“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.

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.”

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.

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.

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.

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.

The religious congregation to which I belong, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, has a long, proud history of sending young men off to faraway lands.

More recently, however, our biggest challenge has not come from those former faraway lands, but from the place where our congregation itself first took its roots, Western Europe and North America. The toughest missionary territory in the world today is secular culture. It’s here where our churches are emptying and greying, where our seminaries and religious houses no longer receive a regular flow of new life, and where our preaching is often ineffective.

With this in mind, two years ago, we, the Oblates, launched a new mission, a pilot-project, to try to re-enter secular culture more deliberately as missionaries, akin to the way we previously used to go off to faraway lands.

Four young men, three priests and one brother, were chosen and sent to England to found this new mission. Two others, a priest and a seminarian, have joined them since. The team took as their setting the Bullring shopping district in central Birmingham, one of the largest shopping plazas in the world.

Before going there, the team spent nearly a year readying themselves. As part of their preparation, they spent some months together in reflection and retreat, pondering, among other things, what they might offer that’s unique, new. While doing this, they looked at a number of efforts that were already being made to be more deliberately missionaries within a secular culture.

What they saw were a number of commendable projects which, each in its own way, had a certain success. But, too often, a given project, despite its goodness and effort, would also be driven by a particular ecclesiology and ethos, which would make for a certain exclusivity in its embrace.

Some projects they examined focused on the sacraments and devotions and drew in a good number of people, including the young. A lot of the activity here happened in churches, in shrines, at pilgrimages, at World Youth Days. The approach here was quite traditional, as was the dress of the missionaries (clerical collars, cassocks, liturgical vestments). The appeal was to the mainstream and the invitation was for persons to make themselves solidly at home inside the institutional church.

Some of the other projects they looked at took a very different approach. Here there was no focus on sacraments and prayer at all, except in rare instances. The missionary venue was not a church, shrine, or pilgrimage, but a secular setting, a drinking bar, a hostel, a coffee house, a drug-laden street corner, a social agency, and the dress of the missionaries was not clerical, but casual, blue jeans, cut-offs, t-shirts. The appeal was not to the mainstream but to those on its edges and the invitation was not so much to make yourself at home in the institutional church as to a prophetic presence at its edges.

Looking at all of this, these young men asked themselves: “Why not both? Why not both sacraments and bars, clerical collars and blue jeans, justice and devotions, the prophetic edge and the institutional church, attention to the margins and to the mainstream? Why not all of these together inside one missionary team and one missionary project?”

What they could offer, they felt, that was new was precisely a wider inclusivity, an ecclesiology that would not force people to make false choices between churches and drinking bars, blue jeans and clerical dress, justice and the devotional life, the institutional and the prophetic. There’s a lesson in that.

“Sing to the Lord a new song!” How might we do that in terms of trying to make Christ credible today inside the secular world? What’s ourold song? What’s missing in what we are presently doing? What can we do that’s new? Haven’t we already tried almost everything imaginable? There are, after all, only so many ways of doing ministry, of trying to preach, of reaching out to those who do not come to church with us. What more can we do?

We can, I submit, learn a lesson from this group of young missionaries in Birmingham, England. Like them, we can strive for a wider ecclesial embrace, respect more people and more things. We can try to hold two worlds together. This would be a new song!

Giving witness to Christ today requires precisely that we build communities that are wide enough to hold our differences. What we need is not a new technique, but a new sanctity; not a cooler dress, but a more inclusive embrace; not some updating of the gospel to make it more acceptable to the world, but a more courageous radiating of its wide compassion; not some new secret that catches peoples’ curiosity, but a way of following Christ that can hold more of the tensions of our world in proper balance so that everyone, irrespective of temperament and ideology, will find themselves better understood and embraced by what we hold most dear.

Every year I write a column on suicide because, among all forms of death, it’s still the one we struggle with the most. How can suicide happen? What makes a person take his or her own life?

Suicide, no doubt, is the most misunderstood of all deaths and leaves behind a residue of questions, guilt, anger, second-guessing, and anxiety which, at least initially, is almost impossible to digest. Even though we know better, we’re still haunted by the feeling that suicide is the ultimate act of despair, a deed that somehow puts one outside the family of humanity, the mercy of God, and (in the past) the church’s burial grounds.

When someone close to us commits suicide we feel both pain and shame. That’s why suicides are often not reported publicly. An obituary is more likely to say that this person “died suddenly”, without specifying the cause of death. This reticence to admit how our loved one died speaks deeply about both the pain and shame that we are left with after the suicide of a loved one. To lose a loved one to death is painful, to lose a loved one to suicide is also disorienting.

What needs to be said about suicide? A number of things need to be re-iterated over and over again:

First, that suicide, at least in most cases, is a sickness, a disease, a terminal illness that takes a person out of life, as does any terminal illness, against his or her will. In essence, suicide is death through emotional cancer, emotional heart attack, emotional stroke. That’s why it’s apt to say that someone is “a victim of suicide”. Suicide is a desperate, if misguided, attempt to end unendurable pain at any cost, akin to throwing oneself through a window and falling to one’s death because one’s clothing is on fire. Suicide is an illness, not a sin.

Next, those left behind when a loved one commits suicide should not unduly second-guess themselves, anxiously examining over and over again what they might have done differently, why they weren’t more present, or how they somehow failed the one who committed suicide. Part of the anatomy of the disease is precisely the pathology of distancing oneself from one’s loved ones so that they cannot be present to the illness. When a loved one commits suicide we can’t help but ask ourselves: “If only I had been there! Why was I absent just on that morning?” But we weren’t there precisely because the person committing suicide did not what us to be there and picked the moment, the venue, and the means precisely with that in mind.

Besides, we’re human beings, not God. People die from accidents and illnesses every day and all the love and attentiveness in the world sometimes cannot not prevent someone we love from dying. Suicide is a sickness and, like cancer, sometimes cannot be cured by any amount of love and care. Knowing this isn’t an excuse to rationalize our failures, but it can give us some consolation in knowing that it wasn’t our neglect or inattentiveness on a given day that led someone we love to suicide.

Finally, we should not have undue worry and anxiety over the eternal fate of our loved ones who commit suicide. Why not?

First, in most cases, as we know, suicide victims have cancerous problems precisely because they are over-sensitive, wounded, too- bruised to be touched, and too raw to have the normal resiliency needed to deal with life. Their problem is not one of pride and strength, but rather of shame and weakness. What drives them to do this act is not the arrogance of a Hitler, but the weakness of an illness.

That’s why we can make a distinction between “falling victim to suicide” and “killing oneself”. The former is done out of illness, the latter is done out of pride. On the surface they might look the same, but there’s an infinite moral distance between being too bruised to continue to touch life and being too arrogant to continue to take one’s place within it.

And God, more than anyone else, understands this. God’s understanding and compassion are much deeper than ours and God’s hands are infinitely gentler than our own. If we, in our imperfect love and limited understanding, have some grasp of this, shouldn’t we be trusting that God, who is perfect love and understanding, is up to the task and that our loved ones are safe in God’s hands and God’s understanding?

Any faith that connects itself to a God worth believing in doesn’t have undue anxiety as to what will happen when God, finally, face to face, meets a bruised, gentle, over-sensitive, wounded, ill, struggling soul. Indeed, we have many scriptural references as to what happens, namely, God, who can descend into any hell we can create, goes straight through our locked doors, enters into the hell of our paranoia, illness, and fear, and gently breathes out peace.