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.”

Faith Means that God is With Us

December 19, 2004

If Christ was born into the world to redeem it, why doesn’t our world look more redeemed? Why is our world still full of loneliness, anxiety, betrayals, sickness, poverty, violence, war, and death? What did Christ’s birth into our world really change?

These aren’t irreverent questions; they’re the right questions. Only in struggling to answer them do we begin to understand more deeply the mystery of Christ. What is that mystery?

In the gospels, one of the angels who announces Jesus’ birth, tells us: “They shall name him Emmanuel” (which means `God is with us.”) What do those words mean?

Sometimes it’s helpful to proceed by the via negativa, namely, by explaining what something doesn’t mean. In this case, the fact that Christ is born into our world does not mean that those who believe in him will be spared the pain, loneliness, seasons of sickness, heartaches, betrayals, anxieties, fears, and humiliations that afflict everyone else. Faith offers no one an escape from pain. Moreover, believers, just like unbelievers, will suffer too the darkness of doubt, the painful fear that the heavens are empty. Faith in Christ doesn’t remove any of the pains inherent within the human condition, including the pain of doubting God’s existence. Faith promises no magic pass-cards.

What it does promise is that God will be with us so that we do not have to walk through loneliness, sickness, violence, anxiety, fear, and death alone. We have a hand to grasp, a love to embrace, a truth to cling to, and a power to sustain us (even through death itself). We walk in the same world as everyone else, but, like a young child holding on to her mother’s hand as she walks into school for the first time, we are not alone, a trusted, sustaining, guiding love walks with us. God doesn’t remove us from what can hurt us, but walks with us amidst it all.

But that explanation too can feel pretty empty on any given day. If God is walking beside us, hand in ours, why don’t we feel that more really? Why does God often seem non-existent, not with us at all?

Because believers, like everyone else, are not exempt from the trial of faith, from the darkness of doubt, from those emotional and spiritual dark nights that can crush us, bring us to our knees, and can make us cry out in fear that God has abandoned us, as happened to Jesus on the cross. Part of being human (and faith isn’t some magic bullet immunizing us against the human condition) is the experience of God’s seeming absence.

So how can we say that “God is with us” when mostly it feels like God isn’t there for us? That’s a complex question and a full answer would necessitate a discussion on why, in the nature of faith, God’s reality is often felt more like an absence than a presence. But, without entering into a full-blown discussion on this, allow me to give just one perspective:

In the Jewish scriptures there’s a famous incident where Moses asks God to see his face. God answers that this is impossible because nobody can see God’s face and live. When Moses persists in his demand, God offers a compromise: He tells Moses that he will place him in a cleft in the rocks, put his hand over Moses’s face, and then pass by, so that Moses will get to see his, God’s, back, though never his face.

What’s meant by this? Among other things, that we are wise not to be overly naive about the powerful, sacred, archetypal energies that flow through us. Even when something is beautiful and good, like sex for instance, it doesn’t mean we don’t have to treat with sacred caution. We’re wise to accord things their proper respect, to keep our shoes off before the burning bush.

But there’s a wonderful sub-text here too which can help explain why we so often think that God is absent in our lives. Generally we struggle to feel God in the present moment, to see God’s face in the here and now. In the present, God often seems absent. Yet, when we turn around and look back in our lives, when we look back on our story, we more easily see how God has been there all along and how we have walked in a divine presence, protection, guidance, and love that were imperceptible at the time but are clear in retrospect. We see God more clearly in our past than in our present. We see God’s back more than we see God’s face.

This can be helpful in understanding how Christ is present to us, even when it doesn’t always feel like it.

Faith doesn’t promise us a ladder to crawl out of the pains of life, it promises a friend to walk with through those pains. Mostly though it’s only when we look back in our lives that we see that this friend has always been there.

Jesus’ Dysfunctional Family Tree

December 12, 2004

The full story of how Jesus Christ came to be born includes elements that we do not easily imagine when we sing our Christmas hymns. Jesus’ family tree and blood-line were far from perfect and this, according to the great biblical scholar, Raymond Brown, needs to be kept in mind whenever we are tempted to believe in Jesus but want to reject the church because of its imperfections, scandals, and bad history. Jesus may have been immaculately conceived, but there is much in his origins, as the gospels make clear, that’s as un-immaculate as any contemporary church scandal.

