Some years ago, an op-ed piece appeared in the New York Times by Frank Bruni, entitled The Wages of Celibacy. The column, while provocative, was fair. Mostly he asked a lot of hard, necessary questions. Looking at the various sexual scandals that have plagued the Roman Catholic priesthood in the past years, Bruni suggested that it was time to re-examine celibacy with an honest and courageous eye and ask whether its downside outweighs its potential benefits. Bruni, himself, didn’t weigh-in definitively on the question; he only pointed out that celibacy, as a vowed lifestyle, runs more risks than are normally admitted. Near the end of his column, he wrote: “Celibate culture runs the risk of stunting [sexual] development and turning sexual impulses into furtive, tortured gestures. It downplays a fundamental and maybe irresistible human connection. Is it any wonder that some priests try to make that connection nonetheless, in surreptitious, imprudent and occasionally destructive ways?”

That’s not an irreverent question. It’s a necessary one. We need the courage to face the question: is celibacy, in fact, abnormal to the human condition? Does it run the risk of stunting sexual development?

Thomas Merton was once asked by a journalist what celibacy was like. I suspect his answer will come as a surprise to pious ears because he virtually endorses Bruni’s position. His response: “Celibacy is hell! You live in a loneliness that God himself condemned when he said: ‘It is not good to be alone!’” However, that being admitted, Merton immediately went on to say that just because celibacy is not the normal human condition doesn’t mean it cannot be wonderfully generative and fruitful, and that perhaps its unique fruitfulness is tied to how extraordinary and abnormal it is.

What Merton is saying, in essence, is that celibacy is abnormal and dooms you to live in a state not willed by the Creator; but, despite and perhaps because of that abnormality, it can be particularly generative, both for the one living it and for those around him or her.

I know this to be true, as do countless others, because I have been deeply nurtured, as a Christian and as a human being, by the lives of vowed celibates, by numerous priests, sisters, and brothers whose lives have touched my own and whose “abnormality” served precisely to make them wonderfully fruitful.

Moreover, this particular abnormality can have its own attraction. I once served as a spiritual director to a young man who was discerning whether to join our order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate or to propose marriage to a young woman. It was an agonizing decision for him; he wanted both. And his discernment, while perhaps somewhat overly romantic in terms of his fantasy of both options, was at the same time uncommonly mature.  Here (in words to this effect) is how he described his dilemma:

I grew up in a rural area and was the oldest in my family. When I was fifteen years old, one evening just before supper, my dad, still a young man, had a heart attack. There were no ambulances to call. We bundled him up in the car and my mother sat in the back seat with him and held him, while I, a scared teenager, drove the car on route to the hospital some 15 miles away. My dad died before we reached the hospital. As tragic as this was, there was an element of beauty in it. My dad died in my mother’s arms. That tragic beauty branded my soul. In my mind, in my fantasy, that’s how I want to die – in the arms of my wife. Given the grip of that fantasy, my major hesitation about entering the Oblates and moving towards priesthood is celibacy. If I become a priest, I won’t die in human arms. I’ll die as celibates do – held in faith but not held in human arms.

But one day in trying to discern all of this, I saw another picture: Jesus didn’t die in the arms of a spouse; he died lonely and alone. I’ve always had a thing about the loneliness of celibates and have always been drawn to people like Soren Kierkegaard, Mother Teresa, Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, and Daniel Berrigan, who didn’t die in the arms of a spouse. There’s a real beauty in their way of dying too!

Bruni is right in warning that celibacy is abnormal and fraught with dangers. It does run the risk of stunting sexual development and especially of downplaying a biblically mandated fundamental human connection, namely, the fundamental anthropological dogma contained in the story of God creating our first parents and his pronouncement that it is not good (and dangerous) to be alone! 

Celibacy does consign one to live in a loneliness that God himself condemned, but it is also the loneliness within which Jesus gave himself over to us in a death that is perhaps the most generative expression of love in human history.

