The Truth Sets Us Free

July 10, 2005

A friend of mine, an alcoholic in recovery, is fond of saying: “Alcoholism is only 10% about a chemical, and 90% about dishonesty. You can drink, as long as you do so honestly.” He draws a wider moral axiom from this, adding: “In fact, you can do anything, as long as you don’t have to lie about it! It’s dishonesty, living a double life, that kills the soul and kills families.”

He’s right. It’s no accident that, in scripture, Satan is called “the prince of lies”, not the prince of sex or the prince of greed. More than anything else, it’s lying that corrupts the soul, destroys relationships, and sets itself against light. Lying is darkness, the worst form of it.

This is clear in scripture. Jesus tells us that all sins can be forgiven, except one: If someone should blaspheme the Holy Spirit, he says, that would constitute an “unforgivable sin”. How does one blaspheme against the Holy Spirit? Why is this unforgivable?

The unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit begins with lying, with rationalization, with the refusal to acknowledge the truth. But we don’t commit this sin easily, overnight, the first time we tell a lie. We commit it down the line, through a sustained series of lies, long after we first told a lie to our loved ones and began to hide important parts of our lives from them. The soul warps slowly, like an old board soaked too often in the rain. It’s not the first time it gets wet that makes the warp.

We commit the sin against the Holy Spirit when we lie for so long that we believe our own lies. If we lie long enough, eventually light begins to look like darkness and darkness begins to look like light. That’s especially true of the lie of a double life, when we are no longer honest with our loved ones. If we do that long enough, eventually our betrayals begin to look like virtue, our lies like the truth, and what our families, faith, and churches stand for begins to look like falsehood, death, darkness.

Our sin then becomes unforgivable because we no longer want to be forgiven or deem any need to be forgiven. When a sin is unforgivable it’s because we don’t want to be forgiven, not because we’ve crossed some moral line in the sand beyond which God will no longer tolerate our behaviour. The blockage is rather that what we once saw as truth (honesty, faith, family, fidelity, health through transparency) now looks like falsehood and the behaviour we once had to hide from others and lie about now seems as virtue.

We commit the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit when we live so long inside of a lie that our souls can no longer recognize truth or forgiveness. That’s why Martin Luther warned: “Sin honestly!”

In John’s gospel, Jesus doesn’t talk about the sin against the Holy Spirit, but gives its lesson instead in reverse. He tells us that the single condition to enter into the kingdom, to go to heaven, is to refuse to lie, even if we are weak and sinful. Thus, in Chapter 9, John tells the story of a man who comes to faith in Jesus even though he is not particularly interested in faith or religion. He comes to faith and commitment simply because he refuses to tell a lie. Because the man refused to lie, Jesus eventually found him.

About 15 years ago, a young man, still in his twenties, produced an award-winning movie, Sex, Lies, and Videotapes. The story is rather simplistic and crass at times, but overall teaches the a lesson that could be from John’s gospel: The hero of the story, a young man with a bad history in the area of sexuality, resolves to make himself better by making a vow to never again tell a lie, even a very small one. Like the man who’s born blind in John’s gospel, that vow brings him to health. He gets better, much better. He then sets up a video camera and invites people to come and tell their stories. Those who tell the truth also get better, healthier, and those who lie and hide their infidelities continue to deteriorate in both health and happiness. The truth does set us free.

In her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a “happy death”. To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether or not death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, without pretence, without the need to lie about our lives.

Only a saint, she says, can afford a saint’s death. The task for the rest of us is to die in honesty, as sinners asking God to forgive us for a life of weakness.

We need too to live that way.

Second Birth

July 3, 2005

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.

What The Next Hundred Years Will Bring

June 26, 2005

In his new book, God’s Politics, Jim Wallis predicts 50 things that will happen during this next century. Among these, he foresees the following:

1) Faith will be defined much more by action than by doctrine, even as religious fundamentalism continues to grow.

2) The secular left will give up its hostility to religion or it will die. Some liberals will get the question of values right, and some conservatives will begin to care about poor people.

3) Women in leadership in every area of life will become a given.

4) Internet pornography will quietly undermine people’s lives and relationships, if there are no restraints.

5) More parents will choose good books over mindless and soulless television. Those who don’t will produce children who are increasingly mindless and soulless. Raising children will again be seen as an important thing.

6) The enormous gap between the rich and the rest of us will finally be recognized as a real problem for both democracy and religion. Overcoming poverty will become the great moral issue. More affluent families will get off the pressure train and adopt a simpler lifestyle.

7) The challenge of pluralism will replace the challenge of secularism, as many diverse religious and spiritual traditions have to learn to live with one another.

8) Television will get worse, and more people will decide they don’t want their reality to be like reality TV.

9) Violence will be affect everyone and we will have to learn much more about forgiveness and reconciliation if we are to heal the violence.

10) The need for prophetic religion will grown and hope will be the most essential thing both inside of religion and inside of society itself.

To his list, let me add some predictions of my own. During this next century:

1) The issue of dialogue among the great religions of the world will become much more important than our present ecumenical conversation among Christian churches. Whether the great religious traditions of the world can learn to understand and accept each other will become the single most important issue in the world, religiously and politically.

2) The struggle with militant fundamentalism and terrorism will remain front and centre, the consuming agenda item, for the next 50-75 years. But, like Soviet Marxism, militant fundamentalism too will run its course and collapse from the inside.

3) The ongoing struggle with Islamic fundamentalism will help the religious right better grasp some of the moral strengths within secularity, even as it will help the secular left better appreciate how Judeo-Christianity underpins most of what’s best inside the secular world.

4) Abortions will slowly decrease and will decrease to the extent that pro-Life and pro-Choice advocates stop demonizing each other and begin to work together in good will to minimize abortion (which, ultimately, nobody wants).

5) Sexual schizophrenia will continue to increase as family and social structures continue to destabilize and this, perhaps more than anything else, will continue to sow a deep restlessness everywhere.

6) Virtually all parts of the world will become more multi-ethnic and multi-cultural. Initially this will increase tensions, but ultimately it will reduce them and make the world a safer, richer, and more interesting place. There will be much inter-marrying, ethnically and religiously, and this will help break down many old separations and biases. There will be less racism in the world by the end of the present century.

