Looking for Rest Amid the Pressures of Life

November 26, 2006

The poet, Rumi, once wrote:

“What I want is to leap out of this personality
And then sit apart from that leaping
I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.”

In a day of instant and constant communication, cell phones and emails, I suspect that we all fit that description. Certainly I do. I’ve lived too long where I can be reached.

It seems that we’re almost always over-stretched with too much to do. We come to the end of each day tired, yet conscious of what we’ve left undone. There’s always someone else we should have phoned, emailed, or attended to in some way. Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases, crammed to the brim, and still unable to hold all we need to carry along. What’s wrong here?

Whenever we feel that way, it’s a sure sign that we’ve lost the proper sense of time. Life is meant to be busy, but we’re also meant, at regular times, to have sabbatical, sabbath time, to rest and enjoy.

When we look at scripture we see that God established a certain rhythm to time.

Biblically, this is the pattern: We’re meant to work for six days, then have a one-day sabbatical; work for seven years and have a one year sabbatical; work for seven times seven years (forty-nine years) and have a Jubilee year; and finally work for a lifetime and have an eternity of sabbatical. The idea is that our pressured, hurried, working days should be regularly punctured by times of rest, celebration, enjoyment, non- work, non-pressure, and that ultimately all work will cease and we will have nothing to do except to luxuriate in life itself.

And what’s supposed to happen on a sabbath? What constitutes sabbath time?

First, a sabbath is meant to be unordinary time, a time when our normal work and the everyday pressures of life are stopped. Partly this is meant to free us up for deeper things, but mainly it is meant to remind us that we do not live to work, but rather work in order to live and love.

Next a sabbath is meant to be a time for enjoyment, for high celebration. And this isn’t abstract: On a sabbath we’re meant to eat our best meal of the week, wear our best clothing, rest, enjoy the earth and each other, and (if you’re really an Orthodox believer) to make love. On a sabbath we’re meant to drink in life in all its fullness, including its sensuality. Our language still carries some remnants of this when, for example, we speak of wearing our Sunday best and having our Sunday dinner.

Finally, sabbath is meant to be a time for reconciliation, for forgiving debts, for giving up grudges, for making peace with our enemies. The cessation of work, the rest, the celebration, the drinking in of enjoyment, and the making love are all partly ends in themselves. The sabbath was made for us. However they’re also in function of something else, namely, reconciliation, forgiveness. We only truly celebrate the sabbath, have a genuine holiday, if we forgive someone and it’s because we don’t do this that, so often, our vacations don’t relax us for long. We’re tired, go on vacation, get a good rest, get away from the pressures of our work, enjoy some unpressured time, perhaps even get some sun and a tan, but then come home and very soon, within hours or days, are just a tired as we were before we went on vacation. Why? Because we didn’t forgive anybody and our hurts and bitterness are the deep roots of our tiredness. There’s a statute of limitations to all debts, including our personal hurts.

A couple of years ago, Wayne Muller wrote a little book entitled, Sabbath: Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy Lives. I leave you with some of his wisdom:

– Sabbath need not be a year or even a day. It can also be an afternoon, an hour, a walk, a dinner. Sabbath is a time when we drink, if only for a few moments, from the fountain of rest and delight. It is a time to listen to what is most deeply beautiful, nourishing, and true.

-Sabbath is different kind of fertility; it honours the wisdom of dormancy. If certain plant species do not lie dormant for winter, they will not bear fruit in spring. A period of rest, within which our roots quietly take in nourishment, is the key to health. Like plants, we too must have periods in which we lie fallow and silently nourish our roots.

-We are almost always running, trying to catch the things that will make us happy when, in fact, those very things are trying to catch us!

-God said: “Remember to rest.” This is not a lifestyle suggestion, but a commandment, as important as not stealing, not murdering, or not lying.

We need sabbath. We’ve all lived too long where we can be reached.

Steadying Ourselves in the Storm

November 19, 2006

The early years of my adulthood and priesthood were spent teaching theology at a College in Edmonton, Canada. They were exciting years: I was young, full of energy, loved teaching, and was discovering the joys of ministry. These were good years, everything that young adulthood should be.

But they weren’t always easy years. My congenital restlessness, the demands of ministry, the tensions of community, the obsessions I’m forever prone to, the not-infrequent departure of cherished friends from the priesthood, and the constant movement of people through my life, occasionally left me in emotional chaos, gasping for oxygen, too restless to sleep, wondering who I was, saying to myself, like Janis Joplin in her moments of desperation: ‘Where is everybody going?’

But I had a little formula to help handle this. Whenever the chaos got really bad , I would get into my car and drive four hours to our family farm just across the border in Saskatchewan. My family still lived in the house I’d grown up in, ate at the same table I’d eaten at as a child, slept in the same beds we had as children, and walked the same ground I’d walked as a child. Usually it didn’t take long for home to do its work. I’d only need to be there for a meal or overnight and the chaos and heartache would subside, I’d begin to feel steady and to know again who I was.

Coming home didn’t cure the heartache but gave the heart the care it needed. Somehow home always works.

Today the same kind of emotional chaos and heartache can still unsettle me on occasion and leave me unsure of who I am, of the choices I’ve made in life, and of whom and what to trust. But I can’t often drive to my childhood home anymore and so I have had to find the steadying that going home once gave me in new a way. And, even amidst a good community, loving friends, and a wonderful job, that isn’t always easy to find. Home can be elusive on a restless night. What steadies the heart when it’s restless isn’t so easy to access. Once you’ve left home, you sometimes can’t get back there again.

So what do I do now when I need to go home and retouch my roots to steady myself? Sometimes a trusted friend is the answer; sometimes a family that has become family to me can provide that special place, sometimes I can find that place in prayer or in nature, but sometimes I can’t find it at all and I have to live with the chaos until, like a bad storm, it blows over.

But through the years, I’ve also discovered that sometimes a special book that can take me home in the same way as driving there once did. One of the books that does this for me, almost without fail, is The Story of a Soul by Therese of Lisieux. Not surprising, it’s the story of a recessive journey, the story of Thereseâs own effort at recapturing what her house, home, and family once gave her.

But the recessive journey in itself is not what gives this book (which I highly recommend for anyone who’s heart is aching in way that unsettles the soul) such a special power. Many autobiographies unsettle more than they settle. Remembering alone doesn’t necessarily care for the heart and sometimes our memories of home and childhood carry a lot of pathology and pain. Not everyone’s home was safe and nurturing.

What The Story of a Soul does is what a good home does; it names and claims for us what’s deepest and most precious inside of the human person. That’s what gives the soul the steadying it needs.

What is that place? Home is where we can shut the door on the outside world, where a warm fire is burning, where we can eat familiar foods, where we don’t have to be on guard when we speak, where we can be sick and somebody takes care of us, where we can sleep in our own beds, where a trusted hand steadies the world, where we can be weak, and where we can shut the door and lock out every kind of storm and restlessness. Home is where we are safe. It’s also the place where, one way or the other, we learned about God. (And it’s this that is so tragically and irrevocably destroyed in sexual abuse.) I used to drive four hours, just for a meal or a night’s sleep, in order to find that. Today, among other places, I find it when I read The Story of a Soul.

There are headaches and heartaches for which there is no cure. But the soul doesn’t need to be cured, only to be properly cared for. Our task is go home, to find those people, places, prayers, and books that truly care for our souls at those times when our world is falling apart.

