The Struggle to Trust

September 10, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Chastity and Healing

September 3, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Set Apart or One With?

August 27, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Real Moral Struggle

August 20, 2006

“The Heart has its reasons!”

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

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

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

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

Jesus warns against this everywhere. For example:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Home – The Place from which to Understand

August 13, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suicide – The Pain of the Ones Left Behind

August 6, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

Here are her words:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Need for Confession

July 30, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.