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.

Tasting The Darkness of Good Friday

March 20, 2005

A year ago, partly in response to the popularity and controversy surrounding Mel Gibson’s movie, The Passion of the Christ, TIME magazine ran a cover story on the question of why Jesus died. The piece was well researched and included the opinion of a variety of scholars, but it also delved into the feelings of ordinary people around this question.

One person who expressed her feelings was a young woman who, as a child, had witnessed her mother being murdered by a jealous boyfriend. Looking back on her mother’s death, she senses, without being able to put it into words, that somehow her mother’s blood is connected to the blood that Jesus shed on Good Friday and that his death, also unfair, somehow gives dignity to her mother’s death.

Her hunch is right. There is a connection, even if we lack the words to explain it, between what Jesus tasted on Good Friday and what any person who is unfairly victimized tastes. We have our own Good Fridays and they are not unconnected to what happened on Calvary two thousand years ago. Indeed, what Jesus underwent on Good Friday is, as this woman says, what gives us dignity when we taste the blood of humiliation, loneliness, helplessness, and death. What did Jesus undergo on Good Friday?

Interestingly, the gospels do not focus on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). What they highlight instead is his emotional suffering and his humiliation. He is presented as lonely, betrayed, alone, helpless to explain himself, a victim of jealousy, morally isolated, mocked, misunderstood, stripped naked so as to have to feel embarrassment and shame, and yet, inside of all this, as clinging to warmth, goodness, and forgiveness. Good Friday, in Luke’s words, is when darkness has its hour. What does that taste like?

*Whenever we find ourselves outside the circle of health and vibrancy, on a sick bed alone, with the sure knowledge that, despite the love and support of family and friends, in the end it is us, by ourselves, who face disability and disfigurement, who have to lose a breast or an organ to surgery, who face chemotherapy and maybe death, when we are alone inside of that, alone inside of fear, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we find ourselves alone inside duty, bound by moral chains we cannot explain, tied down in our freedom so as to be seen as too timid, too frigid, too afraid to pick up our own lives, when innocence and duty are seen as a weakness, when circumstance steals away our dreams and what we would want for ourselves we need to give to others, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we are misunderstood and because of that are made to look weak, bad, wrong, when we have to live with a misunderstanding that makes us look bad in the eyes of others, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we experience the pain of inadequate self-expression, when there are symphonies inside us that will never see the light of day because we cannot express ourselves, when we feel the pain that comes come knowing that most of what is best inside us will die with us, unexpressed, seemingly wasted, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we find ourselves the object of jealousy, animosity, and threat because of what we believe in, when what is virtue in us is made to look like selfishness, when we are made to feel shame for what we believe in, when what is precious to us is deemed offensive to others, we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we find ourselves alone and lost, before aging, before the loss of health, before the loss of sexual attractiveness and our former place in life, and before the loss of life itself, we are feeling the loneliness of dying and we are feeling what Jesus felt on Good Friday.

*Whenever we are unfairly made to be a victim, when we are made to carry someone else’s sickness, we are feeling what Jesus felt at Calvary and we are tasting the darkness of Good Friday.

When we taste that bitterness there is little else to say other than what Jesus said when he was arrested in the Garden of Gethsemane and led away to humiliation and death: , “But this is your hour – the triumph of darkness.”

We know what that means. All of us have moments when our world falls apart and when, as the Book of Lamentations says, all we can do is put our mouths to the dust and wait. Wait for what? Wait for darkness and death to have their hour, wait for (as Matthew says in his Passion account) the curtain of the temple to be torn from top to bottom, and the earth to shake, and the rocks to split open, and the graves to open and to show themselves to be empty.

Gethsemane – The Place To Give Up Resentment

March 13, 2005

(Last in a six-part Lenten series)

“When you carry someone’s cross, don’t send him or her the bill!”

This is one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The challenge of being an adult, one who helps carry life for others, is to give ourselves over in love, duty, and service without resentment. Those last words are key: Real love is not simply a matter of giving ourselves over in service and duty (mostly we have to do this anyway, whether we want to or not) it’sa question of giving ourselves over without being resentful.

This was one of the struggles of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was asked to give up his life and freedom for something higher and, like all of us,felt a fierce resistance. Nobody, easily and naturally, gives himself or herself over to the deeper demands of love, duty, and service. Transformation through prayer is needed to bring us there.

We see this in Jesus: Only after having prayed is he finally able to say: “Yet not my will, but yours, be done”. When he says this, his gift is pure. He is able to give himself over without resentment to the demands of a love which will take his whole life. After his prayer in Gethsemane, he is able to do what he needs to do without the feeling that he is a victim.

Jesus is victimized, but never a victim. When Pontius Pilate tries to intimidate him by telling him: “I can save your life or I can take it”, Jesus responds: “Nobody takes my life from me, I give it up freely!” That translates: “You can’t take from me by force what I have already freely given over out of love!”

And that’s the lesson: We become life-giving adults and our love becomes free of manipulation only when we can say this and mean it: “Nobody takes my love and service from me, I give it over freely!” Only when we stop seeing duty as an unfair burden that we haven’t chosen can we love and serve others without resentment and without making others feel guilty because of what it’s costing us.

But, it’s not easy to say those words and mean them. Like Jesus in the face of the deeper demands of love and duty, we initially say: “Let this cup pass! There’s got to be a way out of this, a way for me to become free of this.” That’s natural. It’s natural to want our freedom, to want to be free of burdens, of duty, of unfair circumstance. Nobody wants a martyrdom that he or she didn’t sign up for!

But eventually this form of martyrdom finds us all. If we are sensitive and good-hearted, love will frequently become duty, demanding circumstance, and an invitation to sacrifice ourselves for someone or something else. Always there will be someone or something making demands on our freedom and opportunity: children who need us, an aging parent who has only us, family obligations, a spouse with an illness, a crisis at our workplace, a tsunami in Asia, a war we don’t want, a church that needs volunteers, and obligations of every kind that come from being sensitive to the demands of God, family, church, country, morality, and the poor.

