A couple of years ago, I was at the home of some friends for a dinner. During the meal, their kids, all quite young, had been rather loud, cranky, self-absorbed, and unmannered, as is the way sometimes with young children and with the ups and downs of the dinner table. After the meal, when they’d left to play in an adjoining room, the mother, tired and frustrated from her battle of wills with them, made this comment: “Sometimes when I look at my kids, I blush with a kind of shame because I see myself in their faults! I know exactly from where they get all of that! It’s in their genes. I see my faults inside of them. The good thing is that, seeing this, triggers a real compassion in me. I want to hug them and apologize!”

There’s a wonderful theology in that observation. The way she felt, looking at her children and their faults, is, I suspect, the way God must feel as he looks at us, his kids, with our unmannered faults and our self- absorption. God is like that mother. No doubt God experiences the same frustration in his battle of wills with us, but, no doubt too, God fills with compassion and understanding in the face of our faults, blushing with a little shame for how he made us. Like that mother, God sees exactly where all of this comes from and who and what is responsible for those congenital propensities.

Simply said, though a lot of nuance is immediately needed once it is said, so many of our faults stem from the way God made us, namely, from the divine fire, divine appetites, divine energy, and godly grandiosity that God has put inside us. Our faults take their root there.

That can sound like blasphemy, but it’s quite the opposite really. It’s not an attempt to blame God for our faults, but rather an effort to explain, more deeply, why we are as we are, why we have tendencies towards sinful and destructive things, why life is so infinitely complex, and, most important of all, why God was not a stingy, small-minded, small-hearted, petty, defensive creator when he made us.

When God made us, she didn’t play it safe, making us small, stupid, mechanical, easy to control, low-risk projects. God rolled the dice and risked the highest possible stakes, love and freedom. God gave us as much as she could give without making us, ourselves, gods and goddesses (the one thing God can’t do). God made us godly, almost divine, and that has consequences.

God is infinite, the creator of everything, self-sufficient Being, and Being who, in a manner of speaking, owns everything that is – all beauty, all love, all truth, all existence, and even all pleasure. That’s a lot to carry without losing one’s balance. God never loses her balance, but we, who have been given so much divine dignity and energy, often do.

And that’s the problem: If we sense within us a divine likeness, is it any wonder that sometimes we inflate with grandiosity and strut with pride; if we sense inside us infinite love, is it any wonder that we sometimes fill with lust and want to make love to the whole world; if we sense within us God’s holding all of being in existence, is it any wonder that we are often greedy and jealous, convinced like the mythical gods of old that we have first rights to sleep with everyone and that the whole world is really ours; if we sense within us the ecstasy of fulfilment that is inside of God, is it any wonder that we tend to excess and addictions, that we would want to swallow all the food, drink, and pleasure in the world and do nothing other than drink in its enjoyment; and if we sense that we are godly in nature, is it any wonder that we fill so easily with hatred and murderous rage when we are slighted or ignored?

We see this crystal-clear in sone of its higher expressions; for example, in our experience of creativity. Why do so many great artists have such a temptation towards atheism or various forms of idolatry? It’s no great mystery. The greater the talent, the greater the work produced, the greater the artist, the more divine energy that seeps through, the easier it is to mistake the image of God for its reality – which is always the definition of idolatry.

The heart has its reasons. So too do pride, idolatry, lust, greed, anger, and concupiscence. God built us in a rather unsafe way. To walk the earth like gods and goddesses is, in fact, a dangerous business. Fortunately God knew this before she made us and, like an understanding mum who has mused on the origins of her children’s faults, still took that risk and now blushes just a little as she looks at us and our foibles and faults.

Kathleen Norris’ recent book, AMAZING GRACE, is subtitled, “A Vocabulary of Faith”. What’s implied here is that Christian faith, timeless in content, needs to struggle to articulate itself meaningfully today. Eternal truths must still find a vocabulary so that they can be spoken and heard within a particular time and culture.

We need that today, a working-vocabulary for the faith. The primary missionary task for us in the Western world is no longer that of sending missionaries to foreign lands but that of trying to evangelize our own children, of trying to communicate the faith within our own homes.

That’s no easy thing. We’ve all been trying to do it for years without much success. More and more, our own children no longer walk the path of faith, at least that of explicit faith.

