Listening to Christ’s Heartbeat (1 of 6)

February 26, 2006

[First in a six-part Lenten series on “Mystical Images”]

How do you hear a heartbeat?

At the end of her novel, A Map of Glass, Jane Urquhart, has her heroine, Sylvia, recall how her father, a doctor, once gave her a toy stethoscope as a gift when she was a little girl. She was fascinated with it: “I loved the little silver bell at the end of the double hose, a bell I could place against my chest in order to listen to the drum, to the pounding music of my own complicated, fascinating heart.”

Our hearts are complicated and fascinating and we’d all be gentler with ourselves and find our lives more interesting if we listened more regularly to their beat. That’s also the secret in our relationship with Christ. We need to put a stethoscope to his heart and listen to its complex and fascinating rhythms. How do we do this?

In the Gospel of John we’re given a mystical image for this. In John’s account of the Last Supper, he has a disciple, whom he describes as “the one whom Jesus loved”, reclining on the breast of Jesus. Obviously this connotes a deep intimacy, but it’s also meant to convey something else. If you lean your ear on someone’s chest you are able to hear that person’s heartbeat and that sound eventually begins to gently reverberate throughout your own body.

So this is the image, the image of perfect discipleship for John: We are “the one whom Jesus loves” and we need to have our heads on Jesus’ breast so as to hear his heartbeat and, from there, look out at the world. Being attuned to Christ’s heartbeat and reclining in solace and intimacy on his breast will give us both the vision and the sustenance we need to live our lives as we should.

As we know, “the one whom Jesus loved” in John (historically this might have been John himself) is meant to refer to every one of us. Each of us is to be the “beloved disciple”, the one who reclines on Jesus’ breast in special intimacy. For John, this constitutes the very heart of discipleship and dwarfs everything else (charism, church office, even prophecy) in terms of what’s important. Indeed, at the Last Supper, Peter (the pope, the leader of the church) cannot even talk to Jesus directly,but must ask his question through the “beloved disciple”. That’s John’s way of saying that intimacy with Jesus is more important than any charism or leadership role.

And that’s our call, to have the kind of intimacy with Christ that has us reclining on his breast, hearing his heartbeat, and looking out at the world from that perspective. But how do we do that practically?

To recline on Jesus’ breast is not the image William Blake so brilliantly describes in his poem, Infant Sorrow, where fear and hurt suggest it’s best “to sulk upon my mother’s breast.” In this case, our eyes are turned inward, or are closed, and what we are seeking is only comfort. John’s image says something more.

His is an image of the intimacy of lovers, where the bond of intimacy offers deep comfort but also attunes one heart to the other in such a way that energy and strength flow out, first from the one who is doing the consoling and then from the one who is drawing that consolation.

The image works this way: We are to put our heads on Christ’s breast, feel that intimacy, hear his heartbeat, be filled with the comfort of that, and then let the energy and strength we feel there flow out, through us, into the world. And that is meant to fill us with the vision and sustenance we need to live as we should.

In terms of vision: When we are listening to Christ’s heartbeat and looking out at the world from there, we will see what it means to love purely, beyond ideology, beyond being liberal or conservative, beyond different schools of thought, and beyond our opinions and those of others. We will also have a vision of self-sacrifice, beyond our own comfort, own ambitions, and society’s sincere, though shrunken, capacity to renounce pleasure and the immediate for something deeper and more meaningful long-range.

In terms of sustenance: When we are listening to Christ’s heartbeat, feeling his comfort, and looking out at the world from there, we will also more easily find the strength to keep our hearts soft when everything beckons us to be hard, our tongues gentle when everything is gossip and slander, and ourselves aware of others’ gifts when all around there is jealousy. We will more easily find the capacity to forgive despite our wounds, to live chastity inside an over-stimulated culture, to see beauty inside dram and duty, to see the sacred inside of the humdrum, and to remain aware of God’s presence inside a godlessness that sometimes overwhelms us.

Our sensitivity must be a stethoscope that hears the beat of the complex and fascinating heart of Christ.

Love’s Baptismal Robe

February 19, 2006

D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem on love he called, History. It reads like this:

The listless beauty of the hour
When snow first fell on the apple trees
And the wood-ash gathered in the fire
And we faced our first miseries.

Then the sweeping sunshine of noon
When the mountains like chariot cars
Were ranked to blue battle-and you, and I
Counted our scars.

And then in a strange, grey-hour
We lay mouth to mouth, with your face
Under mine like a star on the lake
And I covered the earth, and all space

The silent, drifting hours
Of morn after morn
And night drifting up to night
Yet no pathway worn

Your life, and mine, my love
Passing on and on, the hate
Fusing closer and closer with love
Til at length they mate.

At the beginning of every love, romantic or not, the dream for that love is connected to an ideal of purity, mutuality, and respect. Every real love begins with the idea that this time we’ll get it right, this time we won’t make the mistakes we’ve made all those other times, this time love will work its magic. And in the early stages of love, that ideal is spontaneously respected.

In the stage of attraction, flirtation, infatuation, and the rooting of love in the poetic imagination love generally enrobes itself, figuratively, in whiteness, in purity, in all that’s best inside us. Its put on a baptismal robe because it senses that here, finally, it will be initiated into life.

There is nothing as potentially life-giving and redeeming as falling in love. It re-colors the world completely. As the great novelist, Iris Murdoch once said: “The world can change in fifteen seconds, when you fall in love.”

But the world, as we know, can also turn indifferent, dark, and angry in fifteen seconds, or fifteen years. We don’t all die like Romeo and Juliet, still in the grip of that bliss-producing, soul-searing, divine fever we call “falling in love”, where death for love seems not too high a price to pay.

Time, familiarity, differences, congenital restlessness, old immaturities, wounded pride, a wandering eye, and simple human selfishness soon enough begin to dispel the magic. Where we once couldn’t get enough of each other, swallowed our own hurts and pride for the other, and would willing, like Romeo and Juliet, have died for each other, we now begin to count our scars, let the days drift, and no longer search for the path towards the other’s door. Hate begins to fuse with love, resentment with delight, and we reclaim our singleness.

What D.H. Lawrence so brilliantly describes in this poem is how gradually and imperceptibly love can lose its purity, it’s divine fever, and its divine intent, even in its most intimate expressions.

And what he is referring to is not that inevitable, and ultimately healthy, transformation where love, simply by its own innate structure pressures towards maturity and pushes us beyond romantic infatuation and illusion. All love eventually programs its own dark night of the soul and this is healthy. Nor is he referring to the valuable insight that hate is not the opposite of love.

What he is referring to is the disease that creeps into a relationship when, for whatever reason, familiarity begins to breed contempt and disrespect and the ideal that was part of the dream that originally triggered that love is violated. Milan Kundera once said that when the idea that a love was founded on dies, then the love dies too. He’s right.

Real love is always founded on the ideal of purity (of intention), mutuality, and respect. In our heart of hearts we do want what’s right, what’s best; we don’t want to stain what we love. And this implies things far beyond sex.

When we first say the words, “I love you,” and mean them, our hearts are connecting us to an ideal, a dream, a divine form, and a purity that draws energy from all that’s best inside us. But once we begin to compromise that ideal with any kind of disrespect whatsoever, then we begin the slide down that slippery slope that Lawrence describes here and no expression of intimacy, the sexual bed included, will the redeem the initial dream for that love. Our love will then begin imperceptibly to sleep with hate, until we can no longer tell the difference. Our relationship will contain as much resentment as it does delight and we will soon find ourselves strangers to each other.