For example, in giving us the origins of Jesus, the gospels point to as many sinners, liars, and schemers in his genetic and historical lineage as they do to saints, honest people, and men and women of faith.

We see, for example, in Jesus’ genealogy a number of men who didn’t exactly incarnate the love, justice, and purity of Jesus: Abraham unfairly banished Ishmael and his mother, Hagar, rationalizing that God favours some people over others; Jacob, by scheming and dishonesty, stole his brother Esau’s birthright; and David, to whom Jesus explicitly connects himself, committed adultery and then had the husband of his mistress murdered to cover-up an unwanted pregnancy and in order to marry her.

And the women mentioned in Jesus background aren’t much better. It’s interesting to note, as Raymond Brown does, which women don’t get mentioned in reference to Jesus’ origins. The gospels don’t mention Sarah, Rebekeh, or Rachel, all of whom were regarded as holy women. Whom do they mention?

They mention Tamar, a Canaanite woman, someone outside the Jewish faith, who seduces her father-in-law, Judah, so that she can have a child; Rahab, also a Canaanite woman, and an outsider, who is in fact a prostitute; Ruth, a Moabite woman who is also outside the official religion of the time; and Bathsheba, a Hittite woman, an outsider who commits adultery with David and then schemes to make sure one of her own offspring inherits the throne.

All of these women found themselves in a situation of marriage or pregnancy that was either strange or scandalous, yet each was an important divine instrument in preserving the religious heritage that gave us Jesus. It’s no accident that the gospels link these women to Mary, Jesus’ mother, since she too found herself in a ritually taboo pregnancy and in a marital situation that was peculiar.

And beyond these less-than-saintly characters in Jesus’ lineage, we see as well that some of the institutions that shaped the Jewish faith were also less than saintly. Institutionalized religion back then suffered from many of the same problems it has today, including the corrupt use of power. Moreover, Israel itself (perhaps justifying the deed by referring to what Jacob had done to Esau) seized the land of Canaan from those who had a prior claim to it, claiming ownership by divine privilege.

Finally, and not insignificantly, we see too that the lineage that gave us Jesus built itself up not just upon the great and the talented, but equally upon the poor and the insignificant. In the list of names that makes up the ancestors of Jesus, we see some that are famous and others that can make no claim to specialness or significance. Jesus’ human blood, scripture tells us, was produced equally by the great and the small, the talented and the talentless.

What’s to be learned for all of this? Perhaps Raymond Brown captures it the best. What all this tells us, he says, is that God writes straight with crooked lines, that we shouldn’t accept an overly-idealized Jesus Christ, and that our own lives, even if they are marked by weakness and insignificance, are important too in continuing the story of the incarnation.

As Brown, himself, puts it: “The God who wrote the beginnings with crooked lines also writes the sequence with crooked lines, and some of those lines are our own lives and witness. A God who did not hesitate to use the scheming as well as the noble, the impure as well as the pure, men to whom the world harkened and women upon whom the world frowned – this God continues to work through the same melange. If it is a challenge to recognize in the last part of Matthew’s genealogy that totally unknown people were part of the story of Jesus Christ, it may be a greater challenge to recognize that the unknown characters of today are an essential part of the sequence.”

Christianity isn’t just for the pure, the talented, the good, the humble, and the honest. The story of Jesus Christ was also written and keeps getting written too by the impure, by sinners, by calculating schemers, by the proud, by the dishonest, and by those without worldly talents. Nobody is so bad, so insignificant, so devoid of talent, or so outside the circle of faith, that he or she is outside the story of Christ.

Naming our Restlessness

December 5, 2004

“A symptom suffers most when it doesn’t knows where it belongs.”

James Hillman wrote that and I learned what it means when I was 17 years old. At that tender age, I entered a religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Like everyone that age, I was pretty restless, overfull with desire, and that was soon compounded by the isolation I experienced during the early years of seminary formation. I remember well my first year of training, a year called novitiate. There were eighteen of us, mostly under the age of twenty, in a building by ourselves, across a lake from a small rural village (the only outside life), cut off from the normal activities of people our age and cut off from contact with women.

We were understandably restless, jumping out of our skins, but that was never talked about, never admitted. We were preparing to take religious vows, to give our lives to God and the church, and it wouldn’t have been right to admit that certain parts of us weren’t onside and that there was more than a little lonely casting of our eyes across the lake, jealously fantasizing about what we were missing out on.

