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.

Christmas cannot be taken for granted.

Swiss theologian, Hans Urs Von Balthasar, once wrote:

“After a mother has smiled for a long time at her child, the child will begin to smile back; she has awakened love in its heart, and in awakening love in its heart, she awakes recognition as well. … In the same way, God explains himself before us as love. Love radiates from God and instills the light of love in our hearts.”

That could be the caption inside a Christmas card. It expresses a spirituality of Christmas.

In the incarnation, at Christmas, God doesn’t enter the world as some superhero who arrives in great power and blows away all that’s bad, so that all we have to do is watch, enjoy the show, and feel smug as evil gets its due. The drama of the incarnation is not a movie to be watched but a real-life event within which we are meant to be players. Christmas doesn’t happen automatically, it needs our participation. Why?

Because God doesn’t enter the world like a Hollywood hero who rescues innocence and goodness at the last minute by a show of physical force. Indeed, at Christmas, God doesn’t even enter the world as an adult, but as a baby, helpless, needing to be nurtured to come to adulthood. The God who is born into our world at Christmas is not the God of power, but the God of helplessness and vulnerability.

But that has to be understood. There’s power by worldly standards and power by divine standards and a great paradox and irony is that divine power exhibits itself as vulnerability and helplessness, the power of the baby rather than that of the strong man. Ultimately though that power, helplessness and vulnerability, is the greatest power of all because it, and it alone, can transform hearts. You don’t soften hearts by overpowering them. You transform hearts through another kind of persuasion.

Christ doesn’t eradicate evil by overpowering it. Happy endings inside the kingdom of God work themselves out quite differently than in the movies, as we can see from Jesus’ refusal to come down off the cross to demonstrate his power. What Christmas brings into the world is the power of a baby which works not so much even through the power of innocence (beautiful as that is) but through the power of what scripture calls (in Greek) EXOUSIA. There isn’t an exact English equivalent for that word. It has connotations of a number of things all mixed together: transparency, vulnerability, defencelessness.

Julie Polter, one of the editors at Sojourners, describes it this way:

“The power of the universe became a babe in arms, not to teach us about the sweetness of love (although that is real too), but to teach us about its vulnerability and tangible expression and practical demands; and to teach us that on such as this, kingdoms are built. In a child, any child, the wealth and righteousness of a society, a nation, a world can be read. This isn’t fuzzy sentimentality; this is the law of the universe and the word of the prophets. … What are we waiting for? For the one who has come and comes again, the child who will lead us.”

We will be led into the messianic time, the prophets assure us, by a child. The Christ-child is that child. But, the power of Christmas is not automatic. It can’t be taken for granted. It has to be given birth, nursed, coaxed, and lovingly cajoled into effectiveness. The baby Jesus doesn’t save the world, the adult Christ does and our task is to turn the baby Jesus into the adult Christ. We need to do that in our own bodies and with our own lives. As Annie Dillard once put it, the Christ we find in our lives is always found as he was found at the first Christmas, a helpless infant, lying in the straw, someone who needs to be picked up and coaxed into adulthood. To make Christ effective, we need, ourselves, to become “the body of Christ”.

To put it metaphorically, the Christ-child has to be awakened by us. We need to go to the manger and awaken the child. How? It’s here that Von Baltasar’s comment is so insightful:

We awaken the child by inducing it to smile. How’s that done? Where is the Christ-child? In terms of an icon, the Christ-child is in the crib, but, in terms of spirituality, the Christ-child appears in our lives in a different way.

If Mary became pregnant by the Holy Spirit – defined as charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity – then obviously the child she gestated will radiate those qualities. We awaken the Christ-child when we smile at charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity until they begin to smile back. What comes back is the power of Christmas, a baby’s power to transform a heart, divine power hidden in human weakness.

We have to help make Christmas happen.

Every year on the third Sunday of advent, the church asks us to do a meditation on joy. That seems a curious thing to ask, though it becomes less curious when we actually reflect on the nature of joy. What is joy?

Few things are as misunderstood as is the notion of joy. Of itself that wouldn’t be serious except that in this case we are often left chasing the wrong things in life.

Too often we confuse joy with good cheer or with a certain rallying of the spirit that we try to crank up when we go to a party or let off steam on a Friday night. We tend to think of joy this way: There is ordinary time in our lives, when duty, work, emotional and financial burdens, tiredness, worries, and pressure of all kinds keep us from enjoying life and from being as cheery and pleasant as we would like. We think of ordinary times in our lives as keeping us from joy – the grind, the routine, the rat-race, the work-week – and so we look forward to special times, weekends, nights out, vacation times, social times, celebrations, and parties where we can break the routine, break out, enjoy ourselves, and experience joy.

Joy then is identified with the boisterous good cheer we try to crank up at parties or the lack of pressure and the freedom from burdens that we feel when on vacation. But is this joy? It can be, though often isn’t. The loud robust cheer that we enter into at parties is often little more than a desperate effort to keep our depressions at bay, a form of denial. That’s why the good cheer dissolves so quickly when we go home and why, three days after returning from vacation, we are again just as tired and in need of a vacation as before.

What is joy? Joy can never be induced, cranked up, or made to happen. It’s something that has to find us precisely within our ordinary, duty-bound, burdened, full-of-worries, and pressured lives. This is joy: Imagine walking to your car or to the bus after a day’s work, tired, needing some rest. But, just as you reach your car or the bus-stop, you fill with a sense of life and health; in some inchoate way, all jumbled together, you feel your body, mind, soul, gender, sexuality, history, place within a family, network of friends, city, and country, and this feeling makes you spontaneously exclaim: “God, it’s good to be alive!” That’s joy.

