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.

The Width of Our Ecclesial Embrace

September 1, 2003

Nikos Kazantsakis once said “the bosom of God is not a ghetto, but our hearts often are.” So too, sadly, are our ecclesiologies.

In church circles today, both liberal and conservative, our ecclesiologies are often anything but inclusive and Catholic (“Catholic” meaning wide and universal). We are pretty selective as to whom we consent to worship with and to whom we will accord the grace and wisdom of God. We tend to pick our fellow-worshippers along ideological lines rather than along the lines that Jesus suggests and we are getting ever more fastidious. More and more within our churches the sincere are divided from the sincere and the old tensions that used to exist between denominations now also exist within each denomination.

Given all of this, it can be helpful to reground ourselves in a critical truth that Jesus revealed.

One of his most stunning revelations is that God does not discriminate: “God lets his sun shine on the good as well as the bad.” God, like the sun, shines on every kind of soil equally, fertile and barren alike. And if God showers love equally on the good and bad, then surely God showers love equally on liberals and conservatives, on the rigid and the fanciful, on those who are joyous and those who are bitter, on the politically-correct and on those less inclined to that kind of sensitivity, and on those who belong to our ecclesial set and on those who would prefer us dead. That’s a disconcerting thought, but such, it would seem, is the scope of God’s embrace.

Jesus says as much: “In my father’s house there are many rooms,” This is a statement about the width of God’s embrace, not about the architecture of a heavenly mansion. God’s heart, as revealed by Jesus, is a wide one, capable of embracing immense differences and carrying unbearable tensions.

That, I submit, is one of the major challenges to our churches today, to stretch our hearts, our theologies, our ecclesiologies, and our pastoral practices so as to be more in tune with the great truth of our founder’s revelation that in God’s house there are many rooms. Can we hold the differences among ourselves in patience, charity, and respect? Can we hold and carry more tension rather than always looking for resolutions that result in some being included and others excluded?

Raymond Brown, in his wonderful book on The Community of the Beloved Disciple, traces out how the early church, immediately after Jesus’ departure, already struggled with many of the tensions we have today. The communities of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Paul emphasized very different things than did the communities that followed John.

However, in the end, the church chose to canonize both of them, chose to accept different Christologies and different Ecclesiologies, and to carry the tension and truth of both. It chose to put these differences into paradox rather than opposition.

Brown’s words at the end of this fine book are ones that we, within every denomination and within every ideology within a denomination, might well take to heart:

He tells us the church’s decision to place the Gospel of John in the same canon as the writings of Mark, Matthew, Luke, and Paul was a decision to live with tension, to imitate God’s wide embrace. As Brown puts it, by choosing to keep both, the church “has not chosen a Jesus who is either God or man but both; has chosen not a Jesus who is either virginally conceived as God’s son or pre-existent as God’s son but both; not either a Spirit who is given to an authoritative teaching magisterium or the Paraclete-teacher who is given to each Christian but both; not a Peter or a Beloved Disciple but both. … This means that a church such as my own, the Roman Catholic, with its stress on authority and structure, has in the Johannine writings an in-built conscience against the abuses of authoritarianism. So also the `free’ churches have in the Pastorals an in-built warning against abuses of the Spirit and in 1 John a warning against the divisions to which a lack of structured authority leads. Like one branch of the Johannine community, we Roman Catholics have to come to appreciate that Peter’s pastoral role is truly intended by the risen Lord, but the presence in our Scriptures of a disciple whom Jesus loved more than he loved Peter is an eloquent commentary on the relative value of the church’s office. The authoritative office is necessary because a task is to be done and unity is to be preserved, but the scale of power in various offices is not necessarily the scale of Jesus’ esteem and love.”

In a time of much ecclesial quarrelling, especially over authority, Raymond Brown reminds us that “the greatest dignity to be striven for is neither papal, episcopal, nor priestly; the greatest dignity is that of belonging to the community of the beloved disciples of Jesus Christ.”

Our ecclesiologies should echo that.

Spirituality and the Second Half of Life

August 24, 2003

When Nikos Kazantsakis was a young man he interviewed an old monk on Mount Athos. At one stage he asked him: “Do you still struggle with the devil?” “No,” the man replied, “I used to, but I’ve grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me. Now I leave him alone and he leaves me alone!” “So your life is easy then,” Kazantsakis asked, “no more struggles?” “Ah, no,” replied the monk, “it’s worse. Now I struggle with God!”

