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.

The Value of Praying a Doxology

October 19, 2003

A friend of mine likes to tease the Jesuits about their motto: “For the greater glory of God.” “God doesn’t need you to enhance his glory,” he likes to kid them. Partly he’s right, but the Jesuits are right too: God doesn’t need our praises, but we need to give praise, otherwise our lives degenerate into bitterness and violence. Why?

Spiritual writers have always told us that we are either growing or regressing, never neutral. This means that we are either praising someone or demanding we be praised, offering gratitude or muttering in bitterness, blessing or cursing, turning attention away from ourselves or demanding it be focused on us, expressing admiration or demanding it, praying a doxology or doing violence. We are always doing one or the other and it’s only by deflecting attention away from ourselves, which is what we do in essence when we give glory to God, that we save ourselves from egoism, jealousy, bitterness, greed, and violence.

It’s no accident that when good art depicts someone as being martyred, it always depicts the victim’s eyes as turned upwards, towards heaven, while the eyes of those who are doing the killing or watching it are turned in other directions, never upward. A good artist knows that if we don’t have our eyes turned heavenward we are involved somehow in violence.

Michael Ondaatje points this out in Anil’s Ghost. He submits that unless we celebrate a faith or create something in art, we will do violence to somebody: Be an artificer or a demon. Praise or create something beyond yourself or fall into the trap of believing that it’s your own person that makes the world go round.

Ondaatje’s right. Moreover this isn’t an abstract thing. The lesson’s simple, unless we’re consistently praising somebody or something beyond ourselves we will be consistently speaking words of jealousy, bitterness, and anger. That’s in fact our daily experience: We sit around talking with each other and, invariably, unless we’re praising someone we’re “killing” someone. Gossip, slander, harsh judgement, vicious comment, are often both the tone and substance of our conversations and they’re the very antithesis of a doxology, of offering praise to God. Nothing sounds less like a doxology (“Glory be to the Father and to the Son and to the Holy Spirit”) than many of our everyday conversations.

The main reason our faith asks us to constantly render glory to God is that the more we praise the less we slander, gossip, or pass judgement. Offering praise to God, and others, is what saves us from bitterness and violence.

And, in the end, overcoming bitterness and violence, is the greatest spiritual hurdle of all. Much tougher than the Sixth commandment is the fifth (“Thou Shalt Not Kill!”). As Henri Nouwen used to say, we’re killing each other all the time. Nobody is shot by a gun who isn’t first shot by a word, and nobody is shot by a word who isn’t first shot by a thought. Our thoughts are too frequently murderous and soon enough get expressed in our words: “Who does he think he is!” “She thinks she’s so special!” “What a hypocrite!” “She hasn’t had an original thought in years!” “It’s all about him, isn’t it!”

Underneath those comments, driving that bitterness, is a not-so- subtle anxiety and hurt: “What about me? Who’s noticing me? Who’s giving anything to me?” I say this sympathetically because it’s not easy to not be anxious in this way, especially for the young, and it’s not easy, after the neuroses of mid-life and beyond, to not be bitter or not feel cheated. For both the young and the old, it’s hard to simply say to someone else, God included, “glory be to you” and really mean it.

We’re made in God’s image, have a divine fire in us that over-charges us for this world, and live lives of quiet desperation. That desperation, all too often, expresses itself in negative, bitter, and even murderous judgements because the divine is us has been ignored and we feel rage about this slight. But that’s precisely why daily, hourly, we need to give glory to God, to pray a doxology. Only by focusing ourselves on the real centre of the universe can we displace ourselves from that centre.

When St. Paul begins his Epistles, he usually does so in a rapture of praise: “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ from whose great mercy we all drink!” That isn’t a throwaway opening, it’s a key part of the main lesson: Only by praising something beyond ourselves do we save ourselves from bitterness. All the great spiritual writers do the same: They won’t write for long, no matter how bitter or difficult the topic, before they insert some kind of doxology: “Glory be to the Father, the Son, and Holy Spirit”. They know a deep secret: Only praise saves us from bitterness and only by blessing others do we save ourselves from cursing them.

Conservatism is a Good Place to Start From

October 12, 2003

Sometimes it’s helpful to imagine you’re a strip of litmus paper and then analyze the colours you turn as you fall into the various acids of life and religion.

I grew up in the 1950s and 1960s, a time both of great stability and mind-boggling change. I had some things that helped keep me steady, wonderful parents and a strong faith community. My parents were immigrants, honest, hard-working, Roman Catholics, with a deep faith. More than that, my dad was one of the most moral men I’ve ever met and my mother was generous and soft-hearted to a fault. Not bad for luck.

