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.

Waiting for the Resurrection

April 11, 2004

“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.

The Agony in the Garden – The Place of Transformation

April 4, 2004

“There is only one way to put an end to evil, and that is to do good for evil.” That cryptic phrase from Leo Tolstoy can serve as a key to help understand the real drama that Jesus underwent in Gethsemane.

The blood he sweated there, as lover, was not just the blood of the romantic lover, the obsessive pain of elusive love, the bitter pain of love gone sour, or the crushing pain of having to give up romance for fidelity. Jesus suffered these in Gethsemane, but there was something more. He also had to sweat the blood of the lover who is willing to absorb the tension inside a community so as to transform it and take it away. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus sweats the blood of the lamb who takes away the sins of the world.

Jesus is the lamb who takes away the sins of the world. That’s the central piece in the Christian notion of salvation and it’s also the ultimate icon inside of our faith. It has a variety of expressions, but always the same meaning: “Jesus’ suffering takes away our sins.” “We are washed in the blood of the lamb.” “By his stripes we are healed.” “Jesus’ sufferings reconcile us to God.” But how are we washed-clean and reconciled through the blood of Jesus?

Scripture expresses this in metaphors and we must be careful, precisely, to not turn metaphor into literal understanding here. Jesus did not die to appease a God whose anger at humanity could not be placated by anything humans could do. God didn’t need to see Jesus suffer horrific pain and humiliation in order to forgive us for sin. God doesn’t have to be appeased; though, granted, that’s what the metaphors and icons of the “lamb of God” can suggest.

Jesus took away sin, not by placating some anger in God, but by absorbing and transforming sin. How?

In ancient times, there were “scapegoat” rituals, liturgies intended to take tension out of a community. When tensions within ran high, communities would gather and symbolically invest those tensions onto a goat or a sheep which they would then drive out into the wilderness to die. The idea was that this animal, the “scapegoat”, took the tension and sin out of the community by leaving the community and dying.

Jesus does this, but in a radically different way. He takes the sin and tension out of the community, not by dying and going away, but by absorbing and transforming it into something else. How does he do this?

Perhaps an image (sadly, more mechanical than organic) might be helpful: Jesus took away our sins in the same way as a filter purifies water. A filter takes in impure water, holds the impurities inside of itself, and gives back only the pure water. It transforms rather than transmits.

We see this in Jesus: Like the ultimate cleansing-filter he purifies life itself: He takes in hatred, holds it, transforms it, and gives back love; he takes in bitterness, holds it, transforms it, and gives back graciousness; he takes in curses, holds them, transforms them, and gives back blessing; he takes in chaos, holds it, transforms it, and gives back order; he takes in fear, holds it, transforms it, and gives back freedom; he takes in jealousy, holds it, transforms it, and gives back affirmation; and he takes in satan and murder, holds them, transforms them, and gives back only God and forgiveness. Jesus takes away the sins of the world in the same way a water-filter takes impurities out of water, by absorbing and holding all that isn’t clean and giving back only what is.

This isn’t easy. To do this, without resentment, means sweating blood, a lover’s blood. Jesus walked into the Garden of Gethsemane as the archetypal lover, but also as one tempted, just as we are, towards bitterness, fear, resentment, and self-protection. He was haunted by all the same proclivities that beset us. But, and this is the point, in Gethsemane, he transformed rather than transmitted those temptations. He didn’t simply give back in kind, letting the energy simply flow through him. He purified the energy and took the tension and sin out of it by absorbing them. It cost him his blood, his life, and his reputation. He had to sweat blood, but he emerged from the Garden the truly generative lover who, at the price of giving away everything, gives back peace for tension and forgiveness for sin, absorbing in his own person the tension and sin so as to take them out of the community. The giving over of that kind of blood really does wash away sin.

And, in doing this, Jesus doesn’t want admirers, but followers. The Garden of Gethsemane invites us, everyone of us, to step in, and to step up. It invites us to sweat a lover’s blood so as to help absorb, purify, and transform tension and sin rather than simply transmit them.

The Agony in the Garden – The Place to Ready Ourselves for Ordeals

March 28, 2004

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.

The Agony in the Garden – A Place of Prayer

March 21, 2004

Poet Theodore Roetke once wrote: “In a dark time, the edge is what we have.” In a dark time we also have prayer.

In the Garden of Gethsemane, as he sweated the blood of loneliness and misunderstanding, Jesus dropped to his knees in prayer: “ ‘ Abba, Father, all things are possible for you. Let this cup pass; yet not my will, but yours be done,’ And coming back and finding his disciples asleep, he returned and prayed even more earnestly.” From Jesus’ prayer in the garden, we can learn how we too should pray in a dark time.

