to the table?

Liberals rightly highlight that freedom is a divine gift, that it has been bought at a great historical price, and that it should never be denigrated or reduced in God’s name. God wants us to be free, and free from fear. The opposite of a liberal is not the church but the Taliban. Next, liberals rightly point out that there are as many dangers in being too safe as there are in taking risks. As Goethe points out, and every parent knows, the dangers of life are many, and safety is one of those dangers. Liberals too rightly point out that historically the golden age of the church was not as golden for non-whites and for women. Finally, and importantly, liberals at their best, challenge us to “catholicity”, namely, to an ever-wider embrace, to an ever-widening openness to what’s other, to the truth revealed by Jesus that God’s heart is not a ghetto but a house with many rooms.

Sadly though, mostly liberals and conservatives fight each other when in fact they badly need each other. Both carry important truths and our culture and our churches would be far healthier if would accept that.

A Higher Court of Things

May 27, 2007

Perhaps more than anything else, moral issues are what divide us. Sincere people, who can agree on almost everything else, often find themselves painfully divided other over issues such as abortion, gay marriage, just war, capital punishment, immigration, and economic justice.

One of the reasons for this is because, purely at the level of justice, each of these is very complex. Inside of each there are certain competing rights which will always make for disagreements in terms of what is asked for by strict justice.

Take capital punishment: We argue back and forth about whether or not it is a deterrent to crime, whether or not it eases the hurt of the families of the victims, and whether or not it is humane; but each of these questions is arguable and each side compiles its own statistics and anecdotal evidence to support its arguments. Simply on the basis of justice, a strong case can be made either way.

However, if we move the argument into the realm of Christian discipleship, the ambiguity disappears: For a disciple of Jesus, capital punishment is always wrong and should never be done (independent of any arguments about justice) because it goes against the very heart of the gospel, namely, we are supposed to forgive murderers not kill them. Jesus is clear on this: He challenges us to forgive those who murder our loved ones and who might indeed murder us. The capacity to forgive a murderer is one of the litmus tests for Christian discipleship. This where Jesus most stretches the heart.

The same is true for a number of other divisive moral issues: abortion, immigration, just war. In each of these there are elements of justice that compete with each other and it is not always clear what justice, all on its own, demands. Strict justice, unlike the gospels, does not demand that we forgive those who have hurt us, does not demand that we turn the other cheek when someone strikes us, and does not demand that we take the high road rather than the way of recrimination. But the heart of Jesus’ teaching does ask this of us. It asks us to move beyond justice to a compassion, understanding, self-effacement, and selfless love that, like the Father of the prodigal son and older brother, can bring God’s understanding, love, and forgiveness to every situation, including murder.

Biblical principle mitigates justice and takes us beyond it. In justice, for instance, we can argue about whose rights are to be defended on the issue of immigration. Biblically it’s a lot clearer: The earth belongs to everyone equally and we have a right to surplus only after everyone else has what is necessary for his or her subsistence. There are higher principles than justice.

This is true too of abortion: In justice we can argue about the competing rights of the unborn for life and the mother for the freedom of choice, even if one does outweigh the other. Biblically though it’s clear: God is the author of all life and human life is sacred, all of it, and it is not our prerogative to ever actively snuff out a human heartbeat.

What isn’t everywhere clear in justice is much clearer in discipleship.

But inside of secular society, laws aren’t always made on the basis of Christian discipleship. Hence we have to try too to argue our moral principles from a human and rational point of view. After all, every one of these moral issues very much affects the common good and each is as much a human and moral matter as it is a religious one.

But, as we know only too well, inside the court of rationality, public opinion, and politics, we don’t always win. We lose as often as we win and, too often, we get lost ourselves in the raw struggle to win. And yet we need to continue to be a moral voice on all of these issues. As painful as it is to divide ourselves from others by taking an unpopular stand on moral issues, Christian discipleship demands that we continue to try to make a case for what we believe to be right inside the arenas of public discourse and politics.

However we need to accept too that, when we argue solely on the basis of justice, we will experience a lot of strong counter-challenge from good, sincere people. We live in a very large and diverse family, in a democracy rather than a theocracy, and we are not free to impose our morality on others. Much as we would like to, we can’t always shape our laws.

But we can shape our hearts and our consciences and there, given the invitations of Jesus, we find demands that go far beyond the demands of justice. It’s in the invitation to deeper discipleship where it is clear that we must forgive murderers rather than execute them, that the earth belongs equally to all, and that God alone has the power to decide life and death.

Measuring Ourselves in Love

May 20, 2007

When I was younger, I was pretty confident that I knew what love meant. After all, we all experience love in some way, being in love, loving someone, being loved by someone. Virtually everyone has known the love of somebody, a friend, a family member, an acquaintance.

But the older I get the more I wonder sometimes whether I, or most anyone else, has much sense of what that over-used word, love, really means? When we are honest, we sense our own distance from its full meaning. Why?

Because, the older we get, the more we also begin to know love’s dark side. Too common are these experiences: We fall in love and think it will last forever, but then fall out of love, feel love go sour, feel love grow cold, see love betrayed, feel ourselves wounded by love, and wound others. Finally, even more upsetting, we all find that there are always people in our lives who are cold, bitter, and unforgiving towards us so that it is not always easy to feel love and be loving.