When we are baptized a white dress is put on us to symbolize purity and words are spoken over us to remind us that this white garment is the outward sign of our inner dignity and that we are meant to bring that dignity unstained into eternal life.

What’s symbolized by our baptismal robes must be the poetic dream for every love. The challenge is always to bring the dignity of that love home, unstained.

What’s Worthwhile is Worth Waiting For

February 12, 2006

Various groups are travelling around high schools and colleges today promoting chastity among young people. They aren’t always getting an enthusiastic reception.

One commentator recently quipped: “They’re telling young people to save it for that one special person they will one day marry. Well, that sounds a lot better when you’re 19 and waiting for that special person than when you’re 39 and not sure what you’re waiting for!”

There’s enough raw truth in that to merit a symposium. What’s expressed here is the despair we feel when life begins to pass us by, when our real dream for love seems over, and when, daily, we become more and more unsure as to whether or not we are on the side of life or not. Waiting seems pretty foolish then and the temptation becomes strong to begin to bend the rules.

But the rules don’t change because we lose our dream. What changes are our feelings for chastity and waiting: How do we wait then? How do we wait when, it seems, there is no longer much worth waiting for?

We don’t have a lot of healthy models on this: Liberals too easily write off the ideal and conservatives too easily refuse to see the hard truth, but the secret lies neither in compromise nor in denial. What we need when we begin to lose heart for the ideal is to get our hearts in touch with what, deep down, they really want. And how do we do that? By committing ourselves to what will give us real life in the long run.

Allow me an example, namely, the infamous, unenthusiastic, but deep, commitment that Peter gives to Jesus at a low point in his discipleship.

The incident takes place in John’s gospel. Jesus had just given a teaching that both confused and upset everyone, the disciples included. He told the people: “Unless you eat my flesh, you will not have life within you!” John reports that, after he said this, everyone walked away, saying this was an intolerable teaching. Jesus then turned to his disciples and asked: “Do you want to walk away too?” Peter answered: “Yes, we would like to, but you have the words of everlasting life!”

This response, devoid of all enthusiasm, speaks though of real maturity: “You have the words of everlasting life!” What gives us life sometimes calls for commitment even when our hearts aren’t onside.

In essence, Peter is saying this: “We don’t get it, but we know that we’re better off not getting it with you than getting it with somebody else!”

I once used those exact words in a class when explaining this story and a man quipped: “That sounds like my marriage!” There was snicker in the classroom, but he said: “I’m serious. Anyone who’s ever been married or committed in a relationship knows that there are times when that relationship will be full of tension, disappointment, and even flat-out coldness. It might feel dead, but you’re smart enough to know that, for you, life lies there, not elsewhere. For you, long-range, life means staying in that relationship even though, on this day, it seems lifeless. Deep down, all of us know exactly what it means to say: “I’m not getting it with you, but I’m better off not getting it with you than getting it with somebody else!”

What’s at issue here, obviously, is not just chastity and waiting until marriage, but a wisdom and a maturity that intuit the big picture and know that what ultimately brings life is not just what helps us make it through a bad night or a bad season.

Love is a decision, not a feeling. We find that hard to believe because, long before we have to decide for love, we first fall into love. Initially it chooses us more than we choose it. But that changes, as we know, and real maturity comes at that exact moment when, like Peter, we commit ourselves to something beyond what feels best in the present moment. Maturity waits, even when it’s 39 years old and not sure any more what it’s waiting for.

And sometimes too, eventually, we know the joy of realizing that it was all worthwhile.

On his wedding day, G.K. Chesterton handed a note to his wife on which he had written that, in all the years previous to their marriage, he was a man who had “four lamps of thanksgiving always before him. The first is for his creation out of the same earth with such a woman as you. The second is that he has not, with all his faults, ‘gone after strange women’. You cannot think how a man’s self-restraint is rewarded in this. The third is that he has tried to love everything alive, a dim preparation for loving you. And the fourth is – but no words can express that. Here ends my previous existence. Take it: it led me to you.”

Patience, waiting, chastity, and commitment are, in the end, worth it.

Helping Each Other into Heaven

February 5, 2006

“To really love someone is to say to that person, you at least will not die!”

Gabriel Marcel wrote those words and they speak of more than simple romance. Inside the human family, especially inside the Body of Christ, to love someone is to help him or her enter eternal life. What we bind on earth, Jesus assured us, is also bound in heaven, just as what we loose on earth is also loosed in heaven.

What’s meant by this?

For Christians, in the Incarnation, God takes on concrete flesh, a body here on earth. We call this the Body of Christ and it’s enfleshed in Jesus, the historical God-man who walked on earth for thirty-three years; in the Eucharist, which we hold to be the Body of Christ; and in the community of believers, the church. Each of these is the body of Christ.

Thus to receive the Eucharist or to touch the community of believers is to be touched by Christ, just as surely as if we had been touched by Jesus himself. And that touch is what heals us, forgives us, and links us to the community of salvation.

If this is true, and it is, then it is also true that when we love each other here on earth, we also hold each other in grace and bind each other to the community of salvation. Simply put, if we are inside the community of grace and we love someone, our love for that person is the cord of grace and forgiveness that helps connect him or her to salvation. As long as that person is connected to us in love he or she will never be outside the community of salvation. Put crassly, if we are inside the community of grace and we love someone, unless that person positively rejects our love he or she cannot go to hell. When we love someone we do say: “You at least will not die!”

Partly this is mystery, though partly it can be understood inside our ordinary categories of love and relationships.

Karl Rahner once explained it this way: Our love for each other does not just give us friendship and companionship here on earth, important though these are. It does something else too for us. It links us to love in such a way that when we stand before God and make our choice, a fundamental choice for all eternity, we stand there already connected in love to a community of grace and therefore much more prone to choose love and God.

Here’s how he puts it:

“As regards to our salvation, we remain dependent on other human beings. This is perfectly obvious, and yet still very difficult to grasp. One might think we are important only for life here and now, or for external things, or at most as regards to the earthly life of the mind. One might think: when it comes to how God stands to me and I stand to God, when we are dealing with the final decision about eternity, when we are dealing with how I ultimately come through when I am completely isolated before the face of God by the remorseless loneliness of my death, then for this question I am one who is completely on my own, left to myself. Then there will remain only God-alone and me; God’s heart, God’s mercy, and my individual freedom of a guilt and a grace that are unavoidably my own.

And yet it is not like this. Everything said above is true, but it is not the whole truth. The whole truth is this: even then we are still part of each other. All persons have their own, inalienable, once-and-for-all freedom, from which they cannot run away, and which they cannot unload onto anyone else. But yet this does not mean that this freedom is an isolated freedom, not even when it is deciding the eternal fate of a human being, or when it is finally shaping a person’s being forever. …

In nature and in grace, therefore, existence is a reality in common. This works itself out in a shared reality of sin and guilt, a shared reality of God’s mercy and God’s grace, a shared reality of origin and goal. But guilt and grace, beginnings and ends, are matters for God. And therefore this human reality in common extends into the sphere of human salvation before God. Human beings are in a communion of salvation and its opposite.”

A priest-friend of mine recently shared with me how he feels loved in certain friendships. He told me: “If I died today, what would be clearest on my mind as I say good-bye to this life is that I’d leave knowing for certain I’m loved!” Given this wonderful grace, how could he possibly choose against love after his death?

