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.

Interruptions: Our Real Work

December 28, 2003

Henri Nouwen once commented that he used to be resentful whenever he was interrupted in his work until he realized that, often times, interruptions were his real work.

There’s a lesson here: We’re often resentful when our plans are interrupted. Sometimes these interruptions are minor, an unexpected phone call while we’re working or watching television. Sometimes though they’re major: an unplanned pregnancy that interrupts our career, an economic hardship that derails our plan for being a writer or an artist, a family situation that prevents us from pursuing a dream, or a loss of health that puts everything on hold.

Countless things, big and small, perennially conspire against our agendas and sabotage our dreams. Often we’re resentful and think to ourselves: “If only! If only this hadn’t happened! Now I have to wait to go back to school, to resume my career. Now I’ll never have a chance to fulfill my dream.” Sometimes in middle age, or even earlier, this resentment takes a more radical form: “I’ve wasted my life, been a victim of circumstance, given in to the demands of others, and now I’ll never get the chance to do what I really wanted.”

But the opposite is also true: Sometimes instead of resentment there’s gratitude because we realize that the interruptions, so unwelcome at the time, were really salvific and, far from derailing our real agenda, were our real agenda.

A couple of examples might help explain this: I’m sure all of us have known individuals or families where an unplanned pregnancy suddenly turned all plans (economic, career, travel, new house) upside down. Initially there was resentment. Later on the unwanted interruption turned into a much wanted and loved child who helped create a happiness that dwarfed anything that might have resulted had original plans not been derailed by that interruption.

The British historian, A. N. Wilson, in a biography of C.S. Lewis, describes how Lewis’ life as a teacher and writer was, during virtually all of his productive years, interrupted by the demands of his adopted mother who made him do all the shopping and housework and demanded hours of his time daily for domestic tasks. Lewis’ own brother, Warnie, who also lived in the household (and who generally refused to let his own agenda be so interrupted) laments this fact in his diaries and suggests that Lewis could have been much more prolific had he not had to spend countless hours doing domestic chores.

Lewis himself, however, gives a different assessment. Far from being resentful about these interruptions, he’s grateful and suggests that it was precisely these domestic demands that kept him in touch with life in a way that other Oxford Dons (who never had to shop and do housework) were not. Wilson agrees and suggests that it was precisely because of these interruptions, which kept Lewis’ feet squarely on the ground, that Lewis was able to have such empathic insights into the everyday human condition.

As these examples illustrate, what initially is experienced as an unwanted interruption can, in the end, be our real agenda.

Of course, this isn’t always true. Our lives are not meant to be left entirely to circumstance. We’re meant too to make choices, hard choices at times, to actively shape our own destiny. It can be unhealthy, fatalistic even, to simply accept whatever happens. It can also lead to considerable bitterness and disappointment with our lives. We have God- given dreams and talents and must, in the name of the God who gave them to us, fight too for our agenda.

However, we must also look for the hand of that God in our interruptions. These often appear as a conspiracy of accidents through which God guides and tutors us. If we were totally in control of our own agendas, if we could simply plan and execute our lives according to our own dreams with no unwanted demands, I fear that many of us would, slowly and subtly, become selfish and would, also slowly and imperceptibly, find our lives devoid of simple joy, enthusiasm, family life, and real community.

Baptism means derailment. Christ baptizes Peter on the rock when he tells him: “Your life is now no longer your own. Before you made a profession of love, you fastened your belt and walked wherever you liked. Now, others will put a belt around you and take you where you would rather not go.” To submit to love is to be baptized, namely, to let our lives be forever interrupted. To not let our lives be interrupted is to say no to love.

C.S. Lewis once said that we’ll spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers he didn’t answer. I suspect we’ll also spend a good part of eternity thanking God for those interruptions that derailed our plans but baptized us into life and love in a way we could never have ourselves planned or accomplished. We do not live by accomplishment alone and sometimes what’s best for us can only be learned conscriptively.

On Not Letting the Sky Wilt

December 21, 2003

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.