In the light of this reticence, I would like comment on Jesus’ most important commandment: “Love one another as I have loved you!”

We too easily read that simplistically, romantically, and in a one-sided, over-confident manner. But this command contains the most important challenge of the whole gospel and, like the deepest part of the gospel to which it is linked, the crucifixion, it is very, very difficult to imitate. Why?

It’s easy to consider ourselves as loving if we only look at one side of things, namely, how we relate to those people who are loving, warm, respectful, and gracious towards us. If we rate ourselves on how we feel about ourselves in our best moments among like-minded friends, we can easily conclude both that we are loving persons and that we are measuring up to Jesus’ command to love as he did.

But if we begin to look at the skeletons in our relational closets our naive confidence soon disappears: What about the people who hate us, whom we don’t like? What about the people whom we avoid and who avoid us? What about those people towards whom we feel resentment? What about all those people with whom we are at odds, towards whom we feel suspicion, coldness, anger? What about those people whom we haven’t been able to forgive?

It’s one thing to love someone who adores you, it’s quite another to love someone who wants you dead!

But that’s the real test. Jesus’ command to love contains a critical subordinate clause, “as I have loved you!” What was unique in the way he loved us?

Where Jesus stretches us beyond our natural instincts and beyond all self-delusion is in his command to love our enemies, to be warm to those who are cold to us, to be kind to those who are cruel to us, to do good to those who hate us, to forgive those who hurt us, to forgive those who won’t forgive us, and to ultimately love and forgive those who are trying to kill us.

That command, love and forgive your enemies, more than any creedal formula or other moral issue, is the litmus-test for Christian discipleship. We can ardently believe in and defend every item in the creed and fight passionately for justice in all its dimensions, but the real test of whether or not we are followers of Jesus is the capacity or non-capacity to forgive an enemy, to remain warm and loving towards someone who is not warm and loving to us.

We shouldn’t delude ourselves on this. It is easy to rationalize this away and, if we do, no doubt there will be more than enough false friends around who will furnish us with both theological and psychological arguments that will justify us in not loving our enemies. But the gospel is uncompromising: We are loving or non-loving not on the basis of how we respond to those who love us, but on the basis of how we respond to those who hate us, and are cold, hostile, and murderous toward us. That’s the hard, non-negotiable truth underlying Jesus’ command to love and, when we are honest, we have to admit that we are still a long ways from measuring up to that.

There’s a sobering challenge in an old Stevie Nicks’ song, Golddust Woman: She suggests that it’s good that, at a point in life, someone “shatters our illusion of love” because far too often, blind to its own true intentions, our love is manipulative and self-serving. Too often, the song points out, we are lousy lovers who unconsciously pick our prey.

What shatters our illusion of love is the presence in our lives of people who hate us. They’re the test. It’s here where we have to measure up: If we can love them, we’re real lovers, if we can’t, we’re still under a self-serving illusion.

Painful Goodbyes and the Ascension

May 13, 2007

Among the deeper mysteries in life perhaps the one we struggle with the most is the mystery of the Ascension. It’s not so much that we misunderstand it, we simply don’t understand it.

What is the Ascension?

Historically it was an event within the life of Jesus and the early church and is now a feast-day for Christians, one that links Easter to Pentecost. But it is more than an historical event, it is at the same time a theology, a spirituality, and an insight into life that we need to understand to better sort out the paradoxical interplay between life and death, presence and absence, love and loss.

The Ascension names and highlights a paradox that lies deep at the center of life, namely, that we all reach a point in life where we can only give our presence more deeply by going away so that others can receive the full blessing of our spirits.

What does that mean?

When Jesus was preparing to leave this earth he kept repeating the words: “It is better for you that I go away! You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. If I don’t go away you will be unable to receive my spirit. Don’t cling to me, I must ascend.”

Why is it better sometimes that we go away?

Any parent with grown children has heard similar words from their children, unspoken perhaps but there nonetheless. When young people leave home to go to college or to begin life on their own, what they are really saying to their parents is: “Mum and dad, it is better that I go away. You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy. If I don’t go, I will always be your little boy or little girl but I will be unable to give you my life as an adult. So please don’t cling to the child you once had or you will never be able to receive my adulthood. I need to go away now so that our love can come to full bloom.”

The pain in this kind of letting go is often excruciating, as parents know, but to refuse to do that is to truncate life.

The same is true for the mystery of death. For example: I was 22 years old when in the space of four months both of my parents, still young, died. For my siblings and me the pain was searing. Initially we were nearly overwhelmed with a sense of being orphaned, abandoned, of losing a vital life-connection (that, ironically, we had mostly taken for granted until then). And our feelings were mainly cold, there’s little that’s warm in death.

But time is a great healer. After a while, and for me this took several years, the coldness disappeared and my parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. I felt again their presence, and now as a warm, nurturing spirit that was with me all time. The coldness of death turned into a warmth. They had gone away but now they could give me their love and blessing in a way that they never could fully while they were alive. Their going away eventually created a deeper and purer presence.