Someone once quipped that we spend the first half of our lives struggling with the devil (and the sixth commandment) and the second half of our lives struggling with God (and the fifth commandment). While that captures something, it’s too simple, unless we define “the devil” more widely to mean our struggles with the untamed energies of youth – eros, restlessness, sexuality, the ache for intimacy, the push for achievement, the search for a moral cause, the hunger for roots, and the longing for a companionship and a place that feel like home.

It’s not easy, especially when we’re young, to make peace with the fires inside us. We need to establish our own identity and find, for ourselves, intimacy, meaning, self-worth, quiet from restlessness, and a place that feels like home. We can spend fifty years, after we’ve first left home, finding our way back there again.

But the good news is that, generally, we do get there. In mid-life, perhaps only in late mid-life, we achieve something the mystics call “Proficiency”, a state wherein we have achieved an essential maturity – basic peace, a sexuality integrated enough to let us sleep at night and keep commitments during the day, a sense of self-worth, and an essential unselfishness. We’ve found our way home. And there, as once before the onset of puberty, we’re relatively comfortable again, content enough to recognize that our youthful journeyings, while exciting, were also full of restlessness. We’d like to be young again, but we don’t want all that disquiet a second time. Like Kazantsakis’ old monk, we’ve grown tired of wrestling with the devil and he with us. We now leave each other alone.

So where do we go from there, from home? T.S. Eliot once said, “Home is where we start from.” That’s true again in mid-life.

The second-half of life, just like the first, demands a journey. While the first-half of life, as we saw, is very much consumed with the search for identity, meaning, self-worth, intimacy, rootedness, and making peace with our sexuality, the second-half has another purpose, as expressed in the famous epigram of Job: “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked I go back.”

Where do we go from home? To an eternal home with God. But, to do that, we have first to shed many of the things that we legitimately acquired and attached ourselves to during the first-half of life. The spiritual task of the second-half of life, so different from the first, is to let go, to move to the nakedness that Job describes.

What does that entail? From what do we need to detach ourselves?

First, and most importantly, from our wounds and anger. The foremost spiritual task of the second half of life is to forgive – others, ourselves, life, God. We all arrive at mid-life wounded and not having had exactly the life of which we dreamed. There’s a disappointment and anger inside everyone of us and unless we find it in ourselves to forgive, we will die bitter, unready for the heavenly banquet.

Second, we need to detach ourselves from the need to possess, to achieve, and to be the centre of attention. The task of the second-half of life is to become the quiet, blessing grandparent who no longer needs to be the centre of attention but is happy simply watching the young grow and enjoy themselves.

Third, we need to learn how to say good-bye to the earth and our loved ones so that, just as in the strength of our youth we once gave our lives for those we love, we can now give our deaths to them too, as a final gift.

Fourth, we need to let go of sophistication so as to become simple “holy old fools” whose only message is that God loves us.

Finally, we need, more and more, to immerse ourselves in the language of silence, the language of heaven. Meister Eckhard once said: “Nothing so much resembles God as silence.” The task of mid-life is to begin to understand that and enter into that language.

And it’s a painful process. Purgatory is not some exotic, Catholic doctrine that believes that there is some place in the next life outside of heaven and hell. It’s a central piece within any mature spirituality which, like Job, tells us that God’s eternal embrace can only become fully ecstatic once we’ve learned to let go.

The Abuse Scandal as a Dark Night of the Soul

August 17, 2003

For the church in the Western World, particularly in the United States, the recent sexual abuse scandal is probably the biggest crisis we’ve yet faced, though it’s not so much a crisis of faith as one of credibility.

In effect, this is a “dark night of the soul” and, like most dark nights of the soul, it wounds at a particularly vulnerable spot. It’s easy to be scandalized, especially religiously, when sex is involved.

And if this is a dark night of the soul, and it is, we will learn its lesson and undergo its purification only if we are clear on some things:

1) A dark night of the soul comes from God.

God doesn’t cause accidents, spread viruses, induce depression, break legs, have people die prematurely, or abuse innocent children. A conspiracy of accidents (brute history, human freedom, and sin) does that. But God speaks through all of this. For the authors of scripture, there are no pure accidents, God’s finger is everything. If Israel loses a war it’s not because the Assyrians have a superior army. No. She loses because she’s been unfaithful and God is purifying her.

