The Language of Silence

January 28, 2007

“Nothing resembles the language of God so much as does silence.”

Meister Eckhard wrote those words. What do they mean? Among other things, they speak of a deep mystery.

What language will we speak in heaven? We don’t know, but we have some inkling of it in the deep experiences of intimacy we have on earth. In our deepest experiences of intimacy and communion, we come together beyond words, in a silence that isn’t empty but is too full for words. In heaven, I suspect, just as in our deepest experiences of intimacy here, there won’t be a need for words. We will know and be known in a language beyond ordinary words, in the language of intimacy and the language of God.

We already experience this somewhat. Sometimes, for instance, we understand someone or feel understood by someone intuitively, beyond words, beyond anything we’ve ever spoken to each other, and often this understanding is deeper than the understanding we come to through normal conversation.

The same is true for intimacy within community. I remember doing a 30-day Ignatian retreat some years ago. About sixty of us were on the retreat and we arrived there as total strangers. The thirty days were spent in silence, except for celebrating Eucharist together each day in the chapel. We ate our meals in silence, never recreated with each other, and never, except for two very brief occasions early on in the retreat, had any conversations with each other at all. Yet, when the retreat ended we had the feeling that we knew each other more deeply than we would have had we socialized and talked during those days. The silence was a powerful language, stronger than words, and it brought us into community in a way that words often cannot.

I’ve experienced this too inside of religious community. I am a member of a missionary order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, and one of the things our founder, St. Eugene de Mazenod, mandated for us was that, each day, we should sit together as a community in chapel for a long period of silence. My experience has been that whenever we do this, something akin to a “Quaker silence”, the silent time spent together does more to bind us into community than do any number of community meetings. Silence is a special language.

But that doesn’t put silence in opposition to words. Silence and words need each other. Words take on greater power when they issue forth from silence, just as they begin to lose their force when they are constant and never-ending. Conversely silence is more powerful after we have already come to know each other through words. There are things that we can only know through silence, just as there are things we can only know through conversations inside of a community.

That is why solitude is such paradox: Solitude, as we know, is not defined as being alone, but as being at peace, as being restful rather than restless. And we all know the strange anomalies that can happen here: Sometimes we are at a celebration with others, but we are too restless to enjoy the occasion or even to be present to it. Socializing with others paradoxically serves to heighten our restlessness and disquiet. Conversely, sometimes we are alone, away from others, but are restful, comfortable, and at peace inside of our own lives. Being alone paradoxically works to still our disquiet and silence is what brings us into community.

And so it is important that we try to learn the language of silence, just as we also try to learn the words that can help us know each other. There is a huge silence undergirding us and inside of us that is trying to draw us into itself. To enter that silence is to enter the reality of God and the reality of our real communion with each other. For this reason, all great religious traditions and all great spiritual writers emphasize the need for silence at times in our lives.

Sadly, we are too often afraid of silence, afraid of being alone, afraid of what we might meet there. Too often silence speaks to us of loneliness, of missing out on life, of being disconnected, of a being a tomb of non-life. And so we cling to each other and look for conversations, amusements, and distractions that can fill in the silent spaces in our lives. Ultimately this running away from silence is founded unconsciously on the fear that, deep down, something is missing, both inside of the world and inside ourselves and we are best to cling to whatever can protect us from that painful truth.

But that fear is unfounded. As Thomas Merton put it, there is a hidden wholeness at the heart of things and that hidden wholeness can only be discovered if we get to the deepest level of things. And the language we need to get there is the language of silence – the language of God and the language of intimacy.

The Miracle of Existence

January 21, 2007

While doing my doctoral thesis, I had the privilege of having as a mentor the distinguished Belgian philosopher-theologian, Jan Walgrave. One day, while discussing a point in philosophy, he asked me: “Do you ever sit on a park bench and ask yourself: Why is there something instead of nothing?” I had to admit that I didn’t, at least not very often.

“Then you are not a philosopher!” he gently commented. “A true philosopher asks that question every day for it’s a miracle that anything exists at all.”

Having met occasionally persons like Walgrave who are true philosophers, I know better than to claim real citizenship inside that circle. True philosophers, like true mystics, true poets, and true artists, are rare. My natural temperament is a bit too pragmatic to be numbered among them. The fault in this is that, like most other non-philosophers, I generally take the world and most everything in it for granted. However, in order to stand correctly in this world, we may not take existence for granted but rather need to live with the sense that all is gift – and is a very precious and precarious gift too. It’s a miracle that we are here at all!