In a section of her poem The Leaf and the Cloud, Mary Oliver describes her feelings as she stands by the gravesite of her father and mother. She reflects on how both their virtues and faults influenced her life. Then she ends the reflection with these words:

            I give them – one, two, three, four – the kiss of courtesy,

                        of sweet thanks.

            May they sleep well. May they soften.

            But I will not give them the kiss of complicity.

            I will not give them the responsibility for my life.      

What shapes our souls? How much is mystery? How much is genetics? How much is the influence of others? How much is our own responsibility? For instance, when I reflect on what helped shape my own soul, the influence of my parents looms large.

Part of me is my mother. She was a sensitive person, someone who sometimes couldn’t say no when it was called for. So, she often found herself over stretched and tired. Today some would say that she didn’t keep proper boundaries. She had sixteen children. Her critics can rest their case.

She was a generous person, always giving things away. As a child I was sometimes angry with her for that. I didn’t want a generous mother. I wanted things. What she wanted was harmony in her family. I remember her coming to tears one Saturday morning as she was cleaning the house and trying to keep peace and order in a family that, on that particular day, was given over to disorder and arguments. She told us how disappointed she was that our family wasn’t like the Holy Family.

We weren’t the Holy Family and she was sometimes frustrated, not so much with us as with the plain inadequacy of life. Beyond this, she was a happy person, more naturally buoyant in spirit than my father. She danced more easily than he, laughed more spontaneously, and was an easier touch for us as kids. She took life less reflectively than he, though not as unreflectively as we naively supposed. During one period of her life, she kept a diary and it testified to the fact that she’d thought more deeply about things than we’d supposed.

Her deepest longing was for a true home and here she got lucky. She met my father. From soon after they met until they day he died, they became soulmates in every sense of that word. She didn’t have to tell him her secrets or share with him her frustrations, and neither he in reverse. They understood each other without having to explain themselves. In all my years of growing up, I cannot ever recall them having a single misunderstanding or even being angry with each other.

My father died of cancer and she, who had been strong until his death, died three months later of pancreatitis and a loneliness nobody could cure. Today some would look at that and say she was a co-dependent. But she would laugh and tell you that she got what she wanted from life. She died of missing my father, died happy. There’s something to be envied in that.

I’m her son and when I contemplate these things, my own soul becomes less of a mystery, as do my struggles, my faults, my longings, and my strengths. I even understand why I’m tired a lot!

And then a good part of me is my father. There’s a lot in me that can be explained by my genes. My father didn’t dance easily, though he was a deeply affectionate man. Dancing was too public for him. He preferred to express affection in private. He loved my mother, his family, and most everyone, but his way was not to trumpet this in public. There was a reticence here that could sometimes look like coldness, but you had to read his actions and his eyes. They told a different story. He had an abhorrence of all exhibitionism, hated long ceremonies, and loathed cheap public displays of anything. He also disliked excess in anything. His was the way of moderation, proper restraint in everything. Our family likes to quip that moderation was his only excess.

He was the stubborn uncompromising moral principle in my upbringing. He agonized over all that was not right in the world and his patience didn’t always meet the test. I feared his eyes at those times when I disappointed him. I also feared, and still do, ever disappointing him. He was one of the most moral people I’ve ever met and he had a sixth sense that was nearly infallible. He knew right from wrong in a way I couldn’t doubt. He instructed me on that – often against my protests. If I end up in hell, I can’t plead ignorance. My father equipped me, faith-wise and morally, for life. But I have the faults that come with that too, his faults, compounded by my own.

So much of us, our strengths and weaknesses, take root in our upbringing – but still, we are responsible for our own lives.

One of the great tragedies in all literature is the biblical story of Saul. Saul makes Hamlet look like a Disney character. Hamlet, at least, had good reasons for the disaster that befell him. Saul, given the gifts with which he started, should have fared better, much better.

His story begins with the announcement that in all of Israel none measured up to him in height, strength, goodness, or acclaim. A natural leader, a prince among his peers, his extraordinary character was recognized and proclaimed by the people. The beginning of his story is the stuff of fairy tales. And so, it goes on, for a while.

