A number of things should be clarified to help us properly contextualize the present crisis of sexual abuse within the church.

What needs clarification? Three things in particular: The effect of sexual abuse on its victims, the prevalence of sexual abuse within our culture, and the nature of the disease of paedophilia:

First, and most important of all, the effect of sexual abuse on its victim:

We can never overstate the utter devastation of soul that is caused in a victim of sexual abuse. Nothing so scars, violates, and unravels the soul – literally pulls it apart – as does sexual abuse. I’ve heard two highly respected psychiatrists say that their hunch is that teenage suicide, so rampant in our culture, is, 80% of the time, a result of sexual abuse, however complex might be the proximate sequence of events leading up to the suicide. That’s also true, I suspect, for many adult suicides. Sexual abuse scars deeply and permanently.

Next, some stunning numbers about it’s prevalence. We don’t, for obvious reasons, have hard numbers here, but, in so far as we can make an educated guess, it’s estimated that, in the Western world, one out of every four or five persons, girls and boys, comes to adulthood scarred, having been violated sexually in either a major way or minor way, though it’s rare the violation is minor because by nature all sexual abuse is serious. In terms of an image, this means that [statistically] some form of sexual abuse is happening in every fourth or fifth house in the Western world.

These tragic numbers do not excuse priests who are guilty, but they can keep us aware that priests are less than .01 per-cent of this massive problem. In fact, statistically, this disease is marginally lower among the clergy and vowed religious than it is among the population at large.

Moreover, also against popular understanding, paedophilia is not a celibate or gay disease. It’s a disease, pure and simple, cutting across all boundaries, clergy and lay, men and women, gay and straight, married and celibate. Like alcohol, it plays no favourites. It’s a sickness and not a question of somebody not having proper willpower or of somebody who doesn’t have sex acting out because of that deprivation.

A comparison might be made to alcoholism: Sixty years ago, society had very little understanding of alcoholism as a disease. We naively thought that the problem was simply a failure of willpower: “Why don’t they just stop drinking!” Now we recognize that alcoholism is a sickness and must be understood and treated as such.

A naive understanding of the nature of paedophilia is also one of the reasons why bishops made some mistakes early on. Unaware of the real and deep nature of this as an illness, some believed the perpetrator when he said, “I’ll never do it again.” The perpetrator was sincere in saying that and they were sincere in believing it, but, as we know now, that’s a dangerous naivete, both ways, akin to an alcoholic (not in treatment) promising to never drink again.

What causes paedophilia? While there is now division over a former axiom that held that “every abuser was first abused”, everyone agrees that paedophilia is caused by some massive trauma in childhood. In many, perhaps most, cases the perpetrators were themselves sexually abused as children. Whatever the trauma he or she experienced, the consensus is that, whatever happened, it was massively deep and this is part of the nature of the disease itself. Paedophilia is an awful disease because something awful caused it.

The anatomy of the illness can help us to understand it: A paedophile is someone who is sexually attracted to a pre-pubescent child. What causes this? The literature in the area suggests that a reason for that attraction, perhaps the main one, is not to do with sex but with the particular trauma the perpetrator experienced as a child, namely, some trauma killed the child in them and the pathological sexual attraction to children exists in the paedophile because his or her own childhood was stolen.

If we keep all of this in mind, it can help us not to fall off either side of a delicate tightrope that needs to be walked on this issue: On the one hand, we can never be too careful regarding sexual abuse. Anything that makes light of it or exposes children to undue risk must be vigorously fought. On the other hand, understanding paedophilia as a disease can help us not to be unduly scandalized by the fact that it also afflicts some priests and religious, as do other diseases.

Nobody is exempt from the human condition and learning that there are some priests who are suffer from a disease that afflicts many, many people shouldn’t lead to the conclusion that a whole system is shot through with hypocrisy, that bishops are more concerned about self- preservation than the gospel, or that vowed celibacy is, in se, an unhealthy condition. Illness is not the same as hypocrisy.

