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.

Living With Fear and Timidity

October 30, 2005

The movie, A River Runs Through It, opens with a young man telling us about his brother, whom he describes as “a beautiful person, who was never afraid of anything!”

That description certainly wouldn’t fit most of us. We’re afraid of a lot of things, too many things. Our lives are almost always coloured by fear. What are we afraid of?

Most everything: At a more obvious level, we fear for our physical safety but, more deeply, we fear for our emotional safety. We’re afraid of getting hurt, of having what’s precious to us violated, of being misunderstood, of being rejected, of ending up alone and lonely, of looking bad, of disappointing others, of being perceived as not being good and generous, of having our inadequacies revealed, and of simply not being good enough in body, soul, intelligence, and virtue.

But there’s also a certain beauty in that. A River Runs Through It depicts the beauty of a life without fear, but there is also a special beauty in a life with fear. We saw that, for instance, in Princess Diana. At her death there was a stunning outpouring of affection from all over the world. Why?

The reasons were deeper than first meet the eye. It wasn’t just her physical beauty that made her “the peoples’ princess”. Many people are physically beautiful, aren’t much loved, and their beauty triggers more envy than affection. What made Diana special was precisely the fact that she had obvious weaknesses tied to her beauty. She lacked self- confidence, was too self-effacing, was too anxious to please, and was forever afraid that she wasn’t good enough. That vulnerability marked her and gave her a rare, emotional beauty.

Conversely, not everyone who lives without fear is beautiful. Sometimes we look at those who have an enviable self-confidence and wish, for everyone’s sake, that they were a little more insecure. Self- confidence too easily expresses itself in self-centredness, in lack of sensitivity, in aggressiveness, in a sense of entitlement, and in exhibitionism. Lack of fear can be beautiful but it can also be ugly and boorish. What we see in some people who fear nothing is the insensitivity of the person who carelessly and thoughtlessly tosses a priceless Rembrandt off the back of a truck, laughing, (What’s everyone worried about?) even as what’s precious is being ruined.

But, even so, fear is a bad thing. Jesus makes that plain. Our light, he tells us, is not meant to be kept under a tub; it’s meant to shine forth. Fear inhibits our light from shining. Simply put, too often we are so afraid of telling others that we love them (for fear of being misinterpreted) that we go through life too-timidly, too rarely expressing our love, affection, and gratitude. Sooner timidity than misunderstanding.

So Jesus constantly tells us to not be afraid. His very mission is to liberate us from fear. When we are too sensitive, too timid, too fearful, and too self-effacing, too much of what is best in us stays inside, light under a bushel basket, and everyone, our loved ones, the world, the gospel, and we, ourselves, are short-changed.

Nelson Mandela, in his inaugural address, said: “There is nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everybody, and, as we let our light shine, we unconsciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

A strong self-confidence and lack of fear can, indeed, be a beautiful gift to the world. We see this in people like Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, John Paul II, Martin Luther King, Jean Vanier. But, in them, and this is the secret, that self-confidence is linked to enough maturity so that their lack of fear becomes a beautiful and life-giving thing.

But most of us aren’t so mature, and most of us aren’t so self- confident. So what do we do?

Some years ago I was counselling a young priest who was generous to a fault, possessed rare depth, was scrupulously faithful in his moral life, was a gifted healer of souls, and was much loved by his parishioners. But he also was over-sensitive, lacked self-confidence, was self-effacing to a fault, and often hovered at the edges of clinical depression.

After listening to his litany of fears and self-doubts one day, I told him: “Because of your sensitivities you will always struggle, but at least you’ll never be a jerk!”

Until you and I reach the maturity of a Nelson Mandela, Mother Theresa, John Paul II, Martin Luther King, or Jean Vanier, perhaps it’s not a bad thing, like Princess Diana and this young priest, to struggle with some fears, timidities, inhibitions, and depressions. That way, you’ll never be a jerk – and there’s a special beauty in that too.

Speaking our Truth from a Deeper Place

October 23, 2005

“Don’t be a liberal or a conservative, but a woman or man of faith!” Jim Wallis coined that phrase and we would all be more charitable and Christian if we took it to heart.

The importance of what’s being said here stuck me recently as I read an interview in Sojourners magazine. A young woman, an Episcopalian priest, was being interviewed. She had just published a book with a very strong message challenging us all to be more respectful of nature and was about to set off on a book-promotion tour. The interviewer asked her whether she was nervous because she had written the book in San Francisco, known for its liberalism, but would now be setting off for less-liberal locales, the bible-belt, and other places not known to be as liberal as San Francisco.

Her response contains a lesson: In effect, she said, “I’m not worried. Most people are sincere and I find that, among sincere people, there isn’t any spiteful resistance to God’s word. People resist ideology (and they should) but my experience is that, if you preach God’s word and not liberal or conservative ideology, most sincere people will hear you!”

That’s a valuable admonition.

We must be careful, irrespective of our ideological temperament and leanings, to be, first of all, woman and men of faith, long before we’re liberals or conservatives. We must learn to speak and minister from faith and from the gospel and not from some liberal or conservative ideal.

It is dangerous and counterproductive, at least in the area of faith, theology, and preaching, to self-define. Anybody who presents himself or herself as, before all else, a liberal or a conservative, a social justice advocate, a defender of the tradition, a feminist, an advocate for family values, a gay-rights advocate, an ecologist, a defender of the faith, or puts himself or herself under any label that carries the baggage of liberal or conservative ideology will experience, even before he or she speaks, a fierce resistance (most of which is not resistance to truth or to the gospel but is, rightly, resistance to ideology).

Both liberals and conservatives carry important truths and defend values that must, in the name of God and truth, be defended. But those truths and values are generally too encrusted within liberal or conservative ideology to be palatable to anyone of the opposite persuasion.

For example, if I present myself as a liberal, a feminist, an ecologist, a gay-rights activist, or as a social-justice advocate, roughly half of the population everywhere will already be defensive and suspicious of my truth, motives, and agenda, long before I get to speak a word.

