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.

Nothing is more evident than the existence of God – and nothing is more obscure. God is everywhere and yet it’s virtually impossible to imagine how God exists. Why?

If babies in the womb could talk, they could help us with this. A baby inside the womb cannot see its own mother or even imagine its mother’s existence not because the mother doesn’t exist, but because the mother so totally encompasses it. A baby must first be born to see its mother and form a picture of her.

That image can be helpful in our struggle both to believe in God and to believe in life after death.

We’re creatures of the senses. That’s our nature. We draw life through our physical senses, from what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell. Hence when we try to imagine anything, the pictures we draw are ultimately based upon what we’ve experienced through our senses. And so it’s hard for us to imagine and believe in a reality that’s totally beyond our present one. Our imaginations simply run dry.

We can imagine death because it’s physical, we’ve seen it, felt its bitterness, but we can’t imagine what life looks like beyond death. How can one picture “the resurrection of the body and life everlasting”?

And yet, that’s what we’re asked to do, imagine life after death, imagine the unimaginable, picture what cannot be pictured, and put our faith in something that goes beyond what our minds can think. How do we do that?

The analogy of a baby in the womb can be helpful: Imagine you could talk to a baby in the womb. Having never seen the light of this world, knowing only the confines and securities of the womb, the baby would, I suspect, be rather sceptical of your story of the existence of a world beyond the womb. You’d be hard pressed to convince it to believe both that outside of its mother’s womb there exists a world infinitely larger than what it is presently experiencing and that it is to its advantage to eventually be born into that immense world.

On the basis of everything it has experienced, the baby simply lacks the tools to imagine the world of which you are speaking. Unable to picture that world, it would have difficulty in believing in it and would struggle to let go of the world it knows, the womb.

If a baby in the womb possessed self-awareness, it would have to make a real act of faith to believe in life after birth. It would surely fear birth as much as we fear death.

In our fear of death, we are not unlike babies in the womb fearing birth. This world, for all its immensity and for all it offers, is just another womb, bigger than our mother’s womb, but ultimately still small and constricting in terms of its potential to offer full and eternal life.

And like babies in the womb, it’s virtually impossible for us to imagine life beyond our present experience. And so we clutch on to what we know, to what gives us life, our umbilical cord, our present life and its routines, and we fear everything that might loosen our grip on that. We fear life after death in the same way as a baby fears life after birth.

That’s because our situations are basically the same. We’re still in a womb, still being gestated, except now we call it aging. And inevitable is the day when a new pelvic thrust, death, will awaken, in the deep dark recesses of our minds and bodies, the memory of just such a push many years earlier. And, as years earlier, a dim passage will promise a new world and, just as the first time, we won’t have much say in the matter. We’ll have to trust that being born is what’s best for us.

To my mind, there are few things as helpful in understanding death as is the analogy of birth, except that it’s not an analogy. Seen through the eyes of faith, death is not like a birth, it is a birth: We’re initially born from our mothers’ wombs, into a seemingly large world, which for a time leaves us literally speechless. However, this seemingly immense world is, itself, limited and basically just another womb within which we are again being gestated and readied for birth into an even larger world which, I suspect, will, in its magnitude and beauty, leave us again mute.

And, just as initially we had to first be born before we could see our own mothers, so too we must first die, be born again, before we can see our true mother, God. After this second birth, just as after the first, we will lie open-mouthed and awe-struck before a beauty, magnitude, and love that we had never imagined.

Birth and death require the same act of faith, a trust that a fuller life and a more meaningful contact with the mother awaits us beyond the womb.

In the early 1960’s, Michel Quoist wrote a book entitled, Prayers, which became immensely popular. The book combined rare depth with a language bordering on poetry. One of the prayers in the book speaks of our struggle for purity – purity of heart, of body, of intention:

I’ve given you all, but it’s hard, Lord.
It’s hard to give one’s body, it would like to give itself to others.
It’s hard to love everyone and claim no one.
It’s hard to shake a hand and not want to retain it.
It’s hard to inspire affection, only to give it to you.
It’s hard to be nothing to oneself in order to be everything to others.
It’s hard to be like others, among others, but to be other.
It’s hard always to give without trying to receive.
It’s hard to seek out others and be, oneself, unsought …

That describes perhaps our deepest struggle in life and in love. We struggle with purity, though we rarely admit it.

Today the word purity has taken on mainly negative connotations. It’s understood as a sexual concept and is mostly seen as negative. For many people it connotes fear, timidity, and a certain uptightness about sex and life. The popular culture almost ridicules purity and it’s rare that a critically-acclaimed movie, a major novel, or a renowned artist captures its essence aesthetically, celebrates its beauty, and challenges us with its importance.

That’s sad, really, because our lack of purity is, I believe, is one of the deep causes of sadness in our lives. There’s a difference, as we know, between pleasure and happiness. Bracketing purity can sometimes be the route to pleasure, but it’s never a road to happiness. Lack of purity always brings a sadness.

What is purity? First of all, it’s not primarily about sex, though because our sexual desires are so powerful we often compromise our purity in sex. And here, despite all our claims of how free and liberated we are, we still sense the value of purity, however inchoately. Indeed the idea that sex is somehow dirty never quite disappears. Deep down, we still long for purity, though mostly we don’t understand what we’re longing for. What we long for is not immunity from the earthiness of sex, but purity of heart, chastity of intention. The deep-seated idea that sex is dirty has, I suspect, more to do with millennia of bad hygiene than with the aesthetics and morality of sex.. Sex isn’t bad, but our intentions can be.