One of the things that can help us grasp this is contemporary science, particularly what it says about the origins of our universe. Science, like theology, tells us that we weren’t always here and it we shouldn’t take for granted that we are here. Why not?

When one examines the current scientific hypothesis regarding the origins of our universe (the Big Bang theory) one realizes that it is a miracle, something beyond the human imagination, that there is something instead of nothing.

Science today tells us that our universe had a birthday. Roughly 15 billion years ago there was a time-zero, a time when everything in our universe as we have it now did not exist. Everything that is now in our entire universe began about 15 billion years ago with an explosion (the “big bang”) from something which was probably tinier than a single atom. Moreover, for our universe, our world, and human life to have come about a mind-boggling combination of factors had to be just right. I say “mind-boggling” because it’s when we examine these factors that we are left with the philosopher’s wonder as to why there is something at all instead of nothing. Let me list just a few of these mind-boggling things:

First off, as Stephen Hawking writes, “If the rate of expansion one second after the Big Bang has been smaller by one part in a hundred thousand million it would have all re-collapsed” and we would have no universe. On the other hand, if it had been greater by one part in a million, the universe would have expanded too rapidly for planets to form. That equilibrium (upon which depends the existence of our universe) is, even today, still balanced on that same razor’s edge.

Second, if the nuclear force caused by this great explosion had even been slightly weaker we would have only hydrogen in the universe. If it has been even slightly stronger, all the hydrogen would be converted into helium. In either case, we would not have the present universe, the planet earth, and human life. Moreover the explosion was just strong enough so that carbon could form; yet if it if had been any stronger all the carbon would have been converted into oxygen. Again, had there been a variation within a millionth of a part, we’d have no earth and no life.

Finally, in the first seconds that followed this great explosion, for every one billion antiprotons in the universe, there were one billion and one protons. The billion pairs annihilated each other to produce radiation, but one proton was left over. A greater or smaller number of survivors (or no surviving protons at all if they had been evenly matched) and, again, we would not have a universe. And, to accentuate this anomaly, normally there is a perfect symmetrical balance between particles (a billion protons for a billion antiprotons). Why the billion and one?

And then the complexity that is ultimately produced by this big bang! For example, there are a hundred trillion synapses (points at which a nerve impulses pass from one neutron to another) in a human brain and the number of possible ways of connecting them is greater than the number of atoms in the universe.

Looking at all of this, the chance coincidence of so many trillion possibilities that had to be exactly right for a universe and life to emerge, even Stephen Hawking admits, “there are theological implications.”

Jan Walgrave used to define these “theological implications” this way: “The next time you are sitting on a park bench and looking at a tree or into the eyes of someone you love there should flood through you gratitude for the marvel of it all and you should ask yourself: Why is there something instead of nothing?”

Loneliness and God’s Pleasure

January 14, 2007

Eric Liddel, the Olympic gold medallist and runner whose story was told in the movie, Chariots of Fire, once made this comment: “When I run, I feel God’s pleasure.” That’s good theology. We feel God’s pleasure in us whenever we do something well.

If that’s true, and it is, then we know something is good for us if God takes pleasure in us doing it. But how do we discern that?

Donald Cozzens, in a recent book, relates this to the question of loneliness and asks: Does God take pleasure in our loneliness just because loneliness invariably deepens us? What kinds of loneliness are good for the heart and what kinds aren’t? He cautions that we must discern this carefully. Not every kind of loneliness deepens us in the right way.

He’s right. There are kinds of loneliness that beset us that are neither good for us nor pleasing to God. Sometimes the restlessness and emptiness we feel are there because we are doing something wrong or because something is wrong in us. Selfishness, self-indulgence, infidelity, betrayal, sin, or sickness all can trigger a fierce loneliness, but this doesn’t necessarily mean that we will benefit from the pain. Sometimes too loneliness and restlessness are caused by something we are not doing, like entering enough into solitude and into our own silence.

In these cases, while the loneliness might still teach us something, God takes no pleasure in it. Rather the loneliness indicates that something is wrong.

However there are kinds of loneliness, whose sting is just as painful, that are signs of health, signs that we are doing something right, signs that we are where we should be. When we suffer these types of loneliness, we feel God’s pleasure in us, not because we are suffering but because we are doing something right.

