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.

Biblical Anxiety

October 24, 2004

The opposite of belief is not non-belief, but anxiety. To not believe, to not have faith, is to be anxious in a particular way. What way?

We get a hint at an answer in Jesus’ rather-famous comment about the lilies of the field. He tells us to consider how the flowers of the field neither toil nor spin and yet nobody, no Queen or King in all of his or her royal glory, was ever arrayed like a simple flower in the field. Jesus ends this admonition with the words: “Don’t be anxious. No sparrow falls from the sky or a hair from your head, except that God notices.” What he’s saying here is this: “Your life will not go unnoticed, you will not be forgotten. Don’t be anxious about having to leave a mark for yourself. You don’t need to make an assertion with your life!”

Yet perhaps our deepest worry is precisely that we will be forgotten, that we will go through life unnoticed, unmarked by anything that is really special.

Chicago-based theologian, John Shea, uses a very simple example to help us understand this: Have you ever, he asks, gone to your closet to look for something and, while browsing through your closet, find an item of clothing (a pair of slacks, a shirt, a sweater, a blouse) that you’d completely forgotten that you still had. You’re genuinely surprised that this particular piece of clothing still exists because you’d completely forgotten about it.

In essence, that describes one of our deepest, inchoate fears: Somewhere below our conscious awareness, somewhere in the recesses of our being, we worry that one day God will look down on this earth and, with genuine surprise, see that you or I still exist and will exclaim in surprise: “My God, she’s still alive! I’d completely forgotten about her!”

That might sound fanciful, but it’s not. Where we experience this anxiety is not so much in some conscious worry that we’ve fallen off of God’s radar screen, but in the constant, restless, insatiable worry that our lives are insignificant, that we’re not leaving behind anything of permanence, that what we are doing isn’t important enough, that we aren’t special, and that we’re destined to remain small-town and small- time, unknown and forgotten, anonymous nobodies swimming in a sea of anonymity.

That’s why we are so driven to make an assertion with our lives. We live, as Thoreau puts it, “lives of quiet desperation”, striving constantly in a thousand ways to leave some mark behind by doing something that’s special enough so that, in some way, we create some immortality, however small, for ourselves. (“Plant a tree; write a book; have a child!”) Our fear is always: If I don’t guarantee a place for myself, who will?”

That anxiety, the Gospels tell us, is the opposite of faith, the opposite of believing in God. Why? Because when we’re anxious in this way it’s precisely because we do not trust that the God, who gave us birth, desire, and talent, will also give us significance, permanence, and immortality. Faith invites us to believe that our real significance is not to have our name put up on billboards among the Hollywood stars, but to have our name written in heaven, among the eternal stars. A place in God’s heart gives us a significance and a permanence that the hall of fame does not.

“Do not be afraid,” Jesus says, “everything that is hidden will one day be revealed.” A curious statement, given that all of us have done things we prefer others not to know. Shouldn’t we be afraid if all we have ever done will one day come to light?

But what Jesus is saying will be brought to light is not our hidden sin (“files on the road”, as Leonard Cohen says), but our hidden story, our hidden significance, our hidden specialness, our hidden dignity. We need not make an assertion of our lives and our talents so as to try to prove anything because God will prove it for us. We need only to trust, trust that God will give us the significance and immortality we cannot guarantee of ourselves.

Former baseball star, Reggie Jackson, once made this comment about himself (tongue-in-cheek, as was his colourful, humorous style): “I have to deal with the magnitude of me!” The problem is exactly the opposite (as I’m sure Reggie would admit): We have to deal always with the “insubstantiality of me”, the anxious fear that we’re insignificant, that we’re small, and that we’re destined to die and disappear. That fear is what gnaws away at our faith and can, on any particular lonely day when we feel awash in a sea of anonymity, have us believe that God is dead.

Because this anxiety, the fear of being forgotten, so drives us to assert ourselves, we pray each time we go to Eucharist: “Protect us from all anxiety as we wait in joyful hope for the coming of our Saviour, Jesus Christ.”