We’re strange creatures, more lovely than we think and more sinful than we imagine, too hard and too easy on ourselves all at the same time.

Human nature is a curious mix. On the one hand, we’re better than we think and this beauty and goodness doesn’t just come because, deep down, we’re made in the image and likeness of God or because, as Plato and Aristotle say, we’re metaphysically good. That’s true, but our loveliness is also less abstract. We’re beautiful too, at least most of the time, in our human and moral qualities.

Most of the time, in fact, we are quite generous, often to a fault. As well, most of the time too, despite appearances, we’re warm and hospitable. The same is true in terms of the desire and scope of our embrace, both of our minds and our hearts. Inside of everyone, easily triggered by the slightest touch of love or affirmation, lies a big heart, a grand soul, a MAGNA ANIMA, that’s just itching to show itself. Mostly the problem isn’t with our goodness, but with our frustration in trying to live out that goodness in the world. Too often we look cold and self- centred when we’re only hurt and wounded.

We don’t always look good, but we are. Mostly we’re frustrated precisely because we cannot (for reasons of circumstance, wound, and sensitivity) pour out our goodness as we would like nor embrace the world and those around us with the warmth that’s in us. We go through life looking for a warm place to show who we are and mostly don’t find it. We’re not so much bad as frustrated. We’re more lovely than we dare imagine.

That’s the half of it, there’s another side: We’re sinners too, more so than we think. An old Protestant dictum about human nature, based upon St. Paul, puts it accurately: “It’s not a question of are you a sinner? It’s only a question of what is your sin?” We’re all sinners and, just as we possess a big heart and a grand soul, we also possess a petty one (a PUSILLA ANIMA). Inside us too, congenitally, there’s selfishness, jealousy, and a pettiness of heart and mind that is never far from the surface.

Moreover, generally, we are blind to our real faults. As Jesus says, we too easily see the speck on our neighbour’s eye and miss the plank in our own. There’s a real contradiction here: Where we think we’re sinners is usually not the place where others struggle the most with us and where our real faults lie. Conversely it’s in those areas where we think we’re virtuous and righteous that, most often, our real sin lies and where others struggle with us.

For example, we’ve have always put a lot of emphasis on the 6th commandment, sexual ethics, and haven’t been nearly as self-scrutinizing in regards to the fifth commandment (that deals with bitterness, judgements, anger, and hatred) or with the 9th and 10th commandments (that have to do with jealousy). It’s not that sexual ethics are unimportant, but our failures here are easier to see and harder to rationalize. The same isn’t true for bitterness, anger, especially righteous anger, nor for jealousy. We can more easily rationalize these and not notice that jealousy is the only sin that God felt it necessary to prohibit in two commandments. We’re worse than we imagine and mostly blind to our real faults.

So where does that leave us? In better and worse shape than we think! Recognizing that we’re more lovely than we imagine and at the same time more sinful than we suppose can be helpful, both for our self- understanding and for how we understand God’s love and grace in our lives.

Aristotle used to say that “two contraries cannot exist within the same subject”. He’s right metaphysically, but two contraries do exist inside of us morally. We’re both good and bad, generous and selfish, big- hearted and petty, gracious and bitter, forgiving and resentful, hospitable and cold, full of grace and full of sin, all at the same time. Moreover we’re dangerously blind to both, too unaware of our loveliness as well as our nastiness.

To recognize this is both humbling and freeing. In essence, we’re, “loved sinners”. Both goodness and sin constitute our real identity. Not to recognize the truth of either leaves us either unhealthily depressed or dangerously inflated, too hard on ourselves or too easy on ourselves. The truth will set us free and the truth about ourselves is that we’re both better and worse than we picture ourselves to be.