The same is true if I present myself as a conservative, a traditionalist, an advocate for conservative values, or as someone who, above all else, is concerned with proper doctrine, boundaries, safety, and order.

Roughly half the population everywhere will conclude that I have nothing of value to say to them, long before I’ve even had a chance to speak. Why?

Because, in both cases, whether I present myself as a liberal or a conservative, the general experience has been that because of this self-definition, I will be selective in my sympathies, intolerant of those who think differently, incapable of genuinely appreciating what the other side has to say, and that I will use authority or intellectual intimidation to shut down debate and will be mean-spirited towards those whom I perceive as less enlightened or less orthodox than I.

But, and this is the point, if, before all else, I define myself as a woman or man of faith, my first message will not be family values, feminism, ecology, doctrine, tolerance, boundaries, the tradition, the breaking of unhealthy fear and superstition, or even a pro-life or pro- choice position in the abortion debate.

My first message rather will be that: “Everyone is equal in God’s eyes, irrespective of race, gender, or sexual orientation.” “Family, heterosexual marriage, and chastity are key to the survival of the human race.” “Nature may never be abused, but must be properly respected.” “The truth sets us free and we must have the courage to face this.” “Our compassion and embrace, humanly and ecclesially, must imitate the non-selective compassion and embrace of God, who loves everyone equally on this planet.” “Not all religion is equal and faith asks us to commit to a concrete religious family.” “God has revealed definitive religious truth historically and we are wise to look into the wells of our religious traditions rather than try to come to God simply through private experience.” “Jesus came to free us from fear, not to make us more afraid.” “Both the life of the unborn child and the freedom of a pregnant woman must be morally defended.”

Sincere people, on both sides of the ideological fault-line, will not argue with, nor resist, those truths and in those truths we find the truth of both the liberal and the conservative.

Our Struggle For Community

October 16, 2005

We all ache for community and tend to be dissatisfied with what we’re actually experiencing in our lives. Everywhere, it seems, people are looking for community and complaining that their families, churches, and workplaces are disappointing them.

There is a general frustration about community, at every level. Today, it seems, community everywhere is in trouble. Marriages, families, religious communities, associations, and even business and civic communities that sustain themselves over the long-range are the exception more than the rule. As well, many people have tried to start new communities and in almost every case have failed, despite much initial passion and good will.

Why is that? Why, when we so desperately want community, do we find it so hard to achieve and sustain?

Perfection is the enemy of the good and what we over-idealize will invariably disappoint and frustrate us. And that’s exactly our difficulty with community – with marriage, with family, with church, with friendship, with civic community. Simply put, we’re often unable to sustain community because we have false notions and false expectations as to what constitutes it. An overly romantic notion so much clouds our vision that we rarely even recognize real community when we see it. Allow me an example:

Several years ago, I was serving as spiritual director to a very idealistic young man. He was a member of a religious order, but spent a lot of energy complaining about his particular community. Constant was his gripe that there wasn’t enough intimacy within the community, that people didn’t share deeply enough with each other, that the real issues were never addressed, and that he felt lonely and isolated.

No doubt there was some truth in this. Active religious communities tend to be addicted to their work and ministry and they often sacrifice the needs of the community to the demands of ministry. As well, at a point, all communities (including marriages) struggle with real, heart-to- heart, sharing. Tiredness, fear, distrust, private wound, and every kind of reticence conspire together to generally keep the table conversations focused more on sports, the weather, current events, fashion, and entertainment than on what’s really on our minds. I didn’t doubt the substance of this young man’s complaint.

But, at one stage, worn out by his complaining, his community sent him to a psychologist. After delivering his regular litany of complaints, the young man was surprised at the psychologist’s reaction. Instead of re-enforcing his theories about how dysfunctional the community was, the psychologist told him, gently but firmly: “What you’re looking for you won’t find inside a religious community because what you’re looking for is a lover – not a religious community!”

This is a parable, of sorts. It points out what real community is by flushing out some of the things that it isn’t. What is community?

There are many kinds of community – of which being lovers is in fact one kind. However community as Christ defined it – Christian community, apostolic community, life together in the Holy Spirit – is, as this psychologist made clear, something quite other than what the romantic imagination spontaneously imagines. What is it? Before defining it positively, we need first to dissociate it from some of the things with which it is commonly confused.

By a certain via negativa, one might say that Christian community is not:

Mutual compatibility, like-minded individuals gathering together on the basis of liking each other.

Huddling together in fear or loneliness, lonely or scared people ganging up against a cold and hostile world.

People rallying around a common task or cause, people brought together because they share a common passion or ideal.

Family, understood in the romantic sense, people brought together through psycho-sexual attraction.

Family, understood in the biological sense, people bonded through blood.

A common roof, people brought together because they live in the same house, eat at the same table, or sleep in the same bed.

None of these are bad and each in fact makes for a certain kind of community. However none of them touches the essence of Christian community. What is that?

Simply put, it is a gathering around the person of Christ in a way that displaces our selfishness so that we begin to live in a charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, constancy, mildness, and chastity that make it possible to precisely live with each other beyond differences, fears, and incompatibilities.

The kind of bond that withstands the test of time within marriage, family, religious community, civic community, and friendship, is ultimately rooted in something beyond liking each other, huddling in loneliness, working for a common cause, feeling erotic attraction for each other, or sharing a blood-line, a neighbourhood, a house, or even a bed.

Community means staying together even when we don’t like each other, aren’t attracted to each other, and struggle with hopeless differences. Only when we understand and accept this will romance, a beautiful thing in itself, cease being an obstacle to real community.

Life’s Key Question

October 9, 2005

Several years ago, at retreat, an elderly monk shared with me about the ups and downs of 50 years of monastic life. At the end of this he said to me: “Give me some hints on how I should prepare to die! What should I do to make myself more ready for death?”

The heaviness of such a question is enough to intimidate a person with a spirituality deeper than my own, and when it’s asked by someone twice your age whose heart seems already deeply charitable, faith-filled, and wonderfully-mellowed through years of quiet prayer, then perhaps the best answer is silence. I wasn’t so naive as to offer him much by way of an answer, his trust in me notwithstanding.

