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.

Against an Eternal Horizon

June 29, 2003

We understand our lives best when we see them against the horizon of the infinite. Nowhere is this more important than in the belief that there is a life beyond this one.

Today it is not always fashionable to say this. More and more, theologians and spiritual writers are either ignoring the importance of life after death or, worse still, positively denigrating any emphasis one might want to put on it. For example:

A few years ago, I was watching a discussion on television between a prominent religious commentator and a panel of theologians representing a number of Christian churches. The commentator asked the panel this question: “Should it make any difference in the way you live whether or not you believe in life after death?”

Everyone on the panel and the host himself agreed that it shouldn’t. In their view of things, whether or not you believe in life after death shouldn’t make any difference practically in the way you live. Each asserted that they believed in individual immortality, but each also said that this didn’t, and shouldn’t, influence their daily actions in a practical way.

Moreover they pushed things further: Several of them suggested that focusing on belief in life after death can be positively harmful because it can deflect a person off of the proper agenda for this life, work against strong involvement in this world, and tie one immaturely to a system of rewards and punishments. Belief in life after death, for them, can throw off the proper focus for life in this world.

What’s to be said about this?

There’s a certain commendable stoicism in it to be sure, but, at the end of the day, such a view of things is religiously false and wreaks a certain havoc in our lives.

What’s wrong is not that God, or anyone else, is disappointed with our theological inconsistency. What’s wrong is that we are more prone to do violence to ourselves and to others because life cannot give us what we want.

Simply put, when we stop believing in life after death we tend to put too much pressure on this life to give us the full symphony. When we stop seeing our lives as being completed by something beyond the present world, it becomes natural to become more frustrated with the limits of our lives and to begin to demand, however subtly or unconsciously, that our spouses, children, friends, careers, jobs, and vacations give us something they can’t give, namely, complete fulfilment, full meaning, final satisfaction, joy beyond frustration, ecstasy, heaven.

When we stop, practically, believing in a heaven beyond this life, we too easily demand that we have a taste of heaven right now. Crassly stated, if this life is our only kick at the cat, it’s becomes pretty hard to handle the fact that this one kick at it is almost always a long, long ways from what we would want it to be. None of us goes through this life without our share of bitter disappointment, crushed potential, broken dreams, and daily frustration. Our lives are never the way we dreamed them to be. There’s always a huge gap between our dignity, our desire, our potential, and the actual state within which we find ourselves. We come into this world over-charged, are all too soon beaten-up, and never quite find the end of the rainbow. There are no perfect lives. There is no heaven this side of eternity.

All of us have suffered abuse of body and heart. All of us have been unjustly robbed of our potential. All of us live inside situations of tension, bitterness, gossip, and hatred. All of us suffer a certain silence between ourselves and those we most love, and all of us suffer the absence of full embrace and sexuality in our lives. None of us have the whole symphony and none of have joy without shadow. All of us too live with a history of bad choices, mistakes, sins, and opportunities missed.

Thus, unless we can somehow place our present lives against an horizon of an after-life that completes it, the punishing limits, daily inadequacy, and brute mortality of this world will eventually drive us to depression, bitterness, or violence. Outside of a vision of life after death, we can’t come to full peace with this life, the sophisticated stoicism of so much of contemporary theology and spirituality notwithstanding.

In one of the parables, Jesus points out how those servants who do not expect their master’s return go about getting drunk and beating their fellow-servants. This image of violence is precisely a metaphor for the type of violence we do to life and to each other when we do not see our lives against the horizon of the master’s return.

Conversely, when we do await the master’s return we don’t have to demand that this life give us more than it can and we can more easily live without impatience, bitterness, and violence, even inside of lives that are far from complete.

Moving Beyond Hurt

June 22, 2003

Something important, I believe, can be learned from our reaction to capital punishment.

For a good number of people, capital punishment is hailed as something that is needed to help bring about healing and closure for those most affected by the violence that the condemned man or woman perpetrated. Healing and new life, they believe, cannot begin until a certain raw justice has been served. Sometimes this idea has a more- gentle expression in groups and individuals who, while themselves non- vindicative, sincerely believe that only capital punishment can help the victims’ loved ones heal and move on. Often though its expression is more bitter, as seen in those groups that gather outside the execution chamber and gleefully count down the seconds until the lethal needle is injected. For these persons only an eye for an eye, a life for a life, can help to make things right again.

There are of course others who strongly disagree and believe that an eye for an eye solves nothing. These are the ones who stand, outside the execution chamber and in living rooms and chapels everywhere, silently praying. Figuratively speaking, they are like Mary standing under the cross of Jesus – helpless, muted, reduced to praying for an intervention from a power beyond our own. But even this biblical gesture, virtuous though it may be, is, of itself, not enough. Prayerful protest, all by itself, does not bring about the kind of healing and restoration that leads to new life. Perhaps it’s the best we can do on a given day, as it was for Mary on Good Friday, but something else is still needed.