Failure and the Second Half of Life

October 17, 2004

“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.

Binding and Loosing

October 10, 2004

Gabriel Marcel once said: “To love someone is to say to that person, you at least will not die!”

He’s right. To cherish another person is to give him or her a meaning and permanence that accident and death cannot take away. But there’s a deeper meaning too: To love someone is to hold a place in heaven for him or her. What’s meant by that? It sounds fanciful.

This idea is present inside the Christian scriptures, but it’s also something we intuit in our hearts. Like Job, without the benefit of a belief in life after death but still knowing in his gut that ultimately love triumphs, we too know in the recesses of our hearts that love’s bonds are salvific. In the end, we won’t be separated from our loved ones, even if we walk different paths in life, except if the other positively chooses to be separated. We make places for each other in heaven through love.

What does this mean?

Jesus said: “Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven.” Too often we understand this simplistically, taking it to mean that Jesus placed special power inside scripture, the sacraments, and the institutional church. True. But there’s more.

At another level, in saying that we can bind and loose, Jesus is saying what Gabriel Marcel is saying, namely, that to love another person is to assure him or her a place (if he or she wants it) in heaven. How does this work?

When Jesus walked the roads of Palestine for three years, a wondrous grace came to all who touched him. To touch Jesus, in love and sincerity, was to be healed, converted, made to walk upright, made to hear, and made to praise God. It also gave that person a place inside the community of life. To touch Jesus or to be touched by him was salvation.

But Jesus didn’t take this grace away when he ascended. He left it with the community of believers, the community of the sincere, which is now his body on earth, In fact he promised that we, his body, could do “even greater things” than he did.

And his body is not just the historical church in its scriptures, sacraments, church gatherings, institutional structures, and hierarchy. Rather, all of us together, and each one of us individually, make up the body of Christ on earth. Therefore when we touch someone or someone touches us in love and sincerity, if we are in inside the community of faith and sincerity, that other person is touching the body of Christ just as surely as people at the time of Jesus were able to touch him.

We are the body of Christ on earth and, like Jesus, have the power to bind and loose. Among other things, this means that when our loved ones (spouses, children, family, friends, colleagues) no longer walk the path of explicit faith and church with us, we can connect them to the faith, the church, the body of Christ, and heaven itself simply by remaining bonded with them in love and community. By being connected with us, they are connected to the church (since we are the church). Moreover, when we forgive them anything, including their non-church going, they are forgiven by the church and forgiven too, Jesus assures us, in heaven.

One of the marvels of the incarnation is that, if we want, our heaven will include our loved ones. In 1995, when Quebec was holding a referendum to decide whether or not to remain part of Canada, a popular slogan across Canada read: “My Canada includes Quebec!” We can say the same thing about our loved ones, even when they don’t go to church with us: “My heaven includes my children, my spouse, this particular friend!” Heaven will back that up. That’s Jesus’ promise.

Partly this is mystical, partly it’s simply the dynamics of love and family. What binds us together as family is much deeper and wider than simply who is at table with us on a given Sunday.

That’s one side of equation, the church side, but this also works the other way: Sometimes we, the church-goers (with our own moral and spiritual blind spots), are held inside the body of Christ, the community of the sincere, by those who love us (and don’t go to church with us), but who are at God’s table in some areas where we are not.

This idea is so wild and wonderful that it’s hard to believe. It’s always been this way. It’s not easy to believe that heaven is as accessible as the nearest water tap, or the nearest friend. When Pope Pius XII was giving the instruction for his Encyclical on the Body of Christ, Mystici Corporis, he told educators and preachers: “When you are teaching about the Body of Christ, don’t be afraid to exaggerate, because it is impossible to exaggerate so great a mystery!” What an apt description of the incarnation!

Jesus’ Sensitivity

October 3, 2004

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.