7) China will become the world’s superpower, eclipsing both the United States and Europe.

8) Inside of Christianity and our churches:

– Our understanding of God will widen and deepen, as will our understanding of the cross.

– Many of the old tensions between Catholics and Protestants will dissolve and there will be more unity among Christian churches.

– The Christian churches will recover more of their Jewish roots.

– We will see a return more to the both the theology and pastoral practices of the early church. We will have to learn again, as was the case in the first generations of Christianity, what it means to be church.

– Many people will choose not to be baptized and more people, as in the time of Augustine, will choose to be baptized only later in life.

– People will either become mystics or non-believers.

– We will learn to understand salvation in a deeper and more inclusive way. We will slowly understand more deeply how God’s universal salvific will is all-embracing, plays no favourites, is never a question of luck or chance, and is ultimately beyond all human and ecclesial manipulation.

– We will understand more deeply our own role of binding and loosing inside the body of Christ and the community of the sincere.

– Women will continue to assume more leadership inside the church.

– Vocations to the priesthood and religious life will continue to decrease, until we produce a new St. Francis and a new St. Clare who can give us a new romantic imagination for those vocations.

– New saints will emerge and they will give us new hope, new imagination, and the vision we need to walk with God and build church, right inside all these changes.

Purity

June 19, 2005

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.

Meeting God Without Fear

June 12, 2005

What would you feel if God suddenly walked into a room? Fear? Shame? Joy? Apprehension? Panic? A desire to hide? Relief when God finally left? Indeed, how would we even recognize God should God walk into a room?

Jane Tyson Clement, a poet and a member of the Bruderhof community, fantasizes about what might run through her mind and heart if Jesus suddenly walked up to her. In a poem entitled, Vigil, she writes:

“What would I do, O Master,
if you came slowly out of the woods.
Would I know your step?
Would I know by my beating heart?
Would I know by your eyes?
Would I feel on my shoulder too, the burden you carry?
Would I rise and stand still till you drew near
or cover my eyes in shame?
Or would I simply forget everything
except that you had come and were here?”

Those last lines highlight the most important of all truths, namely, that God is love and only by letting that kind of love into our lives can we save ourselves from disappointment, shame, and sadness.

I don’t often remember my dreams, nor do I set much stock by them, but, several years ago, I had a dream that I both remember and set some stock by. It went something like this:

For whatever reason, and dreams don’t give you a reason, I was asked to go to an airport and pick up Jesus, who was arriving on a flight. I was understandably nervous and frightened. A bevy of apprehensions beset me: How would I recognize him? What would he look like? How would he react to me? What would I say to him? Would I like what I saw? More frightening yet, would he like what he saw when he looked at me?

With those feelings surging through me, I stood, as one stands in a dream, at the end of a long corridor nervously surveying the passengers who were walking towards me. How would I recognize Jesus and would his first glance at me reflect his disappointment?

But this was a good dream and it taught me as much about God as I’d learned in all my years of studying theology. All of my fears were alleviated in a second. What happened was the opposite of all my expectations: Suddenly, walking down the corridor towards me was Jesus, smiling, beaming with delight, coming straight for me, rushing, eager to meet me. Everything about him was stunningly and wonderfully disarming. There was no awkward moment; everything about him erased that. His eyes, his face, and his body embraced me without reserve and without judgement. I knew he saw straight through me, knew all my faults and weaknesses, my lack of substance, and none of it mattered.

And, for that moment, none of it mattered to me either. Jesus was eager to meet me! In that moment, as Jane Tyson Clement suggests, one forgets everything, except that God is here. There’s no place for fear or shame or wondering what God thinks of you.

And that’s a lesson we must somehow learn, somehow experience.

We live with too much fear of God. Partly its bad theology, but mostly we fear because we’ve never experienced the kind of love that’s manifest in God and we take for granted that anyone who sees us as we really are (in our unloveliness, weaknesses, pathology, sin, insubstantiality) will, in the end, be as disappointed with us as we are with ourselves.

At the end of the day we expect that God is disappointed with us and will greet us with a frown. The tragedy and sadness here is that, because we think that God is disappointed in us, especially at those times when we are disappointed with ourselves, we try to avoid meeting the one person, one love, and the one energy, God, that actually understands us, accepts us, delights in us, and is eager to smile at us. We are relieved that we never have to pick up Jesus at an airport. That’s also true of church: We stay away from church exactly at those times when we would most need to be there.

A prairie poet and former Oblate confrere, Harry Hellman, gets the last word on this. He puts it well:

Let’s go back to the weather.
Most days you don’t notice there is any
until you fall into love, and/or sin,
and then you see the clouds and stare holes into heaven,
looking for Christ
when He’s really at your shoulder looking for you
and in such great shape, you’d never believe what he’s been through.

Then before you know how it happened, it’s July again or August
and you have time to do what you should have been doing all your life,
sitting or walking on the grass in bare feet
and loving. …

Then you’re all petals once more, and tendrils
till the storm breaks
your heart.

And the biggest piece goes to heaven,
and to hell with the weather.

Searching for a New Maturity

June 6, 2005

“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.

Supporting Family Values

May 29, 2005

The issue of “family values” has long divided liberals and conservatives. It constitutes an ideological fault-line, determining what newspapers we read, what television programs we watch, what circles we socialize in, what jokes we tell, what political party we vote for, and sometimes even what church we attend.

And the issue colours the debate on many things: same sex- marriage, sex and violence on TV, abortion, the traditional idea of family as heterosexual and two-parented, the role of women within society, the role of a wife within a marriage and family, the place of motherhood, what constitutes pornography, what should be allowed under the right of free expression, sex education in schools, prayer in schools, censorship, the place of religion in politics, and whether society should be allowed to impose structures that protect traditional values.

Irrespective of how one feels on these issues, what is now evident is that there is a clear connection between the demise of the family and the increase in youth delinquency, crime, drug use, suicide, violence in general, bullying in schools, teenage pregnancy, personality breakdown, bad manners, and the weakening of civic communities. Family life is important and its demise has real, measurable consequences.