Robert Funk once formulated three dictums on grace that capture this well:
*Grace always wounds from behind, at the point where we think we are least vulnerable.
*Grace is harder than we think: we moralize judgement in order to take the edge off it.
*Grace is more indulgent than we think: but it is never indulgent at the point where we think it might be indulgent.

It’s easy to be cynical about the hype surrounding Christmas, not just because it starts earlier each year and seems focused on everything but the birth of Jesus, but also because Christmas itself seemingly doesn’t deliver on its promise.

What is the promise of Christmas? What Christmas is meant to bring is laid out in the biblical texts given us in our advent liturgies. Mostly these are prophetic visions of what things will look like after God sends a messiah into the world. Taken mainly from the Jewish prophets, particularly from Isaiah, these visions promise that the birth of the messiah will turn reality delightfully upside down. What Christmas promises is universal peace, the lion and lamb lying down together; reconciliation, enemies forgiving each other; justice, valleys filled in and deep places raised up; food for all, every sheep carefully tended to; restfulness from our longing, everyone cradled peacefully in loving arms; and healing from all wound, God himself drying every tear on earth. The Christmas crib is an icon of that peace. The hymn “Silent Night” captures its spirit.

But our world, as we know, is far, far from this peace. There are few silent nights, at least if we are to believe the evening news. There is a threat of war and terrorism everywhere, sincere people are killing each other in the name of God, the gap between rich and poor is widening daily, and tens of millions are sick and dying of hunger and AIDS in a world rich in food and medicines. Everywhere there are people who are hungry, oppressed, living in fear, and daily there are more people murdered and raped than our newspapers and newscasts have space and time to report. Christmas still seems more of a promise than a reality.

Granted, this is not the whole story or perhaps even the real story. There’s perspective that the evening news doesn’t tell: The vast majority of people on this planet are sincere and are trying to deal with all of this as best they can. As well, the vast majority of people on this planet rise each day and turn their faces to God and pray. There’s still more belief than non-belief, sincerity than insincerity, sanity than insanity, and goodness than malice on this planet. Not all is war and violence.

So what is the real state of things? Can we sing “Silent Night” and have it mean something? Has Christmas delivered on its promise?

Singing “Silent Night” and “Joy to the World” with the same wonder felt by the first shepherds, after just having been told of Jesus’ birth by the angels, is precisely what our faith asks of us. And that’s an adult, not a childish, task. The Christmas promise has come true, though we need to recognize how:

The prophet Isaiah tells us that when the birth of the messiah is announced to King Ahaz, God says: “A virgin will give birth a son whom she shall call him Immanuel” – a name which means “God-is-with-us”. To understand this is to celebrate Christmas without denying or trivializing either the truth of God’s promise or the real pain and evil in the world.

Christmas is precisely the challenge to celebrate while we are still in pain. Jesus’ birth means that God-is-with-us. That fact alone doesn’t mean immediate consummate joy or even automatic justice. Our world still looks much the same. In Christmas, God doesn’t send a super-hero to rid the earth of evil by forcefully destroying all that’s bad. God sends a helpless baby, lying in the straw, needing to be picked up, nursed, nurtured. That’s God’s wisdom, the power of a baby. Babies don’t shoot bad guys, like Sylvester Stalone or James Bond at the end of movie, they change hearts by offering a gentler presence.

So Christmas doesn’t rid the world of evil. For the Christian, just as for everyone else, there will still be sickness, senseless hurt, broken dreams, and cold, lonely seasons when love is far away. Christmas doesn’t promise heaven on earth. Rather it promises us, here on earth, something else: God’s presence in our lives.

And it’s that presence, not the power of a superhero to blow away all that’s bad, that redeems us. When we sense that God-is-with-us we can give up selfishness, bitterness, and jealousy because we are no longer alone in them. Everything can be born if it can be shared. We no longer walk alone in our pain. When we are not alone then pain and happiness are not mutually exclusive and the agonies and hurts of life do not exclude deep meaning and deep joy.