What? What lies beyond even the powerful protest of prayer?

New relationship. What’s needed for life to be truly restored is a new relationship that takes us beyond old hurts and purifies our memory of those hurts by weaving old wounds into a new situation. What is meant by that? Perhaps an example can help:

One of the families who lost a loved one in the Oklahoma City bombings did more than protest the execution of their child’s killer. They went to visit Timothy McVeigh’s parents, prayed with them, consoled them, and established a certain friendship with them. In doing that, they were able, in a way not possible before, to forgive their child’s killer and purify their own memory of the terrible injustice that had been dealt them. Only this, the establishment of a new situation, ultimately brings about new life and new spirit (something the popular mind calls “closure”).

Jacques Dupuis, speaking in the context of the historical wounds that various religions have inflicted upon each other, makes the same point. How to move beyond old hurts? For him, this requires more than good intention and silent prayer: “Purification of memory is not at all easy. Peoples and religious communities cannot be asked to forget how much they have suffered. … For them forgetting would be tantamount to betrayal. The personal identity of a human group is built up from a concrete historic past that in any case cannot be annulled, even if there were a will to do so. But even while not forgetting, memory can be healed and purified through a shared determination to begin a new constructive mutual relationship of dialogue and collaboration, of encounter.”

John of the Cross has a spirituality of healing based upon precisely this idea, new relationship, deeper growth that takes us beyond old hurts. We heal, he says, by “growing to our deepest centre”, something he defines as the maximization of our deepest moral potential. That centre, he says, then becomes a great fire that heals our wounds and faults by burning them away as if by cautery (a medical procedure wherein doctors cure a sore that will not heal by burning the wound still deeper). Healing, for him, comes about by deeper growth and deeper relationship, which, initially, make the wound worse, but eventually bring about a cure.

Put more simply: If John of the Cross were your spiritual director and you came to him wanting healing from some hurt or moral fault, he would not have you focus on the hurt or the fault itself, but would challenge you instead to begin a deeper relationship to life, love, and morality. For John, a deeper relationship is what creates the new energy needed to move beyond old hurts and old faults. We heal, he says, not by making new resolutions but by living in a new way.

And nowhere is this more true than in coming to forgiveness and peace with those who have hurt us. We cannot forgive and move on simply on the basis of good intention and raw willpower. We’ll forgive, but not forget – and nothing will change. Our memories need to be purified and this can only happen through fire, that is, by relating in a new way to that which hurt us so that the new relationship cauterizes the old wound by deepening it enough so that it might heal.

From Asking to be Carried to Helping Carry

June 15, 2003

An icon is a holy picture, an image showing something of the divine. Perhaps the best icon to depict adulthood is a picture of a mother or a father carrying a tired or a sleeping child. Few images capture as beautifully and as deeply what an adult is meant to do, carry the young.

Today too many things tempt us away from this and invite us instead to remain always a child, an adolescent. Why do I say this?

Because so much in our world today is telling us: “Don’t grow up! Don’t be a mother or a father or a grandparent or an elder. Don’t take on the responsibility that comes with adulthood. Remain instead the puer or the puella, the eternal boy or the eternal girl. Keep forever a youthful body and an untethered spirit. Have no irrevocable commitments or binding responsibilities. Assume neither the body nor the duties of an adult!”

That’s the air we breathe. More and more the ideal of a woman is Tinkerbell and the ideal of a man is Peter Pan, adolescent figures swinging through the sky, youthful, slim, free. Hollywood’s leading men and women are made to look younger and younger, the fashion industry dictates that there are to be no middle-aged bodies, and men and women old enough to be grandparents want still to look as if they’re twenty. What’s wrong with that?

What’s wrong is that Peter Pan and Tinkerbell are children. Neither has ever carried anything or anyone, nor made a commitment or assumed a responsibility. No wonder they’ve no stretch-marks, no wrinkles, no bodies stooped from carrying burdens, no middle-aged fat, no wrinkles, no grey hair, and precious little anxiety about the brokenness of our world. They’re children and children are not yet scarred by the burden of having to carry things.

Robert Bly, in his insightful work, The Sibling Society, suggests that what is lacking in our culture are parents and elders. Nobody wants to assume those roles because to assume them is to admit we’re no longer children ourselves and we don’t want to do that. Instead, too often, a mum wants to be her daughter’s best friend rather than the parent her daughter desperately needs and a dad wants to be his son’s buddy rather than the father that his son really wants. As adults we want to be perceived as cool rather than as parental, as free rather than responsible. What this does, more often than not, is put us in unconscious competition with the young rather than make us their mentors.

