Irritations and the Spiritual Life

August 8, 2004

Stanley Elkin once suggested that “it’s easier for a camel to pass through the eye of needle than for an irritated person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” True enough.

An old German axiom submits that you can die of irritation and, I suspect, more than a few have succumbed. The rest of us cope, albeit with high blood pressure. Irritations beset us like mosquitoes at a picnic, unwanted little gnats, not significant in the big picture, but still capable of taking the joy out of the moment.

The same is true for marriage, family, friendship, church, and life in general. Irritations can so easily take the joy out of them. We can love and respect someone deeply, share the same values, be willing to die for him or her, and yet be constantly irritated by some minor quirk or habit that he or she exhibits – the way he habitually clears his throat, the way she’s always late for everything, his need to tell a joke at a party, how she eats her food too slowly, the fact that he snores, the way she does her hair, his incapacity to choose clothes that match, the particular octave of her giggle, his fancy for Country and Western music, her elitist disdain for hamburgers and fast foods, his tendency to leave dirty cups in the sink, the list goes on. None of these is really important, but, like mosquitoes, they can take the joy out of a picnic.

And, of course, there’s still “Murphy’s Law”, those endless irritations that arise from a mischievous aberration within the universe itself. These are not about quirks or bad habits, they’re all about bad timing: “Why is this slow driver in front of me just now when I’m late for an important appointment? Why did the hairdresser choose just this time, my high- school reunion, to make a mistake on my hair? Why did Bobby get the measles just when we’re about to set off on a hard-earned vacation?” There’s a malicious little gene within the DNA of the universe itself whose sole purpose, it would seem, is to try our patience and tolerance. “Murphy’s Law” isn’t responsible for the great tragedies in life, but it is responsible for a lot of language that shouldn’t be used in the presence of children.

Funny thing about irritations, they usually don’t reflect upon what’s important in life, character, values, love, or overall graciousness and meaning, but they make us lose perspective.

Thus, you can come down to breakfast on a given morning and, because someone has spilled milk on the floor and not mopped it up, you can be irritated enough to lose all gratitude for the fact that the sun is shining, you’re healthy and in the prime of life, are surrounded by people who love you, have meaningful work to look forward to, and are about to sit down to bacon and eggs. A little spilled milk and, instead of thanking God, you’re invoking God’s name in less gracious terms.

Similarly, you can walk into your bathroom and instead of being grateful for the marvels of modern plumbing you groan and swear inwardly because nobody has taken the thirty seconds required to put the toilet-tissue into the dispenser (“Am I the only person in this house who knows how to do this!”) Not exactly the stuff of mysticism, but then life has an earthiness that mystics must, at a point, confront.

What do we do with all those irritations?

Irma Bombeck once wrote her own version of the classic piece: If I had my Life to Live Over Again. In it, she talked about the many times, as a mother, she was irritated when her young children would disturb her, smear dirt on the walls, make a mess in the house, or smudge her clean dress with affectionate, but grimy, hands. If she had it to do over again, she writes, she would cherish those disturbances, ignore the dirt and mess, and kiss the child who’d just smudged her clean clothing because, all too soon, long before we’re ready, those loved ones move on, disappear from our lives, and we’re left with just memories, longing ones, of all those wonderful things that once irritated us.

Time and distance, all too soon, take away so much that’s precious and the day will come when we’ll look back with longing (and hopefully humour) to the days of spilled milk in the kitchen and of toilet-tissue dispensers that seemed forever to be empty and we’ll wonder why we couldn’t, then, seize the moment. And the time will come too, all too soon, when our loved ones are gone or we are preparing to leave, when it will be only with fondness that we remember how such a wonderful person once snored, cleared his throat too often, ate her food too slowly, couldn’t match his colours, loved Country and Western music, disdained hamburgers and fast foods, and, for too short a blessed time, shared life with us.

Substance and Appearance

August 1, 2004

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.

Struggling with Being Blessed

July 26, 2004

Rock star, Janis Joplin, was once asked, “What’s it like being a pop idol?” Her answer: “It can be awful sometimes. You have no idea how hard it is to go out on stage and make love to 20,000 people and then go home and have to sleep alone!”

That’s a remarkable comment. What she’s describing is not simply the rarefied angst of a famous pop star, but a pain that, deep down, afflicts every one of us by the very nature of our being specially blessed by God.

And specially blessed we are. All great religious traditions have the idea that human beings carry a special, almost god-like, dignity. The Judeo-Christian scriptures call this “the image and likeness of God in us” and tell us that, because of it, we are special, unique, creative, blessed.

But this is often imagined in a way that’s dangerously simple. What exactly does it mean that we’ve been made in the image and likeness of God?

We tend to be overly-romantic about this, simplistically imagining that somewhere deep inside us there is stamped, like a beautiful Russian icon, some imprint of God which then gives each of us a wonderful dignity that may never be violated, endows us with a marvellous creativity, and makes us, among all the creatures of the universe, special. Because we are in the image and likeness of God we are specially called, loved, and blessed.

All of that is true, but something else is true as well. To walk this planet in God’s image and likeness isn’t just a question of standing before the world, feeling a great dignity, bursting with creativity, and saying: “Look at how wonderful, unique, and talented I am!” It’s also, and equally, a question of carrying the burden of all that creativity and divinity. God, as scripture assures us, isn’t an icon, but a fire that can never be tamed, and we carry that fire inside us, both in the marvel of our positive energies and in the punishing madness, restlessness, and jealousies that rage inside our frustrations. It’s not easy, and sometimes far, far from romantic, to walk the earth as gods and goddesses. That we are blessed also makes for deep struggles.

Why? Why do we struggle with what’s highest in us?

Here’s the algebra: Deep down, all of us know we’re special, that we’re not just accidental, meaningless little chips of energy falling off the conveyor-belt of cosmic evolution, indistinguishable from billions of others. We know we’re unique, precious, have meaning, and are made for a special destiny. We know too we’re lying if we deny it.

But, and this is the point, this sense of being special doesn’t just set off holy and altruistic energies inside us. It also inflames us with narcissism, grandiosity, a sense of entitlement, jealousy, rage, boredom, restlessness, and (ironically) the sense that God does not exist.

Put into simple language, there’s something inside us that says: “If I’m in the image of God then I too have a right to be the centre of the universe, I too have a right to be an object of supreme adoration, and I too am entitled to drink in everything, own everything, and sleep with everyone. Everything is mine by right! And, if I’m nearly a god myself, why do I need to believe in any God beyond me?”