But beyond agreeing on this, conservatives and liberals pretty much disagree on what constitutes the problem and on what should be done about it. Why is the family in trouble?

Conservatives see the family in trouble because of our reluctance to address certain issues: sex and violence on television, unchaperoned access to information on the internet, the existence of non-traditional families, same-sex marriages, pornography, opposition to all censorship, promiscuous sex, marital infidelity, and a culturally-accepted scorn of respect, taste, and manners. What’s needed to stem the tide, they believe, is the courage to stand up and challenge these things.Conservatives believe that family values should be supported culturally and politically.

Some conservative groups go further and lay particular blame for the crisis in family values on certain groups and certain ideologies: the gay-lobby, single-mothers, working-mothers, welfare recipients, feminism. But honesty compels us to admit that when our marriages break up and our families break down, usually the issue is not feminism, same-sex marriages, or single-mothers. Almost always there are other reasons, much closer to home, as to why our relationships fall apart. Yet, conservatives are right in their basic assertion that the family needs to be protected culturally and politically.

Liberals, sadly, have been slow to admit both the importance of the family and its need for protection. Perhaps it’s been an over-reaction to certain excesses within the conservative agenda on family values, but many liberals have simply abdicated on this issue. As well, liberals have tended to be naive about the effects on marriage and family of marital infidelity, casual sex, what young people are exposed to on television, and the dumbing-down and vulgarizing of much of the entertainment industry.

But liberals have been very right on something else, the conservative blind spot on this issue, the impact of economics on family values. Where conservatives have tried to protect family values culturally and politically, liberals have tried to protect them economically.

A number of studies, including a much-quoted one by Anna Greenberg, suggest that biggest challenge facing families today is that they don’t have enough time for each other. This is especially true for parents, who never have enough time to give their children the attention they need. And why isn’t there enough time? Too much pressure from the workplace! Too many families find themselves in a never-ending, all-consuming struggle for adequate pay, proper health care, decent housing, access to decent education. That struggle constitutes a virtual conspiracy against family life. People are working more and more hours and having less and less time for family. The economic squeeze, perhaps more than any cultural shift in attitudes, is the real cancer working against family values. The pressures of the workplace and the marketplace are killing families.

Family values, liberals say, have to be protected economically. If we value the family we have to make the economic adjustments needed so that mothers can be mothers, fathers can be fathers, and families can have the time, security, health, and housing they need to live as family. Those adjustments do not flow from a conservative economic agenda.

But there’s good news: Conservatives and liberals, especially those trying to raise children, are beginning more and more to agree with each other on the value of family. Unfortunately, they still tend to disagree on what is needed to protect family.

Conservatives are right when they say family values must be protected politically and culturally, but liberals are also right when they say the family must be protected economically.

The issue of family is too important to let ideology divide us. We need to learn from each other that family and family values must be protected in ways both conservative and liberal.

The Jesus Code – Unravelling The Secret

May 22, 2005

We all love to unearth hidden things, to crack some puzzle or code. We need only to look at the hoopla surrounding The Da Vinci Code to see how true this is. Like children, we all still believe there’s a buried treasure somewhere, a secret wisdom, just waiting to be found.

Interestingly, Jesus speaks of just such a hidden secret. The gospels tell us he spoke in parables and that these were only understood by those who were inside a certain circle, but they remained riddles to everyone outside that circle.

That, of course, begs the question: What is the hidden secret and who is inside and who is outside the circle of understanding? In the message of Jesus, what’s the secret to be discovered, the code be cracked?

Mark’s gospel takes this up explicitly. His Jesus makes it very clear that there is a hidden, secret wisdom that needs to be grasped if one is to understand the deep design of things. What is it?

In caption, it’s the cross of Christ and the wisdom that’s contained within it. The hidden secret is that love is most truly revealed in the brokenness of Jesus on the cross. What’s hidden in the cross of Christ is the code that we have to break open if we are to learn the deep secrets of life. The cross contains a wisdom, the wisdom of the crucified, which is a prism through which all else is to be viewed.

More specifically, what is this wisdom?

Unlike false, gnostic teachers who are forever playing games and giving the impression that learning the deep secrets is a question of luck, brilliant intelligence, or of becoming their disciples, Jesus tries everywhere to reveal the secret in public and in a language open to everyone. His whole life and mission are an attempt to lay open for everyone the deepest secret of all and to make that secret accessible to everyone, as accessible as the nearest water tap or the village well. Since Jesus, the deepest secret is an open secret. What is it?

One entry into it is through the words Jesus speaks to his uncomprehending disciples on the road to Emmaus. In trying to explain this secret, he asks them: “Wasn’t it necessary?” Wasn’t what necessary?

The secret is that there is a necessary connection between certain things: Isn’t a certain prior suffering and humiliation always the condition for glory? Don’t we all, like Cinderella, first have to sit in the ashes before the glass slipper will fit our feet? Isn’t sublimation always the means to the sublime? Isn’t it precisely when we are vulnerable and unable to impress or overpower others that we are finally open to intimacy, love, and family? Aren’t self-sacrifice and self-denial, in the end, the way real love manifests itself? Isn’t the crucifixion of the private ego the route to empathy and community? Isn’t the forgiveness of those who hurt us the final manifestation of human maturity?

And, most graphic of all, isn’t the way Jesus died – innocent, trusting, unwilling out of love to protect himself against suffering, absorbing hatred and sin, understanding and forgiving those who were murdering him, refusing to resort to any kind of superior physical power to overwhelm his adversaries, refusing to give back in kind, and refusing to give himself over to bitterness and cynicism – the paragon of mature human love?

Love is the deepest mystery within the universe. It lies at the base of everything, the cosmic, the biological, the emotional, the psychological, the sexual, the spiritual. There is no level of reality where one doesn’t see the relentless deep pull inside of all things towards a unity, community, fusion, and oneness beyond self. Love stirs all things, speaking to every element in the language it can understand. Deep inside of us, we know too that this alone can bring us home.

