Not Our Own Children

July 23, 2006

Towards the end of Margaret Laurence’s novel, A Jest of God, there is a particularly moving dialogue: Rachel, the story’s main character, an aging, spinster teacher, is more than a little frustrated with her state in life, teaching other people’s children rather than having her own. Lamenting to another woman, who is a mother, she complains how painful it is for her as a teacher to, year after year, intimately work with and get to know the young children in her classroom only to have them soon move on to other classrooms and to grow away from her. She expresses an honest envy of women who have their own children.

The mother to whom she is speaking says in reply: “It’s not so different for a parent. You also get to have young children only for a short time. They move on and grow away from you. They have their own lives. They don’t belong to you. In the end, even for parents, your kids are never really your own!”

There are a number of lessons in this: The children we have are never really ours. They are given to us, in trust, for a time, a short time really, and we are asked to be mothers and fathers, stewards, mentors, guardians, teachers, priests, ministers, and friends to them, but they are never really our children. They belong to somebody else, God, and to themselves more than they ever belong to us.

There is both a deep challenge and a deep consolation in understanding and accepting that.

The challenge is more obvious. If we accept this, we will be less inclined to act as “owners” of our children and we will be less prone to manipulate our children for our own ends, to see them as a satellites within our own orbits, and more inclined to love, cajole, challenge, and correct, even while giving them their freedom.

The consolation is not as obvious, but it is my focus here: When we realize, in the healthy sense, that our children are not really ours, we also realize that we are not alone in raising and caring for them. We are, in a manner of speaking, only foster parents. God is the real parent and God’s love, care, aid, and presence to our children is always in excess of our own. God’s anxiety for our children is also deeper than our own.

Ultimately, you are never a single parent, even when you don’t have a human spouse to help you. God, like you, is also worrying, struggling, involved, crying tears of solicitousness, trying to awaken love. What is consoling is that God can touch, challenge, soften, and inspire at levels inside of a child that you cannot reach.

Moreover, your children cannot, ultimately, turn their backs on God. They can refuse to listen to you, walk away from you, spit on your values, but there is still another parent from whom they can never walk away, whom they carry inside. Not many people, I suspect, would ever have the courage to be a parent without realizing this.

That we aren’t alone in our task of parenting needs emphasis today for lots of reasons: More and more, very sincere couples are opting not to have children for fear of the world into which they would be bringing those children. They look at the world, at themselves, their inadequacy, and are frightened at what they see: “Do we really want to bring children into a world like this? We are powerless to guarantee them health, safety, security, love. It’s an unfair risk to the child!”

Persons who think like this are right in their feeling of powerlessness and in their sense that they cannot guarantee health, safety, love, and security to a child. But they are wrong in their feeling that they alone are responsible for effecting and guaranteeing these. God is also there and can redeem our children and make them whole beyond any tragedy that might befall them. We can risk having children since God risks it.

Finally, and perhaps most consoling of all, realizing this can do more than a little to bring some peace and joy into the hearts of those who have lost children tragically – to accidents, but especially to suicide, drug and alcohol related deaths, and other such things that make parents second-guess, worry about their failures and betrayals, and worry about all the things they should have done. Again, we are being asked to not forget that we are not the only parents here. When this child died, in whatever circumstance, he or she was received by hands far gentler than our own. They left our foster care and our powerlessness to fully embrace them to live with a parent who can fully embrace them and bring them to joy and wholeness that we could never quite give.

Fear not you are inadequate! You can live with that. You’re only a foster parent. God is the real parent.

Stopping the Haemorrhaging by Touching the Hem of the Garment

July 16, 2006

Several years ago in Germany, while giving the sacrament of confirmation, a bishop was questioning the children who were about to be confirmed: “Who can administer the sacrament of confirmation?”, he asked. A young girl answered: “Any bishop, once he’s attained the age of reason!”

Our old catechisms used to tell us that we reach the age of reason at, roughly, age seven. At one level, that’s true, we can be responsible for ourselves then in a way we couldn’t when we were toddlers or in kindergarten. But it takes a lot longer than age seven, a lifetime really, to be in full ownership of ourselves. And so, at another level, we might better peg the age of reason sometime after age 30, when we have a more responsible sense of who we are, what our lives mean, and what decisions we need to make in order to bring life to ourselves and thers. It’s takes a long time before we can be really responsible.

But there’s a further problem, by the time we reach maturity, we have also lost some vital, life-giving parts of ourselves. By the time we get to possess ourselves, all of us have been wounded, shamed in our enthusiasm, and parts of our bodies and our souls have died and turned cold. By the time we get to be more fully in possession of ourselves we are no longer whole.

And this bitterly limits how well we can love and especially how fully we can give life. Let me illustrate this:

In the gospels we are told, within a single story, how Jesus cured two women who, on the surface, seem to have very little in common. The story runs this way:

Jesus is approached by a man named Jairus, who asks him to come and cure his daughter who is thirteen years old. As Jesus is making his way to Jairus’ house, hemmed in by a curious crowd, a woman who, we are told, had been suffering from internal haemorrhaging for twelve years and had spent all her money on doctors without getting any better, approaches him surreptitiously, saying to herself: “If I but touch the hem of his garment, I will be healed!” She does just that and, the gospels tell us, instantly the flow of blood stopped. Touching Jesus did for her what doctors couldn’t do, it stopped her internal haemorrhaging.

Then, as Jesus is approaching Jairus’ house, he is told that the man’s daughter is already dead, but he enters the house anyway, goes to the young girl’s bed, takes her by the hand, and brings her back to life.

What these two women have in common is this: For different reasons, both are unable to get pregnant and give life; the young girl, because she dies at puberty, just as she has the radical possibility of getting pregnant, and the other woman, because the forces inside her that are meant to give life are damaged and haemorrhaging, making it impossible for her to hold a pregnancy. What Jesus does is give back to both women the possibility of giving life, in one case by stopping the flow of blood and in the other by starting it.

We all need a similar miracle: By the time we’re finally ready to give life some deep parts of us have already died and are too cold and lifeless to ever become pregnant. As well, like the woman whose internal bleeding makes it impossible for her to get pregnant, we too are wounded in ways that have us forever haemorrhaging out the life forces we need in order to give life. Parts of us have died and parts of us have been wounded and we are forever haemorrhaging in body, heart, and soul. It’s hard for us to give life.

How do we, like the woman, touch the hem of the garment so as to be healed? How do we, like Jairus’ daughter, let Jesus take us by the hand and restore to us our fertility?

I remember a comment made to me by a young man who had been struggling for a long time to break an addictive habit in his life. He said: “It took me a long time, and countless failures, to realize that you can’t change your life simply by willpower. You can only change it by grace and community.” Alcoholics Anonymous has always known this. Willpower, while important, is not enough. Only by touching some higher power, and this is most easily done inside a community, can we actually change our lives. Therapy too is helpful to a point, but only to a point. In the end, the power to give life can only be restored to us through grace and community, through letting a power beyond give us something that we cannot give to ourselves.

Then, and only then, will those parts of us that are dead or diseased begin again to give life.

In Pursuit of Innocence

July 2, 2006

In the novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence describes a woman, Hagar Shipley, who, after overhearing a very unflattering comment about herself one day, goes into a public toilet and examines her face in a mirror. She’s taken aback by what she sees, scarcely recognizing herself. What she sees in the mirror is a face grown old and hard in experience – bitter, cynical, full of disdain. There’s nothing left in her face of the innocent child or young woman she once was and still imagines herself to be.