The world is not divided up between those who are burdened by duty and those who are free of it. Anyone who is sensitive and good is burdened by duty. The world is divided up rather between those who are burdened with duty and are resentful about it and those who are burdened with duty and are not resentful about it.

That is very much the lesson of Gethsemane: What Jesus gave over to his Father in the Garden is not perhaps so much his life, since his enemies were closing in on him and he might have had to die in any case, irrespective of any willingness or unwillingness on his part. Thousands of people die violently every day, against their will. There’s nothing special in that. What’s special in Jesus is how he prepared himself to meet that death, namely, by being willing to die without resentment, without putting a price-tag on it, without making anyone feel guilty about it, and with a heart that was warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than bitter, and large and understanding enough that it didn’t have to demand its due. In the face of bitter duty, he took his life and his love and made them a free gift.

That’s the greatest struggle we have in love. We’re good people mostly, but, like the Older brother of the prodigal son, all too often we nurse resentment, even as we do all the right things. That leaves us outside the house of love, hearing the music, but unable to dance, bitter about life’s unfairness. We need, at some point, to say: “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

If we say that and mean them, we will taste for the first time ever, real freedom.

Gethsemane – The Spirit Is Willing But The Flesh Is Weak

March 6, 2005

(Fifth in a six-part Lenten Series)

“Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you!” Leonard Cohen coined that phrase in a melancholic poem, Hallelujah, and it reflects how certain things can seduce us so that we end up breaking our word, our commitments, and even our integrity. Lot of things, it seems, can overthrow us.

Beauty, sex, ambition, jealousy, fear, tension, wounds, anger, despair, impatience, frustration, hatred, tiredness, and even misguided religious fervour can overthrow us. The spirit is willing, says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the flesh is weak.

And it is! The simple fact is that too often we cannot actualize ourselves as we would like. We’re never as good as we’d like to be, never as stable as we’d like to be, never as much at peace as we’d like to be,never as bright as we’d like to be, and never as beautiful as we’d like to be. We always fall short somehow.

One shortfall is moral: When we’re honest we know the truth of St. Paul’s words: “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the things I hate.” (Romans 7, 15-16)

How true! We’re a mystery to ourselves and, often, a disappointment as well. There’s a universal truth in the old Protestant dictum: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner, it’s only a question of `What’s your sin?'”

But it isn’t always about sin. The flesh is also weak in terms of simple adequacy. A generation ago, Anna Blaman put it this way:

“I realized that it is simply impossible for a human being to be and remain `good’ or `pure’. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, I left another in the cold. … No day and no hour goes by without my being guilty of some inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done. … except being inadequate, which we are good at, because it is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else.”

Henri Nouwen, speaking more for our generation, has a gentler, though not-less clear, expression of this:

“One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations.”

We’re weak and we fall short, not so much in intention as in execution. Generally it’s not because of ill will that we end up experiencing what St. Paul, Anna Blaman, and Henri Nouwen so accurately describe. We don’t want to be unfaithful, unreliable, neglectful, irresponsible, or inadequate. What’s truest inside us wants to keep watch with Jesus in Gethsemane, wants to possess the moral greatness of a Mother Teresa, and wants to be known and respected for fidelity, reliability, and adequacy. The spirit, mostly, is willing, but, as Jesus warns in the Garden of Gethsemane, “the flesh is weak”.

What’s to be learned from this? What does the Garden of Gethsemane have to teach us as we struggle with weakness and inadequacy?

That we don’t overcome our inadequacies by willpower alone, by simply willing that we might be better. We change our lives through grace and community. In the Garden an angel came and strengthened Jesus. That same angel has to come and strengthen us.

In Gethsemane, Jesus didn’t just warn us about the never-ending struggle between good-intention and good execution, between desiring to be good and actually being so. He underwent the struggle himself. His spirit was willing, but his flesh, like ours, was full of resistance. Ultimately he triumphed. However that triumph did not come about simply because he willed to remain faithful (though he did and that was a necessary part of the triumph) but because “an angel came and strengthened him”, that is, divine power eventually did for him what he could not do for himself.

A lot of things can, and do, overthrow us, despite the fact that we want to be good. One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that we cannot overcome this simply by renewed willpower and good intention. We need, in the struggle, to surrender to grace and community in such a way that God’s angels can come and give us what we can’t give ourselves, namely, goodness, wholeness, and adequacy.

Gethsemane – As The Place We Are Put To The Test

February 27, 2005

(Fourth in a six-part Lenten Series)

“A common soldier dies without fear, but Jesus died afraid.” Iris Murdoch wrote those words and they teach one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The Garden of Gethsemane is also the place where we are put to the test. What does this mean?

The great spiritual writer, Henri Nouwen, once wrote a book (In Memoriam) within which he tried to come to grips with his mother’s death. The manner of her death had surprised him and left him struggling with some painful doubts and questions. Why?

His mother had lived a full life; she’d died surrounded by a loving family and friends, and in her final illness had been made as comfortable and pain-free as possible by the best of modern medicine. What’s troubling about that?

She’d died struggling, it seemed, with her faith, unable to find at the most crucial moment of her life consolation from the God she’d loved and served so faithfully her whole life.

His mother, as he explains at the beginning of the book, had been a woman of exceptional faith and goodness. He was teaching aboard when he received the phone call that she was dying. Flying home to be with her, he mused naively how, painful as it was going to be, his mother’s death would be her final gift of herself and her faith to her family. A woman who had given them the faith during her life would surely deepen that gift by the way in which she would face her death.

But what he met in his mother and her struggles as she died was, at least to outward appearances, very different. Far from being peaceful and serene in her faith, she fought doubt and fear, struggling, it seemed, to continue to believe and trust what she had believed in and trusted in her whole life. For Henri, expecting that someone of such deep faith should die serenely and without fear, this was very disconcerting.

“Why”, he asked, “Would God do this? Why would someone of such deep faith seemingly struggle so badly just before her death?”

The answer eventually came to him: All her life, his mother had prayed to be like Jesus and to die like Jesus. Shouldn’t it make sense then that she should die like Jesus, struggling mightily with doubt and darkness, having to utter, “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” Jesus didn’t die serenely, but struggling with doubt. Shouldn’t his most committed followers expect a similar struggle?