Dark Memory

November 12, 2006

Inside each of us, beyond what we can express in words, picture clearly, or even feel distinctly, we have a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, the imprint of a love so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else. This imprint lies beyond conscious memory but forms the centre of the heart and soul.

This is not an easy concept to explain. Bernard Lonergan, one of the great intellectuals of the past century, tried to explain it philosophically. He said that we bear inside of our souls “the brand of the first principles.” That’s accurate, but perhaps too abstract to grasp. Maybe the old myths and legends capture it best when they say that, before birth, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always in some dark way remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness. To be in touch with your heart is to be in touch with this primordial kiss, with both its preciousness and its meaning.

What exactly is being said here?

Within each of us, at that place where all that is most precious within us resides, there is an inchoate sense of having once been touched, caressed, loved, and valued in a way that is beyond anything we have ever consciously experienced. In fact, all the goodness, love, value, and tenderness we experience in life fall short precisely because we already know something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.

We all have this place, a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place that we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy. There we are temples of God, sacred churches of truth and love. It is there that we bear God’s image.

But this must be understood: The image of God inside of us is not some beautiful icon stamped inside of the soul. No. The image and likeness of God inside of us is energy, fire, memory; especially the memory of a touch so tender and loving that its goodness and truth become the prism through which we see everything. Thus we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside of us. Things touch our hearts when they touch us here and it is because we have already been touched and caressed that we seek passionately for a soul mate, for someone to join us in this tender space.

And we measure everything in life by how it touches this place: Why do certain experiences touch us so deeply? Do not our hearts burn within us in the presence of any truth, love, goodness, or tenderness that is genuine and deep? Is not all deep knowledge simply a waking up to something we already know? Is not all love simply a question of being respected for something we already are? Are not the touch and tenderness that bring ecstasy nothing other than the stirring of deep memory? Are not the ideals that inspire hope only the reminder of words somebody has already spoken to us? Does not our desire for innocence (and innocent means “not wounded”) mirror some primal unwounded place deep within us? And when we feel violated, is it not because someone has irreverently entered the sacred inside us?

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will be spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, centred. To be truly ourselves is to remember, to inchoately touch and feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what both fires our energy and provides us with a prism through which to see and understand.

Today, too often, a wounded, calloused, cynical, over-sophisticated, and overly adult world invites us to forget, to move beyond this childishness (which is really child-likeness). It invites us to forget God’s kiss in the soul. But, unless we lie to ourselves and harden ourselves against ourselves, the most dangerous of all activities, we will always remember, dimly, darkly, the caress of God.

The Communion of Saints

November 5, 2006

Growing up, as part of our family prayer, we used to pray for a happy death.

I pictured that this way: you died cradled in the loving arms of family, friends, and church, fully at peace with God and everyone around you.

That’s a good picture, the ideal, but not everyone gets to die that way. Randomness, contingency, and accidents too often have us die in broken, compromised, and cold situations: bitter, unforgiving, unforgiven, not fully reconciled, alienated from someone, not going to church, angry, drunk, dead by drug overdose, a victim of suicide. Death, not infrequently, catches some of us before we’ve had time to say the things we should have said or do the things we should have done. Too often we die with unfinished business, too much of it. As the old confiteor says: we need forgiveness for what we’ve done and left undone.

To give a few examples: I was once counselling a man, a priest in his fifties, who was still unable to forgive himself because when he was a young, shy, and frightened boy of seven, and his mother lay dying, he was too afraid to give her a hug when she asked for it. More than forty years later, he still nursed guilt and a deep regret for this unfinished business with his long-dead mother.

In another case, I officiated at the funeral of a man who had been quite happily married for 35 years. One afternoon he had a bitter argument with his wife over some minor thing, rushed out of the house in anger, and was killed in an accident minutes later. What terrible timing for one’s death!

Many of us can empathize with these examples. Who among us doesn’t have unfinished business with someone whom death has taken away? Perhaps we had hurt that person, or he or she had hurt us, and it was never fully reconciled. Or we feel guilt because, while that person was alive, we should have given more of ourselves to him or her, but were too busy with our own lives to reach out. Worse still, perhaps someone has died for whom we had felt hatred and we should have made some gesture of reconciliation and we never did. Now it’s too late! Death has separated us and some painful bitterness now lies irrevocably unresolved and we live with the guilt, wishing we had done something before it was too late.

But it’s not too late. It’s never too late if we take seriously the Christian doctrine of the communion of saints. This doctrine, so central and important that’s enshrined in our creed, asks us to believe that we are still in real community of life and communication with those who have died.

To believe in the communion of saints is to believe that those who have died are still alive and are linked to us in such a way that we can continue to talk with them, that our relationship with them can continue to grow, and that the reconciliation that wasn’t possible before their deaths can now occur.

Why can this happen now, when it seemed so impossible before?

Because our communication with them is now privileged. Death washes some things clean. This is not the stuff of fantasy, but of solid dogma. We know its truth because we experience it.

How often in a family, a friendship, a community, or in any human network, do we experience a tension, a misunderstanding, an anger, a frustration, an irreconcilable difference, a selfishness, or a hurt that can’t be undone, and then everything changes because someone dies? The death brings a peace, a clarity, and a charity, that were not possible before.

Why? It’s not simply because the death changed the chemistry and took someone out of the family, the office, or the circle of friends, or even, as may sometimes seem the case, the source of the tension is the one who died. It happens because, as Luke’s account of Jesus on the cross teaches, death washes things clean.

“Today you will be with me in paradise!” Jesus speaks those words to the good thief on the cross and they’re meant for every one of us who dies without yet fully being a saint and without having had the time and opportunity to make all the amends and speak all the apologies that we owe to others. There is still time after death, on both sides, for reconciliation and healing to happen because inside the communion of saints we have privileged access to each other and there we can finally speak all of those words that we couldn’t speak before. We can reach across death’s divide.

It can be a great consolation to die a happy death, snug and reconciled in the arms of love, with no unfinished business. But, happily, there’s time still after death for this to happen for those of us who aren’t so lucky and who end up dying with some bitterness, anger, wound, and frustration still gnawing away.

Breathing Emotionally

October 29, 2006

One of the things that made Henri Nouwen such a loved writer was his disarming honesty. He hid little about himself.

And one of the things that he was able to give voice to was his constant struggle to be affirmed, to be made to feel special, to be touched, to be singled out for admiration, to feel tangible proofs of love. Over and over again, in his diaries, he shares his yearning for this. The wording varies, but the pleading is always along these lines:

Today the small rejections of my life are too much for me – a sarcastic smile, a flippant remark, a brisk denial, a bitter silence, a failure to be noticed, a coldness from a colleague, an indifference from someone I love, a nagging tiredness, the lack of a soul mate, a loneliness that I can’t explain. I feel empty, alone, afraid, restless, unsure of myself, and I look around for invitations, letters, phone calls, gifts, for someone to catch my eye in sympathy, for some warm gesture that can heal my emptiness. And right now I don’t particularly want God, faith, church, or even a big and gracious heart. I want simply to be held, embraced, loved by someone special, made to feel unique, kissed by a soul mate. I’m empty, a half-person. I need someone to make me whole.

What Nouwen articulates in this is not a particular neurosis, immaturity, narcissism, or a lack of intimacy. That may be true too of him (or any of us) on a given day, but what he expresses here is the universal human struggle for emotional and spiritual maturity. And that struggle isn’t easy.