Part of the struggle, admittedly only part of it, is the struggle to find a vocabulary for the faith that is meaningful to them. Today we need to be able to stand within secularity and effectively articulate the faith there, much like the missionaries of old tried to do this in other cultures. Secularity is a culture and has its own particular language.

How do we find, or develop, a language that can effectively speak the faith in our highly secularized culture? Perhaps we can learn something from those who have, at least to a point, been effective in doing this. Who are these people?

Many have tried and are trying to do this, but perhaps the most effective missionary to secularity in our time has been Henri Nouwen. His books found a receptive audience not just among Christians across denominational lines but also, to a point, within the secular world.

Nouwen was effective, among other reasons, because of his language. His words were carefully chosen and he worked hard at them. He used to re-write his books many times over, trying to get just the right wording for things, searching always for a simpler language of soul. What was his recipe? It was a tricky one, and he didn’t always pull it off himself, but in essence this was his formula:

He tried to be simple, without being simplistic; express deep sentiment, without being sentimental; be self-revealing, without being exhibitionistic; be deeply personal, yet profoundly universal; be explicitly Christian, without using the inner table-talk of the worshipping community or the rote repetition of biblical language; be devotional, without being pious; speak from a clearly committed stance, without being judgemental, exclusive, or doctrinaire; be contemporary, without being full of cliche, fad, and “cool”; be moral, without the alienating rhetoric of political correctness; speak always of God’s invitation while respecting freedom and never proselytizing; be iconoclastic when necessary, yet always respecting where people are at; be healthily deconstructionist and constructionist at the same time; use the language of critical thought and at the same time the language of the artist; use language that radiates the joy of the resurrection, even as it leads deeper into the mystery of suffering; use a language full of hope and realism, soul and spirit, energy and wisdom, bright colour tempered by grey; a language deeply sensitive to human weakness, even as it challenges weakness and invites towards what is sublime; a language that’s deeply compassionate, yet never compensatory.

Quite a formula! That’s an incredible tightrope to try to walk without falling off either side! Small wonder he re-wrote his books over and over to try to get it right, small wonder that he agonized as much as he did, and small wonder his books were so popular and inspiring when he did pull it off successfully! His is a formula for the language of soul.

It’s an interesting study to see how Nouwen’s language evolved during the nearly 30 years that he wrote in English. In his early books, his language reflects a lot that he was a psychologist and an academic. Technical terms, especially from psychology, creep into his writings. More and more, as the years go on, we see his words get more simple and we see less and less in the way of technical or clinical terms from psychology or elsewhere. Rather we see emerging the language of soul – simple, unpretentious, deeply personal, accessible to all, carrying universal secrets.

I see others too trying to do this, to speak and write within the language of soul. Inside church circles, I see it in Kathleen Norris, Richard Rohr, John Shea, Robert Barron, Andrew Greeley, Mary Jo Leddy, Anne Lamott, Daniel Berrigan, and John O’Donohue, among others. It’s a language we need to learn.

The eternal truths that God has revealed need, in every age, a proper vocabulary to give them expression. They need the language of soul. That’s not a language that’s easy to learn, although it’s the most natural language of all. Like Nouwen, we must work at it -for the sake of our own children who lack a vocabulary for their faith.

One of the great tragedies in all literature is the biblical story of Saul. Saul makes Hamlet look like a Disney-character. Hamlet, at least, had good reasons for the disasters that befell him. Saul, given what he started with, should have fared better, much better.

His story begins with the announcement that, in all of Israel, none measured up to him in height, strength, goodness, or acclaim. A natural leader, a prince among peers, his extraordinary character was recognized and proclaimed by the people. The beginning of his story is the stuff of fairy-tales. And so it goes on for awhile.

But, at a point, things begin to sour. That point was the arrival on the scene of David – a younger, handsomer, more-gifted, and more- acclaimed man than he. Jealousy sets in and that envy turns Saul’s soul to poison. Looking at David, he sees only a popularity that eclipses his own, not another man’s goodness, nor indeed the need of the people for that goodness. He grows bitter, petty, cold, tries to kill David, and eventually dies by his own hand, an angry man who has fallen far from the innocence and goodness of his youth.

