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.

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.

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.

“During the second-half of life, success no longer teaches us anything. It still feels good, but we don’t learn from it. Now we learn more from failure.”

Richard Rohr says that. What’s meant by it?

Some years, I was preaching in a church. The Gospel that day was the famous Martha-Mary incident, where Mary sits at the feet of Jesus, doing nothing, while her sister, Martha, is busy with all the necessary tasks of hospitality and serving. Martha asks Jesus to reprimand Mary for her inactivity, but Jesus, in a now-famous phrase, tells her: “Mary has chosen the better part!”

Homilizing on this, I quoted some pretty credible sources: Mother Teresa, Henri Nouwen, and Jean Vanier, all of whom point out that we need to develop our sense of self-worth not from what we do, but from what we are, namely, from our innate dignity as human beings. What we are is more important than what we do, and it’s dangerous to rely on achievement and success in order to feel good about ourselves.

A man approached me afterwards and asked: “Have you ever noticed that the people who tell us that it isn’t important to achieve anything are mostly great achievers? Mother Teresa has won a Nobel prize and Henri Nouwen has written more than fifty books and receives invitations from all around the world. It’s easy, I suspect, to feel good about yourself after you’ve done something, but how am I supposed to feel good about myself when I’ve never done anything that’s impressed anyone?”

He makes an important point, namely, that there’s a season for everything, including achievement and success. That season is the first- half of life. A healthy self-image isn’t just handed to us on a platter. Part of the task of our youth is to do the kinds of things that not only build up the world, but also help us build up ourselves. One of the lessons in the parable of the talents is that there are penalties too for not being successful.

Thus there’s a time in life when doing things is mandated, even by the Gospels. That time is the first-half of life (all those years when we’re active in the work-force, caring for family, paying a mortgage, giving ourselves over to the service of others, and trying to build up the world and find meaning for ourselves). It isn’t our time then to simply sit at the feet of Jesus.

But, as James Hillman says, “Early years must focus on getting things done, while later years consider what was done and how.” During the second-half of life, success loses its importance. Why?

First, because to rely on success to feel good about ourselves becomes, at a point, a cancer: If we only feel important when we’ve achieved something of importance then we need to continue, over and over again, to achieve something of importance, an impossible task.

More importantly, while success builds self-image it doesn’t necessarily build character or soul. Bluntly put, too often success inflates rather than mellows the soul. Failure, while always containing the danger of hardening the soul, is more naturally suited to deflate the ego and mellow the heart. The major task of aging is that of mellowing – grieving, forgiving, letting go, accepting vulnerability, and moving beyond the greed, ambition, competitiveness, and perpetual disappointment of youth. Like a good wine, the soul needs to be mellowed in cracked old barrels (an apt image for aging bodies) to bring out its warm, rich character. After a certain age, failure more than success is more likely to help us do that.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, when we’re young and success still teaches us something, too often even our best work is motivated more by our need to prove something (ourselves, our talents, our goodness) than by any genuine altruism and concern for others. Our successes may actually be helping others and doing a lot of good, but, in the end, we’re trying to prove ourselves. We’re still not, in essence, making love to the world, to art, to education, to technology, to church, to a cause, or even to another person. We’re making a statement: “I count, I’m worthwhile, I’m talented, I’m good, I’m loveable, notice me, love me.” There’s nothing wrong with that, up to a certain age, it’s how we grow, and the taste of some success is often useful precisely in moving us along towards a purer motivation. But there comes a point when life is no longer about proving ourselves, or anything else. The task now is to become selfless, beyond proving anything, least of all our own worth. A healthy dose of failure is often quite useful in teaching us this.

Success always feels good, but at a certain age it no longer works its magic. That doesn’t make it wrong to continue to be successful, it only makes it wrong to need to succeed in order to feel good about ourselves.

Michael Buckley, the American Jesuit, once did a fascinating study of Jesus and Socrates, comparing them in terms of human excellence. The result? In many aspects, Jesus appears to be the weaker of the two men.

This, of course, must be properly understood. Weakness here does not refer to moral weakness, but to something else. What?

Here are Buckley’s words:

There is a classic comparison running through contemporary philosophy between Socrates and Jesus, a judgement between them in human excellence. Socrates went to his death with calmness and poise. He accepted the judgement of the court, discoursed on the alternatives suggested by death and the dialectical indications of immortality, found no cause for fear, drank the poison and died. Jesus – how much to the contrary. Jesus was almost hysterical with terror and fear, “with loud cries and tears to him who was able to save him from death.” He looked repeatedly to his friends for comfort and prayed for an escape from death, and he found neither. Finally he established control over himself and moved into his death in silence and lonely isolation, even into the terrible interior suffering of the hidden divinity, the absence of God.