The mystery of love and intimacy contains that paradox: To remain present to someone we love we have to sometimes be absent, in ways big and small. In the paradox of love, we can only fully bless each other when we go away. That is why most of us only “get” the blessing our loved ones were for us after they die. Mystically, “blood and water” (cleansing and the deep permission to live without guilt) flow from their dead bodies, just as these flowed from Jesus’ dead body.

And this is even true, perhaps particularly so, in cases where our loved ones were difficult characters who struggled for peace or to bless anyone in this life. Death washes clean and releases the spirit and, even in the case of people who struggled to love, we can after their deaths receive their blessing in way we never could while they were alive. Like Jesus, they could only give us their real presence by going away.

“It is better for you that I go away!” These are painful words most of the time, from a young child leaving her mother for a day to go to school, to the man leaving his family for a week to go on a business trip, to the young man moving out of his family’s house to begin life on his own, to a loved one saying goodbye in death. Separation hurts, goodbyes bring painful tears, and death of every kind wrenches the heart.

But that is part of the mystery of love. Eventually we all reach a point where what is best for everyone is that we go away so that we can give our spirit. The gift that our lives are can only be fully received after we ascend.

Moral Loneliness

May 6, 2007

Robert Coles, in describing Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness.

What is that?

Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for a soul mate. We are lonely in different ways: We always feel some distance from others, always feel some restlessness that cannot be alleviated even within our deepest experiences of intimacy, and always feel an inchoate nostalgia for a home we can never quite find. There is loneliness, a restlessness, an aching, a yearning, a longing, an appetite, a disquiet, a nostalgia, a timelessness, and a sexual inconsummation inside of us that never quite gives us easy rest. We are, in the words of Toni Morrison, soul-chained to deep things outside of ourselves.

Moreover, this dis-ease lies at the center of our experience, not at its edges. We are not restful persons who sometimes get restless, serene persons who sometimes experience disquiet, or fulfilled persons who once in a while get frustrated. Rather we are restless beings who occasionally find rest, disquieted persons who sometimes find solitude and serenity, and dissatisfied men and women who at times find satisfaction.

And, among all these multifarious yearnings, one is deeper than all the others: What we really long for, beneath everything else, is a moral partner, someone to meet us in the depth of our souls, someone from whom we don’t have to hide what’s truest inside of us, and someone who understands and spontaneously honours all that is most precious to us. Someone like that would be a true soul-partner and more than we long someone to sleep with sexually, we long for someone to sleep with in this way, morally. What does this mean?

Scripture and the mystics, unafraid of earthy and sexual images, express it best. What we ultimately long for is soul-consummation. Here is an image from the Song of Songs (3, 1-4)

On my bed at night I sought my beloved:

I sought but could not find him!

So I got up and went through the city;

in the streets and on the squares, seeking my beloved.

I sought but could not find him!

I came upon the watchmen-on their rounds in the city:

“Have you seen my beloved?”

Barely had I passed them when I found my beloved.

I caught him and would not let him go,

until I had brought him to

my mother’s house,

to the room where my mother had conceived me!

It is hard to come up with an image that is more intimate than this one: What we most long for is to take someone home, to our mother’s room, to the most intimate of all places, to the very bed on which we were conceived. But that is a place in the heart, the ache of moral loneliness.

What exactly is being said here?

Each of us, beyond what we can name, has a dark memory of once having been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, an imprint of a love so tender, good, and pure that its memory is a prism through which we see everything else. The old myths express it best when they tell that, before we were born, God kissed our souls and we go through life always remembering, in some dark way, that kiss and measuring everything else in relation to it and its original purity, tenderness, and sweetness.

This unconscious memory of once having been touched and caressed by God creates the deepest place inside of us, the place where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. When we say that something “rings true”, what we are really saying is that it honours that deep place in our hearts, that it coincides with a deep truth, tenderness, and purity that we have already experienced.

From this place all that is deepest and truest within us issues forth – our own caresses, kisses, and tears. Paradoxically this then becomes the place that we most guard from others, even as it is the place that we would most like someone to come into, providing that entry respects precisely the purity, tenderness, and truth of the original caress of God that formed that tender cavity in the first place.

This is the place of deepest intimacy and the place of deepest loneliness, the place where we are innocent and the place where we are violated, the place where we are holy, temples of God, sacred churches of reverence, and the place that we corrupt when we willfully lie. This is our moral center and the aching we feel there is rightly called moral loneliness. It is here that we long for a soul mate.

And it is in this longing that we experience what is deepest inside of us, namely, an unyielding ache that drives us out of ourselves where, like the author of the Song of Songs, we desperately search for someone to sleep with morally.

God’s Voice as Invitation

April 29, 2007

Where does God speak in our world? How does God speak?

Whenever you hear a voice that sounds coercive, threatening, overbearing, that is somehow loud and in your face, you can be sure that, no matter how religious and holy it might claim to be, it is not God’s voice. God’s voice in this world is never coercive or overbearing in any way, but is always an invitation and a beckoning that respects you and your freedom in a way that no human institution or person ever does. God’s voice is thoroughly underwhelming, like a baby’s presence.