What happened here? How does someone who has so much going for him – goodness, talent, acclaim, power, blessing – grow into an angry, petty man who kills himself out of disappointment? How does it happen?

The late Margaret Laurence, in a brilliant, dark novel, THE STONE ANGEL, gives us a pretty good description of exactly how this happens. Her main character, Hagar Shipley, is a “Saul” of sorts. Hagar’s story begins like his: She is young, innocent, and full of potential. What’s to become of such a beautiful, bright, talented, young woman? Sadly, not much becomes of her at all. She drifts, into everything, adulthood, an unhappy marriage, and into an deep unrecognized and unspoken disappointment that eventually leaves her slovenly, frigid, bitter, and without energy or ambition. What’s as remarkable as sad is that she doesn’t see any of this herself. In her mind, she’s still the young, innocent, gracious, popular, attractive young girl she once was in high school. She doesn’t notice how small her world has become, how few real friends are around, how little she admires anything or anyone, or even how physically unkempt she has become.

Her awakening is sudden and cruel. One winter day, shabbily dressed in an old parka, she rings the doorbell of a house where she is delivering some eggs. A bright young child answers the door and Hagar overhears the child tell her mother: “That horrible, old egg-woman is at the door!” The penny drops.

Stunned, she leaves the house and finds her way to a public bathroom where she puts on all the lights and studies her own face in a mirror. What looks back is a face she doesn’t recognize, someone pathetically at odds with whom she imagines herself to be. She sees in fact the horrible, old egg-woman that the child saw at the door rather than young, gracious, attractive, big-hearted woman that she still imagines herself to be. “How can this have happened?” she asks herself. “How can we, imperceptible to ourselves, grow into someone we don’t know or like?”

In one way or other, it happens to all of us. It’s not easy to age, to come crashing down from so much of what we dreamed for ourselves, to watch the young take over and receive the popularity and acclaim that once were ours. Like Saul, we fill with a jealousy that we don’t recognize and, like Hagar, we grow ugly without knowing it. Others, of course, do notice.

It’s not that we don’t gain something as this happens. Usually we grow a lot smarter, wiser even, and often we grow into surprisingly generous people. But we’re a lot more nasty than we once were. We whine too much, feel too-sorry for ourselves, and generally curse more than bless those who have replaced us in youth, popularity, and acclaim.

And so, the great spiritual – and human – task of the second- half of life is precisely this: to give up this jealousy, this ugliness, to come back again to the love, innocence, and goodness of youth, to revirginize, to come to a “second-naivete”, to begin again to admire something.

At the beginning of the Book of Revelations, John, purporting to speak for God, has this advice for us, at least for those of us who are beyond the bloom of youth: “I’ve seen how hard you work. I recognize your generosity and all the good work you do. But I have this against you – you have less love in you now than when you were young! Go back and look from where you have fallen!”

We might want to hear that from scripture, before we overhear it from some young girl telling her mother that some bitter, ugly, old person is at the door.

World Youth Days, 2002, have just ended and, from every appearance, were a wonderful success. Hundreds of thousands of young people descended on Toronto for a week and, under the gaze of world television, colourfully, publicly, and energetically celebrated their faith. The city was sometimes taken aback. How can this be happening? We live in a secularized culture and it’s assumed that the young don’t have any faith. Then this, ancient faith and youthful energy wedded together and publicly displayed! As one newspaper editorial put it, “It’s enough to upset your balance. How do you keep your secular perspective in a world awash with faith?.”

Moreover central to this gathering of nearly a million young people was a feeble, largely physically-disabled, 82 year-old man, John Paul II. The young people came to celebrate their faith, but they came, perhaps more than for any other reason, to meet this man. Why? At one level, of course, the appeal is obvious. He is, after all, the Pope. But such wide appeal also begs some questions: Why is this man, who is almost the antithesis of what youth normally idolize, so stunningly popular? Why are all these young people, so full of energy and health, drawn to old man who walks around in ancient robes?

There is, of course, the appeal of his office, perhaps the most symbolically revered in the world. There is too his personal sanctity and charism. He’s a gifted man. But there is something else, something important to name, operative here too. Besides being a religious event this was also a human one. Something happened here that, ideally, should be happening a lot more often, namely, energy and wisdom were meeting and doing to each other what God and nature intended.