The effects of this are everywhere. We see it in the cult we’ve developed around the body – the pressure to look young, to not show the effects of aging, to value physical looks above all else. Partly this is good. It’s made us more sensitive both to our health and our looks; a good thing in itself, aesthetically and morally. There’s something healthy about wanting to look good for, as we know, the first sign of clinical depression is when we no longer care about our appearance. But this has a debilitating underside as well. What all this pressure to remain young and look attractive does is make it very difficult for us to accept mortality and all that comes with it.

And part of what comes with it is the pressure to never grow up, to never really mature, to remain forever the child, the adolescent, someone who looks over his or her shoulder for some adult to summon or blame. Too often our attitude mimics that of children and adolescents. When they’re caught in a situation where something’s gone wrong, invariably their response is: “It’s not my fault!” “This has nothing to do with me!” “Mum and dad have a problem!” “Someone needs to fix this!”

Notice how little different this sounds from: “Our leaders are evil!” “The culture’s a mess!” “The church needs to straighten itself out!” “The bishops have a real problem on their hands with this sexual abuse thing!” Bottom-line, these are the phrases of children and adolescents: “Something’s broken, but it’s not my fault. I’m not responsible!”

Taking responsibility and trying to help carry things is one of the primary tasks of adulthood and stepping forth to do this is one of the litmus-tests of maturity. As mothers and fathers, we’re supposed to be carrying the children, not asking to be carried ourselves.

But to do so will scar us in a way that will set us apart from the young. We’ll have stretch-marks, bent bodies, anxious hearts, the stoop that comes with carrying burdens, grey hair, wrinkles educed by worry, and probably some middle-aged fat as well. Moreover we won’t always be best-buddies to our children or the coolest mum or dad on the planet, but we will be the elders, the mentors, the teachers, the adults, the parents, the mums, and the dads that our society so sorely misses.

Falling Asleep out of Sorrow

June 8, 2003

“And they were asleep out of sorrow.” St. Luke uses those words to tell us why the disciples fell asleep during Jesus’ agony in the Garden. They fell asleep, he says, not because the hour was late and they were tired from the supper and the wine. No, not that. They fell asleep “out of sorrow”, “out of sheer grief”.

That’s a pretty accurate description of why we often sell ourselves short, refuse to suffer for what’s noble, and choose to short-circuit tension rather than carry it with patience. We’re like the disciples in Gethsemane, not bad persons, just a long ways from what’s best in us because we’re “asleep out of sorrow”. What’s meant by that?

We don’t live in the best of all possible worlds, Leibnitz said that. That’s more than an abstract statement. Most days it’s a fact that grates us, frustrates us, eats away at our patience and moral fibre, and leaves us living lives of quiet desperation. We’re far from whole, every one of us. We carry too many wounds, broken dreams, betrayals, imperfections in our bodies, and past mistakes. None of us has been loved perfectly and none of us is loved perfectly. Everyone of us has, in one fashion or other, been slighted, ignored, not properly valued, put down, taken for granted, abused. Because of this, all of us carry inside of us a deep, inchoate sorrow. It’s that sorrow that makes us fall asleep.

We’ve all experienced this and know what it feels like:

There are times in life when we feel loved, secure, safe, valued, an integral part of things. When we feel that way, what’s best inside of us more easily bursts forth. We find it easier then to walk the high-road, to carry tension, to put up with things, to be self-sacrificing, and to see others’ suffering and not just our own. When we’re like this, we’re more awake, more observant, more compassionate, more truly ourselves.

But we also know its opposite: There are times in life when we feel put down, ignored, valueless, taken for granted, misunderstood, abused, inadequate for what’s best in life. It’s easy then, and understandably so, to settle for the first soft shoulder or easy way out that offers itself, irrespective of long-term consequences. Dragged down by an inchoate sadness, we’re no longer looking for the high-road, we’ll settle for any road at all as long as it makes us feel better.

However when we do that, we’re settling for second-best, selling ourselves short, not operating out of what’s best in us, not because that’s what we really want, but because, given our deep sadness, second- best or even third-best will do. We’re trying to get by, to survive, to make do. We’re not trying to be saints. That’s a conscriptive, but not a healthy, humility. Sadness can diminish hope and make you fall asleep.

And any number of things can trigger this. Sometimes a tiny put- down will send us tumbling to the depth of sorrow – a slight from a friend, sarcasm from a colleague, being taken for granted, being ignored in a gathering. Other times it will be a weightier thing: a betrayal by a loved one, disappointment in your own body, a professional failure, a physical illness, a lost job, the breaking down of a relationship, a rejection in love, the death of a loved one, or even the seemingly irrevocable presence of injustice and violence of our world. A slight or a holocaust, either can trigger the kind of sorrow that brings on the sleep the disciples fell into in Gethsemane.