The love we experience from each other on this earth will, no doubt, greatly sway our choice when we stand alone before God and have to choose between love and its opposite for all eternity.

Deeper Thing Under the Surface

January 29, 2006

We connect to each other at different levels. How we do that through words is one thing, but that isn’t the only thing or often even the most important thing. We talk and have conversations, but what’s really important is mostly growing under the surface, silent, unobserved, though solid and ultimately the glue that binds us together or the wedge that drives us apart. We have ordinary conversations about trivialities and then one day we realize that we love or hate each other, that we’re fast friends or have nothing in common. How does it happen?

Imagine you live in proximity to your mother and you make a commitment to visit her three times a week. In the course of a year, that means you will be visiting her about 150 times. How many times, among all those times, will you have a deep conversation with her? A dozen times? Five times? A couple of times?

Mostly, as we know, the conversation won’t be deep, but will revolve around the ordinary business of living: “The kids are fine!” “Steve dropped in last week!” “Mum, your food really is bland, how can you stand all that jello?” “No, we didn’t get much rain, just a sprinkle!” “Yes, I’ll be sure to pass your greetings on to Martha; she always asks about you!”

You will talk about the weather, about your siblings, about diets, about who’s moving away, and about whom you saw at the mall. And, given that you’re busy and preoccupied with many pressures in your own life, it will be natural that occasionally you will furtively glance at your watch, to see how much longer you need to stay before you can politely leave and go back to many things pressing in your own life.

But there will exceptions, perhaps five or six times a year, when something will trigger a deeper conversation and your mother will turn to you and say: “I want to tell you about when I first met your father!” “I need to tell you about something that happened when I was pregnant with you!” “If always wanted to share this with you, but couldn’t!” And then, for that visit, you won’t be sneaking glances at your watch and you won’t be talking about the weather, jello, and trivialities. You will be hearing something that touches your soul and, driving home, you’ll feel that you’ve made a deeper connection and have something special (an insight, a bit of history, a token of intimacy, an expression of trust) that you can treasure. That’ll be special, but, in the end, it won’t be the real fruit of your regular visits with your mother.

The real fruit will be what was happening under the surface – unobserved, silent, but solid – all those other times when you were talking about the weather, diets, and trivialities. Simply put, if you visit your mother 150 times a year and spend an hour or so each time, you will, through all of that, develop a bond with her that goes far beyond what gets said on any given day, deep or superficial. That bond will grow because you’re having regular contact. You’ll get to know her and will be connected in a way that can only happen between people who sit down with each other three times a week.

Ordinary chitchat is not the stuff of intimacy, but regular contact is because, as the chitchat is going on, something deeper is happening (for good or for bad) under the surface.

This is also true of our prayer lives and our relationship with God. If we make a commitment to sit in private prayer every day for half an hour, how many times might we expect that we’ll feel a deep movement of soul, a stunning insight, or an affirmation that really warms us? A dozen times a year? Five or six times a year? Perhaps.

Most of the time though our prayer time will be a lot like those visits we make regularly to our mothers. We’ll be absorbed with the weather, diets, and with whom we saw at the mall, even as we sneak the occasional glance at our wristwatches. We will treasure those times when something special breaks through, but those times will not be what’s really important.

What’s really important will be what’s growing under the surface, namely, a bond and an intimacy that’s based upon a familiarity that can only develop and sustain itself by regular contact, by actually sharing life on a day-to-day basis.

In describing one of the deep movements within mature prayer, John of the Cross writes: “At this point, God does not communicate himself through the senses as he did before, by means of discursive analysis and the synthesis of ideas, but begins to communicate himself through pure spirit in an act of simple contemplation in which there is no discursive succession of thought.”

Think about that the next time you are talking trivialities with your mother – or get bored in prayer.

Making the Taboo a Holy Place

January 22, 2006

There are no places where God isn’t present, though we rarely believe that. Like the people of old, we still have certain taboo areas, places that for us are far from God.

In the gospels we see Jesus going into those places that are considered godless and taboo and dispelling old fears and superstitions by taking God’s presence into them.

Thus we see Jesus entering into the lives of the sick, touching lepers, curing a woman struggling with menstruation, dining with prostitutes, and ultimately dying on a cross. All of these were considered unholy, unclean, taboo places, especially death by crucifixion – “Cursed is the one who dies on a tree!” There were powerful fears and taboos surrounding these things.

Yet Jesus entered those places without false fear and superstition. But he didn’t enter into them the way we, the adult children of the Enlightenment, do. For us, the dispelling of superstition, unhealthy taboo, and false fear is generally seen as a triumph of personal maturity, a growing-up, a liberation from false, phantom ghosts that we’re too smart to believe in. For us, it’s a question of false fear and unhealthy timidity, suffered in the name of religion, being exposed. Good riddance.

Some of this, in fact, is good. We’ve always lived with too much fear. True religion is meant to free us from this. That’s why virtually every time God appears in Scripture the first words are: “Do not be afraid!”

But our problem today is that, while we have entered old taboo areas and exposed false fears and superstitions, we haven’t, like Jesus, baptized those areas and made them holy. We haven’t taken God into them. Instead we have mostly emptied them, de-enchanted them, flattened them out, taken the mystique and soul out of them and left nothing but the biological, the social, the natural. We’ve cleared away a lot of false fear and superstition, but one wonders how much we’ve really gained.

Take just one example, sex: For most of history there has been, for all peoples, a great many taboos around sex. All the great religions of the world have deemed sex as sacred and surrounded it with every kind of prohibition and taboo, as indeed has virtually every culture until recently. In Jesus’ time, for example, adultery was punishable by death and the simple biological fact of menstruation was seen to render you unclean.

We’ve come a long way since then and now live in a culture that has essentially no religious, moral, or psychological taboos around sex and has little, if any, fear of it. The good news in this is that we have emptied sex of superstition, false fear, and false taboo. The bad news is that we have also robbed it of most of its sacredness, mystique, depth, and soul. We’ve been able to exorcise its demons, but have been unable to baptize it. We’ve removed its stigma, but without being able to infuse it with the sacred.

And we’re the poorer for it: So now we have lovers instead of spouses and soul mates because when sex is emptied of the sacred it can be casual and schizophrenic. We talk of someone as “hot” rather than as beautiful because once there are no longer any divine angels inside sex, there is mostly only biology left. And we go home after having sex because we haven’t found a home in it, despite the fact that anthropologically and religiously sex is meant to bring us home and be, itself, the most intimate of all homes. Unlike Jesus, we haven’t been able to take God into the place of taboo.

So today there’s a lot of sex, but a growing loneliness. We have no fear of sex, but our souls aren’t healed by it either. We’re liberated, but not whole or happy.

Perhaps our grandparents lived in too much fear of sex, but at least for them it held the sacred. We have little fear, but we also have a dumbed-down reality. Free of angels and demons, we experience precious little in the way of mystery and all too soon know the truth of William Auden’s comment: “We all know the few things that man, as a mammal, can do.”

In truth, there is a certain moral victory in our demystifying of sex from false taboo, but, until we re-enchant it (by taking the sacred into that former-taboo space) that victory will be a hollow one.

Jesus went into places that were considered taboo, unclean, and outside of God’s grace and cast out false fear and superstition there. But he did this not to claim some personal maturity. He did it to take God’s presence into those places. He came to free us from fear, even as he taught us that “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom.”