Mary as a Model of Faith

December 7, 2003

“Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” Picture the scene: Jesus has just impressed a crowd and a woman, probably a mother, shouts out: “You must of had a wonderful mother!”

Jesus responds something to this effect: “Yes, I had a wonderful mother, though in ways you don’t imagine. She was wonderful not because she gave me biological birth, all mothers do that. What made her a great mother is that she gave me birth in the faith.”

Here, as in others places, we have to be careful to understand what Jesus is really telling us about his mother. We see places in the gospels where he seemingly does not speak highly of her when in fact the reverse is true. For example, the instance when he is approached and told: “You’re mother is here, trying to see you,” and he answers, “Who is my mother?” Then, pointing to the people sitting around him, he says, “Those who hear the word of God and keep it are mother and brother and sister to me.”

Is Jesus distancing himself from his mother here? No. He’s pointing out the real link between them, namely, among all the people in the gospels, Mary is the pre-eminent example of the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. For this reason, more than because of biological motherhood, Jesus claims her as his mother. Giving birth to Christ is something more than biological.

Moreover, it’s also something we’re asked to do. How?

Looking at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we see that it’s not something that’s done in an instant. Faith, like biology, also relies on a process that has a number of distinct, organic moments. What are these moments? What is the process by which we give birth to faith in the world?

First, like Mary, we need to get pregnant by the Holy Spirit. We need to let the word take such root in us that it begins to become part of our actual flesh.

Then, like any woman who’s pregnant, we have to lovingly gestate, nurture, and protect what is growing inside us until it’s sufficiently strong so that it can live on its own, outside us. This process, gestation, as we know, is often accompanied by nausea, morning sickness, and a stretching of the flesh that permanently scars the body.

Eventually, of course, we must give birth. What we have nurtured and grown inside of us must, when it is ready, be given birth outside. This will always be excruciatingly painful. There is no painless way to give birth.

Birth, however, is only the beginnings of motherhood. Mary gave birth to a baby, but she had to spend years nurturing, coaxing, and cajoling that infant into adulthood. The infant in the crib at Bethlehem is not yet the Christ who preaches, heals, and dies for us. Every mother needs to give birth twice, once biologically and once in faith, once to an infant and once to an adult.

Finally, motherhood has still one more phase. As her child grows, matures, and takes on a personality and destiny of its own. the mother, at a point, must ponder (as Mary did). She must let herself be painfully stretched in understanding, in not knowing, in carrying tension, in letting go. She must set free to be itself something that was once so fiercely hers. The pains of childbirth are often gentle compared to this second wrenching.

All of this is what Mary went through to give Christ to the world: Pregnancy by the Holy Spirit; gestation of that into a child inside of her; excruciating pain in birthing that to the outside; nurturing that new life into adulthood; and pondering, painfully letting go so that this new life can be its own, not hers. When the woman in the crowd told Jesus, “You must of had a wonderful mother!”, his answer had precisely this in mind. Mary was a wonderful mother, but in ways that went far beyond the simple fact of motherhood. She heard the word of God and kept it. That obedience, more than biological motherhood, gave both an infant Jesus and an adult Christ to the world.

And in this, Mary wants imitation, not admiration: Our task too is to give birth to Christ. Mary is the paradigm for doing that. From her we get the pattern: Let the word of God take root and make you pregnant; gestate that by giving it the nourishing sustenance of your own life; submit to the pain that is demanded for it to be born to the outside; then spend years coaxing it from infancy to adulthood; and finally, during and after all of this, do some pondering, accept the pain of not understanding and of letting go.

Christmas isn’t automatic, it can’t be taken for granted. It began with Mary, but each of us is asked to make our own contribution to giving flesh to faith in the world.

The Mary of Piety

November 30, 2003

Devotional prayer to Mary, the mother of Jesus, has always been the center-piece within Catholic piety. Among other things, those devotions have focused upon various Marian shrines, places where Mary allegedly appeared, Lourdes, Fatima, Guadalupe, Medjugarie, among other places.