She’s stunned and asks herself: How can this have happened? How can one, imperceptible to one’s self, change and become so different, so cold, so lifeless, so devoid of freshness and innocence?

It can, and does, happen to all of us. Most of us have long ceased being the type of person that the child we once were would want to be friends with. In a word, we’ve lost a lot of our innocence and, with that, a lot of the freshness, wonder, and fire that we had when we were little. We pay a heavy price for that.

Towards the end of his life, the American Educator, Allan Bloom, wrote a book he entitled, The Closing of the American Mind. In it, he suggested that our perspective on life is narrowing, that our minds are in fact closing, and that what has perhaps contributed the most to this is precisely our progressive loss of innocence as we have grown more and more sophisticated.

For Bloom, innocence means chastity, not just sexual, but in every area of our lives. Chastity, for him, means experiencing things only if and when we can experience them in such a way that we remain integrated. In simple language, this means we lack chastity and we lose innocence whenever we have experiences that unglue us, psychologically, emotionally, spiritually, or sexually. Obviously a lot of healthy experiences, necessary to growth, will do that to us, but there are experiences that unravel a deeper, moral part of our being. It’s these experiences that close our minds and harden our faces.

In Bloom’s assessment, today many of us have lost too much of our innocence and this manifests itself both in a certain hardness and in a lack of idealistic fire inside of us. He coined a phrase for this – “erotically lame”. For him, there is a kind of sophistication that takes the fire out our eyes and out of our dreams and leaves us limping when we walk anywhere inside the arena of sublimity. We have already, he believes,become somewhat unglued.

How do we recover our innocence?

Adult innocence should not be confused with the natural innocence of a child. Children are innocent precisely because they are still children, naive, and inexperienced in life. For an adult, innocence, has to mean a certain “second naivete”, a “post-sophistication”, that has already accounted for experience. Childishness is not childlikeness. The former takes its root in naivete and lack of experience; the latter takes its root in an experience and a knowledge which is both wise and chaste enough to take on the wonder of a child.

How do the Gospels look on this? Jesus challenged us to innocence by inviting us to have both the heart of a child and the heart of a virgin. … “Unless you have the heart of a child you will not enter the kingdom of Heaven.” “The Kingdom of heaven can be compared to ten virgins waiting for their bridegroom.”

For Jesus, the heart of a child is one that is fresh, receptive, full of wonder, and full of respect and the heart of a virgin is one that can live in inconsummation, without experiencing the finished symphony. The child and the virgin both have to live inside a great patience because many of the things they intensely desire cannot not be had just yet. Both hearts may not test their God.

Deep down, we all still long for this. Just as any healthy child spontaneously longs for the experience of an adult, any healthy adult longs for the heart of a child. But it isn’t easy to keep the heart of a child.

Innocence, Pulitzer-Prize winning author Annie Dillard suggests, “is not the prerogative of infants and puppies, and far less of mountains and fixed stars, which have no prerogatives at all. … Like any other of the spirit’s good gifts, it is there if you want it, free for the asking, as has been stressed by stronger words than mine. It is possible to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares: single-mindedly, driven by a kind of love, crashing over creeks, keening and lost in fields and forests, circling, vaulting over hedges and hills, wide-eyed, giving loud tongue all unawares to the deepest, most incomprehensible longing, a root-flame in the heart, and that warbling chorus resounding back from the mountains.”

It’s time to pursue innocence as hounds pursue hares, single- mindedly, crashing over creeks, keening in lost fields, driven by a kind of love.

Coping with the Divine Fire Within

June 25, 2006

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

Henri Nouwen wrote that and the older we get the more we experience its truth. In this life, there’s no such a thing as a “clear-cut pure” joy. But that doesn’t make our lives less-worth living, it simply changes our perspective. Karl Rahner said a similar thing: “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.”

What this means is that we aren’t restful creatures who occasionally get restless, fulfilled people who occasionally are dissatisfied, serene people who occasionally experience disquiet. Rather we are restless people who occasionally find rest, dissatisfied people who occasionally find fulfilment, and disquieted people who occasionally find serenity. We don’t naturally default into rest, satisfaction, and quiet, but into their opposite.

Why?

We too easily assume that we must be doing something wrong to trigger all this restlessness and disquiet. Sometimes that’s the case, but our deepest emotional aches and pains have their real root in what’s best in us rather than in what’s worst in us. Ultimately, our profoundest dissatisfactions take their root in what’s deepest inside us, the image and likeness of God.

As Christians, we believe that we bear the image and likeness of God inside of us and that this is our deepest reality. We are made in God’s image. However we tend to picture this in a naive, romantic, and pious way. We imagine that somewhere inside us there is a beautiful icon of God stamped into our souls. That may well be, but God, as scripture assures us, is more than an icon. God is fire – wild, infinite, ineffable, non-containable.

If that same fire is inside us, and it is, then there are divine appetites inside of us too, appetites that are not ever satiable in this life. There’s a divine restlessness written right in our DNA.

And that divine fire is at the root of most of what is problematic in our lives: grandiosity, jealousy, rage, egotism, our incapacity to be satisfied, our constant longing for more, our restless ambitions, our pathological complexities, our greed, and our propensity for addiction. It’s difficult to live in this world and be satisfied, humble, chaste, and not jealous of others. It’s difficult too to have to share this world with six billion others who are just as special as we are. Something in our very make-up wants always to stand out, to be recognized as unique, to own the world, and to be acknowledged as godly. No wonder there are so many jealousies and wars on this planet.

But this divine fire is also the root of all that’s good in us. When we have divine fire inside of us, it’s also impossible to be satisfied with mediocrity, with sin, with lack of meaning, with only this world, with what’s second best, and with anything less than a full surrender in love to all that’s good – others, the world, God. When we’re in the image of God it’s impossible not to go through life and be relentlessly driven to search for love and to search for God.

Being in the image of God is our greatest blessing and our greatest struggle. Because of it, we search for meaning, give our lives for each other, create magnificent works of art, and bow in worship to God. But because of it we also spend too many sleepless nights, are often furiously jealous of each other, and too often see others as rivals, give in to rage, and murder each other. It’s not a simple thing to carry infinity in a finite body and a finite world.

St. Augustine summarized it all in one line: “You have made us for yourself Lord and our hearts are restless until the rest in you.” Given the way we’re made, it’s hard to live in this world and settle for second-best – and, in that, lie the roots for both greatness and self-destruction.

Cultivating Loneliness

June 18, 2006

Few persons in recent centuries have touched the human heart as deeply as Soren Kierkegaard, the Danish philosopher. There are reasons for this, some more obvious than others. He was a man of rare brilliance, with a lot to offer.

But perhaps the major reason he was able to so deeply and exceptionally touch our hearts had less to do with his brilliance than with his own suffering, especially his loneliness. Albert Camus once suggested that it is in solitude and loneliness that we find the threads that can bind us together in community. Kierkegaard understood this and embraced it to the point that he positively cultivated his own loneliness.

As young man, he fell deeply in love and, for a time, planned marriage with a woman to whom he was passionately attached. However, at one stage, at great emotional cost to himself and (so history would suggest) at even a greater emotional cost to the woman, he broke off the engagement and set himself to live for the rest of his life as a celibate. His reason for this?