And that’s the challenge: We are to fear nothing, even as we are to have a holy, reverential fear of everything. One, without the other, is not good.

Standing Under the Cross

January 15, 2006

As Jesus was dying, the Gospels say that Mary, his mother, stood under the cross. What was she doing while standing there?

On the surface, it seems she wasn’t doing anything at all: She wasn’t saying anything, wasn’t trying to stop the crucifixion, and she wasn’t even trying to protest its unfairness or plead Jesus’ innocence. She was silent, seemingly passive, overtly doing nothing. But, at a deeper level, she was doing all that can be done in this kind of situation, she was standing inside of it, in strength, refusing to give back in kind, resisting in an much deeper way.

What’s meant by that?

Sometimes well-intentioned artists have pictured Mary as lying prostrate under the cross, the wounded mother, helplessly distraught, paralysed in grief, an object for our sympathy. But that doesn’t honour what happened there nor teach us its lesson. Prostration, in this situation, is weakness, collapse, hysteria, resignation. In the Gospels, “standing” is the very 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 (sometimes darkness has its hour) but she could stop some of the hatred, bitterness, jealousy, heartlessness, and anger that caused it and which surround it. And she helped stop these by refusing to give back in kind, by transforming rather than transmitting them, by swallowing hard and (literally) eating them rather than give them back, as everyone else was doing.

Had Mary, in righteousness and outrage, begun to scream hysterically, shout angrily at those crucifying Jesus, or physically tried to attack someone as they were driving the nails into Jesus’ hands, she would have been caught up in the same energy as everyone else, replicating the same 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. Most 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 conduct 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.”

That’s a bitter pill to swallow, but sometimes it’s our only choice. 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 we can do 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.”

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

We see this illustrated in the reaction we see to capital punishment in our society. Whenever a convicted killer is executed, we see two basic reactions: One group, generally very sincere and good people, stand in strong approval of the execution, chanting for justice, convinced that it’s necessary to execute this man or woman for the overall good, that justice demands an eye for an eye, a life for a life.

A second group, strongly opposed to what is happening, has already tried every legitimate means possible to try to stop the execution and have failed. Now, rather than giving themselves over to the bitterness and anger that permeate the situation, they stand in silence, praying, candles in hand, knowing that they cannot stop this execution, but they can help stop some of the bitterness, anger, and darkness that surround it. Their gentleness, silence, and prayer literally breathe out compassion, love, understanding, and forgiveness to everyone on every side.

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.

Sin and Sadness

January 9, 2006

French philosopher, Leon Bloy, a man very instrumental in helping bring Jacques and Raissa Maritain to faith, once stated: “There is only one real sadness in life, that of not being a saint!”

That’s not a statement of piety, but a deep insight into the heart of life itself. Sin makes us sad. Life would be better if we understood that. We’ve always associated sin with badness more than sadness, but we lose something in that equation. Sin makes us more sad than it makes us bad.

Sin can also make us bad because it makes us prone to lie. That’s its ultimate danger. Giving into temptation because of weakness or passion doesn’t make us bad. What does is when we deny, rationalize, excuse ourselves, and accuse others after we sin. That’s what hardens, warps, and embitters the soul.

We see this already in the Adam and Eve story, the first sin. Their disobedience was one thing, but their need afterwards to hide and try to cover themselves, with clothes and excuses, was what ultimately put them outside the garden of joy. We have the same impulse every time we sin, namely, to try to cover and excuse ourselves. We try to make sin all right by denying how it affects us. That, not God’s forgiveness, is the problem.

It’s not about God’s understanding, generosity, or forgiveness that we ever need to worry. God, Jesus assures us, is generous and forgiving beyond our imaginings. Jesus forgives his killers even as they’re murdering him and, as the parable of the vineyard workers who arrive at different hours but still all receive the same reward makes clear, our real problem is not whether or not God is generous, but whether or not we can receive that generosity without weighing merit or being jealous. The danger is not that we won’t receive our due; the danger is more that we might end up getting everything and enjoying nothing. Sadness, not hell-fire, is what looms as the real threat.

The problem with sin is not that it makes us bad or puts us outside God’s love, it’s that it makes us sad, here and now. And this, as we know from experience, is not an abstract thing.

To the exact degree that we sin, we begin to lose our capacity for simple joy, delight, and freshness, and become bored, angry, jealous, and incapable of appreciating anything or praising anyone. To the degree that we sin too, the sound of joy, the sound of what’s childlike and innocent, begins to irritate us and we, almost-automatically, begin to protect ourselves by enfleshing ourselves inside a cocoon of sophistication, cynicism, and hardness. Inside that hardness we too easily begin to see our bad choice as a moral triumph, as a victory for freedom, and as something that has made us smarter and wiser than others.

But, with that comes a sadness that we can’t hide from others even when we try to hide it from ourselves. Like Adam and Eve, we walk out of the garden of innocence with our eyes more open, but with our hearts much less capable of being delighted or inspired.

Sin robs us of our innocence by wounding and killing the child inside. To be innocent, as we know, means to be “un-wounded” and our capacity to experience joy, as know both from experience and scripture, is very much linked to innocence, to what’s still childlike inside us. Sin makes us sad precisely because it makes us sophisticated in a way that wounds the child inside of us. The opposite is also true.

A couple of years ago, a group of young priests asked me to join their support group for one of their weekly meetings. Their group was unlike any group, clerical or lay, with whom I’ve ever spent an evening. They’d come together to support each other in their resolution to try to live out their priesthood in a way that was more honest, transparent, non-compensatory, and saintly. So each week they met and with searing honesty confessed their most private sins and weaknesses to each other. Obviously this made them better priests, and that was their aim. But what surprised them, as a delightful by-product, was that it also made them much, much happier with their lives. Their joy (and their lack of anger, lack of self-pity, and lack of complaint) was palpable.

The youngest member of the group, just thirty-five years old, told me: “Father, I joined this group last year and doing this each week and attempting to live such a radical lifestyle is the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life. But it’s also the best thing I’ve ever done. I’ve never been this happy!”

When the rich young man in the gospels walks away from Jesus’ invitation to radical discipleship, it doesn’t say that he walked away bad, only that he walked away sad. He remained good, sincere, and sad. And isn’t that perennially our situation?

An Immune System within the Body of Christ

January 1, 2006

We’ve gone mystically tone-deaf.

Robert Bellah tells how one of his researchers, speaking at a conference, made the statement: “Some people believe that human life is priceless.” A scientific expert, in all seriousness, challenged him: “We have no data on that.”

We might smile a little at the naivetŽ of that but, sadly, most of us are often just as insensitive when it comes grasping some of the deeper things that under gird life. Mysticism is not our strong point and that leaves us mostly in the dark in terms of intuiting one of the central realities within the Christian faith, namely, how the body of Christ works.

We believe in what we can grasp rationally, but how the body of Christ works is not something we can grasp in that way. Hence some of what’s important to health inside that body is often neglected because we simply don’t know any better. Just as ignorance of what is good for us physically can lead to bad health habits, so too inside the body of Christ. We need to know how to keep a strong and healthy immune system.

How do we build up a strong, healthy immune system inside the body of Christ?

Part of our Christian faith, as canonized in our creed, is the belief that our unity and community with each other in Christ is so real, so deep, so physical, and so mutually interdependent that we constitute not an aggregate or a corporation but an organism, a living body. The body of Christ is not a body in the way General Motors is a body, but is a body in the way that a man or woman is body. The unity inside that body is not mystical or analogical, it’s real.