What are the key ingredients in Jesus’ prayer in Gethsemane? Among other things, five elements might be highlighted:

Childlike intimacy with, and reliance upon, God as a great, all-loving, all-powerful parent who can make everything okay:

Jesus begins his prayer with the words: “Abba, Father.” Abba is a word which, at the time, a child would use affectionately for his or her father, roughly equivalent to our words “Daddy” or “Papa.” Obviously it connotes a deep connection, an intimacy beyond even friendship, a certain daily familiarity. But it also implies more, namely, the simple, childlike hope one’s father (or mother) can fix what’s wrong.

Some years ago, a mother described to me the horror of watching her teenage son die of a gunshot wound. They were in their house when someone shot her son through a window. The boy, stunned, muted and dying from the gunshot, stumbled into the room in which she was sitting. He was unable to speak in words, but his eyes spoke the clear, simple plea of a child: “Mum, make this okay!” Of course she couldn’t and he died in her arms.

Jesus’ opening words in his prayer in Gethsemane say roughly the same thing – and prayer in a dark time invites us to make this kind of plea.

Trust in God, despite overpowering darkness and chaos:

“All things are possible for you.” Despite his aloneness, his betrayal, the hatred and madness around him, and the fact that darkness, not light, appears to be triumphing, Jesus prays in trust, trusting that the centre still holds, trusting that, despite every indication to the contrary, God is still solidly Lord of this universe.

In essence, his prayer is saying: “Father, I believe you are still master of this world, still more powerful than all of these forces, and your truth and light are still worth giving everything for, despite the fact that right now everything seems to belie that.”

Jesus trusts God not just when truth seems to be prevailing, but also, and especially, when falsehood seems to be triumphing.

Radical honesty and boldness in expressing fear:

“Let this cup pass.” In Gethsemane, Jesus lifts mind and heart to God. He doesn’t tell God what he thinks God wants to hear; nor does he tell God where he, Jesus, would like to be in terms of maturity. No, he tells God where in fact he really is at, cringing, frightened and reluctant before bitter duty.

There’s no denial or pretence in his prayer. His humility expresses itself with childlike clarity.

Iris Murdoch once wrote: “A common soldier dies without fear, Jesus died afraid.” His Gethsemane prayer reflects that.

The willingness to give God the space within which to be God:

“Yet not my will, but yours be done.” Despite everything in him that cringes before the implications of saying yes, Jesus still consents to give God the space within which to be God. His prayer gives God a blank cheque to fulfill his purposes, even if, for a time, that purpose is grossly misunderstood.

Repetition, repeated prayer:

“He returned and prayed even more earnestly.” Scripture promises that faith and prayer will move mountains, but it doesn’t promise that they will move them immediately.

Sometimes for prayer to be effective, it has to be prayed many times ─ over and over. Jesus does this in Gethsemane. Only after repeated efforts does an angel finally come and strengthen him.

St. Monica prayed for her wayward son, Augustine, for many years. Eventually he converted and became one of the great saints in history. Gethsemane teaches us this lesson – prayer needs to be repeated.

C.S. Lewis once said, “The harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man, and God’s compulsion is our liberation.” The prayer of Jesus in Gethsemane, the model for all prayer in a dark time, illustrates that great truth.

The Agony in the Garden – The Place Where Angels Strengthen Us

March 14, 2004

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?”

The Agony in the Garden – The Place to Stay Awake

March 7, 2004

As Jesus and his disciples enter the Garden of Gethsemane, he tells them: “Stay awake, watch!” The implication is that they’re about to learn something, a lesson is to be taught.

But, as we know, they didn’t stay awake, they fell asleep, not because the hour was late and they were tired after a long day, nor even because of the wine they’d drunk at the supper. They fell asleep, Luke says, “out of sheer sorrow”. They fell asleep because they were disconsolate, disappointed, confused, depressed. And, because of that sleep, they missed the lesson they were supposed to learn from watching Jesus in his prayer. What was that lesson?

Jesus, himself, explains it three days later on the road to Emmaus when, in speaking of his suffering and death, he asks: “Wasn’t it necessary?” What the disciples were supposed to see and grasp in the Garden of Gethsemane was the intrinsic connection between suffering and transformation and the necessity, in that process, of being willing to carry tension, disappointment, and unfairness without giving into despair, bitterness, recrimination, and the urge to give back in kind.

We fall asleep out of sorrow whenever we become so confused and overwhelmed by some kind of disappointment that we begin to act out of hostility rather than love, paranoia rather than trust, despair rather than hope. We fall asleep out of sorrow whenever we sell short what’s highest in us because of the bitterness of the moment.

And this is one of perennial temptations we have in life, to fall asleep out of sorrow. Most times when we give in to weakness or commit sin we do so not out of malice or bad intent, but out of despair. For example: A number of times, I have had friends who gave themselves over to periods of sexual promiscuity even though they knew better. They weren’t so naive nor rationalizing to believe for a minute that what they were doing was either life-giving or morally right. So why did they do it? Flat-out loneliness, inchoate depression, practical despair. They were asleep out of sheer sorrow. Unspoken in their actions were these words: “Given my life, my practical situation, that’s the best I can hope for. I’ll take second- best, even fifth-best, because for me there can be no first-best.” Their action was simply compensatory.

