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

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

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

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

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

What’s to be said about this?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*”We must gamble everything for love.” Rumi

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.

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.

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.

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.