We aren’t born simple, mature, whole, saints. That’s life’s journey. We’re born complex, lonely, greedy, restless, with powerful, selfish instincts that remain with us even when we are mature. What Nouwen gives expression to is the aching and pressures we feel inside of us because of those instincts.

And it’s not a just a question of finding intimacy and meaning in our lives (a spouse, a family, close friends, someone to socialize with, meaningful work). Having these can help, but nothing ultimately takes our loneliness away or fully reprograms our instincts and so the day inevitably arrives when the pain that Nouwen expresses here begins to gnaw away inside us. To feel this kind of need for tangible affirmation is not a sign that there’s something wrong in our lives but simply a sign that we’re emotionally healthy and not calloused, warped, or depressed. In the end, it’s healthy to feel our need for the touch of another in a way that’s so visceral that it drives us to our knees.

And that isn’t just emotionally painful, it’s also spiritually confusing. When we take this tension to prayer and ask God to take it away, more often than not it will seem that our prayer isn’t heard. The tension will remain and sometimes even intensify. Why?

Not because God hasn’t heard our prayer, but because we are being weaned, just as surely as a baby from its mother’s breast. What’s happening is this: Our natural instincts give us one way of breathing emotionally. What naturally gives us energy, emotional oxygen, is the good feelings we derive from tangible love, emotional affirmation, loving touch, and physical pleasure. It’s not that these are wrong, it’s just we won’t ever become mature if our motivation for living with and serving others is contingent upon always having to feel these. We’ll never grow mature if unconsciously we keep saying: I will love you and stay with you, as long as there’s something in it for me.

Maturity, emotional and spiritual, demands that ultimately we choose love, choose service, choose prayer, and choose God, not on the basis of a feeling but on the basis of value, truth, and goodness. We are mature when love is a decision that’s not based upon an emotional pay- off for us but on the intrinsic goodness that’s inside the other.

But to come to this, we have to learn a new way of breathing emotionally. The excruciating pain we feel sometimes when precisely we want nothing more in the world than a physical and emotional touch that we can’t have is, in essence, a weaning, the pain of the child who has to cry herself to sleep because her mother will no longer nurse her, but is forcing her instead to learn a new way of taking in sustenance. Our prayers don’t seem to be heard because God, like a good mother, knows that giving a certain emotional breast back to the child only delays the inevitable. Maturity lies in learning how to breathe emotionally in a new way.

The mystics called this “a dark night of the soul”. And we are in one of these dark nights every time we feel the kind of aloneness that drives us to our knees pleading in mercy for the kind of tangible touch that, for a moment at least, would let us feel whole again.

Some Reflections on the Priesthood

October 15, 2006

On the tenth anniversary of my ordination, I published a reflection on the priesthood, intending it as a challenge to the Catholic community to understand its priests more empathically. Maybe I’m more mature today, though perhaps the years have also blunted some of the courage and verve I had back then. So, twenty years later, I share again the words I wrote when I was still a very young priest:

“Ten years a priest! I can say it out loud: They’ve been good years; full enough of giving and receiving. I have enjoyed the ministry and have been able to help some people even as I have been helped by others. There have been too some incredibly special moments, depth moments clearly touched by transcendence, and I have also tasted sufficient agony. I’ve no regrets.

My initial fears on entering the seminary had centred around loneliness and boredom. These have been non-issues. The spectres of pressure, over-intensity, and burnout cast a much more threatening shadow.

And I’ve survived, and survived with enough enthusiasm to hoist a few drinks to celebrate the event and to look forward to the future.

As I look ahead, I would like to offer a reflection to the Catholic community vis-a-vis its priests:

Roman Catholics still understand a priest too much in terms of his cultic role. There is undue significance given to the cultic powers a priest has been given to preside at Eucharist and administer the sacraments. Partly because of this the priest is too easily cast in the role of the tribal medicine man. Like the medicine man, he is respected and revered because he is feared. But he is not genuinely loved, nor understood, because he is never perceived and accepted as being fully human like the rest of us. Too frequently, with all but our very closest friends, we are made to feel out-of-the-ordinary, medicine men.

More debilitating still is the Catholic community’s understanding of the priest as a sexual being. Bottomline, a priest is expected to act as if were not a being full of sexual complexity. Please do not misunderstand this: What I’m pleading for is not that the Catholic community invite or condone sexual weakness and irresponsibility in its priests. Nor should it invite a priest to be simply “one of the boys.”

The issue is one of accepting a priest’s full humanity, including his sexuality and the necessary complexity that follows from that. The priest need not a be handed a license to be irresponsible, but he needs to be handed the feeling that he is understood and accepted fully as he is, including his complexities and sexuality.

Unfortunately, that is rarely afforded us and, consequently, we must pretend, pretend that we are eunuchs. No eunuch can preach effectively to the full-blooded. That is why we are politely listened to, even as it is taken for granted that we have nothing vital to say about real life.

A priest generally finds himself in a no-win situation: If he seemingly understands life too clearly, including its earthier aspects of sex and sin, then he draws the suspicion of the Catholic community. Conversely, if he radiates the innocence and naivete the community wants of him, he is relegated to the realm of the insignificant, still allowed to do his magic, but no full-blooded person turns to him for genuine understanding and guidance.

It’s an interesting speculation as to why the Catholic community wants its priests to radiate naivete and non-complexity. I suspect it’s because, deep down, we’re all a little afraid our own complexity and somehow if father goes through life pretending that he has no shadow, we can also more easily pretend that we haven’t got one either.

Finally, we tend to leave no room for our priests to be weak. I am not speaking here of weak in the moral sense, but weak in the way Jesus was weak and in the way that any truly sensitive person is: vulnerable, not always together, emotionally over-wrought, chronically over-extended, and prone to cry very needy tears at times. We demand instead someone who projects that all is well all the time and who bleeds only ichor.

And so my plea is this: Please don’t, consciously or unconsciously, ask your priest to dress in medieval clothes, to stay in the sanctuary, and to be so timid as to be unable to dare the perilous task of living. Let him be himself: complex, weak, sexed, masculine, involved, needy, and free not to pretend. Priests are tired of being cast in the clothing of senility while everyone is crying to be young, tired of being cast as eunuchs without real blood, sinew and passion.

Small wonder hardly anyone wants to join us!

We need, priests and community together, to risk some new directions. There are risks in this of course, but, as Goethe once put it; ‘The dangers of life are infinite and safety is among them’.”

Standing on New Borders – Islam

October 1, 2006

In the early 1990s, Islamic extremists were terrorizing much of Algeria. Among other things, they’d warned all foreigners to leave the country. One group that didn’t heed their warning was a group of Trappists who been founded there in 1934 to be a Christian presence in the Muslim world. They’d been warned explicitly by a terrorist group to leave, but refused.