We lived in that restlessness; but for me, a wonderfully freeing thing happened half-way through that year. My restlessness didn’t go away but something helped put it into perspective. Somebody named it for me. An old priest visited us one day, took one look at us and said: “You’re restless, aren’t you?” We were too pious to admit it. “Good!” he continued, “You should be jumping out of your skin! It isn’t natural for young people to be cut off like this, but don’t worry about it. It can do you good. Being restless doesn’t mean you can’t be good priests!”

His simple, honest naming of what we were feeling introduced us to ourselves. We were still restless, but now we felt better, normal, and healthy again. A symptom suffers less when it knows where it belongs.

All of us need to have our restlessness named for us. We all feel like jumping out of our skin at times. But, as this old priest said, we should feel that way. It’s normal, a sign of emotional health. It’s normal to sometimes cast our eyes jealously across the waters, to feel that we are missing out on life, and to have that nagging feeling that our lives are too small for us.

This experience has many faces. Sometimes it shows itself as a restlessness that besets us on a Friday night when it seems everyone in the world is doing something exciting except ourselves. Other times we feel it as dissatisfaction with everything in front of us because we’re obsessed with a relationship that isn’t really ours to have. Most deeply though we feel it when the limits of life break through to us. How does this happen?

We come into this world with insatiable desires, huge talents, boundless energy, and grandiose dreams. Like a god or goddess, we’d like to drink up the planet, taste every wine, and know every experience; but, in all this desire and potential, we, all of us, eventually find ourselves in a very limited, circumscribed place and situation. At some point reality sets in, the daydreams are over, and we find ourselves in one particular city, in one particular job, with one particular partner, with one particular family, with one particular set of friends, and with one very concrete set of domestic commitments and duties. All of our potential, all of our desire, all of our talent, all of our ambition, have come down to this – this time, this place, this city, this job, this partner, this family, these duties, this little space in history, this very circumscribed life which, good though it is, cannot but fall short of our expectations.

As Thoreau once said, as a young person we dream of building a bridge to the moon and sometime in mid-life we pick up the materials we’ve gathered and build a woodshed.

And it’s not easy to be satisfied with a woodshed. And so the temptation is to do violence to our loved ones and our commitments by being unfairly dissatisfied with them. We do this whenever we say, however subtle and unspoken this might be: “All that I might have been … and I’m stuck with just this!”

We need some old sage, some magus, man or woman, to name this for us, as the old priest named it for me when I was seventeen: “You feel restless! Good! You’re supposed to feel that way! It doesn’t mean you’re life and situation aren’t good!”

Karl Rahner once named it this way: There can be a real danger in fantasizing too much about tangible happiness. There is no other happiness in this world outside of tranquilly accepting that here all symphonies remain unfinished and that part of the foundation of love is solitude and self-denial. We must learn how to weep in peace.

Advent Hope

November 28, 2004

Henri Nouwen was once asked: “Are you an optimist?” His reply: “No, not naturally, but that isn’t important. I live in hope, not optimism.”

Teilhard de Chardin once said the same thing in different words when he was accused of being overly-idealistic and unrealistic in the face all the negative things one sees in the world. A critic had challenged him: “Suppose we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, what then happens to your vision of a world coming together in peace?” Teilhard’s response lays bare the anatomy of hope: “If we blow up the world by nuclear bombs, that will set things back some millions of years, but eventually what Christ promised will come about, not because I wish it, but because God has promised it and, in the resurrection, God has shown that God is powerful enough to deliver on that promise.”

Hope is precisely that, a vision of life that guides itself by God’s promise, irrespective of whether the situation looks optimistic or pessimistic at any given time.

Hope is not simple optimism, an irrepressible idealism that will not let itself be defeated by what’s negative; nor is it wishful thinking, a fantasy- daydream that someday our ship will come in; nor is it the ability to look the evening news square in the eye and still conclude, realistically, that there are good reasons to believe everything will turn out well.

Hope is not based on whether the evening news is good or bad on a given day. The daily news, as we know, is better on some days and worse on others. If we hope or despair on the basis of whether things seem to be improving or disintegrating in terms of world events, our spirits will go up and down like the stock market. Hope isn’t based on CNN, or any other network. Instead, hope looks at the facts, looks at God’s promise, and then, without denying the facts or turning away from the evening news, lives out a vision of life based upon God’s promise, trusting that a benevolent, all-powerful God is still in charge of this world and that is more important than whether or not the news looks good or bad on a given night.

Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners and one of the prophets of hope in today’s world, has a wonderful way of illustrating this:

Politicians, he says, are all of a kind. A politician holds up his finger in the wind, checks which way the wind is blowing, and then votes that way. It generally doesn’t help, Wallis says, to change the politicians because those who replace them do exactly the same thing. They too make their decisions according to the wind. And so – “We need to change the wind!” That’s hope’s task. The wind will change the politicians.

How does this work? Wallis uses the example of the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa. Apartheid was not brought down by guns or violence or even by changing the politicians, but by changing the wind. And it was changed by hope. How?

In the face of racial injustice, people of faith began to pray together and, as a sign of their hope that one day the evil of apartheid would be overcome, they lit candles and placed them in their windows so that their neighbours, the government, and the whole world would see their belief. And their government did see. They passed a law making it illegal, a politically subversive act, to light a candle and put it in your window. It was seen as a crime, as serious as owning and flaunting a gun. The irony of this wasn’t missed by the children. At the height of the struggle against apartheid, the children of Soweto had a joke: “Our government,” they said, “is afraid of lit candles!”

It had reason to be. Eventually those burning candles, and the prayer and hope behind them, changed the wind in South Africa. Morally shamed by its own people, the government conceded that apartheid was wrong and dismantled it without a war, defeated by hope, brought down by lit candles backed by prayer. Hope had changed the wind.

During the season of advent, Christians are asked to light candles as a sign of hope. Unfortunately this practice, ritualized in the lighting of the candles in the advent wreath, has in recent years been seen too much simply as piety (not that piety doesn’t have its own virtues, especially the virtue of nurturing hope inside our children). But lighting a candle in hope is not just a pious, religious act; it’s a political act, a subversive one, and a prophetic one, as dangerous as brandishing a firearm.

To light an advent candle is to say, in the face of all that suggests the contrary, that God is still alive, still Lord of this world, and, because of that, “all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well,” irrespective of the evening news.

Finding our Loved Ones After Their Deaths

November 21, 2004

As Christians, we believe in the “communion of saints”. We believe that those who have died are not only still alive but that they are, as well, still in a real relationship with us.

But how? How do we find our loved ones after they have died?

It is interesting to note that Christianity, unlike some other religions, has never had a significant cult around dead bodies or cemeteries. We respect them, reverence them, but we do not try to mummify our dead (as the ancient Egyptians did) nor do we have much in the way of special ceremonies or religious rituals around cemeteries. There’s a reason for that.

On Easter Sunday morning, Mary Magdala and some other women, armed with spices in view of embalming his dead body, went Jesus’ grave. But they didn’t find him there, instead they found an angel who (in effect) asked them: “Why are you looking in a cemetery for someone who is alive?” “He’s not here,” the angel added, “go instead to Galilee and he will meet you there.”

That instruction is still valid today: When we are looking to meet our loved ones who have died we will find them in “Galilee” more so than in any cemetery. Where and what is “Galilee”?

Galilee, for Mary Magdala and the contemporaries of Jesus, was more than a place on a map, the Northern-part of Israel. It was also, and especially, the place where Jesus’ spirit had flourished, the place they had first met him, the place of his key miracles, and the place where their own spirits had been stretched, enlarged, and warmed by contact with him. Galilee represented the place of their innocence, their first fervour, their initial learning, their first falling in love. Now, after Jesus’ death, they were being asked to go back to that place as the privileged spot where Jesus would meet them again.

And our faith says the same thing to us: Like Mary Magdala and the early Christian believers, we can meet our deceased loved ones by going back to “Galilee”, namely, by going to those places where their spirits flourished and where our own spirits were instructed, stretched, and warmed by contact with them. What, practically, does that mean? Allow me an example:

My own parents died thirty years ago and are now buried, side by side, in a little cemetery in the rural countryside where I grew up. Sometimes when I’m home, I visit their graves, say a few prayers there, and remind myself of what each of them gave me. It’s nice, but it’s not where I really meet my mother and father. I meet them, more deeply, in “Galilee”, that is, in those places where their souls most flourished and where they took God’s boundless, beautiful, colourful, life-giving energy and enfleshed it.