I once thought that this was because Socrates and Jesus suffered different deaths, the one so much more terrible than the other; the pain and agony of the cross so overshadowing the release of the hemlock. But now I think that this explanation, though correct as far as it runs, is superficial and secondary. Now I believe that Jesus was a more profoundly weak man than Socrates, more liable to physical pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, more affected by love and hate. Socrates never wept over Athens. Socrates never expressed sorrow and pain over the betrayal of friends. He was possessed and integral, never overextended, convinced that the just person could never suffer genuine hurt. And for this reason, Socrates – one of the greatest and most heroic people who has ever existed, a paradigm of what humanity can achieve within the individual – was a philosopher. And for the same reason, Jesus of Nazareth was a priest – ambiguous, suffering, mysterious, and salvific.

In what way precisely was Jesus a weaker man than Socrates?

In his incapacity to protect himself against pain, in his vulnerability, and in the interior anguish and exterior humiliation that this congenital, moral trait inevitably produces. In contemporary language, Socrates was simply set together better as a human being than Jesus was, at least in terms of how we normally judge this.

In Socrates there was, certainly in the face of opposition and death, a poise, an ease, an interior peace, and an attractive calm that was absent in Jesus. Socrates was “cool” in a way that Jesus wasn’t. Socrates always looked attractive. Jesus didn’t. Jesus sweated blood (no glamour there), shed tears that he was unable to hide, and was stripped naked and humiliated in front of his loved ones. You don’t look attractive when that happens and you can’t hide the pain of that from others.

And yet, that’s exactly what we most want to do. In our world there’s a powerful, omnipresent pressure (put forth even in the name of religion, humanity, and maturity) to protect ourselves against pain and humiliation, to never, never be vulnerable enough so as to risk falling flat on our faces. At all cost, no matter what other kinds of pain we must endure, we don’t want to be caught needy, being the one who has to ask, the one who has to beg, the one who’s embarrassed, the one who doesn’t look good.

And so we try to arrange ourselves, our lives, and our relationships in such a way so as not to be too affected by things, so as avoid the tension of interior anguish, and so as to never risk not looking good. The attractive persona (“cool”) of Socrates more than the humble, all-too human, tears of Jesus is our ideal.

But, and this is the point, by protecting ourselves in this way we don’t ever become vulnerable enough to enter into an intimacy with others and the world that is salvific and priestly. We never save anyone, even though we look good. What’s meant by that?

To love is to care. But as soon as we begin to do that, we open yourself to weakness, sensitivity, and humiliation. Why?

Because to be sensitive is to know that it’s better to be sad than bitter, better to be hurting than hard, better to shed tears than be indifferent, better to taste death than never risk living, better to feel rejection than never to have loved, better to groan in interior anguish than to prematurely resolve tension, and better, for the sake of love, family, faith, and commitment, to sometimes look the fool, the needy one, the simpleton, than to always successfully hide what’s most true inside us so as to be the one who never has a hair, a feeling, or an opinion that’s out of place.

In the movie, The English Patient, there’s a wonderful scene, stunning in its lesson:

A number of people from various countries are thrown together by circumstance in an abandoned villa in post-war Italy. Among them are a young nurse, attending to an English pilot who’s been badly burned in an air-crash, and a young Asian man whose job it is to find and defuse land-mines. The young man and the nurse become friends and, one day, he announces he has a special surprise for her.

He takes her to an abandoned church within which he has set up a series of ropes and pulleys that will lift her to the ceiling where, hidden in darkness, there are some beautiful mosaics and other wonderful works of art that cannot be seen from the floor. He gives her a torch as a light and pulls her up through a series of ropes so that she swings, almost like an angel with wings, high above the floor and is able to shine her torch on a number of beautiful masterpieces hidden in the dark.

The experience is that of sheer exhilaration, she has the sensation of flying and of seeing wonderful beauty all at the same time. When she’s finally lowered back to the floor she’s flushed with excitement and gratitude and covers the young man’s face with kisses, saying over and over again: “Thank you, thank you, thank for showing this to me!”

And, from her expression, you know she’s saying thank you for two things: “Thank you for showing me something, that I could never have come to on my own; and, thank you for trusting me enough to think that I would understand this, that I would get it!”

I’m grateful to Barbara Nicolosi, from Act One, an Institute for Christian writers in Hollywood, for showing this film-clip and challenging all of us at the Suenens Institute in Chicago this past summer to learn its lesson. What is that lesson?