He felt that what he had to give to the world came a lot from his own loneliness and that he could share deeply in other peoples’ loneliness only if he felt that loneliness himself. Loneliness, he intuited, would give him depth. Rightly or wrongly, he judged that marriage might in some way deflect or distract him from that depth, painful though it was.

I suspect that many of us will smile at his reasoning. Marriage is hardly a panacea for loneliness, just a loneliness is no guarantee for depth. As well, many of us will be critical of what seems to be implied in this, namely, that celibacy is somehow superior interiorly to being married, as if married life were somehow a hindrance to depth.

However, there is a part in us too, our mystical center, that, I suspect, understands exactly why he did this. What Kierkegaard understood, not perfectly of course since this always remains partly a mystery, is the connection between loneliness and mysticism, longing and intimacy.

What is meant by this? How do we connect to each other in and through our loneliness and longing? What does it mean that we are in mystical connection with each other?

Thomas Aquinas once suggested that there are two ways of being in union with something or somebody: through actual possession and through desire. We understand the first part of this more easily, actual possession means concrete contact, real union, but how are we connected to someone or something through desire?

In his Booker-Prize winning novel, The Famished Road, Ben Okri describes a Nigerian mother chiding her overly restless son for haunting her dreams: “Stay out of my dreams! That’s not your place! I’m married to your father!” What a curious rebuke – scolding someone for being in your dreams! But the mystic within us understands this. In our restlessness and loneliness, just as in our prayers for each other, we haunt each other’s dreams and each other’s hearts in ways that are just as deep as physical touch.

Moreover by entering deeply into our own loneliness we also enter deeply each other’s dreams. Kierkegaard understood this and worried that if his marriage interfered with his loneliness it would interfere with his power to enter our dreams. Whatever the flaws in his reasoning, we can’t argue with the results. He did enter our dreams and he continues to positively haunt many lives. His words have helped bring healing, strength, faith, and courage to many of us.

Why? Partly it’s mystical and we have a better sense of it in our hearts than in our heads. Partly, though, this can be understood: Our loneliness is a privileged medium through which to enter our own hearts. Listening to our own loneliness puts us in touch with ourselves. When we come to grips with our longing we discover, as Henri Nouwen puts it, that nothing is foreign to us (grandiosity, greatness, greed, generosity, frustration, joy, the capacity to kill, the capacity to die for another, selfishness, sanctity). Every human feeling and the potential for every human action lies within the complexity of our inconsummate hearts. In our loneliness and longing we are introduced to ourselves.

But by being introduced more deeply to ourselves we are also introduced more deeply to each other. In letting our loneliness haunt us, we begin, in the best sense of that phrase, to haunt each other’s dreams. In loneliness and longing, empathy is born. When nothing is foreign to us nobody will be foreign to us – and our words will begin to take on the power to heal others.

“What is a poet?” Kierkegaard once asked. His answer: “A poet is an unhappy person who conceals deep torments in his or her heart, but whose lips are so formed that when a groan or shriek streams over them it sounds like beautiful music.”

Loneliness is what makes us poets, mystics, artists, philosophers, musicians, healers, and saints.

The Sacredness of Work

June 4, 2006

When I was in high school we read an old German classic entitled, Immensee. It told the story of a love that never happened, but that should have, except that the tragic hero of our story was never able to express his love to the woman he loved. So he ended up alone, with an aching heart, full of regrets.

The book ends with him reminiscing about the woman’s last words to him. When they parted, years back, she’d said to him: “I know you’ll never come back!” He hadn’t realized then how prophetic those words would be. Now, recalling them, he is overcome with regret and his life feels empty. He’s deeply sad, but, after luxuriating in that melancholy for awhile, we are told, he went to his desk and, despite nursing a great heartache, he began again “to work with all the vigour of his youth.”

Thank God for work, sometimes that’s the only thing that sits between us and unbearable melancholy. Work is a wonderful, God-given, thing.

We lack a good theology of work. Too often work is seen as something that takes us away from God and prayer, a distraction to the spiritual life. Hard work is admitted to be a good, honest thing, but, even so, never a holy thing in itself, a gift from God so that we can be co-creators with Him.

In fact, in some theologies, work is seen as a punishment for sin, something introduced on the planet after Adam’s sin, not willed or intended by God ideally. In this view, except for sin, there would be no work.

Some of this, of course, is true. Work can be a distraction and an escape (both from God and family). It can be a rationalization against entering into the deeper things. As well, we too easily take our self-worth from our work so that we feel good about ourselves only when we are achieving something and are anxious always that, deep down, outside of our work and our achievements, we have little to offer. And so we work to try to prove ourselves and our work often becomes cancerous, something we can’t quit doing because our entire sense of self-worth is tied up with it. There are real dangers in work.

But there are dangers in everything. Work can be an excuse to avoid the deeper things, but it is also the deep, natural form of contemplation that God gives to us as humans.

We have to spend most of our waking lives working. That should tell us something, namely, that work must be the major avenue through which God wants us to journey towards the deeper things. Given the way we are built and the way life is shaped, God surely does not expect us to consciously think about Him most of our waking moments. God is not an egoistical tyrant, demanding our conscious attention, even while we have to work long hours amidst all the heartaches, headaches, restlessness, anxieties, fears, and preoccupations that impale themselves upon us every waking minute. If God wants our conscious attention every waking minute, then there is some fatal flaw in the way we are built and the way life is set up.

But there is no fatal flaw. God is the ground of our being, the ground too of our work and our relationships. In God “we live and move and have our being.” We know God not just in our conscious awareness and in prayer, but also in a deep inchoate way, by participating with Him in building this world – by growing things, building things, carving things, creating things, cleaning things, painting things, writing things, raising children, nursing bodies, teaching others, consoling others, humouring others, struggling with others, and loving others. Work, like prayer, is a privileged way to get to know God because, when we work, we are toiling in partnership with Him.

Jesus knew well both the feel of work and of tiredness. Here’s a little meditation from Caryll Houselander:

“Christ earned his living, with the joys, exultations, fatigues of other men. Had you gone to visit his home in Nazareth you would have found him like other men, but giving a significance to ordinary things that others often fail to do. Imagine such a visit. … you have come to supper. He is putting away his tools; unconsciously he smiles at the burnish on them; you see how he loves his tools. On the floor by the bench there are wood shavings, how clean and fine they are, curled like yellow petals. What a beautiful thing work is, seen from this man’s angle! He sits down in the doorway, you with him, you notice the signs of the day’s fatigue, good fatigue that seeps out of one in the evening. He wipes his face, his eyes are a little tired, they have the intensity of eyes that use the last rays of light. Yes, he works hard. He gives good measure.”

The Mystery of Presence and Absence in Love

May 28, 2006

Someone needs to write a book with one of these titles: The Metaphysics of a Goodbye, The Anatomy of a Farewell, The Pain of Moving On, or, better still, A Spirituality of the Ascension. Why such a book?

Because we experience many painful goodbyes in life. There are so many times when someone we love has to go away, or we have to go away. There are many times when, for whatever reason, someone has to move on and irrevocably change a relationship. Almost always this is painful, sometimes so painful that it leaves us feeling restless and empty, as if all the colour, energy, and joy have gone out of our lives.

But, as we know, usually this isn’t the end of the story. Most of the time, after the restless, dark heartache of a painful goodbye has worn off, we experience the opposite, a deep joy in sensing now our loved one’s presence in different way.