Karl Rahner, studying the phenomenon of Marian apparitions, points out that all these apparitions have one thing in common: In every case, Mary appears to a poor person. In every alleged apparition that has become accepted in popular devotion, the person Mary appears to is someone insignificant in the world’s eyes. Mary has never, it seems, appeared to a Wall Street Banker, a major civic or church leader, nor even to a theologian in his or her study. She seems to pick her audience with a special purpose in mind. What purpose? To provide for them, the poor, something that the elite find elsewhere, namely, a romantic vision of the faith by which to sustain themselves emotionally. That shouldn’t surprise us. Mary, after all, gave us the Magnificat. She has always had a special relationship to the poor.

More recently, as we know, Marian devotion and devotional prayer in general have fallen on hard times, intellectually and theologically. More and more, Marian devotion is written off as non-essential to the faith or worse as a harmful distraction to it. Christ, the Word, and the Eucharist, it is argued, are what’s essential and the object of our intimacy is Jesus, not Mary. Moreover, what brings us together as Christians are the Word and Eucharist, not devotional prayer. Simply put, you shouldn’t be substituting devotions for scripture or the Eucharist, nor saying the rosary in their place.

In essence, this critique is correct and was a needed corrective both at the time of the reformation and again at the time of the Second Vatican Council. Devotional life, and indeed all spiritual enthusiasm, too easily lose balance and, almost without exception, tend to lose their grip on the essentials. That’s the danger inherent in all romance. It’s very power to inflame the heart makes it a powerful narcotic that easily becomes an end in itself. Romance easily becomes unbridled, unglued, disorienting. We know that. But we also know its power to transform lives. It can change everything in fifteen seconds.

Christ, the Word, and the Eucharist are the essentials within our faith, but, just as the main course in a meal doesn’t necessarily make a complete meal, so too the essentials of our faith don’t necessarily satisfy all our faith needs, particularly in terms of the heart. What the devotional life adds to the essentials is precisely the romantic, emotional fire.

And that’s more necessary than we think. Eric Mascall, a Protestant theologian, commenting on the place of the devotional within the more strictly liturgical and theological, suggests that the danger in opting for essentials alone is that “we end up on a diet of antiseptics, safe from food-poisoning, but in danger of suffering from malnutrition.” He’s right. To give an example:

Today liturgists and theologians are almost universally opposed to having eulogies at funerals. The funeral liturgy, they contend, is complete of itself and the eulogy is an unneeded, inept distraction. They’re right, in a way. The funeral liturgy is complete of itself, theologically. But that doesn’t mean it’s complete humanly. It’s not. The normal congregation at a funeral isn’t composed of people whose faith and emotional lives are so mature and integrated that the latter is fed and satisfied through the former. They want and need more than the essentials of faith and liturgy, particularly on that day. They want and need another kind of ritual, a devotional one that speaks more directly to them (however lengthy and in bad taste those eulogies sometimes are). The heart is part of the soul and too needs its due. We don’t live on essentials alone.

Classically, in terms of our prayer lives, this has been handled largely by devotions and, among devotions, the ones to Mary, the Mother of Jesus, have had the privileged place, especially among the poor. In Marian devotions, the faith takes on a special relationship to the poor. In a manner of speaking, Marian devotions are the mysticism of the poor. In relating to her, countless people, without the benefit of professional training in theology or liturgy have wonderfully appropriated to themselves deep, essential truths about God’s person, presence, compassion, and providence. They know and taste God’s love, through their relationship to Mary.

Many years ago, when I was an 18 year-old novice, a very pious old priest gave us a talk. He shared how a young man had come to him complaining that he’d lost his faith. The old priest had simply told him: “You’ve lost your faith because you’ve lost your mother, Mary.” Funny how among the hundreds of hours of talks and conferences that I heard during my novitiate year, that pious, overly-simplistic, near-saccharine, theologically-impoverished comment is about the only thing I still remember.

Faith and a Time of Agnosticism

November 23, 2003

Why does our generation struggle with faith?

Martin Heidegger once gave this answer: “We are too late for the gods and too early for Being.”