Sadly whenever someone tries to teach this, immediately there are objections, often angry and bitter: What about God’s judgment? What about God’s condemnation of sin? What about God’s anger?

Scripture does, on the surface, give us the impression that God is sometimes angry and full of condemnation and violence. But these are anthropomorphisms (a way of speaking about God that reveals how we feel about God when we are unfaithful, sinful, and violent).

God’s voice does judge and it does condemn, but it judges and condemns not by coercive force, but in the same way that the innocence of a baby judges false sophistication, in the way that generosity exposes selfishness, in the way that big-heartedness reveals pettiness, in the way that light makes darkness flee, and in the way that the truth shames lies. God’s voice judges us not by overpowering us but by shining love and light into all those places were we find ourselves huddled in fear, shame, bitterness, hostility, and sin.

But this is not something we learn easily. Already way back, before the birth of Christ, sincere religious people were yearning for God to come into the world in power. What they wanted, and prayed for, was a physical superstar who would come into the world and cleanse it by overpowering sin and evil and rooting them out by force. What they wanted in the longed-for Messiah was a morally superior violence that would give evil no options, but force it literally to acquiesce. What we got instead was a helpless baby in the straw who overpowered no one.

Twenty centuries later, we are still struggling to accept this. Too often the Christ we try to incarnate and preach is still that ancient, longed-for, overpowering Messiah who aims to cleanse the world through flat-out coercion.

We see this most clearly of course in Islamic extremists who like well-intentioned Christians back in the time of the Inquisition, sincerely believe that error has no rights and that, in the name of God, we must use force, violence if necessary, to bring about God’s will on earth. In this view, murder and violence may be done to further God’s purpose because God wants his will imposed upon this world, whether the world wants to accept it or not. But this is the antithesis of true religion.

We need to view God, always, as non-coercive, as an invitation. This has immense implications for everything to do with church and religion, from how we preach, to how we catechize, to how we do liturgy, to how we reach out to those who don’t share our beliefs, to how we approach divisive moral issues, to how loud we turn up the sound system in our churches. God’s voice is not a loud, coercive, overbearing, threatening voice, one that gets into your face whether you like it or not. Rather, God’s voice invites in, beckons, leaves you free, and is as non-threatening as the innocence and powerlessness of a baby – or a saint.

We would do well to better understand this. We are, I believe, too prone inside our church circles to blame the world’s resistance to God’s message simply on its hardness of heart, sin, and indifference. Partly that’s true, but a large part of that resistance has its root too in another source, namely, our own preaching, catechesis, pastoral practice, moral fever, and elitism. Too often, however sincerely we might be doing this, the voice we try to give to God is too-laden with coercion, threat, manipulation, violence, harshness, our own judgments, our own fears, our own wounds, and especially our own egos to bear enough resemblance to the divine kenosis and free invitation that Jesus gave voice to in his birth, life, and message.

Sometimes, after just having given a talk or a homily, I am told by a well-meaning person: “You should raise your voice more! Speak louder! You’re speaking too softly!”

I don’t think so! We need, I believe, to (figuratively and perhaps literally) begin more and more to lower our voices whenever we purport to be speaking in God’s name because God’s voice never overpowers, is never overbearing, never shouts at anyone. Indeed, as Mary Jo Leddy (a voice that speaks God’s hard challenge with the correct invitational gentleness) says: We need to find the few words that are truly our own – and then speak them, clearly but softly.

Commandments for Daily Life

April 22, 2007

Almost thirty years ago, Daniel Berrigan wrote a little book that he entitled, Ten Commandments for the Long Haul. It was, in effect, a handbook of sorts on how to be a prophet in today’s world. It was Berrigan at his best, explaining how a prophet must make a vow of love and not of alienation. Anyone who is trying to be prophetic, from the right or from the left, might profitably read this book.

He ends with a number of Commandments, not ten but forty-seven of them. Here’s a sample of them (paraphrased), just to give you a taste of his insight, language, and wit:

1) Call on Jesus when all else fails. Call on Him when all else succeeds (except that never happens).
2) Don’t be afraid to be afraid or appalled to be appalled. How do you think the trees feel these days, or the whales, or, for that matter, most humans?
3) Keep your soul to yourself. Soul is a possession worth paying for, they’re growing rarer. Learn from monks, they have secrets worth knowing.
4) About practically everything in the world, there’s nothing you can do. This is Socratic wisdom. However, about of few things you can do something. Do it, with a good heart.
5) On a long drive, there’s bound to be a dull stretch or two. Don’t go anywhere with someone who expects you to be interesting all the time. And don’t be hard on your fellow travelers. Try to smile after a coffee stop.
6) Practically no one has the stomach to love you, if you don’t love yourself. They just endure. So do you.
7) About healing: The gospels tell us that this was Jesus’ specialty and he was heard to say: “Take up your couch and walk!”
8) When traveling on an airplane, watch the movie, but don’t use the earphones. Then you’ll be able to see what’s going on, but not understand what’s happening, and so you’ll feel right at home, little different then you do on the ground.
9) Know that sometimes the only writing material you have is your own blood.
10) Start with the impossible. Proceed calmly towards the improbable. No worry, there are at least five exits.