That the church needs to do for the world exactly what this young man did for his nurse friend, namely, (in terms of a metaphor) to point to where beauty is hidden in darkness, be that in the darkness of old churches, ancient creeds, abandoned liturgies, old-fashioned devotions, or two thousand year-old practices of community, charity, justice, and forgiveness; or be that in the hidden riches within nature, physical beauty, health, youth, art, and science. There are treasures of great beauty hidden all over, including in forgotten places inside our churches. Our task is to point these out to the world.

And part of that task, like the young man in the English Patient, is to trust that people will understand and to trust as well that they are worth all the effort we must make to point out where these treasures are hidden.

Beauty has a power to transform the soul and instill gratitude in a way that few things have. Confucius understood this and suggested that beauty is the greatest of all teachers. People can doubt almost anything, except beauty.

Why can’t beauty be doubted? Because beauty, like oneness, truth, and goodness is a transcendental property of being itself. “All being is one, true, good, and beautiful,” states classical philosophy. Thus, beauty needs no justification beyond itself. Beauty can be solely for beauty’s sake. Moreover, as a transcendental property of being, beauty shows us something of God. To experience beauty is to see some of God’s colour, to become homesick for heaven.

But, as Barbara Nicolosi also pointed out, beauty isn’t always pretty. It can be revealed in the perfection of a Michelangelo sculpture but it can also be seen in the wrinkles and limp of an old woman or in a cup of water given to an old man on the street.

Today, a number of writers, Nicolosi among them, are suggesting that our neglect of the importance of beauty is one of the major reasons why less people are interested in the church. Already a generation ago, Hans Urs Von Baltasar had emphasized beauty as a key component both in how God speaks to us and how we are meant to speak about God to the world. More recently, writers such as Robert Barron, Kathleen Norris, and Andrew Greeley, among others, have echoed those sentiments. We must, as Barron puts it, “stop building beige churches”. Nicolosi is clearer still. We must, she says, stop “the uglification” of Catholicism.

In the face of brutality, what’s needed is tenderness; in the face of hype and ideology, what’s needed is truth; in the face of bitterness and curses, what’s needed are graciousness and blessing; in the face of hatred and murder, what’s needed are love and forgiveness; and, in the face all the ugliness and vulgarity that so pervades our world and the evening news, what’s needed is beauty.

God speaks through beauty and so must we – and we must believe enough in people’s sensitivity and intelligence to trust that they will understand.

The award-winning Broadway play, Children of a Lesser God, tells an interesting story of how love can go wrong, even when it seems like it’s going right.

The story focuses on a spirited young woman who is deaf. Intelligent, sensitive, and wounded, she resists most attempts to help her, until one day a gifted teacher, a man her own age, enters her life. For awhile she resists both his love and his efforts to help her, but eventually trust grows in her and she opens up to him. They fall in love and, for awhile, things are wonderful and he helps open her to the world.

But then the story takes a curious turn. At a point, a huge tension begins to grow up between them. She feels guilty about it, sensing she should be grateful, even as resentment and anger continue to grow in her. For his part, he can’t help feeling angry because he feels himself being pushed away after all he has done for her. The tension eventually produces a storm, a big one, lots of anger, lots of shouting, lots of recrimination, and a calm afterwards.

In that calm, she, still feeling guilty, apologizes and tells him she feels badly because he has been such a great teacher and she owes so much to him. But the storm has taught him its lesson. He now knows the reason for her resentment. In essence, he puts it this way: “I’ve been a good teacher and have loved you, up to a point, but now I realize what I was really doing. In effect, I was saying this to you: `Grow, but not so much that you don’t need me any more. Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be free, but not of my expectations for you.’ I offered you my love and help … as long as I could dictate how you use them.”

Perhaps the deepest struggle we have (psychologically, morally, and spiritually) is with possessiveness and what that triggers in us, restlessness, jealousy, greed, and manipulation. Something inside our very DNA makes us want to possess whatever is beautiful and to have exclusively for ourselves whatever we love. It’s no accident that there are two commandments against jealousy. From a toddler’s tantrum over his mother’s inattention to the sexual jealousy so universal in adulthood, we see that it’s hard to look at what attracts us and respond only with gratitude and admiration.

For this reason, when we should be feeling wonderful, we often feel unsettled, restless, obsessed, and jealous in the face of beauty and love. Etty Hillesum gives us an honest expression of this in her insightful memoir, An Interrupted Life:

“And here I have hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful scenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual, I might almost write too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it. Hence the painful longing that could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works. It all suddenly changed, God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my short walk round the Skating Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with the light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past. Then all the beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart and I would not have known what to do with the pain. Then I would have felt the need to write, to compose verses, but the words would still have refused to come. I would have felt utterly miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have sapped all my energy. … but its beauty now filled me with joy. … I no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated.”