What does he mean by that? First, quite simply that less and less people today have faith in the old way. The gods are receding, as any look around the Western world will tell you. But Heidegger has something else in mind too, namely, the reason the gods are receding is that we don’t have the same fears our ancestors once had. Belief in God, he feels, is predicated on a certain fear and astonishment. Former generations, much more than we, felt their vulnerability, mortality, and helplessness in the face of energies and forces beyond them. Because of that, they looked for a power outside of themselves, God, to help them. Fear, among other things, made them believe in God.

And they, of necessity, feared many things: plagues that could come at a whim and wipe out whole populations, illnesses for which there was no cure, natural disasters against which there was no defence, hunger as an ever-present threat, and even the normal process of childbirth as potentially ending a woman’s life. There were no antibiotics or sophisticated medications or procedures to prolong life, no vaccinations, none of the things we have that make us less vulnerable to whim, nature, disease. Beyond this, they also lived with the fears that came from superstition, from lack of knowledge and of science. There were dark powers, they believed, that could curse you, bring bad luck, kill you. Many things were to be feared. This kind of vulnerability helps induce faith.

More positively, though, this vulnerability brought with it the capacity to be astonished. Before a universe that holds so many mysteries – thunder, lightning, the stars, the changing seasons, the process of conception, and the simple inexplicable fact that the sun rises and sets every day – there is cause for healthy astonishment, for holy fear, and there is the constant reminder of our littleness and the fact that life cannot be taken for granted.

Today, of course, we have few of these fears. We have faith in medicine, rationality, science, and in what we, humanity, can do for ourselves. As for astonishment before the power of nature? The weather channel has demythologized that.

Much of this, in fact, is good in terms of God and faith. Fear is not a good motive for religion, but rather the antithesis of true religion (whose task it is to cast out fear). Mature faith must take its roots in love and gratitude, not fear. Thus, freedom from false fear holds a rich potential for a maturer faith and religion.

Nonetheless, for now at least, we don’t seem to be actualizing that potential. There is less and less conscious faith. Ordinary consciousness, at least in the Western world, is agnostic and even atheistic. We don’t seem to feel a need for God and, consequently, the transcendent is slowly receding. We’re too late for the gods.

Moreover, as Heidegger adds, we’re also “too early for Being.” What does this add?

For Heidegger, we’ve lost many of our old fears and superstitions, but aren’t necessarily more mature and understanding because of it. We’ve moved beyond the old sense of helplessness, vulnerability, and mortality, without recognizing the new helplessness, vulnerability, and mortal danger within which we live. Like a child, sauntering along a dangerous ledge but blissfully unaware that he or she is one slip away from serious injury or death, so too are we in our new-found sense of confidence and fearlessness: We think ourselves invulnerable, but are only one doctor’s visit, chest pains, or a terrorist attack away from a fearful reminder of our own vulnerability. We aren’t immortal after all.

But this is not our real helplessness. Fearing for our physical health and safety is not the kind of vulnerability that today opens up a place for God in our lives. The scary ledge we walk along and are in constant danger of falling off has to do with the heart and its illnesses and deaths. More than our bodies, our souls are menaced today: We’re all one slip away from a broken heart, a broken family, a broken marriage, a broken life, the loss of a loved one, a betrayal in love, the bitterness of an old friend, the jealousy of a colleague, a coldness of heart within, an anger which won’t let go, a wound too deep for forgiveness, and a family, community, church, and world that cannot reconcile. Self-sufficiency is always an illusion, most especially today.

We need God as much as did our ancestors. We just don’t know it as clearly. Nothing has changed. We still stand in radical insecurity before energies and powers beyond us, storms of the heart, no less frightening than the storms of nature. We’re no less helpless, vulnerable, mortal, or fearful than the people of old and need God as much as they did, only for different reasons.

Jesus’ Moral Loneliness

November 16, 2003

Therese of Lisieux was much photographed. Her sister, Celine, loved using a camera and took lots of photos of Therese. Many of these survive. And there’s an interesting element in them, as Ruth Burrows once observed: In all her photographs, Therese is always alone, somehow by herself, even in a group shot. There’s a quality of loneliness about her in virtually every picture, no matter how many others are in the photo.