Parents, for example, experience this when their children grow up and leave home to start lives of their own. At first, when a child leaves home to go to college, to get married, or to take a job elsewhere, we are often left with a restless heartache that leaves us feeling empty. But, after a while, especially when our child, in the full bloom of adulthood, comes back to visit us our heartache can just as quickly disappear because our loved one, now no longer a child, can offer us a richer love and presence than he or she could when they were little. The pain of losing someone turns into the joy of finding something deeper in the one whom we thought we had lost.

When Jesus was preparing his disciples for his ascension, he told them: “It is better for you that I go away! You won’t understand this now. You will grieve and have heavy hearts, but, later, this will turn to joy and you will understand why I have to do this because, unless I go away, I can’t send you my spirit.”

These are the unspoken words that children say to their parents when they leave home to begin lives on their own; these are the unspoken words we say to our friends when we have to move on from a certain circle of friendship to get married; these are the unspoken words spouses sometimes say to each other when they have to grow in ways that, at the end of the day, will make their marriage stronger, but which, on a given day, leave their partner with a heartache; and these are the unspoken words we say to each other every time we have to say a goodbye, even if it’s just to go off to work for the day: “It is better for you that I go away, even if there is sorrow now!”

The paradoxical interplay of presence and absence in love is a great mystery. We need to be present to each other physically, but we also need to be gone from each other at times. We bring a blessing both when we visit someone and when leave after the visit is over. Presence is partly predicated on absence and there is something of our spirit that we can only give by going away. Why is this so?

Because absence is sometimes the only thing that can purify presence. When we are physically present, there are always certain tensions, irritations, disappointments, flaws in our bodies, and faults in our character that partially block full love and blessing. That’s why we rarely appreciate our loved ones fully, until they are taken away from us.

Absence can help wash clean. What the pain of absence does is stretch our hearts so that the essence, the beauty, the love, and the gift of the one who is absent can flow to us without being coloured by the tensions, disappointments, and the flaws of everyday life. As well, the other’s absence can work to stretch our hearts so that we can receive him or her in a way that more fully accepts and respects who he or she really is. That’s why our children have to go away (and we have to feel that bitter heartache) before we can accept that they are no longer children, but adults like ourselves, with lives of their own.

The mystery of saying goodbye is really the mystery of the Ascension, the most under-understood mystery both inside and outside of religion. The Ascension is about going away so that our loved ones can fully receive our spirit. It’s about the mystery of saying goodbye, when goodbye isn’t really goodbye at all, but only love’s way of taking on a different modality so that it can be present in a way that’s deeper, purer, more permanent, less-clinging, and less-limited by the tensions, disappointments, inadequacies, wounds, and betrayals that, this side of eternity, forever make our intimacy a work in progress.

Needed: A New Maturity to Match Our Freedom

May 21, 2006

We are the freest people to ever walk this planet, at least in terms of opportunity. Our freedom is so great that, at times, it is almost a burden, an over-choice. We often find it difficult to commit ourselves to marriage, to a vocation, to a career, and to a friendship precisely because we are so free and have so many choices.

Freedom is a great gift. But it’s easily misused and easily becomes a destructive thing. We’ve all hurt others and ourselves through the misuse of our freedom.

But something doesn’t become bad just because it’s misused. Food remains a good thing, even when we over-eat. It’s the same with freedom. It remains always the greatest gift that God has given us, even though we don’t always use it maturely. Jesus came to bring us freedom. But it’s easy to lose that perspective and, today, it’s not uncommon to hear sincere, good-hearted, religious people speak out against freedom, as if it were an enemy, something that should be restricted in the name of God, church, and morality.

While that’s sincere, it’s also misguided. What’s needed today is not less freedom but more maturity. We don’t need to roll back freedom in the name of God and morality: we need raise the level of our maturity to match the level of our freedom. Simply put, we are often too immature to carry properly the great gift of freedom that God has given us. The answer to that is not to denigrate freedom in the name of God and morality, but to invite a deeper maturity so as to more properly honour the great gift that we have been given.

Our model here is Jesus, himself. Nobody has walked this earth as freely as he did. But he also had the maturity to carry such great freedom without ever misusing it. If we can believe the gospels, Jesus wasn’t afraid of anything – satan, temptation, tax-collectors, prostitutes, street people, rich people, poor people, church people, non-church people, moral people, and immoral people. He went into the singles’ bars of his time, but he didn’t sin.

And in that lies the challenge: To walk in freedom, but not compromise ourselves in doing so. Not an easy thing to do. There is always a double danger: On the one hand, we can be too timid and too frightened to use our freedom to take God’s presence and grace into places that are morally threatening, like Jesus did. That’s often where we, as church people, sell ourselves and our freedom short. We are so afraid of seemingly godless places that we simply stay away from them, fearing for our own safety. That’s sometimes a very prudent thing to do; it isn’t always an imitation of Jesus. He wasn’t afraid to go into godless places.

As well, there’s the opposite danger, namely, that we go into morally dangerous places and lose ourselves there. Like Jesus, we eat and drink with sinners, but, unlike him, we sin because we don’t have the maturity and moral strength to be in dangerous situations without falling.

But, dangers notwithstanding, the great challenge is to become mature enough to walk in the freedom of Jesus without compromising. Whenever we are able to do that, we become missionaries in the true sense, namely, we take God’s love and light into places that are devoid of them. But that’s not easy to do. We need models to help us.

Someone who can help mentor us on this, I believe, is Henri Nouwen. One of his great gifts was his honesty about his own moral and emotional struggles and the capacity to share that in a way that helps us in our own struggles.

Nouwen was searingly honest in admitting that he struggled. He shared that, even if you are sincere, prayerful, morally honest, and trying your best, it doesn’t mean that you won’t, at the same time, also be weak, complex, tempted, torn, discouraged, forever at war with certain parts of yourself, sinful, and subject to obsessions, addictions, and pathologies. Our desires are deep, complex, unyielding, wild horses, bent on their own path – and all of this co-exists with what’s healthy, good, and best in us. So it’s not easy to be whole, mature, and to walk into morally dangerous places and not sin.

Nouwen was so honest and humble about this that there were seasons in his life when he wouldn’t travel by himself, but always took along a companion, because he recognized that there are a lot more moral dangers travelling alone than there are when we have family, companions, and community along with us.

We aren’t all as mature and as strong as Jesus. Like Nouwen, we need to be honest and humble about our weaknesses, sometimes we simply don’t have the maturity to walk into dark places alone. We’re wise to take someone with us so that, in the strength given by family and community, our maturity can measure up to our freedom.

Dealing with Hurt and Disappointment

May 14, 2006

All of us know the humiliation of being rejected, over-looked, ignored, left for another. As well, we know what it feels like to be unable to actualize our persons, our talents, and our dreams in the way that we would like. And there are times too when we compromise ourselves, betray what’s best in us, sin.

Our lives forever fall short of our dignity, our dreams, and our ideals, just as our capacity for self-expression forever falls short of our inner riches. Inside each of us, there’s always a frustrated artist, musician, poet, writer, athlete, politician, lover, and saint. It’s never a question of “Are we hurt?”, but only of “Where are we hurting?”