The same often holds true too when we give into bitterness, anger, jealousy, hostility, and the urge to give back in kind. Why are we sometimes so petty? Why are we sometimes less than the gracious, understanding, and forgiving persons we would like to be? Simply put, we’re biting in order not to be bitten. Some deep disappointment has rendered us asleep to what’s highest inside of our own selves and some depression has rendered us powerless to our own goodness.

It’s not easy to stay awake to the lesson Jesus was trying to teach in the Garden of Gethsemane.

*Whenever we feel so weak and overcome by disappointment that we give into actions that we know are not good for us, but seem to be the best we can do given our practical situation, we have fallen asleep out of sorrow, just as the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

*Whenever the unfairness of life so embitters us that we cannot resist the urge to give back in kind, anger for anger, recrimination for recrimination, pettiness for pettiness, we have fallen asleep out of sorrow, just as the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

*Whenever the complexity of life so confuses us so that we no longer feel any obligation to take care of anyone beyond ourselves, but only want to protect ourselves, to hide, and to find a secure place of shelter, we have fallen asleep out of sorrow, just as the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

*Whenever we feel so overwhelmed by the fact that God seems silent, withdrawn, and unwilling to intervene and clean up the world that we can no longer imagine the existence of God, we have fallen asleep out of sorrow, just as the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

*Whenever we feel like a minority of one, so alone, little, and despairing before the powers of chaos and darkness that we believe that Christ is no longer Lord of this world, we have fallen asleep out of sorrow, just as the disciples did in the Garden of Gethsemane.

We’re all familiar with the popular song: Help me make it through the Night. Its chorus gives us, in effect, a dictionary-description of practical despair: “I don’t care what’s right or wrong; I don’t try to understand, let the devil take tomorrow, because tonight I need a friend.” That’s exactly the kind of sorrow that overwhelmed the disciples in Gethsemane and drugged them into sleep, numbing them both to what Jesus wanted them to see there and to what was highest inside of their own ideals.

The Agony in the Garden – The Place Where You Suffer as a Lover

March 1, 2004

We tend to misunderstand “the passion of Jesus.” Spontaneously we think of it as the pain of the physical sufferings he endured on the road to his death. Partly that misses the point. Jesus’ passion should be understood as passio, passivity, a certain submissive helplessness he had to undergo in counter-distinction to his power and activity. The passion of Jesus refers to the helplessness he had to endure during the last hours of his life, a helplessness extremely fruitful for him and for us.

And the first component in the helplessness begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately after he has celebrated the Last Supper. The Scriptures tell us that he went out into the garden with his disciples to pray for the strength he needed to face the ordeal that was now imminent.

It’s significant that this agony take place in a garden. In archetypal literature (and Scripture, among other things, is this kind of literature), a garden is not a place to pick cucumbers and onions. Archetypally, a garden is the place of delight, the place of love, the place to drink wine, the place of intimacy. The garden is paradise. That’s why Adam and Eve in their paradisiacal state are described as being in a garden.

So it’s no accident that Jesus ends up having to sweat blood in a garden. And it’s precisely as a lover that he’s in agony there. The Jesus who sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane is not the great king, full of pain because the sheep will not heed the shepherd; nor is it the great Magus, full of sorrow because nobody wants to pick up on the truth he’s revealed; nor is it the great warrior, frustrated in his efforts to defeat the powers of sin, death and darkness.

These pains and frustrations mostly take place elsewhere, among the crowds in the Temple, in the desert. The garden is for lovers, not for kings, magi and warriors.

What the Gospel writers focus on is not the scourging, the whips, the ropes, the nails, the physical pain ─ none of that. They emphasize rather that, in all of this, Jesus is alone, misunderstood, isolated, without support. What’s emphasized is his suffering as a lover; the agony of a heart that’s ultra-sensitive, loving, understanding, warm, hungry to embrace everyone but which instead finds itself misunderstood, alone, isolated, hated, brutalized, facing murder.

That’s the point that has been too often missed in both spirituality and popular devotion. I remember as a young boy, being instructed by a wonderful nun who told us that Jesus sweated blood in the garden of Gethsemane because, in his divine nature, he was saddened because he already foresaw that many people would not accept the sacrifice of his death. That’s a wonderfully pious thought, but it misses the point of what happened in Gethsemane.

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus suffering as lover. His agony is not that of the Son of God, frustrated because many people will not accept his sacrifice, nor even is his agony the all-too-understandable fear of the physical pain that awaits him. No, his real pain is that of the lover who’s been misunderstood and rejected in a way that is mortal and humiliating.