Richard Rubenstein, in a book called, After Auschwitz, says: “When I say we live in the time of the death of God, I mean that the thread uniting God and man, heaven and earth, has been broken. We stand in a cold, silent, unfeeling cosmos, unaided by any purposeful power beyond our own resources. After Auschwitz, what else can a Jew say about God, except that he is dead?” Deep sorrow can do that to you. After Gethsemane and Golgotha, Jesus’ disciples also thought God was dead when they were only asleep.

What wakes us up? Peter woke up when he heard the cock crow, saw Jesus’ face, and realized that love stays even after you betray it. On learning that, he never fell asleep in that way again. Obviously there’s a deep secret here. Sometimes, though, it’s an even further sorrow that wakes us. As John Shea says, “the cock will crow at the breaking of our own ego. There are lots of ways to wake up.” Mostly though, as the Gospels make plain, it’s new light, a risen body, an empty tomb, a resurrection, a rainbow breaking in after the storm, an unexpected forgiveness, and a second-chance that wake us. And, as our faith assures us, we have an infinite number of second-chances even if we have, for most of our lives, settled for second-best.

Reflection on Vocations

June 1, 2003

Shortly after he entered the Trappists, Thomas Merton wrote up the story of his conversion and journey to a monastery in a book, Seven- Story Mountain. It became a best-seller that, among other things, caught the romantic imagination of his generation. For years afterwards, Trappist monasteries were flooded with applications, not all for the right reasons of course, but a large number of men did become good monks because of a romantic ideal that Merton’s story triggered.

The absence of this kind of romantic ideal is, to my mind, one of the main reasons why today, in the Western world, fewer and fewer men and women are responding to the call to priesthood and religious life.

We need again an ideal for priesthood and religious life that people can fall in love with, something that inflames the romantic imagination. That’s absent today. Our very sophistication, it seems, is killing us. We are openly weary and often cynical about these vocations. No surprise we get few takers. “No romantic illusions allowed!” seems to be the catch-phrase. If we applied that criterion to marriage there would be few takers there as well.

Mature commitment, at a point, depends upon wilful decision and not upon naivete, romantic feelings, conscriptive duty, or lack of other opportunities. I very much like an expression used by Marriage Encounter groups: “Love is a decision!”, they say. They’re right. We can, and often do, make commitments out of naivete, lack of opportunity, or romantic feelings, but we won’t sustain them long-term, at least not without resentment or infidelity, unless, at some point, we re-choose them in a new and purer way.

Maturity comes with that. We’re mature only when we choose to love, serve, obey, bow down, give over our freedom, and give over ourselves to someone or something because we know and accept that this is the right thing to do, irrespective of how we feel about it on a given day or what more attractive options might be beckoning.

But – that’s not true initially. First you have to fall in love! Every romantic, mystic, or poet, knows that. Married folks too know it. Granted, at some point after the honeymoon love has to become a decision, but that’s not what initially brings you to marriage. First you fall in love. You get seduced by an ideal. That ideal turns out to be partly an illusion, but it’s what’s gives you the courage to pull the trigger and give yourself over in the first place. “All miracles begin with falling in love!”, says Morris West. Most life-long commitments begin in the same way.

We need, again, to have a romantic ideal about the vocations of priesthood and religious life, otherwise we can expect still fewer priests, nuns, and religious brothers in the future.

That immediately raises the question: What makes for such a romantic ideal? What did Merton’s book have that present books on the priesthood and religious life do not have?

What works and what doesn’t? Mother Theresa’s ideal, for example, fires the romantic imagination for some, though not for others. She was a saint and her ideal of religious life, austere though it may be, is, if anything, wonderfully romantic. But why hasn’t it led to a deluge of young women banging on convent gates in the Western world?

Perhaps more interesting for us in a highly secularize context is the ideal of religious life that is depicted in Sister Helen Prejean’s, Dead Man Walking. Her story has some key similarities to Seven Story Mountain: Both are confessional, good works of art, make morality attractive, are subtly invitational, show religious life under a good light, are wonderfully romantic, and unearth the hidden monk and nun inside each of us. Both Seven Story Mountain and Dead Man Walking make priesthood and religious life a romantic thing. Why hasn’t the latter stirred up the same vocational romance as the former? I wish I knew.

There are many reasons why, in the Western world today, our rectories, convents, seminaries, and monasteries are greying and emptying. Conservatives attribute it to secularity, to a lost sense of self- sacrifice, to an incapacity in many people to make a life-long commitment, to the sexual revolution, and to an erosion of faith in the culture. Liberals suggest other reasons: an emerging laity is a message from the spirit about vocations, an all-male priesthood and the ecclesially-imposed discipline of celibacy need an overhaul, and the priesthood and religious life need to take on new forms before we can again in conscience call people into them.