Avery Dulles once put it this way: “The incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape the ambiguities of life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.”

When I was a child, as part of our family prayer, we used to pray for a happy death. In my young mind, I had a certain conception of what that might look like. A happy death would be to die inside of grace, cradled warmly in the loving arms of family and church, fully at peace with God and others, having had time to speak some final words of love and gratitude.

Not many people get to die like that. Accidents, unfortunate circumstance, and the complexity of human relationships conspire so that often people die in less-than-ideal situations – angry, compromised, unforgiving, bitter, immature, unreconciled. Sometimes too the very cause of death speaks of lack of peace: drunkenness, an overdose of drugs, depression, recklessness, suicide. Death often catches people before they have had time to do and say the things that should have been done and said. Invariably there is some unfinished business.

We all know examples of this: A man dead in an accident whose last words to his family were ones of anger; a woman dead of an overdose who hasn’t talked to her family in years; a colleague dead by his own hand, a friend who dies bitter, unable to forgive; or even simply the loved one who’s taken away before he or she has had the chance to speak some last words of love and farewell. Rarely do people die with no unfinished business.

The pain of this can linger for a long time. I remember, in my early years of priesthood, counselling a man in his fifties who still carried pain and guilt from his mother’s death more than forty years previous. He had been taken to his mother’s bedside in the hospital, but wasn’t aware that she was dying. She had asked him to give her a hug and he, a child, frightened and reticent, had backed away. The next day she died and thus his last memory of his mother was his refusing to hug her. When I met him it was forty years later and he still hadn’t made peace with that.

Many of us have had persons close to us die with whom we had unfinished business, a hurt that was never reconciled, an injustice that was never rectified, a bitterness that never softened. Death has now separated us and the unfinished business remains precisely unfinished and we are left saying: “If only there was another chance!”

Well, there is another chance. One of our wonderful, albeit neglected, Christian doctrines is our belief in the communion of the saints. It’s a doctrine that’s enshrined in the creed itself and it asks us to believe that we are still in vital communication with those who have died. Moreover, it tells us that the communication we now have with them is free from many of the tensions that coloured our relationship with them while they were still alive.

Hence, to believe in the communion of saints is to believe that we can still tend to unfinished business in our relationships, even after death. Simply put, we can still talk to those who have died and we can, even now, say the words of love, forgiveness, gratitude, and regret that ideally we should have spoken earlier. Indeed, inside the communion of saints the reconciliation that always eluded us while that person was alive can now more easily take place. Why?

Because inside the communion of saints, after death, our communication is privileged. Death washes clean. It clarifies perspective and takes away a lot of relational tensions. Why do I say this? Both because our faith and our experience teach us this.

For example, all of us have experienced situations where, inside of a family, a friendship circle, a community, or a group of colleagues, a bitter difference grows up and festers so that eventually there is an unresolvable tension. Things have happened that can no longer be undone. Then someone in the family or community dies and that death changes everything. In a strange way the death brings with it a peace, a clarity, and a charity which, prior to it, were not possible. Why is this? It’s not simply because the death has changed the chemistry of the group or because, as we may simplistically conclude, the source of the tension or bitterness has died. It happens because, as Luke teaches in his Passion narrative, death can wash things clean. Death releases forgiveness, in the same way as Jesus forgave the good thief upon the cross as he died.

This can be an immense consolation to us. What we can’t bring to wholeness in this life can, if we are attentive to the communion of saints, be completed afterwards. We still have communication, privileged communication, with our loved ones after death. Among the marvels of that lies the fact that we still have a chance to fix the things, after death, that we were powerless to mend before death took a loved one away.

It’s not easy to be centred, rooted, secure in who we are, able to give the world our best. More commonly, we find ourselves adrift, unsure of ourselves, with most of what’s best in us still frustrated, buried, waiting for a better day. Too many things, it seems, conspire against us living out what’s truest and best inside us.