And, just as in any physical body there are visible aspects that can be observed with the naked eye and other, more invisible, aspects that go on under the surface and escape simple observation, so too within the body of Christ. Most of what is happening regarding health or disease within the body, is, long before it shows up externally, not observable to the unaided eye. Enzymes, bacteria, viruses, and antibodies do their work for health or disease invisibly. By the time we see external symptoms, they have already been working for a long time.

This is true too inside the body of Christ. The things that, in the end, preserve health or cause disease are, like viruses and antibodies, invisible. They are only seen in their eventual effect on the body. What happens for health or for disease in any one cell, be it ever so small, eventually affects the health of the whole body. Thus, Christ taught, and the saints believed, that the most private spiritual and moral battles which go on inside one’s conscience have an effect for good or for bad on all of humanity. Private acts have a profound effect on the whole body, beyond what “we have data on.”

Therese of Lisieux based the very core of her spirituality on this and her life and death eventually gave us “data” that validated her faith in this. As a lively 15 year-old, she fasted and prayed that a condemned criminal might become a Christian before being executed. He did. As a dying 24 year-old, she offered her sufferings so that others might be healed and she boldly stated that upon her death she would deliver a shower of roses upon this earth. Everything that’s happened around her name and to the little town of Lisieux ever since provides considerable data that she did deliver on that promise. Small private acts can deeply affect the overall health of the whole world.

This idea can of course be badly understood. At its worst, it has been understood as a kind of “Divine Credit Union” into which the good paid and the bad withdrew – the crucified Christ and the saintly mother pay in and the wayward child takes out! In its most crass form, some of these divine savings bonds could even be sold as indulgences.

But such a misunderstanding is not our danger today. Our problem tends to be the opposite: An age which is besotted by the empirical and which de-emphasizes private morality, tends to forget that a body needs a strong immune system and healthy antibodies to keep it free of disease.

What are the antibodies that create a healthy immune system within the body of Christ? If we can believe those who have been doctors of the soul, we create healthy antibodies when we silently suffer for each other, when pray for each other, when live out lives of quiet martyrdom, and when we emerge victorious in our little battles with what’s petty inside of us. Our seemingly small sins – the grudge, the masturbation, the little lie, and the petty jealousy – do make a difference.

Mystics have secrets worth knowing. The health of a body depends on tiny processes invisible to the naked eye.

Keeping Watch with the Shepherds in Bethlehem

December 18, 2005

“And shepherds were keeping watch in the night!”

When the Gospel of Luke recounts the Christmas story, it tells us that, when Jesus was born, shepherds were keeping watch in the night. What were they watching for in the dark? For more than for what might threaten their flocks. They were looking for light, for something to brighten their darkness.

John’s Gospel makes this point. It doesn’t give us a description of Mary and Joseph in a stable at Bethlehem. Instead it describes the coming of Jesus at Christmas in an image, a light shone in the darkness. Notice that John doesn’t say that a light shone into the darkness, but that it shone in the darkness. That’s an important distinction.

Christmas, Christ being born in our world, is very much about finding God inside of what’s commonplace and inside even the darkness of sin, violence, war, greed, and the indifference that sometimes seem everywhere. Christmas is about light being seen inside of darkness.

And so one of the things that Christmas asks us to do is to imitate the shepherds in the Christmas story and keep watch, hoping to see “light inside of darkness”. How do we do that?

Our Christian tradition has different ways of expressing it, but it’s what Jesus meant when he told us to “read the signs of the times” and what John of the Cross meant when he said that “the language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives.” God is inside ordinary life and our job is to see God there.

Classically, this was expressed in the concept of “divine providence”, namely, the notion that inside the conspiracy of accidents that shape our lives we can see the finger of God writing history from another point of view. God shines forth, in some way, in everything that happens.

We need therefore to be meteorologists of the spirit, reading inner weather so as to see the deeper movements of God inside the outer events of history. We watch like the shepherds when we look at our world, with all that’s in it, both good and bad, and see light there, namely, God’s presence, grace, graciousness, forgiveness, love, unselfishness, innocence.

But that’s not easy to do. The darkness around us is deep. We live in a world where what we see is often simply bitterness, wound, non- forgiveness, anger, greed, false pride, lust, injustice, and sin. Where do we see light inside of that? Do you see light in the 6:00 news each night?

Christmas tells us that the problem isn’t just with the news, but with how we see the news. What we see is very much colored by what we feel and think at any given moment. Philosophers used to express this in the axiom: “Whatever is received is received according to the mode of the receiver.” Sound wisdom. The Buddhists put it more simply. They have an axiom which says that we don’t see what’s outside of us but we see what’s inside of us and project it outside. To illustrate this they offer a colorful little anecdote.

A fat, overweight Buddha was sitting under a tree one day. An arrogant, young soldier walked by, saw him, and said: “You look like a pig!” The Buddha looked up at the soldier and said: “And you look like God!” Surprised, the soldier asked him: “Why do you say that I look like God?” The Buddha replied: “You see, we don’t see what’s outside us, we see what’s inside and project it outwards. I sit here all day and think about God and when I look out, that’s what I see. You, on the other hand, must be thinking about something else!”

The point, I think, is clear. Our eyesight, even our physical eyesight, is linked to our attitudes, our thoughts, our feelings, our wounds, and our virtues. They form the prism through which we see. The task therefore, to keep watch in the night, is to link our eyesight to the virtues of Christmas. What are these?

Christmas speaks of childlikeness, wonder, innocence, joy, love, forgiveness, family, community, and giving. When we are in touch with these we more easily see what’s special inside of ordinary life. These make light shine in the darkness.

Sometimes, just as at the first Christmas, we see light in darkness most clearly in the face of a newborn, a baby, where innocence can still stun us into wonder and soften, for a while, the edges of our cynicism and hardness. That, in fact, is one of the main challenges of Christmas.

Like the shepherds we’re asked to watch in the night and we’re watching when, in our hearts, there is more wonder than familiarity, more childlike trust than cynicism, more love than indifference, more forgiveness than bitterness, more joy in our innocence than in our sophistication, and more focus on others than on ourselves.

Christmas is meant to soften the heart and it’s that which sharpens the eyesight.

Don’t Worship Your Emotions

December 11, 2005

John Shea shares this story: He once invited a renowned storyteller, Reuven Gold, to meet with his students. During that visit, one of the students, a young priest facing a painful transition in ministry, poured out his anxiety to the classroom, especially his fear of failure.

After listening awhile to the young priest, Reuven made a comment that seemed designed to actually increase the priest’s anxiety. The priest was momentarily flustered, but suddenly grasped Reuven’s deeper point, stopped abruptly, smiled, and said: “Thanks, I feel better.” Then in a loud voice, but devoid of anger, Reuven said: “Don’t worship your emotions.”

That’s sound advice for all of us, especially as we examine our attitudes towards the issue of capital punishment, the death penalty. We need to stop worshipping our emotions. No easy task.

If we’re honest, we have to admit there’s something inside of us that wants the death penalty, needs it, and cannot help but feel a certain vindication and glee when a murderer, especially one who is cold and unrepentant, receives the death penalty. The itch for justice is too deeply written into our DNA. That’s why so many popular movies and novels end not just with the triumph of good over evil, but with good crushing and killing evil. Something inside of us feels vindicated and whole again when evil is crushed and brought to its knees by sheer force so that the playground bully can be arrogant no longer and must finally eat his own violence. We want that and feel a deep release whenever it actually happens.