We all struggle with this, whether we admit it or not. In fact it’s when we don’t admit it that we become most bitter in life. When we’re most enraged it’s precisely because what’s divine in us is not being recognized, acknowledged, and properly honoured by others and, not least, by ourselves.

We get a privileged glance into this struggle when we look at the lives of many artists, pop stars, intellectuals, and other high-achievers. Often what’s evident in the life of such a person is that, first, he or she is highly attuned to creative energy, to what’s divine inside the world. However, often times by the same token, he or she is also a person who has to struggle, and mightily sometimes, simply to fit into the flow and the discipline of everyday life, to be “normal”. The person who is highly sensitive to creative energy is often too, by that exact same energy, driven towards addictions, sexual entitlement, jealousy, pathological disquiet, deadly boredom, the rejection of God, and sometimes, sadly, towards self-destruction.

And this kind of struggle should not be seen simplistically, as is often the case, as the result of somebody being a spoiled brat, a child- deity in a high-chair, who’s never had to discipline himself or herself to fit in with the rest of the human race. What’s illustrated rather is a universal struggle, just more clearly choreographed, to live out the fact that we’re made in God’s image and likeness.

We’re born into this world with divine fires inside us. Inside those fires lie seeds of every kind, both for self-destruction or for greatness.

Suicide – The Most Misunderstood of All Deaths

July 25, 2004

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.

The Mother Tongue

July 18, 2004

Hans Urs Von Baltasar once wrote: “After a Mother has smiled for a long time at her child, the child will begin to smile back; she has awakened love in its heart, and in awakening love in its heart, she awakes also recognition.”

Awakening love and recognition within a child’s heart is a result of more than just the mother’s smile, her voice is also important. Mothers don’t just cuddle babies and smile at them, they also speak to them. It’s this, hearing the mother’s voice beckoning the child to come outwards towards a bigger world even when there isn’t yet any real understanding of what’s being said, that’s vital in bringing a child to self-awareness and speech. We come out of the darkness and chaos of infancy precisely to the extent that we are called out by voices that cajole, caress, reassure, and keep forever luring us beyond ourselves.

During the early critical months of a child’s life, it’s the mother’s voice that does most of this. That’s why the first language we learn is called our “mother tongue”. There are no “father tongues”. It’s the mother’s voice that first caressed us and lured us out of unthinking, inarticulate darkness. Rainer Marie Rilke says that an infant’s journey into human awareness depends upon the mother’s voice displacing “the surging abyss.”

Language philosophers agree. In their view, language structures consciousness and creates the very possibility of thought and feeling. Before we can use a language, we’re trapped inside a darkness and chaos that leave us unable to think or speak as human beings.

We see this illustrated in the case of Helen Keller, who was born blind and deaf and was taught to speak only by the extraordinary efforts of a gifted teacher, Annie Sullivan. In a real sense, Annie Sullivan, Helen’s teacher, broke open the world for her. By teaching her language, Annie Sullivan precisely brought Helen Keller out of darkness and chaos and opened up for her the possibility of freedom, thought, deeper feeling, self-expression, and the awareness of love.

Perhaps no image is more valuable than this to help us understand how the Word of God is meant to work in our lives. All preaching, teaching, theology, and pastoral practice is really in function of letting God’s voice become the smiling, beckoning, caressing, cajoling, luring voice of the mother, calling us out of fear, darkness, chaos, and muted frustration to freedom, thought, self-expression, and the awareness of love.

The purpose of God’s word is not, first of all, to challenge us towards charity, social justice, morality, or even to the worship of something higher or to form community among ourselves, important though these are in themselves. Christ came, as God’s incarnate Word, to bring us life, light, and love. This means that Christ came to do what our mother tongue does, namely, to call us out beyond the fear, darkness, and chaos that prevents us from entering the world of self-expression, thought, and conscious love.

Christ, as Word, is analogous to Annie Sullivan trying to help Helen Keller break through the chaos of being trapped inside herself, unaware of deeper consciousness, unable to speak, and blocked from fully entering human life. It’s no accident that the gospels speak of Christ as “the Word” because Christianity is more a particular kind of language (a “mother tongue”) than it is a religion.

Religion doesn’t always understand itself in that way. In our theology schools, in our church circles, and in our preaching and religious teaching, in general there is too little of Annie Sullivan and too much a using of God’s word for every other kind purpose. If we look at a sampling of religious literature of any persuasion (the preaching, teaching, and writing of liberals and conservatives alike within any denomination) or at the language that drives social justice spiritualities, academic theology, devotional literature, new age spiritualities, or the theologies of other world religions, we will find, with few salient exceptions, too little that sounds like a “mother tongue”. For the most part, we will search in vain for an Annie Sullivan who with infinite patience, understanding, and gentleness, is trying to coax us out of the darkness, inarticulateness, deafness, and chaos into which we were born.

That’s not to say that what passes today for preaching, theology, and pastoral practice is not full of valuable truth, interesting insights, and prophetic challenge. There’s lots of good theology around. But what’s more absent are the loving sounds and coaxing words, along with the gentle cadence, that we first heard from our mothers when they lured us into self-awareness. What’s needed in theology, spirituality, and church circles are caressing, gentle, beckoning voices that, with the patience and love of an Annie Sullivan, try to teach us how to speak and to enter a world whose complexity and hugeness dwarfs and frightens us. It’s not easy to be led out of darkness.

The search for God is very much the search to hear the divine in our “mother tongue”.

Helping Create a Symphony of Prayer

July 11, 2004

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.

The Struggle for Sincerity

June 27, 2004

We live with two great desires. Beyond our desire for intimacy we also want sincerity. But, like intimacy, this too is rather elusive. It’s not easy to be sincere.

I was reminded of this recently while having a conversation with a friend who’d just become a father. “Now that I have a child,” he told me, “I want to grow up, finally grow up. I’m tired of the way I am, of being bounced around by every fad and politically-correct thing to think, say, or do. I’m sick of not knowing what I really stand for deep down. I have to find a way to move beyond that or I’ll never grow up. But it’s hard. How do I know what’s true within me? How do I really know my own truth?” This man was already in his late thirties, into mid-life, and still unsure of how much of what he said, did, or thought was really coming from his true centre.

