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.

The Beauty of Light and Morality

April 20, 2003

In the Hebrew scriptures we are presented with the rainbow as a sign of the resurrection and of God’s unconditional love for us. What a beautiful, wonderful, apt symbol! A rainbow bends light so as to refract it and show what it looks like on the inside, its colours, its mystery, its spectacular beauty. Light has a beautiful inside that we can’t always see.

God is light! Scripture tells us that. That’s more than metaphor. God is the author of all that is, physical and spiritual, and in the refraction of light we get to see a little bit of what God looks like on the inside. In a rainbow we get to see, physically see, something of God. Small wonder a rainbow can take your breath away. Of course God isn’t physical, but God is the ground of all being, the physical no less than the spiritual, and in the refraction of light we get to see something of the beauty of God.

We are the poorer for not understanding that. We speak of God as love, but God is also beauty and thus many things, the rainbow being one of them, the human body being another, physically refract that beauty and show us what that beauty can look like in living colour.

But the beauty of God isn’t just physical, though it is that. The beauty of God is refracted and seen too in the moral realm.

The gospels, for example, tell us that at the precise moment Jesus died on the cross, “the veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom”. What’s meant by this? Scholars argue among themselves as to exactly all that it means; for example, the displeasure of God in abandoning the temple, the opening of a once-closed sacred place to the Gentiles, and the parallel to the high priest tearing his robe at Jesus’ trial. It’s a rich expression. Whatever else it means, it also means this: The veil in the temple separated the people from the inner-sanctuary and prevented them from seeing what went on in the holy of holies. It hid the sacred. When it is stripped away we get a clear view of the holy of holies. Thus the gospels tell us that, in the crucifixion, when we look at Jesus’ death on the cross, we get a clear look into the inside of the holy of holies, namely, an unobstructed look into the inside of God.

Thus the cross does what a rainbow does, only in a different sphere. A rainbow refracts light, bending it and breaking it down so that we can see, partly, how it is made up. The cross does the same thing, it refracts the moral realm, bends it and breaks it down so that too, partly, we can see how it is made up. In a rainbow, we see beneath the surface and we see the spectacular colours that make up light. In the cross, we too see beneath the surface and see the spectacular love, forgiveness, empathy, and selflessness that make up the inside of the moral realm.

We don’t often connect these two, the rainbow and the cross. but our scriptures do and it’s something we should do too. The physical beauty of refracted light and the moral beauty of the cross of Jesus reveal different aspects of the same reality, both show us God in living colour. Too often in our practical spirituality we make no connection between the two.

But both speak of the same reality and we are healthier when we see that. There should be no divorce between aesthetics and spirituality, beauty and morality, physical light and the cross. A sunset and Calvary, a rainbow and Gethsemane, the face of a movie star and the morality of Mother Theresa, both reveal aspects of the same reality and bear the signature of the same author. Both bend the light and show us something of the divine. Morality is an aspect of a genuine aesthetics, just as aesthetics is an integral part of a genuine morality. The rainbow and the cross should never be separated.

Tragically though we do separate them. Mostly we live with dualisms: We want to be saints but we disdain beauty; we want to be artists but we disdain morality; we want to be theologians and spiritual directors but we focus on the cross and not on beauty; or we want to be theologians and doctors of the soul but we focus on beauty and not on the cross. Mostly we pick one or the other – the rainbow or the cross.

But the beauty of divinity shines through both. God is light and God is love. Too often we take those two affirmations for granted without connecting them. The rainbow and the cross show us something of what’s beneath those realities, light and love. When they are refracted, beamed through a particular prism, we get to see them on the inside and get to see their inner colour and spectacular beauty.

Forgive Them for they know not what they do!

April 13, 2003

As Jesus is being crucified, he asks his Father to forgive his killers. These are his words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing!”

Karl Rahner once made an interesting comment on this. He pointed out that, in fact, they did know. The people crucifying Jesus knew exactly what they were doing. They knew he was innocent, they knew their own jealousy, and they knew too that they were doing something wrong; just as we know, at least most of the time, when we are doing wrong. Our sense of right and wrong is not that easily derailed, even when we are caught up in a mob action where there is a certain moral blindness and safety in numbers.

So what does Jesus mean by this? What were his executioners ignorant of? How could they be innocent when they knew better? For Rahner, the statement, “they know not what they are doing”, refers to something beyond conscious awareness. What those crucifying Jesus didn’t know is how much they were loved. They weren’t ignorant of their own motivation. They knew their own deceit. But they had too little knowledge and awareness of God’s love for them. It’s that ignorance that made them – and makes us – mostly innocent of real sin.

Scholastic thought used to distinguish between “culpable” and “inculpable” ignorance. It termed the latter “invincible ignorance” and defined it as a darkness, a lack of understanding, for which we are not responsible. In this framework of thought, you are not considered to be committing a sin when you do something wrong if you do it out of an ignorance that isn’t your fault. For the Scholastics, in order to sin, you first have to have a certain awareness. Of what? Of love. Allow me an illustration:

Some years ago, I received a letter from a woman in her late forties. She began the letter by telling me that she could, in all truth, say that for the first forty years of her life she had not committed a sin.

Her words: “I grew up in a terrible home and was abused and unloved as child. I became bitter, suicidal, and acted out in every way. I bit in order not to be bitten and broke every commandment except murder (which in fact I contemplated), but I really don’t believe I ever sinned, even though I knew I was doing wrong at the time. Why don’t I think I sinned? Because sin is a betrayal of love and nobody, as far as I knew, had ever loved me. God was loving me, I know that now, but I had no way of knowing or believing that then. I did what I needed to do to survive.

Sometime after my fortieth birthday a miracle happened. I fell in love and that person fell in love with me. I experienced love for the first time. I know now what it means to sin because I’m loved. Now when I do something wrong it’s a sin because I am betraying love. But you first need to be loved in order to betray that. When I didn’t know love and had no way of sensing God’s love for me, I had nothing to betray, at least as far as I knew. That’s why I believe that, even though I did many wrong things, I didn’t sin.”