What Jesus is undergoing in Gethsemane might aptly be paralleled to what a good, faithful, loving, very sensitive, and deeply respectful man or woman would feel if he or she were falsely accused of pedophilia, publicly judged as guilty, and now made to stand powerless, isolated, and misunderstood, and falsely judged before the world, family, friends, and loved ones. Such a person too would surely pray: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!”

The agony in the Garden is many things, but, first of all, it’s Jesus’ entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter rejection, aloneness, humiliation and the helplessness to do anything about it. This is deepest black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony begging for release.

Whenever our mouths are pushed into the dust of misunderstanding and loneliness inside that black hole, it’s helpful to know Jesus was there before us, tasting our kind of loneliness.

The Agony in the Garden – The Special Place of Loneliness

February 22, 2004

We tend to misunderstand “the passion of Jesus”. Spontaneously we think of it as the pain of the physical sufferings he endured on the road to his death. Partly that misses the point. Jesus’ passion should be understood precisely as “passio”, passivity, a certain submissive helplessness he had to undergo in counter-distinction to his power and activity. The passion of Jesus refers to the helplessness he had to endure during the last hours of his life, a helplessness extremely fruitful for him and for us.

And the first component in that helplessness begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately after he has celebrated the last supper. The scriptures tell us that he went out into the Garden with his disciples to pray for the strength he needed to face the ordeal that was now imminent.

It’s significant that this agony should take place in a Garden. In archetypal literature (and scripture, among other things, is this kind of literature), a garden is not a place to pick cucumbers and onions. Archetypally, a garden is the place of delight, the place of love, the place to drink wine, the place where lovers meet in the moonlight, the place of intimacy. The garden is paradise. That’s why Adam and Eve in their paradisiacal state are described as being in a garden.

So it’s no accident that Jesus ends up having to sweat blood in a garden. And it’s precisely as a lover that he’s in agony there. The Jesus who sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane is not the great King, full of pain because the sheep will not heed the shepherd; nor is it the great Magus, full of sorrow because nobody wants to pick up on the truth he’s revealed; nor is it the great warrior, frustrated in his efforts to defeat the powers of sin, death, and darkness. These pains and frustrations mostly take place elsewhere, among the crowds, in the temple, in the desert. The garden is for lovers, not for kings, magi, and warriors.

It’s Jesus, the lover, the one who calls us to intimacy and delight with him, who sweats blood in the garden. That’s why, in describing his suffering during his passion, the evangelists focus little on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). Indeed, Mark puts it all in a single line: “They led him away and crucified him.” What the gospel writers focus on is not the scourging, the whips, the ropes, the nails, the physical pain, none of that. They emphasize rather that, in all of this, Jesus is alone, misunderstood, lonely, isolated, without support, unanimity-minus-one. What’s emphasized is his suffering as a lover; the agony of a heart that’s ultra-sensitive, gentle, loving, understanding, warm, inviting, hungry to embrace everyone but which instead finds itself misunderstood, alone, isolated, hated, brutalized, facing murder.

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus suffering as a lover. His agony is not that of the son of God, frustrated because many people will not accept his sacrifice, nor even is his agony the all-too-understandable fear of the physical pain that awaits him. No, his real pain is that of the lover who’s been misunderstood and rejected in a way that is mortal and humiliating. What Jesus is undergoing in Gethsemane might aptly be paralleled to what a good, faithful, loving, very sensitive, and deeply respectful man or woman would feel if he or she were falsely accused of paedophilia, publicly judged as guilty, and now made to stand powerless, isolated, misunderstood, and falsely judged before the world, family, friends, and loved ones. Such a person too would surely pray: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!”

The agony in the Garden is many things, but, first of all, it’s Jesus’ entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter misunderstanding, rejection, aloneness, loneliness, humiliation, and the helplessness to do anything about it. The agony in the Garden is the black hole of sensitivity brutalized by callousness, love brutalized by hatred, goodness brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by wrong judgement, forgiveness brutalized by murder, and heaven brutalized by hell. This is deepest, black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony begging for release.

But, whenever our mouths pushed into the dust of misunderstanding and loneliness inside that black hole, it’s helpful to know that Jesus was there before us, tasting just our kind of loneliness.

Romantic Imagination with Religion

February 15, 2004

There are many reasons why our churches are greying and emptying. Conservatives attribute it to the intoxicating power of secularity, to a pampered culture that has lost its sense of self-sacrifice, to rampant individualism, to the sexual revolution, and to an adolescent grandiosity in the adult children of the Enlightenment. Liberals suggest other reasons: People are treating their churches the way they treat their families and, today, family life has broken down in Western culture, little wonder the church is struggling. They point too to what they see as a church out-of-step with the culture, a church too rigid, too patriarchal, too much perceived as anti-life, anti-erotic, too much consumed with its own agenda.

