“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.

My old philosophical mentor, Eric Mascall, used to say that, in our time, all the goods are in the store-window and there’s very little under the counter. He was commenting on empiricism as a philosophy and how it was slowly robbing daily life of its mystery and depth. Sadly, that comment made years ago, rings true today at a different level.

Our world has become obsessed with appearance, with image, with persona, with what’s in the store-window, with how we’re perceived. Today it’s more important to look good than to be good, more important to look healthy than to be healthy, and more important to have a good- looking surface than to have much in the way of integrity and depth underneath.

We see this everywhere, in our obsession for the perfect physical appearance, in the cult around image, in our mania for celebrity, in the imperialism of fashion, and in our not-so-disguised efforts to be perceived as connected to all the right things.

For example, typically, more and more Universities are handing out honorary degrees to two types of people, celebrities and highly recognized justice advocates. I’m not sure that many of those institutions actually care about the poor or intellectually endorse what the entertainment and sports industry (which produce most of our celebrities) are doing, but a Nelson Mandela, Desmond Tutu, Meryl Streep, Jodi Foster, Wayne Gretsky, or David Beckham looks mighty good on a University’s public face: “Just look how caring, beautiful, and energetic we are!”

In the end, and I hope I’m not being cynical, it seems it’s not so important what an institution believes in or how it treats its employees and students, it’s only important how it’s seen and perceived from the outside. Giving a doctorate to a Mother Theresa doesn’t do much for the poor in India, but it does a fair amount for the institution that’s honouring her.

The same is true in politics. Image has triumphed over substance. We tend to care less about policy than about appearance and we elect people to political offices more on the basis of their persona than anything else. To be elected to a public office today, it’s more important to have the right image than to have political substance and the character.

But we shouldn’t be too hard on the triumph of appearance over substance in public life because this simply mirrors what’s happening in our private lives: More and more, appearance is the first thing, the whole thing, and the only thing. It’s not important to be good, only to look good.

Cosmetics is becoming the biggest industry in the world and concern for how we look, for the perfect body, is now a crucifying anxiety that’s leaving more and more of us, especially young people, dissatisfied with our own bodies and sadly restless within our own lives. The prevalence of anorexia, among other eating disorders, more than bears this out. Too often we’re dieting, not to be healthy, but to try to attain and maintain an impossible appearance. Everything is about how we look and so we exercise more, diet more strictly, and spend yet more money on fashionable clothing in an attempt to look right, even as we remain chronically disenchanted with how we look and know deep down that we’re fighting a losing battle as our bodies age and society’s standards grow ever more unattainable. Worse still, we tend now to make value judgements based on physical appearance alone. Our worth lies in looking good.

Not that all of this bad, mind you. Concern for physical appearance is a good thing in itself, as are concerns for exercise and diet. We are meant to look good and to feel good. Neither bodily health nor healthy aesthetics about our appearance should ever be denigrated in the name of morality, depth, or religion. Indeed lack of concern for one’s physical appearance is a telltale sign of depression or even some deeper illness of soul. Our concern for appearance is a good thing, but, today, it’s a good thing taken too far.

Concern for appearance should never replace a concern for substance, depth, and integrity of soul, just as, conversely, concern for substance and depth may never be an excuse for shoddiness and sloppy appearance. Still, today, we’ve lost the proper balance and it’s hurting us in more ways than we imagine.

Faith is built on the blood of martyrs and the institutions that bind a society together (marriage, family, church, politics) are sustained largely on the basis of self-sacrifice. But ninety-nine percent of that martyrdom and self-sacrifice remains hidden, silent, anonymous, unnoticed, unglamorous, blood shed in secret, love given for reasons beyond appearance.

If this is true, and it is, then the prognosis for the future leaves me uneasy. When appearance is everything, we soon stop focusing on deeper things and then slowly, imperceptibly, appearance begin to look like character, celebrity begins to replace nobility of soul, and looking good becomes more important than being good.

Death is always painful, but its pains are compounded considerably if its cause is suicide. When a suicide occurs, we aren’t just left with the loss of a person, we’re also left with a legacy of anger, second-guessing, and fearful anxiety.

So each year I write a column on suicide, hoping that it might help produce more understanding around the issue and, in a small way perhaps, offer some consolation to those who have lost a loved one to this dreadful disease. Essentially, I say the same things each year because they need to be said. As Margaret Atwood once put it, some things need to be said and said and said again, until they don’t need to be said any more. That’s true of suicide.

What’s needs to be said, and said again, about it?

First of all that it’s a disease and perhaps the most misunderstood of all diseases.

We tend to think that if a death is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not. For most suicides, this isn’t true. A person who falls victim to suicide dies, as the does the victim of a terminal illness or fatal accident, not by his or her own choice. When people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and accidents, they die against their will. The same is true suicide, except that in the case of suicide the breakdown is emotional rather than physical – an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, a breakdown of the emotional immune-system, an emotional fatality.

This is not an analogy. The two kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers, breakdowns of the immune-system, and fatal accidents, are identical in that, in neither case, is the person leaving this world on the basis of a voluntary decision of his or her own will. In both cases, he or she is taken out of life against his or her own will. That’s why we speak of someone as a “victim” of suicide.

Given this fact, we should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is always an act of ultimate despair. God is infinitely more understanding than we are and God’s hands are infinitely safer and more gentle than our own. Imagine a loving mother having just given birth, welcoming her child onto her breast for the first time. That, I believe, is the best image we have available to understand how a suicide victim (most often an overly sensitive soul) is received into the next life.