Sin is a betrayal of love. However, you first have to be loved and, however dimly, sense that before you can betray it. In Rahner’s view, this is what lies behind Jesus’ plea to his Father to forgive his killers because they don’t know any better. At one level, of course, they do, but at the another, a far more important one, they don’t. Like the woman whose letter I just quoted, they don’t know how much they are loved. They are biting in order not to be bitten.

There’s more jealousy, hatred, anger, murder, adultery, slander, lying, and blasphemy at God in our world than there is sin. We’re not so much bad as ignorant, inculpably so. Often times when we do wrong, we aren’t betraying love because we don’t know love to begin with. That doesn’t mean our behaviour isn’t destructive, that it doesn’t ruin lives, wreak havoc with happiness, and that it doesn’t continue (as scripture so graphically puts it) to murder God out of ignorance. Our actions have real and often permanent effects. Those effects may never be trivialized. When we do wrong we hurt others and hurt ourselves, even if we aren’t sinning. Darkness is always the enemy of light. It’s just that, more often than not I suspect, our actions may be wrong, very wrong, but they’re not sinful because we don’t know what we’re doing. Our darkness is invincible, inculpable, something for which we aren’t really responsible.

Mercifully God’s compassion and understanding are deeper than our own and God’s love can descend into hell itself and, even there, forgive and redeem us.

The Value of Ritual in Sustaining Prayer

April 6, 2003

In a homily at a wedding, Dietrich Bonhoeffer once gave this advice to a young couple: “Today you are young and very much in love and you think that your love can sustain your marriage. It can’t. Let your marriage can sustain your love.”

Love and prayer work the same: The neophyte’s mistake is to think that they can be sustained simply through good feelings and good intention, without the help of a ritual-container and a sustaining rhythm. That’s naive, however sincere. Love and prayer can only be sustained through ritual, routine, and rhythm. Why?

What eventually makes us stop praying, John of the Cross says, is simple boredom, tiredness, lack of energy. It’s hard, very hard, existentially impossible, to crank-up the energy, day in and day out, to pray with real affectivity, real feeling, and real heart. We simply cannot sustain that kind of energy and enthusiasm. We’re human beings, limited in our energies, and chronically too-tired, dissipated, and torn in various directions to sustain prayer on the basis of feelings. We need something else to help us. What?

Ritual – a rhythm, a routine. Monks have secrets worth knowing and anyone who has ever been to a monastery knows that monks (who pray often and a lot) sustain themselves in prayer not through feeling, variety, or creativity, but through ritual, rhythm, and routine. Monastic prayer is simple, often rote, has a clear durational-expectancy, and is structured so as to allow each monk the freedom to invest himself or hold back, in terms of energy and heart, depending upon his disposition on a given day. That’s wise anthropology.

Prayer is like eating. There needs to be a good rhythm between big banquets (high celebration, high aesthetics, lots of time, proper formality) and the everyday family supper (simple, no-frills, short, predictable). A family that tries to eat every meal as if it were a banquet soon finds that most of its members are looking for an excuse to be absent. With good reason. Everyone needs to eat every day, but nobody has energy for a banquet every day. The same holds true for prayer. One wonders whether the huge drop-off of people who used to attend church services daily isn’t connected to this. People attended daily services more when those services were short, routine, predictable, and gave them the freedom to be as present or absent (in terms of emotional investment) as their energy and heart allowed on that given day.

Today, unfortunately, we are misled by a number of misconceptions about prayer and liturgy. Too commonly, we accept the following set of axioms as wise: Creativity and variety are always good. Every prayer- celebration should be one of high energy. Longer is better than shorter. Either you should pray with feeling or you shouldn’t pray at all. Ritual is meaningless unless we are emotionally invested in it.

Each of these axioms is over-romantic, ill thought-out, anthropologically naive, and not helpful in sustaining a life a prayer. Prayer is a relationship, a long-term one, and lives by those rules. Relating to anyone long-term has its ups and downs. Nobody can be interesting all the time, sustain high energy all the time, or fully invest himself or herself all the time. Never travel with anyone who expects you to be interesting, lively, and emotionally-invested all the time. Real life doesn’t work that way. Neither does prayer. What sustains a relationship long-term is ritual, routine, a regular rhythm that incarnates the commitment.

Imagine you’ve an aged mother in a nursing-home and you’ve committed yourself to visiting her twice a week. How do you sustain yourself in this? Not by feeling, energy, or emotion, but by commitment, routine, and ritual. You go to visit her at a given time, not because you feel like, but because it’s time. You go to visit her inspite of the fact that you sometimes don’t feel like it, that you sometimes can’t give her the best of your heart, and that often you are tired, distracted, restless, over- burdened, and are occasionally sneaking a glance at your watch and wondering how soon you can make a graceful exit. Moreover, your conversation with her will not always be deep or about meaningful things. Occasionally there will be emotional satisfaction and the sense the something important was shared, but many times, perhaps most times, there will only be the sense that it was good that you were there and that an important life-giving connection has been nurtured and sustained, despite what seemingly occurred at the surface. You’ve been with your mother and that’s more important than whatever feelings or conversation might have taken place on a given day.

Prayer works the same way. That’s why the saints and the great spiritual writers have always said that there is only one, non-negotiable, rule for prayer: “Show up! Show up regularly!” The ups and downs of our minds and hearts are of secondary importance.

Contemplative Prayer

March 30, 2003

One of the great spiritual writers of our time is Thomas Merton, a Trappist monk. Merton, though, wasn’t born in a monastery. A checkered past and a driving restlessness led him there and what he was looking for was solitude, respite from a temperament that would not let him rest.

His mother and father had both been artists and Merton inherited from them those qualities that make for a good artist: huge talent, a fertile imagination, and a punishing restlessness. By the time he was twenty-five he was poised professionally to do great things, but his personal life was a mess, more than that. He was dying, literally, because he couldn’t slow down, anchor himself in everyday life, and simply rest. Restlessness was beating him up like a playground bully. He wasn’t eating properly, sleeping regularly, had no redeeming rhythm or routine to his life, was spending his nights in jazz clubs, living on cigarettes and alcohol, nursing a stomach ulcer, and having too many sleepless nights. His health was deteriorating dangerously.

Spiritually and morally he was searching, sincerely and even desperately, for someone or something to commit himself to; but, even as he flirted with faith and church, his restlessness and bad habits made it difficult for him to commit himself to anything in a consistent way. There’s an infamous story told of how he used to hang around Catherine Doherty’s early Madonna-House community in New York, until Catherine one day told him to stay away because he was a bad influence on the community.