They were aware of the danger and their Abbott, Father Christian, wrote out a “last testament”, to be opened if they were murdered. Two years later they were, Father Christian and six of his monks. What he shared in that letter is worth reflecting upon, as the tension between the Islamic and the Western worlds continues to heighten. Here, in part, is what he wrote:

“If it should happen one day – and it could be today – that I become a victim of the terrorism, which now seems ready to engulf all the foreigners living in Algeria, I would like my community, my Church, and my family, to remember that my life was given to God and to this country. … I would like, when the time comes, to have a moment of lucidity, which would allow me to beg forgiveness of God and my fellow human beings, and at the same time to forgive with all my heart the one who would strike me down. I could not desire such a death. It seems important to state this. I do not see, in fact, how I could rejoice if the people I love [Islam] were to be accused indiscriminately of my murder. … I am also aware of the caricatures of Islam, which a certain Islamism encourages. It is too easy to salve one’s conscience by identifying this religious way [Islam] with the fundamentalist ideologies of the extremists. … My death, clearly, will appear to justify those who hastily judged me naive, or idealistic: `Let him tell us now what he thinks of Islam.’ But … this is what I shall be able to do, if God wills – to immerse my gaze in that of the Father, and contemplate with him his children of Islam just as he sees them. For this life lost, totally mine and totally theirs, I thank God.”

As I watch the news each day, read the newspapers, hear political and religious commentators, and listen to friends share about the situation in the world, I find few words that challenge me as deeply as these.

What this extraordinarily courageous Abbott calls us to is what’s deepest inside Christianity and all authentic religion, namely, a solidarity with others, all others, that’s based upon a common God and a common humanity, a fact that relativizes every other difference. We are brothers and sisters, all of us, Muslims and Christians, and everyone else, under one gaze of love from God.

But that’s not easy to see, nor accept, when daily we are hating, imprisoning, torturing, and killing each other in the name of God and our respective values. What Father Christian invites us to is to live out of the Gospel, not out of our feelings. What, in essence, does that mean?

The Gospels recount an incident where, one day, Jesus was “walking along the borders of Samaria, when he met a woman.” Scripture scholars assure us that what is being described here is more than mere geography and more than a simple conversation between Jesus and a Syro-Phoenician woman. A border is a boundary, the edges of something foreign, and Samaria and this woman were what was particularly foreign at that moment.

Samaria was a different ethnicity and a different religion, and the woman a different gender. In essence, the Gospels are saying: “One day Jesus was walking along the edges of ethnicity, religion, and gender, as these there then known and accepted.” I doubt that we will find anywhere, in scripture or elsewhere, a more succinct and accurate description of where the Christian churches today, all of them, are standing: We are standing on the borders of ethnicity, religiosity, and gender, as we once knew these, particularly as these pertain to Islam.

And to what do does this call us?

Precisely to what Abbott Christian both incarnated and articulated: to stay in the relationship, to not caricaturize, to not misunderstand, to not let what’s worst in each other eclipse what’s best in each other, to continue to trust in our common God, to die in love if necessary, and especially to not forget, ever, that we are brothers and sisters, given equal life by a common Father.

And this is not a dangerous flight into idealism, biblical but impractical, a child’s naivete. It’s also astutely political, a brutal realism. Until we and Islam embrace as brothers and sisters, there can be no peace, and no military power in the world, as we are painfully learning, can provide us with security.

But for that to happen we have to, like Fr. Christian, immerse our gaze with that of the Father and contemplate the children of Islam as he sees them.

Caring for Our Hearts

September 24, 2006

“Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you can end up with a broken heart that way.”

Therese of Lisieux wrote that. But what exactly does she mean, given that most of the time love will break our hearts anyway even if we’re not seeking ourselves?

The heart breaks in different ways. It can break in a way that softens, purifies, and stretches it in love and selflessness, or it can break in way that makes it bitter, jealous, and cold. Heartbreaks can be warm or cold and, either way, the pain will bring us to our knees and that moment will define us, one way or the other. Let’s look at an example:

At the end of the Victor Hugo’s, Les Miserables, there’s a particularly poignant scene where Jean Val Jean, now an old man, is praying in a inordinately lonely moment. It’s the evening of his adopted daughter’s wedding, a celebration he is unable to attend. He is on his knees, painfully alone, physically ill, emotionally drained, and acutely aware that the young woman who has brought so much joy and meaning to his life will now be drawing her life from someone else. Indeed she is dancing and celebrating at this very moment when his grief in losing her is so great.

But, despite the pain, his heart is at peace, joyful even, at the knowledge that the young man she has fallen in love with and is marrying will provide her with the very joy that he, as her father, could not give her. In the moment of his deepest loss, he is able to be happy for her and to withdraw quietly without bitterness into that self- effacement and solitude that loss and aging eventually ask of us all. As his heart is breaking, he blesses and lets go, knowing that what is most important, his daughter’s happiness, is assured and that, given the mystery of love, his own relationship to his daughter is ensured by his gracefully letting go.

That’s one example of a heart breaking, in a good way. The opposite is the heartbreak we experience when we lose somebody and our hearts freeze over in jealousy and bitterness. What that bitterness and coldness reveal in fact is that, all along, it was not the other’s well-being we had been seeking, but our own. The proof is that now, when we can no longer be the primary relationship in that other person’s life, we no longer really wish him or her well. Indeed, not so subtle is the wish that a certain unhappiness will befall that other, so that he or she will know that it was a mistake to no longer remain primarily invested in us.

That’s the antithesis of the blessing we see at the end of Les Miserables where Jean Val Jean, despite the pain of his own loss, can rejoice that someone else can be a more powerful instrument of happiness than he in his daughter’s life. He can be happy because his love is for his daughter, not for himself.

Notice what underlies a murder-suicide. There is a broken heart, but when it breaks a rage spews forth that reveals that, all along, the love has not been for the other but for oneself. The cold truth becomes clear: If I can’t be the main person in her life, nobody will be! Better her dead, than without me! What kind of love has this been along the way?

We replicate this in subtle ways: Indeed many of the tears we shed are cried not for others but for ourselves. We may think we’re crying about someone else’s pain, but, more often than not, what is revealed in our tears is more our own possessiveness than our compassion, more our own brokenness than the wounds over which we think we are weeping. In our tears, just as in love, we are often unconsciously seeking ourselves.

We replicate this too, more than we think, in our good deeds and generosity towards others. We can be generous, big-hearted, self- sacrificing, and helpful, as long as we are assured that we are needed, that we are important, that nobody else can quite provide what we are giving. But, should we one day find out that someone else has arrived who is wanted more than we are, we can very quickly become cool and distant, resentful even, because someone else is providing a help and a happiness instead of us, perhaps healthier and deeper than ours. The resentment we feel betrays that, to a large measure, what we were seeking in our generosity was ourselves, not someone else’s happiness.

All of this, of course, can be even more painfully true when we fall in love and experience the heartaches and heartbreaks that go with that.

And so is a doctor’s warning, a health warning, a fair warning: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you can end up with a broken heart that way.”

What is True Religion?

September 17, 2006

What is the essence of true religion? What, in the end, constitutes authentic discipleship? There is a lot of tension within and among the churches today about precisely that question.

For some, religion is all about proper identity, boundaries, doctrine, morality, liturgy, laws, and rubrics. The anxiety then is about measuring up, about being faithful to a tradition.

For others, religion means justice and concern for the poor. The anxiety then is always about proper sensitivity to every structure and action that impacts the poor.

Finally, for some, religion means proper interiority, inner peace, harmony with the earth and with others, forgiveness, being big of heart, and having a personal, intimate relationship with God.

Who is right? In some ways, they all are.

When we look at the development of Judaism, which gave us Jesus, we see that their understanding of religion went through three phases: Deuteronomy, Prophecy, and Wisdom.