That’s true too in the present situation. Put biblically, it’s not the press that’s causing this scandal. God’s hand is behind this, humbling and purifying us. The real issue is not inflated, anti-clerical press- coverage, but our infidelity and God’s pruning hand.

2) Contending with a dark night is not a distraction to our ministry, it is our real ministry.

“I was always upset by distractions in my work,” Henri Nouwen once said, “until I realized those distractions were my real work!” That is true too for this scandal. This isn’t a distraction to real ministry, it is the real ministry of the church.

Carrying this scandal properly is something that the church is invited to do for the sake of the world. Jesus said, “My flesh is food for the life of the world.” The church exists for the sake of the world and we must keep that in mind as we face this crisis. What does that mean?

Put simply: Right now priests represent less than one per-cent of the overall problem of sexual abuse, yet they are on the front pages of the newspapers and the issue is very much focused on the church. While this is painful, it can also be fruitful. The fact that priests and the church are (in a way) being scapegoated is not necessarily a bad thing. If our being scapegoated helps society to bring the issue of sexual abuse and its devastation of the human soul more into the open, then we are precisely offering ourselves as “food for the life of the world”.

There are very few things that we are doing as Christian communities today that are more important than helping the world deal with this issue. If the price tag is humiliation and a drain on our resources, so be it. Crucifixions are never easy.

3) A dark night asks us to “sing a new song”.

Sing to the Lord a new song! But what’s the old song?

Jesus specifies this when he says that unless our virtue goes deeper than that of the scribes and pharisees (the “old song”) we can’t enter the kingdom of heaven. What was the virtue of the scribes and pharisees? Theirs was an ethic of strict justice: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, give back in kind. What’s wrong with that?

It’s too easy. Anyone, Jesus says, can live the virtue of strict justice at a certain level. A paraphrase of Jesus might read like this: Anyone can be nice to those who are nice to them, can forgive those who forgive them, and can love those who love them. But can we love those who hate us? Can we be gracious to those who curse us? That’s the litmus test of Christian orthodoxy and it’s what’s being asked of us in this scandal: Can we love, forgive, reach out, and be empathic in a new way? Can we have compassion for both the victim and the perpetrator? Can we have compassion for some of our church leaders who made mistakes? Can we give of our money when it seems we are paying for someone else’s sin? Can we help carry something that doesn’t make us feel good and clean?

This is a dark night of the soul. Like every dark night it’s meant to stretch the heart. This is always painful and our normal impulse is to do something to end the pain. But it won’t go away until we learn what it’s meant to teach us. And what is that, beyond a new humility?

That there is a terrible pain within the culture today, a soul- devastation caused by sexual abuse, and we, the church, are being asked, like Christ, to have our flesh be food for the life of the world so that this wound might be opened to healing.

Gospel Challenge

August 10, 2003

The gospels point out that, before his conversion, Zacchaeus was a short man, someone lacking in height, but that, after his conversion, the tall man gave back what the small man had stolen. Meeting Jesus, it seems, made Zacchaeus grow bigger in stature.

That’s what goodness does to us, it makes us grow taller. For example, a friend of mine shares this story: He has a neighbour who frequently drops round to drink coffee and chat. The neighbour is a good man from a wonderful family and has been blessed with lots of love and good example in his life. But, like the rest of us, he has his weaknesses; in his case, gossip and occasional pettiness. One day, as he was sitting with my friend, he made a very racist remark. My friend, instead of accusing him of being a racist or shaming him with the inappropriateness of his remark, called him instead to his own essential goodness: “That comment surprises me,” he said, “coming from you. I’ve always considered you and your family big-hearted people, with class, never petty. I’ve always envied your family for its goodness and understanding. That remark simply doesn’t sound like you!”

The man’s reaction was instant, positive. Immediately he apologized: “You’re right,” he said, “I don’t know why I sometimes say stupid things like that!” Like Zacchaeus the taller man gave back what the smaller man had taken.