And there is an inner code, a certain DNA, within love itself. It too has inner secrets, an inner structure, and a code that needs to be cracked if we are to properly understand its dynamics. And we don’t crack that code all at once, at a weekend retreat or at religious rally. We crack it slowly, painfully, with many setbacks, over the course of a lifetime.

But Jesus gave us the keys to crack it. They can be named: vulnerability, the refusal out of love to protect ourselves, self-sacrifice, putting others before ourselves, refusing to give back in kind when someone hurts us, a willingness to die for others, the refusal to give ourselves over to cynicism and bitterness when things beset us, continued trust in God and goodness even when things look the opposite, and especially forgiveness, having our hearts remain warm and hospitable, even when we have just cause for hatred.

These are the keys to the wisdom that Jesus revealed and the gospels tells that we are “inside” or “outside” the true circle of love, depending upon whether or not we grasp this wisdom.

The Danger Of Riches

May 15, 2005

“Nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor!” That’s an axiom attributed to James Forbes, the pastor of Riverside Church in New York City.

He’s right. If Jesus is to be believed, then we need to believe that the poor stand before us always as that place where we are judged. We get to heaven (or don’t) on the basis of our response to the poor. The cross of Christ is the key to life and the cross is forever being erected at that place where the excluded ones, the poor, suffer. Only at that place can we learn the crucified-wisdom that, at the end of day, puts us inside the circle of discipleship, or, stated in another way, opens up for us the gates of heaven.

But, as we know, it’s not easy to actually feed the hungry, clothe the naked, console the sorrowful, or help the downtrodden. Why?

Mainly because we never see them. We think we do, but in reality we don’t. In fact, that’s the point the gospels make when they point out the dangers of riches, namely, wealth blinds us so that we don’t see the poor.

We see this clearly in the famous, gospel parable about the rich man who dines sumptuously every day, while a poor man, Lazarus, sits under his table and eats the crumbs that fall there. The rich man dies and goes to Hades and, from there, he finally sees Lazarus – implying that he had never seen him before even though Lazarus had sat just a few feetaway from him during his life.

John Donahue, a biblical scholar, makes this point about that parable: “The rich man is condemned not because he is rich but because he never saw Lazarus at his gate: the first time he sees him is from Hades, emphasized by the somewhat solemn phrase, `He lifted up his eyes, and saw’. Here the text is bitterly ironic. In life there was a chasm between himself and Lazarus because of wealth and power; in death this chasm still exists.”

The real danger of wealth is that it causes a “blindness” that renders us incapable of seeing the poor. Jean Vanier, in the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto in the late 1990s, made the same point: The “great chasm that can’t be bridged”, he suggests, exists already now, in the present distance between the rich and poor. The next life simply eternalizes a present situation where the rich and poor are separated in a way so that one cannot cross over to the other. Why?

According to the gospels, the major reason is that the rich simply don’t see the poor.

It is easy to miss the point here: Jesus isn’t saying that wealth is bad. Nor is he saying that the poor are virtuous and the rich are not. Indeed the rich are often just as virtuous in their private lives as the poor. We sometimes naively glamorize poverty, but poverty isn’t beautiful and, often times, isn’t particularly moral either. A lot of violence, crime, sexual irresponsibility, domestic breakdown, drug abuse, and ugliness of all kinds, happens on the poorer side of the tracks. The rich are no worse than the poor, in these things.

But where the rich are worse is in vision, eyesight. When we are rich, we have a congenital incapacity to see the poor and, in not seeing them, we never learn the wisdom of the crucified. That’s why it’s hard, as Jesus said, for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.

That’s also why it’s hard for rich nations and rich individuals to reach across the great divide that separates us from the poor. We try, but in the richest nation in the world, the United States, one in every six children still falls below the poverty line and, worldwide, despite all the resources and good-will on this planet, one billion people subsist on less than a dollar a day and thirty thousand children die every day from diseases that could easily be prevented by simply supplying clean drinking water. There’s a gap that we can’t find a way to cross.

We see – but we don’t see! We feel for the poor – but we don’t really feel for them! We reach out – but we never reach across. The gap between the rich and poor is in fact widening, not narrowing. It’s widening worldwide, between nations, and it’s widening inside of virtually every culture. The rich are becoming richer and the poor are being left ever further behind. Almost all the economic boom of the last twenty years has sent its windfall straight to the top, benefiting those who already have the most.

What Jesus asks of us is simply that we see the poor, that we do not let affluence become a narcotic that knocks out our eyesight. Riches aren’t bad and poverty isn’t beautiful. But, nobody gets to heaven without a letter of reference from the poor.

The Mystery Of Saying Goodbye

May 8, 2005

When I was 23 years old, in the space of just three months, both my parents died. They were young, I was young, our family was young – too young, we felt, to let them go. But they died despite that and their leaving left a gaping hole in our lives.

But after a time that void began to fill in and our sadness began to dissipate. It didn’t happen quickly. It took a couple of years, but eventually things changed. What was once a cold absence now became a warm presence. Our mother and father came back to us in a new way. We began to feel their presence as a warm nurturing spirit, as a permanent sustaining love. They were now present to us in a deeper way, a way devoid of tension.

When they were still alive, we loved each other, but, as with all families, that love was fraught with some tension. Love and concern can never be given and received without some shadow, some resistance, some irritations, without negative feelings too entering. It’s like that in all families and it’s like that even inside of our most intimate relationships.

Face to face, in this life, there is no such thing as intimacy without a shadow, clear-cut pure love. Mo matter how much we love someone, we will still always experience some feelings of resistance, of disappointment, of irritation, of boredom, of not being understood, of not being properly valued, of needing a private space at times, of being wounded too in this relationship.

But, after our parents died and our grief over their leaving dissipated, their love for us and their presence began to flow into our lives in a way beyond those tensions. We now felt their love without a shadow. In their going away, in their deaths, they were able to give us something that they couldn’t give us as fully when they were with us, namely, presence and love without a shadow.

Why? What happened? Was this simply a question of time healing the wound of death? A question of death making us forget about former tensions and disappointments with each other?