For example: My mother was a woman of great generosity, kind- hearted and selfless to a fault. When I go to that place, when I’m generous and kind-hearted, I feel my mother’s laugh, sense her consolation, and find myself again warmed by her warmth. Conversely, at those times when I’m petty and selfish it does me little good to adorn her grave with flowers or prayers. She’s there too, of course, like God’s presence, faithful when we’re unfaithful, but, when I’m not in her “Galilee”, it’s harder for her to meet me and give me what she once gave me as my mother.

It’s the same with my father: His great quality was his integrity, his moral stubbornness, his refusal to compromise, his unrelenting insistence that one should always take the high road, the one less- travelled. When I prove myself his son in this, I feel his presence, his humour, his intelligence, his solid hand on my shoulder, his trustworthiness. Conversely, when I make moral compromises, he’s still present, but his humour, intelligence, and trustworthy hand, can no longer nurture me in the same way.

There’s both a deep truth and deep challenge in the words the angel spoke to Mary Magdala on Easter morning: “Why are you looking for a living person in a cemetery. He’s not here. Go instead to Galilee and he will meet you there.”

Where do we find our loved ones after they have died? Where will others find us after we have died? In “Galilee”, in those places where we most give our own unique expression to God’s boundless energy.

We should honour our dead and honour the cemeteries where their bodies now rest, but we meet our deceased in “Galilee”, in those places where their spirits flourished and where our own souls were stretched and instructed and warmed in our contact with them. More than honouring their graves, we need to honour their lives, we need to honour the wonderful energy that they uniquely incarnated and which, in turn, nurtured, instructed, stretched, cajoled, consoled, warmed, teased, humoured, steadied, and blessed us.

When we do that our relationship with them does not just continue, it deepens.

Songs of Innocence and Experience

November 14, 2004

There’s a wonderful little book of essays by Christopher de Vinck entitled, Songs of Innocence and Experience. It radiates what its title suggests, both innocence and experience, a rare combination.

Innocence and experience are indeed a rare combination. It’s hard to find in one and the same person a certain purity, trust, childlike curiosity, freshness, reverence, and respect, living peacefully alongside a mature awareness that life isn’t simple, that sentimentality isn’t always a virtue, that safety too can be a danger, that people are inextricably sexual, that life is best entered into without undue fear and timidity, and that we shouldn’t pretend that all is always rainbows, sweetness, and God.

It’s rare to find both reverence and sophistication, idealism and realism, purity and passion, inside the same person. And yet, to my mind, that’s one of the keys to life. Though it’s also a formula for tension. One of the great tensions in life is the ongoing battle inside us between innocence and experience.

On the one hand, something inside us yearns always for innocence, purity, freshness, and trust. If we lose these, we soon find ourselves cynical and disillusioned with an unhappiness that comes precisely from being over-sophisticated, from having been around, from having had our eyes opened, from having knowledge without innocence. As Albert Camus once said, when we first plunge into experience (partly as an unconscious vengeance against the fears and restraints of our childhood) it feels like a liberation. Soon enough, however, it turns into disappointment and defeat. Like Adam and Eve after eating the apple, our “minds are opened”, but we find out too that we’re naked and don’t trust each other, and our innocent happiness is gone.

And real innocence isn’t easy: There’s a pressure inside of us to distance ourselves from it because we fear it as a naivete, a timidity, a frigidity, a hiding one’s head in the sand, a failure to look life in the eye. We have an innate resistance to what’s unsophisticated and frightened. At the same time, there’s a pressure inside us to idealize innocence. We like to put innocence on a pedestal, yearn for it, but then see it as a simplicity and asexuality that is as impossible for a full-blooded adult as it is undesirable. We see this over-idealization, for example, in our unwillingness (and flat-out incapacity) to see Jesus as being in any way sexual, to see Mother Theresa as complex and subject to temptation, and in our inability to conceive of the feminine except as either virgin or prostitute.

Just as we long for innocence, we also long to give ourselves over to all that life offers without undue fear, frigidity, and taboo. Our better instincts tell us: Experience is good, so keep your head out of the sand, accept the pathos and the complexity of life, don’t be in denial about sexuality, and don’t be overly sentimental about childhood and innocence because sentimentality itself is an over-emphasis on innocence.

