Standing Under the Cross

January 15, 2006

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

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

What’s meant by that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sin and Sadness

January 9, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

An Immune System within the Body of Christ

January 1, 2006

We’ve gone mystically tone-deaf.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Keeping Watch with the Shepherds in Bethlehem

December 18, 2005

“And shepherds were keeping watch in the night!”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Don’t Worship Your Emotions

December 11, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Blessed by Pagan Friends

December 4, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Cataclysms of the Heart

November 27, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Litmus Test for being Christian

November 20, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Feeling God in Vulnerability

November 13, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

What does that mean?

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

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

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

But what does that mean?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Reflections on Death

November 6, 2005

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.