But it’s a good question. How do we prepare to die? How do we live so that death does not catch us unaware? What do we do so that we don’t leave this world with too much unfinished business?

The first thing that needs to be said is that anything we do to prepare for death should not be morbid or be something that distances or separates us from life and each other. We don’t prepare for death by withdrawing from life. The opposite is true. What prepares us for death, anoints us for it, in Christ’s phrase, is a deeper, more intimate, fuller entry into life. We get ready for death by beginning to live our lives as we should have been living them all along. How do we do that?

John Shea once suggested that the kingdom of heaven is open to all who are willing to sit down with all. That’s a one-line caption for discipleship. In essence, the single condition for going to heaven is to have the kind of heart and the kind of openness that makes it possible for us to sit down with absolutely anyone and to share life and a table with him or her. It that is true, then the best way we can prepare to die is to begin to stretch our hearts to love ever wider and wider, to begin to love in a way that takes us beyond the natural narrowness and discrimination that exists within our hearts because of temperament, wound, timidity, ignorance, selfishness, race, gender, religion, circumstance, and our place in history.

We prepare to die by pushing ourselves to love less narrowly. In that sense, readying ourselves for death is really an ever-widening entry into life.

John Powell, in his book, Unconditional Love, tells the story of a young student who was dying of cancer. In the final stages of his illness, he came to see Powell and said something to this effect: “Father, you once told us something in class that has made it easier for me to die young. You said: `There are only two potential tragedies in life, and dying young isn’t one of them. These are the two tragedies: If you go through life and don’t love and if you go through life and you don’t tell those whom you love that you love them.’

When the doctors told me that I my cancer was terminal, I realized how much I’ve been loved. I’ve been able to tell my family and others how much they mean to me. I’ve expressed love. People ask me: `What’s it like being 24 years old and dying?’ I tell them: `It’s not so bad. It beats being 50 years old and having no values!'”

We prepare ourselves for death by loving deeply and by expressing love, appreciation, and gratitude to each other. Jesus says as much. When the woman at Bethany poured an entire bottle of expensive ointment on his feet and dried his feet with her hair, he commented on her lavish expression of affection and gratitude by saying: “She has anointed me for my impending death.” What he meant should not be piously misinterpreted. He wasn’t saying: “Since I’m soon to die, let her waste this ointment!” He was saying rather: “When I come to die, it’s going to be easier because, at this moment, I am truly tasting life. It’s easier to die when one has been, even for a moment, fully alive.”

What makes it difficult for us to die, beyond all the congenital instincts inside of us that want us to live, is not so much fear of the afterlife or even fear that their might not be an afterlife. What makes it hard to die is that we have so much life yet to finish and we finish it by loving more deeply and expressing our love more freely.

Had that old monk cornered Jesus and asked him the same question he asked me, I suspect, Jesus might have said: Prepare for death by living more fully now. Work at loving more deeply, less discriminately, more affectionately, and more gratefully. Tell those close to you that you love them and death will never catch you like a thief in the night.”

Our Inability to Cast Out Demons

October 2, 2005

The older I get, the more I realize that there is a huge difference between speaking effectively, perhaps even brilliantly, and actually changing anybody’s life. It’s one thing to impress a person, move a heart, inspire someone, reveal the depth of some truth, help someone to understand himself or herself more deeply, or to teach and minister in a way that brings admiration. No small thing. But it’s something else, something much more difficult, to move someone in such a way that he or she actually changes and gives up the habits, compensations, addictions, indulgences, fears, and angers that stand between him and her and the joy of being a saint.

Even when we are at our best, we are still not very effective in helping each other better our lives. In effect, people listen to us and say: “You’re wonderful, but this isn’t going to change my life!” Like John the Baptist, we are able to point out the way, but not able to help affect the transformation that’s needed for someone to actually change his or her way of life. That’s why there’s a lot more admiration than transformation inside religious and moral circles.

And that’s true too in the world at large. In the arts, politics, and academia, we’ve become masters at everything, except actually creating new beauty and actually bettering community. We’re brilliant at showing what’s wrong, but far less effective in actually improving the situation. If we’re honest, we can all truthfully speak these words (which John Shea puts into the John the Baptist’s mouth): “I can denounce a king, but I cannot enthrone one. I can strip an idol of its power, but I cannot reveal the true God. I can wash the soul in sand, but I cannot dress it in white. I can devour the word of the Lord like wild honey, but I cannot lace his sandal. I can condemn the sin, but I cannot bear it away.” Why? Why is our power less than our knowledge? Why, when we know so much, are we so powerless to change things?

Largely, I believe, it’s because our own lives aren’t integral enough. We aren’t saints, pure and simple, and only saints have the right to actually ask someone to change his or her life and have some power to affect that transformation. Why?

There’s a story about a troubled mother who had a daughter who was addicted to sweets. One day she approached Gandhi, explained the problem to him and asked whether he might talk to the young girl. Gandhi replied: “Bring your daughter to me in three weeks time and I will speak to her.” After three weeks, the mother brought her daughter to him. He took the young girl aside and spoke to her about the harmful effects of eating sweets excessively and urged her to abandon her bad habit. The mother thanked Gandhi for this advice and then asked him: “But why didn’t you speak to her three weeks ago?” Gandhi replied: “Because three weeks ago, I was still addicted to sweets.”

And there’s the lesson: We must do more than just point out the right road to others, we must be on that road ourselves. For this reason, the integrity of our private lives and private morals, down to the smallest detail, is the real power behind our words.

In her autobiography, The Story of a Soul, Therese of Lisieux tells how she sensed that she could help others, across time and distance, by being part of the silent, hidden, moral heart within the Body of Christ. Hidden away in an obscure convent, she sensed she could help people outside those walls, and help the whole world, by being part of a hidden moral heart. And so she bore down in her private life and focused on making every action, no matter how small, pure and loving, believing that some universal power would flow forth from this private, hidden goodness.