I point this out with sympathy. He was longing for sincerity, which he identified with “finally growing up” and was finding that for the most part it was evading him. He was struggling to contact his own soul, to think his own thoughts, and was finding more false layers there than he’d ever imagined. He was discovering, in the words of Iris Murdoch, that it’s not easy to get out of a muddle. Much as the desire for sincerity haunts us, it’s still difficult to be sincere. Why?

Because too many things get between us and our real centre. What things? The mind-set of our culture, fads, ideology, group-think, rationalizations, old wounds, present hurts, body chemistry, infatuations, private fantasies, among other things, help block us off from our real thoughts and feelings. Who, for example, really has his or her own opinion on Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of Christ? What do we really think about this movie? Did we, liberals and conservatives alike, really watch this movie or did we watch each other watch it?

What do I really think about anything? What’s me as opposed to some prescribed value, feeling, opinion, bias, or ideology that I’ve drunk in from my circle of friends, family, church, or culture? What does it mean to be sincere?

Dictionaries offer two versions of the root of the word and both interpretations shed light on its meaning. Some dictionaries suggest that sincere comes from two Latin words: sine (without) and caries (decay). Hence, to be sincere means to be “without corruption”. Other commentators suggest that its root is: sine (without) and cero (to smear, to coat with wax). In this view, to be sincere means “to be uncovered, to have a certain transparency of soul”, to not have a coat of anything covering over you.

Certainly both are true. To be sincere is to be uncorrupted. To be sincere is also to be bare, uncoated, transparent, truly yourself, not covered with pretence, whim, fad, political correctness, posturing, or acting out. To be sincere is to be without false props, without a mask, without anything that’s not really you.

But this isn’t easy. Parker Palmer, the renowned American Educator, once commented that while he was doing his graduate degree in theology at a Christian seminary, despite all the good and sincere people he met there and all the valuable insights that passed through the classrooms, there was little in the way of genuine sincerity at one level. Classrooms themselves, he suggests, almost ex officio, militate against sincerity. I paraphrase his comments: During all those years, in all those classes, with all those good people, I doubt that there was ever truly one sincere question asked. There was a lot of posturing, some pretence, a lot of asking of the right things, a lot of political correctness, but not really a question that laid bare a heart, that spoke truly for someone’s soul, that issued forth from a genuine curiosity.

A generation earlier, C.S. Lewis made a similar statement. In his book, The Great Divorce, Lewis, arguing against a professor of theology who no longer believes in a Transcendent God, outlines the anatomy of a lost faith, suggesting that, at root, it takes its base in insincerity: “Let us be frank. Our opinions were not honestly come by. We simply found ourselves in contact with a certain current of ideas and plunged into it because it seemed modern and successful. At College, you know, we just started automatically writing the kind of essays that got good marks and saying the kind of things that won applause. When, in our whole lives, did we honestly face, in solitude, the one question on which all turned: whether after all the Supernatural might not in fact occur? When did we put up one moment’s resistance to the loss of faith.”

Sincerity is what truly lays bare the heart, genuinely speaks for the soul, and makes for honest curiosity. My friend was right to identify it with the struggle to “finally grow up”.

Providence and the Conspiracy of Accidents

June 20, 2004

Some years ago, in a class in religious experience, a woman shared this story:

She had been raised in a religious home and had been a regular church-goer until her university years when her interest in religion progressively dropped so that by the time of her graduation she no longer attended church. Her indifference to religion continued for several more years after her graduation. Her story focused on how that changed.

One day, several years after having given up going to church, she went to spend some time with a married sister who lived near a major ski resort. She arrived on a Saturday evening and the next morning, Sunday, her sister invited her to go to church with her. She went skiing instead.

On one of her runs down the hill that Sunday she hit a tree and broke her leg. Sporting a huge cast, she was released from hospital several days later. The next Sunday morning, her sister again asked her to come to church with her. This time, with skiing not an option, she accepted the invitation. As luck would have it, the readings for the day were about the Good Shepherd and as chance would have it, there was a visiting-priest from Israel. The priest could not see her, complete with cast, sitting in the back pews and so there was no explanation, other than divine providence or pure, sinister fluke, for how he began his homily:

“There’s a practice among shepherds in Israel, he said, that existed at the time of Jesus and is still in use today that needs to be understood in order to appreciate what Jesus says about God as the Good Shepherd. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, if a shepherd senses that this particular lamb is going to be a congenital stray and forever be drifting away from the herd, he deliberately breaks its leg so that he has to carry it until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again!”

“I may be dense,” shared the woman, “but, given my broken leg and all that chance coincidence, hearing those words woke up something inside me. I have prayed and gone to church regularly ever since!”

“The language of God is the experience God writes inside our lives,” says John of the Cross. James Mackey suggests that divine providence is “a conspiracy of accidents” through which God speaks. What this woman experienced that Sunday was precisely the language of God, divine providence, God’s finger in her life through a conspiracy of accidents.

Today such a concept of divine providence is not very popular. Our age tends to see this as too-connected to an unhealthy fatalism (“It’s all in God’s hands, I needn’t take all the necessary measures!”), an unhealthy fundamentalism (“God sent AIDS into the world as a punishment for sexual promiscuity!”), or an unhealthy theology of God (“God sends us natural and personal disasters to bring us back to our senses!”)

It’s good that our age rejects these false notions of providence because God does not start fires, floods, wars, AIDS, or anything else to punish us. God doesn’t break anyone’s legs. Nature, chance, freedom, and brute contingency do. Sometimes, admittedly, sin is involved, but that’s not the point. God doesn’t send catastrophes to wake us up.

But to say that God doesn’t initiate or cause these things is not the same thing as saying that God doesn’t speak through them. God speaks through chance events, accidents, both good and bad. Past generations more easily grasped this.

My parents, for example, had a finely-tuned and theologically-correct sense of divine province: They were farmers and, for them, like Abraham and Sarah of old, there were no accidents, only providence and the finger of God. If they had a good harvest, God was blessing them. If they had a poor one, well, they concluded that God wanted them to live on less for a while and for a good reason. And they would always in the end figure out that reason.

Jesus called this “reading the signs of the times”. How do we do this? We do it by becoming meteorologists of soul who read the inner movements of the spirit in the outer weather of history.