We’d like to be grounded, be ourselves, have a clear direction in life, be free of compulsions, and live out more our dignity, goodness, and creativity; but too many things push us the opposite way. Ideology, anger, bitterness, envy, restlessness, confusion, moral compromise, and the simple need to get by, all pull us down and we end up giving into various compensations (as substitutes for what we really want) and thus quietly despair of ever carrying our dignity, talents, and solitude at any high level.

Why does it happen? The fault is with prayer, or lack of it. We cannot stay steady in a churning sea without a good anchor, cannot avoid giving into compensation unless what’s highest in us is given enough expression, and cannot deal with the issues of finitude unless we have some transcendent focus. Unless we are anchored in something beyond the here and now there is a good chance that we will drown in the present moment.

Jesus models the kind of prayer we need to cope with a world that goes mad at times and with a heart prone to drink in that madness. The gospels describe Jesus praying in different ways, but sometimes they simply say: “He turned his eyes towards heaven!” The same expression is used of other great faith-figures – Stephen, Paul, the early martyrs – and it’s used of them at those times when the forces of madness are precisely threatening to kill them. When the world around them is going mad, they “turn their eyes towards heaven.” The phrase hasn’t been lost on artists.

Virtually every painting of someone being martyred has this motif, the martyr has his or her eyes lifted up towards heaven, in contrast to the eyes of the executioners and onlookers which are cast downwards in hatred, envy, and group-think or in the blank stare of mindlessness.

Jesus lifted his eyes towards heaven and that freed him of hatred, envy, group-think, and mindlessness. What does this mean? How did he turn his eyes towards heaven?

What made Jesus different (and what makes any prayerful person different) is not intellectual insight, superior willpower, less fiery 
emotions, or monastic withdrawal from the temptations of the world.

Prayer is not a question of insight, of being smarter than anyone else; nor of will, of being stronger than anyone else; nor of emotional 
restraint or sexual aloofness, of being less passionate than anyone else; nor of withdrawal, of being less exposed to temptation than anyone else. Prayer is a question of unity and surrender, of uniting one’s will with someone else and surrendering one’s will to that other. Prayer is the desire to be in union with someone, especially in union with that other’s will.

Perhaps the people that have understood this best are Alcoholics Anonymous groups. They long ago realized that it’s not by strength of will or by intellectual insight that we keep from drowning. Nobody with an addiction of any kind has ever studied or willed their way out of that. Through pain and humiliation, he or she has eventually come to realize there is only one way out of helplessness, surrender of one’s will to a higher power, God. In essence, people get together at Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to (as scripture would put it)”turn their eyes towards heaven.”

Each of us needs to find our own way of doing this if we are to cope with the forces that threaten to drown us. It’s not through study or willpower that we will rise above ideology, anger, bitterness, discouragement, jealousy, restlessness, confusion, dissatisfaction, moral ineptitude, the endless practical demands of life, and the compensations we give into in order to cope with all of this. We will always be adrift, until we, like Jesus, regularly “turn our eyes towards heaven.” In my experience, the extraordinary people that I have known and admired all have had the same secret, they prayed privately.

Gil Bailie puts it well in VIOLENCE UNVEILED. Commenting on Jesus’ unique capacity to rise above the forces that were drowning everyone else, he says: Jesus broke the snares of satan, not intellectually, but by being God-centred, he “turned his eyes towards heaven.” This is what made him immune to the contagion of desire. If we don’t imitate Jesus in this, we will soon enough imitate the world in its restless, destructive envy. As Bailie puts it: We haven’t a prayer of eliminating the worst of our mimetic passions unless we find a truly transcendent focus for our deepest imitory urges. We cannot keep the last commandment unless we keep the first – “Without prayer, we haven’t a prayer!”

Inside a little book entitled, THE THOMAS MERTON POEMS, J.S. Porter writes this piece:

There’s too much of everything
books, stars, flowers.