How right she was! We know that from our own lives. Anyone who has had the right and power to ask us to make a real sacrifice has had that right and power only because he or she was inviting us into a moral reality that he or she was already living, at least essentially. Conversely, we’ve all experienced how feeble is the invitation from someone who speaks the right things, but doesn’t live them.

In the gospels, we see an instance where Jesus’ disciples are perplexed because they’re powerless to cast out a demon. When they ask Jesus about it, he says: “This kind is cast out only by prayer and fasting.” That cryptic phrase contains more than we suspect.

The power to baptise with fire and spirit, that is, the power to actually change someone’s life for the better, unlike the power to simply enlighten, issues forth only from a heart that is essentially pure, moral, and integral because only that kind of heart can cast out the real demons.

Proofs for the Existence of God

September 25, 2005

Can you prove that God exists? Some of the greatest philosophers believed that it can be done. Anselm, Aquinas, Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, Hartshorne, among others, all tried to do it.

They used different approaches. Some, like Thomas Aquinas, tried to try to prove God’s existence by arguing that the existence and design of the universe necessitate a God as its creator and ground.

One of Aquinas’ proofs, for example, goes this way: Imagine you’re walking along a road, see a stone lying on the ground, and someone asks you: “Who put that stone there?” You can easily answer that it’s always been there. Not much suggests that this is anything beyond brute nature. However, imagine you’re walking along that same road and you see a watch lying on the ground, still ticking, still keeping time. Could you still answer that it has always been there? Not so easily this time. Its intelligent design suggests that it’s not simply the result of blind nature, but the product of some intelligent designer, just as the fact that it’s still ticking makes it clear that it hasn’t always been there.

Aquinas then takes this image and extends it to the whole universe. Its intelligent design (for example, the central nervous system and brain structure of the human being) is a billion times more complex in terms of intelligent design than is a wristwatch and the fact that it’s running down tells us that can’t always have been here. Some intelligent designer must have helped fashion it and it must have had a beginning in time.

Descartes, Leibnitz, Spinoza, and Anselm have a different argument. Theirs goes this way: If God is possible, then God exists, because it is impossible to have a possible God. Since God is possible, God exists!

That may sound almost silly to the ordinary mind, but this peculiar little equation, expressed in different ways, has intrigued some of greatest minds on the planet, hinting that the rest of us, ordinary mortals, are perhaps missing something of its meaning.

The British philosopher, Frederick Copleston, in a famous debate with Bertrand Russell, once put all of these arguments into one equation: If the universe makes sense, then God exists. Russell, an atheist, actually conceded this truth, but then argued that the universe doesn’t make sense but is simply a brute, accidental fact that cannot be meaningfully explained.

What’s to be said about these “proofs”? Do they prove anything?

These are not mathematical or scientific equations and therefore don’t prove anything in that fashion. Nor are they arguments that compel a sceptic to believe in God. But that doesn’t mean they’re meaningless either. Their value is that they point to something deeper, beyond mathematics and science, something below the surface that invites you either to trust or doubt, to believe that it all makes sense or is meaningless. Their power is a moral power: Like how do you know if someone loves you? How do you know you can trust somebody? What gives you the feeling that life makes sense?

Karl Rahner once suggested his own proofs for the existence of God. For him, we taste God in certain experiences and these experiences ultimately imprint us with the belief that the universe makes sense, that we have sufficient reason to love and trust, that there’s a world beyond this one, and that there’s a God. Here’s a paraphrase of his argument:

Have you ever remained silent, though you wanted to defend yourself, though you were treated unfairly? Have you ever forgiven, though you received no reward for it and people took it for granted? Have you ever obeyed, not because you had to or else there would be some unpleasantness, but simply because of some mysterious, silent, unfathomable reality inside of yourself? Have you ever made a sacrifice, without receiving thanks, without recognition, without even feeling satisfaction inside? Have you ever been absolutely lonely and, within that, had to make up your mind to do something purely for the sake of conscience, from a place beyond where you can describe, from a place where you are deeply alone, and where you know you are making a decision for which the responsibility will be yours alone, always and eternally? Have you ever tried to love when no wave of enthusiasm was carrying you along, where you could no longer confuse your own needs with love? Have you ever persevered without bitterness in doing your duty when that duty looked like death, felt like it was killing you, looked stupid to those outside, and left you helpless to not envy those who have chosen a path with more pleasure? Have you ever been good to someone from whom no echo of gratitude or comprehension came back and where you weren’t even rewarded with the feeling that you had been good and unselfish?

If you’ve ever had any of these experiences, then you’ve experienced God and know that there’s a deeper ground beneath the one on which you walk.

On Being Jealous of God’s Generousity

September 18, 2005

“The cock will crow at the breaking of your own ego – there are lots of ways to wake up!”

John Shea gave me those words and I understood them a little better recently as I stood in line at an airport: I’d checked in for a flight, approached security, saw a huge line-up, and accepted the fact that it would take at least 40 minutes to get through it.

I was alright with the long wait and moved patiently in the line – until, just as my turn came, another security crew arrived, opened a second scanning machine, and a whole line-up of people, behind me, who hadn’t waited the forty minutes, got their turns almost immediately. I still got my turn as I would have before, but something inside of me felt slighted and angry: “This wasn’t fair! I’d been waiting for forty minutes and they got their turns at the same time as I did!” I’d been content waiting, until those who arrived later didn’t have to wait at all. I hadn’t been treated unfairly, but some others had been luckier than I’d been.

That experience taught me something, beyond the fact that my heart isn’t always huge and generous. It helped me understand something about Jesus’ parable concerning the workers who came at the 11th hour and received the same wages as those who’d worked all day and what is meant by the challenge that is given to those who grumbled about the unfairness of this: “Are you envious because I’m generous?”

Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness?

You bet! And ultimately that sense of injustice, of envy that someone else caught a break is a huge stumbling block to our happiness. Why? Because something in us reacts negatively when it seems that life is not making others pay the same dues as we’re paying.