What do we do with our possessiveness? Good spirituality and good psychology agree that the answer lies in a healthy maturity that can admire without seeking to own and love without seeking to manipulate. But that’s easier said than done. We don’t change our deepest instincts (John of the Cross calls them “our metaphysics”) simply by willing away possessiveness.

What’s the answer? A life-long walk towards a very difficult maturity. Overcoming our incurable instinct to possess is one of the final hurdles in life. When we’re no longer prone to jealousy, we’re saints.

In the meantime, it can be helpful to name this. A symptom suffers less when it knows where it belongs.

Our generation struggles with believing in God, not that this, as Reginald Bibby states, puts God in trouble. God isn’t in trouble because people stop believing or going to church.

Today God is not so much denied as ignored, though there are growing numbers of people who now profess that they no longer believe in God. Those numbers however (to quote Bibby again) aren’t nearly as high as is commonly supposed. Atheism is still relatively rare and, as Michael Buckley says, is not a problem, but “a situation, an atmosphere, a confused history.”

Of more concern, I believe, are the ways we try to think of God. On the one hand, we see a creeping fundamentalism, where our concepts and language about God are being taken ever more literally. The bible is taken as a history book and the language surrounding God is taken at face value. On the other hand, we see a tendency to take the symbolic character of religious language to its extreme, namely, to a place where it excludes all claims to historicity and ontology (as having any reference to anything that actually exists in the real world). God then becomes just a symbol, a myth, not real in the normal sense.

Both of these views are gaining in popularity. Fundamentalism is appealing more and more to those who are tired of a relativism wherein everything can mean anything, and the reduction of God to a symbol (without truth claims) is attracting more and more people who, rightly, have grasped that the human mind and imagination cannot wrap themselves around the idea of God in a literal way. So what’s to be said about this?

Perhaps a quote from Karl Rahner can set the stage: “We are just discovering today that one cannot picture God to oneself in an image that has been carved out of the wood of the world. … this experience is not the genesis of atheism, but the discovery that the world is not God.”

What’s contained in this caption?

First, that God is ineffable. God cannot be captured in any picture inside the imagination or concept within the mind and all our language about God is, by definition, necessarily metaphor, analogy, and is more inaccurate than accurate. God cannot be thought-of or spoken-about in the way we think about and speak about anything else.

Consequently, we must be wary of taking religious language too literally. When we turn analogy into univocity (metaphor into physics) we set ourselves up for the impossible task of trying to conceptualize the infinite within finite categories. That leads to atheism because when we try to literally picture God and imagine God’s existence, the imagination runs dry and we easily conclude that, because God is unthinkable, God doesn’t exist. But that isn’t a necessary equation, knowing and thinking aren’t the same thing. We know infinitely more than we can think.

However with that being said, at least for Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, no matter the language, God is more than simply an impersonal force, the deepest principle of life, the intelligent DNA inside of evolution, directing things. God is that, but more. While God is not a person who can be thought of in the way we think of ourselves and other persons, God is a person in that at some deep place there is a divine mind, heart, and personality that’s meant to be personally related to and is meant to be the object of worship, love, affection, and appeal.

God is both symbol and reality and symbol here isn’t just Harry Potter fantasy, nor, at least inside the great religions of the world, just a rich expression of the deep archetypal structure of things.

In his autobiographical writings, Nikos Kazantsakis makes an interesting confession. Late on in life, he came to believe that Christianity happened because Mary Magdala loved Jesus so deeply that, after his death, she refused to let him die inside of her heart and began to proclaim that he was alive. Her story grabbed hold in the hearts of others and the rest is history. Christianity arose out of that love – and that lie. When Kazantsakis wrote Zorba, the Greek, he was trying to do like Mary Magdala, give some immortality to Zorba because he loved him so deeply and thought him so exceptional. What happened?

Zorba, the Greek made for a good book and great movie, but we don’t measure time by Zorba’s birth. Kazantsakis’ wish to bestow a certain divinity and immortality on Zorba didn’t exactly take off and shape history in the way the resurrection of Jesus did. Why not? Because for a religious myth to have a long-term grip on history and on the hearts of hundreds of millions of people, more than just a symbol needs to be involved. The great religions of the world have their staying power because, at least at a few key times, a God who is very real, alive, and personal, manifested a real, physical, tangible presence within actual history.