Deuteronomy: When the Jewish people first began to form into a religious community, their religious practices (and anxieties) were very much concerned with establishing an unique identity, having proper boundaries, adhering to a certain moral code, and observing, and quite rigorously too, a huge number of rubrics. And this did make for a certain clarity as to who was in and who was out, who belonged and who did not, who was faithful and who was not.

Prophecy: But that notion of religion was eventually challenged. After a time, prophets came along who looked at their religious community and, in the name of true religion, demanded a different focus. Simply put, they began to say: “God cares less about our religious observance than about the poor!” True religion, for them, was about caring for the poor. This became their mantra: The quality of your faith is judged by the quality of justice in the land, and the quality of justice in the land is judged by how the poor, the most vulnerable in society, are faring. Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

Wisdom: But the Jewish scriptures do not end with the prophets, eventually something else developed. Another group of religious leaders and teachers came along who, while not discounting the value of proper boundaries and morality or care for the poor, brought another insistence, namely, compassion, the need for a huge, generous heart that can embrace differences. True religion then became compassion, understanding, a wide, generous heart.

Where does Jesus land? He ratifies all of these.

On the one hand, he makes it clear that proper identity, teaching, morality, doctrine, and liturgical practices are not negotiable items that may or may not form an integral part of religion. He warns, clearly and strongly, not to be cavalier about the commandments, the law, community practices, the tradition.

However Jesus is also clear, as were the great Jewish prophets, that, at a point, religion is about how we care for the poor, pure and simple. There is perhaps no more frightening text in scripture than Jesus’ teaching on the last judgement in Matthew’s Gospel, chapter 28. He tells that, on the last day, we will be judged by God on one basis: Did we care for the poor? Did we give bread to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, clothe the naked? Notice that there are no orthodoxy tests, no creedal formula to recite, no catechetical requirements to measure up to, nor even questions about private morality, only the question of how we treated the poor.

But there is still a further strand of teaching in Jesus that challenges even beyond the requirement of caring for the poor. He tells us, “Be compassionate as your heavenly father is compassionate.” True religion, for Jesus, is, at a point, about the size and quality of our hearts, about how wide or narrow they are, about how mellow or bitter they are, about how forgiving or angry they are, and about how much they can imitate God’s love which goes out warmly and equally to all, to the bad as well as the good. The final challenge of Jesus is for each of us to have a heart that, like the father of the prodigal son and the older brother, can embrace both the weakness of one and the anger of the other. God’s heart is not a ghetto, neither is heaven, and for us to go to heaven we need to have hearts that are not ghettos.

Perhaps this perspective can help us sort through some of the tensions we live in today as different groups claim one or the other of these emphases as the core of religion. Boundaries, identity, morality, liturgy, rubrics, are important, as is a non-negotiable commitment to the poor.

But, in the end, all of these have to be shaped by a heart that radiates God’s all-embracing compassion, understanding, forgiveness, gentleness, warmth, and non-discriminating love. Otherwise it is an easy and logical step to bitterness, hatred, and violence – all done in the name of God and true religion.

The Struggle to Trust

September 10, 2006

Perhaps the most important thing we ever need to learn is this: It is safe to love!

It is safe to love. Yes, it is safe to be vulnerable because we are in loving hands. It is safe to surrender because we fall into light, not darkness. It is safe to be weak because the strength we need is found when we give up on our own power. It is safe give up the hurts we cling to because these lose their force when we are in love. It is safe to trust, to let our loved ones be free, because a power beyond us loves them more than we do and ultimately takes care of their safety. It is safe to give ourselves over without fear because, as faith teaches, in the end, all will be well. And it is safe to live our lives with daring because God, as Julian Norwich assures us, sits in heaven, smiling, completely relaxed, his face looking like a marvellous symphony. The world is ultimately safe. It is safe to love.

But it’s not easy to believe that. Perhaps if we had all been loved perfectly, had perfect confidence, and had never been wounded, disappointed, betrayed, or made to cry tears of regret, we would find it easier to believe that it is safe, that we can trust, that we have no need to protect ourselves, and that we do not need to be forever anxious about how we are measuring up, how we are being perceived, how we are being understood, and whether we are worthy of love.

Most of the time we find it hard to trust because we find ourselves wounded, lacking confidence, anxious about many things, feeling the need to protect ourselves. It is hard to trust and especially it is hard to show weakness and to be vulnerable. In the air we breathe everywhere (sometimes even in our most intimate relationships) we inhale a distrust that makes us want to show a superior strength, attractiveness, talent, intelligence, self-reliance, and cool detachment. Distrust and self- protection are everywhere. It’s hard to let ourselves be vulnerable, to trust that it is safe to love.

And yet, deep down, vulnerability and surrender are what we most deeply want. At every level, we need and want surrender. Morally and religiously, the entire gospels can be put into one word: Surrender. Emotionally, psychologically, and sexually the deepest imperative inside of us is simply: Surrender. And, deeper than all of our anxieties and our need to protect ourselves, lies a truth we know at the core of our being, namely, that in the end we cannot take care of ourselves, we cannot make ourselves whole, and we cannot hide our weaknesses from each other. We need to surrender, to trust, to let ourselves fall into stronger and safer hands than our own.

But in order to do this we need to trust, trust that it is safe to love, to let go, to reveal whom we really are, to show weakness, to not have to pretend that we are whole and self-reliant. This, as we know, is not easy to do. Indeed, on any given day and at any given moment, it is existentially impossible for us to feel safe, to give ourselves over, to be vulnerable. And so we generally risk the cold misery of detachment rather than risk being misunderstood, rejected, shamed, or seen as needy.

How do we move towards trust? How do we, as Henri Nouwen puts it, move from the house of fear to the house of love?

There is no easy way, no simple formula, no magic bullet, and simply realizing where we need to go is not enough to get us there. Awhile back, at a workshop, a woman came up to me at the break and said: “I agree with what you, trust is everything, but … I can’t get there!” She speaks for almost all of us.

How can we get there? How do we pull the trigger on trust?

This is a journey that takes a lifetime. To master this is to be a saint.

So we shouldn’t be surprised if we still find ourselves, at least on any given day, a long ways from where we want to be. Perhaps the best advice comes from Ruth Burrows, the British Carmelite. In her “Guidelines for Mystical Prayer”, she offers us this:

Surrender and abandonment are like a deep, inviting, frightening ocean into which we are drawn. We make excursions into it to test it, to see whether it’s safe, to enjoy the sensation of it. But, for all kinds of reasons, we always go back to dry land, to solid ground, to where we are safe. But the ocean beckons us out anew and we risk again being afloat in something bigger than ourselves. And we keep doing that, wading in and then going back to safety, until one day, when we are ready, we just let the waters carry us away.

Chastity and Healing

September 3, 2006

If you’ve never read Christopher De Vinck, you owe yourself a favour. He is, I believe, one of the truly moral essayists writing today. Like Henri Nouwen, with whom he was a friend, he often uses his own story as a springboard to highlight something universal within the human condition.

Several years ago, he wrote an essay, Faith in Marriage, within which he shares this story:

As a young college student in New York City, he found himself at one point particularly lonely. Part of that loneliness, understandable in itself in a young person, was the dream he nurtured about marriage. He idealized about the woman he one day hoped to marry, a woman who would not only take away his youthful loneliness, but would be like the woman described in the Book of Revelations, clothed with the sun, have the moon under her feet, and a crown of stars on her head.