In the gospels we see an incident where Jesus goes to the synagogue on a Sabbath, stands up to read, and quotes a text from Isaiah – except he doesn’t quote it fully but omits a part. The text (Isaiah 61,1-2) would have been well known to his listeners and it describes Isaiah’s vision of what will be the sign that God has finally broken into the world and irrevocably changed things. And what will that be?

For Isaiah, the sign that God is now ruling the earth will be good news for the poor, consolation or the broken-hearted, freedom for the enslaved, grace abundant for everyone, and vengeance on the wicked. Notice though, when Jesus quotes this, he leaves out the part about vengeance. Unlike Isaiah, he doesn’t say that part of our joy will be seeing the wicked punished.

In heaven we will be given what we’re owed and more (unmerited gift, forgiveness we don’t deserve, joy beyond imagining) but, it seems, we will not be given that catharsis we so much want here on earth, the joy of seeing the wicked punished.

The joys of heaven will not include seeing Hitler suffer. Indeed the natural itch we have for strict justice (“An eye for an eye”) is exactly that, a natural itch, something the gospels invite us beyond. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness and thereby prevents us from entering heaven where God, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, embraces and forgives without demanding a pound of flesh for a pound of sin.

We know we need God’s mercy, but if grace is true for us, it has to be true for everyone; if forgiveness is given us, it must be given everybody; and if God does not avenge our misdeeds, God must not avenge the misdeeds of others either. Such is the logic of grace and such is the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves.

Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about vindication, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder.

It is not surprising that, in some of the great saints, we see a theology bordering on universalism, namely, the belief that in the end God will save everyone, even the Hitlers. They believed this not because they didn’t believe in hell or the possibility of forever excluding ourselves from God, but because they believed that God’s love is so universal, so powerful, and so inviting that, ultimately, even those in hell will see the error of their ways, swallow their pride, and give themselves over to love. The final triumph of God, they felt, will be when the devil himself converts and hell is empty.

Maybe that will never happen. God leaves us free. But, when I, or anyone else, is upset at an airport, at a parole-board hearing, or anywhere else where someone gets something we don’t think he or she deserves, we have to accept that we’re still a long ways from understanding and accepting the kingdom of God.

Acknowledging our own Complexity

September 11, 2005

As a seminarian, I was introduced to the writings of Thomas Aquinas. I was nineteen years old, young for philosophy, and his abstract language befuddled me for a time. But slowly some of what he was saying began to break through and it felt like I was being introduced to myself. I’d always been deeply restless, in every sense of that word, and the grip of that restlessness and its concomitant complexities worried me, leaving me wondering sometimes whether I was normal.

What Aquinas taught me was that everyone feels that way. Fierce restlessness is normal because, as he puts it, “the adequate object of the human intellect and will is Being itself.” What that means is that only one thing can fill in our restlessness, full union with everything and everybody – God, others, the world.

To be satisfied we would have to drink in every experience in the whole world, know everything perfectly, be known by everyone, be in union with God, and, in essence, be making love to the whole world. Anything less leaves us wanting more. And we feel this way not because we’re over-sexed and greedy but simply because we’re normal human beings, half-divine, half-animal, eternal souls, yearning bodies, torn in different directions, lured by greatness, suffocating in dust.

Later I began to read Karl Rahner and he, drawing upon Augustine (“You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you!”) taught me that we’re not restful beings who occasionally get restless, but rather restless beings who occasionally find some rest. In this life, our normal default is not restful, but restless. Knowing this added another little chip to my self-understanding.

Henri Nouwen added a further insight. For him, our biggest moral battle is not the struggle to choose the good, but the struggle to not choose everything else at the same time. We want the good, but we want everything else alongside it.

Reflecting on his own experience, he summarizes the struggle this way: I’d like to be a great saint, but I also want to taste every sensation that sinners get to experience; I’d like to spend time alone in solitude, but I’d also want to be with friends and not miss out on anything; and I’d like to have a simple lifestyle and serve the poor, but I also want a comfortable, well-equipped apartment. Every choice is a painful renunciation and so even choosing what’s good is a complex, trying business.

And it’s helpful to recognize and acknowledge this, not so that we can rationalize our moral lapses, but so that we don’t falsely idealize innocence so as to make it impossible to imitate Jesus and the saints. What’s meant by that?

Sentimentality is the false glorification of innocence. And we do that all the time in name of holiness. One of the ways we do this is by refusing to admit complexity and sexuality into holiness. For most of us, for example, it’s impossible to see persons we regard as truly holy – Jesus, Mary, Therese of Lisieux, Mother Theresa, John Paul II – as morally complex, sexually struggling, emotionally lonely, chronically tempted, human beings. And this makes them impossible to imitate. They’re admired but not imitated because they’re over-idealized and seen as different, without sex, without complexity, without the congenital temptations that beset the rest of us. Sadly, this undercuts their real witness. Because of false idealization, what their lives really said becomes so encrusted with over-pious sentimentality that, to the full-blooded, their moral achievement has little to say. They’re seen as creatures of a different kind.

I remember as a boy, sitting in church in our outback community and being told by a wonderful, well-meaning priest that he was pleased to be with us because we were “simple farm-folk whose lives, thank God, weren’t so complicated like those of big city people!” I was young then, naive, thought this a compliment, and then felt myself abnormal, sitting as I was with my private struggles among folks whose lives, we had just been told, were simple, uncomplicated, and free of the punishing restlessness that haunted mine.

But holiness is not to be confused with being uncomplicated or sexless. It’s about the proper ordering of things.

Therese of Lisieux recounts an incident from her childhood. One of her older sisters was getting rid of her toys and brought them in and asked the two youngest children in the family, Therese and her sister, Celine, to each choose one, before she disposed of the rest. Celine, for her part, chose a colourful ball. Therese looked at the basket and simply said: “I choose them all! I want them all!”

And we do too! That’s the real struggle on the road to God and community. We want it all. But that yearning is not a sign of pathology. It’s a sign that we’re emotionally alive, normal, healthy, and still firing on all the cylinders that God gave us.