How can one flower be precious
in a bed of thousands?

How can one book count
in a library of millions?

The universe is a junkyard
burnt out meteors, busted up stars
planetary cast-offs, throwaway galaxies
born and buried in an instant
repeating, repeating

Yet something remains
the dream of fewness
one woman, one man.

You can’t write it any better, the great romantic ideal – the dream of fewness, two persons being enough for each other, giving each other eternal significance.

There was a time in life when this piece would have burned holes into me, touched what I then-thought was my soul, stirred a fiery passion within me, and left me feeling restless. It still triggers some of those old aches, though other parts of me, more mature and jaded now, raise some questions.

Is this adolescent romanticism, Hollywood fantasy, Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep in THE BRIDGES OF MADISON COUNTY, or is it the real stuff of the heart? Is this some lonely narcissism looking for an equally self-centred soul to gang-up with against the world or is it a dream for what’s ultimately precious within the kingdom of God?

Good questions. However the questions themselves need some teasing out. Most of us tend to get more cynical about romance as we age and mature. That’s true as a fact, but is it a good thing? What changes in us as we give up our youthful romanticism for what we deem to be maturity? What prompts adult scepticism of romance, maturity or a fatigued soul? If I’ve lost my passion, is this a sign of wisdom or of a heart that’s lost its zip? I suspect it’s some of both.

The dream of fewness can be adolescent and can lead to a lot of unnecessary heartache and foolish decisions. It happens all the time. We torture ourselves and are dissatisfied with our intimate relationships because we nurse the dream that, out there, somewhere, there’s that perfect soulmate that we still need to find in order to be whole and healthy. Any other kind of love, no matter how much life and security it might be bringing, is judged second-best. That’s precisely what’s at issue for Edith Wharton’s tragic hero in THE AGE OF INNOCENCE. A stable marriage and a couple of wonderful children never quite seem to compensate for what he might have had – torrid, dark, passion. Her hero tortures himself with the ideal of a missed romance even as he is very loved inside of a good marriage. The emptiness he feels has a certain tragic poetry to it, but it has a certain adolescence as well. The dream of fewness and can make us very unhappy and boorishly unappreciative of the love within which we actually live.

Conversely, though, a heart that’s not at least a little tortured by unrequited romantic longing is usually too a heart that’s lost its passion and its proper fire for life. The dream of fewness is rooted in our wildest longings. It’s a dream of heaven really, of beatific vision as sweet embrace. Romantic love, in its very sweetness, intuits the kingdom. Whatever its down-side, it points us towards ecstasy and tries to lure us there. Nobody who still aches for romance needs to be reminded that we are meant to live by more “than bread alone” or that life is more than just its simple sweetening through comfort and security. The ache of romance, perhaps more than anything else, propels those of us who aren’t yet saints beyond ourselves, outwards, towards something beyond comfort and safety. It’s a fire that also says: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until the rest in you.”

To lose the dream of fewness is to lose some health. To be jaded or cynical about romance is denigrate one of God’s good gifts. We may never, in the name of maturity or religion, be cynical about romance, first love, first fervour, and the tastes of ecstasy these hold out. Each of these plays its own part in the way God draws us towards himself and into the kingdom.

Several years ago, a former student of mine who was getting married wrote this to me: “Father, this isn’t naive passion. I know what I’m doing. I’m not looking for any Hollywood romance here!”

I wasn’t impressed by her effort to show this extra maturity. I sent her Porter’s poem on the dream of fewness, along with a note that said: “Enjoy young love, your honeymoon, the dream of fewness. It’s one of the better foretastes of heaven given you in this life. The accidents of life, soon enough, will deprive you of that. Taste and remember!”

God gave us romance for just that reason, as a tiny foretaste of the ecstasy of eternal life. Taste and remember!