In what kinds of loneliness do we feel God’s pleasure?

The loneliness of Gethsemane, of having to sweat blood in order to be faithful, of self-sacrifice, lets us feel God’s pleasure, as too does the loneliness that comes from entering healthily into our own solitude and silence. These kinds of loneliness beset us not because we are doing something wrong or because there is something wrong in us. Rather, in these instances, we are lonely because we are doing something right and are being healthily sensitive and faithful.

Loneliness of this kind stretches the heart, makes us more empathic, shows us where the threads of compassion lie, and makes us deeper as persons by putting us in touch with the immensity of God, of others, of the world, and of our own souls. In this kind of loneliness we intuit the deeper meaning of things.

Indeed nothing is more beneficial to us in terms of coming to depth and maturity as is the right kind of loneliness. Our successes may bring pleasure and glory into our lives, but they rarely bring depth. Loneliness is what makes us deep. But it can make us deep too in the wrong way. This is the algebra: Loneliness will make us deep, but it can make us deep too in anger and bitterness just as easily as in gratitude and compassion.

And God does not take pleasure in this. God takes pleasure only when our loneliness deepens us in the right way. And loneliness can deepen us in that way:

“Every tear brings the Messiah closer.” “It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of spirit is brought forth.” “The person who loses his or her life will find it.” “Unless a grain of wheat falls in the ground and dies, it cannot bring forth new life.”

Each of these axioms teaches us that there is certain kind of loneliness that is not only beneficial to us but is in fact the only route to depth, empathy, and selflessness. But, as we shall see, that depends upon how we undergo that pain.

In the Gospels, we see an incident where two disciples, James and John, come to Jesus and ask him if they might have the seats of glory at his right hand and at his left hand.

Jesus asks them in return: “Can you drink of the cup (of suffering)?” They answer, “Yes, we can.” Jesus then tells them something to this effect: “Indeed, you will drink the cup of suffering – everyone will! But you might not get the glory! Suffering will make you deep, but it can just as easily make you deep in bitterness. You will only get the glory if you undergo your suffering in the right way!”

God takes pleasure in us when we do things right, when we exercise the talents He gave us and find satisfaction and fulfilment in that. When we do well what God meant for us to do, we feel God’s pleasure.

But God, like a good parent watching a child mature, also takes pleasure in us when loneliness and suffering open and stretch our hearts in ways that make us deeper, more compassionate, and less selfish.

Getting and Not Getting the Secret

January 7, 2007

What’s life’s deep secret? Do we ever really understand life? Do we ever really get things right? What lies at the center of life?

These are the deeper questions that gnaw away inside of us and we are never really sure how to answer them.. Do we ever really understand what our lives are all about?

Yes and no! I suspect that most of us go through life bouncing back and forth between knowing and not knowing, between feeling steady and feeling insecure, between having days when we feel we’re getting things right and having days when everything seems out of sorts.

As the Sufi mystic Rumi, once put it, we live “with a secret we sometimes know, and then not know.”

I suspect we all know what that feels like. Some days, it seems, we know the secret to living and feel we are inside of things, at their heart. This may not necessarily be something we are consciously aware of, but something sensed at some deeper level. There are times when our lives make sense in a way Vaclav Havel once described. Steadiness, he suggests, lies “not in the conviction that something will turn out well, but in the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” There are days when we know the truth of that.

But there are also days when we aren’t sure exactly what we know, when we feel outside of things, when the circle of life seems to exclude us, and we walk round the edges of love and meaning, unsure, unsteady, feeling some inexplicable guilt because we have the sense that somehow we are doing things wrongly and are not where we should be.

And so we live with a secret we sometimes know, and then not. We feel steady and then unsure, strong and then vulnerable, moral and then guilty; loveable and then unworthy; we sense that we know the secret to life and then suddenly we feel we don’t. Sometimes we stand inside of things and sometimes we stand outside of them.

I’ve always been struck by a very poignant expression in the Gospel of Mark. He tells us that Peter betrayed Jesus at his trial, ultimately cursing him in order to save himself, After that betrayal, Mark (in a stunningly cryptic statement) says simply: “Peter went outside! “

Outside of what? Obviously he is referring to much more than Peter simply stepping outside of a door and leaving a room or a courtyard. In betraying Jesus, and in betraying himself, Peter “went outside” of something else, namely, outside all that’s best inside of himself, outside of the community of life, and outside the secret of life itself.