The great mystics called this struggle “the dark night of faith”, an experience within which God purifies us by seemingly withdrawing all sense of his presence so that our thoughts and feelings run dry and we can no longer imagine God’s existence. We become, in our hearts and heads, atheists at that moment, though something in our souls knows another reality.

And it’s an awful feeling, one of the worst pains possible. Darkness, chaos, and fear overwhelm us and we stand, literally, on the brink of nothingness, of non-existence, sensing our finitude, littleness, and loneliness in a way we never sensed them before. We feel exactly what it would mean to live in a universe where there is no God.

The great doctors of the soul tell us that, while nobody is immune from this trial, it is generally experienced in so radical a way only by those who are the most mature in the faith and thus more ready to be purified by its particular fire. It’s not surprising then that it is experienced so strongly by people like Henri Nouwen’s mother.

The rest of us tend to get it in bits and pieces. Little doses of what Jesus experienced on the cross appear in our lives, reveal the fearful edges of nothingness, and let us taste for a moment what reality would feel like if there were no God. Part of the darkness and pain of that (and why it feels as if we are suddenly atheists) is that, in that experience, we come to realize that our thoughts about God are not God and how we imagine faith is not faith. God is beyond what we can feel and imagine and faith is not a warm feeling in the heart or a certainty in the mind, but a brand in the soul – beyond thought and feeling.

One way or the other, all of us have to learn this. But we’d like the lesson to come to us a bit more gently than how it came to Jesus in his last hours. Whenever we pray the Lord’s Prayer and say, “Do not put us to the test”, we’re asking God to spare us from this night of doubt.

When Jesus walked into the Garden of Gethsemane, he told his disciples: “Pray not to be put to be put to the test.” We need to pray for that because real faith can sometimes feel like doubt and serenity can too easily turn into dark fear.

Gethsemane – The Place Of Moral Loneliness

February 20, 2005

(Third in a six-part Lenten Series)

Our deepest loneliness is not sexual, but moral. More than we yearn for someone to sleep with sexually and emotionally, we yearn for someone to sleep with morally. What we really want is a soul mate.

What does this mean?

Ancient philosophers and mystics used to say that, before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything in relation to its original sweetness.

Inside each of us, there is a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent imprint inside us, one so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else.

Thus we recognize love and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside us. Things “touch our hearts” because they awaken a memory of that original kiss. Moreover, because we have a memory of once having been perfectly touched, caressed, and loved, every experience we meet in life falls a little short. We have already had something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is because our outside experience does not honour what we already know and cling to inside.

And that dark memory, of first love, creates a place inside us where we hold all that is precious and sacred. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to enter; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of compassion and the place of rage.

The yearning and pain we feel here can be called moral loneliness because we are feeling lonely in that precise place where we feel most strongly about the right and wrong of things, that is, we feel alone in that place where all that is most precious to us is cherished, guarded, and feels vulnerable when it is not properly honoured.

Paradoxically, it is the place where we most want someone to enter and yet where we are most guarded. On the one hand, we yearn to be touched inside this tender space because we already know the joy of being caressed there. On the other hand, we don’t often or easily let anyone penetrate there. Why? Because what is most precious in us is also what is most vulnerable to violation and we are, and rightly so, deeply cautious about whom we admit to that sacred place. Thus, often, we feel wrenchingly alone in our deepest centre.

A fierce loneliness results – a moral aching. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to visit us in that deep part where all that is most precious is cherished and guarded.Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soul mate. Great friendships and great marriages, invariably, have this at their root, deep moral affinity. The persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the true sense because they sleep with each other at the deepest level, irrespective of whether they have sex or not. In terms of feeling, this kind of love is experienced as a “coming home”, as finding a home, bone of my bone. Sometimes, though not always, it is accompanied by romantic love and sexual attraction. Always, however, there is a sense that the other is a kindred spirit, one whose affinity with you is founded upon valuing preciously the same things you do.

But such a love, as we know, is not easily found. Most of us spend our lives looking for it, searching, restless, dissatisfied and morally lonely.

It’s this kind of loneliness that brought Jesus to his knees in the Garden of Gethsemane. The blood he sweated there is the blood of a lover, one betrayed, morally betrayed, hung out to dry in all that was precious to him.

Nikos Kazantsakis once wrote that virtue is lonely because, at the end of the day, it is jealous of vice. “Virtue,” he writes, “sits on its lonely perch and weeps for all it’s missed out on.” Not quite, though perhaps that’s what it feels like.

But the pain of virtue, while not immune to jealousy, is a whole lot deeper than Kazantsakis (and conventional wisdom) suspect. It’s the pain of Gethsemane, of moral loneliness, the ache of not having anyone to sleep with morally.

One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that when we sweat our moral aloneness (without giving in to compensation or bitterness) we undergo a moral alchemy that can produce a great nobility of soul. “What’s madness,” Theodore Roethke asks, “but nobility of soul at odds with circumstance?” True. And that madness intensifies loneliness, even as, more than anything else, it opens the soul to the possibility of finally finding a kindred spirit.

Gethsemane – A Place To Learn A Lesson

February 13, 2005

(Second in a six-part Lenten Series)

There’s nothing wrong with wanting health, success, beauty, power, glamour, money, or fame. Of themselves, these are good and can, if used properly, help God’s glory shine through in ordinary life. But they can also be dangerous and can just as easily corrupt, inflate, and weaken rather than strengthen character. We want these things, but they aren’t always good for us.

Ironically, the reverse is also true: We don’t want failure, humiliation, sickness, powerlessness, poverty, or inferiority of any kind. Yet these, more than success and glamour, are what produce character and depth inside us. We see this, for instance, in a family who has a handicapped member. It’s this person who gives the family character and depth. The son or daughter who’s the professional athlete or the wonderfully beautiful fashion-model bring glory to the family, but not necessarily character. Character comes from something else.