This is curious because Therese was a friendly person, had good social skills, was very attractive, and in many of these photos is pictured standing with family members whom she loved deeply. Yet there’s always a loneliness, an aloneness, that’s evident. But her loneliness there radiates a particular quality: It’s not the pain of someone at odds with family and community, but rather a moral loneliness. What is this?

It’s something that Jesus suffered from. How so?

Looking at the passion narratives, we see that what the evangelists emphasize in the suffering and death of Jesus are never his physical suffering. These sufferings must have been horrific, yet the gospels never dwell on them. Mark’s gospel, for example, puts all Jesus’ physical suffering into a single phrase: “And they led him away and crucified him.” What the gospels do emphasize is Jesus’ emotional suffering, particularly his aloneness. Again and again, they point out how, in his hardest hour, he was stood alone, abandoned, betrayed, against the mob, misunderstood, unable to make his truth visible, humiliated, unanimity-minus-one.

This is also a clear motif in the way his sufferings in Gethsemane are described. Luke tells us he “sweated blood” there. But key to understanding his agony in the garden is the fact itself that his suffering there took place in a garden. Archetypally, as we know, gardens are not places for growing vegetables, but places of delight, lover’s delight, Adam and Eve naked in the garden of Eden. A garden is where lovers meet. The Jesus who sweats blood in the garden of Gethsemane is not Christ the teacher, the magus, the healer, or the miracle-worker. In the garden, it’s Christ, the lover, who sweats blood – and it’s to a garden where he calls us to meet him in intimacy.

In both Gethsemane and on the road to Calvary, the gospels emphasize Jesus’ emotional suffering, not the scourging, the nails, the blood. What’s emphasized is that in his most trying time, Jesus was very much alone. In his bitterest hours, Jesus suffered from what might best be described as moral loneliness.

What’s moral loneliness?

The term, I think, should be credited to Robert Coles, who first used it to describe Simone Weil. What it suggests is that inside each of us there’s a place, a deep centre, where all that’s tender, sacred, cherished, and precious is kept and guarded. It’s here, in that deep centre, where we’re most sincere, are still innocent, and where we unconsciously remember that once, before birth, we were caressed by hands gentler than our own. Here we remember the primordial kiss of God. It’s also in this place, more than any other, that we fear lies, harshness, disrespect, being shamed, ridiculed, or violated. We’re most vulnerable there, so we’re scrupulously careful as to whom we admit into this space, our moral centre, even as our deepest longing is precisely for someone to share that place with us. More than we need someone to sleep with sexually, we need someone to sleep with morally. We need a soulmate.

But these aren’t easy to find. It’s rare to have a perfect moral partner, even inside of a good marriage or friendship. We achieve moral consummation more easily in fantasy than in real life. Because of this, especially as more of the tensions of life descend on us, we perennially face a double temptation: Resolve the tension by giving into various compensations which, while not the answer, get us through the night; or, perhaps worse still, give into bitterness, anger, and cynicism, and in this way drop our ideals because it’s too painful to live with them. Either way we sell ourselves short and settle for second-best.

What’s to be learned from Jesus’ example in his struggle with moral loneliness? The gospels emphasize that he was bitterly alone in his pain, but that he refused to use either the road of compensatory escape or of soul-hardening cynicism. He stayed and carried the tension to term. Not easy, but that’s the gospel route.

Our own moral loneliness can be tyrannical in the pressures it puts on us. But that’s not a license or invitation to begin jettisoning commitments, responsibilities, morals, and whatever else it takes, to try to find that one-in-a-million romance, that perfect soulmate, who can complete us. What Jesus (and people like Therese of Lisieux and Simone Weil) model is how to carry tension correctly, how to carry solitude at a high level, and how to resist, no matter the pain, calling second-best by any other name than second-best.