But, at a point, things begin to sour. That point was the arrival on the scene of David – a younger, more handsome, more gifted, and more acclaimed man. Jealousy sets in and envy slowly turns Saul’s soul to poison. Looking at David, he sees only a popularity that eclipses his own, not another man’s goodness, nor indeed how that goodness can be a gift to the people. He grows bitter, petty, cold, tries to kill David, and eventually dies by his own hand, an angry man who has fallen far from the goodness of his youth.

What happened here? How does someone who has so much goodness, talent, power, and blessing, grow into an angry, petty man who kills himself out of disappointment? How does this happen?

The late Margaret Laurence, in a brilliant, dark novel, The Stone Angel, gives us an interesting description of exactly how this can happen. Her main character, Hagar Shipley, parallels somewhat the biblical Saul.

Hagar’s story begins like his: She is young, good, and full of potential. What’s to become of such a beautiful, bright, talented, young woman? Sadly, not much at all. She drifts into everything: adulthood, an unhappy marriage, and into a deep unrecognized disappointment that eventually leaves her slovenly, frigid, bitter, and without energy or ambition. What’s as remarkable as it is sad, is that she doesn’t recognize any of this as happening to her. In her mind, she remains always the young, good, gracious, popular, attractive young girl she was in high school. She doesn’t notice how small her world has become, how few friends are around, how little she admires anything or anyone, or even how physically unkempt she has let herself become.

Her awakening is sudden and cruel. One winter day, shabbily dressed in an old parka, she rings the doorbell of a house to which she is delivering eggs. A young child answers the door, sees Hagar, and Hagar overhears the child tell her mother: “That horrible, old egg-woman is at the door!” The penny drops.

Stunned, she leaves the house and finds her way to a public bathroom where she puts on all the lights and studies her face in a mirror. What looks back is a face she doesn’t recognize, someone pathetically at odds with whom she imagines herself to be. She sees in fact the horrible, old egg-woman that the child saw at the door rather than young, gracious, attractive, big-hearted woman she still imagines herself to be. How can this happen? she asks herself. How can we, imperceptible to ourselves, grow into someone we don’t even recognize?

To a greater or lesser degree, this happens to us all. It’s not easy to age, to absorb the death of   much of what we dreamed for ourselves and to watch the young take over and receive the popularity and acclaim that once were ours. Like Saul, we can easily fill with a jealousy and an anger to which we are blind and, like Hagar, do not notice inside ourselves. Others, of course, do notice.

But, for most of us, as this is happening, we remain still good and generous people, except that we are more caustic, cynical, and judgmental than we once were. We remain good people, but whine too much, feel too sorry for ourselves, and curse more than bless those who have replaced us in youth, popularity, and status.

Hence, one of the pre-eminent human and spiritual tasks in the second-half of life is precisely to recognize this jealousy, this ugliness, inside ourselves and to come back again to the love and freshness of our youth, to revirginize, to come to a second naivete, and to begin again to give others, especially the young, the gaze of admiration.

At the beginning of the Book of Revelations, the author, speaking in God’s voice, has this advice for us, at least for those of us who are beyond the bloom of youth: “I’ve seen how hard you work. I recognize your generosity and all the good work you do. But I have this against you – you have less love in you now than when you were young! Go back and look from where you have fallen!”

We might want to hear those words from scripture before we overhear them from some young girl telling her mother that a bitter, ugly, old person is at the door.

We live this life “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears.” This was part of a prayer my parents prayed every day of their adult lives, as did many others in their generation. In the light of contemporary sensitivities (and one-sided spiritualities) this might sound morbid. Are we to understand our lives as time of grieving in a world that cannot deliver happiness? Is this really what God wants of us?

Taken without nuance, this can indeed be morbid. God didn’t put us into this world to suffer in order to go to heaven. No. God is a good parent. Good parents bring children into this world with the intent that they should flourish and find happiness. So why might our Christian faith ask us to understand ourselves as mourning and weeping in a valley of tears?