And what is the secret of life itself?

In the Gospel of Mark, Jesus says: “To you is given the secret of the Kingdom of God, but to those outside, everything is in riddles.” To whom is he referring? Who is “you”? What is the secret? What puts you inside? What puts you outside and makes the Gospel a riddle?

In Mark’s Gospel, the answers to these questions are clear: You are “inside” or “outside” the true circle of understanding, not on the basis of being Jew or Gentile, of being man or woman, or of going or not going to church. Rather you are inside or outside the circle of true understanding on the basis of “getting” or “not getting” the secret. And what is the secret?

In essence, the secret to life is the cross of Christ or, as various scripture scholars and spiritual writers put it, the brokenness of Jesus on the cross, the wisdom of the cross, the invitation that lies inside the cross, and the willingness to live out the demands of the cross.

It’s not easy to try to summarize all that this means. To do that, one would have to summarize all the deepest challenges within revelation, theology, and spirituality: God’s unconditional love and forgiveness, God’s loving presence inside of human twistedness, vulnerability as the path to intimacy, God’s identification with the poor and the excluded, the necessary connection between suffering and glory, the paradoxical nature of love and life (which can only be received by giving them away), the centrality of self-sacrifice as the key to love and fidelity, and the importance of giving our lives over without resentment (of not sending the bill whenever we carry someone’s cross).

There’s a lot inside this secret! And when we are at our best, when we let the demands of love, truth, and fidelity take us to where we would rather not go, we know its truth and live inside of it. On those days, we know the secret of the kingdom and the Gospels make sense. But then there are days that, like Peter when he betrayed Jesus, we “go outside”, outside of truth and what’s best inside of us, and from that perspective life, love, truth, Jesus, and the Gospels all look like an empty riddle.

Ultimate Consolation

January 1, 2007

The most singularly consoling doctrine in all of religion is the Christian belief that Christ descended into hell.

Christ descended into hell. What is meant by that?

There is an old understanding that interprets the phrase this way: After the original sin of Adam and Eve, the gates of heaven were closed and nobody was able to go to heaven until Christ came and paid the price for our sin. But then, after Jesus died, in that time between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, he went to that underworld place where all the good people who had died since the time of Adam and Eve waited and he opened up for them the gates to paradise. Christ’s going to that place of the dead (mythically imagined geographically, but theologically conceived of spiritually) was understood as Christ’s descent into hell.

However there is an even older understanding of this doctrine which, while not denying the essence of what was just said, interprets it this way: The descent into hell highlights something in the way that Jesus lived and died.

First of all, we see this in the way that Jesus lived and revealed God’s presence: We see in gospels, time and again, that Jesus goes into all the dark, taboo places and takes God’s light and love there. The ultimate dark, taboo place of course is hell itself.

And we see this most clearly in Jesus’ death: When we look at the way that Jesus died, we see that in his death he “descended into hell”, that he went into a place and space of utter alienation and complete darkness where he was, outside of everything except raw faith, completely cut off from community, life, and God. There, in that place where he was so utterly alienated and alone, he was able to breath out the spirit of God and of life.

What does that mean for us? Let me try to explain by using a series of image:

In the Gospel of John, the evangelist describes how the resurrected Jesus appeared to the disciples. He tells that the disciples were “huddled together in a locked room, in fear” and that Jesus (twice) came right through the locked doors, stood in the middle of them, and breathed out peace. These images are significant and powerful: “they were huddled in fear”; “Jesus entered through the locked doors”; “Jesus stood in the midst of them and said, ‘Peace be with you’.”

In St. Paul’s Cathedral, London, there hangs a famous painting, The Light of the World, by Holman Hunt. It shows Christ with a lantern, knocking on a door, waiting for it to be opened from the inside. A redacted version of this, made into a holy card, circulates in pious circles. It shows Christ, with a lantern, knocking on a door on which there is no door-knob on the outside. There is only a knob on the inside and there, huddled in fear, depression, and paranoia, stands a man who is obviously faced with the choice : Open the door and let Christ in or keep Christ waiting outside! The obvious implication is: Only you can open that door! The picture suggests that this particular man might be too depressed to be up to the task.