And so there’s always an argument for the death penalty: It’s necessary as a deterrent, it brings a needed closure to the families of the victims, it’s a demand of justice itself.

But, in the end, those arguments are more emotional than logical. This is feeling, not faith, speaking.

First of all, as most studies show, the death penalty doesn’t act as a deterrent. Nor does it bring closure for the victim’s loved ones. It brings instead catharsis, that wonderful (though ephemeral) feeling of release and vindication that we experience at the end of a movie when the bad guys finally get shot. And, while justice seemingly does demand the death penalty, there’s a morality (and a logic) higher than that of strict justice. Only forgiveness is ultimately a deterrent and only it brings real closure.

And for a Christian the issue is clear: the death penalty is always wrong, not because it isn’t a deterrent and doesn’t bring closure, but because it goes against the very heart of the gospel. The one thing that Jesus asks us to do that sets us apart as Christians, more than anything else, is to love those who hate us, to do good to those who curse us, to not give back in kind, murder for murder, but to forgive our enemies, including murderers.

Jesus witnessed to this in his own death (“Forgive them for they know not what they do!”) and he challenged us to the same by telling us that our virtue needs to go deeper than that of the scribes and the pharisees, that is, the virtue of strict justice which, precisely, prescribed the death penalty in the name of fairness and in the name of God.

The renowned anthropologist, Rene Girard, asserts that the cross of Jesus is the single most revolutionary moral event ever in history, but that it is like a capsule whose power is being released slowly (in terms of our understanding and absorption) through the centuries. Simply put, as the centuries go on, slowly, more and more, we are grasping its deeper moral demands.

John Paul II was a testimony to this. It took 2000 years before finally a pope stood up and pronounced unequivocally that the death penalty was wrong, not because it was ineffective as a deterrent, but because it goes against the center of the gospel. No pope again, ever, will affirm the contrary. We’ve absorbed the meaning of the cross a little more deeply and part of that understanding is that capital punishment is not God’s way and, ultimately, not our way either.

Still that doesn’t make it easier for us to emotionally move away from the idea of the death penalty. It’s one thing to believe something in faith, it’s quite another to have one’s heart and emotions onside. And so, generally, we’re lying if we say that it is easy to forgive and to move beyond our need for justice. Our emotions demand strict justice, especially for those who are stubborn, cold, callous, unrepentant. At the level of our feelings, we want to see the arrogant broken by justice, by death if necessary.

But, but, let’s not worship our emotions. We’re meant instead to worship a God whose son, Jesus, tells us that the highest moral and spiritual demand of all is forgiveness. What distinguishes a Christian from others is, in the end, the willingness and the capacity to not give back in kind, even to murderers.

Being Blessed by Pagan Friends

December 4, 2005

Gilbert K. Chesterton, the renowned Catholic apologist, was a great friend with George Bernard Shaw, the famous playwright, even though Shaw, an agnostic, had major issues with Chesterton’s belief in God and especially with Chesterton being a Roman Catholic. Indeed, when he heard that Chesterton had become a Roman Catholic he wrote him a letter expressing his disappointment. Ever the colourful writer, Shaw ended that letter describing to Chesterton a vision he had of him going to confession:

“You will have to go to confession next Easter, and I find the spectacle – the box, your portly kneeling figure, the poor devil inside wishing you had become a Fireworshipper instead of coming here to shake his soul with a sense of his ridiculousness and yours – all incredible, monstrous, comic. …. Now however I’m becoming personal (how else can I be sincere?).”

But these differences didn’t deter them from being great friends and from deeply admiring each other. At one stage, Chesterton felt a need to defend Shaw from well-intentioned Christians who were vilifying him because of his agnosticism. Speaking in Shaw’s defence, he wrote: “There is one fundamental truth in which I have never for a moment disagreed with him. Whatever else he is, he has never been a pessimist; or in spiritual matters a defeatist. He is at least on the side of Life…. Everything is wrong about him except himself.”

I have friends like that, pagans, in the best sense of the word. From a strict Christian point of view, most everything’s wrong with them, except themselves. They aren’t professed agnostics or atheists, but they don’t exactly fit the description of a practising Christian either. They rarely go to church, mostly disregard the church’s teaching on sex, pray only when in crisis, and are basically too immersed in life here-and-now to think much about God, church, and eternity.

But, even so, they radiate life, sometimes in ways that shame me. There’s something about them that’s very right, inspiring even, and life giving. They may be practical agnostics and ecclesial atheists, but their presence mostly brings positive energy, goodness, love, intelligence, humour, and sunshine into a room.

Don’t get this wrong: This is not to imply (as does the over- simplistic, rationalizing notion that’s so popular today) that those who do go to church and try to follow the church’s rules are hypocrites and immature, while those who don’t go to church and make their own rules are the real Christians. No. There’s nothing enlightened about people drifting away from the church, thinking they are beyond church, living outside its rules, or believing that a passionate focus on this life justifies a neglect of the other world. That’s a fault in religiosity, a fault too in wisdom and maturity.

The wonderful energy that we see, and should bless, in the many good persons we know who no longer go to church with us is precisely that, wonderful energy, not depth. Paul McCartney, perhaps the most talented, pop-musician ever, makes people dance, no small thing, a godly thing even. We dance too little and our spirits are perennially too heavy. But one should never confuse playful energy (“Ob-la-dee, Ob-la-da, life goes on!”) with the wisdom of Mother Theresa, John Paul II, Henri Nouwen, John of the Cross, or Jesus. It’s a wonderful thing to make people dance, to bring sunshine into a room, to lift human hearts so that they can love a little more, but it’s not the full menu, the deepest part of the menu, or something that suggests that the other part of the menu is all wrong. It is what it is and it is only what it is.

But it’s on the right side of things, on the side of life. It’s wonderful, it helps bring God into a room, and it should be blessed.

And that’s why, as Christians, we need to both bless our good pagan friends and let ourselves be blessed by them. That’s why too we should be more discriminating in our use of phrases like “a culture of life” and “a culture of death”. God is the ultimate author of all that’s good, whether that goodness, sunlight, energy, colour, and warmth is seen inside a church building or outside of it. Wherever that energy is, there’s “a culture of life”, even if it might also be carrying pieces of “a culture of death”. What’s wrong is wrong, and must always be named in that way; but what’s good is good, and it must also always be named in that way.

I look at some of my pagan friends, at their energy, their generosity, their warmth, what they bring into a room, and my heart lifts and I believe in God more deeply. God also made their sunshine and their warmth. They don’t go to church, and that isn’t good, but they’re on the side of life and that, implicit faith, is a challenge for me to remain too on the right side of things.

Cataclysms of the Heart

November 27, 2005

There are times when the world unravels. Who hasn’t had this feeling? “I’m falling apart! This is beyond me! My heart is broken! I feel betrayed by everything! Nothing makes sense any more! Life is upside down!”

Jesus had a cosmic image for this. In the gospels, he talks about how the world, as we experience it, will someday end: “The sun will be darkened, the moon will not give forth its light, stars will fall from heaven, and the powers of heaven will be shaken.” When Jesus says this, he is not talking as much about cosmic cataclysms as of cataclysms of the heart. Sometimes our inner world is shaken, turned upside down; it gets dark in the middle of the day, there’s an earthquake in the heart, and we experience, in effect, the end of the world as we’ve known it.