And here too we feel all kinds of pressures that can easily warp our perspective. On the one side, the pressure comes from fear (fear of confusion, of getting hurt, of losing ourselves, of being misunderstood, of being betrayed). This can make us timid and reticent, at the door of experience but too fearful to enter. We fear precisely having our eyes opened. On the other side, especially in Western culture today, the pressure is to embrace experience as salvation itself, namely, to idealize experience in a way that denigrates innocence (“Get beyond the nonsense you were taught as a child!”) and plunges us into experience without proper checks and taboos so as to make sophistication, knowledge, and pleasure the meaning of life itself. Like Adam and Eve, this soon enough opens our eyes, but, experience without innocence, is a formula for unhappiness – cynicism, distrust, sarcasm, arrogance.

Experience and innocence need to be held in a proper tension. We need to sing both songs. But that’s no easy task, given all the temptations there are to resolve this tension too easily towards one side or the other.

The road forward, I believe, lies in what is sometimes called “second naivete”. This refers to an innocence that has already incorporated experience, gone beyond it, is post-sophisticated, has looked life in eye, tasted it, and decided that some things are worth reverencing, that a certain purity is always needed, that we have to unlearn some things even as we learn others because children have a secret worth knowing.

Allan Bloom, the great American educator, used to tell his students: “You’ve had a rich experience. You’ve seen and done a lot of things. I respect that sophistication. But, I’m going to try to teach you how to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny again so that you’ll have a chance at being happy!”

Jesus taught that too. In essence, he said: “Be childlike, without being childish. Learn again, without denying experience, the innocence that makes for happiness.”

Unspeakable Loneliness

November 7, 2004

When Kim Campbell was Prime Minister of Canada she gave a very candid interview to MACLEAN’S magazine within which she spoke of the ups and downs of being a public figure. You are surrounded by people, she said, but sometimes you live in “an unspeakable loneliness.”

“Unspeakable loneliness”. What is that?

There is a lot of loneliness, as we know, that can be spoken about. When you are lonely in certain ways, no matter the pain, you can still put out a hand and someone will take it, hold it, offer empathy, and the loneliness itself can lead to a deeper sense of being loved and valued.

That is often the case with the loneliness you feel when you lose a loved one in death, with the loneliness you feel when you lose a special intimacy with your children as they grow up and into their own lives and interests, with the loneliness you feel as you age and lose the taut health and attractiveness of a young body and the place that gives you in the world, and even with the seemingly inarticulate loneliness you feel in adolescence, when you are so blindly driven by the need to make contact that a certain desperate loneliness is choreographed by virtually every movement of your body and attitude.

There is a loneliness that can be spoken of because its pain is greater than its shame. It drives you to your knees, but also more deeply into humanity. Nature equips you to deal with this. This kind of loneliness hurts you but it does not damage you. It can be talked about, no small thing: Anything can be borne if it can be shared.

But there is a loneliness that cannot be shared, which is “unspeakable” because it is experienced in a way that is so private and humiliating that, were you to speak of it, you would further damage an already over-fragile sense of self that has been made so fragile by the loneliness itself.

You experience this kind of loneliness whenever you are alone in something in a way that you cannot share with anyone else because the loneliness itself feels like a private sickness, like a thing of shame, which makes you so vulnerable that any attempt to share it with someone would only make things worse and be a further humiliation.

You experience this especially in rejection, betrayal, abuse, powerlessness, and the feelings you have when you doubt your own attractiveness, intelligence, goodness, strength, and emotional stability. Not only are you then alone and outside of something or someone you want, but you are left with a wound, a humiliation, a sense of not measuring-up, an insecurity, and a shame, that is only deepened should you talk of it. There is a pain that is “unspeakable”.

You experience this, “unspeakable loneliness”, in those areas of life where shame and insecurity seep in, where your relationships become one-sided, where you get walked-on, walked-away from, get dumped, suffer abuse, get bullied on the playground, are the one who is never asked out, get chosen last, are too weak to defend yourself, where your body and feelings aren’t right, where you aren’t bright enough, aren’t attractive enough, have bad skin, varicose veins, are overweight, have an over-bearing mother you are ashamed of, where you end up being the one who has to beg, who needs to ask, who has to sit by the phone hoping it will ring, where you are the one who is pushed away because you are too obsessed, too needy, too desperate, too different, too weak, too angry, too compromised, too wrapped up in some private wound, weakness, sickness, or history to be that wonderful, normal, resilient, irresistible person everyone is looking for.