It’s interesting to note that the word “Gospel” means “good news”, not “good advice”. The gospels are not so much a spiritual and moral theology book that tell us what we should be doing, but are more an account of what God has already done for us, is still doing for us, and the wonderful dignity that this bestows on us. Of course the idea is that since we are gifted in this way our actions should reflect that dignity rather than what’s less lofty and more petty inside us. Morality is not a command, it’s an invitation; not a threat, but a reminder of who we truly are. We become taller and less petty when we remember what kind of family we ultimately come from.

In essence, we all have two souls, two hearts, and two minds. Inside of each of us there’s a soul, heart, and mind that’s petty, that’s been hurt, that wants vengeance, that wants to protect itself, that’s frightened of what’s different, that’s prone to gossip, that’s racist, that perennially feels cheated. Seen in a certain light, all of us are as small in stature as the pre- converted Zacchaeus. But there’s also a tall, big-hearted person inside each of us, someone who wants to warmly embrace the whole world, beyond personal hurt, selfishness, race, creed, and politics.

We are always both, grand and petty. The world isn’t divided up between big-hearted and small-minded people. Rather our days are divided up between those moments when we are big-hearted, generous, warm, hospitable, unafraid, wanting to embrace everyone and those moments when we are petty, selfish, over-aware of the unfairness of life, frightened, and seeking only to protect ourselves and our own safety and interests. We are both tall and short at the same time and either of these can manifest itself from minute to minute.

But, as we all know, we are most truly ourselves when what’s tall in us takes over and gives back to the world what the short, petty person wrongly takes. John of the Cross, the great mystic, made this insight the center-piece of his theology of healing. For him, this is the way we heal:

We heal not by confronting all of our wounds and selfishness head- on, which would overwhelm us and drown us in discouragement, but by growing to what he calls “our deepest centre”. For him, this centre is not first of all some deep place of solitude inside the soul, but rather the furthest place of growth that we can attain, the optimum of our potential. To grow to what our deepest DNA has destined us for is what makes us whole, makes us tall – humanly, spiritually, and morally.

Thus, if John of the Cross were your spiritual director and you went to him with some moral flaw or character deficiency, his first counsel would be: What are you good at? What have you been blessed with? Where, in your life and work, does God’s goodness and beauty most shine through? If you can grow more and more towards that goodness, it will fan into an ever larger flame which eventually will become a fire that cauterizes your faults. When you walk tall there will be less and less room for what’s small and petty to manifest itself.

But to walk tall means to walk within our God-given dignity. Nothing else, ultimately, gives us as large an identity. That’s useful too to remember when we challenge each other: Gospel-challenge doesn’t shame us with our pettiness, it invites us to what’s already best inside us.

True and False Notions of Freedom

August 3, 2003

C.S. Lewis tells the story of his conversion in a little autobiographical piece entitled, Surprised by Joy. His journey has some things to teach us.

For years he was blocked from committing himself to faith precisely because of his keen, uncompromising intellect. Brilliant, searching, sceptical of easy answers, he was unable to picture to himself how the great events of Christ’s life and resurrection could have happened. Moreover, he saw commitment to faith as somehow selling short one’s freedom. In all of this, he was constantly challenged by J.R.R. Tolkien, the author of Lord of the Rings, a friend and a practising Roman Catholic. Lewis recalls how, on many an evening, Tolkien and he would have dinner together and then walk the streets of Oxford for hours, arguing faith and religion. On one such evening, shortly before his conversion, Tolkien challenged him to this effect: “Your inability to picture for yourself the mysteries of Jesus’ life is a failure of imagination on your part!” Lewis was stung by that remark, but realized too its truth.

Not long afterwards he converted to Christianity and, as Surprised by Joy puts it, on the night when he finally, first, knelt down to acknowledge his faith he did so not in a burst of joy and enthusiasm, but “as the most reluctant convert in the history of Christendom.” Parts of him were still in rebellion, but he knew he needed to kneel in a certain acquiescence because, as he put it, he had come to know that “the harshness of God is kinder than the softness of man and God’s compulsion is our liberation.” Happiness and freedom, he realized, are paradoxical in the extreme. You can only have them by giving them away. Giving away freedom is what makes us free, just as jealously hoarding it is the ultimate enslavement.

Scripture speaks of truths “hidden since the beginning of the world”. What Jesus reveals about the relationship of love and freedom is one of these truths. What does he reveal? That the essence of love is a certain obedience, a free acquiescence, a giving over of one’s freedom, a laying down of one’s life for love, morality, duty. Freedom doesn’t achieve its purpose by claiming itself for itself, but by giving itself away.