Purgatory Revisited

November 9, 2003

“A common soldier dies without fear, Christ died afraid.” Iris Murdoch wrote those words. Among other things, theyunmask the simplistic notion that if one has faith and a clean conscience he or she will face death more serenely than someone who dies in bad conscience or dies lacking faith and virtue. Sometimes faith and good conscience do ease the passage into the next life, but the reverse can be just as true, people who are sick of heart or warped in conscience can welcome death as a friend, even as people who have faith and virtue fear death because, like Jesus, everything in them cherishes living.

Murdoch’s adage reveals something else too, about the old doctrine on purgatory. Purgatory? Yes. If Jesus was afraid of death then a healthy fear of death is indicative of something. Of what? Of a certain pain that comes with death and which Roman Catholics have classically called purgatory. What’s purgatory?

Protestants have always, for good reasons, rejected this notion, at least as it has perennially been understood in the popular mind, namely, that there exists, outside of heaven and hell, a third place, purgatory, where we go after death and spend time in painful purification, readying ourselves for heaven. Biblically, of course, this doesn’t wash. Protestants are right, there’s no state after death outside of heaven or hell. We’re either at God’s right hand or at God’s left hand, sheep or goats. There’s no third option.

But Roman Catholics are right too. While there’s no place between heaven and hell, there’s a painful, transformative experience that has to be undergone between enjoying the health and bloom of our natural lives and eventually bursting into full ecstasy within the embrace of God and the communion of saints in heaven. Purgatory isn’t a place, it’s an experience, that of enduring a necessary, purifying pain that readies us for the full joy of heaven. What does this pain consist in and why is it necessary?

The pain of purgatory is two things: First, it’s the pain of being unconditionally embraced by selflessness while we are still selfish, the pain of being enfolded by goodness while we are still sinful. We already experiences this, partially, in our daily lives where, as we know, few experiences are as humbling, painful, and purifying as is the experience of being undeservedly loved and gratuitously forgiven. Love purifies, that’s why love hurts.

But there’s a second pain too that makes for purgatory. Purgatory is also the pain of letting go of the every-day securities, attachments, and pleasures of this life. Purgatory is the pain of letting go of this life in order to live in the next. That’s not an abstract concept.

We see it in those facing death. The pain in dying is more about saying good-bye to this world and our loved ones than it is about facing the unknown on the other side. It’s hard to die because it’s hard to shake a hand and say good-bye for the last time to a loved one, a loved home, a cherished routine, a healthy body. Letting go like this isn’t like purgatory, it is purgatory.

Imagine dying a sudden death, by an accident or heart attack. One minute you’re alive, tangibly connected to family, friends, a home, a routine, a healthy body, plans for a future, an anticipated dinner that evening, your favourite sports team on a wonderful playoff run. Wham! Death! The next minute you’re on the other side, in heaven yes … but, in one instant, stripped of everything you’ve drawn your life from. You’re in God’s arms, secure, loved, forgiven, but with a lot of suddenly severed attachments and unfinished business on earth. You’re living in the eternal but it’s been quite a jolt exiting the natural. Full ecstasy doesn’t come instantly, even when it’s offered unconditionally.

The pain of purgatory is the pain of the ascension, the pain of standing where Mary of Magdala stood on the morning of the resurrection and hearing: “Do not cling to what was! Eternal life is infinitely richer, but it’s not your old life!” Letting go of this world with its joys, its beauties, and its wonderfully solid flesh, is the pain of purgatory.

And our prayers for our deceased loved ones need to reflect that. More immediately after their deaths, they still want and need our former contact. Slowly though, as time passes, our prayers must more and more invite the ascension and must work at freeing both them and us from how we once had each other (“Do not cling! Let the old ascend!”). Eventually our prayers must give our loved ones permission to be free from how things used to be with us and the world, so that they can enter fully into that final ecstasy of love which, though dimly glimpsed in faith, is beyond our imaginings and which we too will one day enter, though only after having, through purgative pain, ourselves let go of the marvels of earthly, natural life, with all its wonderful tangible solidity.