Loneliness of this kind can drive you into fantasy where, in your daydreams, you get to live out what is denied you in reality. Mostly this is harmless, little more than private little cassettes with perfect endings that you play internally to make life more bearable. Sometimes though “unspeakable loneliness” produces a restlessness and chaos that is suicidally painful and acts out in very bitter and destructive ways.

Nobel Prize winning novelist, Toni Morrison says: “There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like a skin.

Then there’s a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.”

There is a solution to “unspeakable loneliness”: it needs to be spoken, to be shared, to be made public. To speak the unspeakable is a risk, an anguish, an irony, but, when the unspeakable is spoken, what once felt shamefully private and sick can become a badge of courage and a distinguishing mark of healthy citizenship inside the human condition.

Living with our own Complexities

November 4, 2004

Catherine de Hueck Doherty, the founder of Madonna House, once gave a wonderfully insightful interview. A renowned and respected spiritual figure, she acknowledged that her path wasn’t easy. Why? Because, like the rest of us, she was pathologically complex. Being a human being, she suggested, isn’t easy.

Here’s how she described herself. I paraphrase:

“Inside me,” she said, “there are three people. There’s someone I call the ‘Baroness’. The ‘Baroness’ is the one who’s spiritual, efficient, and given over to prayer and asceticism. She’s the religious person inside me. She’s the one who founded a religious community, who writes spiritual books, challenges others, and has dedicated her life to God and the poor. The ‘Baroness’ reads the gospels and is impatient with the things of this world. For her, life here and now must be sacrificed for the next world.

But, inside me too, there’s another person I call ‘Catherine’. ‘Catherine’ is, first of all and always, the woman who likes fine things, luxuries, comfort, pleasure. She enjoys idleness, long baths, fine clothes, putting on make-up, good food, and used to (while married) enjoy a healthy sex life. ‘Catherine’ enjoys this life and doesn’t like self-sacrifice. She’s not particularly religious and generally hates the ‘Baroness’. ‘Catherine’ and the ‘Baroness’ don’t get along.

However, there’s still another person inside of me, who’s neither ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’. Inside me too there’s a little girl lying on a hillside in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. This little girl doesn’t particularly like either ‘Catherine’ or the ‘Baroness’.

… and, as I get older, I feel more like the ‘Baroness’, long more for ‘Catherine’, but think maybe the real person inside me is the little girl daydreaming on a hillside.”

Had these words been uttered by someone still struggling with basic conversion, they wouldn’t pack much punch. They come however from a spiritual giant, from someone who had long ago mastered essential discipleship and had, long ago too, vowed herself to a radical discipleship of service to God and the poor. If saints struggle in this way, what about the rest of us?

That’s the point. Saints struggle and so does everyone else. It’s not a simple thing to be a human being and it’s even more complex if you’re striving to give yourself over beyond what comes naturally, morally and spiritually.

Like Catherine de Hueck Doherty, all of us have multiple persons inside us. Inside each of us there’s someone who has faith, who wants to live the Beatitudes, and who wants to be attuned to truths and realities of the gospels. Inside each of us, there’s a martyr who wants to die for others, a ‘Mother Teresa’ who wants to radically serve the poor, and a moral artist who wants to carry his or her solitude at a high level. But inside each of us there’s also someone who wants to taste life and all its pleasures here and now. Inside each of us there’s a hedonist, a sensualist, a libertine, a materialist, an agnostic, and an egoist. Beyond that, inside each of us there is also a little girl or little boy, innocent, daydreaming, watching the clouds on some hillside, not particularly enamoured of either the saint and the sinner inside us.

Who’s the real person? They all are. We’re all of these: saint and pleasure-seeker, altruist and egoist, martyr and hedonist, person-of-faith and agnostic, moral-artist and compensating libertine, innocent child and jaded adult, and the task of life is not to crucify one for the other, but to have them make peace with each other.

Peace, as we know, means more than the simple absence of war. It’s a positive quality. What makes for peace? Two things: harmony and completeness.

A musical melody is peaceful when all the different notes are strung together so as to make a harmony, a melody. Part of peace is to not have discord. But there’s another part: To play a melody, you also need a full keyboard. Peace also depends upon having enough keys at your disposal to play all the notes that the musical scores demands. A keyboard with a wide, wide range of possibilities is not a bad thing.