His honesty eventually paid off and he took the plunge of faith. Leaving New York, career, and friends behind, he entered the Trappist Abbey in Kentucky. He did it, in his own words, to save his life, having realized that, unless he did something as radical as this, he would soon die. He did it too to search for God and to find something that had eluded him all his life, simple rest.

Initially, the monastery did for him what he had hoped for, it gave him a sense of God’s presence, a clear direction in life, and a calm body and spirit. He went through a burst of first-fervour that he shared with the world in his classic autobiography, THE SEVEN-STORY MOUNTAIN.

But restlessness, as we know, cannot be turned on and off like a water-tap. It seeps through even monastery doors. His restlessness returned, but now, as a monk, he had an answer for it. His answer? Contemplative prayer, solitude.

Contemplative prayer is the answer to restlessness. But Merton learned that it is not an easy thing, not a technique you master at a weekend seminar. During the last years of his life, living as hermit, he tried to explore more deeply what it meant to live in solitude and contemplation. What he eventually learned and recorded in his diaries during those years surprised him. Contemplation, he found out, is not some altered-form of consciousness, nor a blank consciousness emptied of all thought and feeling, nor even a consciousness that empties itself of everything except thoughts and feelings about God. What is it?

As Merton lived these years alone, as a hermit, he sensed himself moving in and out of solitude and contemplation and he tried to give words to that experience. Solitude, he came to realize, is not something that we attain once and for all. We don’t divide our lives into “before” and “after” we have found solitude, rather our hours and our days are divided between those times when we are more in solitude and those times when we are more caught up in the distractions of our work and the heartaches of our restlessness.

What does solitude feel like? Here’s Merton’s description: “It is enough to be, in an ordinary human mode, with one’s hunger and sleep, one’s cold and warmth, rising and going to bed. Putting on blankets and taking them off, making coffee and then drinking it. Defrosting the refrigerator, reading, meditating, working, praying. I live as my ancestors lived on this earth, until eventually I die. Amen. There is not need to make an assertion about my life, especially so about it as mine, thought doubtless it is not somebody else’s. I must learn to live so as to forget program and artifice.”

Contemplation is not, first and foremost, a technique for prayer. Sometimes prayer, especially centering prayer, can help us find it, but contemplation is something more. It’s a way of being present to what’s really inside our own experience. We are in solitude, contemplation, in prayer, when we feel the warmth of a blanket, taste the flavour of coffee, share love and friendship, and perform the everyday tasks of our lives so as to perceive, in them, that our lives aren’t little or anonymous or unimportant, but that what’s timeless and eternal is in the ordinary of our lives.

Sensing the eternal in the ordinary is contemplative prayer and that, and that alone, stills our restlessness.

Affective Prayer

March 23, 2003

A couple of years ago, I attended a six-day retreat given by Robert Michel, an Oblate colleague and a highly sought-after spiritual mentor. His approach was disarming. Most of us are forever looking for something novel, at the cutting-edge, outside the box, something complex, but what he offered was stunningly simple and down-to-earth. He spent the whole time trying to teach us how to pray in an affective way.

What exactly does that mean, to pray affectively? In essence, what he told us might be summarized this way: “You must try to pray so that, in your prayer, you open yourself in such a way that sometime – perhaps not today, but sometime – you are able to hear God say to you: `I love you!’ These words, addressed to you by God, are the most important words you will ever hear because, before you hear them, nothing is ever completely right with you, but, after you hear them, something will be right in your life at a very deep level.”

These are simple words, but they capture what we ultimately try to do when we “lift mind and heart to God” in prayer.

In the end, prayer’s essence, its mission-statement, its deep raison d’etre, is simply this: We need to open ourselves to God in such a way that we are capable of hearing God say to us, individually, “I love you!”

This might sound pious and sentimental. It’s anything but that. Don’t be put off by simplicity. The deeper something is the simpler it will be. That’s why we have trouble understanding the deep things, be they of science or the heart. What separates the great minds (Augustine, Aquinas, Descartes, Whitehead, Einstein, Lonergan) from the rest of us is their capacity to grasp the simple. Anyone can understand what’s complex, but we have trouble grasping the principle of relativity, the concept of being, the concept of love, and things about the nature of the God, for exactly the opposite reason. They’re too simple. The simpler something is, the harder it is to wrap our minds around it and the more we need to make it complex in order to understand it. That’s true too of prayer. It’s so simple that we rarely lay bare its essence. It has ever been thus, it would seem.

John’s gospel already makes that point. The Gospel of John, as we know, structures itself very differently from the other gospels. John has no infancy narratives or early life of Jesus. In his gospel, we meet Jesus as an adult right on the first page and the first words out of Jesus’ mouth are a question: “What are you looking for?” That question remains throughout the rest of the gospel as an hermeneutical colouring suggesting that beneath everything else a certain search is going on. A lot of things are happening on the surface, but underneath, there remains always the nagging, restless question: “What are you looking for?”

Jesus answers that question explicitly only at the end of the gospel, on the morning of the resurrection. Mary Magdala goes looking for him, carrying spices with which to embalm his dead body. Jesus meets her, alive and in no need of embalming, but she doesn’t recognize him. Bewildered, but sincere, she asks Jesus where she might find Jesus (something, I suspect, we do often enough in prayer). Jesus, for his part, repeats for her the question he opened the gospel with: “What are you looking for?” Then he answers it:

With deep affection, he pronounces her name: “Mary”. In doing that, he tells her what she and everyone else are forever looking for, God’s voice, one-to-one, speaking unconditional love, gently saying your name. In the end, that’s what we are all looking for and most need. It’s what gives us substance, identity, and justification beyond our own efforts to make ourselves lovable, worthwhile, and immortal. We are forever in fear of our own seeming insubstantiality. How to give ourselves significance? We need to hear God, affectionately, one-to-one, pronounce our names: “Carolyn!” “Julia!” “Kern!” “Gisele!” “Steve!” “Sophia!” Nothing will heal us more of restlessness, bitterness, and insecurity than to hear God say: “I love you!”