College life is not kind to that type of idealism and one day, submitting to peer pressure, he consented to go along to a river party, not knowing exactly that this was an arranged tryst between a number of hormonally over-charged college boys and some bored working girls from a neighbouring town. The mathematics had been carefully done and there was a girl, Linda, selected for him.

As everyone else disappeared into secluded spots, Chris was left by himself with Linda, a decent enough girl, probably as ambivalent about what was expected as he was. As she began to undress, he took a step back, then another, and suddenly, impelled by something deeper in him, he (in his own words) ãran and ranä, away from the party and away from that particular initiation.

But his essay doesn’t end there. He adds this brief, but brilliant, commentary: ãI did not know that I would be married six years later, that Roe [my wife] and I would be married for twenty years, that we would have three children, but running away from that river that night I hoped that someday Roe would be there, my Roe, clothed with the sun, having the moon under her feet, and upon her head a crown of twelve stars.ä

Another friend shares this story: during his last year in high school he had been painfully and hopelessly obsessed with a girl who looked upon him with disdain. Helpless to fight his obsession, hoping against all hope, he devised a rather elaborate (but pathetic) scheme to try to impress her at a public gathering. It backfired and he was left humiliated, a laughing-stock. The rejection shredded his self-image and left him depressed for months. In that dejected condition he left his hometown for college.

Ten years later, now happily married, he brought his wife back to his hometown and they went one evening and sat at the place where he had been so humiliated. He retold the story as they sipped on sodas and he nursed a cigar and they laughed as the reliving of that painful memory made something suddenly clear, namely, that those moments when we are young and foolish and obsessed are seen in an entirely different perspective and are healed when we are held, feel more whole, and are secure beyond the dangerous loneliness of youth with its in-built temptations against chastity and the future.

I’m not sure exactly how we need to challenge our age, especially our youth, in terms of the beauty and importance of chastity. I only know that it needs to be done. Virtually everything in our culture and within youth today militates against it. Chastity is seen as a naivetŽ, a timidity, a stance against life, not one for it. Our culture has unconsciously inhaled, and misunderstood, one of William Blake’s, Proverbs from Hell: ãSooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires.ä

We try all kinds of approaches to try to convince the world that chastity is important: It’s worth waiting until marriage. Your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit. You are worth more than this. All of those are right, and important. Deep down, beyond the bravado, people actually know the truth of these. At our core, we all intuit the value of chastity.

But that inchoate moral sense, it seems, isn’t always enough to make a young man walk away when there’s a river party. The deep-down sense that something is not best for us doesn’t always, nor often, make us resist temptation when our loneliness and insecurity are high and the time and temperature are right.

What does? I’m not sure, but perhaps the clue lies in Christopher De Vinck’s appeal to idealism, to a vision, to a dream deep inside each of us for a soul mate who will come into our lives and be so clothed with the sun that we can renounce a momentary compensation for a future within which we can sit with someone at the place of our youthful longing and humiliation, sip a soda, and laugh about how painful it once was.

Set Apart or One With?

August 27, 2006

At the center of our lives there is an innate tension.

On the one hand, something in us wants to be different, wants to stand out, be separate, show itself to be unique and independent. From the minute we’re born, our independence and uniqueness begin to make their protest. We don’t want to be the same as everyone else. And this isn’t just a mark of pride or ego. Nature intended it that way. If no two snowflakes are meant to be the same, how much more so human beings?

We are meant to individuate, develop a uniqueness, and grow into a woman or man such as there has never been one on this planet. Our uniqueness is part our gift to others and so one element of growing into maturity is having the strength to let that uniqueness emerge.

But we have an equally strong, almost contradictory, impulse inside us. At our center too we yearn for unity, community, family, intimacy, connection, solidarity, oneness with others and the world. As much as we want to be separate and stand out, we too want to be connected, to fit in, to take our proper place. And this isn’t necessarily a mark of timidity or fear.

Rather one of the marks of maturity is the desire to, as Thomas Merton once put it, disappear into humanity, melt into the body and soul of this earth, dissolve into a bigger oneness that makes up the family of humanity and the Body of Christ. All the religions of the world invite us to this; namely, to move into a compassion, an empathy, and a solidarity with others and earth that makes that larger reality more important than our private lives.

Thus we live always with a certain tension: On the one hand, we want to stand out, even as another irrepressible part of us wants be one with everything and everybody.

As Christians, that tension is reflected inside of baptism itself. On the one hand, baptism is meant to set us apart, separate us from the world. Indeed the very word, ECCLESIA, from which we derive the concept of Church, has this connotation.

Ecclesia comes from two Greek words, EK KALEO (EK, “out of”, KALEO “to call”) To be baptized into the church, at one level, means to be “called out of” the world and set apart from others.

But, just as equally, baptism calls us into family, community, and the Body of Christ (where, as one cell within a living organism, we are not meant to stand out but to humbly be part of something far larger than our own private reality). Thus, baptism sets us apart and calls us into solidarity with others, both at the same time.

And this makes for the tension we feel everywhere today in the world and in the church: How much, and in what way, should Christians set themselves apart from the world?

Should we, for instance, set ourselves apart publicly by external symbols? Do we make the sign of the cross in a restaurant? Wear a religious habit or a clerical collar? Put a sign on our car that speaks of Jesus? Wear or do anything to make ourselves stand out in public?

There is no right or wrong answer to those questions. Why? Because we are called, always, to do both. We are called to set ourselves apart, even as we are called to disappear into humanity. Practically that means that we must somehow radiate both. But how to do that?

Jesus doesn’t offer an easy answer. As far as we can tell, he never set himself apart by his clothing or any other externals. John the Baptist, on the other hand, did and in a very pronounced way. Everything in his appearance and message spoke of “otherness”, but he was a prophet, not the Christ.

Jesus, it seems, set himself apart, not by externals, clothing and symbols, but through the integrity of his life. Where he showed himself to be different was by not sinning, by praying for whole nights, by fasting and going off by himself into the desert, by forgiving his enemies, by constant intimacy with God, and by being morally faithful when everyone else betrayed.

But what does that mean for us practically? We have a long tradition, stretching from John the Baptist to Mother Teresa, that suggests that external symbols are important, even as we have an equally long tradition that suggests that God doesn’t call all of us to set ourselves apart in this way. Vocation, it seems, is sensitive to both temperament and circumstance and that makes for a situation within which there will always be some of us who, in the externals of our lives, will radiate more the fact that we are set apart, while others will radiate more the fact that we are called to disappear into humanity.

And each of us, like Jesus, needs to have enough personal intimacy with God to recognize, more precisely, that to which we are called.

Our Real Moral Struggle

August 20, 2006

“The Heart has its reasons!”

Blaise Pascal wrote that and it explains why our feelings and behaviour are often a mystery to us: “Why do I feel this way?” “Why am I so restless just now?” “Why am I angry at this person when I should feel love?” “Why am I so tense at this meeting?” “Why do I feel this particular jealousy, coldness, bitterness, or obsession?”

The heart has its reasons and we’re not always privy to them. And part of the heart’s tortured complexity is its pride. We have proud hearts (for good reasons). Because of that pride, we are never far from being defensive, aloof, cold, assertive, suspicious, and paranoid. A very small slight can trigger huge reactions that can quickly make us shut doors inside of us.