There is a legitimate challenge in this image: There are certain doors that we must open in order to let Christ into our lives. In another sense however, this is a bad holy card. If it’s right, then the Gospel of John is wrong because, after the resurrection, with the disciples huddled in fear inside of a room, Jesus does not stand and knock, waiting, saying: “Only you can open that door!” He comes right through the locked doors, stands in the middle of the circle of fear, breathes out the Holy Spirit, and says: “Do not be afraid! Peace be with you!”

Several years ago, some family friends of mine had a 19 year-old daughter who became severely depressed and attempted suicide. They rallied round her, took her to the best doctors and psychiatrists, and tried every possible way of having their love break through the shell of her sickness and alienation. It didn’t work. Eventually she killed herself. All the love in the world and all the best medicine and psychiatry could not any more penetrate inside her private hell. Her family could not “descend into hell” and open up for her the gates of life and community. They were helpless before her darkness, her hell.

But Christ can descent into that, and into every hell that can be created. That’s what the descent into hell means. There is no hell that Christ cannot penetrate, no locked door he cannot go through. When this young woman woke up on the other side of this life, I am certain that she found Christ standing in the middle of her huddled fear and loneliness breathing out the spirit of community and joy and saying: “Do not be afraid. Peace with you!”

Sometimes you don’t have to open the door!

Searching for Bethlehem in the Soul

December 17, 2006

Nearly twenty years ago, the renowned educator, Allan Bloom, wrote a very provocative book entitled, The Closing of the American Mind. As its title suggests, this isn’t a book that flatters contemporary culture. Part of our mind is darkening, he suggests. Our sophistication is making us smarter but less wise. Something inside of us is narrowing. What? What’s narrowing inside of us? How are our minds closing?

His basic idea can be captured in one image, this autobiographical piece:

When he was a young, undergraduate student in University, one of his professors walked into class on the first day and said this to the students: “You come here from your parochial backgrounds, full of your childish beliefs; well, I am going to bathe you in the great truths and set you free!”

Bloom wasn’t impressed. He remarks that the professor reminded him of a little boy who had solemnly informed him at age seven that there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. However, Bloom adds, he wasn’t bathing me in any great truths, just showing off, like the professor. But still the lesson wasn’t lost on him. From this, Bloom resolved to teach in the opposite way. He would, on the first day of his classes, walk into the lecture room, look at his young students, and begin his class in words to this effect: “You come here with a lot of experience, already having tasted life, having been to a lot of places, and seen a lot of things, so I’m going to try to teach you how to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny again – then maybe you’ll have a chance to be happy!”

This invitation, to learn how to believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny again, is one of the many challenges of Christmas. And the challenge is not so much to come back to the innocence of a child (something we could never do, even if we tried) but to see the knowledge and maturity that we’ve gained from all our years of learning and experience not as an end but as a stage, a necessary one, on the journey to a still deeper place, wisdom, fuller maturity.

What that means is that it is not just important to learn and become sophisticated, it is equally important to eventually become post- sophisticated; it is not just important to grow in experience and shed naivete, it is equally important to eventually find a certain “second naivete”; and it is not just a sign of intelligence and maturity to stop believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny, it is a sign of even more intelligence and deeper maturity to start believing in them again.

An old philosophy professor of mine used to express this is a series of adages: If you ask a naive child, if she believes in Santa and the Easter Bunny, she will say yes. If you ask bright child if she believes in Santa and the Easter Bunny, she will say no. But if you ask even a brighter child if she believes in Santa and the Easter Bunny, she will say yes, for a deeper reason.

Almost everything about Christmas, from its deep real meaning to the piety and even (ironically) the commercialism we surround it with, invites us to be that third child.

But that’s not easy. To be an adult is precisely to be experienced, complex, wounded. To be an adult is to have lost one’s innocence. None of us, unless we die very young, carries the dignity of our person and of our baptism unstained through life. We fall, we compromise, we sin, we get hurt, we hurt others, and mostly we grow ever more pathologically complex, with layer after layer of emotional and intellectual complexity separating us from the little girl and little boy who once waited for Christmas in innocence and joyful anticipation. And that can be painful.

Sometimes, if we’re sensitive, the innocence of children can be like the stab of knife to the soul, making us feel as if we’ve fallen from ourselves. But, in the end, that’s an unhealthy over-idealization, the false nostalgia of J.D. Salinger’s, Catcher in the Rye. We’re not meant to be children forever and innocence will always be lost.