Partly, but there is something deeper involved. Intimacy is a curious thing, deep and paradoxical. Inside intimacy, presence and absence play on each other in such a way that, on a given day and in a given season of a relationship, it is hard to tell which provides the deeper connection.

Sometimes when we are physically present to each other we cannot give each other what we need to and we must go away, at least for a time, in order for that to happen.

Sometimes only our absence can deepen and cleanse our presence. Sometimes it is better that we go away, for a day or for a season. That is part of the mystery, the theology, and the psychology of the Ascension.

At one level, this is a mystery, yet we have a sense of how it works.

As a parent, you experience this when your children grow up and move away. First there is the pain of letting them go, but eventually there is the joy of having those same children come back and stand before you in a new way, as adults now who can befriend you and be with you in a way that they couldn’t as children. But, this doesn’t happen unless your children first go away. Good parents know that by hanging on too tightly, by not giving your children the space within which to be absent, you not only stunt their growth, but you deprive yourselves of eventually having a wonderful adult came back to you with something deeper to give then the dependent love of a child. That’s true in every relationship.

Jesus tries, painstakingly and repeatedly, to teach this to his disciples before his ascension. He tells them, again and again: “It is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away I cannot send you the spirit. You will grieve now, but later you will rejoice.”

It took me years to understand, even partially, what Jesus meant by those words and I’m still struggling, perhaps more in my heart than in my head, to accept that at times we have go away in order for our spirits to bloom more fully and be capable of being received by those we love most, beyond the tensions and irritations that forever cloud relationships.

When children leave home for the first time to begin lives on their own, in one fashion or another, they are saying to their parents what Jesus said to his disciples before his ascension: “It is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away I cannot come back to you in a deeper way!”

We speak those words too every time we walk out of a door, for a long time or even for just a day, and have to say the words: “Good-bye!”

Permission To Be Unhappy

May 1, 2005

A recent issue of TIME magazine featured an essay by James Poniewozik on why artists today, at least in their subject matter, tend to focus more on unhappiness than happiness. Artists explore emotions and lately, as he puts it, they’re choosing mostly to explore those that make us feel lousy. Joy isn’t their model any more. It’s been a long time since anyone produced a masterpiece and called it, An Ode to Joy. Perhaps Leo Tolstoy spoke for modern art when he said: “All happy families are alike”, implying that they are boring and unhappy families are not.

Why? What’s behind this? Is there a special depth inside unhappiness? Is what’s broken more interesting than what’s whole? Is unhappiness more beautiful than happiness? Why are so many artists sceptical of joy?

Poniewozik suspects that the problem is not that artists are sceptical of joy, but that they are reacting aesthetically, as one would to anything that’s over-sweet, to the millions upon millions of unsolicited smiles that greet us from every billboard, magazine page, and television ad. Everyone we see there is always smiling, in perfect health, with perfect teeth, perfect hair, perfect family, suggesting a perfect life beneath it all.

Happiness is so easy, it would seem, effortless really, all deep struggles can be put aside simply by using the right laundry soap, eating low-carb hamburgers, choosing the right shampoo and make-up, carrying the right mobile phone, making the right wine selection, and driving the right car. The very air we inhale suggests that, since everyone else is already smiling and happy, there’s no excuse really to feel the heaviness we’re feeling.

But, when happiness is promised this easily, someone, Poniewozik says, has to say that it’s okay to feel unhappy and not be smiling all the time.

Formerly, the church did that. It had religious symbols that reminded us daily that we lived in a broken world, amid fractured dreams, that life was a struggle, that happiness was hard to come by, that we were always vulnerable, that death posed a constant threat. Religion made us aware that humanity had fallen from grace, that we were wretches in need of God’s help, that we were here as pilgrims on earth with no real home, that real joy had to be waited for, that the sublime came only after long sublimation, and that we lived in “a valley of tears” within which we shouldn’t over-expect.

Much of this sounds pretty morbid however in a culture where, precisely, there is the promise of easy happiness, of easy smiles, and of having the full symphony here and now, without any sublimation. How, when happiness is seemingly so easy, can we sing a song that proclaims that divine sweetness lies in the feeling that God can save “wretches” like us? No wonder we resist words like sin, unworthiness, purgatory, death.

If love, beauty, and happiness were as simple and easy as the latest television commercial suggests, why, like the prophet, Isaiah, would I feel so unworthy before them that I should want to cleanse myself with a burning coal?

But, and this is the point, when I no longer see myself as a pilgrim in a fallen world, as a wretch in need of grace, and as living in a “valley of tears”, then I don’t have moral permission either to feel unhappy, to feel as if I’m missing out on life. Nor do I have permission to be alone on a Friday night, without a soulmate, lonely, hurting from broken relationships, caught inside a dysfunctional family, frustrated inside a far-from perfect church, not in great health, and trying to find happiness without a perfect body or a perfect job.

Today, many of our artists are doing for us what the church used to do, namely, they’re telling us that it’s okay not to feel happy all the time and that if we’re trying to smile all the time we’re probably in denial because life isn’t simple, joy is elusive, and it’s perhaps found in places where we haven’t been looking lately.

There are many reasons why artists tend to focus on what’s unhappy. Partly it’s the artistic temperament itself, its hypersensitivity, its tortured complexity, its capacity to name what’s under the surface, its sensitivity to how beauty reveals itself (“That’s how the light gets in”) in the cracks of our brokenness. Partly too, and less flattering, it is simple arrogance, an elitism, a condescending intellectualism that can easily make an ideology out of unhappiness because it secretly believes that ordinary joys, and laundry commercials, are beneath its dignity.

But partly its an insight which sees life deeply enough to understand that happiness is not an easy thing, that a genuine smile should be sparked by more than just the right toothpaste, that there are problems that cannot be solved by a newer software, that there are lonely seasons too in life, and that honesty compels us to admit that we cannot always be smiling and happy.

Welcoming A New Pope

April 25, 2005

There has been a mixed reaction to the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy.

For many conservatives there was joy and celebration. This was the best of all possible choices. The stunning outpouring of love and respect that the world showed at the death of John Paul II indicated that it wanted more of the same. In Benedict XVI, by all indications, it should get that. His election made it clear that there would be real continuity with what John Paul II had started. It also meant, for them, that the world and the church are to expect no major changes from the Vatican. The church is once again in safe, trusted hands.