Moreover since prayer is meant to be a mutual thing, it’s important too that we respond in kind: Part of affective prayer is also that we, one- to-one, with affection, occasionally at least, say the same thing to God: “I love you!” In all long-term, affectionate relationships the partners have to occasionally prompt each other to hear expressions of affection and reassurance. It’s not good enough to tell a marriage partner or a friend just once “I love you!”. It needs to be said regularly. The relationship of prayer is no different.

Prayer, it is said, is not meant to change God but us. True. And nothing changes us as much for the good as to hear someone say that he or she loves us, especially if that someone is God.

Seeing the Resurrection

God never overpowers, never twists arms, never pushes your face into something so as to take away your freedom. God respects our freedom and is never a coercive force.

And nowhere is this more true than in what is revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. The Gospels assure us that, like his birth, the resurrection was physical, real, not just some alteration inside the consciousness of believers. After the resurrection, we are assured, Jesus’ tomb was empty, people could touch him, he ate food with them, he was not a ghost.

But his rising from the dead was not a brute slap in the face to his critics, a non-negotiable fact that left sceptics with nothing to say. The resurrection didn’t make a big splash. It was not some spectacular event that exploded into the world as the highlight on the evening news. It had the same dynamics as the incarnation itself: After he rose from the dead, Jesus was seen by some, but not by others; understood by some, but not by others. Some got his meaning and it changed their lives, others were indifferent to him, and still others understood what had happened, hardened their hearts against it, and tried to destroy its truth.

Notice how this parallels, almost perfectly, what happened at the birth of Jesus: The baby was real, not a ghost, but he was seen by some, but not by others and the event was understood by some but not by others. Some got its meaning and it changed their lives, others were indifferent and their lives went on as before, while still others (like Herod) sensed its meaning but hardened their hearts against it and tried to destroy the child.

Why the difference? What makes some see the resurrection while others do not? What lets some understand the mystery and embrace it, while others are left in indifference or hatred?

Hugo of St. Victor used to say: Love is the eye! When we look at anything through the eyes of love, we see correctly, understand, and properly appropriate its mystery. The reverse is also true. When we look at anything through eyes that are jaded, cynical, jealous, or bitter, we will not see correctly, will not understand, and will not properly appropriate its mystery.

We see this in how the Gospel of John describes the events of Easter Sunday. Jesus has risen, but, first of all, only the person who is driven by love, Mary Magdala, goes out in search of him. The others remain as they are, locked inside their own worlds. But love seeks out its beloved and Mary Magdala goes out, spices in hand, wanting at least to embalm his dead body. She finds his grave empty and runs back to Peter and the beloved disciple and tells them the tomb is empty. The two race off together, towards the tomb, but the disciple whom Jesus loved out-runs Peter and gets to the tomb first, but he doesn’t enter, he waits for Peter (authority) to go in first.

Peter enters the empty tomb, sees the linens that had covered the body of Jesus, but does not understand. Then the beloved disciple, love, enters. He sees and he does understand. Love grasps the mystery. Love is the eye. It is what lets us see and understand the resurrection.

That is why, after the resurrection, some saw Jesus but others did not. Some understood the resurrection while others did not. Those with the eyes of love saw and understood. Those without the eyes of love either didn’t see anything or were perplexed or upset by what they did see.

There are lots of ways to be blind. I remember an Easter Sunday some years ago when I was a young graduate student in San Francisco. Easter Sunday was late that year and it was a spectacularly beautiful spring day. But on that particular day I was mostly blind to what was around me. I was young, homesick, alone on Easter Sunday, and nursing a huge heartache. That colored everything I was seeing and feeling. It was Easter Sunday, in spring, in high sunshine, but, for what I was seeing, it might as well have been midnight, on Good Friday, in the dead of winter.

Lonely and nursing a heartache, I took a walk to calm my restlessness. At the entrance of a park, I saw a blind beggar holding a sign that read: It’s spring and I’m blind! The irony wasn’t lost on me. I was blind that day, more blind than that beggar, seeing neither spring nor the resurrection. What I was seeing were only those things that reflected what was going on inside my own heart.

Christ is risen, though we might not see him! We don’t always notice spring. The miraculous doesn’t force itself on us. It’s there, there to be seen, but whether we see or not, and what precisely we do see, depends mainly upon what’s going on inside our own hearts.

Priestly Prayer – Prayer for the World

March 16, 2003

One of the responsibilities of being an adult is that of praying for the world. Like the high priests of old, we need to offer up prayers daily for others. Indeed we are all priests, ordained by the oils of baptism and consecrated by the burdens of life that have given us wrinkles and grey hair. As adults, elders, priests, we need, as scripture puts it, “to make prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, for ourselves and for the people.” All of us, lay and cleric alike, need to offer up priestly prayer each day.

But how do we do that? How do we pray priestly prayer? We pray as priests, as Jesus prayed in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel, every time we sacrifice self-interest for the good of others. That’s priestly prayer in its widest sense. However, we pray that prayer, formally and sacramentally, whenever we pray the prayer of the church, namely, the Eucharist or the Divine Office. This kind of prayer, called liturgy, is what keeps incarnate the priestly prayer of Christ.

In priestly prayer we pray not just for ourselves, nor ideally by ourselves, but we pray as a microcosm of the whole world, even as we pray for the whole world. In this kind of prayer we lift up our voices to God, not as a private offering, but in such a way as to give a voice to the earth itself. In essence, when we pray at the Eucharist or at the Divine Office, we are saying this:

“Lord, God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice: See in my openness, the world’s openness, in my infidelity, the world’s infidelity; in my sincerity, the world’s sincerity, in my hypocrisy, the world’s hypocrisy; in my generosity, the world’s generosity, in my selfishness, the world’s selfishness; in my attentiveness, the world’s attentiveness, in my distraction, the world’s distraction; in my desire to praise you, the world’s desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world’s forgetfulness of you. For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens or closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice. I am your priest on earth.