“Blessed are the pure of heart, they shall see God!” Those words come from Jesus and contain more challenge than we imagine. Purity isn’t just a route we need to go if we want to see God, it’s also a practical secret for tasting happiness in this life. Purity is what takes manipulation out of our relationships and sadness out of our lives. How?

Purity is not so much about sex as it is about intention. We need a certain purity and chastity of intention or we will always manipulate others in everything, including sex. We are pure when our hearts don’t greedily or prematurely grab what isn’t theirs. As Quoist so aptly puts it, we are pure when we can grasp a hand and not try to retain it, when we can love without being over-possessive, serve without being manipulative, and when we no longer try to make other people orbit around us as their center. We are pure when we stop using others for our own enhancement, whatever that might be. We become more pure as we become less manipulative in relationships.

But that’s hard to do. It’s hard to do in love and sex because of the fierce, restless, and sometimes obsessive desires and jealousies we feel there. But it’s hard to be pure in any aspect of our lives. We live with such powerful desires to drink in everything and everybody that it’s easy to be manipulative, to be blind to what we’re doing to others as we struggle to create meaning, pleasure, and power for ourselves. It’s easy to have a sense of entitlement, to be angry, to be bitter, to be jealous, to be driven by the search for pleasure or power, to use others for our own enhancement, to be so addicted to the pursuit of experience and sophistication that we sacrifice even our happiness on that altar. It’s easy to be impure.

And it’s also easy to be sad and unhappy, right within the experience of pleasure. Impurity can bring a certain richness of experience, a certain sophistication, and a certain pleasure. Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened, not closed, after their sin and one suspects, despite the pictures in our early catechisms, that their new-found sophistication helped block any real remorse. Impurity does open one’s eyes..But it also brings a certain sadness, a cynicism, a split inside of ourselves, and a lack of self-worth into our lives.

Having a sense of our own dignity is predicated upon a certain purity. Impurity never lets us feel good about ourselves.

“Be in the world, but not of the world!” Great advice, but not easy to follow.

We struggle with this tension. On the one side, the temptation is to keep ourselves pure and unstained by the world, but at the cost of excessively separating ourselves from it, not loving it, not leaving ourselves vulnerable as Jesus did to feel its pains, and not modelling how someone can live inside the world and still have a vibrant faith and church life. The other temptation is the opposite: To enter the world and love and bless its energy, but to do so in a way that ultimately offers nothing in the way being salt and light for the world.

We will never be free of this tension. Such is the price of paradox. However in order to live within it more healthily, we need a certain theology and spirituality to guide us and we need a greater personal maturity to sustain us.

What kind of theology and spirituality can help us? What kind of personal and collective maturity is being asked of us?

In terms of a theology and spirituality, what we need is a vision that holds in proper tension our love for the world and our love for God. One may not be sacrificed for the other; they must be brought into proper relation.

We need to be able to love the world in such a way that we bless and honour its goodness, its energy, its colour, its zest, and its moral strengths, even as we stand where the cross of Jesus is forever being erected and speak prophetic words of challenge in the face of the world’s moral deficiencies, injustices, self-preoccupation, proclivity to greed, and less-than-full vision. But prophecy is predicated on love. Unless we first honour and bless what is good in the world we don’t have the moral right to criticize it.

We need to be in solidarity with the world in everything but sin, blessing it with one hand, even as we hold the cross of Christ with the other.

But that’s not easy. We don’t just lack the vision, we also lack the moral and emotional strength needed to imitate Jesus. He could walk with sinners, eat with them, embrace them, forgive their sins, feel the pain and chaos of sin, yet not sin himself. He could challenge the world, even as he blessed and enjoyed its energies.

And the struggle to do that is not abstract, but earthy: Mostly we can’t live as Jesus did simply because we lack the maturity to walk amidst the temptations, distractions, and comforts offered by the world without either losing ourselves in them, selling out our message, or unhealthily withdrawing into safe enclaves to huddle in fear, against the world, protected from it, but at the cost of denigrating its goodness, energy, colour, and zest.

It’s no accident that our church communities sometimes look fearful, grey, sexless, and uninviting in comparison to the freedom, colour, eros, and energy that’s manifest in the world. We remain religious, but often at the cost of being unhealthily fearful, timid, frigid, and depressed.

But Jesus was never fearful, timid, frigid, or depressed. We often are because we need to protect ourselves, given that we haven’t got Jesus’ maturity. And our timidity has its own wisdom, but …

In the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola looked at the church and thought a new maturity was needed. He founded the Jesuits in response.

We need that today. Someone needs to found a religious community with no rules because, for its members, none would be needed. Everyone would be mature enough to live out a poverty, chastity, and obedience that does not need to be externally prescribed and over-protected by symbols that set it apart. Attitudes and behaviour would be shaped from inside and would emanate from a commitment to a community, a vision, and a God that puts one under an obedience that is more demanding than any outside rule. The community would be mixed, men and women together, but strong enough to affectively love each other, remain chaste, and model friendship and family beyond sex and without denigrating sex. The community would be radically immersed in the world. Its members, sustained by prayer and community, would be free, like Jesus, of curfews and laws, to dine with everyone, saints and sinners alike, without sinning themselves. This community would give itself to the world, even as it resisted being of the world.

Perhaps that’s naive, but whenever I voice this fantasy to an audience the reaction is always very strong: Where can I find that? I’ll join tomorrow!

The world needs mature Christians who, like Jesus, have the strength to walk inside the world, right inside the chaos of sin itself, without sinning themselves. Like the young men in the Book of Daniel, Christians must be able walk around inside the flames without being consumed themselves, safe, singing sacred songs in the heart of the blaze.