“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?”

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.

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, 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.

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.

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.

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.

Words are really all we have to fend off the chaos. They can’t make or remake reality, but they can give us a vision with which to lift ourselves out of the ordinary.

But today so many of the words we need to fend off the chaos no longer have much power to do that. We’re like D. H. Lawrence’s, Lady Chatterley. Of her world, Lawrence writes: “All the great words were cancelled for her generation. Love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half dead now.” That’s true too for us. More and more, the words we need to give us meaning have less and less power to do that. The deep things aren’t deep any more. What’s meant by that?

The meaning we give things depends upon the words, the symbols, with which we surround them. For example, suppose you suffer from chronic backache. Your doctor can tell you that you have arthritis, a biological way of explaining your pain. You feel better for that. A symptom is less painful when it’s named. But there are various levels of naming. You can go to see a psychologist and she can tell you that your pain is more than a medical condition: “You’re in mid-life crisis,” she says. Those words speak of more than simple arthritis. Your symptom now has a meaning beyond the simple creaking of age. But it can go deeper still. Talking to a spiritual director, you are told that this pain is your cross, your Gethsemane, your dark night of the soul, your river of Babylon, your desert-experience for transformation. Ordinary pain now becomes something with a religious meaning and significance. Meaning depends upon the words we use to describe our pain.

The same holds true for love. What does it mean to “fall in love”? That you have “great chemistry” with someone? That you have found a “soulmate”? Or that you have found the person whom God, from all eternity, has destined you to meet? That last interpretation doesn’t exclude “great chemistry” or finding a “soulmate”, but it adds a wonderful extra dimension, God’s providence in our lives. A deeper set of words sets your finite experience against an infinite horizon and that, precisely, is the secret to faith and meaning.

When we surround our everyday experiences with the proper words then our experiences are longer half-dead, as D.H. Lawrence says. Ordinary experiences – love, joy, pain, happiness, marriage, being a father, being a mother, being a husband, being a wife, making coffee, drinking it, doing our ordinary chores – will contain something of the timeless, the eternal. Meaning and happiness are less about where we are living and what we are doing than about how we view and name where we are living and what we are doing. A symptom suffers less when it is correctly named and an experience is only sublime when it’s given its proper name.

There’s a famous story of a journalist interviewing two workers at a construction-site where a new church was being built. She asked the first: “What do you do for a living?” His reply: “I’m a brick-layer” She asked the man standing beside him: “What do you do for a living?” He replied: “I’m building a cathedral!” Perspective changes everything and it comes from how we understand and name what we’re experiencing.

Canadian poet, J.S. Porter, once said: “When you take away the sky, the earth wilts!” He’s right. When we don’t surround our ordinary activities with the proper words and symbols we soon lose all enchantment and our experiences become precisely half-dead. We need wide vision, high symbols, and the right words to turn the seeming poverty of our ordinary lives into the stuff of faith and poetry.

Rainer Marie Rilke once received a letter from a young man who complained that it was difficult for him to become a poet because he lived in a small town where life was too domestic, too parochial, and too small- time to provide the stuff of poetry. Rilke wrote back something to this effect: If your daily life seems poor to you, then tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches because there are no places or lives on earth that are not rich. Every life is potentially the stuff of poetry, of romance, of the sublime.

What’s the secret to calling forth those riches?

G. K. Chesterton, I think, had it right when he said that we need to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. We’ve an unhealthy itch for what’s new – salvation through novelty alone – but the words we need to lift us to the heights of poetry and the sublime are more often found in the ancient wells of faith, on old parchments of scripture, and in over-familiar hymns and confessions that we call the creeds.

When our own words are half-dead we need to relearn some older secrets.