There is a great paradox in that and we see it stunningly portrayed in the scene where Jesus stands before Pilate during his trial. From every outward appearance, Jesus is unfree. He stands before Pilate and the crowd, shackled, helpless to walk away, seemingly a victim. Yet, in all of literature, one will never find an image of someone more free than Jesus at that moment. When Pilate says to him: “Don’t you know that I have the power to set you free or put you to death,” Jesus answers, “You have no power over me. Nobody takes my life. I lay it down of my own free will.” Pilate understood exactly what that meant, you can’t make a saint into a victim or a martyr into a scapegoat. You can’t take by force what someone has already freely given over.

Scholastic philosophy used to make a distinction around the notion of freedom that partly captures this. It spoke of freedom as “freedom- from” and “freedom-for”. The former designates a certain adolescent ideal, where freedom means lack of restraints, lack of duty, lack of moral inhibition, the capacity to do whatever you like. The latter designates the purpose of freedom itself, namely, the capacity for self-donation in love, for altruism, for morality, for duty, for service.

This is not something we understand or accept easily. We are all too easily seduced by the idea that freedom means “freedom-from” – from duty, from moral restraint, and from anything else that inhibits or ties us down. Duty, morality, and religion are then seen as unhealthy weights, shackles to be shed. But that’s a dangerous, unhappy, notion.

In Mark’s Gospel, the disciples of Jesus are cast in a particularly bad light. They don’t just abandon Jesus during his passion and death, they misunderstand, betray, and get things wrong all the way along. But that’s partly the point of Mark’s Gospel. For him, it’s difficult, indeed impossible, to come to faith in Jesus unless we share precisely in the cross by giving away our freedom as Jesus did, freely, without resentment. In Mark’s view of things, discipleship can only be grasped existentially, by participation in what lay at the heart of Jesus’ mission, his giving away his freedom to his Father.

Simone Weil, a fiercely independent mind who died fighting for freedom, was once asked: “What are you searching for?” Her answer, in essence: “I’m searching for someone to be obedient to because without obedience we inflate and grow silly, even to ourselves.”

It was precisely this realization that drove a reluctant C.S. Lewis to his knees in genuflection. God’s harshness is softer than our kindness and obedience in love is what sets us free.

Our Misconceptions about Suicide

July 27, 2003

Margaret Atwood once wrote that sometimes things need to be said, and said, and said, until they don’t need to be said any more. Each year I write a column on suicide because, given the misconceptions about it, some things need to be said over and over again.

What are our misconceptions about suicide? What must be re- iterated over and over again.

First, that suicide is not an act of despair. We are, too slowly, emerging from a mindset that understands suicide as the ultimate act of despair – culpable, irrevocable, and unforgivable. To commit suicide, it is too commonly believed, puts one under the judgement once pronounced on Judas Iscariot: “Better to not have been born.” Until recently, victims of suicide were often not even buried in church cemeteries.

What we didn’t understand when we thought these things is that the propensity for suicide is, in most cases, an illness, pure and simple. We are made up of body and soul, either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure, heart attacks, aneurysms. These are physical sicknesses. But we can suffer these too in the soul, not just the body. There are malignancies and aneurysms too of the heart, mortal wounds from which the soul cannot recover. In most cases, suicide, like any terminal illness, takes a person out of life against his or her will. The death is not freely chosen, but is an illness, far from an act of free will. In most instances, suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like a woman who throws herself through a window because her clothing has caught fire. That’s a tragedy, not an act of despair.

If this is true, and it is, than we should also give up the notion that suicide puts a person outside the mercy of God. God’s mercy is equal even to suicide. After the resurrection, we see how Christ, more than once, goes through locked doors and breathes forgiveness, love, and peace into hearts that are unable to open up because of fear and hurt. God’s mercy and peace can go through walls where we can’t. As we all know, this side of heaven, sometimes all the love, stretched-out hands, and professional help in the world can no longer reach through to a heart paralysed by fear and illness.

But, where we stand helpless, God’s compassion can still reach through. God’s love can descend into hell itself (as we state in our creed) and breathe peace and reconciliation right into wound, anger, and fear. God’s hands are gentler than ours, God’s compassion is wider than ours, and God’s understanding infinitely surpasses our own. Our wounded loved ones who fall victim to suicide are safe in God’s hands, safer by far than they are in the judgements that issue from our own limited understanding. God is not stymied by locked doors as we are.