And so we all carry a lot of disappointment, frustration, and sadness inside. What we feel in that, really, is wounded pride, but that’s no small, or ungodly, thing. In making us, God gave us a great dignity and we sense that dignity. Our hearts, minds, and dreams are huge, wonderful, and incurably restless. In them, we intuit the divine, its hugeness and its mystery. So we don’t easily absorb limits, humiliations, indignities, rejections, and disappointments. And we don’t easily absorb sin either. We hurt and that does something to us.

When we turn away in coldness from someone or something we once loved, perhaps even from God and religion, we usually do so out of hurt, wounded pride, out of the need to protect ourselves and keep our dignity intact.

While that’s understandable, it isn’t life giving. What is?

What can we do with wounded pride? With disappointment? With jealousy? With the sense of having been wronged? What can we do with all those feelings that invite us to become cold, bitter, angry, and cynical? What can we do when we’ve sinned and betrayed our own dignity and dreams?

The natural temptation is to deny, to lie, to pretend that none of this is happening inside us. And so when we’re asked how we are, we generally say we’re fine, even when our hearts are bleeding, our jealousy is raging, our faces are tense, our eyes are sad, our dignity is compromised, our fists are clenched.

Whenever we deny that we’re wounded, we prepare the perfect breeding ground for bitterness, anger, cynicism, coldness, and rage. When we don’t recognize and accept our wounds and frustrations, we easily grow cold, grow hard, and toughen our skins, minds, and hearts. We turn away in bitterness from what’s soft and life giving to what’s hard so as to put a protective shell over our wounded pride. It seems the only way to preserve ourselves.

But there’s another option – grieving, mourning, tears. We can mourn our losses and cry the kind of tears that rip open our feelings of security and safety and bring us face to face with the painful truth that we are broken, not whole, disappointed, and unable to actualize our dreams. When we grieve, we soften, rather than harden, our hearts in the face of loss and humiliation.

Some months ago, I went a wake service for a friend. For his vigil service, his family had prepared a wonderful collage of photographs of him in various, mostly happy, poses. One photo, in particular, triggered a strong reaction in me. It was a picture of the deceased man holding his grandchild and beaming with a pride, joy, and happiness that can only come from holding your own grandchild. I was unexpectedly stung to the quick, knowing that as a celibate I would never know that particular deep, holy, unadulterated joy, that there would never be a photo of me looking like that, that my face would never radiate that particular kind of happiness and pride, and that one of the deepest, holiest experiences given in this life would never be mine.

I was suddenly very sad and as I walked out of church, mostly ignoring friends around me, everything inside of me was drawn towards coldness, bitterness, anger at my loss, jealousy of others, and frustration at my choices in life. I also felt fiercely restless. I tried eating, phoning friends, taking a walk, but nothing helped until I finally sat down to pray. Tears began to flow and I began a free-fall, literally, into my own chaos, brokenness, inadequacies, restlessness, and pathologies. It’s not pleasant, but scary, to enter into your own brokenness, into all those places that you’ve denied exist inside of you.

I felt scared, but strangely at peace, and the feelings I had then, while still painful, were no longer cold or hard because when we cry we learn that salvation lies not in our capacity to be strong enough never to be broken, but in the opposite, namely, in a surrender in helplessness to a God who can fill in all those places where we are helpless, lost, jealous, restless, and broken.

“The person who doesn’t have a softening of the heart, will eventually have a softening of the head.” Chesterton said that. He’s right.

Eucharist as God’s Physical Embrace

May 7, 2006

There’s a story told of a young Jewish boy named Mortakai who refused to go to school. When he was six years old, his mother took him to school, but he cried and protested all the way and, immediately after she left, ran back home. She brought him back to school and this scenario played itself out for several days. He refused to stay in school. His parents tried to reason with him, arguing that he, like all children, must now go to school. To no avail. His parents then tried the age-old trick of applying an appropriate combination of bribes and threats. This too had no effect.

Finally, in desperation they went to their Rabbi and explained the situation to him. For his part, the Rabbi simply said: “If the boy won’t listen to words, bring him to me.” They brought him into the Rabbi’s study. The Rabbi said not a word. He simply picked up the boy and held him to his heart for a long time. Then, still without a word, he set him down. What words couldn’t accomplish, a silent embrace did. Mortakai not only began willingly to go to school, he went on to become a great scholar and a Rabbi.

What that parable wonderfully expresses is how the Eucharist works. In it, God physically embraces us. Indeed that is what all sacraments are, God’s physical embrace. Words, as we know, have a relative power. In critical situations they often fail us. When this happens, we have still another language, the language of ritual. The most ancient and primal ritual of all is the ritual of physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot.

Jesus acted on this. For most of his ministry, he used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So on the night before he death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart.

To my mind, that is the best understanding there is of Eucharist. Within both my undergraduate and graduate theological training, I took long courses on the Eucharist. In the end, these didn’t explain the Eucharist to me, not because they weren’t good, but because the Eucharist, like a kiss, needs no explanation and has no explanation. If anyone were to write a four hundred page book entitled, The Metaphysics of a Kiss, it would be not deserve a readership. Kisses just work, their inner dynamics need no metaphysical elaboration.

The Eucharist is God’s kiss. Andre Dubos, the Cajun novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.” He’s right. A couple of years ago, Brenda Peterson, in a remarkable little essay entitled, In Praise of Skin, describes how she once was inflicted by a skin-rash that no medicine could effectively soothe. She tried every kind of doctor and medicine. To no avail. Finally she turned to her grandmother, remembering how, as a little girl, her grandmother used to massage her skin whenever she had rashes, bruises, or was otherwise ill. The ancient remedy worked again. Her grandmother massaged her skin, over and over again, and the rash that seemingly couldn’t be eradicated disappeared. Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. It’s then that he begins to torment the cat!” Mothers, with young children, are only too familiar with this late afternoon hour and its particular dynamic. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.

That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child, perennially tormenting the cat. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

A Prodigal God

April 30, 2006

A couple of years ago, Barbara Kingsolver wrote a book entitled Prodigal Summer. It tells the story of young woman who got pregnant during a summer within which everything seemed to be dangerously fertile. From the plants, through the insects, through the animals, to the people, everything seemed to be teeming with fecundity, overactive, overabundant in seed. Life seemed to be bursting forth everywhere. The title of the book is good metaphor for what she describes, a summer overabundant in fertility.

Nature is like that, teeming with everything, prodigal, fertile, overabundant, wasteful. Why else do we have 90% more brain cells than we need and why else is nature scattering billions of seeds, of virtually everything, all over the planet every second?

And if life is so prodigal, what does this say about God, its author?

God, as we see in both nature and in scripture (and know from experience), is over-generous, over-lavish, over-extravagant, over- prodigious, over-rich, and over-patient. If nature, scripture, and experience are to be believed, God is the absolute antithesis of everything that is stingy, miserly, frugal, narrowly calculating, or sparing in what it doles out. God is prodigal.

Dictionaries define “prodigal” as “wastefully extravagant and lavishly abundant.” That certainly describes the God that Jesus incarnates and reveals.

We see this in the parable of the Sower. God, the sower, goes out to sow and he scatters his seed generously, almost wastefully, everywhere – on the road, among the rocks, among the thorns, on bad soil, and on rich soil. No farmer would ever do this. Who would waste seed on soil that can never produce a harvest? God, it seems, doesn’t ask that question but simply keeps scattering his seed everywhere, over-generously, without calculating whether it is a good investment or not in terms of return. And, it seems, God has an infinite number of seeds to scatter, perpetually, everywhere. God is prodigious beyond imagination.