Alongside these commandments, I’d like to share a Decalogue for Daily Living that Pope John XXIII wrote for himself, his own Commandments for daily life. They reflect his depth, his simplicity, and his humility:

1) “Only for today, I will seek to live the livelong day positively without wishing to solve the problems of my life all at once.
2) Only for today, I will take the greatest care of my appearance: I will dress modestly; I will not raise my voice; I will be courteous in my behaviour; I will not criticize anyone; I will not claim to improve or to discipline anyone except myself.
3) Only for today, I will be happy in the certainty that I was created to be happy, not only in the other world buy also in this one.
4) Only for today, I will adapt to circumstances, without requiring all circumstances to be adapted to my own wishes.
5) Only for today, I will devote 10 minutes of my time to some good reading, remembering that just as food is necessary to the life of the body, so good reading is necessary to the life of the soul.
6) Only for today, I will do one good deed and not tell anyone about it.
7) Only for today, I will do at least one thing I do not like doing; and if my feelings are hurt, I will make sure that no one notices.
8) Only for today, I will make a plan for myself: I may not follow it to the letter, but I will make it. And I will be on guard against two evils: hastiness and indecision.
9) Only for today, I will firmly believe, despite appearances, that the good Providence of God cares for me as no one else who exists in this world
10) Only for today, I will have no fears. In particular, I will not be afraid to enjoy what is beautiful and to believe in goodness. Indeed, for 12 hours, I can certainly do what might cause me consternation were I to believe I had to do it all my life.”

Einstein on God and Religion

April 15, 2007

A recent issue of TIME magazine carried a series of excerpts from the diaries of Albert Einstein that give us an insight into how he felt about God and religion. There is a lot of disagreement as to whether he was an atheist or a believer. These excerpts let him speak for himself.

What exactly did he believe about God and religion? Here are some of his comments:

Asked at a dinner party as to whether he was religious, he replied: “Yes, you can call it that. Try and penetrate with our limited means the secrets of nature and you will find that, behind all the discernible laws and connections, there remains something subtle, intangible, and inexplicable. Veneration for this force beyond anything we can comprehend is my religion. To that extent I am, in fact, religious.”

He was Jewish, but his parents were agnostic about Judaism and sent him to a Catholic school as a boy. There he studied both the Catholic catechism and the Jewish scriptures with some enthusiasm. Asked to what extent Christianity influenced his life, he answered: “As a child I received religious instruction both in the Bible and in the Talmud. I am a Jew, but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarean … No one can read the Gospels without feeling the actual presence of Jesus. His personality pulsates in every word. No myth is filled with such life.”

Asked whether or not he believed in God: “I am not an atheist. I don’t think I can call myself a pantheist. The problem involved is too vast for our limited minds. We are in the position of a little child entering a huge library filled books in many languages. The child knows someone must have written those books. It does not know how. It does not understand the languages in which they are written. The child dimly suspects a mysterious order in the arrangement of the books but doesn’t know what it is. That, it seems to me, is the attitude of even the most intelligent human being towards God. We see the universe marvelously arranged and obeying certain laws, but only dimly understand these laws.”

At one point, he composed a personal creed. Here’s one of its tenets: “The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion that stands at the cradle of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder or stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead, a snuffed out candle. To sense that behind anything that can be experienced there is something that our minds cannot grasp, whose beauty and sublimity reaches us only indirectly : this is religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I am a devoutly religious man.”

As well, he was always harder on atheists than on believers in his criticisms: “What separates me from most so-called atheists is a feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos.” Doctrinaire atheists, he suggested, are unconsciously and unhealthily reacting to their past: “Fanatical atheists are like slaves who are still feeling the weight of their chains which they have thrown off after a hard struggle. They are creatures who – in their grudge against traditional religion as ‘the opium of the masses’ – cannot hear the music of the spheres.”

But, despite these insights,, his faith was not traditional. He doubted that God was personal and he didn’t believe in personal immortality.

So where does he really land in terms of God and religion?

He didn’t get some things right, but then who does? As Christians we believe that the first thing we need to affirm is that God is ineffable. God escapes our thought.. That means that, while we can know God, we can’t imagine God, can’t conceptualize God, and can’t speak with any accuracy about God. God is infinite being and that, by definition, is beyond the categories of our thought and imagination. Trying to imagine God is like trying to imagine the highest number possible, an impossibility because numbers have no limit, you can always count one more.

That God cannot be imagined with any accuracy is, in fact, a Christian dogma. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215) taught dogmatically that any words we use about God are more inaccurate than accurate, suggesting that Einstein’s “feeling of utter humility towards the unattainable secrets of the harmony of the cosmos” is perhaps closer to the truth of faith than is the concept of God of his critics.

Personally, I find his insights healthy and refreshing – and a valuable apologetic for belief in God. When the person who is perhaps the greatest scientific mind in history tells us that there is an unimaginable, benign, awe-inspiring, ordering presence beyond us that is undergirding everything and that we should live in wonder and humility in the face of that, then the arguments of lesser minds that faith is naive and superstitious become considerably less compelling.