For many liberals, though, the reaction was very different. They were, at least initially, deflated and depressed by the choice. Why?

Well, as the whole world knows, Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, has been the head watch-dog in the church for the past 24 years and, in that role, accumulated some baggage. He also acquired a persona within which he is perceived as hard, inflexible, ultra- conservative, overly-clerical, negative towards women, regressive on Ecumenism, overly centralizing in his ecclesiology, hostile rather than understanding towards the world, and too prone to listen to selective pockets of malcontents rather than to the wider community. Many of these perceptions are perhaps unfair; he was, after all, a symbolic lightening-rod around which a lot of free-floating frustration and anger could constellate. However it is fair to say that, more than his supporters would be willing to admit, this is how he has been perceived.

Beyond this, there is too the perception that, in choosing him, the Cardinals may have been more motivated by the desire to batten down the hatches against secularity than by the kind of love, concern, risk, and self-dying for the world that Jesus embodied and expressed when he said, “My flesh is food for the life of the world!” In times of uncertainty, clarity too easily trumps everything else, especially risk. Liberals fear this has happened here.

Where do I weigh in on this?

Cardinal Ratzinger wasn’t my first choice and may have been in fact my last choice, but, after some initial disappointment, I’ve made my peace with his selection. Why?

I’ve never met the man, but am close to many people who have and all of them, to the person, attest that his public persona is not accurate, and never has been. Our new pope, they assure us, is more soft than hard, more understanding than judgemental, more respectful than authoritarian, and, as even his critics admit, stunning in his intelligence.

Moreover, as his first homilies and actions already indicate, he promises to be quite different as a pope than he was as head- disciplinarian in the church. As a friend of mine explains it: “I was once a vice-principal in a school, in charge of discipline. Later on, I became the principal, in charge now of animating spirit and life. The different roles gave me an entirely different agenda – and a very different persona.”

Benedict XVI was a brilliant and even liberal theologian before being named to head up the Congregation of Faith and Doctrine. My suspicion is that we will see some flashes of that again, now that he is freed of the watchdog responsibility. He might well surprise everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, as did John XXIII. We might have the surprise of our lives and might find ourselves inside Morris West’s novel, Lazarus, where an aged pope, known for his strong conservatism, stuns everyone by not being what anyone expected.

Finally, there is this too: Given where John Paul II had taken the church and the curia, it might be wise to have a pope, for a while, who will try to move things ahead only slightly, without being a major reformer. Any major reformer would, I suspect, find himself quickly crushed, and not just inside Vatican walls, by the structure and legacy that John Paul II left behind.

Thus, ironically, Pope Benedict XVI might be the best placed person right now to actually achieve any reform. Critics of reform will find it difficult to fight him, given his pedigree. To risk an analogy here: Ariel Sharon, because of his uncompromising pro-Israeli stance and his history in helping establish some of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, might be for that reason precisely the man best placed to dismantle the settlements and lead Israel into a new relationship with Palestine. Like Ariel Sharon, Benedict XVI’s past can be his greatest asset in helping lead us into something new. We may yet see the deep wisdom in this selection.

Beyond all of this of course is the Holy Spirit. Faith asks us to believe in the Spirit’s role in these things even when our personal expectations and agendas aren’t met. The community is more important than personal need. Good will come of this choice, no doubt, even if, for now, not everyone is equally enthusiastic.

Multi-Citizenship – Wide Loyalties

April 17, 2005

Our Oblate General House in Rome is an international complex within which live people from every continent on earth. We have three television rooms there, one Italian, one French, and one English. During my time on our General Council, I used to watch the BBC World News each night in the English room. It was an interesting experience, not just watching the events of the day, but watching them while sitting among people from different countries and sensing how people were affected in different ways, depending upon their country of origin.

I remember one night sitting in that room and hearing President George Bush comment on the Kyoto Accord, telling the world: “America will sign Kyoto when it’s convenient for America to do so!” There was a visceral reaction within many of the non-Americans watching the news as he said these words. You could sense a silent anger: “What about the rest of the world? Aren’t you part of the world?”

The point here is not to comment on the Kyoto Accord, which admittedly poses difficulties for leaders in every country. The point rather is what is captured in that unspoken feeling: “Aren’t you part of the world?”

The challenge is not just to George Bush but to all of us. We all too easily define ourselves, our citizenship, our loyalties, our concerns, and our interests in a way that does not reflect our wider citizenship. And we easily turn that narrowness of concern into a virtue by appealing to country (“We need to take care of our own! My Country, right or wrong!”); religion (“I owe nothing to the world, I belong to a church!”); family (“I’m loyal to my own! Blood is thicker than water!”); or gender and race (“We’ve been hurt and that justifies some present intolerance!”)

Not that this is all wrong. There is virtue and goodness in loyalty to country, religion, family, race, and gender. These are important identities, key parts of our self-definition, and they do demand certain loyalties, responsibilities, and duties, and do too make a moral claim on our freedom. We may never take these for granted and think we don’t owe anything to them.

But we too easily lose perspective, as do whole countries, cultures, and religions. Too often we lose the sense that we are also citizens of other realms and each of these too makes certain demands and moral claims on us. We are not just citizens of one country, members of one religion, members of one family, and members of one race and gender. We are citizens of the whole world, one with all who believe, brothers and sisters with all who are sincere, and part of the one family of humanity. And these wider loyalties constitute our deepest identity.

Jesus said as much: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters? Those who hear and keep the word of God are mother, brother, and sister to me!” In saying that, Jesus redefined both our citizenship and our loyalties. Real family, real country, real religion, and real identity are not based upon blood relationship, skin colour, gender, church affiliation, or shared geography. What makes real family, country, religion, or identity is a shared spirit, the Holy Spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity. These transcend all other boundaries of country, religion, family, race, and gender. They are what we ultimately ask for our loyalty.