But, Jesus assures us too, in this upheaval, one thing remains the same: the word of God, God’s promise of fidelity. That doesn’t get turned upside down and, in our disillusionment, we are given a chance to see what really is of substance, permanent, and worthy of our lives. Thus, ideally at least, when our trusted world is turned upside down we are given the chance to grow, to become less selfish, and to see reality more clearly.

Christian mystics call this “a dark night of the soul” and they write it up as if God was actively turning our world upside down and causing all this heartache deliberately to purge and cleanse us.

John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic, puts it this way: God gives us seasons of fervour and then takes them away. In our seasons of fervour, God gives us consolation, pleasure, and security (sometimes with considerable passion and intensity) inside our relationships, prayer, and work. As a gift from God this is meant to be enjoyed. But, John tells us, God will, at a certain point, take away the pleasure and consolation and we will experience a certain dark night, namely, where we once felt fire, passion, consolation, and security, we will now feel dryness, boredom, disillusion, and insecurity. For John of the Cross, all honeymoons eventually end.

Why? Why would God do this? Why can’t a honeymoon last forever?

Because eventually, though not initially, it blocks us from seeing straight. Initially all those wonderful feelings we feel when we first fall in love, when we first begin to pray deeply, and when we first begin to find our legs in the world, are part of God’s plan and God’s lure. The passion and consolation we feel help lead us out of ourselves, beyond fear and selfishness. But, eventually, the good feelings themselves become the problem because we get hung-up on them rather than on what’s behind them.

Honeymoons are wonderful, but, on a honeymoon, generally we are more in love with being in love and all the wonderful energy this creates than we are in love with the person behind all those feelings. The same is true for faith and prayer. When we first begin to pray seriously, we generally are more in love with the experience of praying and what it’s doing for us than we are in love with God. On any honeymoon, no matter how intense and pure the feelings seem, those feelings are still very much about ourselves and not about the person we think we love. That is why, sadly, many a warm, passionate honeymoon eventually turns into a cold, passionless relationship.

Until we are purified, and we are purified precisely through dark nights of disillusionment, we are too much seeking ourselves in love and in everything else. Therese of Lisieux used to warn: “Be careful not to seek yourself in love, you’ll end up with a broken heart that way!” We’d have less heartaches if we understood that. As well, before we’re purified, most of the tears we shed, no matter how real the pain or loss, say more about us than they say about the person or situation we are supposedly mourning.

In all this, there’s both bad news and good news: The bad news is that everything we feel as precious will someday be taken from us. Everything gets crucified, including every feeling of warmth and security we have. But the good news is that it will all be given back again, more deeply, more purely, and even more passionately in terms of feeling.

What dark nights of the soul, cataclysms of the heart, do is to take away everything that feels like solid earth so that we end up in a free-fall, unable to grab on to anything that once supported us. But, in falling, we also get closer to bedrock, to God, to reality, to truth, to each other, beyond illusions, beyond selfishness, and beyond manipulative love masquerading as something else. Clarity eyesight comes after disillusionment, purity of heart comes after a certain kind of heartache, and real love comes after the honeymoon.

The Litmus Test for being Christian

November 20, 2005

Who’s a real Christian and who’s not? Who’s faithful to the teaching of Christ and who’s selective in following him? Who’s morally committed and who’s not?

Everywhere, in the name of religion, truth, morality, ideology, or political-correctness, we’re erecting various tests of orthodoxy and morals. Usually one issue of morality, dogma, dress, or political- correctness is set up as the litmus test. How you stand on that issue determines how you are judged in general and, depending whether you’re liberal or conservative, that issue can be anything from abortion, to feminism, to gay marriage, to war, to poverty, to capital punishment, to clerical dress, to (inside of Islam) whether not a woman covers her face in public. But, invariably, there is a litmus test, one issue on which you are judged.

So it’s worth asking: Did Jesus have a litmus test? Is there one issue, principle, or dogma within his teaching that can function as a criterion for judgement so that we are, in effect, a Christian or not, depending upon where we stand on that issue?

The question isn’t a simple one: On the one hand, it asks the question of essentials: What’s essential and what’s negotiable in the teachings of Jesus? But it asks, as well, whether there is there any one thing inside the teachings of Jesus that can serve as a defining criterion as to what makes one uniquely Christian?

Regarding the question of essentials, I submit, that there are four things that Jesus asks of anyone who would be his disciple:

First, that he or she “keep the commandments”, both the larger commandment of the heart “to love God and neighbour” and the ten commandments. “If anyone loves me, he will keep my word.” An essential component of Christian discipleship is having a private relationship to Jesus and being faithful in the area of private morality.

Second, Jesus mandates social justice as non-negotiable, not optional, within Christian discipleship. This is clear from Jesus’ own life, from the text on the last judgement in Matthew’s gospel, and from the fact that in the gospels, on average, one out of every eight lines is an imperative from Jesus to reach out to the poor.

Third, as Jesus defines it, discipleship demands involvement within a concrete community of faith. Christian discipleship is not something we do alone. We’re asked to journey to God with each other, as part of an ecclesial community, as part of a church. As the First Epistle of John, puts it: “The one who claims to love a God that he cannot see and does not love a neighbour whom he can see is a liar.”

Finally, what Jesus asks of us as an essential component of discipleship is a mellow, warm, grateful heart. Discipleship isn’t just about what we do; it’s also about the spirit within which we do it. We need the right truth, but also the right energy. Nothing counts for much, no matter how right or orthodox the action, if it doesn’t issue from love and gratitude. In T.S. Eliot’s words: “The last temptation that’s the greatest treason, is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.” When our concern for truth, orthodoxy, justice, or morality comes out of a place of anger, bitterness, or judgement, we are no longer acting as disciples of Jesus, no matter how right the cause. No action rooted in bitterness, anger, jealousy, self-righteousness, or in a desire for revenge can ever justify itself in Jesus’ name.

Thus these things – private integrity, social justice, involvement in ecclesial community, and mellowness of heart – are the essentials of Christian discipleship. But there’s still a further question: Is there anything in Jesus’ teaching and his challenge to us that might serve as a litmus test? Is there any one, singular, teaching that can serve as a criterion as to who is and who isn’t a true disciple of Jesus?

There is. For Jesus, the litmus test for a disciple, at least for a mature disciple, is this: Can you love an enemy? Can you bless someone who curses you? Can you forgive, and can you forgive even a murderer?

It is precisely to this challenge that Jesus refers when he tells us that our virtue must go deeper than the virtue of the scribes and Pharisees. The scribes and Pharisees were, for the most part, sincere and decent men and women who loved God, tried to help the poor, were concerned about truth and morals, and practised justice. But loving an enemy and forgiving a murderer aren’t prescribed by justice, the ten commandments, church dogma, human decency, or even sincerity. They’re an invitation to something deeper, an invitation that comes from Jesus’ life and teaching, and an invitation that, in the end, constitutes the litmus test of mature discipleship.

Who’s a real Christian and who’s not? The deepest answer in the gospels would be: The person who can love an enemy, bless those who curse her, and forgive everyone, even a murderer.

Feeling God in Vulnerability

November 13, 2005

Sometimes we understand things through their absence. The experience of loneliness teaches us about love. Sometimes too the more painful the absence, the more we’re opened to what we’re missing. The more fierce and raging the loneliness, the bigger the cavern for love it creates inside of us.