On Carrying Ecclesial Tension

September 4, 2005

We disagree a lot and are forever frustrated with each other. That’s true in all families, communities, and churches. In this world, there’s no life together without a shadow.

Inside of our churches, we have more than enough things about which to disagree: God, Jesus, church, morality, worship, spirituality, justice, discipleship.

It has never been different: We see major divisions already within scripture itself. The bible does not give us one, clear understanding of God, Jesus, church, eucharist, morality, and discipleship. It gives us a series of understandings, some of which almost seem to contradict each other and some of which had the apostles at odds with each other. Peterand Paul disagreed on a number of things, quite heatedly it seems, and John’s theology of the church and the eucharist is very different than Matthew, Mark, Luke, or Paul. In scripture, we already see many of the tensions and divisions that divide us today.

But this doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re doing something wrong, that sin and infidelity are the problem. Sometimes they are, but not always. Even the great saints didn’t always see eye to eye on everything. There can be legitimate reasons to see things differently. There’s no principle that says that truth, as it is held in the hearts of sincere people, should fit together without friction. And there’s a reason for this.

God, by definition is ineffable, beyond grasp, beyond imagination, and it is a given, a truth beyond dispute, that our understanding of God (and of all the deep mysteries within life) will of necessity have a variety of expressions, none of them adequate to the reality. All the religious expression in the world will still never give adequate expression to God and to Christ, just as all the psychological and aesthetic expressions in the world will never give adequate expression to the mystery of the love that grounds our lives.

That principle, that all our language and concepts are inadequate, is in fact enshrined in church dogma, but has never been properly respected. If we really accepted that our concepts and language are inadequate, we’d more easily accept too the differences, tensions, and disagreements that are inherent in family, church, and community.

But none of us like to live in tension and neither do our church communities. Tension is painful and so the temptation is always to try to resolve it. And this often leads to a resolution that is premature, simplistic, and too much dictated by liberal or conservative ideology.

Thus, if I’m a conservative, my sense will be that things are clear, but get confused because false freedom sets itself against truth and community. My itch will be to resolve tension and differences by appealing to authority, dogma, tradition, law, and rubrics, but without an equal appeal to the complexity of life and individual freedom.

Conversely, if I’m a liberal, my approach to understanding things will be to start from life’s ambiguity rather than from its clarity. My worry will be that complexity and private conscience are not being sufficiently respected and my itch (suffered in the name of conscience, freedom, and the spirit) will be to resolve issues without an equal appeal to tradition, dogma, authority, and law.

Who’s right here? Neither and both.

The conservatives are right to appeal to tradition, authority, dogma, and law. Freedom and sincerity alone are not enough. We need to be reminded of the lessons learned from history, of mistakes already made, of moral imperatives that we’re not free to accept or reject on our own terms, and of the dangers of naive freedom and the unchecked ego.

But the liberals are right too in keeping us aware that human authority, even of the ecclesial kind, is not God and is always inadequate to the task of representing God’s parental hand. There’s a place where everyone stands in conscience, alone, before God, and nobody, not even the church, gets to judge what goes on there. Liberals are right as well in making us uncomfortable every time we believe that we’ve arrived in truth and that our present way of understanding things is sufficient to do justice to the complexity of reality and to God’s understanding of things.

Thus, we need to carry both, the conservative and the liberal understanding of things. There’s an important place both for authority and conscience, dogma and truth’s incapacity to be captured in any one formula, and for the demands of church and the demands of individual freedom. The secret is to respect both, refuse to betray either, and then accept the tension that ensues.

This isn’t be easy. We hate tension. But we must try to carry it because life and truth need both sides of the equation. To quote Karl Rahner: “You must try to bring about the miracle of this double identity over and over again. The sum will never work out. But try for it, over and over again. One of the two on its own is not enough. Only the two together are sufficiently crucifying.”

Moving to a New Job and a new City

August 28, 2005

Never assume that your life is as interesting to others as it is to yourself.

A wise axiom. In the more than twenty years I’ve been writing this column, I have only on rare occasions focused on my own life. But this particular column will be an exception because I have just undergone a major transition and believe it’s helpful for a reader to know at least the broad strokes of the life of the one who stands behind the words he or she is reading.

So what’s happened in my life? I’ve just moved to Texas, the land of George Bush, of staggering distances, of large ranches, of huge oil deposits, of evangelical churches on every corner, of stadiums named after orange juice, of warm hospitality, of over-large beef steaks, of championship basketball, where you’d best learn Spanish if you hope to converse with half of the population, and where you will find, amidst this all, some wonderful Catholic communities.

What’s my new job? I’ve been sent by my community, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, to head up our school here in San Antonio, the Oblate School of Theology. The plan is that I be here for five years.

During that time, I will work mainly as an administrator, going to meetings, working with faculty, helping develop academic programs (particularly in spirituality and missiology), trying to keep harmony among our employees, meeting with seminary rectors, being a liaison with bishops, trying to help our school keep its moorings and its charity in a time of increasing polarization and nastiness inside society and the church, and (though I’m not sure exactly how this is done) even doing some fund-raising. If you can believe this, tomorrow, as part of this new job, I will be blessing golf balls at our annual golf tournament. Hardly the stuff of mystics, but discipleship demands flexibility.

I will, of course, continue to do some teaching (though less than I’d like) and some writing, including this column. I have several books on the boil; one on Secularity (virtually finished), and another, a follow-up to the Holy Longing, which unfortunately won’t see the light of day for another year or so.

What had I been doing? I’ve just finished a six-year term on our General Council in Rome. Like my new job, it too was an administrative position, so the jump to blessing golf balls isn’t as radical as it sounds. I wasn’t exactly teaching advanced mysticism the past six years, but it was important work and it had me dividing my time between two of the world’s most wonderful cities, Rome and Toronto.

Leaving those cities and the friends and colleagues I met there has been the hardest part of this. I’ve never been good at saying good-bye and I’d just got through the worst of grieving Rome when I had to leave Toronto three weeks ago. Moving isn’t easy.