There’s some truth in all these assertions, but I’d like to suggest another reason: We’ve lost a romantic ideal for our faith and church lives. We’ve no idealistic fire left. We’ve subjected faith, religion, and church to a scorching exorcism and have not yet moved on, to restore to them again their angels, their proper light, their beauty. We need to re- romanticize faith, religion, and church and give people something beautiful with which to fall in love.

And to do this, we need more than good theology and good pastoral programs. Good theology stimulates and inflames the intellect. Thomas Aquinas and Bernard Lonergan would add that it also helps move the will. Love needs vision.

Thus, the Christian community is always in need of good academic theology. As history shows, every time the church has compromised on its intellectual tradition, seeing it as unimportant, it has paid a heavy price. Good, solid, academic theology is perennially the great corrective within church life and spirituality. Without it we lose balance.

Recently we’ve been blessed with an abundance of good theology. It’s hardly the academy of theology that is weak at the present time. The last thirty to forty years have produced (literally) libraries of wonderful books on scripture, church history, liturgy, dogmatics, moral theology, spirituality, and pastoral practice. We’re not lacking for solid ideas.

What we’re lacking is fire, romance, aesthetics, as these pertain to our faith and ecclesial lives. What needs to be inflamed today inside religion is its romantic imagination and this is not so much the job of the theologian as it is the job of the saint and the artist. We need great saints and great artists, ideally inside the same person.

We see this, for instance, in Francis of Assisi. Francis was not a great theologian by the standards of the academy of theology and it was not his insights as a theologian that so moved history and transformed Christianity. He does not have major cities named after him and more than 300 congregations of men and women trying to live out his charism because of the books he wrote. His greatness lay in his sanctity and in his art and in the particular way he brought those together. It was as a saint and artist that he was able to inflame the romantic imagination of the church and the world. When he took off his clothes and walked naked out of Assisi, he wasn’t preaching from a pulpit, lecturing from a university podium, or writing a book. He was making an aesthetic, saintly gesture, and that gesture, complete with the commitment he made afterwards to back it up, helped restructure the romantic imagination of Christianity and the world in general. Seven hundred years later, his gesture and his life still speak. Such is the power of great saints and great artists.

We see this too, though to a lesser extent, in the effect of great works of religious art. Take, for example, the painting of the last supper by Leonardo di Vinci: Nobody today cannot not picture the last supper as he painted it, even though scholars agree that Jesus and his disciples at table would not have looked anything like his imaginative depiction of it. But one great artist and one great painting can permanently brand itself into the imagination.

It is this, saints and gospel-art, that we most need to revitalize our faith and our churches today. Generally speaking, the theologians are doing their part and so too are diocesan and parish programs. But solid ideas and solid programs alone are not enough. They need to be backed by saints and artists in way that can re-inflame the romantic imagination. We need a new Francis, a new Clare, a new Augustine, a new John of the Cross, a new Therese of Lisieux.

Intellectuals and artists come at conversion from different sides: Bernard Lonergan, a great intellectual, used to say: “Conversion begins in the intellect”; Morris West, a great novelist, used to say: “All miracles begin with falling in love!” I doubt they ever met, but I’ve no doubt they would have respected each other because both are right. Without vision the heart doesn’t know where to go; but, without romantic fire it doesn’t want to go anywhere, least of all to church.

The Law of Karma

February 4, 2004

Faith and instinct both give us a sense of what Hindus and Buddhists call the law of karma. Simply put, we have a gut-feeling that our actions, good and bad, have consequences that come back to either bless or haunt us. But is this true? Do we really have to way pay for everything we do?

Mary Jo Leddy, in her wonderful book on gratitude, claims that one of the great principles innate within reality itself is this: “The air you breathe into the universe is the air that it will breathe back and if your energy is right it will renew itself even as you give it away.”

In essence, that’s the law of karma, a mystery expressed in different ways in all the great religions of the world.

Jesus, for instance, puts it this way: “The measure you measure out is the measure you will be given.” The air you breathe out is the air you will re-inhale.

If that’s true, and it is, it explains a lot of things (though not necessarily to our liking). Why, perennially, are we caught up in situations of pettiness, jealousy, and non-forgiveness? Why are we inhaling so much bitter air? Perhaps it has to do with the air we’re breathing out. What are we breathing out?

We’d like, of course, to think that we’re breathing out the air of gratitude, generosity, forgiveness, honesty, blessing, self-effacement, joy, delight. We’d also like to believe that we are breathing out the air of concern for the poor, the suffering, the unattractive, the bothersome. And, we’d like to believe too that we’re big-hearted people, breathing out understanding and reconciliation.

Would it were so. Too often we’re blind to what’s really going on inside us and are unconsciously breathing out the air of arrogance, self- interest, pettiness, jealousy, competition, fear, paranoia, dishonesty, interest in others only when it’s convenient, and are emitting signals that others are a threat to us as we seek attention and popularity, and jostle with them for sexual, financial, and professional position.