We all know how easily this happens: We feel a little threatened and immediately doors that were once open begin to close inside of us and we feel the need to protect ourselves, to reclaim ourselves from someone, to be cool, aloof, disinterested, and seemingly given over to more important things. Where just minutes before there was warmth, vulnerability, softness, trust, and the desire to share, there is now a chill, a hardness, a distrust, and a reluctance to share anything beyond the surface.

There’s a biblical name for this, “hardness of heart”.

Jesus warns against this everywhere. For example:

He idealized children, warned about the dangers of not welcoming them, asked us to be like them, and laid hands on them. Scholars tell us that his laying hands on them was more than a simple gesture of affection. The laying on of hands is an ordination, a missioning. For Jesus, children are “missionaries” in that they reveal to others that discipleship consists in having a heart that is not yet hardened, but is still trusting, vulnerable, warm. We all start from there, but our wounds cause us to harden. Jesus invites us back to that place, before our hearts grew hard.

Jesus teaches this too when he is questioned about divorce. There’s an incident in the Gospels, little understood, where the Scribes and Pharisees ask him: “Is it lawful to divorce?” (In essence: “How does God look on divorce?”)

Instead of answering them, Jesus turns the question back to them: “What did Moses teach?” They answer that Moses said a man could divorce his wife. Jesus uses their answer as a springboard to teach something deeper. He tells them that Moses allowed this only because of their “hardness of heart”, but that originally, before there was sin, God’s design was that the physical, one-flesh, sexual union between a man and woman was meant to reflect a communion of spirit between persons within which the very notion of divorce is foreign. One-flesh union reflects what is happening inside of God, perfect union of male and female, perfect mutual empowering. That kind of union should never be broken apart.

Divorce, Jesus tells us, is a reality, not in the design of God, but in the bitter realities of our world and how those realities harden our hearts and render it impossible at times for us to not have our relationships unravel.

What Jesus does in this teaching is invite us to go back, back to the beginning, back to pre-fallen times, back to that time before our hearts began to harden, back to when we were still childlike, and, from there, to try to answer for ourselves how God feels about divorce and the fracturing of any relationship. Not an easy thing.

In my life, I go to a lot of meetings. Almost always I am with good, sincere, dedicated people. Almost always too we meet in an atmosphere of shared faith, shared prayer, and shared concerns. But sometimes at those meetings the mood and tone will suddenly change. A minor slight, an unexpected irritation, a small misunderstanding, a gratitude that isn’t expressed, an ill-chosen comment, or just someone having a bad day, can trigger a chill, a loss of trust, a hardening of atmosphere, and suddenly we all feel a need to protect ourselves and the whole atmosphere becomes guarded and professional, devoid of warmth and genuine sharing.

And therein lies one of the biggest moral struggles within our lives: To keep a mellow, warm, trusting heart when, as Pascal says, the heart has its reasons to want to chill and become aloof in order to protect itself. But the capacity to resist that impulse, to not turn cold, to not turn off, is, I believe, the real mark of maturity and even of faith. It’s this that makes for a great lover.

For the most part, as we know, we’re not there, none of us. We’re still too often defensive, cool, self-protecting and prone to all the subtle negative behaviours this triggers. But it’s good to recognize that this is a broken place, a humble place, and a place from which we are invited, each day, to make a new beginning.

Home – The Place from which to Understand

August 13, 2006

More than anything else, we long for home. Our deep ache for intimacy, security, and comfort is, in the end, a longing for home, nothing more. We are forever restlessly searching for someone or something to take us home.

But what is home? Is home a family? A house? A city? A country? A lover? A language? An ethnic group?

Home transcends all of these. We can find a home in many different families, houses, cities, countries, ethnic groups, and languages, and we can be far from home within our own family, house, city, country, and ethnic group.

Home is a place in the heart, not a bloodline, building, city, or ethnicity. Home is that deep, fragile place where we hold and guard what’s most precious to us. It’s that place where, in some dark way, we remember that once, before we came to awareness, we were caressed by hands far gentler than any we’ve met in this life and where we were once kissed by a truth and a beauty so perfect that they are now the unconscious standard by which we measure everything. Home is where things “ring true”, where what’s most precious to us is cherished, the place of tender conscience, of intimacy.

And we know when we’re there and when we’re not. Home is a gut feeling, a resting place, a goodness, a security that we sense or don’t sense.

Sometimes people ask me: “How do I know that the love I have for a person is the kind of love that I can build a marriage on?” My answer: “Love is a mystery and there are no guarantees, but, ask yourself this: `Does this person bring me home? Or, is this a love, irrespective of how powerful and exciting it is, from which I need eventually to go home?'” There’s a huge difference between sharing powerful feelings with someone and building life and a home with him or her. There’s a huge difference between an affair and a marriage, between having a honeymoon or building a life with someone. Many kinds of kinds of love make for a honeymoon, but only one kind takes us home.

And then, after we’ve found home, we still have the problem of staying there. This isn’t meant literally, but in a deeper way. How?

In the Gospels, immediately after he denies Jesus, we are told that Peter “went outside”. What’s being described here isn’t a simple physical movement, someone stepping through a door and going outside. What’s meant is that Peter went outside of himself, outside of who he is, outside of his conscience, outside of his normal understanding of things. He “went outside” in the way a man “goes outside” when he goes to a singles’ bar and links up with someone in a way that takes him “outside” of his normal moral reality.

And from that, he has to go home. Why? Because, like Peter, he has “gone outside”. What a person does in any morally schizophrenic act, in essence, takes him or her away from home (even if that act is done in his or her own house). Morally and psychologically the act is done away from home. It’s done “outside”.

There’s a crude joke that catches this. It asks: “What do promiscuous people do after they have sex?” The answer: “They go home!” That expresses a sad irony: Sex is not something from which we are ever meant to go home. It’s meant to take us home, to constitute home. Intimacy is home and if we need to go home from an experience that’s an infallible sign that what we’ve experienced isn’t ultimately life giving for us.

And this has huge implications for understanding life: In the Gospels, Jesus says: “To you [inside the circle of understanding] are revealed the secrets of the Kingdom, but to those outside everything is in riddles.” Who’s “inside” and who’s “outside” the circle of understanding? Who “gets” the secret and who doesn’t “get” it?

“Getting” or “not getting” the secret is not a question of intelligence, learning, luck, or finding the right books or teachers. Rather, we are “inside” the circle of understanding and we “get” the Gospels when we are at “at home”, when we are true to what’s deepest in us, when we are true to our consciences, when we don’t morally “go outside” (as did Peter and as we do when we do acts that, morally, aren’t true to who we are). When we are morally faithful, we “get” the Gospel.

Conversely, we “don’t get” it when we “go outside”, outside morally, when we “leave home” by being unfaithful as Peter was.

And we know this truth from experience: When we’re faithful, the Gospels make sense. When we’re unfaithful, almost immediately, we fill with objections, grow bitter, and begin to poke holes into truths we once believed.

T.S. Eliot once said, “Home is where we start from.” It’s also the place from which we understand what does or does not bring us life.

Suicide – The Pain of the Ones Left Behind

August 6, 2006

Each year I write a column on suicide and try to highlight three things.

First, suicide is a illness, not something freely chosen. A person who dies by suicide, certainly in most cases, dies against his or her own will. Suicide is death by illness, not something someone wills.