That’s true too of human nature. Our complexity is not our enemy but our friend. All those pathological opposites inside us are precisely what make up our keyboard. It’s precisely because we’re both sinner and saint, hedonist and martyr, adult and child, that we have the enough keys to play the various musical scores that life hands us.

The secret, of course, is harmony, melody. We need to move beyond a random, undisciplined stabbing at the keyboard because that produces discord. We’ve all had enough experience in life to know that. Peace comes when we put all the complex pieces inside of us together in such an order so as to make a beautiful melody.

And, of course, the more varied the notes, the more complex the musical score, the richer the final melody.

Carrying Tension

October 31, 2004

One of the things we’re asked to do as Christians is to help “take away the sins of the world” as Jesus did. How?

Jesus “took away the sins of the world” by holding, carrying, purifying, and transforming tension, that is, by taking in the bitterness, anger, jealousy, hatred, slander, and every other kind of thing that’s cancerous within human community, and not giving it back in kind.

In essence, Jesus did this by acting like a purifier, a water filter of sorts: He took in hatred, held it, transformed it, and gave back love; he took in bitterness, held it, transformed it, and gave back graciousness; he took in curses, held them transformed them, and gave back blessing; and he took in murder, held it, transformed it, and gave back forgiveness. Jesus resisted the instinct to give back in kind, hatred for hatred, curses for curses, jealousy for jealousy, murder for murder. He held and transformed these things rather than simply re-transmit them.

And, in this, he wants imitation, not admiration. Christian discipleship invites us, like Jesus, to become a “lamb of God”, a purifier, that helps take tension out of our families, communities, friendship circles, churches, and work-places by holding and transforming it rather than simply give it back in kind.

But that’s not easy. Jesus did this, but the gospels say that he had to “sweat blood” to achieve it. To carry tension is to fill with tension ourselves and, as we know, this can be unbearable. We don’t have God’s strength and we aren’t made of steel. As we try to carry tension for others, what do we do with our own tensions? How do we carry tension without becoming resentful and bitter? How do we carry another’s cross without, however subtly, sending him or her the bill?

This isn’t easy, as every health professional can tell you. Tension wreaks havoc inside us, physically and emotionally. You can die of high blood pressure or of disappointment. But there are some rules that can help.

First, carrying tension for others does not mean putting up with abuse or not confronting pathologically or clinical dysfunction. To love someone, as we now know, does not mean accepting abuse in the name of love.

Second, we need to find healthy outlets to release our own tensions. However we should never download them on the same people for whom we are trying to carry them. For example, parents carry tension for their children, but, when frustrations build up, they should not angrily vent those frustrations back on the kids themselves. Rather they should deal with their own tensions away from the children, with each other and with friends, when the kids are in bed, over a bottle of wine. The same holds true for everyone: We should never vent our frustrations on the very person or persons for whom we are trying to carry tension.

Finally, in order to deal with the frustrations that build up in us, we need, in the midst of the tensions, to be connected to something (a person, a friendship, a hand, a God, a creed, a perspective) beyond ourselves and the situation we’re in.

Scripture offers some wonderful images for this. It tells us, for example, that as Steven was being stoned to death out of hatred and jealousy, he kept his “eyes raised to heaven”. That’s not so much a physical description of things, as every artist knows, but a commentary on how Steven kept himself from drowning in the spinning chaos that was assaulting him. He stayed connected to a person, a hand, a friendship, an affirmation, a perspective, and a divine power outside of the madness.

We see the same thing, just a different metaphor, in the story of the three young men who are thrown into the blazing furnace in the Book of Daniel. We’re told that they walked around, right in the midst of the flames, untouched by the fire because they were singing sacred songs. Like Steven, they sustained their love and faith amidst bitter jealousy and hatred by staying connected to something outside of the fiery forces that were consuming everyone else.

We need to contemplate that lesson. Like Jesus, and like everyone else who’s ever walked this planet, we all find ourselves forever inside families, communities, churches, friendships, and work-circles that are filled with tension of every kind. Our natural temptation, always, is to simply give back in kind, jealousy for jealousy, gossip for gossip, anger for anger. But what our world really needs is for some women and men, adults, to step forward and help carry and purify this tension, to help take it away by transforming it inside themselves.

But that’s not easy. Like Jesus, it will involve “sweating blood”. So, as we volunteer to step into the fire, it’s wise not to go in alone, but to stay connected to some hand, some friend, some creed, and some God who will help sustain us in love and faith, right inside the madness and fire.