When suicide victims wake on the other side, they are met by a gentle Christ who stands right inside of their huddled fear and says: “Peace be with you!” As we see in the post-resurrection appearances of Christ, God can go through locked doors, breathe out peace in places where we cannot get in, and write straight with even the most crooked of lines.

Finally, too, there is a misunderstanding about suicide that expresses itself in second-guessing: If only I had done more! If only I had been more attentive this could have been prevented.

Rarely is this the case. Most of the time, we weren’t there when our loved one departed for the very reason that this person didn’t want us to be there. He or she picked the time and place precisely with our absence in mind. Suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. That’s part of the anatomy of the disease.

This, of course, may never be an excuse for insensitivity to those around us who are suffering from depression, but it’s a healthy check against false guilt and anxious second-guessing. Many of us have stood at the bedside of someone who is dying and experienced a frustrating helplessness because there was nothing we could do to prevent our loved one from dying. That person died, despite our attentiveness, prayers, and efforts to be helpful. So too, at least generally, with those who die of suicide. Our love, attentiveness, and presence could not stop them from dying – despite our will and effort to the contrary.

The Christian response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the person’s eternal salvation, and anxious self-examination about we did or didn’t do. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it is, a sickness, and stop being anxious about both that person’s eternal salvation and our less-than-perfect response to his or her illness.

God redeems everything and, in the end, all manner of being will be well, even beyond suicide.

Our Struggle with Envy

July 20, 2003

Why do we struggle with the things we struggle with? What explains us to ourselves? The Bible begins with a series of stories that try to give reasons for the human condition. We’re pretty familiar with one of these, Adam and Eve eating the apple, but less familiar with the story that follows immediately after it.

The second such story on the human condition is the one about Cain and Abel and it might be told this way: Once upon a time, two children are born. The older is Abel and everything about him is right. The sun itself seems to shine through his body, his talents, his temperament. Born just when his mom and dad most want a child, he never disappoints them, or anyone else. Love and good cheer seemed to surround him and he succeeds effortlessly at everything he tries. The smoke of his sacrifice goes naturally upwards.

Then you are born! Right from day one things aren’t right. Your parents aren’t in a good space when they conceive you, your delivery is long and difficult, you are a sickly baby which is only a signal of things to come: Most everything about you is a disappointment – your arrival, your physical appearance, your grades at school, your disposition. Whatever you do somehow isn’t enough, The smoke from your sacrifice never seems to go heavenward.

Eventually your failures, forever seen in the shadow of Abel’s light, overcome you. You become bitter and resentful and lash out at Abel, trying to tear away his goodness, even as everyone around you sees the bitterness and envy in your eyes and begins to avoid you because of this. That further stigmatization, unspoken but always present, causes still a deeper loneliness and resentfulness. You become Cain.

Few of us admit to being jealous. Jealousy, we believe, is too petty a thing, something beneath our dignity. Yet jealousy is one of the most pervasive and destructive forces on the planet, more deeply ingrained in all of us than we ever have the courage to admit. It’s no accident that, among the Ten Commandments, jealousy gets two commandments, while murder and adultery have only one each. It’s no accident either that the Gospels see satan and the devil as working primarily through envy (the devil by using it to divide people from each other and thus dissipate families and communities, and satan by using it to bring about the kind of mob madness that leads to crucifixions). Envy is one of the classic seven deadly sins. It deserves its place on that lofty list. None of us are immune to it. The stigma of Cain marks us all.

What does that stigma look like? Jealousy rarely calls itself by its real name. It shows itself in us rather as bitterness, as hyper criticalness, as the incapacity to praise someone else, as a congenital blockage that prevents us from truly rejoicing in others’ good fortune, as an incapacity to feel the same empathy for the fortunate as for the unfortunate, as an unacknowledged sense of relief when a celebrity falls from grace, as a feeling of being cheated on by life itself, and as a restlessness that makes our own lives always too small and asphyxiating. That’s what envy looks like. That is the mark of Cain.

And it’s a huge, huge hurtle in the spiritual life. Why?