By temperament they were both conservative, with an immigrants’ fear of change, the world, the dangers out there. They liked things safe, solid, to be known in their consequences before they were tried. And they wanted us, their kids, to play it safe too, to venture away from home only when we knew we could find our way back again. They had faith in the old taboos: Always be careful about your friends, your morals, your religion, your soul. Be careful too about sex. Partly this was fear; partly it was wisdom, deep wisdom that more parents ought to impart to their children.

The old taboos contain not just the fears of past generations, but the wisdom and experience of those generations as well. In essence, what they say is that naive freedom can be dangerous, there are lots of places you can get lost, where your mind can snap, your heart can break, you can lose yourself, and, as Iris Murdoch says, get into a muddle and never get out. There’s wisdom in that old advice: Only venture as far from home as your soul can safely handle.

I’m grateful that my parents started me out on such conservative footing. It gave me the foundation I needed from which to build. When I began to study literature, philosophy, and theology, I found myself in ever-more liberal classrooms. I’m grateful for that. My parents gave me both wisdom and fear, and those classrooms helped free me from some of the fear.

But it wasn’t without struggle: I remained my parents’ son and didn’t take to new ideas easily, but great teachers, caring colleagues, wonderful friends, and the experience of ministry stretched my horizons against my early training, taking me, sometimes, a long ways from the religious home of my parents: immigrant Catholicism, the Baltimore Catechism, Catholic devotions, distrust of other faiths, uncritical obedience to the letter of the law, fear of what’s outside my circle.

Today I’m pretty comfortable in many circles. I move with ease among Protestants and Evangelicals. I’m comfortable there, in their churches, with their prayer, their faith, their friendship. I’m growing more comfortable too with Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, Taoism, Native religions, even secular religion. I’m not always fully at home here, but there are aspects in all of these faiths and cultures where I’m at home and from where I can travel easily back and forth to my own religious home.

I’m not sure any more whether I’m liberal or conservative. A younger ecclesial set sometimes sees me as a (burned-out) liberal. They may be right on the “burned-out” part, but my liberal friends distrust me almost as much, they know me too well, and are even more suspicious now because I spend time in Rome. Liberal or conservative, it doesn’t matter, I’ve a decent comfort zone on both sides of that ideological fault-line.

Much of that is because of my conservative roots. Because of them I can be more free. Like everyone else, of course, I’m still struggling to be free and creative. We never quite get there. Many of the old taboos, still have their hold on me. And I’m grateful for that too. I may be more uptight than I should be, but, on the positive side, I can still find my way home from most any place and I can find a home most any place in the world and inside most any church, faith, or culture.

Sometimes when I’m in Rome, I pack a lunch, walk down to St. Peter’s Square, sit in the shade of one of its pillars, and watch people from all over the world snap photos and eat Italian ice-cream. I look across the square and see lights on inside the papal apartment and suspect that an aging pope is sitting at his desk right now with his sleeves rolled up, over strong peasant arms, and is penning some encyclical or church ordinance, parts of which will no doubt irritate me. No matter. I’m home. It could be my dad writing that piece. Like my dad, the pope knows the value of the old taboos, even if sometimes they express fear along with wisdom. I’m at home in Rome, just as I am with my Protestant friends. I thank my parents for that.

Conservatism is a good place to start from.

Dark Nights of the Soul

October 5, 2003

When Therese of Lisieux entered the Carmelites at age fifteen, she tried to anticipate the difficulties she would face there. She knew that many would see this as the misguided notion of an immature child, entering a convent to be with her older sisters who were already there. She knew too that because of her age she would draw unhealthy reactions from every side and would either be doted-on as the darling little child or scorned as the spoiled brat. She knew too that the monastic routine would be hard, spartan living conditions, early rising for prayer, poor food, inadequate heat. Nor was she naive about the petty human tensions she would find there. She had prepared herself for all of this and felt she was ready for whatever awaited her.

But dark nights of the soul strike where you least expect, where you’re vulnerable and don’t know it. She had anticipated all the things that might shake her foundations, except the one that actually did. Not long after she entered Carmel, her father became mentally ill and his personality changed completely. This was particularly devastating for Therese since, not only was there no understanding of his condition as a disease then, but her father had been, to that moment, such an exceptional, faith-filled, gentle, kind-hearted man, who had doted on her, his youngest daughter, that he had been, for her, the incarnation of God’s gentle, steady love.