If we examine ourselves with courage and honesty, we will see that almost all the things that have made us deep and given us character are the very things we’re often ashamed of: a plain body that won’t let us stand out in a crowd; a quirky family whose habits can only be understood from the inside; a frustrating job where our real talents can never emerge because we don’t have the right education or the right opportunities; a troubled history within which there have been too many instances where we were the dumb one, the weak one, the sick one, the excluded one, the fat one, the slow one, the one chosen last when sides were drawn up, the one without a date on a Friday night, and the one who got beaten up on the playground. Beyond that, we’ve also been forever the frustrated one, the one who, despite the burning ache for greatness, has never and will never create the masterpiece, write the symphony, or dance on a world stage.

But character and depth aren’t given for scoring goals in the World Cup, for winning Oscars in Hollywood, or for being so successful or beautiful that you become an icon for an adoring public. Character and depth are given for coping with powerlessness, inferiority, and humiliation, that is, for finding that deeper place inside of you where you can make a happy peace with the fact that your mother is too fat, that your father never blessed you, that you were abused, that the school bully humiliated you in front of your friends, that you were always the outsider, and that even today you live a life of quiet desperation wherein sickness, addictions, dark family history, loneliness, and inadequacies of every kind are barely kept at bay.

There’s an innate connection between attaining a certain level of depth and having experienced a certain level of humiliation. That’s one of the lessons of Gethsemane.

When Jesus walks into the garden of Gethsemane, he asks his disciples “to watch”. They’re meant to learn a lesson there, to see something illustrated. But, as Luke tells us, they missed the lesson because they fell asleep “out of sheer sorrow”, were blinded by simple depression, and were unable precisely to stare humiliation in the eye. That’s why on the morning of the resurrection, when Jesus meets two disciples walking away Jerusalem (the church, the faith, and the place of humiliation) towards Emmaus (a Roman Spa, a place of human consolation) he has to point out to them the necessary connection between humiliation and depth: “Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should have to suffer in this way so as to enter into his glory?”

What they’d missed seeing in the Garden, missed seeing Jesus struggling with and eventually accepting, was precisely the innate link between the experience of humiliation and the resurrection of character. Resurrections come after crucifixions, Easter Sundays after dark Fridays, and depth of soul after the kind of pain that one is ashamed of.

However, just like power and success, failure and humiliation are also dangerous. Power can corrupt, but so can powerlessness. Many are the acts of violence that issue forth when people feel powerless and humiliated. Sometimes failure and frustration build character, but sometimes they build monsters and murderers. Feelings of inferiority drive us into the deeper parts of our souls, but demons, not just angels, lurk in those depths. That’s why Gethsemane is drama without a pre- written ending. Not everyone will handle things like Jesus did. The feeling of humiliation can make or break us, pushing us either into greatness or perversity.

In Jesus’ case, it pushed him into greatness. How he handled his humiliation was perhaps his greatest gift to us and his deepest revelation of wisdom. By accepting humiliation and powerlessness (without resentment, but as a gift that can used to give something deeper back to the community) he taught us one of the deep secrets inside the very DNA of love itself, namely, that only when the private ego is crucified do real love, community, and character emerge.

Gethsemane As Liminal Space

February 6, 2005

(First in a six-part Lenten Series)

There’s never a good time to die, to bid final good-byes, to lose health, to have a heart attack, to be diagnosed with terminal cancer, to lose friends, to be betrayed, to be misunderstood, to lose everything, to be humiliated, to have to face death and its indescribable loneliness. That’s why there’s a powerful resistance inside us towards these things.

We can take consolation in knowing that this was the case too for Jesus. He didn’t face these things either without fear, trembling, and the desire to escape. In the Garden of Gethsemane “he sweated blood” as he tried to make peace with his own loss of earthly life.

The Garden of Gethsemane is, among other things, “liminal space”. What is this? Anthropologists use that expression to refer to special times in our lives when our normal situation is so uprooted so that it is possible precisely to plant new roots and take up life in a whole new way. That’s usually brought about by a major crisis, one that shakes us in the very roots of our being. Gethsemane was that for Jesus.

It’s significant that Jesus didn’t go straight from the last supper room to his crucifixion. He first spent some time readying himself. What’s incredible in his story is that he had only one hour within which to do this inner work.

Imagine this scene: You’re relatively young, healthy, and active. You’ve just enjoyed a festive dinner with close friends, complete with a couple of glasses of wine. You step out of the dining room late at night and you now have one hour to ready yourself to die, one hour to say your final good-byes, to let go, to make peace with death. Sweating blood might be a mild term to describe your inner turmoil. This would surely be an intense hour.

And so it was for Jesus. That’s why his liminal time is often called his “agony in the garden” (an apt term to describe real “liminal space”.) What’s interesting too is what scripture highlights in his suffering in Gethsemane. As we know, it never emphasizes his physical sufferings (which must have been pretty horrific). Instead it emphasizes his emotional crucifixion, the fact that he is betrayed, misunderstood, alone, morally lonely, the greatest lover in the world, with God alone as his soul mate.

And what’s burning up his heart and soul in Gethsemane? Jesus, himself, expresses it in these words: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!” His resistance was to the necessity of it. Why death and humiliation? Couldn’t there be some other way? Couldn’t new life somehow occur without, first, dying?

In the Garden, Jesus comes to realize and accept that there isn’t any other way, that there’s a necessary connection between a certain kind of suffering, a certain letting go, a certain humiliation, and the very possibility of coming to new life.

Why that necessity? What do we ultimately sweat blood over? Perhaps Job put it best: “Naked I came into this world and naked I leave it again.” We are born alone, without possessing anything: clothing, a language, the capacity to take care of ourselves, achievements, trophies, degrees, security, a family, a spouse, a friend, a reputation, a job, a house, a soul mate. When we exit the planet, we will be like that again, alone and naked. But it’s precisely that nakedness, helplessness, and vulnerability that makes for liminal space, space within which God can give us something new, beyond what we already have.

There are times when we sense this, sense its necessity, and sense too that one day, perhaps soon, we will, like Jesus in the Garden, have to make peace with the fact that we are soon to exit this life, alone, but for our hope in God. That’s Gethsemane, the place and the experience.