We can learn something from watching toddlers play. There’s a disarming, brutal honesty in them. They simply rip what they want from each others’ hands and try to shout louder than the rest to gain attention. We do the same thing, except in more subtle and less honest ways. Beneath the surface of our everyday politeness and decorum, in ways we don’t often have the courage to look at or acknowledge, we’re still toddlers trying to snatch the toys from each other and trying to shout louder than others to get attention. The real air we’re breathing out is fraught with self-interest, jealousy, competitiveness, pettiness, fear, and less than full honesty. In subtle, and not-so-subtle, ways we’re saying to each other:

“You’re a rival – sexually, professionally, and in terms of popularity and attention.” “Who do you think you are!” “I’m more important than you.” “I’m brighter and more successful than you.” “I’m better looking than you.” “I’ve had more life-experience than you.” “I’m sophisticated beyond your naivete.” “I’m the person here who’s the most knowledgeable, everyone should be listening to me.” “My sufferings are deeper and more important than yours.” “I’m more interesting than others and my story is more important.” “I hate you for your good looks and good luck, none of which you deserve.” “I really don’t like you, but I’ll be nice to you until I find a way to free myself of this relationship that circumstance has dictated.” We would never admit that we feel these things, but, too often, that’s the air we’re breathing out.

Is it any mystery then that our lives are full of competition, jealousy, bitterness, anger, accusation, and false judgement? Is it a mystery why so often, beneath a polite surface, there is so much thinly disguised competition, jealousy, and non-forgiveness around? We’re breathing these things into the world, should we be surprised that we’re re-inhaling them? The measure we’re measuring out is the measure that we’re receiving.

And Jesus takes this even further. He adds: “To those who have much, even more will be given; and from those who have little, even what they have will be taken away.” That sounds so unfair, the innate cruelty of nature, the survival of the fittest applied to the gospels, Jesus as Darwin. Isn’t Jesus’ message supposed to be about the survival of the weakest? It is, but a certain law of karma still applies:

To the big of heart, who breathe out what’s large and honest and full of blessing, the world will return a hundredfold in kind, honesty and blessing that swells the heart even more. Conversely to the miserly of heart and dishonest of spirit, the world will give back too in kind, pettiness and lies that shrink the heart still further.

That’s the deep mystery at the centre of the universe: The air we breathe out into the world is the air we will re-inhale.

Compassion and Truth

February 1, 2004

Back when I was still teaching full-time, I was, for a period of time, the Acting Dean at a Theological College. In that role, I received one day a phone call from one of the local parish priests. The conversation went something like this:

“Are you the Dean of theology at the College?”

“Well, I’m filling in for the dean who’s on sabbatical.”

“Your students are a pain in ass! They take a couple of courses, come back, and terrorize the parish! Nothing’s ever right for them. They roll their eyes at everything: how we do liturgy, my preaching, the parish’s priorities, at our ecclesiology in general. I don’t doubt they’re right most of the time, but that’s not the point. It’s their arrogance that’s destructive. Don’t you teach them any compassion?”

There’s a challenge: Don’t you teach them any compassion?

Truth must always be yoked to compassion. Growth in our lives (be it intellectual, spiritual, psychological, professional, or moral) should not lead to arrogance, elitism, or the false judgement that we, now so free and enlightened, are stuck among the ignorant and unwashed. Rather any genuine growth should lead to a concomitant growth in compassion, respect, gentleness, and the capacity to be more understanding of what’s in opposition to us.

Jesus said as much when he instructed us to speak our truth in parables, lest our speaking it causes more harm than good. In essence, what Jesus tells us is that truth is not a sledge-hammer, and simply having the truth is not enough. Our truth must be right, but so too must be our energy. For the truth to set us free it must come with an equal dose of compassion, otherwise our being right will only lead to more divisiveness inside the community and lots of personal bitterness.

An example might be helpful: Imagine a marriage within which, at a point, one partner begins to grow in ways that the other partner cannot share. Often this leads to divorce or, more commonly, to a lot of resentment and bitterness in the partner who is trying to grow in a new way and now is left with the feeling: “I’m stuck with someone who doesn’t understand or support what I’m doing and is an obstacle to my growth and happiness.”

What’s true inside a marriage is true inside all families, religious communities, parishes, and circles of friendship. At a certain point, one member or the other, begins to grow in a way that becomes a threat to the others.

What’s to be done? Stop going down that path for the sake of peace in the family? Plough on ahead, regardless of consequences?

There is no fully happy solution here, but some of the tension can be undercut if there is an equal effort to grow in compassion. A little learning can be a dangerous thing. That’s true for all of us and sometimes (perhaps most times) our personal quest for achievement, enlightenment, holiness, justice, or straightening-out the church, is fraught with more than a little illusion and grandiosity and we need precisely the type of grounding that a partner, a family, a parish, or a circle of friendship is so willing to provide. And, while that’s true, it’s not the whole story.