Therese knew the truth of God’s love because she knew the truth of her father’s love. God could be trusted because her father could be trusted. Her father’s illness turned that upside down. Not only did she lose her father, but she was left with questions that rocked the foundations of her beliefs: If a love that is so beautiful and trustworthy can become something so totally other, what can be trusted? If she had been so wrong about her father, might she be just as wrong about God, about faith, about things in general?

It took Therese a long time to come to peace with this, but eventually she did and, afterwards, her faith was more mature. Undergoing this crisis freed her from much false romanticism and illusion.

What she underwent in this crisis is what, classically, Christian mysticism calls a “dark night of the soul”. A dark night of the soul is a crisis that shakes our deepest conviction about how God, faith, the world, and our own personalities work. But, by doing this, these dark nights also shake us in our complacency, expose our illusions and false romanticism, show us where we most need God, and invite us to a deeper level of maturity.

Scripture has it own language for “dark nights of the soul”. In the Hebrew scriptures we see that virtually every defeat, every drought, every humiliation, and every disappointment that Israel experiences is interpreted as somehow coming from God’s hand and coming to her as an invitation to repentance, to a deeper relationship with God, to more mature faith. The Gospels speak of Jesus having a crisis of soul in Gethsemane (“he sweated blood”) and then again on the cross when he felt as if God had abandoned him. In some wonderful imagery in his Second letter to the Corinthians, Paul speaks of his outer nature as crumpling away, even as his inner nature is becoming more firm. That aptly captures what a dark night of the soul does, both in terms of pain and effect, it cracks our outer shell, even as it firms up what’s deepest inside us.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in a letter to his provincial at a particularly painful time in his life when he was being silenced by the church and shunned by some of his former colleagues, wrote that, because of this, some of his old certitudes were crumpling, but, also because of this, at a deeper level, he was becoming more “riveted” to Christ and to his commitment to community and service. That’s a pretty apt description of what was happening to Jesus on the cross.

The mystics speak of these “dark nights” as “coming from God”, though they don’t mean that God actively causes the set of circumstances that trigger them. God doesn’t cause illness, rejection, failure, or any of the other things that can rip our lives apart. But God speaks through these events, just as God spoke to Therese through her Father’s illness, and just as Jesus saw his Father as sending him “the cup” that he had to drink on Good Friday.

Every one of us we will undergo “dark nights of the soul”. It’s important to understand this because our natural tendency in any crises (illness, rejection, failure, disappointment, exclusion, broken relationships) is to see only the negative and not see that, in this crumpling, there is a needed purification and there is an invitation from God to a new maturity.

It’s bad when the storm shows up in our lives, but, it’s worse if the storm never shows.

The Kenosis of God

September 28, 2003

Last year, in a presentation at a symposium on “Being Missionaries to our own Children”, Michael Downey posed this question: How do we speak of God inside a culture that’s pathologically distracted, distrusts religious language and church institutions, and yet carries its own moral energy and virtue?

That’s a key question today, when so many of our own children, siblings, and friends no longer go to church and are challenging our religious beliefs. They certainly fit Downey’s description: Distracted, distrustful of religious language and church institutions, yet carrying a lot of moral energy in their own way. Where do we go with that?

Downey’s answer? Among other things, he suggests that we need an image of God and of Jesus that can show what God does in these situations. What image of Jesus might be helpful here?

There are, as we know, many images of Christ, both in scripture and in our church traditions. Christ is presented variously as “shepherd”, “king”, “teacher”, “miracle-worker”, “healer”, “bread of life”, “sacrificial lamb”, “lover”, among other things. Different ages have tended, for their own reasons, to pick up more on one of these than the others. What might be a fruitful image of Christ for our culture, one within which so many of our own children no longer walk the path of explicit faith with us?

Downey’s suggestion: The image of Christ as the kenosis of God; Jesus as divine self-abandonment; God as emptying himself in the incarnation. What does this mean?

Scripture tells us that, in Christ, God offers a love so pure, so self- effacing, so understanding of our weaknesses, so self-sacrificing, so “self-emptying”, that it’s offered without any demand, however veiled, that it be recognized, met, and reciprocated in kind. In the incarnation, God, like a good mother or father, is more concerned that his children are steered in the right direction than that he, himself, be explicitly recognized and acknowledged for who he is and thanked for it. God, like any parent, takes a huge risk in having children. To have children is to leave yourself painfully vulnerable. It’s also to be called upon for an understanding, a patience, and a self-dethroning that, literally, can empty you of self. That’s as true of God as of any mother or father.