Our own prayer there, I suspect, will be less about necessity than about timing: “Lord, let this cup be delayed! Not yet! I know it’s inevitable, but just give me more time, more years, more experience, more life first!”

To feel that way is understandable and, if we’re young, even a sign of health. Nobody should want to die or want to give up the good things of this life. But Gethsemane awaits us all. Most of us, however, will not enter this garden of liminal space voluntarily, as did Jesus (“Nobody takes my life, I give it up freely!”). Most of us will enter it by conscription, but just as really, on that day when a doctor tells us we have terminal cancer or we suffer a heart attack or something else irretrievably and forever alters our lives.

When that does happen, and it will happen one way or the other to all of us, it’s helpful to know that we’re in liminal space, inside a new womb, undergoing a new gestation, waiting for new birth – and that it’s okay to sweat a little blood, ask God some questions, and feel resistance in every cell of our being.

Lost Is A Place Too

January 30, 2005

In her book, Survivor, Christina Crawford writes: “Lost is a place, too.”

That’s more than a clever sound-byte. It’s a deep truth that’s often lost in a world within which success, achievement, and good appearance define meaning and value.

What can that phrase teach us? That sometimes it’s good to be without success, without health, without achievements to bolster us, without good appearance, and even without meaning. Being down-and- out, alone, lost, struggling for meaning, and looking bad, is also a valid place to be.

One of the greatest spiritual writers of all time, John of the Cross, would agree with that. If he was your spiritual director and you explained to him that you were going through a dark, painful patch in life and asked him: “What’s wrong with me?” He would likely answer:

“There’s nothing wrong with you; indeed, there’s a lot right with you. You’re where you should be right now: in the desert, letting the merciless sun do its work; in a dark night, undergoing an alchemy of soul; in exile, lamenting on a foreign shore so that you can better understand your homeland; in the garden, sweating the blood that needs to be sweated to live out your commitments; being pruned, undergoing spiritual chemotherapy, to shrink the tumours of emotional and spiritual dead-wood that have built up from wrong-turns taken; in the upper room, unsure of yourself, waiting for pentecost before you can set out again with any confidence; undergoing positive disintegration, having your life ripped apart so that you can rearrange it in a more life-giving way; sitting in the ashes, like Cinderella, because only a certain kind of humiliation will ready your soul for celebration; and undergoing purgatory, right here on earth, so your heart, soul, and body can, through this painful purging, learn to embrace what you love without unhealthily wanting it for yourself.”

He’d also tell you that this can be a good place to be, a biblical and mystical place. That doesn’t make it less painful or humiliating, it just gives you the consolation of knowing that you’re in a valid place, a necessary one, and that everyone before you, Jesus included, spent some time there and everyone, including all those people who seem to be forever on top of the world, will spend some time there too. The desertspares nobody. Dark nights eventually find us all.

Knowing this, of course, doesn’t make it easier to accept feeling lost and on the outside, especially in a world in which being successful is everything. That’s why it’s hard to ever admit, even to our closest friends, that we’re struggling, tasting more ashes than glory. Small wonder that our Christmas letters to our friends each year invariably are a list of all that’s gone well in our lives and never an admittance of struggle or humiliation.

The need to name being lost as a valid place is important for us, both communally and personally.

In many ways, at least in the Western world, that’s exactly where the church is today, namely, in the desert, in a dark night, lost, being pruned, undergoing a purifying alchemy. We’re experiencing public humiliation in the sexual abuse scandal, in our greying and emptying churches, and in the strong anti-clericalism inside our culture. We’re aging, unsure of ourselves, lacking in vocations, and becoming ever more marginalized.

But that’s a place too, a good place to be. From the edges, humbled and insecure, we can again become church.

The same holds true in our personal lives. We have our good seasons, but we have seasons too where we lose relationships, lose health, lose friends, lose spouses, lose children, lose jobs, lose prestige, lose our grip, lose our dreams, lose our meaning, and end up humbled, alone, and lonely on a Friday night. But that’s a place too, a valid and an important one. Inside that place, our souls are being shaped in ways we cannot understand but in ways that will stretch and widen them for a deeper love and happiness in the future.

Good wines are aged in cracked old barrels. That’s what makes them rich and mellow. They can, of course, go sour during the process. That’s the risk. The soul works in the same way and, thus, we might ask whether failure and loneliness, as they shape our souls, need to be re-imagined aesthetically: Are maturity and transformation, growth in beauty, not about more than success, health, having it all, and looking like a million dollars?

Beauty is ultimately more about the size of our hearts, about how much they can empathize, and how about widely and unselfishly they can embrace. To that end, the desert-heat of loneliness is helpful in softening the heart, enough at least to let it be painfully stretched. That happens more easily when we’re lost, feeling like unanimity-minus-one, unsure of ourselves, empty of consolation, aching in frustration, and running a psychic temperature. Not pleasant, but that’s a place too.

“Get Behind Me Satan!”

January 23, 2005

When you read the lives of the saints, especially in some older books, you can get the impression that they lived in a different world. Many of them describe physical encounters with Satan within which they would, literally, get beaten up by him. Satan, it seemed, was forever lurking under a bed, in a basement, in a stairwell, or in some dark corner, just waiting to pounce on them and beat them up. They had to be careful not to venture naively into dark places; though, conversely, there were times when they readied themselves and went deliberately, to the desert, to openly do battle with him.

And, in that fight, they had a great weapon, simple one-line mantras: “Get behind me, Satan!” “Satan, leave this room!” “Satan, leave me alone!” That brought guaranteed results. He left them in peace for a while, though they emerged somewhat scraped and bruised from the encounter.

Such language sounds pretty esoteric and even superstitious to us. Not many of us have ever had Satan pop up from under our beds or from some dark place and begin to beat us up. Or have we?

Who or what is Satan? Believers today are split as to whether or not they believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for a venomous power that can overwhelm you, strip you of moral strength, and leave you precisely with the feeling of having been beaten up. Either way, whether we believe that Satan is an actual person or simply a symbol for malevolence, temptation, and lack of moral strength, the encounters that the saints describe happen to us too in our rational, agnostic lives just as surely as they happened to pious believers in former times.

