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”.

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.

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.”

“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.

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.

“When I despair, I remember that all through history, the way of truth and love has always won. There have been murderers and tyrants, and for a time they seem invincible. But in the end they always fall. Think of it, always.” Mohandas K. Gandhi wrote those words and they can be helpful in difficult times.

We live in difficult times. We’ve only to watch the news on any given evening. If there’s an all-knowing, all-powerful, and all-loving God who’s Lord of this universe, his presence isn’t very evident on the evening news: There’s violence all over the planet, fuelled on every side by self-righteous ideologies that sanction hatred, by self-interest that lets community fend for itself, and by a socially-approved greed that lets the poor fend for themselves.

It’s fair and reflective to wonder: Where is the resurrection in all of this? Why is God seemingly so inactive? Where is the vindication of Easter Sunday?

These are important questions, even if they aren’t particularly deep or new. They were the questions used to taunt Jesus on the cross: “If you’re the son of God, come down off that cross! If you’re God, prove it! Act now!” Then and now, it seems, we’ve never figured out why salvation can’t work like a normal movie where, at the end, a morally superior violence kills off all that’s bad.

Except God doesn’t work like a Hollywood movie and never has. For centuries they prayed for a messiah, a superman, to come and display a power and a glory that would simply overpower evil but what they got was a helpless baby lying in the straw. And when that baby grew up they wanted him to overthrow the Roman empire and instead he let himself be crucified. We haven’t changed much in what we expect of God.

But God, as revealed in the death and resurrection of Jesus, doesn’t meet our expectations even as he infinitely exceeds them. What the resurrection teaches is that God doesn’t forcibly intervene to stop pain and death. Instead he redeems the pain and vindicates the death. God rids the world of evil not by using force to blot it out, but by vindicating what’s good in the eyes of evil so that eventually the good is all that’s left. Evil has to forever “look upon the one whom it has pierced!” until it understands what it has done and lets itself be transformed. How does this work?

What the resurrection of Jesus reveals is that there’s a deep moral structure to the universe, that the contours of the universe are love and goodness and truth and that this structure, anchored at its center by Ultimate love and power, is non-negotiable: You live life its way or it simply won’t come out right. More importantly, the reverse is also true: If you respect the structure and live life its way, what’s good and true and loving will eventually triumph, always, despite everything. If this is true, and it is, then we don’t have to escape pain and death to achieve victory, we’ve only to remain faithful, good, and true inside of them.

However part of what’s revealed here is that we need a great patience, a patience called hope. God’s day will come, but God, it seems, is not in any hurry.

Good and truth will always triumph, but this triumph must be waited- for, not because God wants us to endure pain as some kind of test, but because God, unlike ourselves, doesn’t use coercion or violence to achieve an aim. God uses only love, truth, beauty, and goodness and God uses these by, structurally and non-negotiably, embedding them into the universe itself, like a giant moral immune-system that eventually, always, brings the body back to health. God doesn’t need to intervene like a super-hero at the end of a Hollywood movie and use a morally- superior violence to kill the bad people so that the good are spared pain and death. God lets the universe right itself the way a body does when it is attacked by a virus. The immune-system eventually does its work, even if, in the short term, there are pain and death. But always, in the end, the universe rights itself.

Simply put: Whenever we do anything wrong, anything at all, it won’t turn out right. It can’t. The structure of the universe won’t receive it and it comes back to us, one way or the other. Conversely, whenever we do something right, anything that’s true, good, loving, or beautiful, the universe vindicates that. It judges our every act and its judgement allows no exceptions.

Perhaps that judgement doesn’t seem to be immediate, it can seem a long time in coming and thus, for a time, we can be confused and ask the question: “Why doesn’t God, truth and goodness, come down off the cross?” But, eventually, as Gandhi says, always, without a single exception, evil is shamed and good triumphs. The resurrection works.

Luke’s account of Gethsemane says this of Jesus:”And being in a certain agony (AGONIA), he prayed more earnestly.” This word, AGONIA, doesn’t just describe the intensity of Jesus’ suffering, but also his readying of himself for the painful task that awaits. How?

An athlete doesn’t enter the arena of competition without first properly warming up and, at the time this text was written, a serious athlete would warm up for a competition by first working himself or herself into a certain intense sweat, a lather, an AGONIA, so that he or she wouldn’t enter the competition with cold muscles.

Gethsemane teaches that to enter the spiritual arena, one too must first be properly warmed up. Cold muscles are a hazard here as well: We cannot walk from self-pampering to self-sacrifice, from living in fear to acting in courage, and from cringing before the unknown to taking the leap of faith, without first, like Jesus in Gethsemane, readying ourselves through a certain AGONIA, that is, without undergoing a painful sweat that comes from facing what will be asked of us if we continue to live the truth.