Socrates had the order correct when he said that, before he was a citizen of Athens, he was a citizen of the world. Leo Suenens, the former Cardinal of Brussels, was right too when he said in his diaries that, were he to become pope, he would not look upon the day of his papal consecration as the most important day of his life, but would rather still see the day of his baptism as more important. Baptism trumps papacy, just as world citizenship trumps the name of the specific country named on our passports. There will be no countries in heaven and, sometimes, already here on earth, we are asked to have loyalties beyond the countries and religions within which we find ourselves.

Both our humanity and our faith make us citizens of many worlds, demand of us wide loyalties, and demand too that we do not name intolerance, narrowness, racism, sexism, self-interest, and indifference to the suffering of others as virtue by appealing to some narrower loyalty.

Our real passport is not issued by an individual country and baptism puts us into solidarity with others beyond any one faith or denomination: We are citizens of the world before we are citizens of a country; women and men of faith before we belong to some religion; Christians before we belong to a particular denomination; baptized before we are priests, bishops, cardinals, or popes; and we are all bound together in a way that makes our signing-on to Kyoto, or any other global project, more than a issue of individual convenience.

The Descent Into Hell

April 10, 2005

Several years ago, a young woman I knew attempted suicide. She was 23 years old and away from home. Her frightened, concerned family rushed to her side. They brought her home, got her the best medical and psychiatric attention available, and, most importantly, rallied around her, trying in every way to bring her out of suicidal depression.

They weren’t successful. Two months later, she killed herself. She had descended into a place into which no human love, medicine, or psychiatry could penetrate, a private hell beyond human reach.

What hope do we have in situation like this?

Humanly there isn’t any. Outside of faith, she is lost to us and we are helpless to reach her. But, inside of faith, there is hope, surprising hope.

We have a doctrine within our faith, which to my mind, is singularly the most consoling belief in all religion, namely, the belief that Christ can descend into hell.

One version of our creed tells us that Jesus “descended into hell”,? What does this mean?

We are not always sure. There are various traditions as to its meaning: In one version, perhaps the most common, the idea is that the sin of Adam and Eve closed the gates of heaven and they remained sealed until the death of Jesus. Jesus’ death opened them and Jesus, himself, in the time between his death and resurrection, descended into hell (Sheol, the Underworld) where all the souls who had died since the time of Adam somehow rested. He took them all to heaven. His “descending into hell”, in this version of things, refers to his going into the underworld after his death to rescue those souls.

But there is another understanding. It suggests that Jesus’ descent into hell refers especially to the manner of his death, to the depth of chaos and darkness he had to endure there, and to how the depth of love, trust, and forgiveness he revealed inside that darkness manifests a love that can penetrate into any hell that can be created. That’s rather abstract to be sure, so allow me an illustration:

In St. Paul’s Cathedral in London, England, there is a famous painting by Holman Hunt that has inspired numerous, less worthy, imitations. It is a painting which depicts Jesus outside a door with lantern, and the picture suggests that we, who are inside that door, must open the door to allow Jesus in, otherwise he will always remain outside. In some of the imitations of that painting, the artists have taken things further, namely, they have placed a knob on the inside of the door, but none on the outside, suggesting that Jesus cannot enter our lives unless we open the door to let him in.

I remember as a child, seeing this image on a holy card, and being haunted by it, fearing precisely that one day I might be too hurt, depressed, or otherwise paralysed to open that door.

But, powerful as this image is, it is belied by the gospels. How?

John, in his gospel, gives us this picture: On the day Jesus rose from the dead, he finds his disciples huddled in fear inside a locked room.Jesus, unlike the imitation versions of Holman Hunt’s great painting, does not stand outside the door and knock, waiting for the disciples to come and open the door. He goes right through the locked doors, stands inside their huddled circle of fear, and breathes out peace to them. He isn’t helpless to enter when they are too frightened, depressed, and wounded to open the door for him. He can descend into their hell by going through the doors they have locked out of fear.

That is also true for the various private hells into which we sometimes descend. We can reach a point in our lives where others can no longer reach into our pain and where we are too wounded, frightened, and paralysed to open the door to let anyone in. Human care can no longer reach us. But Jesus can enter those locked doors, can descend into our hell.

I am sure that when the young woman, whose suicide I mention, woke up on the other side, she found Jesus standing inside her fear and sickness, breathing out peace, love, and forgiveness, just as he did in the darkness and chaos that he descended into in his death. I am sure too that she, sensitive young woman that she was, found in his ordering, forgiving breath a peace that was, for all kinds of reasons, denied her in this life.

Our belief that Jesus did, and can, “descend into hell” is the single most consoling doctrine within all religion. It gives us hope when, humanly, there isn’t any. Sometimes, because of illness and hurt, someone we love can descend into a place where we, no matter our love and effort, can no longer reach. But not all is lost: Jesus can descend into that hell and, even there, breathe out a peace that again orders the chaos.

On The Death Of John Paul II

April 3, 2005

“The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.” (Romans 14)

This is certainly true for Pope John Paul II. He had a profound influence on our world, perhaps more than any other person in the last half-century. That influence too, as we know, was not merely religious. He helped shape history.

But we must celebrate all of this correctly so that, in his death, we, friend or foe, can receive his spirit and blessing in a way that we were unable to do while he was alive. What’s meant by that?

Henri Nouwen, in his later writings, began to develop the idea of how each person’s death, like Jesus’ death, is meant to release his or her spirit more fully. Here’s how he puts it:

“It was only after Jesus had left his disciples that they were able to grasp what he truly meant to them. But isn’t that true for all who die?

It is only when we have died that our spirits can completely reveal themselves. … I know this because I have seen people die in anger and bitterness and with a great unwillingness to accept their mortality. Their deaths became sources of frustration and even guilt for those who stayed behind. Their deaths never became a gift. …

Yes, there is such a thing as a good death. We ourselves are responsible for the way we die. We have to choose between clinging to life in such a way that death becomes nothing but a failure, or letting go of life in freedom so that we can be given to others as a source of hope.” (Becoming the Beloved)

John Paul II died as he lived, in a faith that flowed out to the world as warm spirit. His death stopped the world for a moment and everyone alike, powerful and poor, Christian and non-Christian, stood muted, silent, not in the silence that came of frustration, guilt, or unfinished business, but in a hushed reverence that spoke of a man and a life that blessed and suggested that it’s wise to stand in silence for awhile and consider what that blessing might be. What might it be?