There’s some truth in all of these reasons, though none are the real culprit. What is? We lack a romantic ideal for these vocations. They’ve been subjected to a scorching exorcism and now it’s time to move on. We need to restore to them their angels, their proper light, their beauty. We need to re-romanticize priesthood and religious life and give people something beautiful to fall in love with.

Faith’s Darkness

May 25, 2003

Why does God stay hidden? Why doesn’t’ God reveal himself so concretely and physically that no one could doubt his existence?

I like Karl Rahner’s perspective on this. God isn’t hidden, he says, we just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality: “We are just discovering today that one cannot picture God to oneself in an image that has been carved out of the wood of the world. This experience is not the genesis of atheism, but the discovery that the world is not God.”

We struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas,out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things.

Why is that? Rahner’s insight provides a clue: We struggle with faith because the world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. Why not? Precisely because God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics.

Thus, it’s easy to have doubts about God’s existence, and not just if we are young and still over-enthralled by the reality of this world, its stunning beauty, the promises it dangles before us, and its overpowering physical character. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else.

But that struggle, ironically, also afflicts those who are mature in faith, in a more painful way in fact. It was Jesus, after all, not some wayward youth who cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” and who cautioned us to pray daily so as “not to be put to the test”. It was this test exactly that Jesus had in mind. What is “the test”?

The classical mystics speak of two “dark nights of the soul”, two painful, purifying periods of life we must all undergo. The first of these it calls “the night of the senses”. This darkness, they tell us, refers to a period of painful trial which helps purify our motivation so as to make us less selfish. But these same mystics assure us that, during this first dark night, we are given consolation in our faith. God feels near. The feeling is like that of taking a bitter-tasting medicine that we know will make us better.

The second night, “the night of the spirit” is much more “the test” to which the Lord’s Prayer refers. What happens here is that God seemingly disappears. All our old securities in faith dissolve and all efforts to reground ourselves through former faith-practices come up dry. God seems unreal to our heads and hearts, even as, in the depth of our being,something else is happening which belies what’s happening on the surface, namely, even as our thoughts and feelings about God seem empty, we are, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief.

Nicholas Lash, professor of Divinity at Cambridge, once made this comment about our struggle: ” … we need do no more than notice the most of our contemporaries still find it `obvious’ that atheism is not only possible, but widespread and that, both intellectually and ethically, it has much to commend it. This view might be plausible if being an atheist were a matter of not believing that there exists `a person without a body’ who is `eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything’ and is `the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.’ If, however, by `God’ we mean the mystery, announced in Christ, breathing all things out of nothing into peace, then all things have to do with God in every move and fragment of their being, whether they notice this and suppose it to be so or not. Atheism, if it means deciding not to have anything to do with God, is thus self-contradictory and, if successful, self-destructive.”

Lash isn’t saying that a personal God doesn’t exist, but that God’s person and being are of a different order, beyond the wood of this world, and that over-powering light can feel like darkness.

Being Missionary to our own Children

May 18, 2003

It is no secret that we’re having trouble passing the faith on to our own children. Our churches are greying and emptying and our own children are no longer walking the path of faith, at least not public and ecclesial faith, with us. The most difficult mission field in the world today is Western culture, secularity, the board rooms, living rooms, bedrooms, and entertainment rooms within which we and our children live, work, and play.

With this in mind, the religious congregation I belong to, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, held a symposium recently in San Antonio, Texas, which had as its theme: “Missionaries to Secularity”; perhaps more aptly subtitled: Being missionaries to our own children. John Shea, John O’Donohue, Robert Schreiter, Robert Barron, and Mary Jo Leddy were invited as special resource persons. Here are ten principles we enunciated there:

1) Secularity is both a restriction of consciousness and a widening and freeing of it. It is spiritually interested, but largely spiritually illiterate, not so much bad as asleep. Evangelization is very much about waking someone to another reality. Liberals and conservatives are asleep in different ways, liberal ideology is too privatized and conservative ideology too re-entrenched in authority and rules, even as our culture had replaced the ideal of a good life by the vision of having more.

2) How does one become spiritual without leaving behind the physical, the emotional, the sexual, the bodily? To move beyond churches that are weary, grey, and tired, we must move beyond clericalism, fear of the feminine, excessive dis-ease with eros, false reliance on authority, and reclaim our mystical and our intellectual traditions.

3) Jesus offers a model: He tries to wake us from both our distractions and from the ways we habitually fall asleep “out of sorrow”. We need to begin our proclamation with what lies at the centre of our faith: Christ has died and has risen. We kill God, but God returns in a forgiving love and this is what opens up a new world. What’s unique to Christianity is that God gives himself as friendship, love, forgiveness, non-violence, empathy, compassion.