Mary Jo Leddy once commented that in order to live in real courage we must die before we die. In any situation that is dominated by fear, she asserts, we need to be living the resurrection already before we die. This means that choosing not to die is not always the same thing as choosing to live. Rather we need to choose truth, integrity, and duty even if it means pain and death, otherwise the deep instinct for self-preservation will forever cause us to be more concerned about our own safety and comfort than about anything else and fear will always dominate our lives.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus dies before he dies and in that way readies himself for what awaits him. The next day, when Pilate threatens him with death, Jesus stands in a freedom and courage that can only be understood if we understand what happened to him in the Garden. When Pilate says to him: “Don’t you know that I have power over you, power to take your life or to save it.” Jesus answers: “You have no power over me whatsoever. Nobody takes my life, I give it over freely.” In essence, Pilate is threatening a man already dead. No big threat. Jesus had already undergone the AGONIA. In great anguish he had given his life over freely the night before and so he is ready for whatever awaits him.

We see something similar in Oscar Romero, martyred in 1980. When Romero was first named an Archbishop, he was a good, sincere man, but also someone who lived in timidity and fear. However as he met with the poor and let them baptize him with the truth he began to experience a certain AGONIA, namely, it became clearer and clearer to him that he was on a collision-course which would eventually force him to choose between backing away from the truth so as to save his own life or speaking the truth and being killed for it. Understandably, he began to sweat a certain blood, a certain spiritual and emotional lather began to warm his spiritual muscles. At a point, he had to speak the truth and, in doing so, assured his own death. But he had readied himself. He had already suffered his AGONIA in Gethsemane and could now act with courage because he had already given his life away and thus no longer lived in the paralysing fear that someone might take it from him.

Martin Luther King, in his memorable speech, I HAVE A DREAM, says the same thing: Choosing self-preservation is not necessarily choosing life. Sometimes we need to accept opposition to choose community; sometimes we need to accept bitter pain to choose health; sometimes we need to accept a fearful free-fall to choose safety; and sometimes we need to accept death in order to choose life. If we let fear stop us from doing that, our lives will never be whole again.

We have nothing to fear but fear itself; easily said, but mostly our lives are dominated by it. We may be sincere and good, but we’re also fearful. Fearful of pain, of losing loved ones, of misunderstanding, of opposition, of sickness, of shame, of discomfort of all kinds, and ultimately of death. Deep inside us is a powerful pressure to do whatever it takes to ensure our own lives, safety, and security.

And so it’s not on the basis of nature that we give our lives away or move towards real courage. Like an athlete preparing for a tough contest, we must train for this. Like Jesus in the Gethsemane, we must die before we die, we must experience a courage-inducing AGONIA, so that, already having given it all away, we no longer live in the paralysing fear that someone might take it from us.

In a book soon to be released, Trevor Herriot writes: “Only after we have let the desert do its full work in us will angels finally come and minister to us.”

That’s one of the lessons of Gethsemane. It’s only after the deserts of loneliness, duty, and helplessness have done their work in Jesus that “an angel from heaven came and ministered to him.” A unique thing can happen to us when we are overwhelmed. When the burden of self- sacrifice prostrates us in weakness and leaves us sweating blood, it’s then that God’s strength can flow into us most deeply. Many people have experienced this.

Martin Luther King, for example, recounts his own agony in the Garden and the angel that came to strengthen him:

“One night toward the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, `Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you, before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ I hang up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached a saturation point. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward.

In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory:

`I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced him before.”

The parallel to Jesus in Gethsemane is so obvious that it’s superfluous to elaborate on it. God sends angels to strengthen us precisely when God finds us lying prostrate, sweating the blood of duty. Moreover that particular kind of sweat does something else for us as well.

In the Gethsemane accounts we’re told that, right after being strengthened by an angel, Jesus gets up off the ground and walks with courage to face the ordeal that awaits him. His agony and the strengthening he receives within it, readied him for the pain that lay ahead. Indeed, at the time of Jesus, the word “agony” had a double sense: Beyond its more obvious meaning, it also referred to a particular readying that an athlete would do just before entering the arena or stadium. An athlete would ready himself (in those days the athlete normally was a he) for the contest by working up a certain sweat (agony) with the idea that this exercise and the lather it produced would concentrate and ready both his energies and muscles for the rigours that lay ahead. No athlete wants to enter the contest unprepared, not ready. The gospel writers want us to have this same image of Jesus as he leaves the Garden of Gethsemane: His agony has brought about a certain emotional, physical, and spiritual lather so that he is now readied, a focused athlete, properly prepared to enter the battle. Moreover, because of his strengthening brings a certain divine energy, he is indeed more ready than any athlete.

Christina Crawford, writing about a low time in her life, once commented: “Lost is a place too!” Indeed, biblically, it’s a very important place. It’s the place where angels can come and minister to us and it’s the place that readies us for spiritual battle. When our own strength gives out, when the pain of duty seems too much, when we lie prostrate in weakness and cringe before what truth, justice, and God seem to be asking of us, when we’ve come to the point where, like Martin Luther King, we can no longer face it alone, we’re finally at that place where angels can minister to us and we’ve finally worked up the spiritual lather that has readied our souls and bodies for the Good Fridays that await us all.

Certain things, Trevor Herriot suggests, can only happen in gardens and deserts: “How long, covered in the sackcloth of grass, thorn and sky, before our desires and illusions fall to intimations of communion; before edges dissolve and we comprehend the mystic’s dream of union beyond all boundaries and distinctions?”