And what I hold up for you today is all that is in this world, both of joy and of suffering. I offer you the bread of the world’s achievements, even as I offer you the wine of its failure, the blood of all that’s crushed as those achievements take place. I offer you the powerful of our world, our rich, our famous, our athletes, our artists, our movie stars, our entrepreneurs, our young, our healthy, and everything that’s creative and bursting with life, even as I offer you those who are weak, feeble, aged, crushed, sick, dying, and victimized. I offer to you all the pagan beauties, pleasures, and joys of this life, even as I stand with you under the cross, affirming that the one who is excluded from earthily pleasure is the cornerstone of the community. I offer you the strong and arrogant, along with the weak and gentle of heart, asking you to bless both and to stretch my heart so that it can, like you, hold and bless everything that is. I offer you both the wonders and the pains of this world, your world.”

To pray like this is to pray liturgically, as priest. And we pray like this each time we go to the Eucharist or when we, with others or alone, pray the Divine Office of the church. It is particularly this latter prayer, the Divine Office (also called “Breviary” or “Liturgy of the hours”), that is available daily as the priestly prayer for those of us who are not ordained ministers in the church. And this is especially true for two of those liturgical hours, Lauds (Morning Prayer) and Vespers (Evening Prayer). They, unlike the other hours which are more the particular domain of monks and professional contemplatives, are the ordinary priestly prayer of the laity.

And what is important in praying them is to remember that these are not prayers that we say for ourselves, nor indeed prayers whose formulae we need personally to find meaningful or relevant. Unlike private prayer and contemplation, where we should change methods whenever praying becomes dry or sterile, Lauds and Vespers are prayers of the universal church that are in essence intended to be communal and priestly. They don’t have to be relevant for our private lives. We pray them as elders, as baptized adults, as priests, to invoke God’s blessing upon the world.

And whenever we do pray them we take on a universal voice. We are no longer just a private individual praying, but are, in microcosm, the voice, body, and soul of the earth itself, continuing the high priesthood of Christ, offering prayers and entreaties, aloud and in silent tears, to God for the sake of the world.

Obstacles to Prayer

March 9, 2003

Jan Walgrave once commented that our present culture constitutes a virtual conspiracy against the interior life. He wasn’t suggesting that somewhere there is a deliberate force that is consciously scheming to keep us from interiority and prayer, but rather that an accidental flowing- together of forces and circumstances in history are making it difficult for us to live the examined life.

What are these forces? They’re simply the daily headaches and heartaches that afflict us.

First, the headaches: Thomas Merton was once asked what he considered to be the major spiritual disease in the Western world. His answer: “Efficiency. The major spiritual disease in the Western world is efficiency because from the government offices down to the nursery we have to keep the plant running and, afterwards, we’ve no energy left for anything else.” He’s right.

The first problem we have with prayer is that we’re too-busy and too- preoccupied to make time for it. There’s never, it seems, a good time for prayer.

Always we’re too-busy, too-stressed, too-tired, or too- preoccupied to sit or kneel down to pray. We rise early, groan as our alarm-clocks startle us from sleep, rush through breakfast, ready things for the day, fight crowds and traffic enroute to work, settle into a task that’s demanding and draining, gulp-down a quick lunch, end the work-day tired, commute back home, ready another meal, tend to the needs of loved ones, share a meal with others who are just as tired and restless as we are, then, often enough, have still another meeting or event to attend in the evening. The day simply takes us, consumes us, drains us, and leaves us, in its wake, sitting on the couch before a TV set, tired, dissipated, needing still to prepare some things for tomorrow, and wanting a mindless distraction rather than the discipline of prayer. It’s hard to pray in our over-busy lives.

But we’re not just too busy to pray, we’re also too restless. There’s a congenital disquiet inside us. Moreover this natural restlessness is fanned to a high flame by the culture: Five hundred TV channels are within our reach, the internet brings the whole world into our private rooms, there are new movies that we haven’t seen, new songs we haven’t heard, colourful magazines whose covers beckon, sporting events that seem on everyone’s mind, and every kind of special event from the Olympics, to the Academy awards, to World cups, to celebrity gossip programs, to distract us. Beyond that, everyone around us seems to be travelling to interesting places, doing interesting things, meeting interesting people. We alone, it seems, are missing out on life, stuck, outside the circle, with nothing interesting to do.

It’s hard to pray when we are restless and, mostly, we are. Henri Nouwen puts this well: “I want to pray,” he says, “but I also don’t want to miss out on anything – television, movies, socializing with friends, drinking in the world.”

Our deepest greed is not for money, but for experience. We don’t want to miss out on life. Thus, to pray is truly a discipline because when we sit or kneel in prayer so many of our natural cravings feel starved and begin to protest. Restlessness is a great impediment to prayer.

Finally, beyond the headaches and restlessness, there is the ambiguity of prayer itself. Simply put, prayer isn’t easy because we don’t understand it, don’t know how to do it, and don’t understand how the experience should feel. Talking to God, hearing God’s voice, and centring ourselves in God is not as easy as we sometimes make it out to be. God’s reality, while massively real and the ground of the whole universe, is not physical and tangible like the things of this world. The world seems more real; family and friends can be hugged, touched, and talked to, and physical sensation of all kinds doesn’t leave us doubting its reality. But relating to God demands something else and it’s easy to find ourselves bored, doubting, distracted, and anxious to get on to something else when we try to pray.

What we experience in prayer is just as real as the physical world, but we need to be at a certain depth of prayer to know this – and that’s the paradox: Because prayer can seem unreal we often stop doing it, but it will only seem real if we persevere in it long enough and do it deeply enough. We often give up too soon. Prayer isn’t easy.

By definition, prayer is a non-pragmatic, non-utilitarian activity. It’s hard to sit still and (seemingly) do nothing when so many necessary tasks demand our attention and when so much inside us aches for activity and involvement. It’s hard to pray when we suffer from the kind of headaches and heartaches that cannot be eased by taking an aspirin. Walgrave is right, there’s a certain conspiracy against the interior life today. But prayer beckons us beyond, asking us to lift even this up to God.

Pray Always – Prayer as Lifting Mind and Heart to God

March 2, 2003

One classical definition of prayer defines it this way: “Prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.”

That’s a wonderful and accurate description of prayer, the problem is that we rarely do that. It’s rare that we actually open mind and heart to God in order to show God what’s really there. Instead we treat God as a parental-figure or as a visiting dignitary and tell God what we think God wants to hear rather than what’s really on our minds and hearts.