For my parents, that phrase brought a certain consolation, namely, that their lives didn’t have to deliver the full symphony, heaven right now. It gave them sacred permission to accept that in life there will be disappointments, suffering, poverty, sickness, loss, frustrated dreams, heartbreak, misunderstanding, and death. They never over-expected and understood that it is normal to experience pain and disappointment. Paradoxically, by accepting this limitation, they were able to give themselves permission to thoroughly enjoy life’s good moments without guilt.

My fear is that we are not equipping ourselves nor the next generation with the tools needed to undergo frustration, disappointment, and heartbreak without breaking down in faith (and sometimes too in psyche and body). Today, for the most part, our normal expectation is that we shouldn’t be finding ourselves mourning and weeping, but rather that life should be delivering a full symphony. We no longer feel that we have sacred permission to be weeping.

The spirituality we breathe in today from our churches, theologians, and spiritual writers has many strong points (just as the one my parents breathed in had its weaknesses). However, to my mind, for the most part spiritualities today do not leave sufficient space for grieving, a lacuna shared by most of the secular world.

We are not making enough space for grief, either in our churches or in our lives. We are not giving people the tools they need to handle frustration, loss, and heartbreak, nor how to grieve when they are beset by them. Outside of our funeral rituals, we make very little room for grief. Worse still, we tend to give the impression that there is something wrong in our lives if there are tears. What’s the place and value of grieving?

First, as Karl Rahner poetically explains, it is a way of accepting that in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we ultimately learn that here in this life there is no finished symphony. Grieving is also, as Rachel Naomi Remen writes, a critical way of self-care. Not to grieve, she submits, is a denial of our own wholeness. People burn out because they don’t grieve. British novelist Anita Brookner repeats a particular refrain in several of her books. Commenting on marriage, she suggests that the first task in a marriage is for the couple to console each other for the fact that they cannot not disappoint each other.”  

My parents had not read Karl Rahner, Rachel Naomi Remen, or Anita Brookner, but in their daily prayer they reminded themselves that in this life there is no finished symphony, that grieving is healthy self-care, and that it’s consoling to accept that neither of them could ever be quite enough for the other since only God can provide that.

What do we need to grieve? Our human condition and all that comes with it, namely,  impermanence, the loss of our youth, the loss of a youthful body, wounds, betrayals, frustrated dreams, heartbreaks, the loss of loved ones, the death of our honeymoons, the perennial flow through our lives of people, places, and institutions and then disappearing, our incapacity to not be disappointing to others, the loss of our health, and our eventual deaths, that’s what we need to grieve.

And how do we grieve? Jesus left us a template for this when he grieved in the garden of Gethsemane. What did he do when, as the Gospels say, he was reduced to “sweating blood” as he faced his own imminent death? He prayed, prayed a prayer that openly and honestly expressed his agony, that recognized his distance from others inside this suffering, which acknowledged his own helplessness to do anything to change the situation, that repeatedly begged God to alter things, but that expressed a trust in God despite the present darkness. That’s the way Jesus wept.

If Jesus wept, so must we. The disciple is never superior to the master. Moreover, we can learn from Jesus that mourning and weeping in our lives do not necessarily mean that there is something wrong. It might well mean that this is where are meant to be.    

We have sacred permission to sometimes be in agony.

What has been given you to carry? Where do the needs and pains of others conscript your freedom? When is freedom mitigated by circumstance? What are the situations that you are born into or meet in life to which you must respond, perhaps even at the cost of your life?  What may you not walk away from?    

These are important questions, not easy to answer. But they are key questions vis-a-vis discerning one’s vocation: what is that special task to which each of us is asked to give over our lives? 

Each of us comes into this world with a God-given vocation. In essence, that’s easy enough to pinpoint. Simply put, we are all asked to love God and love each other. That’s the same for everyone. However, beyond that bald essence, it’s no longer the same for everyone because we are all born into and meet different circumstances in life. We are born into different families, different countries, different times in history, different cultures, different situations of poverty or affluence, different faiths, different kinds of intelligence, different natural aptitudes, and different physical bodies that vary greatly in terms of health, strength, and physical attractiveness. Philosophers call this your “existential” situation. In that, in that particularity, like snowflakes, no two persons are ever the same. And that uniqueness will color and perhaps fundamentally define your vocation and help dictate what will be given you to carry.