A Wisdom Born of Pain

November 2, 2003

John Powell once wrote a remarkable little book entitled, Unconditional Love, the story of Tommy, a former student of his who died of cancer at age twenty-four. Shortly before he died, Tommy came to Powell and thanked him for a precious insight he had once drawn from one of his classes. Powell had told the class: There are only two potential tragedies in life and dying young isn’t one of them. It’s tragic to die and not have loved and it’s just as tragic to die and not have expressed your love to those around you.

Sometimes only death can teach us that. Sometimes, through a painful conscription, we can learn it without having to die to pay for its wisdom. Here’s an example:

For twenty years, I’ve been teaching a summer course at Seattle University. One of the rituals I’ve developed during those summers is to spend the big American holiday, July 4th, with some family friends on Bainbridge Island, a short ferry ride from Seattle. This family has its own rituals and one of these is that it watches the July-Fourth parade off the front-lawn of one of their friends’ houses.

Four years ago, sitting on that lawn, waiting for the parade, I was introduced to the youngest daughter in that family. She was a senior in high school and a member of their state-winning basketball team, but she was also suffering from cancer and the debilitating chemotherapy treatments being used to combat it. Just 18 years old, weighing less than 100 pounds because of those treatments, she sat wrapped in a blanket (on a warm summer day), quiet and melancholy, while her friends, healthy and robust, drank beer and celebrated life. Things didn’t look good that day. The long-range prognosis was iffy, at best, and her body and spirit didn’t belie that, though friends and family did. She was surrounded on every side by attention, affection, concern, the sense that everyone cared. She was very ill, but she was loved.

I got to know her a little that day and somewhat more in the months and years that followed. Her family and others prayed hard for her, storming heaven for a cure. Those prayers, along with the medical treatments, did their work. She hung on, against the odds at times, slowly improved, and after many months emerged healthy, whole again, back to normal, except once you’ve stared death in the face “normal” is never quite the same again.

When she eventually returned to school, rejoined her friends in their social activities, and picked up the pieces of her former life, she knew that, while things were the same again, they were also very, very different. In the wake of such an experience, ordinary life is no longer something you take for granted, there’s a deeper joy in all things ordinary and a new horizon, wisdom, maturity, and purpose that wasn’t there before. God writes straight with crooked lines and sometimes cancer, terrible as it is, gives more than it takes.

Her new health is more than physical. It’s too a thing of soul, a colour, a depth, a wisdom. Asked publicly by her friends if, given the choice, she would give the illness back so as to have the life she could have had without it, she replied: “No, I wouldn’t give it back. Through it I learned about love.” Like the young man in John Powell’s story, the love she experienced when she was ill taught her that there are worse tragedies in life than getting cancer.

Doctors who research on the human brain tell us that we only use about 10% of our radical brain capacity. Most of our brain cells never get activated, both because we don’t need them (they exist for wisdom rather than utility) and because we don’t know how to access them. The same doctors too tell us that, paradoxically, two things do help us access them: the experience of love and the experience of tragedy. Deep love and deep pain, together, deepen a soul in a way that nothing else can. That explains why Therese of Lisieux was a doctor of the soul at age 24. It also explains the wisdom that this young woman now lives out of, gently challenges her friends with, and radiates to the world.

Five years ago, a young girl had her youth and dreams stolen from her by a brain tumour. There was pain, disappointment, depression, some bitterness, little hope. Everyone seemed luckier than her. That was then. Today, a radiant young woman, Katie Chamberlin, strolls the campus of Gonzaga University, healthy, happy, preparing for a career as a teacher to special-needs children, and, more important, wise, beyond her years, having learned at a young age what most of us only learn when we die, namely, that ordinary life is best seen against a bigger horizon, that life is deeper and more joy filled when it isn’t taken for granted, and that love is more important even than health and life itself.

An Invitation to a Deeper Virtue

October 26, 2003

Perhaps the most misunderstood text in all of scripture is the one where Jesus says to us: “Unless your virtue goes deeper than that of the scribes and the pharisees, you will never enter into the kingdom of heaven.”