In the conspiracy of accidents that make up the ordinary events of our everyday lives, the finger of God is writing and writing large. We are children of Israel, children of Jesus, and children of our mothers and fathers in the faith. We need therefore, like them, to look at each and every event in our lives and ask ourselves the question: “What is God saying to us in this?” The language of God is the experience that God writes inside our lives.

Reading that language is an important form of prayer, one that takes us beyond simply saying prayers to more healthily living out the words: “Pray always”.

In Our Full Humanity

June 6, 2004

Several years ago, in church, I witnessed this incident: A young boy, perhaps six or seven years old, was growing restless and fidgety. Finally in a voice loud enough to be heard by those around him, he said to his mother: “I’m bored!” His mother, with a chiding little jerk to his arm, said sharply: “Michael, you’re not bored!”

Her response reminded me of what we hear, in essence, from many a liturgist, theologian, spiritual writer, teacher, or well-meaning parent at the dinner table. Reacting to the less-than-full-enthusiasm that he or she wants, the comment, spoken or unspoken, invariably is: “You’re not bored! To be bored in this situation is wrong! You’re supposed to be enthused and have your whole heart in this.”

It’s taken me a long time to not be intimidated or bullied by that false expectation. For a long time, I felt guilty, precisely, about being bored in church, about sneaking an occasional glance at my watch during prayer, about thinking about my stomach and its hungers during a church service, about being distracted or falling asleep when trying to pray, about sometimes enjoying more the festive things around feasts like Christmas and Easter than the liturgical celebrations, about more- naturally gravitating towards this world and its pleasures than towards God and the other world, and about feeling less-than-fully enthusiastic sometimes for what should be the centre of my life, God, liturgy, prayer, service, fellowship in family and community.

Daniel Berrigan once said: “Don’t travel with anyone who expects you to be interesting all the time!” That’s also true here: Don’t listen to any liturgist, theologian, spiritual writer, teacher, community guru, or anyone else who expects you to be excited all the time. We get bored, get down, fidget, feel listless, and long for the distractions and pleasures of this life even when at church and it’s healthy to be given permission not to feel guilty about it.

We are, after all, human beings, not angels. What’s needed to give us guidance for the spiritual journey is precisely anthropology, not angelology or some over-idealized, overly-spiritualized, or overly- romantic notion of humanity. Unlike angels or overly-idealized human beings we, real flesh and blood critters, get tired, get sick, get bored, get wounded, get over-anxious, fill regularly with sexual tension, and have to worry about our figure and our weight (not to mention debts and car payments). Unlike the angels, we have been asked to move towards God and each other in time and history and through a physical body and a soul that naturally and powerfully gravitate towards security, self- absorption, pleasure, personal achievement, and excitement.

I say this not as an excuse for mediocrity or lack of effort, but, as a protest for humanity so that we stop feeling guilty for being the way God made us. Simply put, given our God-given constitution, we will at times be bored in church and pretty restless elsewhere and this doesn’t mean that there’s something wrong with us.

John Shea once said: “Nobody does Jesus real well!” He’s right, though we’re asked to try. But, in that effort, perfection can be the enemy of the good and an overly-idealized notion of how we should feel can discourage us because it can give us the idea that our innate humanity is itself delinquent: “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!” We need a liturgy, spirituality, theology, ecclesiology, and psychology of family and community, that take into account precisely the fact that we do get tired and bored, that we are physical, bodily, sexual, wounded, pathologically restless, naturally paranoid, and incurably proud creatures who suffer obsessive heartaches and have mortgages to pay and deadlines to meet, all within a limited framework of time and energy. We need to be given permission to be human, to feel what is in fact going on inside us.

God didn’t make a mistake in making us. God didn’t make us physical, insert us into a physical universe, and then tell us that the physical is a hindrance to the spiritual. Likewise, God didn’t fill us with powerful, creative energies (energies that precisely often leave us bored in church and restless at the dinner table) and then tell us that it’s wrong to feel so fiercely restless, sexual, ambitious, and distracted. God didn’t make us incurably social, tell us it’s not good to be alone, and then express disappointment because we would sooner be with our friends than alone in prayer. God didn’t make us with deep physical hungers and then tell us that the enjoyment of earthily pleasure is somehow wrong. God didn’t make us insatiably curious and then demand that we blunt our enthusiasm for knowledge and entertainment. God didn’t give us humour and lightness of spirit and then announce that heaven is going to be drab, grey, and heavy.

God does not make mistakes, though we do, and one of these is that we too quickly feel guilty if we’re bored in church.

Conflicting Voices

May 30, 2004

We are drowning in a sea of voices.

Superficially, we see this in advertising. Everywhere around us, billboards, radio, television, newspapers, magazines, the internet, and the fashion industry, hold out the promise of something better for us – a new soap, a new lover, a new philosophy of life.

More deeply, however, we experience this sea of voices as a great tension. The different voices we hear pull us in many directions and, after a while, we’re no longer sure who we are, what we believe in, or what will bring us life. Different voices tell us different things and each voice seems to carry its own truth.

On the one hand, there’s a powerful voice beckoning us towards self- sacrifice, self-renunciation, altruism, heroism, telling us that happiness lies in giving life away, that selfishness will make us unhappy, and that we will only be ourselves when we are big-hearted, generous, and put the needs of others before our own. Deep down, we all know the truth of that, it’s Jesus’ voice telling us that there is no greater love, nor meaning, than to lay down one’s life for others. Francis of Assisi was right, we only receive by giving. And so we admire people who radiate that and we feed our souls and those of our children with stories of heroism, selflessness, and bigness-of-heart.

But that’s not the only voice we hear. We hear as well a powerful, persistent voice seemingly calling us in the opposite direction. Superficially, this is the voice calling us towards pleasure, comfort, and security, the voice that tells us to take care of ourselves, to drink in life’s pleasures to the full, to seize the day while it’s still ours to seize.

More deeply, this is the voice that challenges us not to be too timid or fearful to be a full human being. This voice invites us to participate in, contribute to, and enjoy the wonderful energy, colour, wit, intelligence, and creativity that makes the world go round and makes life worth living. This is the voice beckoning us towards romance, creativity, art, sex, achievement, physical health, the voice telling us Jesus’ parable of the talents and holding before us a truth too often neglected in religious circles, namely, that God is also the author of eros, colour, physical health, wit, and intelligence. Life, it insists, needs to be tasted, in God’s name.

So which is the real voice? Is one of these voices to be heeded and the other resisted?