Again, this isn’t an analogy. God is infinitely more understanding, loving, and motherly than any mother on earth. We need not worry about the fate of anyone, no matter the cause of death, who exits this world honest, over-sensitive, gentle, over-wrought, and emotionally- crushed. God’s understanding and compassion exceed our own.

Knowing all of this however, doesn’t necessarily take away our pain (and anger) at losing someone to suicide. Faith and understanding aren’t meant to take our pain away but to give us hope, vision, and support as we walk within it.

Finally, we should not unduly second-guess when we lose a loved one to suicide: “What might I have done? Where did I let this person down? If only I had been there? What if …?” It can be too easy to be haunted with the thought: “If only I’d been there at the right time.” Rarely would this have made a difference. Indeed, most of the time, we weren’t there for the exact reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn’t be there. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. This should not be an excuse for insensitivity, especially towards those suffering from dangerous depression, but it should be a healthy check against false guilt and fruitless second-guessing.

We’re human beings, not God. People die of illness and accidents all the time and all the love and attentiveness in the world often cannot prevent a loved one from dying. Suicide is an sickness there are some sicknesses that all the care and love in the world cannot cure.

A proper human and faith response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the victim’s eternal salvation, or guilty second-guessing about how we failed this person. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it (at least in most cases) as a sickness, a disease, an illness, a tragic breakdown within the emotional immune-system. And then we must trust, in God’s goodness, God’s understanding, God’s power to descend into hell, and God’s power to redeem all things, even death, even death by suicide.

Theologians make an important distinction between what they call “devotional” and “liturgical” prayer. “Devotional” prayer, they tell us, is private in nature and is meant to help sustain us personally on the spiritual journey. “Liturgical” prayer, by contrast, is public by nature, the church’s prayer (not our own), is universal in scope, and is intended for the needs of the world.

We don’t always grasp this, to the detriment of both kinds of prayer. Perhaps we might understand this better if we put different names to these. What helps clarify things for me are the terms “affective” and “priestly” prayer. “Affective” prayer refers to private prayer, prayer that’s about us, focused precisely on bringing us and our feelings to God. “Priestly” prayer, on the other hand, is not about us, is about the world, is public in nature, and it doesn’t have to be meaningful personally to be of value. But how can this be? How can prayer be of value if it isn’t personally meaningful?

An analogy might be helpful: Imagine you’re part of a symphony orchestra, playing an instrument that contributes to an overall musical score. Night in and night out, you’re playing the same piece in the same theatre, helping to create a beautiful symphony for the audience.

The public prayer of the church, priestly prayer, works exactly like that. It’s a symphony intended for the benefit of everyone and open to everyone.

This has a number of ramifications: First of all, it clarifies some age- old questions about who benefits from our prayer and who doesn’t. Are people who have others to pray for them more lucky than those who don’t? Imagine two people, both in pain and in need of prayer: The first is a very well-loved individual, part of a big and loving community, perhaps even a public figure, and he has many people praying for him. The second person isn’t as lucky. She’s alone, without family and friends, unknown to the world, with nobody to pray for her. Are we to believe that the first person has drawn a lucky straw and will benefit from all the prayers offered for him, while the second will languish alone, without the benefit of prayer since she has nobody to pray for her?

No. That’s not the way prayer works, at least not the “priestly” prayer of the church. It creates a symphony that’s intended for everyone, includes everyone, and benefits everyone, the loved, the unloved, the lucky, and the unlucky, all equally. When a symphony is being played it’s not selective or discriminatory, the music is for everybody.

Granted, in its explicit expression, our “priestly” prayer might sometimes be directed towards the needs of one particular person (“Let us pray for Martha who’s ill and in the hospital”), but everyone, Martha included, is given the benefit of the symphony. Indeed, such an understanding of “priestly” prayer should challenge us precisely to continually stretch ourselves in terms of the universal intent of our public prayer when we gather as church. Our public prayers on a Sunday are not so much intended for some individual Martha who’s ill and in pain, as for the whole world in all its ills and pains, Martha and her pains included.

This analogy of public prayer as a symphony sheds light on another issue as well, namely, on why our public, priestly prayer does not have to meaningful to us personally to be valuable.

Imagine again that you’re part of an orchestra that, night in and night out, plays the same musical score. You’ve played the same piece many times over and, most evenings, are bored with it. You’d love, for your own stimulation, to play something else which would give you more energy. But the symphony isn’t yours, isn’t intended for you, and depends on many things beyond your tastes and preferences. Your participation is in function of something else. You’re playing this for somebody else. So you play the same piece, night in and night out, not for your own benefit, but for the audience. You contribute your efforts to the symphony for the benefit of others, even as you yourself would prefer to be playing something else.

That’s how “priestly” prayer works, it makes a symphony of prayer for the benefit of everyone. That’s the intent of all Sunday services and all liturgical prayers of the church.

What constitutes “priestly” prayer? It’s the public prayer of our churches, the Eucharist, the Sacraments, Services of the Word, Sunday worship. It’s also the Office of the Church (the Liturgy of the Hours, the Breviary). All of these, by essence and definition, are public prayers, intended first of all not for the private nourishment of those praying them, but as a symphony of prayer for the benefit of the whole world.

The next time you’re at a church service and telling yourself that this isn’t nurturing you, remember that the function of an orchestra is, first of all, not to entertain itself but to make music for others.