Here’s what’s at stake. We are all born free, yes, but many things both conscript and constrict our freedom.

Let me illustrate with a personal example. I was born the twelfth child in a large family. My parents, first-generation immigrant farmers who, during many years of marriage and child-rearing, were unable to fully support our family from the farm alone. We needed some added income. As well, our outback rural community had only an elementary school and any education beyond the eighth grade required leaving home to attend a boarding school, something my parents could not afford.

Because of that, five of my older siblings had to end their education after elementary school, not because they wanted to or because they lacked the desire or intelligence for higher education, but rather because our financial need and the absence of a local high school necessitated that they leave school and take jobs to help support the family. For all of them, particularly for a couple of them, this was a hard sacrifice. Everything in them hungered for more freedom and choice; but, given their circumstances, this was what they were given to carry. And that sacrifice, that giving over of themselves for something beyond themselves, very much defined their vocation and their very persons. A large part of their vocation was to sacrifice many of their own dreams and ambitions for the sake of the family. Among other factors, my own opportunity for an education was largely predicated on their sacrifice.

However, in this, they are not exceptional. Their sacrifice is mirrored in the lives of millions of men and women all over the world: immigrants who need to sacrifice their own ambitions in order to work in the fields or take menial jobs to support their families; young women and men from developing countries who have to leave their families and go abroad to earn money to send back to their families; millions of young people who cannot attend university because of cost; countless women and men who need to sacrifice whole seasons of their lives to take care of an ill or aging parent; and billions of women who have to sacrifice career to raise children. This is what has been given them to carry – and their sacrifice helps constitute the heart of their vocation.

Beyond these things which can conscript our freedom and radically dictate our vocation, there are still other things which either constrict or open our freedom and so help dictate our vocation: having robust physical and mental health as opposed to being physically or mentally fragile; having an athlete’s body as opposed to having a physical disability; being an alpha male or a homecoming queen as opposed to being the one who is bullied and shunned; being temperamentally aggressive as opposed to being temperamentally gentle and accommodating; or being the one who comes from privilege as opposed to being the one who comes from a background without privilege.

Each of these not only helps dictate your vocation, but each also helps to specially equip you for your vocation. If you are on the fragile and wounded side of the equation, your seeming human shortcomings can give you special powers to be a healer for others. Being wounded, you have special powers to become a wounded healer. Conversely, if you are on the privileged side of the equation, that privilege also dictates your vocation and your special gift, namely, you are now the one to whom much is given and consequently from whom much is expected.

What has been given you to carry?

In its calendar, the church singles out special seasons to celebrate – Advent, Christmas, Lent, and Easter. But, outside of these special times, it invites us to live and celebrate Ordinary time.

Ordinary time. For most of us, I suspect, that phrase conjures up images of something that is less than special – bland, flat, routine, domestic, boring. Inside us there is the sense that the ordinary can weigh us down, swallow us up, and keep us outside the more rewarding waters of passion, romance, creativity, and celebration.

We easily vilify the ordinary. I remember a young woman, a student of mine, who shared in class that her greatest fear in life was to succumb to the ordinary, “to end up a content, ordinary housewife, happily doing laundry commercials!”

If you’re an artist or have an artistic temperament, you’re particularly prone to this kind of denigration because artists tend to set creativity in opposition to the ordinary. Doris Lessing, for example, once commented that George Eliot could have been a better writer “if she hadn’t been so moral.” What Lessing is suggesting is that Eliot kept herself too anchored in the ordinary, too safe, too secure, too far from the edges. Kathleen Norris, in her biographical work, The Virgin of Bennington, shares how as a young writer she fell victim to this ideology: “Artists, I believed were much too serious to live sane and normal lives. Driven by inexorable forces in an uncaring world, they were destined for an inevitable, sometimes deadly, but always ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom.”

The ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom! That does have a seductive sound to it, particularly for those of us who fancy ourselves as artistic, intellectual, or spiritual. That’s why, on a given day, any of us can feel a certain condescending pity for those who can achieve simple happiness. Easy for them, we think, but they’re selling themselves short. That’s the artist inside of us speaking. You never see an artist doing a laundry commercial!

Don’t get me wrong. There is some merit to this. Jesus, himself, said that we do not live by bread alone. No artist needs an explanation of what that means. He or she knows that what Jesus meant by that, among other things, is that simple routine and a mortgage that’s been paid do not necessarily make for heaven. We need bread, but we also need beauty and color. Doris Lessing, who was a great artist, joined the communist party as a young woman but she left after she’d matured. Why? One phrase says it all. She left the communist party, she says, “because they didn’t believe in color!” Life, Jesus assures us, is not meant to be lived simply as an endless cycle of rising, going off to work, responsibly doing a job, coming home, having supper, getting things set for the next day, and then going back to bed.

And yet, and yet, there’s much to be said for seemingly dram routine. The rhythm of the ordinary is, in the end, the deepest wellsprings from which to draw joy and meaning. Kathleen Norris, after telling us about her youthful temptation to sidestep the ordinary to engage in the more ennobling battle with gloom and doom, shares how a wonderful mentor, Betty Kray, helped steer her clear of that pitfall. Kray encouraged her to write out of her joy as well as her gloom. As Norris puts it: “She tried hard to convince me of what her friends who had been institutionalized for madness knew all too well: that the clean simple appreciation of ordinary, daily things, is a treasure like none on earth.”

Sometimes it takes an illness to teach us that. When we regain health and energy after having been ill, off work, and out of our normal routines and rhythms, nothing is as sweet as returning to the ordinary – our work, our routine, the normal stuff of everyday life. Only after it has been taken away and then given back, do we realize that the clean simple appreciation of daily things is the ultimate treasure.

Artists, however, are still partially right. The ordinary can weigh us down and keep us outside the deeper waters of creativity, outside that one-in-a-million romance, and outside of the wildness that lets us dance. However, that being admitted, the ordinary is what keeps us from being swept away. The rhythm of the ordinary anchors our sanity.

Paul Simon, in an old 1970s song entitled, An American Tune, sings about coping with confusion, mistakes, betrayal, and other events that shatter our peace. He ends a rather sad ballad quite peacefully with these words: “Still tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, and I’m trying to get some rest. That’s all I’m trying, is to get some rest.”

Sometimes obedience to that imperative is what saves our sanity. There’s a lot to be said for being a contented, little person, anchored in the rhythms of the ordinary, and perhaps even doing laundry commercials.

I have been writing on suicide for nearly forty years. I do so because suicide is generally misunderstood, badly misunderstood. Moreover, perhaps more than any other form of death, suicide leaves those who are left behind with a heavy burden of sadness, hurt, and guilt.

Four things need always to be said upfront about suicide:

First, suicide is a disease, perhaps the most misunderstood of all diseases. In most cases, the death is not freely chosen. When people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS, or accidents, they die against their will. The same is true for 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.

And this is not an analogy. Suicide is a disease. Most people who die by suicide die against their will. They only want to end a pain which can no longer be endured, akin to someone jumping to his death out of a burning building because his clothes are on fire.

Second, we should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is the ultimate act of despair and something God will not forgive. God is infinitely understanding, loving, and gentle. We need not worry about the fate of anyone, no matter the cause of death, who exits this world broken, oversensitive, gentle, overwrought, and emotionally crushed. God has a special love for the broken and the crushed.

However, knowing all of this doesn’t necessarily take away our pain (and anger) at losing someone to suicide because faith and understanding aren’t always meant to take away our pain but rather to give us hope, vision, and support as we walk within our pain.