Among other things, this speaks of God’s infinite riches, love, and patience. For us, there is both a huge challenge and a huge consolation in that. The challenge, of course, is to respond to the infinite number of invitations that God scatters on our path from minute to minute. The consolation is that, no matter how many of God’s invitations we ignore, there will always be an infinite number of others. No matter how many we’ve already ignored or turned down, there are new ones awaiting us each minute. When we’ve gone through 39 days of lent without praying or changing our lives, there’s still a 40th day to respond. When we’ve ignored a thousand invitations, there’s still another one waiting. God is prodigal, so are the chances God gives us.

Sr. Margaret Halaska once captured this wonderfully in a poem she entitled, Covenant:

The Father knocks at my door, seeking a home for his son:
Rent is cheap, I say
I don’t want to rent. I want to buy, says God.
I’m not sure I want to sell,
but you might come in to look around.
I think I will, says God.
I might let you have a room or two.
I like it, says God. I’ll take the two.
You might decide to give me more some day.
I can wait, says God.
I’d like to give you more,
but it’s a bit difficult. I need some space for me.
I know, says God, but I’ll wait. I like what I see.
Hm, maybe I can let you have another room.
I really don’t need that much.
Thanks, says God, I’ll take it. I like what I see.
I’d like to give you the whole house
but I’m not sure –
Think on it, says God. I wouldn’t put you out.
Your house would be mine and my son would live in it.
You’d have more space than you’d ever had before.
I don’t understand at all.
I know, says God, but I can’t tell you about that.
You’ll have to discover it for yourself.
That can only happen if you let him have the whole house.
A bit risky, I say.
Yes, says God, but try me.

I’m not sure –
I’ll let you know.

I can wait, says God. I like what I see.

If we look back on our lives and are truly honest, we have to admit that of all the invitations that God has sent us, we’ve probably accepted and acted on only a fraction of them. There have been countless times we’ve turned away from an invitation. For every invitation to maturity we’ve accepted, we’ve probably turned down a hundred. But that’s the beauty and wonder of God’s richness. God is not a petty creator and creation, itself, is not a cheap machine with barely enough energy and resources to keep it going. God and nature are prodigal. That’s plain everywhere. Millions and millions of life-giving seeds blow everywhere in the world and we need only to pick up a few to become pregnant, fecund, capable of newness, maturity, and of producing life.

A Mellow Heart in a Bitter Time

April 23, 2006

In her novel, A Good House, Bonnie Burnard tells the story of a relatively happy family. But even happy families have unhappy moments where bitterness chills an otherwise warm house.

She describes one such incident: A young couple, solid and trusting in their relationship, are having a rather intimate talk one afternoon when the woman’s instincts tell her that her husband is hiding something from her, not necessarily at the level of infidelity, but something that he, for whatever reason, will not share with her.

Instantly a door begins to close inside of her, her warmth and trust harden, and she feels the need to protect herself, assert some independence from her husband, and let him know that there are aspects of her life that he doesn’t necessarily know about either. Their intimacy, so warm and trusting just minutes before, dissolves for a while into a certain coolness and distance. What’s happened here?

What’s happened is what happens to all of us, spontaneously and daily, in virtually all of our relationships, particularly with those with whom we are most intimate. Such is our emotional metaphysics, the way our hearts try to protect themselves: We tend spontaneously to replicate the energy we feel around us and feed it back in the same way as we feel it.

Quite simply, whenever we feel warmth, mellowness, vulnerability, transparency, generosity, trust, and big-heartedness in a relationship, we tend to respond in kind, with warm, mellow, vulnerable, transparent, generous, trusting hearts. But the reverse is also true: When we feel coldness, bitterness, self-protection, jealousy, dishonesty, pettiness, or distrust, we tend to become cool, hard, self-protective, assertive, small-hearted, and distrustful.

It’s not easy not to do this. More than anything else, our hearts crave the warmth and trust of intimacy, but, precisely because these make us vulnerable, are hearts also tend to close doors rather quickly at the first signs of betrayal, distrust, or dishonesty.

Fear, especially, tends to do this to us. Most of our fears and anxieties arise out of a lack of confidence, from a poor self-image. Then, because we are insecure, we to try to assert ourselves, to prove that we are loveable, attractive, talented, and worthwhile. When we are afraid, we can’t risk vulnerability, instead we try to do things to show that we aren’t weak or needy. But, to do this, we have to harden ourselves precisely against the type of vulnerability that invites others into our lives.

Jealousy, especially of a person we love but whose love we can’t have, also creates that same hardness in us. That’s why we can be caught up in that strange anomaly where we are cold, distant, and perhaps even hostile, to a person whose love we badly want. Our coldness and feigned indifference towards that person is simply the heart’s attempt to protect itself, to cope with an intimacy it can’t have and the loss of self-esteem that comes with that.

The heart has its reasons, even for turning cold.

Given the truth of this, what makes for a truly big heart is the strength to resist this emotional metaphysics and remain mellow, warm, trusting, and present to others in the face of bitterness, coldness, distrust, jealousy, and withdrawal. More than anything else, this is what defines a great lover.

This is perhaps the greatest moral challenge Jesus left us: We all do pretty well in love when the persons we are loving are warm and gracious, but can we be gracious and mellow in the face of bitterness, jealousy, hatred, withdrawal? That’s the litmus test of love.

It’s also one of the deeper invitations towards maturity. Everywhere in our world – in our most intimate relationships, in our families, in our workplaces, in our churches, and in society as a whole – we forever find ourselves in situations where we meet suspicion, jealousy, coldness, distrust, bitterness, and withdrawal. Our world is often a hard, rather than an intimate, place.

The challenge is to offer a heart that creates a space for warmth, transparency, mellowness, vulnerability, and trust inside of hard places. The challenge is to offer our hearts as a space within which people can be honest, where nobody has to assert herself, where no games of pretence need be played, and where intimacy isn’t held hostage to the momentary fears, jealousies, hurts, and emotional acting out that forever assail us.

And, the more bitter and the more emotionally trying the situation, the more this is needed. When times are bitter, angry, cold, full of disrespect, and fraught with jealousy, when it seems everyone is withdrawing into his or her own world, when most everything seems a lie, and when we are feeling most hurt, taken for granted, slighted, and marginalized, what’s called for is not less, but more, attention to the quality of graciousness and warmth within our response. Bitter times call for, precisely, a deeper response of warmth, mellowness, transparency, truth, and compassion.

What’s needed most in a bitter time is a mellow heart.

A Voice That Never Dies

April 16, 2006

Easter is about many things. We celebrate God’s power to overcome death, sin, and injustice, but we also celebrate the voices and wounds of the ones who died on Good Friday.

To illustrate this, I would like to recount one such voice, that of an anonymous, young woman who was brutally raped and murdered by the Salvadoran military in 1981, at a place fittingly called La Cruz. The story was reported by Mark Danner, a journalist.

He describes how, after this particular massacre, some soldiers told how one of their victims haunted them and how they could not get her out of their minds long after her death.