The Resurrection – The Power of Positive Thinking or the Power of God?

April 8, 2007

Classical writers in all religious traditions tell us that there is a secret to growth, namely, when we reach a certain point, we must let grace do the work. It isn’t that we cease making an effort; it’s just that we need to let our efforts be augmented by something beyond us.

Etty Hillesum, in her diaries, explains this: “I don’t have to tinker with my life [anymore] for an organic process is at work. Something is growing, and every time I look inside, something fresh has happened, and all I have to do is to accept it.”

Is this what we call “the resurrection”?

For many people the resurrection is a metaphor, the faith equivalent of the Phoenix-myth: Deaths aren’t final and we can, if we do it right, rise from our own ashes.

What gives us the power to rise from our own ashes? In this view, proper will-power and positive thinking. The idea is that if you think positively, good things will happen to you. If you believe strongly enough in something, it will happen. If you preserve long enough in hope the good thing wished for will be given you. Faith, hope, and positive thinking make good things happen and resurrect life from its many deaths.

This is the basis for many self-help philosophies and a lot of religious groups. They base themselves more on the power of the human spirit than on the power of transcendent grace. For them, the resurrection is the Phoenix-myth, upgraded a bit by psychological and religious language.

And there is some depth and truth in this. Among other things, the resurrection is about positive thinking and the belief that positive energy makes good things happen, just as self-defeating thoughts are also self-fulfilling. Positive thinking creates positive energy and that energy can help bring life out of ashes. This is true even physically. Sometimes in a serious illness the right attitude is just as important for a cure as the right medication. This is not just wishful thinking; proper attitude lets the right physical, emotional, and spiritual energy flow into the world and into the body.

For many people, this is what the resurrection means, it is a metaphor for the transformation that positive energy can bring into this world..

But it is more than that. The resurrection is not just about the potential effect of positive human energy within us, it is too, and especially, about the power of God, miraculous energy, energy that can do for us what we can’t do for ourselves, energy that can do for us what nature, all on its own, can’t, The resurrection is about power entering our world and our lives from beyond.
How might we understand that?

Paul Tillich once made a distinction between what he termed: Pseudo-religion, Quasi-religion, and Real-religion.

Pseudo-religion is when we use the language of religion (God, revelation, grace, resurrection) but in essence, use those words to refer to what is highest inside of our individual consciousness. And that, at its best, can take us to human maturity and altruism, just as at its worst it can take us to narcissism and grandiosity. In either case, in the end, we are recycling human consciousness, and will-power and positive thinking play the pivotal role in any growth and transformation.

Quasi-religion, on the other hand, does not use the language of religion but uses instead the language of social analysis, psychology, philosophy, economics, and anthropology. And what it calls us to is to what’s highest, not in individual consciousness, but inside of the collective consciousness. Like Real-religion, it calls us beyond ourselves to the transpersonal. Quasi-religion, in its best expressions inside of some political and social ideologies (Marxism, Green Peace, NGOs, Social Justice ideologies), like Real-religion, calls us beyond ourselves, but, unlike Real-religion, it doesn’t ultimately bring transcendent air into our lives. It still only touches what is highest inside of us and our own will-power and positive thinking remain the real driving force behind any transformation either in the world or inside of ourselves.

Real-religion might use or not use the classical words of religion, but, in either case, what it opens up for us is not just what’s highest inside of ourselves and what we can achieve through will-power and positive thinking. Rather it opens us to a power and grace beyond us. It doesn’t simply recycle the air inside of our universe; it brings in air from beyond, divine, transcendent air.

The resurrection has a place for positive thinking and emphasizes the importance of appropriate will-power. But it’s much more than that. Ultimately, it is about the transcendent power of God breaking into nature and into our lives and doing for us what we can’t do simply through will-power and positive thinking. It is a power that can re-arrange the very atoms inside of our physical bodies, our aching emotions, and our divided world and raise up new life from the ashes.

The Cross of Jesus

April 1, 2007

Among all the religious symbols in the world none is more universal than the cross. You see crosses everywhere, on walls, on hillsides, in churches, in houses, in bedrooms, on chains around peoples’ necks, on rings, on ear-rings, on old people, on young people, on believers, and on people who aren’t sure in what they believe. Not everyone can explain what the cross means or why they choose to wear one, but most everyone has an inchoate sense that it is a symbol, perhaps the ultimate symbol, for depth, love, fidelity, and faith.

And the cross is exactly that, the ultimate symbol of depth, love, fidelity, and faith. Rene Girard, an anthropologist, once commented that “the cross of Jesus is the single most revolutionary moral event in all of history.” The world measures time by it. We are in the year 2007 (roughly) since Jesus died on a cross and ever-increasing numbers of people began to organize their lives around its significance.

What is so morally revolutionary in the cross?

Precisely because it such a deep mystery, the cross is not easy to grasp intellectually. The deeper things in life, love, fidelity, morality, and faith are not mathematics, but mysteries whose unfathomable depths always leave room for more still to be understood. We never quite arrive at an adequate understanding of them.