Sometimes, more positively, we get to experience our old innocence and youthful wonder vicariously in the eyes of our own children, in their joyful anticipation and gleeful celebration of Christmas. Their belief in Santa and the wonder in their eyes as they look at the baby-Jesus in the crib help us find a certain softness inside again; not at the same place where we once felt things when we were children and still believed in Santa (because that would only bring the painful stab of nostalgia) but at a new place, a place beyond where we defined ourselves as grown-up (because that’s the place where wisdom is born).

That’s also the place where Jesus is born. That’s Bethlehem in the soul.

Growth Through Dark Nights

December 3, 2006

During my last years of seminary training, I attended a series of lectures given by a prominent Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski, teaching at the time at the University of Alberta. He had written a number of books around a concept he called “positive disintegration”.

Positive disintegration. Isn’t that an oxymoron? Isn’t disintegration the opposite of growth and happiness?

It would seem not. A canon of wisdom drawn from the scriptures of all the major world religions, mystical literature, philosophy, psychology, and human experience tells us that the journey to maturity and compassion is extremely paradoxical and that mostly we grow by falling apart.

Ancient myths talk about the need sometimes to “descend into the underworld”, to live in darkness for a while, to sit in ashes so as to move to a deeper place inside of life; the mystics talk about “dark nights of the soul” as being necessary to bring about maturity; Ignatius of Loyola teaches that there is a place for both “consolation” and “desolation” in our lives; the philosopher, Karl Jaspers, suggests that the journey to full maturity demands that we sometimes journey in “the norm of night” and not just in “the norm of day”; the Jewish scriptures assure us that certain deep things can only happen to the soul when it is helpless and exposed in “the desert” or “the wilderness” and that sometimes, like Jonah, we need to be carried to some place where we’d rather not go “in the dark belly of the whale”; and, perhaps most challenging of all, we see that Jesus was only brought to full compassion through “sweating blood in Gethsemane” and then dying a humiliating death on the cross.

All of these images point to the same deep truth, sometimes in order to grow we must first fall apart, go into the dark, lose our grip on what’s normal, enter into a frightening chaos, lose our everyday securities, and be carried in pain to a place where, for all kinds of reasons, we weren’t ready to go to on our own.

Why? Isn’t there a more pleasant route to maturity?

James Hillman answers this with this image: The best wines have to be aged in cracked, old barrels. And so too the human soul, it mellows, takes on character, and comes to compassion only when there are real cracks, painful ones, in the body and life of the one who carries it. Our successes, he says, bring us glory, while our pain brings us character and compassion. Pain, and sometimes only pain, serves to mellow the soul.

But almost every instinct inside of us resists this wisdom. We don’t like living in tension, try at all costs to avoid pain, fear chaos, are ashamed of our humiliations, and panic when our old securities fall away and we are left in the dark, unsure of things. So our natural instinct is to get out of the darkness and tension as quickly as possible, before the pain has had its chance to mellow our souls, purify our hearts, bring us to a deeper level of maturity and compassion, and do its full purifying work within us.

And, sometimes, we are helped in this escape by well-meaning therapists and spiritual directors who don’t want to see us in pain and therefore try to cure the situation rather than properly care for the soul inside the situation. They want to restore us to normality and good functioning because, as Thomas Moore puts it, they can’t envision us fulfilling our fate and discovering the deeper meaning of our lives.

And so what we need when we are in a “dark night” isn’t the well- intentioned sympathy of a friend who wants to rescue us from the pain, but the wisdom of the mystics who tell us: When you lose your securities, when you find yourself in an emotional and spiritual free-fall, when you are in the belly of the whale, let go, detach yourself, let the pain carry you to where it needs to take you, don’t resist, rather weep, wail, cry, and put your mouth to the dust, and wait. Just wait. You are like a baby being weaned from its mother’s breast and forced to learn a new way of nourishing yourself. Anything you do to stop what’s happening will only delay the inevitable, the pain that must be gone through in order come to a new maturity.

Thomas Moore, in a recent book on Dark Nights of the Soul, offers this advice to anyone undergoing this kind of crisis of soul: “Care rather than cure. Organize your life to support the process. You are incubating your soul, not living a heroic adventure. Arrange your life accordingly. Tone it down. Get what comforts you can, but don’t move against the process. Concentrate, reflect, think, and talk about your situation seriously with trusted friends.”

Or, as Rainer Marie Rilke would advise: “Don’t be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.”

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.