In an ideal world, energy should be enlivening wisdom and wisdom should be admiring and initiating energy. What’s meant by this?

Simply put, energy is what drives our planet in terms of natural motivation, youthful dreams, physical health, physical beauty, colour, sexuality, and raw intelligence. Wisdom is what holds the community together at its centre, teaches it meaning, and helps it to cope with suffering and death. These are very different things, not to be confused with each other. They are also carried and brought to the table by different constituencies: Youth carry and bring the energy, elders carry and bring the wisdom.

And they need each other. Raw energy, like a stream of gushing water, needs to be channelled. Left to itself, not directed by wisdom, it generally destroys rather than brings meaning. Uninitiated energy is generally individualistic, ego-seeking, and the source of jealousy. That is why something can wonderfully energetic, colourful, beautiful, funny, brilliant, witty, sexually robust, and bursting with physical health and, at the same time, in no way connected with anything that holds community together at its centre.

The reverse is also true. Wisdom needs energy. Left to itself wisdom soon becomes grey, colourless, sexless, lifeless, and expressive more of the diminished physical capacities that come with age and handicap than of the pulse that God and nature put into our hearts and instincts. That is why something can be deep, sage, and capable of revealing secrets hidden since the beginning of time and yet seem totally unconnected to our life-pulse, our sexuality, and our aches and yearnings. It’s not for nothing that we colour wisdom grey.

Tragically, in our day and culture, wisdom and energy are rarely brought together and live almost as enemies. We never mistake Jerry Seinfeld for Henri Nouwen, Madonna for Mother Theresa, Alanis Morisette for Therese of Lisieux, Jay Leno for Billy Graham, or Mick Jagger for John Paul II. We look to the one for energy and to the other for wisdom. That’s unfortunate because God is the deep source of both the energy of the one and the wisdom of the other.

The marvel of World Youth Days is that they brought these two together. Energy and wisdom met, had a party, prayed together, informed and initiated each other. John Paul II got to do what every elder, male or female, is meant to do, bless, challenge, and direct young energy, even as he was coloured, enlivened, and delighted by it. And the young pilgrims there got to do what every young person is meant to do, fill the air with dreams and surround those dreams with robust, lively, colourful, healthy, physically-beautiful, sexually-young-and-yearning energy, even as all of that is challenged, directed, and blessed by what’s wise, aged, grey, and full of secrets that still need to be learned.

Most of us are neither as old as John Paul II nor as full of life and colour as the youthful pilgrims who met with him. What’s our job? To be both, pope and pilgrim, to do what the pope did, admire and direct youth, even as, like the youthful pilgrims, we humbly bring all that’s robust and energetic inside us to the wells of wisdom to learn there some of the deeper secrets.

Things rarely are simple. Nothing, save God, comes without a shadow.

That’s good to keep in mind when we assess the pros and cons of liberals and conservatives. Each brings something to the table and each too has an achilles heel.

What is the achilles heel within liberal Catholicism? I suggest three places where liberal Catholicism (Protestantism included) might want to do some self-scrutiny:

1) On our failure, by and large, to inspire permanent, joyous religious commitment.

Cardinal Francis George, speaking at a colloquium organized by COMMONWEAL magazine, recently made this statement:

“We are at a turning point in the life of the church in this century. Liberal Catholicism is an exhausted project. Essentially a critique, even a necessary critique at one point in our history, it is now parasitical on a substance that no longer exists. It has shown itself unable to pass on the faith in its integrity and is inadequate, therefore, in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in ordained priesthood.”

Cardinal George’s comment is directed more towards liberals within Roman Catholic circles, but it applies, I suggest, equally well within Protestant and Jewish circles.

This is not a comment that goes down well with everyone, especially with those of us who have given the best part of our lives struggling to open our churches up to a healthier, less-fearful relationship with modernism, science, secularity, and the very real moral progress that these have helped to bring to the world. Liberal ideology, despite all it has been accused of, has been one of the most powerful moral forces on the planet for the last 400 years. The opposite of the liberal and secular is not the spiritual or the church, but the Taliban. I don’t think any of us, conservatives included, want to be there.