But I’m excited about being in San Antonio and have always enjoyed the opportunity inherent in going to a new place and meeting new people. Painful as it is to have to move, it’s also a graced-opportunity because we meet new people and every person we allow into our live makes us richer.

Moving means saying good-bye, but it also means saying hello. Moreover persons we’ve had to say good-bye to don’t leave us. We carry them with us, as part of us, as part of who we are and what we bring to our new situation. When we stand before new people in a new place we stand there not as persons who have come out of a vacuum, but as men and women formed in heart, soul, mind, and body by that nexus of family and friendships out of which we’ve come.

What we bring to a new situation is very much the people and the things that have touched us in our previous ones. In a real way, we carry family and friends with us as part of who we are and what we do. I can’t imagine either my life or my person today without factoring-in all the persons, friend and foe, I’ve met in the different places I’ve lived: Cactus Lake, Lebret, Battleford, San Francisco, Edmonton, Louvain, Seattle, Oakland, Saskatoon, Rome, Toronto. I shed some tears leaving every one of these places, but now each of them will always be home for me.

Once home, we’ll always find our way back there, even when for all kinds of reasons we have to go far away. That’s true for family and for the friends I’ve made in the various places I’ve lived, or met elsewhere along the way.

I am now in a new place, San Antonio, with a new job, inside a new community, meeting new friends. But my old family and friends, and all those places I’ve lived and worked enroute here, will always be home for me – as will, now, San Antonio, Texas.

When Feeling Down and Out

August 21, 2005

In 1946, with the memory of war still fresh and the ruins of bombed buildings all around him, Karl Rahner preached a series of Lenten sermons in Munich. He reminded the people of the war and their fear:

“Do you remember the nights in the cellar, the nights of deadly loneliness amid the harrowing crush of people? The nights of helplessness, of waiting for a meaningless death? The nights with the lights out, and horror and powerlessness gripping our hearts? When we were just playing at being brave and relaxed? When our own pleasantries and brave expressions sounded so strangely wooden and empty and seemed to have died on us even before they reached the other person? When we just gave up, when we were quiet, when we were just waiting without hope for the end, for death? Alone, powerless, empty.”

Rahner then extends this image, of being “blocked-up” in a cellar, to the way we feel “blocked-up” in our hearts. What’s to be done when we feel like that, lonely, frustrated, our words sounding empty even to ourselves? Here’s his advice:

First, don’t be surprised to feel so lonely and shackled:

“Don’t be shocked at the loneliness and desertedness of your inner prison, which seems to be filled only with powerlessness and hopelessness, with tiredness and emptiness! Don’t be shocked!”

To feel shocked and abnormal at the chaos of our own loneliness and complexity is to not yet have been properly introduced to ourselves. To sometimes feel emptiness and near-despair is normal, a sign of sensitivity and emotional health.

Second, stay inside of that emptiness. Don’t run from it.

The natural temptation is to try to get out of loneliness by plunging ourselves into busyness, distractions, amusements, and social life with the hope of fooling ourselves about our own despair. Part of that too is the tendency to see our emptiness and frustration as a sign that there isn’t any God. Emptiness and chaos can easily cause us to doubt.

But, says Rahner, in this kind of despair we are confusing the true God with the God of our own imaginings. The God of our imaginations, rightly, does not exist. But God is not as we imagine him to be, namely, “the God of earthly security, the God of salvation from life’s disappointments, the God of life insurance, the God who takes care so that children never cry and that justice marches upon the earth, the God who transforms earth’s laments, the God who doesn’t let human love end up in disappointment.” That God doesn’t exist.

Tough words, but true. When we break down, it’s not the real God we despair of, but only God as we imagined him. What we feel in emptiness is not the death of God but rather the space within which God can be born. What loneliness and despair deprive us of is not God, but our illusions about God. The finite, not the infinite, is what’s taken from us.

Rahner goes on to say that, if we stay inside of our loneliness, we eventually become aware that our “emptiness is only a disguise for an intimacy of God’s, that God’s silence, the eerie stillness, is filled by the Word without words, by Him who is above all names, by Him who is all in all. And his silence is telling us that He is here.”

At the end of the day our task is to recognize that God is in the silence, the frustration, the loneliness, the emptiness. Our job is to become aware of this.

We should never be shocked at our own emptiness, nor should we run from it and think that God is dead. God is in the emptiness. But the God who is found there is not God as we imagine Him. The God we find in loneliness and emptiness is the real God, the God that nobody can look at and live because that God is too real, too ineffable, too infinite, too unnameable, too wild, and too much pure fire to be captured in any concepts, words, imaginations, or even feelings. That God, of course, can be met and known; but, this side of eternity, perhaps that God is most easily met precisely when our own words sound flat and empty.

From Depression To Delight

August 14, 2005

It’s not easy to be grown-up and not live in a certain depression. Depression is the disease of the normal person.

But what afflicts most of us is not clinical depression, an illness requiring professional attention, but a certain chronic joylessness. There’s too little delight in our lives.

When we’re not at our best, and many times we aren’t, our mood is almost always coloured by irritation, frustration, jealousy, anger, pettiness, bitterness, and a sense that life isn’t fair. Many is the day when there isn’t a lot of joy in our lives.

However even at our best, our lives still often feel dour, duty-bound, heavy, pressured, sad, and lacking in delight. How often, on any given day, do we suddenly fill with joy at the feel of our own bodies, at the feel of the world, at the feel of friendship, at the feel of faith, at the feel of just being alive, and spontaneously say: “God, it feels good to be alive!” At such a moment we wouldn’t be depressed.

But we can go on for years, be hard working, honest, church going, duty-fulfilling folks, and never experience such a burst of joy. We see this kind of joy mostly in the very young; we need only to walk past a small child who’s just been fed or a kindergarten playground to hear bursts of spontaneous delight and to hear someone shouting to the effect that: “It feels good to be alive!”

How do we recover that?