But that doesn’t mean that we don’t know them. Knowing is different than understanding and we intuit a lot more than we can intellectually imagine or express.

For example, TIME magazine did a cover story some years ago on the meaning of the cross and interviewed a large number of people asking what the cross of Jesus meant to them. One woman admitted that she couldn’t really explain what the cross of Jesus meant to her, but stated that she had a sense of its meaning: When she was young girl, her mother was murdered by a jealous boyfriend. When she saw the blood-soaked mattress and her mother’s bloody hand-print on the wall, she realized that she had to find a connection between her mother’s story (and her blood on that mattress) and Jesus’ story (and his blood on the cross.) Sometimes the heart intuits where the head needs to go.

Beyond this gut-knowledge, what can we intellectually grasp about the meaning of the cross? What is its revolutionary moral character?

Theologians, classically, have tried to come to grips with this mystery by dividing the meaning of the cross (and of Jesus’ death) into two parts: First, the cross gives us our deepest understanding of the nature of God. Second, the cross is redemptive, it saves us. All Christians believe that somehow we are washed clean in the blood of Jesus, the Lamb of God.

Neither of these concepts is easy to explain, though theologians do better with the first, the cross as revelation, than with the second, the cross as redemptive. But both concepts, even to the limited extent that we can intellectually understand them, are thoroughly morally revolutionary.

Christianity is 2000 years old, but it took us nearly 1900 years to fully grasp the fact that slavery is wrong, that it goes against heart of Jesus’ teaching. The same can be said about the equality of women. Much of what Jesus revealed to us is like a time-released medicine capsule. Throughout the centuries, slowly, gradually, incrementally, Jesus’ message is dissolving more deeply into our consciousness.

And this is particularly true about our understanding of the cross and what it teaches. For example: There have been popes for 2000 years, beginning with Peter, but it was only the last Pope, John Paul II, in our own generation, who stood up and said with clarity that capital punishment is wrong (independent of any arguments about whether or not it is a deterrent, brings closure to the victims’ families or not, or can be argued in terms of justice) Capital punishment is wrong because it goes against the heart of the gospel as revealed in the cross, namely, that we should forgive murderers, not kill them.

That is just one of the morally revolutionary features inside of the cross. There are countless more. Rene Girard, speaking as an anthropologist, puts it one way when he says that the cross is the most revolutionary moral event in the history of the planet. Mark, the Evangelist, speaking as a disciple of Jesus, puts it another way: For him, the cross of Jesus is the deep secret to everything.

In Mark’s gospel, to the extent that we understand the cross of Jesus, we grasp life’s deepest secret. And the reverse is just as true: To the extent that we don’t grasp the meaning of the cross, we miss the key that opens up life’s deepest secrets. When we don’t grasp the cross, life deep mysteries become a riddle.

Both Mark and Rene Girard are right: The cross of Jesus contains life’s deepest moral secret, but, as Rumi says, we live with a secret we sometimes know, and then not.

Overcoming Hypersensitivity

March 25, 2007

In her autobiography, Therese of Lisieux describes what she considers as one of the key moments of conversion in her life:

She was the youngest in her family and her father’s favorite. He doted on her and every year when the family came home from church on Christmas Eve, he had a little ritual he played out as he gave a gift to her, his youngest and favorite daughter.

One Christmas Eve when Therese was nine years old and still tender and sad from her mother’s death, as the family returned home from church, she overheard her father tell one of her older sisters that he hoped that, this year, he would no longer had to play that little, childish charade with Therese.

Overhearing this, Therese, a deeply sensitive child, was stung to the core, felt betrayed, and fell into a long period of silence and depression. Eventually she emerged from it and regained her resiliency and joy. Looking back on it years later, she saw her giving up of that particular hurt, and the hypersensitivity that provoked it, as one of the key moments of conversion in her whole life.

We usually wouldn’t define overcoming sensitivity as a religious conversion, but it is precisely that, a conversion with immense religious and emotional repercussions. Our happiness depends upon having the resiliency to accept the many hurts, disappointments, and injustices of life so as to live in the give- and-take that is required for family and community living. And we learn that lesson slowly.

The older I get, the more I am coming to know how sensitive people are and how easily they get hurt. It doesn’t take much for someone to ruin your day. We don’t just get hurt when we meet open hostility, insults, unfairness, or hatred. We can get deeply hurt just by overhearing a casual remark or simply by not being noticed, appreciated, or invited. The human heart is easily bruised, too easily.

And then, like Therese, the impulse is to withdraw, withhold, grow silent, nurse the wound, become depressed, grow cold. That is why we are often so cautious and paranoid inside of our families and communities. We don’t want to be cold, but we’re hurt.

Moreover that doesn’t bring out the best in us. Pettiness too often spawns pettiness. Thomas Aquinas once suggested that we have two souls inside us: an anima magna (a grand soul) and an anima pusilla (a petty soul). When we act out of our grand soul, we are generous, hospitable, big-hearted, and warm. Conversely, when we act out of our petty soul, we are paranoid, bitter, over-protective, cautious, and small-hearted. When we feel hurt it is all too easy to act out of the petty half of our souls.