Third, we should not torture ourselves with guilt and second-guessing when we lose a loved one to suicide. “Where did I let this person down? If only I had been there? What if?” It is natural to be haunted by 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 so that we wouldn’t be there. Suicide is a disease that seems to pick its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. This is not an excuse for insensitivity, but a healthy check against false guilt and painful second-guessing.

We’re human beings, not God. People die of illness and accidents all the time and sometimes all the love and attentiveness in the world cannot prevent a loved one from dying. As a mother who lost a child to suicide writes: “The will to save a life does not constitute the power to prevent a death.”

And so, we must forgive ourselves for our human inadequacy vis-à-vis having lived with someone in suicidal depression. But that is not easy, as this man who lost his wife to suicide attests: “My wife had been unhappy and depressed for so long that I pray that she is now finally at peace. At least once a week for the past four or five years, she would remark that she wanted to die. … It’s been hard for me to disentangle the role I played in her unhappiness. …  At a minimum, I will take to my grave the realization that I could have done more to keep her afloat. Over the past several years, instead of giving a pep talk to try to encourage her to see things in a more positive light, my default option had become avoidance and withdrawal. I had assumed that trying to dispel the fog of her depression only tended to make matters worse, at least for me, since I would often become the easier target for her anger/unhappiness.”

That is a common guilt feeling shared by many who have lost someone to suicide, particularly a spouse. What needs to be understood is that the depressed person’s anger is most often focused precisely on someone whom they trust and are very close to because that is the only safe place where they can unload their anger (without the other reciprocating). Consequently, the person who is the target of that anger will often escape by avoidance and withdrawal – with the resulting guilt feelings afterwards.

Fourth, when we lose loved ones to suicide, one of our tasks is to work at redeeming their memory by putting their lives back into a perspective so that the manner of their death doesn’t forever taint their memory. Don’t take down their photographs, don’t speak in hushed tones about their life and death, don’t put a permanent asterisk beside their names. Their lives are not to be judged through the unfortunate prism of their deaths. Redeem their memory.

What is the Ascension? The Ascension is an event in of the life of Jesus and his original disciples, a feast day for Christians, a theology, and a spirituality, all woven together into one amorphous mystery that we too seldom try to unpackage and sort out. What does the Ascension mean?

Among other things, it is a mystery that is strangely paradoxical. Here’s the paradox: there is a wonderful life-giving gift in someone entering our lives, touching us, nurturing us, doing things that build us up, and giving life for us. But there’s also a gift in the other eventually having to say goodbye to the way he or she has been present to us. Passing strange, there’s also a gift in one’s going away. Presence also depends upon absence. 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, I must ascend.”

How might we understand these words? How can it be better that someone we love goes away? How can the sadness of a goodbye, of a painful leaving, turn to joy? How can a goodbye eventually bring us someone’s deeper presence?

This is hard to explain, though we have experiences of this in our lives. Here’s an example: When I was twenty-two years old, 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 brute facticity of the definitiveness of death for which there is no adequate preparation. There’s nothing warm, initially, in any loss, death, or painful goodbye.

Time, of course, is a great healer, but there’s more to this than simply the fact that we become anaesthetized by the passage of time. After a while, and for me this took several years, I didn’t feel cold anymore. 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, their seeming incapacity to speak to me now turned into a surprising new way of having their steady, constant presence 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, at a deeper place of soul, namely, in those places where their spirits had flourished while they were alive. They had ascended, and we were better for it.

We have this kind of experience frequently, just in less dramatic ways. Parents, for instance, experience this, often excruciatingly, when a child grows up and eventually goes away to start life on his or her own. A real death takes place and an ascension must happen. An old way of relating must die, painful as that death is. Yet, as we know, 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 depends partly on our absence.

And this must be carefully distinguished from what we mean by the axiom: Absence makes the heart grow fonder. For the most part, 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 other, without a deeper dynamic of spirit entering 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 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. It’s painful to have to say goodbye. It’s painful to let someone ascend.

But, if their words could in fact 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, I will be standing before you as an adult son or daughter who is now able to give you the much deeper gift of my adulthood.”