Too often, as adults, we try to do it by working hard at creating pleasure, enjoyment, and delight in our own lives. We try to crank up joy and delight, meeting life with the attitude: “I’m going to have a good time, whatever the cost!” But what we produce is seldom joy. That’s why, so often, we go home from a party feeling more empty than before going. Many of our attempts at creating joy and delight are really only attempts at keeping depression at bay. Our socializing tends to be forced and compulsive rather than spontaneous and fulfilling. For most adults, excess is a functional substitute for delight.

But, here’s the secret: No matter how hard we try to find delight or joy, we can’t find them. They have to find us, catch us by surprise, blind-side us. Every spirituality or psychology worth its name tells us that joy and delight are always a by-product of something else. What?

They’re by-product of acting like God acts, strange though that sounds. Simply put, when we act like God, we get to feel like God; and when we act petty, we get to feel petty! When we do big-hearted things, we get to feel big-hearted; and when we do small-hearted things, we get to feel small.

Whenever we, in our own small ways, begin to imitate God’s selflessness and graciousness we will begin to feel like God. But how do we do that?

We act like God when we are selfless without resentment, when we give without counting the cost, when we give out of our sustenance rather than out of what we have in excess, and when we give our own lives away so that others, particularly the young, can live.

There’s a wonderful expression of this in the hit musical, Les Miserables, when Jean Val Jean, already an old man, goes to bless the young Marius at the barricades. This young man in fact poses a huge threat in that he will soon take Jean’s adopted daughter away from him. Yet Jean, the prototype of an Elder, goes to bless him. When he arrives at the barricades he finds young Marius asleep, but he also finds him in a situation where his youthful idealism and naivete are likely to lead to his death. And so, as he blesses him, he addresses these words to God: “God on high, hear my prayer … Look at this boy, he is young, he is afraid. … So take my life, let him live! Let me die, let him live!”

This is what it means to act like God. To offer one’s life for another, particularly when the cost is high, and particularly too when that other might not even know what you are doing for him or her and might not be grateful for it.

And this isn’t easy to do. It’s painful, as T.S. Eliot once said, costing not less than everything. But I’m certain that, whatever else Jean Val Jean was feeling after blessing young Marius, he wasn’t depressed. You can be sure that sometime after doing this, Jean Val Jean would have had such a sense of the beauty, preciousness, and the wonder of life that he would have spontaneously uttered: “It feels good to be alive!”

The air we breathe out into the universe is the air we will inhale. That’s the law of karma. When we act like God, we get to feel like God. And God is never depressed.

Keeping Our Loved Ones Connected To The Body Of Christ

August 7, 2005

A friend of mine, in his early forties, is the kind of person you want as a friend. Honest, gracious, generous to a fault, kind-hearted, full of humour, he brings colour and character into a room. But, although he’s loved by many people inside the church, he struggles with the church. Partly it’s indifference, partly it’s lack of faith, partly it’s because of how he perceives the church’s teaching on sex, and partly it’s because he grew up inside a generation that, for whatever reason, was neverproperly initiated into the church. Whatever the reasons, he rarely goes to church and feels himself an outsider to its life.

Until recently he didn’t think much about this. He was young and life was full of opportunities, friends, and things to experience and enjoy. Church and religion didn’t seem important to him.

But now that he’s seen enough of life to recognize some its empty crevices and its incapacity to deliver the happiness he’d hoped for, he’s more humble and even a bit sad about his weak relationship to faith and the church. When we talked about religion recently he simply said: “I’m not sure what I really believe, but, that’s me, that’s where I’m at.” Then, with a note of sadness, he added: “I guess if there’s a heaven, I won’t be part of it.”

Knowing the wonderful gift that he is to so many people, but without turning an eye from his shortcomings, I didn’t hesitate to give him this assurance: “Don’t worry about heaven. You’ll be there! Too many of us love you! A lot of us, church people, including me, won’t accept a heaven that doesn’t have you in it.”

My heaven will include you! Can we say that? Is this wishful thinking? Fanciful thought? Bad theology?

It may be wishful thinking, but it’s not fanciful, or bad theology. It’s part of the miracle, the mystery, and the unimaginable wonder of the incarnation.

As Christians, we believe that God took on flesh in Jesus, but we also believe that this was not just a one-shot, 33-year incursion, of God into human history. The mystery of the incarnation goes on. God is still taking on real flesh inside of us, the community of believers.

Scripture says: “We ARE the Body of Christ on earth.” We’re not a replacement for Jesus’ body, not a representation of it, or even his mystical body. We ARE his body and, as such, are meant to do all the things he did, including the forgiveness of sins and the binding of each other, through love, to the family of God.

Jesus himself gave us this power: “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven. … Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven; whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.”

Those statements, among others, have immense, almost unimaginable, implications. As a family of faith, we continue to give physical flesh to God on earth and so, like Jesus, have the power to forgive and to link anyone who is sincere to the family of God. Simply put, this means that we can link those we love (our children, our siblings, our friends, our colleagues, and anyone who is sincere) to salvation, to heaven, to the family that shares God’s table. We can say to God: “My heaven includes those I love!”

Stated in reverse, if, as members of the Body of Christ, we love someone, that person cannot go to hell unless he or she positively rejects our love and our efforts to connect him or her to the family of God. He or she must, of course, at some point, still make a personal choice to belong, but as long as our love is there, that person is solidly connected to the Body of Christ.

Partly this is mystery but partly we understand it from our experience of love and family. Inside of a family, we do not judge who’s in and who’s out simply by who’s home and at table on a given day. Love understands, forgives, and holds others in union in ways that take into account weakness, hurt, complexity, absence, and even sin. A loving mother knows that the family still includes a given child, even if that person is struggling in ways that don’t allow for him or her to be home and at the family table on a given night. Love binds, looses, forgives, and holds others in union even within the painful contingencies of immaturity, absence, anger, infidelity, and sin.

Every time I write about this, I’m flooded with letters, mostly from people who find it incredulous. Some object because, as they put it: “Only Christ can do this!” Point well taken, but, as scripture says: “We are the body of Christ.” Christ is doing this. More commonly the doubt expresses itself this way: “I’d like to believe this, but, if it’s true, it’s too good to be true!”

That’s simply a description of the incarnation!