4) We must listen to our contemplatives: our poets, artists, mystics, and returning missionaries. They will help tell us what’s best and worst in secularity and help us form an alternative imagination, an alternative to the “myth-of-progress”.

5) There are three levels to evangelization: i) The renewal of the evangelizers themselves; ii) a calling back of those who have heard the gospel, but it has not taken hold or been lost in some way; and iii) a calling of those have not yet heard the gospel. Our own children, mostly fall into the second category.

6) Today’s secularity has a particular set of characteristics: i) It is an uneven terrain; ii) you cannot measure it simply by declining church attendance because there is still, in secularity, a strong, diffusive, belief in the supernatural, a believing without belonging; and iii) there is a resurgence of religious sensibility, carried by, among other things, our immigrant communities and the rise of religious movements.

7) Religious decline in secularity, may be the exception rather than the way the future is going. There are three different images of secularity that suggest this: i) Secularity as receding and eroding; ii) as a veneer, you poke deeply into it and see a teeming religiosity underneath, and iii) as an island within a sea of religiosity (in a world perspective). Inside of our churches we, too, are not homogeneous. We are not one generation but are two-and-half generations within a single generation. As well, we should observe how various counter-cultural groups are engaging secularity: fundamentalists, enthusiasm movements, social justice groups, the new conservatives. All these groups, both the right and the left, have three things in common: i) They foster and feed-off a sense of community; ii) they try to give clear form to life; and iii) they call for a clear set of actions.

8) We may not continue to keep our faith private. Evangelization must show itself publicly, like the medieval pilgrimages and processions and today’s papal youth days. Faith must be expressed publicly, in colourful, romantic ways. We must stop building “beige churches” and build churches that express public faith. We are drowning in individuality.

9) Unless we can regain our own inner vision and define ourselves more by what we are for than what we are against we will continue to divide from each other. The Christian tradition offers that inner vision and throws light on a history and upon realities beyond the here and now and, most importantly, calls us to world citizenship, beyond our own backgrounds.

10) Finally, a few sound-bytes to chew on:

*”When the sun shines right even the meanest trees sparkle.” Flannery O’Connor

*”The cock will crow at the breaking of your own ego. There are lots of ways to wake up!” John Shea

*”We are better than we know and worse than we think.” Mary Jo Leddy

*”We must gamble everything for love.” Rumi

Cassie Bernall – Unlikely Martyr

May 11, 2003

One of the students who died in the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, was a seventeen year-old girl named Cassie Bernall.

Soon afterwards a story began to circulate about her death. Several classmates who had been in the room with her when she was shot said she was visibly praying when the gunmen entered. The gunmen asked her whether or not she believed in God. Then, here’s how he described what happened: “She paused, like she didn’t know what she was going to answer, and then she said yes. She must have been scared, but her voice didn’t sound shaky. It was strong. Then they asked her why, though they didn’t give her a chance to respond. They just blew her away.”

But that story was soon disputed: One story claimed that this never happened; another said that it did happen, but not to Cassie; and another claimed that she did give some kind of witness to her killers, but not exactly in the manner just described. To set the record straight and to try to come to grips with her daughter’s death, Cassie’s mother, Misty Bernall, wrote a book, entitled, SHE SAID YES – THE UNLIKELY MARTYRDOM OF CASSIE BERNALL.

The book met mixed reviews: Sections of the secular press considered the story of Cassie’s faith-testimony before her killers as pious fabrication, made up by members of her faith-community to help them deal with her death. Certain sectors of the religious press rushed to canonize her as a martyr. What’s the truth?

There’s an axiom that says that at the moment we die, history stops and myth begins. That’s true for everyone, not just Cassie Bernall. Death washes our lives clean and lets others see us in a clearer light, one which highlights more what is best in us. But this doesn’t change the facts, it merely highlights their essence. Myth is not “Alice-in-Wonderland” fantasy, it’s a painting, an essence under a spotlight.

Misty Bernall’s story of her daughter, Cassie, is this, an essence under a spotlight. She doesn’t sugar-coat her daughter to make her angelic, but shows us a confused, lonely, insecure, often alienated and sometimes bitter, young woman. On the other hand, she doesn’t over-do the negative parts either, so as to make her conversion some miraculous rebirth and her faith’s credibility dependent upon its distance from a former degradation. She paints a picture of a teenage girl with a good heart and a talent for bad luck. Insecure about her appearance, socially mostly on the outside, Cassie falls in, for a time, with a very bad crowd and this feeds her bitterness and alienation almost to the point of rage and insanity. Eventually she pulls herself out of this, not overnight and not miraculously, but through a combination of being loved, finding faith, and being (underneath it all) a pretty exceptional person.

