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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

If you’re someone who’s at all concerned about community, family, church, justice, education, culture, or civic issues, you will, no doubt, find yourself at a lot of meetings. A colleague of mine likes to quip: “When they write our history, they’ll simply say, `They met a lot!'”

Indeed we do. We meet a lot. There are an endless variety of issues that call for our participation in group discussion and community discernment: church issues, education issues, justice issues, moral issues, political issues, social issues, economic issues, and cultural issues. It’s a bottomless well and all those meetings can seem like a huge waste of time and energy, a distraction to real work. Moreover, at a point, we can’t help wondering too: “Are all these meetings changing anything? Would life be any different (other than more leisured and pleasant) if we stopped having all these meetings?” It’s easy to grow tired, discouraged, and cynical about all the meetings we’re asked to attend.

But we should keep something in mind: Pentecost happened at a meeting! One of the central events that shaped Christian history and history in general, happened not to an individual off praying alone or to a monk on a mountain-top or to a solitary Buddha meditating under a tree. None of these. Pentecost happened at meeting and it happened to a community, to a church congregation assembled for prayer, to a family of faith gathered to wait for God’s guidance. Moreover it happened in a common room, a meeting room, in one of those humble, church- basement, type of rooms. It can be helpful to remember that. Our search for God should take us not just into private places of quiet and contemplation but, equally, into meeting rooms.

Where Christianity is different from most other world religions is partly on this very point. In Islam, Buddhism, Hinduism, and Taoism, spirit and revelation break into the world very much through an individual, particularly an individual who is deeply immersed in private prayer. God speaks deeply to those who pray deeply.

Christian spirituality and Judaism have no argument with that. We agree. There’s a privileged experience of God that can be had only in private, alone, in silence. To find God, to receive God’s spirit, it’s important that, at times, we pull away from the group, that we set off to the desert, to the chapel, to the lonely place, the quiet, to be alone with God. We see Jesus do exactly that. Mark’s gospel tells us that when his ministry was most intense, when it was “too busy even to eat”, Jesus pulled away, to be alone for awhile. There are times that call for withdrawal and silence. Meister Eckhart once wrote: “There is nothing in the world that resembles God as much as silence.” All good spirituality shares this view.

However, where Christianity and Judaism differ somewhat from some of the other world religions is in our belief that there is an equally privileged experience of God that can be had only in a group, in community, in family, at a meeting. We don’t just meet God in the desert or in the deep quiet parts of our souls. We meet God there, surely, but we also meet God in the group, the community, the family, at the church gathering, at the meeting: “For where two or three meet in my name, I shall be there with them!” In Christian and Jewish spirituality there are two non-negotiable places where we meet God, alone and in the family. These are not in opposition, but complementary, relying on each other to keep our experience of God both deep and pure.

Pentecost, it is important to note, happened to a group at a meeting, not to an individual alone in the desert. That can be helpful to keep in mind when we tire of meetings, despair of their effectiveness, or resent that they pull us away from important private endeavours. The fact that pentecost happened at a meeting can also be helpful in keeping us focused on why we are going to all these meetings in the first place.

Peter Maurin, Dorothy Day’s initial mentor, used to say: “When you don’t know what else to do, keep going to meetings!” Sound advice! Meetings are the “Upper room”, the place where we wait for pentecost. And what are we waiting for? Why are we in the upper room, at a meeting? Because we are waiting there, with others, for God to do something in us and through us that we can’t do all by ourselves, namely, create community with each other and bring justice, love, peace, and joy to our world.

And so we need to go to continue to go to meetings. We need to spend time together waiting for God, waiting for a new outflow of heavenly fire that will give us the courage, language, and power we need to make happen in the world what our faith and love envision.

See you at the meeting!

Several years ago, Roger Rosenblatt, in an essay in TIME magazine, offered this advice to his son who was graduating from high school and heading off to college: “Whatever you do in life, be sure to admire others who do it as well or better than you. My trade of journalism is sodden these days with practitioners who seem incapable of admiring others or anything.”

The incapacity to admire others doesn’t just afflict journalists. It seems to be a universal disease today. We see it everywhere, in journalism, for sure, but also in the academic world, in professional circles of all kinds, and in church and family life. It seems none of us are very good any more at affording anyone (outside of a very select circle of “our own”) the gaze of admiration. Children are still good at admiring, but, among us, the adults, there’s little in the way of simple appreciative consciousness. We know how to criticize, but not how to admire.

Why? What’s causing this? Why do others and the things around us never seem good enough, never seem worthy of admiration? Why do we always find fault in everyone and everything?

We’d like to think it’s sophistication, a refined sense of truth, aesthetics, and history that makes us so critical of others and things. Indeed there is a flaw in everything, something that’s either simplistic, acting out of self-interest, naive, in bad taste, overly-saccharine, ill- informed, or itself too cynical to merit admiration. Only God is perfect. Everything and everybody else have faults that can be criticized.

But our sophistication, enlightenment, and refined sense of aesthetics are ultimately not the real reason why we find ourselves so easily offended, hypercritical, and so stingy in our admiration and praise. Something more base lurks underneath, immaturity. In the end, our itch to criticize rather than admire is, more often than not, nothing more than a projection of our own unhappiness and a not-so-subtle plea that’s saying: “Admire me!” “Notice me!” “Why am I not being noticed and admired?”

Anthropology tells us that adulthood can be defined this way: A mature man or woman is a principle of order rather than disorder, is someone who helps carry the burdens and tensions of others rather than dumps his or her own tensions on them, is someone who helps feed others rather than feeds off of them, and is someone who admires others as opposed to demanding that others admire him or her. One of the defining traits of human maturity is the capacity to admire. If that is true, and it is, then our proclivity for criticism speaks of a lot more things than simply our enlightenment.

Thomas Aquinas once stated that to withhold a compliment from someone is a sin because we are withholding food that this person needs to live. That’s a challenging statement, but the challenge is more than that of providing food for others to live on. Admiring others also provides us with the food we ourselves need.

One of the reasons why we live with so much dissatisfaction, anger, bitterness, and depression is precisely because we no longer know how to admire. It’s hard to be happy and to feel good about ourselves when we don’t feel very good about anything or anyone around us. Without admiration we can never be happy – nor can we see straight, irrespective of how sophisticated, educated, scientifically-trained, aesthetically fined- tuned, or hermeneutically-enlightened we are.

Hugo of St. Victor had an axiom which said: “Love is the eye!” Only when we see through the prism of love do we see correctly. Admiration is part of that. When we don’t admire, we aren’t seeing straight, pure and simple. When we are forever seeing what’s wrong in others that speaks volumes about our own interior state. Partly we see what’s out there, partly though what we think we see is largely coloured by our own interior disposition. Thus an habitually negative eye says as much about the beholder as it does about the beholden.

Whenever our world feels grey, whenever we feel bitter and short- changed, and whenever we feel frustrated with everything and everyone, we need to ask ourselves: “When was the last time I really admired someone?” “When was the last time I told someone that he or she had done something really well?” “When is the last time I looked at anything or anyone with the gaze of admiration?”

When we admire we get to feel good because, when we act like God, we get to feel like God. God is never grey, depressed, and cynical, and God’s first gaze at us, as both Scripture and the mystics assure us, is not one of critical disapproval but one of admiration. As Julian of Norwich puts it, God sits in heaven, completely relaxed, smiling, his face looking like a marvellous symphony. That’s hardly the description of how we – journalists, academics, artists, theologians, ministers, priests, and ordinary folks – normally look at the world.