They had plundered a village and raped many of the women. One of these was a young woman, an evangelical Christian, whom had been raped many times in a single afternoon and subsequently tortured. However, throughout this all, this young woman, clinging to her belief in Christ, had sung hymns. Here’s how one of the soldiers described it:

“She kept on singing, too, even after they had shot her in the chest.She had lain there in La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing – a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied, had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear – until finally they unsheathed their machetes and hacked her neck and at last the singing stopped.” (The Massacre at El Mozote, N.Y., Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 78-79)

Gil Bailie, who recounts this story in his monumental book on the cross and non-violence, notes not just the remarkable similarity between her death and that of Jesus, but also the fact that, in both cases, resurrection means that their voices live on when everything about their deaths suggest that their voices should have died.

In Jesus’ case, nobody witnessing his humiliating death on a lonely hillside, with his followers absent, would have predicted that this would be the most remembered death in history. The same is true for this young woman. Her rape and murder occurred in a very remote place and all of those who might have wanted to immortalize her story were also killed. Yet her voice survives and will, on doubt, continue to grow in importance, long after all those who violated and killed her are forgotten. As both Jesus and this young girl illustrate, powerlessness and anonymity, linked to a heart that can sing the words: “Forgive them for they know not what they are doing!” while being raped and humiliated, ultimately become their opposite, power and immortality.

A death of this kind not only morally scars the conscience of its perpetrators and their sympathizers, it leaves something that can never be forgotten, a permanent echo that nobody will ever silence. What God raises up after Good Friday is also the voice of the one who died.

A critic reviewing Danner’s book in the New York Times, tells how, after reading this story, he kept “straining” to hear the sound of that singing.

The task of Easter is to rekindle the creed within ourselves. The earliest Christians, immediately upon experiencing the resurrected Jesus, spontaneously voiced a one-line creed: “Jesus is Lord!” That does, in fact, say it all. When we affirm that Jesus has been raised from the dead and is Lord of this world we are saying everything else within our faith as well.

In essence, we are saying that God is ultimately still in charge of this universe, despite any indications to the contrary; that brutality and rape not withstanding, at the end of the day violence, injustice, and sin will be silenced and overcome; that graciousness and gentleness, as manifested in Jesus, are ultimately what lies at the root of all reality; that this young woman, so brutally violated, has now been raised and lives, joyfully, in the heart of God; and that her death, like Jesus’, is redemptive precisely because, like him, she too, in the face of helplessness before the worst brutality the world could perpetrate, could still say: “Forgive them for they know not what they do!”

To celebrate Easter is to affirm that all of this is true. But that also asks something of us:

It asks, as the critic in the New York Times so aptly put it, that we strain to hear the sound of that girl’s singing, that we struggle to keep her, and her song, in our hearts. She is still alive in God’s heart, but we must keep her alive in ours as well.

Why? Not for sentimental reasons, nor simply because her story is exceptional. No. We must keep her alive in our hearts because her song is the leaven, the yeast, of the resurrection and that, and that alone, can raise us up to become exceptional too.

One of the tasks of Easter is to strain to hear the voices of Good Friday.

Jesus’ Last Words

April 9, 2006

Just before he dies on the cross, Jesus utters these words: “It is finished!”

What’s “finished”?

These words can be spoken in different ways: They can be words of defeat and despair (“It’s over, hopeless, I give in!) or they can be words of accomplishment and triumph (“I’ve done it, succeeded, I’ve held out!”).

Obviously, for Jesus, these are not words of defeat. He has triumphed, succeeded, run the toughest race of all to its finish. When he speaks these words, he’s like the winner in the Olympic marathon throwing up his arms in triumph at the finish-line; except in this case both his exuberance of spirit and his arms are nailed down so that his utterance of triumph is not like the pumped-fist of an Olympic winner, but like the cry of an newborn baby that’s finally succeeded in pushing itself through the birth-canal; a startling triumph, but one that, for a time, has you lying in blood, tears, and helplessness.

And his triumph here left him precisely in blood, tears, and helplessness. He’s won, but it’s cost him his life, tested his faith to the limit, lost him his popularity, scattered his friends, shrouded his life in misunderstanding, left him looking compromised, and isolated him in an unspeakable loneliness.

It’s not easy then to pump your fist in triumph, even when you’ve won, especially since your victory isn’t evident to anyone who isn’t journeying inside of this with you. To everyone else, this looks like defeat, the worst kind of defeat.

So what’s “finished”?

At one level, what’s finished is Jesus’ own struggle with doubt, fear, and loneliness. What was that struggle? The painful, lonely, crushing discrepancy he habitually felt between the warmth and ideals inside his heart and the coldness and despair he met in the world.

Everything inside of him believed that, in the end, always, it is better to give yourself over to love than to hatred, to affirmation than to jealousy, to gentleness of heart than to bitterness, to honesty than to lying, to fidelity than to compromise, to forgiveness than to revenge. Everything about him too was a testimony that the reality of God, immaterial and fanciful though it can seem, is in the end more real than the undeniable reality of our physical bodies and our physical world. And finally, everything about him pointed uncompromisingly towards the “road-less-taken” and revealed that real love means carrying your solitude and chastity at a high level.

But, for him, as for us, it wasn’t easy to live that out. As scripture says, sometimes it gets dark in the middle of the day, we find ourselves very much alone in what we believe in, and God seems far away and dead. Faith and love aren’t easy because they feel empty and fanciful whenever they’re betrayed and they only work and prove that they’re real when they’re persevered in.

Jesus, though, did persevere in them and when he utters those famous words:”It is finished!”, it’s a statement of triumph, not just of his own faith, but of love, truth, and God. He’s taken God as his word, risked everything on faith, and, despite the pain it’s brought, is dying with no regrets. The struggle for faith, for him, is finished. He’s crossed its finish line, successfully.

But there’s second level of meaning to his words. “It is finished” also means that the reign of sin and death is finished. An order of things (wherein we live our lives believing that, eventually, everyday joys give way to darkness and the underworld; that paranoia and sin unmask trust and goodness as naive; that the reality of the physical world and this life is all there is; that compromise and infidelity trump everything else, and that death is more real than hope) is also finished. It is exposed as unreal, as a lie, by love, fidelity, gentleness, trust, childlikeness, vulnerability, and the paradoxical power of a God who, in the deeper recesses of things, works more by underwhelming than by overpowering. “

It is finished!” Jesus uttered those words when he realized that, despite all the pain and sin in the world, the center does hold, love can be trusted, God is real, and, because of that, in the end, “every manner of being will indeed be well.” The forces of sin and death are finished because we can, in full maturity and utter realism, believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, in love even when we don’t feel it, and in God, even when God is silent. Faith and God deliver on their promise.

Mohandas Gandhi, in a remarkable passage, once wrote: “When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they can seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.” Many things were finished on the cross, including rule of tyranny and murder.

Mary Under the Cross

April 2, 2006

One of the most popular images in all of scripture (an icon that’s been endlessly painted, sung, put into litanies, written up into poetry, and used to triggered every kind of pious feeling) is the image of Mary, the mother of Jesus, standing silently under the cross as her son dies.

As Jesus was dying, the Gospels tell us that Mary, his mother, stood under the cross. What’s in that image? What’s in this picture that invites us to more than simple admiration, piety, or sympathy?

This is a mystical image and it is anything but pious. In the Gospels, after Jesus, Mary is the most important person to watch. She’s the model of discipleship, the only one who gets it right. And she gets it very right under the cross. What’s she doing while standing there?