We generally misunderstand that because we wrongly think that Jesus is referring to the vices of the scribes and pharisees, not their virtue. We look at the hypocrisy, jealousy, double-standard, and rigid legalism of the scribes and pharisees and easily distance ourselves from that. But it wasn’t their vices that Jesus was referring to, but their virtues.

What was the virtue of the scribes and pharisees? In fact, they had a pretty high standard. The ten commandments, strict justice in all things, compassion for the poor, and the practice of hospitality, constituted their ideal for virtuous living. What’s wrong with that? What’s required beyond these?

In Jesus’s view, what’s wrong is that, in the end, it’s still too easy. Any good person does these things, simply on the basis of decency. What’s wrong is that ultimately we still give back in kind, an eye for an eye – dollar for dollar, goodness for goodness, kindness for kindness, slight for slight, hatred for hatred, murder for murder. Nothing is ever really transformed, moved beyond, redeemed, transcended, forgiven.

Simply put, if I’m living the virtue of the scribes and pharisees, I react this way: If you come to me and say, “I like you! You’re a wonderful person,” my response naturally will be in kind: “I like you too! Obviously you’re a wonderful person!” What I’m doing is simply feeding your own good energy back to you. But that has a nasty underside: If you come to me and say, “I hate you! You’re a charlatan and a hypocrite,” my response will also be in kind: “I hate you too! Clearly you’re a very petty person!” This is ultimately what “an eye for an eye” morality, strict justice, comes down to. We end up feeding back the other’s energy, good or bad, and replicating the other’s virtue, good or bad. That’s the natural way, but it’s not the Christian way.

It’s precisely here where Jesus’ invites us “beyond”, beyond natural reaction, beyond instinct, beyond giving back in kind, beyond legal rights, beyond strict justice, beyond the need to be right, beyond even the ten commandments, beyond the virtue of the scribes and pharisees.

Indeed the litmus-test for Christian orthodoxy is not the creed (Can you believe this set of truths?) but this particular challenge from Jesus: Can you love an enemy? Can you not give back in kind? Can you move beyond your natural reactions and transform the energy that enters you from others, so as to not give back bitterness for bitterness, harsh words for harsh words, curse for curse, hatred for hatred, murder for murder? Can you rise above your sense of being wronged? Can you renounce your need to be right? Can you move beyond the itch to always have what’s due you? Can you forgive, even when every feeling inside of you rebels at its unfairness? Can you take in bitterness, curses, hatred, and murder itself, and give back graciousness, blessing, love, understanding, and forgiveness? That’s the root invitation inside of Christianity and it’s only when we do this that we move beyond “an eye for an eye”.

Admittedly, this isn’t easy, either in theory or in practice. Much inside of conventional wisdom, pop psychology, and contemporary spirituality, will object to the very theory of it, pointing out that carrying tension isn’t healthy for us, telling us that we have a duty not to enable abusive behaviour, and challenging us not to be doormats and victims, but mature persons who claim the legitimate space that’s needed in order to be free, giving persons, responsible to God, others, and self apposite to developing our innate potentials and bringing our gifts to the world. All of these objections are right, of course, though none of them negate Jesus’ challenge. His invitation, cleansed from overly-simplistic interpretation, remains: Don’t be a victim or a doormat or an enabler of abusive behaviour, but do consider, willingly and without resentment, laying down your life for others by living this more sublime challenge.

And it’s exactly on this point, to do this willingly and without resentment, that its practice grows difficult. It’s not easy to do this and not grow resentful and manipulative. More commonly, we carry others’ crosses – but end up being bitter about it and sending them the bill. The scribes and pharisees had this down to an fine art. That too was part of their virtue. Growing resentful or manipulative while serving others is a perennial danger, though, as Goethe says: “The dangers of life are many and safety is one of them.”

And so the invitation of Jesus to what’s higher, more sublime, more noble, remains; as does the gentle, understanding, faithful, non- threatening, non-coercive, non guilt-inducing, but persistent and uncompromising, presence of God.