We know the truth of that from everyday experience: One minute we can be feeling generous, hospitable, and big-hearted, and then an insult or a simple slight can trigger feelings of disappointment, bitterness, and pettiness. Which is really us? They both are! Everything depends, day to day, minute to minute, upon which soul we are drawing our vision and energy from at a given moment.

Of course we can always rationalize our bitterness, coldness, and pettiness by appealing to our sensitivity. We feel slights and insults deeply precisely because we are deep. There’s truth in that. The more sensitive we are, the more deeply we will feel both love and its betrayal. But, and this is the point, we need, like Therese, to see our hypersensitivity as something to be converted from so that we can be resilient enough to absorb the bumps and bruises of everyday living. Nobody can live for any length of time within a family or a community without hurting others and without getting hurt. The challenge is to have the resiliency to live with that.

Daniel Berrigan once commented that if Jesus came back today he would go into every counseling office in the world and drive out both the doctors and their clients with the words: “Take up your couch and walk! You don’t have to be this sensitive!”

Perhaps that’s strong, but it contains an important challenge to conversion. Henri Nouwen used to say that one of the key elements in spiritual conversion is to move from hostility to hospitality. All major spiritualities tell us the same thing.

In Tibetan Buddhism, the bowl is the image for resentment. In it is contained all our bitterness, disappointment, and disillusionment. We sit holding that bowl in our hands. We can either pour it forwards, so that the resentment flows away from us, or we can tip it onto ourselves, allowing all that poison to infect us. Our happiness depends upon which way we tip that bowl.

How can we let go of our hypersensitivity? A priest that I know once gave me this advice: Whenever you feel stung and hurt, pull away, sit in prayer, and stay there until the pain softens enough so that you can face others with warmth again.

Brilliant, Grumpy Old Men

March 19, 2007

Two of the better books I’ve read lately come from secular authors, James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut. What these writers have in common, beyond common sense and great insight, is the fact that they’re both senior citizens, Elders, at that age where one is free enough to say what is needed without having to apologize.

Vonnegut’s book, A Man Without a Country, is a series of essays all loosely held together under the umbrella of the thoughts and feelings of an outsider, an exile, a man who can’t find a home even when he is supposedly at home. Here are a couple of examples:

On creativity: “The arts are not a way to make living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something.”

Reading this, one is reminded of challenge that the poet, William Stafford, once threw out to an audience. He told them: “Get up each morning and write a poem before you do anything else!” “How can you do that?” someone asked, “you don’t always feel inspired!” “Lower your standards!” said Stafford. Creating anything, even if it isn’t up to professional standards or up to our own fantasies, makes the soul grow.

Vonnegut offers some insights too on marriage: What women and men are really looking for, he contends, is someone to talk to. But two people alone in a room or in a marriage don’t always add up to enough people, particularly if one is a woman and one is a man. More people need to be around, lots more. Big families, he says, have this figured out, and that is why marriage works best in extended families where there are more people to talk to. What really happens when a man and a woman are struggling in a marriage is this: No matter what their actual words, they are really saying to each other: “You are not enough people!” That’s the real inadequacy in most marriages.

James Hillman’s book is entitled, The Force of Character, and is on aging. He begins with a question: “Why? Why is it ordained, by nature and God, that just when we reach the age when our mental capacities are at their greatest that our bodies begin to fall apart and no amount of doctoring can keep us glued together?” His answer: The best wines need to be aged in cracked old barrels. So too the soul. It needs to be aged in a cracked old barrel. The physical infirmities and humiliations of old age are what mellow the soul.”

He then writes a series of chapters, each of which reflects on one of the physical challenges of aging, showing how that peculiar challenge is meant to shape and mellow the soul in a needed way. Here’s an example:

Why, he asks, does nature arrange it so that, at a certain age, you have to get up at night to go to the toilet? Why this indignity and cruelty?

Monks know the answer: They ring a bell at night and get up to pray a particular set of prayers called vigils. Vigils are properly done in darkness. Their mood and purpose are only served at night. Nature too knows this too and it turns us all into monks before we die. It makes us get up to attend to a humbling bodily imperative, but, once up, we don’t so quickly get back to sleep because Nyx, the goddess of night, pays us a visit and brings along her children – phantoms of fate, death, guilt, despair, blame, revenge, lust – and they keep us awake and force us to deal with them because we won’t deal with them during daylight. Awakening in the dark has always been seen spiritually as helping open one’s eyes to the other world and as a way of building character beyond selfishness. All religious traditions have the idea that night is the time we can gain the most insight from the other world. Monks have secrets worth knowing. They pre-empt nature and get up voluntarily at night to deal with these things. We don’t and so Nyx and her children, perhaps angry at us for avoiding them during the day, make their unwelcome appearance and force us to deal with them. When we can’t sleep at night, we are forced to recognize that our lives in the light have not been shadow-free.

Another nugget: Healthy sexuality, he says, “lies less in controlling lustful fantasies than in understanding their transpersonal nature as a cosmic dynamic.”

James Hillman and Kurt Vonnegut, a couple of grumpy, brilliant old men who do what Elders are supposed to do, dispense wisdom to the young!