And that she was! Cassie Bernall was an exceptional soul and her story speaks of something more important than technical martyrdom. More important than her affirmative answer to her killers’ question, was her struggle and eventual victory over some of the worst forces of darkness that exist on the planet, loneliness and rejection. She said yes to God and to love on the day of her death because she had already, after a monumental struggle, said that yes in the months and weeks before.

There’s a powerful irony in her story that shouldn’t be missed. The two young students who killed her had cause for their bitterness. They were unpopular outcasts, lonely rejects, considered “losers” by their peers. This experience drove them to an anger and hatred so deep that it eventually led to mass murder and suicide. Cassie Bernall, by her own description of herself, wasn’t much different. She was also an outsider, lonely, “a loser without a date for the prom”. And. indeed, at a point, she was strongly tempted to the same kind of anger, hatred, and bitterness as her killers.

Yet, how different her life ended from theirs. Her killers died angry, hysterical, mad with rage. She died, not unlike Jesus, praying, refusing bitterness, loving, even as she could taste the exact same loneliness as her killers. It’s interesting that in describing the death of Jesus the gospels don’t emphasize his physical sufferings, which must have been horrific, but instead focus on his loneliness, his rejection, his being the outcast, unanimity-minus-one.

Both Cassie Bernall and her killers knew the taste of being unanimity- minus-one and the temptation to bitterness that this brings. But in Cassie’s case the good won out, she died in a fashion remarkably similar to Jesus. She may or may not be a martyr in the technical sense. It doesn’t matter. Like Jesus she died refusing bitterness in the midst of rejection. Not bad for a seventeen year-old! Not bad for anyone for that matter!

Martyr or not, Cassie Bernall is a patron, a saint, someone who, like Jesus, shows us the path beyond bitterness.

The Potential and Dangers of Powerlessness

May 4, 2003

One of the characters in Ursula Hegi’s brilliant novel on Nazi Germany, Stones from the River, is named Ilse Abramowitz.

Ilse is a Jewish woman whose husband, Michael, had been arrested, beaten, and humiliated by a group of young Nazis. They had come to her home, vandalized it, beaten her husband, and taken him away. One of the young Nazis is an eighteen year-old boy named Helmut Eberhardt whom she knows well. She’s friends with his mother and knows too that he is getting married in church the very next day. As Helmut, among others, drags her husband away …

“She pitied the young wife whose body would lie beneath Helmut’s in the nights to come. A thought came to her that had insisted on settling with her for some time now, a thought that would anger Michael if she ever told him: given a choice, she would rather be the one who was persecuted than the one who did the persecuting. Both had a terrible price to pay, but she would rather endure humiliation and fear than grow numb to what it was to be human.”

Better to be persecuted than numb to what’s human. That’s a mature, moral comment, though a risky one. We know the axiom: “Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely!” There’s both an important truth and a deadly warning there. What isn’t as evident is its opposite: Powerlessness too can corrupt and absolute powerlessness can corrupt absolutely. Many of our worst criminals, terrorists, and others who have precisely numbed themselves to what it means to be human, got that way not through the experience of power but through its opposite, the experience of powerlessness and humiliation. Timothy McVeigh and many of the today’s terrorists certainly bear that out. Their hatred and violence take their origin not in the experience of power, but in the experience of humiliation, frustration, and the lack of power to do anything about it, except violence.

That’s always a risk in any experience of humiliation. Martin Luther King once used a very strong image to make this point: Imagine, he said, a young boy using a public bathroom. He’s alone and defenceless when a group of young thugs enter. To make sport for themselves and to act out their mindless self-hatred, they humiliate him by pushing his face into the urinal so as to make him taste their own urine. Among all the experiences of powerlessness and humilation, few have the power to so violate and unravel one’s humanity as does such an experience. At that moment, this boy’s soul is literally up for grabs. As King put it: In that urine he can taste an humiliation that brings permanent bitterness or he can taste the blood of the crucified Christ. But he’s a young boy, not Mother Theresa, and such an experience can just as easily leave him bitter and prone to violence as it can leave him feeling that privileged powerlessness that Jesus called blessed.

“Blessed are you when you are poor, powerless, and persecuted!” Jesus said that. He praised little children and told us that they enter the kingdom of God easily, not because of their innocence (which has its own stunning beauty) but because of their powerlessness. They’re helpless and need to rely on others, even to eat. Jesus also praised the poor, telling us that they too enter the kingdom easily, for the same reason. He wasn’t glorifying poverty (which is an evil to be eliminated) but pointing to the potential blessings inherent in the experience of being poor and powerless.

