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.

“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.

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.

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 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.

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.

(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.

(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.