What particular qualities in John Paul II should we let ourselves be blessed by? I highlight three:

His moral integrity, consistency, and stubbornness.

Both friends and foes agree on this, this man had a stubborn moral integrity and a rare moral consistency. He wasn’t a man for moral compromise and (not perfectly but better than most) he showed a moral consistency that neither his disciples on the right or on the left approximate. He was pro-life beyond the more selective compassion of both conservatives and liberals, not just in his stand against abortion and euthanasia, but also in his views on war and capital punishment and, especially, in his stance against the conditions that make for these in the first place. On every side of the ideological spectrum, we could use a mini-pentecost of sorts so as to more fully appropriate his moral consistency.

His openness to the world, other faiths, and other Christians.

He was the most travelled pope ever and those travels, among other things, tried to open Roman Catholicism to the world, to other religions, and to fellow Christians in a new way. He confronted communism, was sought in counsel by heads of state, embraced heads of other religions, gathered young people into the biggest crowds ever assembled, apologized to Judaism, gave Tony Blair communion in his own chapel, and generally (outside perhaps of signing Dominus Jesus) kept opening doors that had been closed for a long time. Neither a new Catholic intolerance nor a false ecumenism done in his name will receive his spirit and blessing.

His raw faith.

Nobody, friend of foe, doubted his faith. For John Paul II, faith was neither a superstitious comfort (“an opium for the people”) nor just a set of symbols that inspire us towards what’s highest in us and in collective humanity. For him, there’s a living God who is Lord of this universe, a Jesus who is divine, and a deep, unalterable, moral brand inside both the structure of the universe and the make-up of the human soul. There’s a life after death and there’s a life after birth and the latter is meant to be lived in self-sacrificing service of others. His faith was purer than the narrow (and self-serving) literalism of fundamentalism and deeper than the spiritual and moral vagaries of a liberalism not at its best. To celebrate this man’s life properly is ask for a faith like his.

What John Paul II left us will not be received through an uncritical admiration that too quickly strips him of his sometimes obvious humanity. We knew too his faults. But, like Jesus, he has gone away and we are left with his spirit. That spirit, now given more purely than ever before, contains powerful nutrients that can both nourish and stretch our souls.

Midwives of Hope

March 27, 2005

It’s no accident that when Jesus rose from the dead he appeared first to women. Why? During his pre-resurrection ministry, at least so it seems, he called mainly men to be the principal actors. Why a certain reversal at the resurrection?

We can only speculate, but one reason might be that women are midwives. Something new is being born in the resurrection and women are the ones who attend to birth.

That’s a metaphor worth reflecting on, not just in terms of the importance of women in ministry, but especially in terms of how we are all, women and men alike, called to respond to the resurrection, namely, by becoming midwives of hope and trust.

And it’s a needed vocation because all of us, perpetually, are in the agony of struggling to give birth to trust. Why?

Because we’ve all been wounded by betrayal, abuse, broken promises, broken relationships, and empty words. By the time we reach adulthood there is enough disillusionment in us to make it natural to say: “Why should I trust you? Why should I believe this? Why is anything different this time? I know how empty words can be!” The older we get, the harder it is to trust and the easier it is to become sceptical and cynical.

Yet none of us wants to be this way. Something inside us wants to trust, to hope, to believe in the goodness of things, to again feel that trustful enthusiasm we once had as a child, when we were innocent (and “innocent” means “unwounded”), when we could still take another’s hand in trust. No one wants to be outside the circle of trust.

But it’s a struggle, an agony of sorts, as we know. We’d like to trust, but often we can’t give birth to it. That’s where a midwife can be helpful.

When a baby is born, normally the head pushes its way through the birth canal first, opening the way for the body to follow. A good midwife can be very helpful at this time, doing everything from giving support, through giving reassurance, through giving instruction, through teaching us how to breath, through actively helping to pull the new life through the birth canal. Her help can sometimes mean the difference between life and death, and it always makes the birth easier and healthier.

That’s true too for trust and hope. A good midwife can be helpful in bringing these to birth. What can she bring that’s helpful? Insight, support, reassurance, certain spiritual “breathing exercises”, and experienced hands that can, if necessary, help pull the new child through the birth canal.

And one of the things a midwife of hope needs to do is what Jesus did when he met people, women and men alike, after his resurrection. He sent them back to “Galilee” where he promised they would re-find their hope and trust. What is “Galilee”?

In the gospels, “Galilee” is more than a geographical place. It’s a place of the heart: the place of falling in love, of first fervour, of being inflamed with high ideals, of walking on water because one is naive and trustful enough to believe that this is possible. “Galilee” is the place we were before our hearts and ideals got crucified, the place inside us where trust and hope are gestated.

A good midwife of hope, like Jesus on the morning of the resurrection, invites people to “Galilee”. How? Here’s an example: The famed American educator, Allan Bloom, tells a story of how a particular distasteful incident in a classroom once helped change forever the way he teaches. Sitting in a lecture hall as an undergraduate, he felt assaulted by a professor who began his class with these words: “You come here with your small-town, parochial biases, your naivete; well, I’m going to bathe you in great truth and set you free!”

Bloom remarks how this reminded him of a boy who had very solemnly informed him when he was seven that there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. This was no great truth, just an invitation to cynicism, like the professor’s comment. Reflecting on this, Bloom resolved to forever teach in exactly the opposite way. He would begin his classes this way: “You come here with your many experiences and your sophistication; well, I respect that, but I’m going to try to teach you how to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny again – and then maybe you’ll have some chance to be happy!”

The resurrection of Jesus is about more than believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny, but, even so, Bloom’s pedagogy tells us something about what it means to go back to “Galilee” and give birth to trust in our lives.

Somewhere in life we lose the child in us and lose too the trust and hope that go with that. It’s a painful struggle to give birth to trust again and, in that struggle, a midwife of hope, someone who believes in the resurrection, can indeed be a wonderful friend.