As a result we have a pretty narrow range of thoughts and feelings that we consider suitable for prayer. Most of what we actually think and feel is considered too base for prayer. We feel we are praying only when we have attentive thoughts and warm feelings, when we feel like praising God, when we feel altruistic, pure, centred, when we have good feelings towards God, others, and nature, when we feel the desire to pray more, or when we yearn for moral improvement.

Such thoughts and feelings do make for prayer, but we can’t turn then on like a water tap. Many times, perhaps most times, we experience other thoughts and feelings: boredom, tiredness, dissipation, bitterness, sexual fantasy, and sometimes even a positive distaste for church, prayer, and moral improvement. We don’t feel that it is valid to lift these bitter thoughts and impure feelings to God. Instead we try to crank up the thoughts and feelings that we think we should be having when we pray.

There is some legitimacy in this. Classically, spiritual masters have distinguished between prayer and distraction. Prayer, they point out, requires an effort of concentration, of attentiveness, an act of will. It isn’t simply daydreaming or letting a stream of consciousness occur.

But prayer is “lifting mind and heart to God” and that means lifting up, at any given moment, exactly what’s there and not what, ideally, might be there. It would be nice if we always felt warm, reverent, altruistic, full of faith, chaste, hopeful, connected with others and nature, happy about who we are and what life has dealt us. But that isn’t the case. We all have moments and even seasons of doubt, anger, alienation, pettiness, boredom, obsession, and tiredness. Our thoughts are not always holy and our hearts are not always warm or pure. It’s at times like this we need prayer and what we need to take to prayer is, precisely, those bitter thoughts and unholy feelings.

All thoughts and feelings are valid material for prayer. Simply put: When you go to pray, lift up what’s inside of you at that moment. If you are bored, lift up that boredom; if you are angry, lift up your anger; if you are sexually obsessed, lift up your sexual fantasies; if you are tired, lift up that tiredness; if you feel selfish, don’t be afraid to let God see that. Jesus said that we must become like little children to enter the kingdom of heaven. One of the qualities in children to which this refers is precisely their honesty in showing their feelings. Children don’t hide their sulks, pouts, and tantrums. A good mother handles these rather easily, often with a smile. God is up to the task. In prayer, we can be transparent, no matter how murderous, adulterous, or irreverent our thoughts and feelings might seem.

If we do that, it makes it easier for us to “pray always”, as scripture asks. What does this mean? Obviously it doesn’t mean that we should always be at formal prayer, that we should strive to be full-time contemplatives, or even that we should seize every possible occasion we can to pray formally.

To “pray always” invites us rather to live our lives against a certain horizon. It doesn’t necessarily mean to stop work and go to formal prayer, important though that is at times. The point is rather that we need to do everything within the context of a certain awareness, like a married man who goes on a business trip and who, in the midst of a demanding schedule of meetings and social engagements, is somehow always anchored in a certain consciousness that he has a spouse and children at home. Despite distance and various preoccupations, he knows that he is “married always”. That awareness, more than the occasional explicit phone call home, is what keeps him anchored in his most important relationship.

Our relationship with God is the same. We need to “pray always” by doing everything out of that kind of awareness. Moreover, when we do spend time in formal prayer, we need, like children do, to tell God exactly how we feel and invite God to deal with that. Rabbi Abraham Heschel points out how, in prayer, the great figures of scripture did not always easily acquiesce to God and say: “The will be done!” They sometimes fought bitterly and said: “Thy will be changed!” That can be good prayer. It lifts mind and heart to God.

A Challenge from our Born-Again and Devotionally-Oriented Siblings

February 23, 2003

Twenty years ago, the renowned scripture scholar, Raymond Brown, gave a series of lectures to an ecumenical audience on how the various New Testament writers understood the church that Jesus left us. At one stage, reflecting on how the Evangelist, John, understood the church, he made a comment to this effect:

Those parishes and worshipping communities that most stress good theology and proper liturgy as a healthy corrective to privatized and devotional spirituality, often find, to their surprise and consternation, that they are losing parishioners to religious groups that stress a personal relationship to Jesus, that is, groups that come out of old-style Roman Catholic devotions or out of Protestant, “Born-again”, fundamentalism. Mainline pastors argue that this is not a healthy development and state, correctly, that liturgical worship should be the central piece to any ecclesiology and spirituality. But they are also learning, hard, that communal worship alone, even when done with the greatest attention to proper ritual and good aesthetics, can lack something, namely, an accompanying personal spirituality. Jesus needs a personal face and those conducting liturgy must help the community to know that face, otherwise liturgy alone leaves the community wanting for something.

Brown goes on to suggest that mainline Christians sometimes speak of “Born-again Christians” pejoratively, suggesting that their stress on a privatized, salvific relationship to Jesus is not healthy. However, Brown suggests that the Evangelist, John, might ask the mainline churches (and our liturgists and theologians) to be a little more sympathetic towards our devotionally-oriented and “Born-again” siblings because, for John, church membership alone is not a sufficient goal and liturgy is adequate only when it also helps effect a personal, affective relationship to Jesus.

A little theology and a little liturgy can be a dangerous thing. Fortunately, the deeper wells in both teach that, while gathering in liturgy is central, Jesus must also touch each of us in a deep, personal way. Thus, for instance, suppose, as a priest, I say this: “My spirituality and prayer is the spirituality and prayer of the church. Liturgy and the divine office are enough, I’ve no need for private, devotional-type prayer, either for myself or to encourage it for others.”

The danger in that is that I can easily end up a pure functionary, someone who perhaps celebrates liturgy well aesthetically, offers solid scriptural reflections on the word of God, and has some skills in community-building. But I will lack the power – that “authority” that people saw in Jesus – to lead people to Christ because my own soul is insufficiently engaged in that very process. The same holds true for everyone else involved in conducting liturgy.

There’s a principle in psychology which says that I can only educe love out of others if I, myself, have first experienced it. The same is true for liturgy and spirituality: I can only help effect a personal relationship to God in someone else if I have, first, experienced this myself – good ritual, beautiful aesthetics, sound theology, and “ex opere operato” notwithstanding.