What are the qualities of this “self-emptying”?

To “self-empty” in the way Jesus is described as doing means being present without demanding that your presence be recognized and its importance acknowledged; it means giving without demanding that your generosity be reciprocated; it means being invitational rather than threatening, healthily solicitous rather than nagging or coercive; it means being vulnerable and helpless, unable to protect yourself against the pain of being taken for granted or rejected; it means living in a great patience that doesn’t demand intervention, divine or human, when things don’t unfold according to your will; it means letting God be God and others be themselves without either having to submit to your wishes or your timetable. Not an easy thing at all, that’s why we’ve sung Jesus’ praises for two thousand years for doing it, but that’s the invitation.

We need a theology of God and an image of Christ that can give us an horizon and some hope as we struggle to be missionaries in the toughest mission field of all today, our own culture with its own innate virtue and its own innate inattentiveness to God and church. Downey’s suggestion that we take as our horizon God’s “self-emptying” in Jesus is, I believe, a very good one. Properly understood, that image can show us where and how to stand in faith inside a culture that likes to think it’s outgrown faith.

At that same symposium, a social-worker from Quebec, Vivian Labrie, in her keynote address, made this statement: “I believe that God is mature enough that he doesn’t demand to be always the centre of our conscious attention.” While that statement needs some nuance, it is, in its own way, a commentary on the famous Christological hymn in Philippians (2,6-11) which describes Jesus’ “self-emptying” in the incarnation.

When a mother or father sits down at table with the family, she or he doesn’t need, want, nor expect, to be the centre of attention, a prerogative a healthy adult generally cedes to the kids. What he or she does need and want is that the family be happy, respect each other, respect the ethos and aesthetics that the family values, and that everyone is essentially on the right track in his or her life so that each family member knows what’s ultimately sacred, moral, and important, even if a given member doesn’t, at this particular moment, recognize or credit the family for what he or she has been given to prepare him or her for life and happiness.

This is even more true of God, whose love, understanding, patience are beyond our own and who, like any good parent, doesn’t demand to be always the centre of our conscious attention.

Living with Criticism

September 21, 2003

Nobody goes through life without facing criticism, opposition, misunderstanding, suspicion, and, at some point, having to experience hatred.

This is one of the great pains, perhaps the greatest, inside family, church, and community. Eventually we are subject to criticism, our motives and integrity are questioned, and we have to live with the bitterness of those judgements, a bitterness that can rob our lives of joy and us of any self-confidence. The real pain though is not when these negative judgements come from outside, when the big world out there questions our integrity, but precisely when it comes from inside, from persons with whom we are meant to share family and faith.

Experiencing hated, bitterness, and being accused of hypocrisy are not an easy thing to cope with. How do we not question our own essential goodness in the face of criticism and judgement? How do we not put our own truth up for grabs when it’s bitterly questioned? And how do we sustain ourselves in community and resist the urge to walk away in the face of criticism?

I’ve often wondered how Jesus coped with this because certainly he had to face it. He moved around Palestine preaching love, joy, community, and vulnerability, even as people called him a blasphemer (the ultimate accusation of egoism) and hated him enough to kill him. How did he stay joyful in the face of this anger? How did he let himself be vulnerable when others were attacking him? How did he continue to be self-confident in his mission when he was accused of being hypocritical and self-deluded? How did he handle this?

By always taking his real identity from God and not from himself or from the opinions others had of him.

As Jesus moved about doing his mission, he met every kind of reaction: Sometimes the crowds loved him and tried to make him king, other times the same people hollered for his head, “Crucify him!”. He was both loved and hated and always there were some who stood, sincerely no doubt, in bitter opposition and accused him of being the ultimate egoist and blasphemer.

What’s important to notice is that Jesus never took his identity from these reactions, good or bad, feeling confident when the crowds supported him and feeling insecure when he faced opposition. He took his truth and identity from elsewhere. Where?

“I do the will of my father.” His identity, his truth, his courage to act, and his joy were all rooted in something beyond the affirmations or criticisms of the moment, beyond public opinion, beyond the judgement of those who hated him.

Looking at Jesus, we see that, in the face of criticism and hatred, his key questions weren’t: “Can I live with this criticism? Do I let another’s negative judgement intimidate me from the truth and mission I feel called to? Do I let someone’s hatred of me destroy my energy and joy?”