That’s true too for our understanding of God and what it means to draw life from God. If loneliness is what we feel when love is absent, what do we feel when God and grace are seemingly absent? And if loneliness stretches our hearts for deeper love, what does a feeling of God’s absence create inside of us?

We feel the seeming absence of God whenever we feel these things: anxiety for no apparent reason, feelings of guilt we can’t explain, a helplessness we can’t do anything about, fear of death, a nagging sense that something isn’t right, a feeling that somehow we aren’t good enough, a restless drive to make a name for ourselves, a greedy need to drink in as much life as we can, and the inchoate feeling that nothing’s enough, that we aren’t enough, that life isn’t enough, that we’re standing on the edge of nothingness.

At one level, these feelings can all be explained away as nothing more than neuroses, hang-ups, signs of immaturity, lack of robust health, lack of resiliency, over-sensitivity, as signs that we’re weak, over-timid, out-of-sorts.

That can be true, but sensitivity also indicates life, humanity, depth, feeling, faith. What’s alive is sentient, tender to feeling. It’s what’s inanimate and dead that’s never crippled by feelings. Brute things don’t suffer anxiety, rocks don’t worry about betrayal, and self-centred egoists aren’t concerned about sin. To be anxious, uneasy, haunted by the unseen, and worried that somehow we aren’t good enough, can also be a sign of being in touch with something deeper, namely, of being sentient and attuned to the fact that we’re creatures and not God and we must, therefore, be graced and justified by God in order to receive life and salvation.

What does that mean?

Catholics and Protestants have used different languages to explain this, though, in the end, we’ve both had the same concept.

Those of us who were raised Roman Catholics, grew up with the notion of “grace”. For us, the key to living was to be always “in the state of grace”. The big worry was to die “outside of grace”. Negatively, we understood grace as the opposite of sin. Positively, we defined it as being alive inside the Body of Christ.

Protestants mostly used a different language (even as they wrote the timeless hymn, Amazing Grace). They spoke of “justification”, a concept they took from St. Paul. For them, life ultimately had meaning or not and one entered heaven or not on the basis of being justified by God.

But what does that mean?

This isn’t an easy concept to grasp or explain. The biblical language is clear, but concept, like most deep things, is not something we easily get our minds around.

“Justification” (which can also be translated as “Righteousness”) is, first of all, something inside of God. What?

We can only dance around its meaning. It refers to a substantiality, a wholeness, a goodness, a perfection, and an immortality that we can’t imagine but can partially intuit through our experience of its absence. What are we missing that God has?

Classical theology defined God as “Ipsum Esse Subsistens”, self- sufficient being. Only God does not need anything outside of Self in order to come into existence and remain in existence. Everything else, including every human person and humanity itself, needs someone or something outside of itself to be born and to stay in existence. Alone, all by ourselves, we lack a substance, a meaning, and a goodness that we’re powerless to give ourselves. Alone we do stand on the brink of nothingness – and, when we’re sensitive and attuned to things, we know it!

And what we lack is what’s inside of God – substance, life, meaning, beauty, goodness, community, love. Only God can give these to us. Classically, for Roman Catholics, God gives them to us through grace; for Protestants, God gives them through justification. Either way, there’s no life, no meaning, and no future outside of this gift.

And though we can deny this to ourselves, our experience belies that. We feel our vulnerability, our mortality, our powerlessness in every breath we take. We can’t give ourselves life and we can’t even protect ourselves in the life we’re living. Nobody is invulnerable.

No matter our achievements, no matter how strong our self-image, no matter how blessed we are in body, mind, and possessions, in the end, we’re all insubstantial – and we feel it!. We aren’t Ipsum Esse Subsistens.

We can’t give ourselves life, meaning, love, immortality; and, when we feel this, we’re opened, soul, mind, body, to the gift of life and salvation that can only come from God. God can give to us what we can’t give to ourselves.

Reflections on Death

November 6, 2005

None of us likes to think about death, and that isn’t necessarily bad. Our every heartbeat blocks out death, pushes it away, and keeps us focused on living. That’s nature and God working. And this denial of death stems too from the fact that, in the end, we don’t die, don’t become extinct, but move on to deeper life. At some level, we already know that, sense it, feel it, and live life in the face of it. To want to think about death can be as much a sign of depression or illness as of depth. Pushing away thoughts of death is normally a sign of health.

But there are times when faith asks to look death in the eye. Classically, the churches have asked us to do that during the month of November when, at least in the Northern hemisphere, we see a lot of death going on in nature and we see light itself diminishing as the days grow shorter and there is less and less sunlight. The Book of Maccabees says that it’s a healthy thing to pray for the dead and the church tells us that, every so often, it’s healthy too to think about death, both by remembering those who have died and by contemplating the reality and certainty of our own deaths. Death and taxes, Mark Twain assured us, are a certainty for everyone.

But how to think about death? Where is that thin line between contemplating the mystery of death and falling into morbidity, anxiety, and false guilt about being alive and healthy?

Honest prayer can help us walk that tightrope and honest prayer is what we do when we can bring ourselves naked before God, unprotected by what we do, by what we own, by what we have achieved, and by anything else we have to fend off loneliness, fear, and death. In honest prayer we can be deep without being morbid.

But we can also be helped in this by the giants of our faith who have stared death in the eye and have tried to share with us what that feels like. I recommend especially C.S. Lewis and Karl Rahner.

For one perspective, I recommend Lewis’ book, The Great Divorce, which is one of the finest and most readable treatises ever written on Christian death and the afterlife. He comes at it as an Anglican, but is equally sympathetic to both the Protestant and the Roman Catholic traditions. He stresses the continuity between this life and the next and sets this into a wonderful theology of God, grace, and the communion of saints.

From the Roman Catholic tradition, I recommend Karl Rahner. Unlike C.S. Lewis, Rahner stresses the discontinuity between this life and the next, suggesting a much greater dissimilarity than is imagined by Lewis: “It seems to me that the models and schemes people use to try and explain eternal life in general don’t fit the radical rupture that nevertheless comes with death.” We “dress up” eternal life, he says, with images familiar to us, but “the ineffable outrageousness of the absolute Godhead in person falling stark naked into our narrow creaturehood is not being perceived authentically.”

Then in one, vintage sentence (280 words long) he leaves us this image:

“When the angels of death have swept all the worthless rubbish that we call our history out of the rooms of our consciousness (though of course the true reality of our actions in freedom will remain); when all the stars of our ideals, with which we ourselves in our own presumption have draped the heaven of our own lived lives, have burned out and are now extinguished; when death has built a monstrous, silent void, and we have silently accepted this in faith and hope as our true identity; when then our life so far, however long it has been, appears only as a single, short explosion of our freedom that previously presented itself to us stretched out in slow motion, an explosion in which question has become answer, possibility reality, time eternity, and freedom offered freedom accomplished; when then we are shown in the monstrous shock of a joy beyond saying that this monstrous, silent void, which we experience as death, is in truth filled with the originating mystery we call God, with God’s light and with God’s love that received all things and gives all things; and when then out of this pathless mystery the face of Jesus, the blessed one, appears to us and this specific reality is the divine surpassing of all that we truly assume regarding the past-all-graspness of the pathless God -then, then I don’t want actually to describe anything like this, but nevertheless, I do want to stammer some hint of how a person can for the moment expect what is to come: by experiencing the very submergence that is death as already the rising of what is coming.”

Death is a journey into the unknown, the ineffable, the unimaginable, the unspeakable – unspeakable loneliness, ineffable embrace, unimaginable joy.