Second, those left behind should not spend undue time and energy second-guessing: “What might I have done?” “Where did I fail?” “If only I had responded and reached out when I had the chance!” Suicide is the emotional equivalent of cancer, a heart attack, or a stroke, and all the care and reaching-out in the world cannot, at times, save a loved one from death by these. That’s true too for suicide.

Finally, we should not spend too much time either worrying about the eternal salvation of those who die by suicide. God’s love, healing, understanding, and forgiveness reach into those places where we cannot. God can descend into hell and breathe out peace even there. Moreover, as we know, most suicide victims are over-sensitive, wounded persons, too-bruised to be touched. God’s touch is gentler than our own.

With that being said, I would like, this year, to share the feelings and reflections of a woman who, last year, lost her husband to suicide. The victim of suicide may be at peace in God’s arms, but those left behind generally take a long, long time to make peace with this kind of death.

Here are her words:

My husband abandoned me and his daughters about a year ago. Without any warning signs, he left us to fend for ourselves. Yes, he had seemed stressed out and unhappy, but always insisted that everything was fine. One day he didn’t come home from work. The next day his body was found. He had killed himself.

Despite being surrounded by loving family and friends, this reality was mine alone. The pain was excruciating, a pain that no one could share. The loneliness was beyond belief. A black weight settled into my being, a weight that suffocates and crushes. I seemed to live in an alternative reality, that of hell. I prayed to God incessantly for help. Help, help, help. I needed help. My husband had betrayed me massively. My daughters were fatherless. Words cannot convey the pain, despair, suffering I felt. I hurt badly. Anger seethed out of me. I was enveloped in a brutal black place. My being was crushed, my heart shattered irrevocably, my soul in dire need. Send me help. I need help. Please Lord send me help.

`Rest in God,’ a friend advised in a sympathy card. I was desperate to do this. I prayed and prayed. Yet no breath of peace fell on me as I cried each night for help. Yes, friends brought meals over, they did yard work, they tried to be there for me. But no one could share my pain, my living hell. I tried to rest in God, yet the loneliness was too much for me.

I turned from God, the pain of his abandonment was too great. I stopped going to church. I stopped praying. I stopped caring. I considered casual sex, drugs, and drinking. Whatever. I was broken and damaged and didn’t really care anymore. I was still in an alternative reality, still in hell, I didn’t care.

I started feeling better. Subconsciously I was still desperate, on my knees, begging God for solace. Help, help, help. This prayer, this simple prayer, this desperate prayer, wove itself into my being. The times I let myself feel it I would break down in utter despair.

I made it through the first year, but barely. On the one-year anniversary, I relived each excruciating minute, the horror of viewing his body, the unbelievable pain of comforting my wailing daughters whilst desperately needing comfort myself. I went to the chapel where the vigil had been held and sobbed myself sick. I relived my hatred, anger, guilt, abandonment, blackness, despair. My anger slowly dissipated into sadness. Deep deep sadness. A sadness that continues to squeeze my heart, my soul, my being.

My husband was not created to die by his own hand. He was created in God’s image, to become the person God meant him to be. Instead he murdered himself. This is so brutally wrong and skewed. I cannot wrap my mind around it.

My priest told me that sometimes God leads us to what we fear most, to show us we have nothing to fear. It’s true that I don’t fear death anymore. I saw clearly when I saw my husband’s dead body that his spirit was no longer there. I know without a doubt that he is at peace. I just don’t understand how I will ever come to my peace, at least in this world. I feel permanently disabled and damaged and sad.

I cry as I breathe deeply and try to trust. Guide me, guard me, O Lord my God.

Our Need for Confession

July 30, 2006

In his book on the Sabbath, Wayne Muller brilliantly juxtaposes two descriptions:

“Jules and Olivia are in their fifties, and even though their children are grown, they love to celebrate Shabbos. Every Friday night before the Sabbath meal, they draw a warm bath and, together, take off their clothes and bathe. This is their ritual cleansing, part of their marriage covenant, preparation to receive the Sabbath bride. But more than this, it is also a time for intimacies, and confession.

Each unclothed and open to receive the other, they each put a hand to the other’s heart, and ask if there is anything they need to say, any confession, something lingering in the heart that, left unsaid, would hinder a full and joyful Sabbath. On some nights, there is little to say. On other nights, words must be spoken aloud that have lived in secret. Who can imagine what lovers must share, when seeking a pure heart and an honest Sabbath? For thirty years, such honesty comes to this: two beings, warm and close, bathed in love.”

“Confession – it is said – is good for the soul. Before mass, Catholics practice confession, a ritual cleansing before receiving the gift of communion. Not to receive punishment or even absolution, but rather to speak what must be brought out from darkness, if we are to receive the light.” (Wayne Muller, Sabbath, Finding Rest, Renewal, and Delight in our Busy, N.Y., Bantam Books, 1999, p.198)

Roman Catholics are familiar with confession, the sacrament of reconciliation. However, in recent years, the practice of confession has suffered, and pretty massively, from neglect. Less and less people are going to confession and, those who do, are going less frequently. Many people aren’t going to confession at all and those who are going are, by and large, going only twice a year, at penitential services just before Christmas and Easter. This is a far cry from a time when most Catholics would go to confession at least once a month or even once a week.

There’s a sad irony in this: People are beginning to neglect the practice of confession just when, for the first time, we are learning from the experience of the therapeutic community that, for some things, there is no help, and there can be no help, outside of a searingly honest and detailed telling of our sins, addictions, fantasies, and foibles to another human being.

An honest confession is a non-negotiable step in any healing process. What healing programs have discovered – just when so many of us inside church circles are forgetting it – is that, good as it is, it’s not enough just to be contrite silently in our hearts. Full healing can only take place when we express that contrition not just to God in the secret recesses of the soul, but when we also speak it out, and in detail, to another human being.

What’s at issue, as Muller’s brilliant juxtaposition highlights, isn’t, radically, forgiveness itself, or even absolution. Sincerity of heart and touching the Body of Christ inside of family and community, particularly Eucharistic community, as the gospels show us, leads to the forgiveness of our sins. But that alone doesn’t enable us to come to the family table, the Eucharistic table, to our circle of friends, to our communities, and to our marriage beds with hearts that aren’t carrying things that block deeper intimacy and deeper joy.

As well, there is a certain grace, a key one needed to come to grips with our addictions and bad habits, that can, as anyone who has ever been addicted to anything knows, only be entered into when we openly and honestly bring into the light what, until then, has lain hidden in the dark, however sincere our contrition about it. We cannot transform our lives by willpower alone, we also need grace and community and both of these, at a point, depend upon the type of transparency that can only come about by honest confession.

D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem he entitled, Healing, that goes this way:

I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various sections.
And it is not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.
I am ill because of wounds to the soul, to the deep emotional self
and wounds to the soul take a long, long time, only time can help
and patience, and a certain difficult repentance,
long, difficult repentance, realization of life’s mistake, and the freeing oneself
from the endless repetition of the mistake
which mankind at large has chosen to sanctify.

One of the mistakes that too many of us have chosen to sanctity is the misguided belief that there are things that we do in the dark that need never be brought to the light, that private sincerity alone is enough, and that we can continue to grow in intimacy with our loved ones without, regularly, putting our hands on each other’s hearts and speaking aloud those things that have been lived in secret.