Looking at Jesus, we see that the key questions are: “Can I live with myself? Can I be centred and patient enough to let God, history, and truth be my judge? Can I be sensitive to how I’m seen and judged by others, even as I take my identity from a reality deeper than public opinion and the view of those who dislike me? Can I, by casting my eyes more towards heaven, continue to sustain myself in energy and joy, even in the face of bitterness and hatred?”

Jesus shows us the way here, albeit it’s far, far from an easy one. This gate too is narrow. It’s not easy to not be intimidated from doing what we are called to do because we experience opposition. There will always be opposition. Not just because darkness perennially resists light, but because it’s impossible to live for any length of time inside of any kind of closeness, family or community, without irritating and hurting each other. We have different personalities, different histories, different perspectives, and we all arrive on the scene carrying wounds from elsewhere. Community isn’t automatic and it isn’t easy, but we must not let our truth and our joy die in the face of opposition.

Though a caution needs to be added: There is always a danger of self-delusion when we discern our truth. In the face of criticism, opposition, and hatred, we should always seek spiritual direction, from the wise and from the good. Wisdom and goodness are the great principles of discernment. Hence, go to those within the community who are wise and go to those within the community who are good. Ask them how they see you and how they see those particular actions of yours that are so upsetting to your critics.

And know and accept that always there will be criticism, anger, and sometimes even hatred. Jesus experienced this and, in the end, it killed him. He warned that, for us, it will be no different. Hell will always try to blackmail heaven, but that’s to be resisted.

Coping with Complexity

September 14, 2003

Holiness and wholeness are, ultimately, the same thing. To be holy is to be whole. That shouldn’t surprise us, grace builds on nature. What’s problematic is achieving wholeness. Why?

Because we’re all so pathologically complex that we spend most our lives trying to figure out who we really are and trying on various personalities the way we try on different clothes. Allow me an example:

I once saw a wonderful interview with Catherine de Hueck Doherty, a Russian Baroness and the founder of the Madonna House Apostolate. She was already more than 80 years old and, reflecting on the struggles of her spiritual journey, said something to this effect:

“It’s like there are three persons inside me. There’s someone I call the Baroness. The Baroness is spiritual and given over to asceticism and prayer. This is the religious person. She’s the one who founded the religious community, wrote the spiritual books, and who tries to give her life to the poor. It’s the Baroness who’s impatient with the things of this world and who tries to keep her eyes focused on things beyond this life.

But inside of me too there’s another person whom I call Catherine. Catherine is, first of all and always, a woman who enjoys fine things, luxuries, sensual delight. She likes idleness, long baths, fine clothes, putting on make-up, good meals, good wine, and used to, as a married woman, enjoy a healthy sex life. Catherine enjoys this life and doesn’t want renunciation or poverty. She’s not religious like the Baroness. Indeed, she hates the Baroness and has a strained relationship with her.

And, finally, inside of me too there’s someone else, a little girl, a child lying on a hill-side in Finland, watching the clouds and daydreaming. The little girl is different still from both the Baroness or Catherine.

… And, as I get older, I feel more like the Baroness, long more for Catherine, but think that maybe the little girl daydreaming on a hill-side in Finland might be who I really am.”

These words come from a spiritual giant, someone who attained both wholeness and sanctity after a long search and difficult struggle, not someone who’s still grappling with initial conversion. What her words highlight are two things, how complex we are and how difficult is it to find wholeness.

Like Catherine Doherty, all of us too have a number of different persons inside us. Inside each of us there’s someone who knows the truth of the gospel call, is drawn to the religious, strives towards self- renunciation, and that knows that there are more important things than worldly achievement, comfort, and sex. But, inside each of us too, there’s also a hedonist, a sensualist, a person who wants to drink in fully the wine and the pleasures of this life. Moveover, inside each of us there’s also a little girl or little boy, daydreaming still on a hill-side somewhere.

Soren Kierkegaard defined a saint as someone who “wills the one thing.” But, with all these different persons inside us, what do we really will? What’s really our deepest desire?

Importantly too, given that grace is meant to build upon nature and not annihilate it, it’s too simple to think that sanctity is merely a question of the “spiritual person” inside us triumphing over the person inside of us who loves this world or over the child in us who is still given over to daydreaming. Wholeness means somehow making a whole, a harmony, out of all these different persons. To ignore, deny, annihilate, invalidate, or bypass one part for another is precisely never to attain wholeness.