This is a complex question and there’s more to it than meets the eye. Historically, the temptation, at least in religious circles, has been to over- simplistically identify the voice of Jesus with the voice that calls us toward self-sacrifice and asceticism: “Everything is about self- renunciation!” Indeed, it is. Jesus did say that, as did every great saint.

But Jesus and those others also said more and our failure to take heed of the rest of what they said has sometimes made for a spirituality that is a half-truth with some nasty consequences, namely, in the name of religion, we have sometimes become unhealthily fearful, timid, and guilt-ridden. Whenever this happens, the other voice, the one inviting us to enter more fully into life’s dance of energy, is not blotted out but driven underground and there, because we have neglected part of what God has called us to, instead of becoming martyrs, we become people with “martyr-complexes”, frustrated persons whose energies become negative and manipulative in the name of love and service. Moreover, in the name of this half truth, we often end up having God fighting God, truth fighting truth, wisdom fighting energy, and spiritual health fighting physical health, because we’ve put self-renunciation in false opposition to the challenge to also enter into the wonderful God-given energy of this planet where beauty, romance, creativity, physical health, wit, wine- drinking, and good humour also extend part of God’s authentic invitation.

How to find a balance in all of this? If both voices invite us to truth and yet they seem in opposition to each other, where do we go with this?

There is no simple truth, here or anywhere else. Truth is painfully complex (as are we) and truth is always bigger than our capacity to absorb and integrate it. To be open to truth is to be perpetually stretched and perpetually in tension, at least this side of eternity. And that’s true in terms of the seeming opposition between these voices. At times they are in real opposition and we can’t have it both ways, but have to choose one to the detriment of the other. Truth has real boundaries and there’s a danger in letting it mean everything. But there’s an equal danger in letting it mean too little, of reducing a full truth to a half-truth – and nowhere, at least in the spiritual life, is this danger greater than in our tendency to let either of these voices completely blot out the other.

A Spirituality of the Ascension

May 23, 2004

The Ascension throws some important light on the mystery of love and intimacy. What’s the Ascension?

It’s an event inside of the life of Jesus and the early church, a feast- day for Christians, a theology, and a spirituality, all woven together into one amorphous bundle of mystery that we too seldom try to unpackage and sort out. What does the Ascension mean?

Among other things, that the mystery of how we touch each others’s lives is strangely paradoxical in that the wondrous life-giving power of arriving, touching another’s life, speaking words that nurture, doing actions that build up, and giving life for another, depends also upon eventually leaving, being silent, absorbing rather than actively doing, and giving our goodbye and death just as we once gave our presence and our life. Presence depends too upon absence and there’s a blessing we can only give when we go away.

That’s why Jesus, when bidding farewell to his friends before his ascension, spoke these words: “It’s better for you that I go away.” “You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy.” “Don’t cling to me, go instead to Galilee and I will meet you there.”

How might we understand these words? How is it better that someone we love goes away? How can the sadness of a goodbye, of a painful leaving, turn to joy?

This is something that’s hard to explain, though we experience it daily in our lives. Allow me an example: When I was 22, in the space of four months, my father and mother died, both still young. For myself and my siblings, the pain of their deaths was searing. Initially, as with every major loss, what we felt was pain, severance, coldness, helplessness, a new vulnerability, the loss of a vital life-connection, and, the brutality and finality of something for which there is no preparation. There’s nothing warm, initially, in any loss, death, or painful goodbye.

Time is a great healer (though there’s a lot more to this than simply what washes clean or is anaesthetized by the passage of time). After a while, for me this took several years, I didn’t feel a coldness any more. My parents’ deaths were no longer a painful thing. Instead their absence turned into a warm presence, the heaviness gave way to a certain lightness of soul inside me, their seeming incapacity to speak to me now turned into a surprising new way of having their steady, constant word in my life, and the blessing that they were never able to fully give me while they were alive began to seep ever more deeply and irrevocably into the very core of my person. The same was true for my siblings. Our sadness turned to joy and we began to find our parents again, in a deeper way, in Galilee, namely, in those places where their spirits had flourished while they were alive. They had ascended and we were the better for it.

We often have this kind of experience, simply in less dramatic ways. Parents, for instance, experience this, often excruciatingly, when a child grows up, grows away, and eventually goes away to start life on his or her own. A real death takes place here. An ascension has to happen, an old way of relating has to die, painful as that death is. Yet, it’s better that our children go away. The same is true everywhere in life. When we visit someone, it’s important that we come, it’s also important that we leave. Our leaving, painful though it is, is part of the gift of our visit. Our presence partly depends upon our absence.

This however must be carefully distinguished from what we mean by the axiom: “Absence makes the heart grow fonder.” In essence, that’s not true. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, but only for a while and mostly for the wrong reasons. Physical absence, simple distance from each, without a deeper dynamic of spirit taking place beneath, ends more relationships than it deepens. In the end, most of the time, we simply grow apart. That’s not how the ascension deepens intimacy, presence, and blessing.

The ascension deepens intimacy by giving us precisely a new presence, a deeper, richer one, but one which can only come about if our former way of being present is taken away. Perhaps we understand this best in the experience we have when our children grow up and leave home. It’s painful to see them grow away from us, painful to say that particular goodbye, painful to see them, precisely, ascend.

But, if their words could say what their hearts intuit, they would say what Jesus said before his ascension: “It’s better for you that I go away. There will be sadness now, but that sadness will turn to joy when, one day soon, you will have standing before you a wonderful adult son or daughter who is now in a position to give you the much deeper gift of his or her adulthood.”

The Noonday Devil

May 16, 2004

When the Desert fathers first formulated a list of what they considered “deadly sins”, they included the sin of sadness. It wasn’t until the 17th century that it was dropped from the list, replaced by sloth.

How can sadness be a sin? Isn’t it a feeling over which we have no control? Sadness comes and goes, a tidal flow, triggered by circumstance, body-chemistry, the weather. Besides isn’t a certain sadness a sign of solidarity with the world’s pains, a sign of maturity and depth beyond the partying of the young and the denial of death that’s so often expressed in our forced attempts to be upbeat and positive, even as depression nips at our heels? Why should sadness be a sin?

Too much of anything is not a good thing. Even sensitivity, turned loose without checks and balances, can lead us astray. Therese of Lisieux saw her own overcoming of hypersensitivity as one of the turning points, spiritually, in her life. Sensitivity, too, can be a fault.