Annie Dillard, in one of her early books, makes this comment: Sharing why she worshipped in a fundamentalistic, sectarian church (when her natural temperament was towards Roman Catholicism or high- Church Protestantism) she simply says: I go to that particular church because I like the minister. He actually believes what he preaches and when he says a prayer he really means it. Implied in that, sadly, is the comment that, in our high churches, that is not always so evident of those reading the word, leading the prayers, conducting the music, and doing the preaching.

I want to say this sympathetically, as Brown did, and yet not mute its challenge: For those of us who are “High Church”, either by temperament or denomination, it’s too easy to look at the devotional stream within Roman Catholicism or the “Low Church” tradition within Protestantism and see it simply as “Jesus and I” spirituality, as excessively privatized, as seeking the wrong kind of security, as spiritually immature, as theological and liturgical backwater, and as deflecting people from the real centre, worship in liturgy. In making such an assessment, partially, we are dangerously wrong, at least according to one New Testament writer.

In John’s gospel, ecclesiology and liturgy are subservient to the person of Jesus and a personal relationship to him. To teach this, John presents the image of “the beloved disciple”, one who has a special intimacy with Jesus. For John, this intimacy outweighs everything else, including special service in the church. Thus, at the last supper, Peter, the head of the apostles, may not even talk directly to Jesus, but has to channel his question through the one who has this special intimacy with Jesus. In John, everything is second to this particular relationship.

If this is true, and it is, then we who are “high church” have something to learn from our “low church” and more devotionally- oriented siblings: Jesus is our personal saviour!

The Churches and the Social Gospel

February 16, 2003

It’s fashionable today to bash the churches, not just in terms of the scandals within them that hit the newspapers, but, more importantly, in terms of making them out to be enemies of the poor. There’s a popular myth that would have us believe that the churches are rich, self- interested, and too corrupt to have much concern and compassion for the poor. The secular media is now, more and more, seen as the champion of the poor, as the moral voice within the culture that speaks for justice, and as a voice that warns the unsuspecting of the greed and self-interest of the churches.

Don’t get me wrong. The media is not a villain and its critique of the churches, while sometimes biased and inflated, is rendering an important service, not least to the churches themselves who, except for this kind of criticism, too easily ignore parts of the gospel.

With that being admitted, something else also needs to be said: The argument that the media and not the churches are the real guardian of the poor is based upon selective evidence and a very bad memory. One needs only to look back into history, or just look around today, to see another picture. The churches have been, and still are, at those places with the poor where nobody else wants to be.

The churches, for all their faults and infidelities, ultimately were the key moral ingredient in the abolition of slavery, the founding and legitimizing of labor unions, the push for government health care, the rise of feminism, the push for the equality of races, and the ecological movement because, historically, they were the major moral instrument in shaping of the conscience of secularity itself. The Enlightenment has its roots in the Judeo-Christianity.

Our culture, now so critical of the church, should take a look at where its own roots come from in terms of moral principle. More than one historian will tell it that it takes its roots in the biblical and moral traditions of Judeo-Christianity. A certain honesty might, ideally, flow from that. Long before most secular groups became interested in serving the poor and working for social justice, the churches were already there, on the streets and in the academy of ideas, serving the poor and trying to shape the conscience of society.

Let me here, for critics and faithful alike, list, in caption form, some of the main tenets of that long tradition. With little difference among the various churches, Christian spirituality teaches, and has taught for a long time, these moral truths:

1) All people in the world have equal dignity and should enjoy equal rights in terms of respect, access to resources, and access to opportunity.

2) God intended the earth for all persons equally. Thus the riches of this world should flow equally and fairly to all. All other rights, including the right to private property and the accumulation of riches that are fairly earned, must be subordinated to this more primary principle.

3) The right to private property and accumulation of wealth is not an absolute one. It must be subordinated to the common good, to the fact that the goods of the earth are intended equally for all. No one has the moral right to keep as much as he or she can earn without concern for the common good (even is he or she is a celebrity).

4) No person, group of persons, or nation may have a surplus of goods if others lack the basic necessities.

5) We are obliged, morally, to come to the aid of those in need. In giving such aid, we are not doing charity, but serving justice. Helping the poor is not an issue of personal virtue and generosity, but something that is demanded by justice itself.

6) The laws of supply and demand, free enterprise, unbridled competition, the profit motive, and private ownership of the means of production may not be seen as morally inviolate and must, when the common good or justice demand, be balanced off by other principles.

7) Physical nature, too, has inherent rights, namely, rights that are intrinsic to itself and not simply given to it because of its relationship to humanity. The earth is not just a stage for human beings to play on, but is a creature of God with it own rights which humans may not violate.

8) The present situation within the world where some individuals and nations have excess while others lack the basic necessities, is immoral, goes against the teachings of Christ, and must be redressed.

9) The condemnation of injustice is part of the church’s essential ministry of preaching and is an essential aspect of the church’s prophetic role.

10) Movement towards the poor is a privileged route towards God and towards spiritual health. There can be no spiritual health, individually and communally, when there is no real involvement with the struggles of the poor. Conversely, riches of all kinds are dangerous.

In Defense of Mystery

February 9, 2003

Recently I attended a symposium on Interreligious Dialogue. The keynote speakers were all excellent, with a single exception. One speaker suggested that one of the problems with Christianity is that it still contains too many elements that are unacceptable to the critical mind. Christianity, he said, should either expunge or simply ignore those elements within it that cannot be understood and explained satisfactorily in purely rational terms; for example, original sin, Jesus’ death as an expiation, the virgin birth, and the concept of the resurrection.

“Who can believe these things?” he argued. “Intelligent people, critical minds, will invariably reject those beliefs!”

G.K. Chesterton once said, “Learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again.” He should counsel this man. Perhaps the worst temptation any theology can succumb to is the temptation to reduce mystery, to ignore, expunge, or tone down those parts of its tradition that cannot be explained or conceptualized rationally or given satisfactory expression in critical language: “If I can’t think it, picture it, or speak about it rationally, then it’s either myth or nonsense!”

The end result of this is that God gets reduced to the size and shape of our own intelligence and imagination, not a very happy or long-range prospect. Any God who isn’t more intelligent, more powerful, and more enterprising than we is not worth believing in, nor is any religion that doesn’t go beyond our imagination. Faith, if it is to have any depth and sustain us for long, has to ground itself, precisely, in something beyond our own imaginations and our own powers.