Satan, scripture tells us, is the prince of jealousy, bitterness, paranoia, obsession, and lies. Few things in life torment us and beat us up as badly as these. They lurk in every dark corner, come out from under our beds at night, generally threaten us, darken our days, dampen our joys, and make us anxious as to what might lie around the corner. We just word things differently.

We speak of being “obsessed”, while the saints speak of being “possessed”. It’s just a difference of words.

Satan, however we choose to conceive of that power, is harassing us all the time and we, like the saints of old, need to learn the mantra: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Where are we harassed and beaten up by Satan? Here are some, everyday, examples:

Every time our minds and hearts begin bitterly replaying, like cassette tapes, old conversations, old wounds, old rejections, and old injustices, so that everything inside of us wants to scream: “This isn’t fair!” “How dare he say that!” “How can she do that, after all I did for her!” “I hate those people!” “Why do I always get cheated?”, we are being tormented by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!” There will be no joy, goodness, or moral strength in our lives until those obsessions leave us alone.

Every time we feel a deep emptiness inside and our world feels flat and empty of meaning because we are obsessed with someone or something we can’t have, we need to pray: “Get behind me, Satan!” Heartaches, especially over frustrated love, might well speak of romance, but they also bespeak satan in that they drain the joy out of life and deaden all of our manageable loves. Satan doesn’t come at us like a demon with a pitchfork, standing before fire and smoke, he torments us in a frustrated, pathologically-restless, romantic fantasy that has us in near-suicidal depression and comes upon us in dark stairwells, at parties, and right within our own beds.

Every time we feel pangs of jealousy (not necessarily overtly directed against someone else’s good fortune) but in the disappointment that we feel because our bodies, marriages, careers, and even our morals haven’t turned out as perfectly as we’d have liked, whenever we find it hard to be grateful for our own lives, we are being beaten up by Satan and need to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Indeed, any time we have trouble falling asleep at night because some memory, some disappointment, some lost love, some wrong-turn taken, or some obsession won’t let go and give us enough calm to sleep, Satan is harassing us, right in own beds, and we need, like the saints of old, to say: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Satan is alive and well, still tormenting us in our beds, in basement rooms, in dark stairwells, and in broad daylight as we travel to work. We call his presence: obsessions, heartaches, restlessness, jealousy, emptiness, fear, paranoia, old hurts, insomnia, chaos, and other names. Like the saints of old, we need at times when we feel strong enough to wrestle with him openly in the desert, but we need too, whenever our fears and obsessions begin to beat us up, to say the ancient prayer: “Get behind me, Satan!”

Honoring Jacques Dupuis

January 16, 2005

Mirceade Eliade, the anthropologist, once said: “No community should botch its deaths! Sadly, we often do and great men and women pass from our midst without us recognizing what they’ve done for us. The loss is ours.”

On December 28, 2004, Jacques Dupuis, a Belgian Jesuit and a professor-emeritus at the Gregorian University in Rome, died at age 81. We shouldn’t botch that death, but recognize and honour the fact that we’ve lost a great man whose life and work has been a major gift to us.

Jacques Dupuis was not an ecclesial, household name, such as Barth, Rahner, or Tillich. That doesn’t diminish his importance. We live in a world wherein the question of inter-religious dialogue, the relationship of the major world religions to each other, is not just a question of religion but of survival and, among Christian theologians on this issue, perhaps none are more important, or more balanced, than Jacques Dupuis.

In his “The Word From Rome” (January 7, 2005) John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter does what Eliade suggests: he properly honours a death within the family. He gives us an insight into the theologian and the man that was Jacques Dupuis, detailing too, a little, both his struggles with the Vatican and the special gift that he was for the Christian community. I heartily recommend Allen’s piece.

The question that Dupuis tried to address and which became his life’s work is very critical today: How do the major religions of the world interrelate? More specifically for us as Christians, how do we bring together our belief that there is one God who has created all people equally, plays no favourites, and wills the salvation of everyone, and yet has somehow made Jesus Christ the saviour of all?

Dupuis’ greatness lay in his fidelity to both poles of this tension. He was always a traditional Christian who believed in the uniqueness of Jesus Christ, even as he affirmed (in the face of much opposition) the non-negotiable fact that God loves everyone equally and that salvation is never a matter of privilege, chance, or of simply belonging to the right or wrong religious family.

His last book, Christianity and the Religions, From Confrontation to Dialogue, might well serve as the Christian compass in this area. He articulates both how far Christianity can go and how far it must go in understanding the relationship of Jesus Christ to other religions – and he ends up too liberal for the conservatives and too conservative of the liberals.

For him, there is salvation outside of historical Christianity and the great world religions are more than simple natural theologies. In ways that we don’t understand, they are also paths to salvation, instruments of divine revelation. Yet he is clear too that not all religions are equal and Christianity is not just another path, among others, to salvation. Jesus Christ is unique and somehow normative in his revelation of God.

Here’s a sample, a taste, of his own language: “He [Jesus] would not have liked his name invoked against founders and believers of other religious faiths. … [Jesus] recognized the positive value in God’s eyes of the religious experience of others and of the religious traditions in which they lived their faith in the God of the Reign and of life.”

Historical Christianity, he states, is not the Kingdom of God, but an instrument that serves the Kingdom: “As the ministry of Jesus demonstrated, the Reign of God goes beyond all human boundaries of any kind: ethnic, national, religious. … It has in fact been suggested that there is only one beatitude, namely, that of poverty, of simplicity of gaze, of openness to God’s will, of personal availability to the God of the Reign and to other human beings. This beatitude is attainable by all people of goodwill.”

Statements like this upset conservative critics, though liberal critics were likewise distressed by his stubborn refusal to back away from Christ’s claim that he, alone, is “the way, the truth, and the light.” He refused to reduce the tension inherent in respecting a great mystery.

That left him ecclesially lonely, a loneliness that, given his gentle nature, wore heavily on him.

I had the privilege of getting to know him somewhat during his last years. He was a friend and mentor that we, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, leaned on to help us sort through some of our own struggles in this area. He was always available, always gracious, and always radiated a big heart and a keen intellect.