A few years ago Brenda Peterson wrote book of essays entitled, Nature and Other Mothers. Her first entry is wonderfully named, In Praise of Skin. In it, she tells how at one point in her life she was afflicted by painful skin rashes. Like the woman with the haemorrhage in the gospels, she tried every possible doctor but found no cure. Medication after medication, proved ineffective, and eventually the doctors ran out of things to try. The rash always came back.

One day her grandmother assessed her and pronounced a more ancient and accurate diagnosis: “Skin needs to be touched!” Her grandmother then began to give her regular skin massages and these did what the more sophisticated medicines couldn’t do. They cured her.

Peterson’s grandmother is right: Skin needs to be touched!

God knows that better than anyone. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist. In the Eucharist skin gets touched. The Eucharist isn’t abstract, a theological instruction, a creed, a moral precept, a philosophy, or even just an intimate word. It’s bodily, an embrace, a kiss, something shockingly physical, the real presence in a deeper way than even the old metaphysics imagined.

For whatever reasons we tend to shy away from admitting how radically physical the Eucharist actually is. St. Paul didn’t share that fear. For him, the physical communion that takes place in the Eucharist, between us and Christ as well as among ourselves, is as real and radical as sexual union. Thus, for instance, he argues against sex outside of marriage by saying that our union with Christ and each other in the Body of Christ is so intimate and real that, in effect, we would prostitute that Body if we had illicit sex. Strong words. They’re predicated on a very earthy conception of the Eucharist.

The early church followed Paul on this. They understood the Eucharist as so real, so physical, and so intimate, that they surrounded it with the taboos of privacy, reverence, and reticence that we reserve for sexual intimacy. For some centuries, the early church had a practice (still partially followed in some of our own church programs) they called the DISCIPLINE ARCANI. Their rule was that nobody who was unbaptized or not fully initiated into the community could participate in the Eucharist (beyond the liturgy of the Word) and that Christians who were fully initiated were forbidden to speak to outsiders about the Eucharist. The intent of the discipline was not to create a mystique around the Eucharist so as to draw people to it through curiosity. The opposite. The idea was more that the Eucharist is so intimate an act that propriety, respect, and reverence demand non-exhibitionism: you don’t make love in public and you don’t talk to outsiders about this kind of intimacy.

We tend to shy away from that kind of talk. Partly that’s understandable. It’s hard to be comfortable religiously with how Christianity understands the physical and the bodily. Christianity is the most earthy of all religions. It doesn’t call you out of the physical, out of the body, or out of the world. Rather Christ enters the physical, becomes one with it, blesses it, redeems it, and tells us that there is no reason to escape from it.

Something in that goes against the grain. Christ’s relationship to the physical scandalized his contemporaries (“This is intolerable language!” is what the crowds said when Jesus spoke of the physical character of the Eucharist in John’s gospel) and is still hard for us to accept today. But it’s also a wonderful part of Christianity. In the Eucharist, our skin gets touched.

And, given all our tensions, we need that touch, frequently, daily even. The late essayist and novelist, Andre Dubus, once wrote a wonderful little apologia as to why he went to Eucharist regularly, despite the critical circles he moved in: “This morning I received the sacrament I still believe in: at seven-fifteen the priest elevated the host, then the chalice, and spoke the words of the ritual, and the bread became flesh, the wine became blood, and minutes later I placed on my tongue the taste of forgiveness and of love that affirmed, perhaps celebrated, my being alive, my being mortal. This has nothing to do with immortality, with eternity; I love the earth too much to contemplate a life apart from it, although I believe in that life. No, this has to do with mortality and the touch of flesh, and my belief in the sacrament of the Eucharist is simple: without touch, God is a monologue, an idea, a philosophy; he must touch and be touched, the tongue on flesh, and that touch is the result of the monologues, the idea, the philosophies which led to faith; but in the instant of the touch there is no place for thinking, for talking, the silent touch affirms all that, and goes deeper: it affirms the mysteries of love and mortality.”