What Jesus is challenging us to here is not easily understood, and even less easily lived. Why, one wonders, isn’t it more blessed to be rich than to be poor? If one is gifted, respected, and able to achieve one’s dreams, shouldn’t that naturally lead to gratitude? Sometimes it does, and you see that gratitude and greatness in people of noble soul, but, more commonly, it doesn’t. It leads instead to an attitude of entitlement, to a resentment that some have more than we do, to a greedy, jealous, bitter spirit, and to precisely what Ursula Hegi names as a moral numbing- down, a necessary blindness to many of the things of what it means to be human. That’s the corruption of power.

And it sets us on a slippery slope. To numb ourselves to what’s best inside of us – our innate moral sensitivity, our natural compassion, and our deep-down desire for what’s best – forces us to live a lie. When we do this we need to keep lying ourselves and we need to keep putting pressure on those around us to lie too. That’s where our violence begins and it continues, in some form, as long as we are unfaithful to what’s true.

Yes, there’s a risk in powerlessness and humiliation, but there’s even a great risk in its opposite. Ursula Hegi’s Ilse Abramowitz chooses the better part: Better to be persecuted than to be numb to what’s human.

Seize the Moment!

April 27, 2003

Carpe diem! Everyone wants to seize the day. But as Irish novelist, John McGahern, says: “There is nothing more difficult to seize than the day!” Why? Because we have a great naivete about this.

For example, a young man once wrote to Rainer Marie Rilke complaining that he wanted to be a poet, but his daily life offered little in the way of inspiration. His life was not the stuff of poetry, he complained: too much drudgery, too many pressures, life in a small village. How could he write poetry out of such life? He concluded by saying that he envied Rilke’s life as an admired poet, living in a big city, meeting exciting people. Rilke wasn’t exactly sympathetic: “If your daily life seems poor to you,” he replied, “than you aren’t poet enough to call forth its riches. For a poet, there are no uninteresting places, no uninteresting life.” The day is there to be seized.

Robertson Davies, a renowned Canadian writer, recounts something similar. He tells of an incident where he received a letter from a young man asking him to write a letter of reference for a financial grant so that the young man, a budding writer, would have money to go off to a Mexican resort to work on his next novel. Davies replied that would not write the letter, not because he didn’t want to support him, he wished him well as a writer, but because he felt the young man had a false fantasy as to how he might seize the moment and write his novel. Davies cautioned him about false romanticism: “You want to write something deep and inspirational between drinking margaritas and walking the beach”. Nothing much will come of that, he warned. Stay home and write your book there. Annie Dillard gives similar advice. She prefers to do her writing in a plywood shack with no view. For her, it’s easier to seize the moment in a quiet, hidden place than on some public perch that offers a vista of the world.

What these examples point to is that we often miss the moment because we have an overly-romantic, false, notion of what that means, like the two would-be writers who sought help from Rilke and Davies. How do we seize the day?

I like David Steindl-Rast’s answer. He offers a wonderful metaphor for what it means to seize the day: For him, we seize the day by “meeting the angels of each hour”. Who are these angels? They are the unique riches inherent in each hour itself.

Every season, whether chronological, cultural, or religious, brings with it a certain spirit, mood, and feeling that we sometimes capture and sometimes miss. The same is true for the various periods of a day – morning, noon, early afternoon, late afternoon, evening, night. Each has its unique light, its unique impact on our feelings, and (speaking in metaphor) its unique angels who carry its special grace. For example, the light of the morning greets us differently than the light of the late afternoon. Thus, the angels of sunrise impact us differently than the angels of sunset. To seize the day is to meet these angels and let them bless us.

But they can be easily missed. Who among us hasn’t spoken words to this effect: “I was so busy and pressured this year that I missed spring.” “I couldn’t get into Christmas this year, a friend died in early December and I couldn’t get into the spirit of the season.” “I missed lent this year. I was so preoccupied with other things that it came and went before I even realized it was here. You know how these things happen!”

Indeed we do. Many things keep us from meeting the angels of the hour – preoccupation, tiredness, distraction, heartache, anger, daydreams, stress, hurriedness. It’s easy to miss a special season and it’s even easier to miss an ordinary morning, afternoon, evening, or an entire day.

What do we do so as to not miss them? We need to pray. Simply put: If we don’t pray on a given morning, that omission doesn’t offend God. We don’t owe God our prayer. It’s a gift, not a debt owed. But, if we miss praying some morning there is, as our experience makes evident again and again, the real danger that we will also miss the morning. The morning will come and go and we will not meet its angels – its unique light, mood, spirit, refreshment. Noon will catch us before we are even aware that there was a morning. The noon-day and afternoon sun will bring their own angels, but, having missed the angels of the morning, we are pretty prone to miss the angels of noon and the afternoon as well. A day will come and a day will go and we won’t seize it … and then it will not matter much, in terms of grace and joy in our lives, whether we are walking a beach in Mexico or sitting in a plywood shack.