A couple of years ago, he joined us in Thailand for a symposium on world religions. When the meeting ended, he left for the airport, by taxi, at 6:00 am, with a couple of my Oblate confreres. They rode along in silence, as befitted the early hour, until Dupuis, in the front seat, turned to my Oblate confreres in the back and asked: “Isn’t anyone going to talk?” That was also his plea concerning the fearful silence that has for so long surrounded the question of inter-religious dialogue.

Against An Infinite Horizon

January 9, 2005

Does belief in life after death have an impact on how we live our lives right now? Should it?

Several years ago I watched a panel of theologians discuss this question on national television and was surprised by their conclusions: All of them, theologians who professed to believe in God, without a dissenting voice, stated that it shouldn’t make any difference whatsoever whether or not there is life after death in terms of how we actually live our lives. Belief in life after death, they said, shouldn’t affect really our daily lives.

I have problems with that: First of all, it isn’t true, whatever our protests to the contrary. If we say that belief in an afterlife does not (and should not) affect how we live our lives, we’re simply out of touch with some of the deeper things that motivate us. It makes a huge difference, unconsciously, as to how restless or peaceful we are. When we no longer believe in a life hereafter we will, one way or the other, put unfair, restless pressure on this life.

There is a tendency today, both in church circles and in everyday life, to deny this. This, I suspect, is based on an over-reaction to the old punishment-reward system, which played too big a part in the religion of our youth. For too many of us, the idea was that we were supposed to live good lives so that, when we die, we’d go to heaven and not to hell. Part of that view too, over-simplified in the critique of religion made by Karl Marx (“Religion is the opium of the people”), was the idea that, if we believe in life after death, we were more likely to be unhealthily passive and not fully creative in this life.

Our instincts are right in wanting to reject this. However in our proclivity to be more liberal and open-minded, we generally lose sight of something else: Belief in life after death is important, not because it can affect our present lives with fears of hellfire or with the promise of a heaven that can be a soothing narcotic when life can’t deliver what we want, but because only the infinite can provide the proper horizon against which to view the finite.

Our lives our better understood, and more peacefully lived, when they are viewed against the horizon of eternity, against an afterlife.

Whether we believe in life after death consciously and unconsciously colours how we feel minute to minute inside our daily lives. If, for example, we don’t believe in life after death and don’t view our lives against the horizon of the eternal, how do we keep the demons of restlessness, disappointment, sadness, jealousy, self-pity, and cynicism at bay?

If this life alone has to carry everything, how tragic then to be poor, to lack opportunity, to not be healthy, to not have a perfect body, to lack the talent to adequately express ourselves; how tragic then to not regularly experience ecstasy in love, to not find a perfect soulmate, to have to sleep alone; how permanently tragic then to have been the victim of some accident, to have been abused, to be wounded, less than whole; how tragic then to be in a marriage that cannot fully take our loneliness away; how tragic then to be caught up in duty, in circumstance, in family, in history in a way that limits our freedom; how tragic then to not have a job that is fully satisfying, to not have a career that properly honours our gifts; how tragic then to find ourselves aging, losing our physical beauty and becoming marginalized; how tragic then to have face death with our lives still incomplete; how tragic then to have to miss out on any of life’s pleasures; how tragic then to find ourselves always in lives too small for us, small-time, small-town, unknown, our dreams reduced to ashes, nostalgia, jealousy, frustration; how tragic then to contemplate what might have been, to have made wrong choices; how tragic then simply to be alone on a Friday night; how tragic then to have to spend a holiday without someone special to share it with; how tragic then to live in a body, a family, a marriage, a home, a world, and a life which can never give us the full symphony nor ever take away our deepest restlessness and longing.

There is no other horizon, outside of eternity and afterlife, against which we can view the human condition in a way that doesn’t produce undue restlessness, disappointment, sadness, and cynicism.

Belief in a life after this one isn’t meant to make us live in fear of hellfire or in the infantile hope that if we’re good we’ll get a reward for it after we die. Belief in life after death is meant to give us proper vision so that we can, precisely, enjoy the real joys of this life without perpetually crucifying ourselves because of they, and we, aren’t perfect.

The Inclusive Embrace of Catholicism

January 2, 2005

Canadian theologian, Michael Higgins, recently made this observation. At the upcoming Academy Awards, two movies will take centre stage, Mel Gibson’s, THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, and Michael Moore’s, FAHRENHEIT 9/11.

What’s interesting about this, Higgins notes, is that, different as they are from each other, both Gibson and Moore are Roman Catholics, each in his own way very committed to what Catholicism means to him. The secular press of course has quickly marginalized this, calling Gibson an extreme, right wing Catholic, on the theological edges of mainstream Catholicism, and simplistically labelling Moore a secular liberal.

This, as Higgins rightly points out, is not exactly the case: Mel Gibson, whether you like him or not, is not so easily categorized, marginalized, and seen as in some kind maverick on the fringe, in antipathy to mainstream Catholic theological tradition. Likewise for Moore: Like him or hate him, he is not a secular liberal, but a Catholic coming out of the tradition of social justice of Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton. He may well push the political envelope further than they did, but what drives him is not secular liberalism (whose agenda no longer in fact often agrees with Moore’s) but his Catholic roots and the social justice tradition he inhaled there.

I highlight this because, whether or not you were inspired or turned off by either of their movies, there is something significant (and wonderful) in the fact that both Gibson and Moore, seemingly at such extreme ends of the ideological and ecclesial universe, claim the same faith allegiance, derive their inspiration from the same source, and, in the end, worship in the same church. That’s a stretch, but, that’s the point, Catholicism is meant to be a stretch, a huge one, taking us where we would rather not go, beyond our comfort-zone, beyond our own kind, beyond the like-minded.

Jesus said: “In my father’s house there are many rooms!” That’s also meant to be a description, at least ideally, of Christianity, Catholicism, the church, and our theological and ideological embrace. A healthy faith community, a healthy church, and a healthy theological community should find enough room inside it for both Mel Gibson and Michael Moore.

