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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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