We see it, for instance, in Shakespeare’s, Hamlet. Hamlet was sensitive, but his sensitivity had no checks and balances and so, at a point, his life seemed so tragic and unfair and it left him hopelessly wounded, unhappy, destructive.

His was one kind of sadness, the Desert fathers (the same ones who listed sadness as a deadly sin) spoke of yet another. They spoke of something called “acedia”, “the noonday devil”, namely, a sadness that can take you over for no apparent reason. They distinguished this from the kind of sadness that beset Hamlet or that we feel when we have every reason to be sad because we’re experiencing a significant loss or breakdown of something. The “noonday devil”, unlike the devil who strikes at crisis times, hits in broad daylight, when there’s seemingly no reason to be sad.

So what brings on the “noonday devil”? Anything can trigger its entry: an old song on the radio, a beautiful face in a crowd, a reunion party, a half-forgotten lullaby, somebody else’s good fortune, a good- bye hug, the simple mention of significant other’s name, a sorting through of old photographs, or even a family occasion that should ideally bring us joy. We’ve all had the experience, no doubt, of being at a wedding or at some such celebration, an event which should bring us the “noonday angel” of delight, but which in fact brings us sadness, restlessness, and an incapacity to be happily inside the moment or our own skin. Joyous events often overstimulate us in a way that makes us sad.

But how can this be sin? Isn’t what we’re feeling simply a sense of our own mortality, a nostalgia for the infinite, the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, an effect of beauty itself?

Sadness isn’t the sin, but it can be precisely the devil that tempts us towards sin. Like Hamlet, we can unhealthily luxuriate in sadness so as to rationalize making no further efforts to build up anything. Perhaps that’s why the church eventually called this sloth.

I remember as an adolescent in high school, watching and re- watching Hamlet. He was a hero for my wounded adolescence, someone bright enough to understand the disappointment of exclusion, sensitive enough to feel what’s wrong with everything, and witty and enigmatic enough to bring down the world to its hypocritical knees. Hamlet was just the ticket for my hyper-sensitive, lonely, adolescent years. I embraced his sadness like a religion. When you’re lonely and left out, sadness and cynicism are easily passed off as depth.

It’s taken many years, and good people who love me enough to not give up on me, to let go of my fascination with Hamlet and the immature attraction for standing outside the circle. Hamlet, the outsider, can never be a child of the kingdom, no matter how attractive that coolness might seem. A child of the kingdom is not paralysed by the tragic, does not nurse wounds to keep them fresh, does not see joy as naivete, does not offer cynicism in place of hope, and is not the adolescent trickster who refuses to enter the dance and gets his meaning from seeing emptiness in everyone else’s life.

A child of the kingdom, like Hamlet, is indeed saddened by the unfair state of things. She is also regularly smitten by the “noonday devil”. Old songs on the radio, reunion parties, half-forgotten lullabies, and that hyper-restless energy that so often permeates weddings and large gatherings can still send her into a lonely tailspin, a free-fall into a depression without an excuse, nursing darkness under the noonday sun. But, and this is the difference, after the letting the desert do its work, after giving the “noonday devil” his due, unlike Hamlet, the child of the kingdom again turns up her music, picks up her wineglass and her friends, her tools and his duties, her hopes and her prayers, and continues, in joy, despite all that’s wrong, the dance of the resurrection.

A Spirituality of Non-Hurrying

May 9, 2004

“Nothing can be more useful to a man than a determination not to be hurried.” Thoreau wrote that and it’s not meant as something trivial.

We hurry too much, pure and simple. As Henri Nouwen describes it: “One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like overpacked suitcases bursting at the seams. It fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, unrealized proposals. There is always something else that we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we are very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligation.” We are always hurrying.

What’s wrong with hurrying? Any doctor, police officer, spiritual director, or over-worked mother, can answer that: Hurrying causes tension, high blood-pressure, accidents, and robs us of the simple capacity to be in the moment.

But spiritual writers take this further. They see hurry as an obstacle to spiritual growth. Donald Nicholl, for example, says “hurry is a form of violence exercised upon time”, an attempt, as it were, to make time God’s time our own, our private property. What he and others suggest is that, in hurrying, we exercise a form of greed and gluttony? How so?

Too often we have a rather simplistic notion of greed and gluttony. We imagine greed, for example, as hoarding money and possessions, as being selfish, hard-hearted, like Scrooge in the Dicken’s Christmas tale. Indeed, that kind of greed exists, though it’s not the prerogative of many. For most of us, greed takes a different, more subtle form. More than money, we hoard experience. We try to drink in the world, all of it. We would like to travel to every place, see everything, feel every sensation, not miss out on anything. We constantly hurry what we’re doing so as to be available to do something else. We try to juggle too many things at the same time precisely because we want too many things. The possessions we really want are experience, knowledge, sensation, achievement, status. We’re greedy in a way Scrooge never was.

Gluttony works essentially the same. For most of us, the urge to consume is not so much about food or drink, but about experience. Our propensity to over-eat (particularly in an age that is so sensitive to health and fashion) generally has little to do with food and infinitely more to do with other kinds of consumption. We are always in a hurry because we are forever restless to taste more of life.

It’s this kind of hurry, subtly driven by greed and gluttony, that can be a form of violence exercised upon time and can constitute an obstacle to holiness.

But there are other kinds of hurry that come from simple circumstance and duty. Almost everyone of us, at least during our working years, have too many things to do: Daily, we struggle to juggle the demands of relationships, family, work, school, church, child-care, shopping, attention to health, concern for appearance, house-work, preparing meals, rent and mortgage payments, car payments, commuting to and from work, bus schedules, unwanted accidents, unforeseen interruptions, illnesses, and countless other things that eat up more time than is seemingly available.

The gospels tell us that even Jesus was so busy at times that he didn’t have time to eat. That’s not surprising. Robert Moore once said that the mark of a true adult is that “he or she does what it takes”. Sometimes that means being stretched to the limit, being over-extended, having to juggle too many things all at once, driving faster than we’d like, working to the point of exhaustion, even as there is still more that we should ideally be doing.

There’s a hurriedness that doesn’t come from greed or gluttony and that can’t be dismissed with the simplistic judgement: “That’s what she gets for trying to have it all!” Sometimes we have to hurry just to make do and simple circumstance and duty eat up every available minute of our time. That’s not necessarily an obstacle to holiness, but can be one of its paths.