Each of us too hear deep personal calls which, if not responded to, will lead leave both ourselves and our Creator frustrated. We are being called always by God, personal charism, circumstance, injustice around us, and the daemons inside us to grow in ways that will not always please our partners, our families, our parishes, our communities, and our friends. To not respond is to incur the biblical wrath reserved for those who hide their talents; but, conversely, to respond badly, with less than proper compassion, is to make our truth a sledge-hammer which drives the community apart. It’s a tough choice and we risk a certain bitterness either way.

A marriage partner, a family, a parish, a community, or a circle of friends functions in a double way: On the one hand, it’s a floor, a certain safety net that keeps us from ever falling too low. It protects us so we can’t free-fall into any kind of major degeneracy. In every family and community there’s a certain unconscious support that won’t let you fall too low. But, there’s also a certain ceiling, a roof, that defines how high you can grow. In all but the very best marriages, families, parishes, communities, and friendships, there’s an unwritten, unspoken, unalterable law: “You may grow this far, but no further!” And that’s not always bad. While it threatens us with being levelled to a common denominator, it also, as we saw, challenges us not to grow in ways that are one-sided, half-baked, and self-delusionary.

It’s not easy to grow and not cause tension. And so it’s important that any new growth in truth radiates an equally new growth in compassion. We must, as Jesus says, speak our truth in parables.

Beyond Labels

January 25, 2004

Several years ago, while giving a workshop in England, I was approached during a health-break by a couple of participants who asked me: “What are you? We’ve been trying to figure out whether you’re liberal or conservative.” My response: “What difference should that make. Why don’t we just weigh the value of what’s said as to truth or falsity, depth or faddishness, without having to consider whether it’s being driven by a liberal or a conservative agenda? Labels aren’t important. What’s important is truth, depth, God’s consolation and challenge, things helpful to build up the community. No ideology has a monopoly on these.”

That needs to be said out loud more often. It’s generally unhelpful to label others. As soon as we define others in terms of their ideology, ecclesiology, politics, or agenda we insert an extra, unneeded, hermeneutical-filter between them and us and become more selective in our acceptance of truth. Granted, we are always somewhat selective in any case. Everyone operates out of a certain software (philosophically termed a “pre-ontology” and more commonly called a “bias”). The discipline of Epistemology (more recently renamed, Hermeneutics) has forever put an end to any naivete about this. Nobody is completely objective and the route towards objectivity is best pursued when everyone precisely tries to name his or her biases rather than assuming that he or she hasn’t got any and are in a position to point them out in others. Whenever we label, we further distort our perception of reality.

That’s also true when we label ourselves. As soon as we self-define and label ourselves as liberal, conservative, or even as someone trying for middle ground, we become unhealthily selective in our listening.

Sadly, both in society in general and inside of theological and ecclesial circles, we are obsessed with labelling. And we do it equally on both sides of the ideological spectrum: “She’s a liberal! He’s a conservative! She’s a feminist! He’s one of those young neo- conservatives! He’s Opus Dei! She’s from Call to Action!”

The most helpful response might be: So what! None of these labels determines the truth and none of them, in se, distorts it. God’s house has many rooms, just as truth lies in many places, and God’s consolation and challenge is always somewhat coloured by the biases of those who bring the good news: liberals, conservatives, feminists, Protestants, Roman Catholics, Hindus, Buddhists, Muslims, Taoists, New Age people, Social Justice advocates, Opus Dei members, Charismatics.

The challenge is precisely to be open to the truth beyond labels, beyond our own temperament, beyond our circle of ideological intimates, and beyond what’s prescribed for us as politically correct by either the left or the right. Part of this openness too is having the courage to ask ourselves: In what am I ultimately interested? The truth or what fits my ecclesiology? The truth or what’s politically correct? The truth or my being right, even if being right means being bitter and at odds with many sincere people? It’s not easy to ask these questions because, once we ask them, we have to admit that a lot of truth lies outside our own circles.

Recently there was a survey done on the reading habits of both Roman Catholic and Protestant clergy. Each was asked: “Other than the bible, what authors do you read most often to help you in your ministry?” Here are the top five picks in each tradition. Roman Catholics: 1) Henri Nouwen, 2) John Paul II, 3) Raymond Brown, 4) William J. Bausch, 5) Walter Burghardt. Mainline Protestants: 1) Henri Nouwen, 2) William Willimon, 3) Frederick Buechner, 4) Max Lucado, 5) Eugene Peterson.

What’s interesting is that everyone on both lists defies simple classification in terms of liberal or a conservative. Some will probably object and immediately label John Paul II as a conservative. But that can only be done if we haven’t read his social encyclicals or his apologies for the historical sins of institutional Christendom or witnessed his prayer and gestures as he walked in the old city of Jerusalem. The same is true of those who would simplistically label Raymond Brown a liberal. That’s more easily done if you’ve never met or read Raymond Brown.