Scripture tells us that in heaven we will stand before the throne of God to “offer unending praise”. That’s going to be rather difficult, given that we had very little practice in praising anything or anybody on this side of eternity. Simply put, if I go through life habitually bitter, overly critical, and resentful for the way things have turned out, how do I suddenly stop that anger of Cain inside me and begin to rejoice in the wonder and beauty of what’s other? How do I admire beauty rather than try to possess it? Difficult, but that’s precisely the task.

One of the major spiritual tasks, from mid-life onward, is to come to grips with the bitterness that comes from envy, so as to move from criticism to praise, from bitterness to mellowness, from the desire to possess to the desire to admire. That’s not an easy journey.

To move towards the day when we can “offer unending praise” involves acknowledging our jealousy and bitterness, grieving our less than perfect lives, and moving beyond the sophistication of a culture that tells us to praise nothing. Most important of all, it involves forgiving: We need to forgive ourselves, our parents, our culture, our church, our teachers, our mentors, those who have wounded us, life itself, and God for the state of things and the state of our lives. Otherwise we will die as we live, harbouring bitterness, threatened by others good fortune, wanting to possess what isn’t ours, more easily speaking words of criticism than of admiration, and not having had sufficient practice in what constitutes eternal life, namely, “offering endless praise”.

Reading the Signs of the Times

July 13, 2003

There’s a story told about Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet, who used to go each Saturday morning and stand in lines outside a prison in St. Petersburg where she, along with other women, hoped to drop off letters and packages for loved ones who had been arrested during Stalin’s purges. The lines were interminably long, the women were cruelly treated by the guards, and they didn’t even know whether their loved ones were still alive or if the letters and packages they dropped off would ever be delivered. Their waiting was an exercise in frustration. One Saturday, waiting in this way, Akhmatova was recognized by another woman. The woman approached her and said: “You’re a poet, can you describe what’s happening here?” “Yes,” Akhmatova replied, “I can.” Then, the story goes on to say, something like a smile passed between them.

What had happened here? What passed between these women in that covert smile?

There’s something very important in the naming of things. Just to be able to name and describe something is a political act, a prophetic act, a defiant act, and an act that in some way makes us transcendent to whatever circumstance we happen to be caught up in. Naming something is also an act of prayer. How so?

Jesus challenged us to “read the signs of the times”. The challenge here is not so much to have an intellectual insight into a particular event as it is to see the finger of God in that event. John of the Cross says: “The language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives.” To read the signs of the times is to look at each event of our lives and ask: “What is God saying through this event?”

The Jewish scriptures are already a wonderful example of this. We see there that, for Israel, there were no pure accidents, no purely secular events. God’s finger was everywhere, in every event, in every blessing, in every defeat, in every victory, in every drought, in every rainfall, in every death, in every birth. If Israel was defeated in battle, it wasn’t the Assyrians who defeated her. God defeated her. If she reaped a bountiful harvest, it wasn’t simple luck, God was blessing her. Nothing was ever purely secular or simply accidental.

Israel wasn’t so naive or fundamentalistic, of course, as to believe that God was actually the efficient cause of these events or that, in the case of death and disaster, God even intended those events. But, nonetheless, in her view of things, God still spoke through those events. The finger of God and the voice of God were seen in the conspiracy of accidents that made up the outer events of her life. To discern the finger of God in the everyday events of life was, for Israel, a very important form of prayer.

My parents and my many of their generation understood this well. Reading the signs of the times was a spontaneous practice for them. They believed in something they called “divine providence” and, for them, like Israel, the finger of God was everywhere, in every event, good and bad. There was no such thing as pure accident or simple good luck. God was in charge, somehow behind everything. Sometimes they took this too far, believing that God actually started wars, burned-down houses, caused someone to get sick, or broke somebody’s leg to teach a lesson. But, generally, they weren’t that naive. Despite the language (“God did this to us!”) they believed only that God spoke through the event, not that God caused the event.

Whatever our religious strengths today, we no longer search in this way for the finger of God in the ordinary events of life. For us, adult children of the Enlightenment, there is a lot of pure accident, pure secular event, simple good luck, sheer luckless fate. In most of the events of our lives, we’re on our own, orphans without God, at the mercy of fate, victims of a pure conspiracy of accidents.