Still we have to be careful not to rationalize. God didn’t make a mistake in creating time, God made enough of it, and when we can’t find enough time and, as the Psalmist says, find ourselves getting up ever earlier and going to bed ever later because we have too much to do, we need to see this as a sign that sooner or later we had better make some changes. When we hurry too much and for too long we end up doing violence to time, to ourselves, and to our blood pressure.

On Becoming Post-Liberal

May 2, 2004

We’re a people losing heart.

There’s a loss of heart for almost everything: for fidelity in relationships, as less and less people find within themselves the resiliency needed to live out the tensions that long-term commitment inevitably brings; for church, as more and more people quietly or angrily leave their ecclesial communities rather than deal with their own and their church’s humanity; and for politics and the effort needed to build neighbourhood, city, and country because less and less people find the time, energy, and heart to work for others. We’re losing ground most everywhere: There’s a loss of heart for children, for simple freshness, for romance, for innocence, for proper aesthetics, and even for manners.

Thoreau once suggested that we live lives of “quiet desperation”. That may have been more true of his generation, but it’s less true today. Our struggle is more with internal bleeding, though Thoreau’s right about its quietness. This haemorrhaging is mostly quiet and unrecognized, perceptible mainly in its effects. In itself, it looks only like tiredness, battle-fatigue. But it’s more. Permit me a little thesis here:

Two major proclivities have characterized the past couple of generations, at least in the Western world.

First, an unbridled itch for sophistication has driven us out in such a way that, for good and for bad, we’ve ended up shattering most of our former naivete, debunking most of our former heros and heroines, and wreaking havoc with most of our childhood faith and values. Second, an ever-increasing sensitivity has progressively polarized and politicized life around marriage, church, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, culture, hierarchy, and values.

While much of this was needed and is in many instances a clear intellectual and moral progress, we’ve been slow to admit something else. This is also slowly tiring us, gradually wounding the heart and draining away much of its strength and resiliency. To be innocent, etymologically, means to be “unwounded”. The loss of our innocence has, precisely, left us wounded in the heart. A wounded heart seeks to protect itself, to find respite from what wounded it in the first place. Hence, more and more, we have less heart to put up with the strains and tensions of family, church, neighbourhood, community, and country. Instead we protect ourselves by surrounding ourselves with like-minded people, safe circles, and we have too little heart for actually dealing with the tensions that arise from our differences.

We’re well-intentioned, but tired, too tired to be robust enough to deal with tension. Like the woman in the gospels suffering from internal bleeding, we too are finding that constant internal haemorrhaging is making it impossible for us to become pregnant with new life. Like her, we need healing. How?

First, by recognizing and naming this loss of heart. Our marriages, families, homes, churches, communities, friendships, and even civic communities are too much breaking apart because we haven’t the heart to deal with their tensions. If this is true, and it is, then we need to ask ourselves: What’s being asked of us today? What do we need to do to regain some resiliency of heart?

Things looked different in the past. When I was young, society and the church both suffered from an unhealthy naivete and an unhealthy rigidity. The great social movements of that past 40 years, along with new attitudes and sweeping reforms inside the churches, have exorcized most of that naivete and rigidity. A more liberal view of things has taken hold inside virtually all circles, government, legal, ecclesial, academic, the arts, popular culture. We live with the results: endless deconstruction of the old and an uncompromising emphasis on freedom, individual rights, social justice, gender equality, ethnic equality, multi-culturalism, wider tolerance, the ending of old privilege, and on the shortcomings of being naive. Part of this too, in terms of faith and the church, has been a strong, relentless, challenge to grow beyond an infantile belief, to face the dark corners of doubt, to not hide behind false securities.

Much of this, I believe, was good, needed, prophetic even; but I believe as well that it’s now time for a different response, at least for a while. Another shift is needed, though not one which tries to roll back the last fifty years. What’s required is not a conservative or fundamentalistic turn, though that clearly seems to be the temptation for many. We can’t unlearn, nor do we want or need to, what we’ve learned through these years of deconstruction.

We’re not called to turn back the clock, to become arch-conservative or fundamentalistic. We’re called instead, I believe, to become post- liberal, post-critical, post-modern, post-sophisticated, post- deconstructionist, post-ideological, post-hypersensitive, and post- politically-correct.

What exactly does that mean? How do we do these things by rolling the clock forwards rather than backwards? How is this different from the vision of the conservative or the fundamentalist? Answering those questions, beyond both the agenda of both the conservatives and the liberals, is precisely the task.

Setting our Ecclesial Gauges

April 25, 2004

Karl Rahner once cautioned that we should never assume that everyone alive at the same time belongs to the same generation. Nowhere is this more true than in church circles today where we have multiple ecclesiologies operating inside the same churches. In Roman Catholicism, for instance, since Vatican II, we have two-and-a-half distinct generations, all trying to share the same pews. Not an easy task. It makes for tension and this is the case inside all the churches.

That tension, while painful, isn’t necessarily unhealthy. When Jesus says, “In my Father’s house there are many rooms,” he isn’t describing celestial geography, but a heart, God’s, whose compassion and scope is the antithesis of any small sectarian group or any group of like-minded people huddling around some fiery ideology. The challenge for the churches is to mirror this embrace, namely, to build a house with a large entrance and with rooms enough to accommodate persons of every persuasion.

But that’s not easy. Invariably, for every kind of reason, we start narrowing the door and closing off the number of rooms. What’s required to avoid this, I believe, is a more deliberate effort to set our ecclesial gauges properly. What’s meant by this?

Sometimes I picture the church like a huge airplane, complete with a large instrument-panel, gauges of every kind, which indicate the state of things and which someone has to carefully set and monitor so as to have a smooth and safe flight. What does the instrument-panel in the church look like? What are our ecclesial gauges?

To have a healthy ecclesiology, we need to monitor the tension between a series of polarities which perennially compete with each other and which need, precisely, a certain deliberate and delicate regulating. What are these polarities that are in tension with each other?

Among others, I mention these:
*the tension between the liberal and the conservative.
*the tension between the theological and the devotional.
*the tension between the liturgical and the pastoral.
*the tension between Word and Eucharist.
*the tension between social justice and private morality.
*the tension between prophecy and diocesan structures.
*the tension between program and compassion.
*the tension between missionary and maintenance.
*the tension between enthusiasm and stability.
*the tension between ecumenism and denominational commitment.
*the tension between Christianity and other religions.
*the tension between community and individual charism.
*the tension between aesthetics and simplicity of life.