And as C.S. Lewis puts it, it has to surprise you. You can’t find joy, it has to find you. That’s its real quality. You can go to a party and say, “Tonight I’m going to have a good time, if it kills me!” It might! Indeed parties and letting off steam have their place. You might even find good cheer at a party or find a good distraction and these can be needed therapy and a good respite from hard work. But neither is joy.

Joy is always the by-product of something else. As the various versions of The Prayer of St. Francis put it, we can never attain joy, consolation, peace, forgiveness, love, and understanding by actively pursuing them. We attain them by giving them out. That’s the great paradox at the centre of all spirituality and one of the great foundational truths within the universe itself: The air that we breathe out is the air we will eventually breathe back in. Joy will come to us if we set about actively trying to create it for others.

If I go about my life demanding, however unconsciously, that others carry me rather than seeking to carry them; feeding off of others rather than trying to feed them; creating disorder rather than being a principle of peace; demanding to be admired rather than admiring, and demanding that others meet my needs rather than trying to meet theirs, joy will never find me, no matter how hard I party or try to crank up good cheer. I’m breathing the wrong air into the universe.

The great mystic, John of the Cross, ends one of his most famous instructions with this poem:

To reach satisfaction in all
desire its possession in nothing.
To come to possess all
desire the possession of nothing.
To arrive at being all
desire to be nothing.
To come to the knowledge of all
desire the knowledge of nothing.
To come to the pleasure you have not
you must go by the way in which you enjoy not.
To come to the knowledge you have not
you must go by a way in which you know not.
To come to the possession you have not
you must go by a way in which you possess not.
To come to be what you are not
you must go by a way in which you are not.

That, and that alone, is a recipe for joy.

To light a candle is an act of hope.

In the days of apartheid in South Africa, Christians there used to light candles and place them in windows as a sign to themselves and to others that they believed that some day this injustice would end. A candle burning in a window was a sign of hope and a political statement. The government didn’t miss the message. It passed a law making it illegal to place a lit candle in a window, the offense being equal to owning a firearm, both considered equally dangerous. This eventually became a joke among the kids: “Our government is afraid of lit candles!”

They had reason to be! Lit candles, more than firearms, overthrew apartheid. Hope, not guns, is what ultimately transforms things. To light a candle as an act of hope is to say to yourself and to others that, despite anything that might be happening in the world, you are still nursing a vision of peace and unity based upon something beyond the present state of things and this hope is based upon deeper realities and powers than the world admits. To light a candle is to state publicly that you believe that what’s real and what isn’t is ultimately determined by powers and issues that go beyond what’s seen on the evening news. To light a candle is an act of political defiance. It’s also an act of hope.

What is hope?

First of all, it’s not wishful thinking. I can wish to win a lottery, but that wish, all by itself, contains no real power to make it happen. Second, hope is not just natural optimism, an upbeat temperament that always sees the bright side of things. An unwavering optimism about things can sometimes even be helpful, but it’s no basis for hope, like wishful thinking it lacks the power to make its own dream come true. Finally, hope is not simply shrewd observation and common sense, the talent for sorting out the real from the fluff. Useful as this is, it’s still not hope. Why not?

Because hope doesn’t base itself upon a shrewd assessment of the empirical facts, but upon belief in a deeper set of realities: God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness, and the promise that flows from that.

There’s a story told about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that helps illustrate this. Teilhard wasn’t much given to wishful thinking or even to an optimistic temperament, but tended rather towards a lonely realism. Yet he was a man of real hope. For example, on one occasion, after giving a conference within which he laid out an historical vision of unity and peace for the world that paralleled the vision of scripture, he was challenged by some colleagues to this effect: “That’s a wonderful, idealistic vision of things, but suppose we blow-up the world with a nuclear bomb, what happens to your vision then?” “That would set things back some millions of years,” he replied, “but this will still come to fruition, not because I say so or because the facts right now indicate that it will, but because God promised it and in the resurrection of Jesus has shown that He is powerful enough to deliver on that promise.”

Hope, as we can see from this, requires both faith and patience. It works like yeast, not like a microwave oven. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, expresses this colourfully: “All politicians are alike,” he says, “they hold a finger up and check which way the wind is blowing and then make their decisions in that direction. That will never change, even if we change politicians. So we must change the wind! That’s hope’s task – to change the wind!”

When we look at what has morally changed this world – from the great religious traditions coming out of deserts, caves, and catacombs and helping morally leaven whole cultures to apartheid being overthrown in South Africa – we see that it has happened precisely when individuals and groups lit candles and hoped long enough until the wind did change.

We light advent candles with just that in mind, accepting that changing the wind is a long process, that the evening news will not always be positive, the stock markets will not always rise, the most sophisticated defenses in the world will not always protect us from terrorism, and secular liberal and conservative ideologies will not rid this planet of selfishness.

But we continue to light candles and hope anyway, not on the basis of a worsening or improving evening newscast, but because the deepest reality of all is that God exists, that the centre holds, that there’s ultimately a gracious Lord who rules this universe, and this Lord is powerful enough to rearrange the atoms of the planet and raise dead bodies to new life. We light candles of hope because God, who is more real than anything else, has promised to establish a kingdom of love and peace on this earth and is gracious, forgiving, and powerful enough to do it.