Offering Sanctuary for Sadness

September 19, 2004

The church today, at least in the West, it is not a very happy place. Gone are the wonder and the joy of being young, the innocent laughter that so characterizes us when we’re still pre-neurotic. There’s a middle- aged heaviness to the church today, a certain sadness. We’re grieving a lot of things:

What are we grieving?

In essence, four things: i) a lost innocence, ii) a lost unity, iii) a lost child, and iv) a lost wholeness among the people.

At a more obvious level, we are grieving a certain lost innocence. We feel this as we experience the recent scandals within the church, sexual misconduct by some clergy, financial impropriety and abuse of power by some church leaders, and other things that have helped shatter the image of the church as the unsullied bride of Christ that can do no wrong and has done no wrong. Recent studies in church history have also helped highlight this by showing that the church’s long history of grace is coloured too by a long history of sin.

But, painful as this is, this is not what’s most dampening the soul of the church. Less visible, less expressed, but more wounding, is the sense of having lost a certain security, namely, the security of knowing that we were the moral high ground, that we were the cognitive and moral majority, that our virtues were real, and that our ethical beliefs and cherished ways of doing things really did separate right from wrong. Until recently we didn’t have to ask ourselves if we were racist, imperialist, sexist, narrow, bigoted. Today we’re a lot less sure of those things. Maybe it isn’t a bad thing to lose all of that certainty, but it’s hardly a joyful thing. We’ve lost our innocence, our moral virginity. That doesn’t come without sadness.

Beyond this, we are grieving a painful division within the church and society. I doubt there has ever been a time since the reformation that the Church has been so painfully polarized and emotionally divided. In many places, in fact, we have two emotional communities, so divided are we by ecclesiology, theology, ideology, and spirituality. We live in an emotional apartheid, separated by ideology and ecclesiology just as surely and rigidly as if this was mandated by law. Such is the church today and such too is society today. We are a deeply divided community.

Division of course is not new. Christ said that he would bring fire to the earth and that this would divide people from each other. His promise has held true, except that today that the division is not between the sincere and the insincere, the good and the bad, the committed and the non-committed. Today, too often, the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the committed from the committed. When good people can no longer be in community with each other and can no longer even speak respectfully with each other, the result is always sadness and anger (and anger is just another form of sadness). Small wonder that our churches and communities are not always happy places.

Beyond our internal divisions, we are too grieving a lost child, our child, secularity. Perhaps this can best be explained in an image: Western culture is to us, the church, much like an adolescent child is to its parents. We gave it birth, helped raise it, and now, with a fierceness and anger that do not seem justifiable, it is asserting its independence from us, accusing us of being bad parents, and claiming it can find life only by moving away from us (all without acknowledging its debt to us). Like parents too we fear for its safety even as we envy its youth, confidence, power, and daring and resent its independence. Like parents too, we feel a certain sadness. The child has left home, rejecting many of our cherished values in that leave-taking. It is slipping away from us, daily becoming more post-ecclesial. To not feel a sadness about this is to lack in sensitivity and love.

Finally, we are grieving as well the grief of our people, our world. Western society is, in large measure, despondent and suffering from every kind of brokenness. Wholeness, it seems, is no longer the rule. More and more it’s the exception for someone to not come from a broken home, a broken marriage, a series of broken relationships, and an abusive background of some sort. We’re a society of the wounded, we bring this to our churches, and this colours church life. The tensions and sadness inside the church reflect the tensions and sadness inside society as a whole.

And so we are a grieving church, though that is not necessarily a bad thing. Tears can save us from bitterness and hardness of heart. So perhaps one of the important forms of sanctuary that the church can offer the world today is that of being a safe place where you can come and be sad.

Beauty as God’s Language

September 12, 2004

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 Da Vinci Code

September 4, 2004

Most of us, I suspect, are familiar with Dan Brown’s runaway bestseller, The Da Vinci Code.