Thus, we look at the events in the world and the church and we see only historical accident: In September 11, only terrorism, not God, speaks; in the sexual abuse scandal in the church, only the media, not God, speaks; in our incapacity to create peace and justice, we hear only human voices, not God’s; and in the personal blessings and tragedies within our lives, we hear only the voice of luck or fate, not the voice of God.

Partly our instincts are right. God didn’t cause September 11, God didn’t send AIDS as a punishment for sin, and God doesn’t single out some people to win lotteries, while causing sickness and tragedy for others. A conspiracy of accidents does that. But God speaks to us through all of those accidents, good and bad, and one of the most important tasks of faith is to search within that conspiracy of accidents to try to find there God’s finger and God’s voice.

Our Generations’ Particular Task

July 6, 2003

We live in curious religious times. A spiritual renaissance of sorts is happening in the Western world, even as church attendance is in steep decline and less and less of our own children are walking the path of faith with us.

The church is generally blamed for the second-half of this equation, but the evidence mostly doesn’t point that way. Indeed, in some ways, life at the level of parish and church-community has never been more finely-tuned, more biblically literate, or more healthy liturgically than it is today. We have wonderful programs for nearly everything, a clergy that’s well-trained, and a laity that’s participating more and more in the ministry of the church. For the most part, at the level of parish-life at least, we’re doing a lot of things right.

But we’re less apt at something else. Today, it seems, we know what to do with someone who walks through our church doors, but we don’t know how to get anyone who is not already going to church to enter those doors. We are better at maintaining church life than at initiating it.

The reasons for this are complex and often are more bound to what’s happening in the culture than to any particular failure inside the churches. As Reginald Bibby points out, the high premium that we put on individuality within our culture is a bigger culprit than poor church services. Lack of space in our lives for the church, more than dissatisfaction with it, is the bigger issue. People, Bibby says, tend to treat their churches in the same way as they treat their families. They want that connection, even if they want to be left alone most of the time. Hence, just as our grown kids don’t come home all that often, they aren’t in church all that often either.

What’s to be done? What’s being asked of us?

I like something that the Canadian bishops said at the Synod of America in 1997. commenting on how the Catholic church in Canada had very much grown up inside of immigrant communities and how it had flourished there, the bishops commented: “In Canada we know how to be Catholic when we are poor, under-educated, and culturally marginalized, but we don’t yet know how to be Catholic when we are affluent, educated, and culturally mainstream. These things are new to us and we have still to find our way within them.” The situation, I suspect, isn’t much different for most Protestant and Jewish communities. Our faith communities tend to work much better in immigrant settings than in mainstream society.

If this is true, and I suspect it is, then what’s being asked of us today is that we find a new way to live out our faith within the affluence and sophistication of our culture.

How might that be done? Jesus tells us that we enter the kingdom of God more easily when we are poor, childlike, innocent, and helplessness. We had those qualities in abundance before we became affluent, educated, and sophisticated, but we had them by conscription, not by choice. They came with our place in society. Moreover we had them prior to having affluence, education, wide experience, and acceptance within the mainstream. Our innocence was a first-innocence, our poverty a first-poverty, and our reliance on God was often dictated simply by our helplessness. Faith and faith communities work well when there’s poverty, naiveté, innocence, and helplessness. They don’t work nearly as well within affluence, sophistication, and self-reliance.

The task for us then, however difficult, is to become post-affluent, post-sophisticated, post-critical, and post-self-reliant. We need to become “inner immigrants”, living out freely those qualities of poverty, innocence, and powerlessness that our economic, social, and educational status once forced on us.

But how do we become those things? That’s precisely the task. Our generation’s job is to learn what those things mean, enflesh them, and then pattern them for our children and for others to follow. Each generation of believers must, like the Jewish prophets, eat the word of God, digest it, and give it its own flesh. Giving faith to others, especially our own children, is not the simple task of handing on a treasure-chest of eternal truths, like one passes on a baton-stick in a relay race. Each generation, our own no less than any other, has first to give its own flesh to those truths.

One of our major faith-tasks then is to model a new way of being poor, innocent, chaste, and powerless inside of affluence, sophistication, experience, and the power and self-reliance these bring.

Oliver Wendall Holmes once commented that he wouldn’t give a fig for the innocence that lies on this side of sophistication, but would give his life for the innocence that lies on the other side of it. The task of our generation of believers is to find and model that innocence which lies on the other side of sophistication.