Recently I was at a dinner party and the conversation turned to psychological and ecclesial labels: “What’s your Myers-Briggs personality chart?” “What’s your Enneogram number?” “Where do you place yourself on the ecclesial, ideological scale?” There was an eager and animated sharing in this. One person, however, a young mother and nurse, remained silent throughout. Finally someone prevailed upon her: “Where do you land in all of this?” Her answer: “I have an unlisted number!”

There’s wisdom in her answer. We need to let go of labels and try to let the truth speak independently of them. We need too to have the courage to face up to where our own ideologies are blinding us to truth, keeping us in unnecessary anger, and dividing us from others of sincere will. The truth can set us free, no matter which pulpit it comes from.

Facing Otherness and Differences

January 4, 2004

David Tracy, the eminent intellectual, submits that perhaps the biggest challenge confronting us today is that of facing our differences, of accepting, truly accepting, otherness. This challenge confronts us at every level: social, political, cultural, moral, religious.

Here are his own words: “For anyone in this troubled, quarrelling center of privilege and power (and as a white, male, middle-class, American, Catholic, professor and priest I cannot pretend to be elsewhere) our deepest need, as philosophy and theology in our period show, is the drive to face otherness and difference. Those others must include all the subjugated others within Western European and North American culture, the others outside that culture, especially the poor and the oppressed now speaking clearly and forcefully, the terrifying otherness lurking in our own psyches and cultures, the other great religions and civilizations, the differences disseminating in all the words and structures of our own Indo-European languages.” (On Naming the Present, Maryknoll, 1994, p.4)

But that’s not easy, despite a lot of glib rhetoric to the contrary. Most of us claim to accept otherness and difference, but, as Thomas Aquinas might say, we’re there in desire more than in actuality.

We burn lots of politically-correct incense in front of the shrines of multi-culturalism, ethnic diversity, global community, gender equality, wide religious tolerance, alternative lifestyles, and befriending our shadow; but, as we’ll all admit when we’re honest, the reality isn’t as easy as the rhetoric. The simple fact is that otherness frightens us and often brings out the worst in us. It’s not easy to be comfortable, at home, welcoming, to what’s other, different, seemingly deviant. More often than not we try to put up walls against it.

We see that today in the rise of fundamentalism and paranoia of every kind. Everywhere, and not just on the right of the ideological and political spectrum, there seems to be an excessive itch to circumscribe, to reign-in, to exclude, to punish anyone or anything that doesn’t fit our mold (all of which are simply other phrases for “circling the wagons”). For all our talk of global community, wide tolerance, and acceptance of differences, there is, almost everywhere, a growing obsession with boundaries and with protecting one’s own kind in terms of ethnicity, culture, language, religion, gender, idealogy, lifestyle.

Not that all of this is bad. True community can only be predicated on the strong self-identity of those who enter it and true ecumenism can never be rooted in people abandoning their own cherished values and beliefs. True acceptance of otherness and difference only means something if someone first has a strong identity, complete with real boundaries and cherished borders to protect. Fundamentalism, which is not going to go away any time soon, arises precisely when human beings feel adrift, cut off from their own roots, without clear boundaries. We need to protect what we cherish.

But protecting cherished values and defending necessary boundaries are a good place to start from. Ultimately we must move on to face and accept otherness, strangeness, difference, the foreign. Our survival depends upon it. We can no longer live just among our own. Sooner or later, given that the planet is both limited and round, we’ll find it impossible to avoid what’s foreign to us. What’s strange to us will soon enough be part of our neighbourhood, our home, our church, and our perspective on things.

Moreover, welcoming what’s other and different is, in fact, a key biblical challenge. In the scriptures of all the great religions, Christianity no exception, we see that God is defined precisely as “Other”, as what’s beyond imagination, as outside the realm of the familiar. This is what scripture means when it calls God “Holy”; “Holy”, first of all, not because of some moral quality but because of some ontological quality, namely, otherness and difference from us.

Thus, biblically, we have the great tradition within which revelation from God is understood to come mostly through the stranger, the foreigner, the unexpected, the unfamiliar, in what’s different, in the surprise. For this reason the scriptures insist on the importance of welcoming strangers. Since God is Other, strangers, among all others, are the most likely to be carrying God’s revelation.

There’s a Chinese greeting that works as both a blessing and a curse. You say to someone: May you live in interesting times!” We live in such times and, indeed, it’s both a blessing and a curse. We’re being overwhelmed by otherness. Nothing’s safe for long. More than any previous generation, we’re being stretched beyond what’s familiar. Sometimes that’s both painful and disorienting. It’s not easy to have our boundaries, values, and ideas under constant redefinition, especially when we believe in eternal truths.

But we’ve never grasped those truths deeply enough. We have them in part, in small pieces. That’s why we call them mysteries. Moreover, and this is the point, a lot of the pieces we still need to fill out those mysteries lie precisely in what’s foreign to us, in what’s other, strange, different.