God, by definition, is ineffable. Right off the top, that already tells us that everything we can imaginatively picture or rationally say about God is inadequate. There’s a Christian dogma to that effect. In 1215, the church defined dogmatically that all our concepts and language about God are more inaccurate than accurate, more inadequate than adequate, and speak more about how God is different from us than similar.

In the light that, what’s to be said about those things within our faith that we can’t picture or explain rationally? Happily, we should state precisely that they are beyond us, mysteries, wondrous realities that make God worth believing in.

We need to be humble about language. All talk of the sacred is limited by our imaginations and our language. We are finite creatures trying to picture and talk about the infinite; an impossible task, by definition. We have no way of picturing the infinite or of adequately speaking about it. The finite mind runs out of room at a certain point; for example, “What’s the highest number that can be thought of?” The infinite can’t be conceived and God is infinite.

Knowing that, doesn’t weaken my faith: I believe deeply in the reality behind our religious language, namely, the existence of a Trinitarian God, the goodness of that God, the divinity of Christ, the need for salvation through divine sacrifice, the fact of the resurrection, and the promise of God as the only real basis for hope, among many other things. But I’m under no illusion that our language about those realities (including the language of scripture, the creeds, and the dogmas of the church) is meant to be taken literally, like a video-tape. Rather that language puts me in touch with those realities, it lays out some boundaries within which I should stay if I don’t want to stray from the truth, and it stretches my intellect and heart beyond their normal resting places; but it doesn’t give me video-taped images or rational pictures of the reality of God or of spirit. I’m well advised not to take that language too literally, even as I’m equally well advised not to ever throw it away. It’s inadequate, but it’s all we have.

I like Annie Dillard’s comment on this:

“The higher Christian churches – where, if anywhere, I belong – come at God with an unwarranted air of professionalism, with authority and pomp, as if they knew what they were doing, as though people in themselves were an appropriate set of creatures to have dealings with God. I often think of the set pieces of liturgy as certain words which people have successfully addressed to God without their getting killed. In the high churches they saunter through liturgy like Mohawks along a strand of scaffolding who have long since forgotten their danger. If God were to blast such a service to bits, the congregation would be, I believe, genuinely shocked. But in the low churches you expect it at any minute. This is the beginning of wisdom.”

Never assume that religious language is anywhere near adequate; albeit it’s useful. No theology, however good, gives you a picture of God. Good theology helps you know something that you can’t think or picture. The heart knows things that the mind cannot picture and our experience is full of a richness for which we never find adequate words. Thank God for that. That’s the heart of faith.

The Loneliness of Leaving Home

February 2, 2003

Among the kinds of loneliness that afflict us, there’s one we don’t often recognize and deal with very well, the loneliness of moving on. There’s a loneliness that comes with leaving home, with forever losing loved ones, loved places, and loved things.

Home, T.S. Eliot says, is where we start from. But we never get to stay there for long. Neither does anyone else. From the time we’re born until we die, we, and everyone else, are on the move. People, places, things, organizations, and knowledge are passing through our lives in a way that is forever cutting away at our roots, destabilizing us, and leaving us scrambling to find a home.

Finding a home is not, in the end, so much a question of finding a building, a city, a country, or a place where we feel we belong. That’s part of it. More deeply, finding a home is a question of moral affinity, of finding another heart or a community of hearts wherein we feel at one, safe, warm, comfortable, able to be ourselves, secure enough to express both faith and affection. To find a home is to feel what Adam felt when he first saw Eve: “At last, bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh!” That’s not so much an expression of sexual attraction as it is of moral comfort. What Adam sensed in Eve, that he didn’t sense in the rest of creation, was a home.

We go through life lonely, looking for a home, aching to stand one day before some person, some place, some truth, or some family and, like Adam, realize that this, among all the others, is what we are looking for – “At last, bone of my bone!” But how to find that? Where is home?

Everywhere and nowhere, it would seem. There’s an incident in the gospels where Jesus tells us where home is. He’s seated among a circle of disciples when someone comes to him and says: “Your mother and brothers and sisters are outside asking for you!” Jesus’ response is a curious one. No doubt, he loved his mother and his relatives; yet he doesn’t get up and go out to them. Instead he says: “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers and sisters?” Pointing to those around him, he says: “Here are my mother and my brothers. Anyone who does the will of God, that person is my brother and sister and mother.”

By saying this, Jesus is not distancing himself from his natural mother, Mary, since she, in fact, among all the people around him, is the one who most truly fits the description for discipleship that he has just laid down. She, more than anyone else, did the will of God. What Jesus is doing is redefining what makes for family, for home, for homeland.

Normally we define family by blood-ties, common ancestry, ethnicity, language, skin-colour, gender, nationality, or geography. Blood, we say, is thicker than water. But, according to Jesus, the waters of baptism and faith are thicker even than blood. A shared faith, more than a shared blood, ethnicity, language, skin-colour, religion, gender, or geography, is what makes for a family. Faith is what ultimately gives you a home, a homeland, a nationality, a mother-tongue, a skin-colour, and a family that is lasting.

Simply put, when we share a common faith we find ourselves within a community of hearts that is our true country; when we speak the language of faith we have a common language that is understood by all; and when, as Jesus challenges us to, we are willing to sacrifice some of our blood in love, we help create the real blood that makes for one family – Bone from my bone, flesh from my flesh!

Home is where the heart is. Jesus would agree with that. But in his view of things, what ultimately draws the heart and makes for family are not the historical accidents of birth, biology, ethnicity, language, gender, and geography. Family that lasts is constituted not by biology but by faith. In another incident in the gospels a woman says to Jesus: “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!” In today’s idiom, she’s saying: “You must of had a wonderful mother!” Jesus’ answer: “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and keep it!” He’s saying: “Yes, I had a wonderful mother, more wonderful than you imagine; but she didn’t just give me biological birth, she gave me faith!”

We come into this world as a stranger and some people pick us up and make us part of their family. In faith, that happens again, except our new family is bound together by something beyond blood, ethnicity, and geography, and so it outlives these.

There’s a loneliness that comes with leaving home. Something always stays behind, and even that doesn’t stay the same. But there’s an answer to that loneliness, a new home inside a community of faith.