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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The heart has its reasons, even for turning cold.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s “finished”?

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

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

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

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

So what’s “finished”?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Anthropologists tell us that men and women have different congenital flaws. For men, it would seem that the flaw that’s more particularly encoded in our DNA is betrayal. We have a history of running away when things get tough, of not keeping promises, and of selling out in the face of temptation.

It’s not that women are immune from this, but as even the gospels highlight, men have a history here. In Mark’s gospel, for instance, all the men betray Jesus, without a single exception. Indeed, in his gospel, the final words that Peter, the head of the church, speaks are words of betrayal: “I do not know the man!”

Here’s how the gospels describe that betrayal: “Then Peter said, `I swear that I am telling the truth! May God punish me if I am not! I do not know the man.’ … At once, while he was still speaking, a rooster crowed. Jesus turned around and looked straight at Peter, and Peter remembered what the Lord had said to him, `Before the rooster crows tonight, you will deny me three times.’ And Peter went out and wept bitterly.”

What’s in this image?

A number things: First, Peter’s initial brash, over-confidence. Just prior to this betrayal, he had sworn that he would never betray Jesus, even if everyone else did. Second, he made this promise in utter sincerity, with deep love in his heart, fully intending on keeping his word. Third, he broke his promise quickly in the face of adversity. Fourth, perhaps most important, he wept at his sin when Jesus looked at him with love.

What’s to be learned from this? First, that sincerity and good will aren’t enough to keep us from sinning. Sin isn’t always the product of malice or hypocrisy. More often, we sin out of simple weakness.

Moreover, because we sin out of weakness, we have a tendency to rationalize: “It wasn’t so bad! There was nothing I could have done!” But sin is still sin, betrayal is still betrayal, and the damage we do is still real, even when we act out of weakness. Peter didn’t want to betray Jesus, he just wasn’t strong enough not to. And that’s generally too our problem when we don’t hold out against temptation, whether it be to bitterness, sex, gossip, slander, jealousy, hatred, or anything else we sell out to or run away from in order to get through an ordeal, a loneliness, an insecurity, a fear, a season, or a night. Even when we give in out of weakness we’re still betraying, still (in essence) saying: “I do not know the man!”

But while sincerity doesn’t necessarily save us from sin, it does help us hear the rooster crow. As long as we remain sincere, we will soon enough admit our sin and we will know too that God still looks on us with love, even in betrayal.

A very important part of this picture of Peter betraying Jesus is the look that Peter sees on Jesus’ face when he catches his eye in the crowd. The text tells us that “Jesus turned around and looked straight at Peter.” Whenever the gospels tell us that Jesus “looked at” someone, generally that means that he looked at the person with love and understanding, with a look that blesses. What Peter saw on Jesus’ face (in Jesus’ ultimate moment of humiliation and Peter’s ultimate moment of betrayal) was not, as we would expect, a look of disappointment and reproach (“How could you!”) but something Peter had likely never seen or experienced before in his whole life, namely, a look the holds you in warmth and understanding even when you sin and betray. No doubt this was a defining moment in Peter’s understanding of Jesus because, at that moment, he experienced something that releases a different kind of tears, unconditional love.

The tears we weep when we are loved despite weakness are very different from the ones we weep when we feel judged and humiliated by our weakness. To experience love when we don’t deserve it is the one grace that cleanses us of sin and gives us strength against sin.

The image of Peter betraying Jesus teaches us that we are loved sinners, all of us. Our sincerity and good-hearts don’t keep us from sinning. We still betray, break our word, and too easily give in to temptation. But, that’s not the whole story: What’s shown here too is that God doesn’t give us that look of disappointment and disapproval that we’re all too familiar with when we do this. God still looks at us with understanding and continues to hold us solidly in love and blessing.

However we struggle with both sides of this, namely, to admit we’re sinners and to recognize that we’re still loved. But appropriating both of these truths is the key to knowing Jesus and knowing ourselves.

As John Shea says: The false self will crack when the rooster crows. There many ways to wake up!

[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.

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.

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.