On the surface, it seems she isn’t doing anything at all: She doesn’t speak, doesn’t try to stop the crucifixion, and she doesn’t even protest its unfairness or plead Jesus’ innocence. She is mute, seemingly passive, overtly doing nothing. But at a deeper level, she is doing all that can be done when one is standing under the weight of the cross, she’s holding the tension, standing in strength, refusing to give back in kind, and resisting in a deeper way.

What’s meant by this?

Sometimes well-intentioned artists have painted Mary as lying prostrate under the cross, the wounded mother, helplessly distraught, paralysed in grief, an object for sympathy. But that doesn’t honour what happened there nor teach its lesson. Prostration, in this situation, is weakness, collapse, hysteria, resignation. In the Gospels, “standing” is the opposite, a position of strength. Mary “stood” under the cross.

Still, why the silence and why her seeming unwillingness to act or protest?

In essence, what Mary was doing under the cross was this: She couldn’t stop the crucifixion (there are times when darkness has its hour) but she could stop some of the hatred, bitterness, jealousy, heartlessness, and anger that caused it and surrounded it. And she helped stop bitterness by refusing to give it back in kind, by transforming rather than transmitting it, by swallowing hard and (literally) eating bitterness rather than giving it back, as everyone else was doing.

Had Mary, in moral outrage, begun to scream hysterically, shout angrily at those crucifying Jesus, or physically tried to attack someone as he was driving the nails into Jesus’ hands, she would have been caught up in the same kind of energy as everyone else, replicating the very anger and bitterness that caused the crucifixion to begin with. What Mary was doing under the cross, her silence and seeming unwillingness to protest notwithstanding, was radiating all that is antithetical to the crucifixion: gentleness, understanding, forgiveness, peace, light.

And that’s not easy to do. Everything inside us demands justice, screams for it, and refuses to remain silent in the presence of injustice. That’s a healthy instinct and sometimes acting on it is good. We need, at times, to protest, to shout, to literally throw ourselves into the face of injustice and do everything in our power to stop the crucifixion.

But there are times too when things have gone so far that shouts and protests are no longer helpful, darkness is going to have its hour come what may and all we can do is to stand under the cross and help eat its bitterness by refusing to participate in its energy. In those situations, like Mary, we have to say: “I can’t stop this crucifixion, but I can stop some of the hatred, bitterness, jealousy, brute-heartlessness, and darkness that surround it. I can’t stop this, but I will not conduct its hatred.”

And that’s not the same thing as despair. Our muted helplessness is not a passive resignation but the opposite. It’s a movement towards the only rays of light, love, and faith that still exist in that darkness and hatred. And, at that moment, it’s the only thing that faith and love can do.

As the Book of Lamentations says, there are times when the best we can do is “put our mouths to the dust and wait!” Sometimes too, as Rainer Marie Rilke says, the only helpful thing is to absorb the heaviness: “Do not be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.”

That’s not passivity, resignation, or weakness; it’s genuine, rare strength. It’s “standing under the cross” so as to help take away some of its hatred, chaos, bitterness, and violence.

So this is the image: Sometimes darkness has its hour and there is nothing we can do to stop it. Sometimes the blind, wounded forces of jealousy, bitterness, violence, and sin cannot, for that moment, be stopped. But, like Mary under the cross, we are asked to “stand” under them, not in passivity and weakness, but in strength, knowing that we can’t stop the crucifixion but we can help stop some of the hatred, anger, and bitterness that surrounds it.

Walking Away Out of Sorrow (5 of 6)

March 26, 2006

[Fifth in a six-part Lenten series on Mystical Images]

What do we do when we’re depressed? What’s our temptation when a dream is shattered, when we feel betrayed, and when it seems like the trust we’ve shown someone was childish naivetŽ?

Generally the temptation is to gather what pride we have left and walk away, away from that person, away from that place of rejection, away from the humiliation, and away from our former dream, all the while saying to ourselves: “I’ll never trust in this way again! I’ve been burned, taken in, I now know the lesson!”

And, as we walk away from the place where we got hurt, what do we invariably walk towards?

We walk towards human consolation, towards compensation, towards something that looks like it will alleviate the hurt, soothe our wounded pride, or at least distract us from the pain. Sometimes, in fact, we’re so wounded that what we walk towards is simple bitterness and despair. We unconsciously turn our backs on energy, family, community, happiness, faith, trust, and God. Life isn’t worth living, why try!

In Luke’s Gospel, we see this in the story of two, dispirited, disciples walking from away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus on Easter Sunday morning, unaware that Jesus had risen from the dead. Luke writes that on the morning of the Resurrection “two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem toward Emmaus, a village some seven miles away, their faces downcast.”

Every word is pregnant here: For Luke, “Jerusalem” is more than a city. For him, it means the church, it means our faith-dream, and it means the place where Jesus was crucified (the place of pain, betrayal, crucified dreams, humiliation, and shame). On Easter Sunday, he tells us, two disciples were walking away from that, namely, they were leaving the church, leaving their faith dream, and walking away from the place where they felt that dream had ended in shame. Moreover they were walking towards “Emmaus”. What is “Emmaus”?

Scholars tell us that there were several places called Emmaus, but they suspect that the one referred to here was a Roman Spa, a resort of sorts, a place of human consolation, the Las Vegas of that day. Thus, these disciples were doing what we invariably do when we get hurt, walk away from the hurt towards human consolation, towards something will take the pain away or at least distract us from it.

And they were doing this out of depression; their dream had been crucified when Jesus died. Indeed, when they describe their faith to Jesus, they use the past perfect tense: “We had hoped.” Their dream is over, dead. So is their faith.

So this is the scene: Two dejected disciples are leaving the church and walking towards human compensation because their dream has been shattered by the shame and humiliation of the cross. Their dream is over and they are now walking inside the sadness that besets us whenever we feel betrayed, shamed, found to be naive in our trust.

It is because of this sadness that they cannot recognize Jesus when he appears to them on the road. Jesus walks with them and they can’t recognize him. Why?

The answer to that lies in the Agony in the Garden. In Luke’s description of this, when Jesus goes out into the Garden of Gethsemane to pray he tells his disciples: “Watch!” They’re supposed to learn something by watching him. What they were supposed to learn was what Jesus himself learned, or at least learned to accept, in Gethsemane, namely, that there is no other way to glory except through humiliation, no other way to new life except through death, no other way to intimacy except through unspeakable loneliness, and no other way to the light of Easter Sunday except through the darkness of Good Friday.

This is what Jesus had to accept, on his knees and begging for an alternative, in Gethsemane. But, as Luke tells us, after Jesus comes to accept this, he turns towards his disciples and finds them asleep, not out of simple tiredness, but “out of sheer sorrow”. They were too depressed to get the lesson.

This is a mystical image worth meditating. Like these dispirited disciples in Luke’s Gospel, we too, when faced with the kind of pain that brings us to our knees in agony and humiliation, too often are too discouraged and too disheartened to grasp the lesson that’s being taught. We “fall asleep out of sheer sorrow” and then, in our sadness and discouragement, we feel tempted to walk away from what’s hurting us and move instead towards some human consolation, towards something in the world that promises earthly compensation to replace our crucified dream of faith.

The good news is that Jesus finds us on that road and turns us around so that, like the disciples, we never actually get to Emmaus. Instead, after re-reading the scriptures and breaking the bread, we regain our vision and our idealism and find the courage to again return to our faith and to our church.