Sanctity consists in wholeness and a whole person, like Christ, is someone who is both a drinker of wine and an ascetic, a lover of this life and of the next, a dreamer and a realist, among many other things, all at the same time. What must be rejected in the spiritual quest is not our nature, with its endless paradoxes and seeming contradictory attractions, but any recipe for holiness that would have us believe that sanctity can be obtained easily, without tension, confusion, and great patience.

Sanctity too consists in coming to peace. Peace is not just the absence of war or conflict, but is harmony and wholeness. We come to peace when we make harmony out of discord – with all the pieces accounted for and each given its proper place. To cut off parts of ourselves in the quest for wholeness is tantamount to a pianist sawing- off part of his or her keyboard. It makes things a lot simpler, but it also makes it impossible to play most pieces of music.

To be human is to be pathologically complex. But that points to our richness, not poverty, and suggests that all our different parts are important in the spiritual journey. Nikos Kazantzakis once put it this way, “the spirit wants to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance … because … the deeper the struggle, the richer the final harmony.”

From Self-Protection to Being Food for the Life of the World

September 7, 2003

Recently I heard an interview on the radio with a bishop from a large American diocese. At one point he was asked: “As the leader of a large diocese today, what do you consider as your single most important task?” The bishop, a sincere and prayerful man, answered: “To protect the faith.”

For effect, I would like to contrast his answer to one that I once heard from Cardinal Hume when he was faced with essentially the same question. Asked by a journalist in Belgium in 1985 what he considered to be the most important task facing the church, he replied: “To try to help save the planet.”

These are different answers. Which runs closer to Jesus?

Jesus, in defining his meaning and ministry, said: “My flesh is food for the life of the world.” We can easily miss what’s really contained in that. Notice what he’s not saying: Jesus isn’t saying that his flesh is food for the life of the church or for the life of Christians; albeit we, believers, get fed too and, indeed, generally get fed first, but the ultimate reason why Jesus came was not simply to feed us.

His body is food for the life of the world and the world is larger than the church. Jesus came into the world to be eaten up by the world. For this reason, he was born in a manger, a feeding-trough, a place where animals come to eat, and it’s for this reason that he eventually ends up on a table, an altar, to be eaten by human beings (even when done without due reverence or attention). Jesus came not to defend himself, the church, or the faith, but as nourishment for the planet.

We need, I believe, to keep that horizon always in front of us as we journey through a time of anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical sentiment. Today the church, its teachings, and its clergy are often under siege, sometimes for good reasons but many times simply because of ideology and bias. In the Western world today, the only intellectually-sanctioned bias is that against Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. To be bigoted gere is not interpreted as intolerance or as being narrow-minded. Rather it’s seen as the opposite, a sign that one is enlightened and liberal.

The danger in that is not that the church will somehow collapse, but that the church, us, will become too-defensive, too-self-protective, lose the vulnerability that Jesus demonstrated and asks for, and instead see the world as an enemy to be fought rather than as a precious body to which we are asked to give our lives (akin to a parent who has a child whose hostility makes an easy loving relationship difficult, but who must then resist the temptation to write off his or her responsibility for that child). The first task of the church, no matter the difficulty, is not to circle the wagons and defend itself. Even when the world doesn’t welcome what we have to offer, we’re still asked to give ourselves over to it as food.

It’s easy to lose that perspective, especially in a time of disprivilege, and so it’s important that we recall the reason why the church exists. Why does it exist?

The church exists not as an end in itself (though, admittedly, partially, the church, as indeed all community, is an end in itself and needs no justification beyond itself since community in general and ecclesial community in particular are already the new life that Jesus promised). But we exist as a church too to be food for the life of the world, to be eaten up as nourishment by everyone, including those outside our own circles. As Cardinal Hume put it, our real reason to be is beyond our own lives. Ultimately the church is not about the church, it’s food for the world.

That, of course, doesn’t mean the church shouldn’t have an internal agenda. It’s valid too to sometimes turn inward. In order to be a body that can be nourishment for the world, the church needs to generate, foster, and protect its own life. We can’t give life if we haven’t got any. Thus, we need catechises and formation, church programs of every kind, sound preaching, solid doctrinal and moral teachings, and even the painful internal debates we have about denominations, authority, and who gets to do ministry. But these are not an end, but only a means to an end. It’s important to keep that in mind.

Church life exists to build up a body, but that body exists not for itself, but for the world. Our task as church, especially today, is not to defend ourselves or even to carve out some peace for ourselves against a world which sometimes prefers not to have us around. No. Like Jesus, our real reason for being here is to try to help nourish and protect that very world that’s often hostile to us.