Each of these might be conceived of as a separate gauge, icon, on the ecclesial instrument-panel and, inside each gauge, each of the two poles represents something to be guarded. Our task is to try to deliberately set those gauges by pinpointing where, ideally, as an ecclesial community, we want to be on the continuum between the various ecclesial poles (using critical principles rather than ideology, private temperament, or private desire as our guiding needle).

Hence, for example: In the tension between liberal and conservative, how much, like the wise scribe idealized by Jesus, are we willing to give place to the old as well as the new? In the tension between the theological and the devotional, where do we want to place the guiding- needle so as to have a healthy balance between head and heart? In the tension between the liturgical and the pastoral, how much do we want to push ideal liturgical principle as a corrective to sloppy worship and how much do we want the real needs of our congregations to mitigate a potentially sterile ideal? What, for instance, is the place of a eulogy at a funeral, given the balance do we want between the liturgical ideal and the needs of a grieving family?

What’s the proper balance between concern for the issues of justice in the world and concern for private integrity of soul? How much is the church about justice and how much is it about soul-building? How programmatic or compassionate do we want to be? Where is the proper balance between being overly-rigid and overly-loose? Which is the greater risk, to be irresponsible with sacraments and grace or to unhealthily cut off access to God? Do we want to sacrifice aesthetics for simplicity of life by building cheap, ugly churches, or do we sacrifice simplicity of life for good taste? Where’s the proper balance between being loving and loyal to your own denomination and recognizing valid baptism and God’s grace as present in other Christians? The list goes on.

Jung once said that whatever energies we don’t consciously access and direct will unconsciously direct themselves. That’s true here too in terms of these ecclesial energies. To the extent that we do not – prayerfully, communally, and according to sound principle – deliberately set where we want to be on the continuum between these various energies, other things (ideology, self-interest, personal temperament, ego, charismatic personality, whim, the need to be right, the flavour of the moment) will set them for us, though not always in ways that will build a church that reflects God’s compassion, embrace, and beauty.

Mel Gibson’s Passion of Christ

April 18, 2004

When John Shea wrote his book on Jesus, he began with an apology, asking whether yet another book on Christology was really needed. I share that sentiment as I weigh in on the discussion around Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ: Is another opinion really needed? Probably not, but what are columns for?

What’s to be said about Mel Gibson’s, The Passion of the Christ?

First, that it’s a work of art and, as such, is not to be judged, first and foremost, by its particular theological slant. Art isn’t right or wrong, it speaks to you or it doesn’t, is in good taste or bad, is aesthetically palatable or overly saccharine, is powerful or flat, and either ennobles the soul or debases it. In the end, Gibson’s film needs to be judged by these criteria, not by his particular theology.

What’s my judgement? Like most pieces of art, it’s mixed. Let’s begin with its strengths:

First, nobody disputes its power. The film packs a wallop. Some critics would counter with, so does a bad odour. That’s unfair. A foul smell isn’t art. This is art, whether one likes its message or not.

There are too some particularly excellent scenes and character portrayals in the film. The movie opens with Jesus’ agony in Gethsemane and Gibson does this scene excellently. Jesus sweats the water and the blood of the lover’s agonia and Gibson frames it very powerfully, complete with an androgynous devil. Jesus’ mother, Mary, too is particularly well done. No saccharine, no drippy sentimentalism. She’s the woman of the Gospels, strong, standing (not prostrate) under the cross, pondering, holding her faith, her solitude, and her femininity at a high level. As well, the characters of Magdala, Peter, Pilate, Pilate’s wife, and Simon of Cyrene are interpreted well.

But more critically: Gibson chooses to emphasize, to the point of imbalance, the physical sufferings of Jesus. The gospel writers don’t do this, but emphasize instead the emotional and moral loneliness of Jesus. In the gospels, Jesus’ primary sufferings have to do with being betrayed, misunderstood, alone, humiliated, and unanimity-minus-one. Indeed in several accounts of the passion, the physical suffering of Jesus are expressed in a single line: “And they led him away and crucified him.”

What Gibson does by so excessively highlighting Jesus physical suffering, particularly the lashes (which go on and on, far beyond where any human being would have been able to absorb them), is weaken, deaden really, Jesus’ religious and moral triumph. By the time Jesus says: “Forgive them, they do not know what they are doing,” he is so beaten- up and rendered so half-human that his words don’t pack much punch and they issue more from the mouth of a physical than a spiritual athlete. Had the hero of Elephant Man spoken those words at the end of his story, they would, to my mind, have been more powerful than the words that Jesus, portrayed as enduring such horrific physical pain, utters at the end of Gibson’s movie. By emphasizing so much Jesus’ physical struggle, Gibson is partly unable to show us the real depth of Jesus’ moral and religious struggle.

Though, to give Gibson his due, the excessiveness of the physical suffering, particularly of the lashes, is his main point. The lashes represent sin and Jesus’ incredible capacity for endurance represents his willingness to absorb and forgive them. That interplay, as we know, does go on and on and on.

Overall, in balance, this is a good movie. It’s not anti-semitic, though it’s not particularly deep either. This is not retreat material for the spiritually mature, though neither is it the fundamentalistic aberration that the liberal community accuses it of being.

Watching The Passion of the Christ and seeing its impact among popular audiences, one is reminded of something Malcolm X said when he left his Christian roots to embrace Islam. He stated something to the effect that, while he personally preferred Jesus’ gentler message of love, he guessed that, given the times, the harder discipline of Allah was more useful in his work among people in the ghettos because they found themselves such a long, long ways from the experience of order, love, and peace. The gentler gospel of Jesus, he felt, could play a deeper role later on, after the ground is cleared by a harsher initial approach.

Gibson, I believe, has a similar intuition about our culture. In an age obsessed with celebrity, reality-T.V, entertainment as an anaesthetic, in an age which has turned with a nasty adolescent grandiosity upon its Christian roots and thinks The Da Vinci Code carries theological depth and meaning, perhaps this kind of portrayal of Jesus is a wake-up call. A wake-up call isn’t intended to be deep, it’s intended to rouse you from sleep. Tens of millions of people are flocking to see this movie. Whatever else, they’re leaving the theatre a bit more awake and infinitely more cognizant of what it cost Jesus to die for us.