Here’s the storyline: Looking at Leonardo Da Vinci’s painting of the Last Supper, Brown proposes that the figure on Jesus’ right, the “beloved disciple”, is Mary Magdala, who married Jesus, bore him a child, and was Jesus’ real choice to succeed him as leader. Moreover what she represents (the goddess, the eternal feminine, sexuality) is the “Holy Grail”, the real quest of every heart.

But the official church, from its beginning to this very day, has suppressed this, often violently, burning to death more than five million women in the process. Indeed, it’s almost as if the real reason the institutional church exists at all is to suppress this truth. Fortunately a few great men (Da Vinci, Galileo, Curators at the Louvre, Walt Disney, and a Harvard professor) have, through secret codes, preserved the real truth. The Last Supper painting by Da Vinci is such a code, as is Disney’s, Daffy Duck (a symbol of Mary Magdala).

All of this, of course, would just make for a good story if the book hadn’t caught such a fertile, if not exactly deep, vein within the popular imagination. Millions of people are taking its storyline as a truth-claim and numerous groups and societies are springing up around it, presumably to continue to crack and preserve “the code”.

What’s to be said about this?

On the positive side, I give Dan Brown full marks for telling a good story and for being clever, clever enough to know what sells today. What does? The elements of this book: Gnosticism (There are hidden secrets you need to know), anti-Catholicism (Rome is founded on a lie and protects itself by a lie), the importance of a return to the sacred feminine (Patriarchy has thoroughly distorted both history and consciousness), sex (It’s the ultimate liberating force, if the church would but step aside), and fiction as history (Truth is less important than perception). Brown reads the market well.

Less to his credit, his book is full of historical misinformation and flat- out error. Just a couple of examples:

Brown claims that the church has always belittled Mary Magdala as a prostitute to hide her true relationship with Jesus. So much for the tributes of countless church writers, including popes, who spoke of her as “the apostle of apostles” and “the new Eve announcing not death but life,” and so much for the fact that she’s celebrated as a saint by the official church. As well, the claim that Constantine shifted the Christian day of worship to Sunday is simply false, as are his claims that virtually all the elements for Christian worship were taken directly from pagan mystery religions (bypassing their Jewish origins), as is his claim that the sacred name, YHWH, was drawn from the idea of an androgynous physical union between the masculine JAB and the pre-Hebraic name for Eve, HAVAH.

Of course, Brown can claim that he is, after all, writing fiction, not history. True enough, except that millions of people are taking it as history. Is this Brown’s fault? Not entirely, but largely. His historical disclaimer at the beginning of the book is far from honest. Had he said what every fiction writer should say, that this is simply a work of his imagination, nothing more, a lot of the nonsense around the book would not exist. But that’s not what he did and his disclaimer is, to my mind, deliberately ambiguous and self-serving for his thesis (that we’ve all been naively swallowing a Vatican-enforced conspiracy for centuries).

Brown plays to the gnostic in us (“You’ve been had, but I can tell you the real secret!”). But which is the greater naivete, believing in the truth-claims of Christianity or believing that a few intellectuals have access to spiritual secrets denied to the rest of us because they who know the truth have been too intimidated for 2000 years (by the Vatican!) to ever reveal it? Who exactly is being taken for a ride here?

In his memoirs, Nikos Kazantsakis shares why he wrote, Zorba, the Greek. He believed that Christianity was ultimately founded on a lie, a loving lie, but a lie nonetheless. When Jesus died, Kazantsakis suggests, Mary Magdala loved him so much that she simply couldn’t accept his death and so she resurrected him in her heart and began to spread the news that he had risen. Her story took hold and a great religion was born. Kazantsakis had similar feelings about Zorba and tried to do for him what Mary Magdala did for Jesus. Well, that made for a good book and an excellent movie, but hardly for a great religion.

Christianity is a great religion with a billion adherents and the world measures time by its inception, and that’s hardly because a few self- serving church officials have been able to hide the real truth from everyone (except “the wise and the clever”) for a couple of thousand years.