Allow me another example: Most every year, unless other commitments make it impossible, I attend a Religious Education Congress (sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles) in Anaheim, California. It’s always an uplifting, faith-filled event within which more than 30,000 Christians come together to reflect on and celebrate their faith. One of the little sub-themes there that I’ve always enjoyed is the particular placing of some of the book displays in the pavilion where the various publishers sell their wares. Invariably you will find, side by side, the booths for the CATHOLIC WORKER and IGNATIUS PRESS. They’re miles apart ideologically (Michael Moore would shop at the former, Mel Gibson at the latter) yet here they are, side by side, on very friendly terms, participating in the same faith event, both representing something important within the same tradition, neither bent on excluding the other.

There’s something important, I believe, to be learned from this, and not just for Roman Catholics. We cannot build either a society or a church with just liberals or just conservatives. To build community we need to work with more than just those who are like-minded. Any community or church built with just the like-minded is not worth belonging to because it reflects neither what’s best inside the human spirit nor, for those of us who are Christians, the inclusive embrace of Christ. A healthy society and a healthy church includes both the Mel Gibsons and the Michael Moores and everyone in between.

But that doesn’t come naturally. What does come naturally is the proclivity to huddle together in fear and like-mindedness, like the disciples before pentecost, barricaded behind locked door with our own kind, paranoid, suspicious of all who are not of our own mind. Not that all of this is bad. Sometimes we need, for a time, nurturing and healing, a convalescence of sorts, inside a more intentional community so that hearts and nerves that have been frayed by division and opposition within family, community, and church have a chance to be more gently massaged and nurtured. Intentional community of this sort, in essence, is the “upper room” the early church retired to, in pain and fear, as it waited for Pentecost.

But it didn’t stay there forever. Indeed, no real community was formed in that room. They huddled together for a while for a purpose, in fear, in loneliness, consoling each other within a certain fragility; but when they finally felt the real power of God’s spirit, they burst out of those narrow confines. Their narrowness and fear gave way to an inclusivity and a courage which enabled them to speak different languages, languages of both the left and the right, languages of both the liberal and the conservative, languages that both Mel Gibson and Michael Moore could hear and take to heart.

The Earthiness of Christmas

December 26, 2004

Christmas means many things, but, at its heart, lies the concept of the incarnation, namely, the idea that God takes on human flesh, a human body, becomes physical. At Christmas, “the word was made flesh.”

That’s significant for many reasons. Among other things, the fact that God is born into our material world and takes on a human body blesses and sanctifies the physical world and our own bodies. It also assures us that we can find meaning and salvation without having to denigrate either our bodies or the physical world.

This is clear in the Christmas message and is taught explicitly in the way in which Jesus is born. His birth was real, physical, earthy, and, like all human births, messy.

We don’t often allow ourselves to think like that. Mostly we idealize and spiritualize the birth of Jesus so as to imagine it as privileged, somehow miraculous, and thus removed from the mess, blood, smells, and brute physicality of normal human birth. But, as scripture assures us, Jesus was fully human in every way and that means too that he was born through the pain, mess, and earthiness of normal childbirth, complete with all that attends that – blood, messy afterbirth, the need for washing.

Moreover, scripture tells us that Jesus was not born in a cathedral, with the sweet smell of incense perfuming the air, stained-glass windows providing a special light, or soft organ music intimating the presence of the sacred. Indeed he wasn’t even born in a hospital, where modern medicine and sanitation help cover the mess and the smells of childbirth. The gospels tell us instead that he was born in a barn and then laid into an animals’ feeding trough.

Contemporary biblical scholarship nuances this somewhat by telling us that we don’t really know exactly where Jesus was born and that the gospel writers don’t necessarily want us to believe that he was born in a barn and physically placed in a manger. But the gospels do want us to take those symbols seriously, and that still makes the point: Jesus’ birth is placed inside a stable because, among other things, barns don’t look like cathedrals and animals don’t smell like incense. There’s a brute earthiness to a barn, smells you don’t get in church. As for the manger, the feeding trough, well, that makes sense too, given that Jesus will tell us that his “flesh is food for the life of the world”. If one of the main purposes of Jesus’ life is to end up as food, as Eucharist, on a table (we call an altar), shouldn’t he be born in a feeding trough? The wood of the manger and the wood of the altar are one and the same, feeding tables, both of them.

But it’s difficult for us both to imagine and to accept how truly physical, earthy, and messy all of this really is. Everyone struggles with this, conservatives and liberals alike: Conservatives are forever wanting to make Jesus’ actual physical birth a miraculous event, with Mary delivering Jesus in some privileged way so that there isn’t at his birth the normal groaning, blood, and mess of childbirth. Liberals don’t fare much better. They’re forever trying to turn the event of Jesus’ birth into something more symbolic than physical (which then, like the conservatives’ miracle, doesn’t have any real blood).

The same is true for most World Religions. Invariably salvation is seen as an escape from the flesh, an escape from the physical, an escape from dirt, an escape from mess, all done in the name of the spiritual. The way to God, in most religious traditions and in most ordinary imaginations, involves escaping the physical and frowning upon mess.

But that’s not the way of Christianity, as the birth of Jesus makes plain. In the incarnation, Christmas, God enters the world, becomes physical, and, by doing that, assures us that the spiritual does not set itself against the physical, that the sacred is not antithetical to the smells of the human body, and that God is not just found in churches and in places that are clean and reverent. The old moral dualisms – the spiritual against the physical, the clean against the messy – break down in the incarnation.

What Christmas teaches us is that God is as much domestic as monastic, a God of the body as well as of the soul, a God who is found in barns as well as in churches, in kitchens as well as in cathedrals.

Among the many things we celebrate at Christmas therefore is the sacredness of our own lives, in all their physicality. What’s made holy by Jesus’ birth? Most everything that’s physical: nature, our homes, our kitchens, our workplaces, our barns, our restaurants, our bars, our sports facilities, and, not least, our own bodies, including sex and the way babies are born.

Spirit too, of course, is blessed and made holy by the incarnation, but the Word was already spiritual. At Christmas, it “was made flesh.”