Skin heals when touched. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

We need saints today and we need a variety of them. They don’t all look the same, as we commonly suppose. Some saints do have the gaunt, ascetical look, that artists fancy – Mother Theresa, Gandhi; others have cigarettes in their mouths and look like Dorothy Day. There’s Padre-Pio types, in monks’ robes, the very persona of popular piety, and then there’s Thomas-More types, walking around looking ruggedly healthy.

One particular saint we much need today is a contemporary St. Augustine, someone to do for us what Augustine did for his generation. What was that?

Augustine was born in North Africa in 354, grew up there, worked for a while as an itinerant scholar in Italy, and eventually returned to North Africa where he died in 430. By temperament and talent, he was a scholar, and a very good one, but he was conscripted, against his will and temperament, to be a bishop. He served in that role, more pastoral than scholarly, for most of his adult years. He was also a man with a colourful past, converting to Christianity at 25 after a long, difficult intellectual and moral struggle and then spending another 9 years getting his life in line with his beliefs.

What makes him so important and influential, both in his own time and in the subsequent history, is not his colourful past – which is generally overrated in terms of its influence on his theology and spirituality – but his brilliance which he combined so naturally with his faith. Here was a saint, someone humbly committed within the faith community, who brought to that community an extraordinary capacity to articulate both a synthetic structure and working-vocabulary for their faith life. Theologically his framework became the basis for much of subsequent Christian theology in the West. His secular influence is monumental. Very few people have influenced history as much as Augustine. By marrying the concepts of Greek philosophy to the concepts of Judeo-Christianity at a particular time in history, he, in effect, wrote the conceptual software that the Western world today calls “common sense”. For better and for worse, we think in Augustine’s framework.

What we need today is for someone to do for us what Augustine did in his time, namely, help us to find a vocabulary for our faith that works for us. The faith, of course, always works, but the language we use to talk about it often doesn’t. We need a new Augustine. Easier said than done. He was an extraordinary man and not every generation produces such a person. But every generation, our own no less than others, does produce women and men who have, perhaps not to the same high degree that Augustine had these, the talent, passion, aesthetic sensibility, and humble commitment to the community of faith that Augustine had. Our own Augustine might even parallel Augustine vis-a-vis his colourful past, though that is not a sine quo non for doing what he did.

To my mind, in the English-speaking world today, one of the persons who fits that description is Kathleen Norris – a lay woman, a deeply committed Christian, a Presbyterian, a lay Benedictine, a writer, an artist, and a poet, who lives and writes out of South Dakota. In the area of theology and spirituality, she has written three important works: Dakota, A Spiritual Geography; The Cloister Walk; and Amazing Grace, A Vocabulary of Faith. Three works in the area of popular spirituality admittedly do not exact the same measuring stick as one uses to assess the importance of Augustine, whose works number more than 6000 pages, engage classical philosophy at its core, and systematically take up nearly the full range of critical questions in theology, but that isn’t the point here. There will never be another Augustine, never can be. Times have changed and no one can be a doctor in all disciplines any more, nor indeed a full doctor in even one. Knowledge in every field has proliferated and specialized to a point where one can get a comprehensive grasp of only a fraction of the whole. What we need now are a number of Augustines.

Kathleen Norris, to my mind, is one of these. Like Augustine, she brings something special. What exactly?

Simply put, she brings to the table some of the rare qualities he did: an extraordinary intelligence combined with a humble faith commitment, the artistry of a poet emanating from the pen of someone who prays, the experience of a person with a colourful past who has matured into post- sophisticated child-likeness, and a certain pathological sanity that has it feet planted solidly on the ground. To this, she adds the realism and earthiness of someone who has to struggle to pay bills, a depth of soul that personal tragedy brings, the insight that comes from drinking at the deep wells of monasticism, and a robust sense of humour.

Kathleen Norris is an important, eminently sane, and healthy voice within the Christian community today. She deserves to be read.