But George’s comment strikes at a particular painful area. For all of our work at affirming human dignity, spreading the democratic principle, highlighting the plight of the poor, working at eliminating racism, pushing for gender equality, furthering ecological sensitivity, and affirming non-violence we haven’t been able to inspire our own children to follow us in the path of the faith and in the path of adult commitment. Former generations, whatever their faults, did this better. Whether that fault is inherent in liberal ideology itself is not the point. We haven’t been able to do it and it’s something we must examine ourselves on.

2) Have we been too naive in hooking our moral star to liberal ideology in the secular world?

There was a time between 1960 and 1990 when it seemed that the moral idealism of liberals in the church and the moral idealism of liberals in the culture were good dance partners. Liberals inspired by the gospel and liberals fuelled by secular sources had, it seemed, the same agenda: equality for all, non-elitism, greater ecological sensitivity, the elimination of poverty, greater ethnic and racial harmony, wider tolerance, wider mutual respect, and so on. The social agenda of the gospel and the agenda of liberal secular ideology seemed to be one and the same. We lived with the naive assumption that it would ever be thus.

But is this so? Hardly. Divorced from their Judeo-Christian roots, secular liberals have grown-up, and, like so many of our own children, taken some distance from the gospel. Secular liberalism has shifted its moral passion away from the issues of the poor and the misuse of power to issues of gender, sexuality, personal choice, and lifestyle. Secular liberals and liberal Christians are, today, no longer the harmonious dance partners they once. And we’ve been slow to recognize and accept this. Too often, we, liberal Christians, are now dancing with the wrong partner.

3) Have we been too fundamentalistic in not appreciating or even condemning certain religious movements and practices because these offend our liberal sensitivities or remind us too much of our own religious past?

One wonders whether the under-appreciation that we, liberals in general, have had for movements like PROMISE KEEPERS, CHARISMATIC RENEWAL, MARRIAGE ENCOUNTER, CURSILLO, RENEW, ALPHA, and the like, draws its source in genuine concern for the gospel or from offended liberal sensibilities. We tend to look at these movements, see there some strains of patriarchy, fundamentalism, piety, and uncritical submission to authority, and, irritated by these, fail to admit the real gospel transformation these movements sometimes help inspire. Offended in our liberal sensitivities, we become fundamentalist ourselves – uncompromising, unnuanced, locked into a pre-prescribed view, unable to see that sometimes the cruder discipline of authority is needed before someone can live the fuller freedom of the gospel. PROMISE KEEPERS, for example, may not be a spirituality for a mature Christian, but anything that helps get millions of men back home, faithful to their wives, and back to prayer and church should certainly not be seen as the enemy. Liberal assessment of these movements has sometimes been far from compassionate and wise.

A few days ago, I was asked to visit a family who had, just that day, lost their 19 year-old son to suicide. There isn’t much one can offer by way of consolation, even faith consolation, at a moment like this, when everyone is in shock and the pain is so raw. Few things can so devastate us as the suicide of a loved one, especially of one’s own child. There is the horrific shock of losing a loved one so suddenly which, just of itself, can bring us to our knees; but, with suicide, there are other soul-wrenching feelings too, confusion, guilt, second-guessing, religious anxiety. Where did we fail this person? What might we still have done? What should we have noticed? What is this person’s state with God?

What needs to be said about all of this: First of all, that suicide is a disease and the most misunderstood of all sicknesses. It takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, we, those left behind, need not spend undue energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with any sickness, we can love someone and still not be able to save that person from death. God loved this person too and, like us, could not, this side of eternity, do anything either. Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets this person on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, can go through locked doors and touch what will not allow itself to be touched by us.

Is this making light of suicide? Hardly. Anyone who has ever dealt with either the victim of a suicide before his or her death or with those grieving that death afterwards knows that it is impossible to make light of it. There is no hell and there is no pain like the one suicide inflicts. Nobody who is healthy wants to die and nobody who is healthy wants to burden his or her loved ones with this kind of pain. And that’s the point: This is only done when someone isn’t healthy. The fact that medication can often prevent suicide should tell us something.

Suicide is an illness not a sin. Nobody just calmly decides to commit suicide and burden his or her loved ones with that death any more than anyone calmly decides to die of cancer and cause pain. The victim of suicide (in all but rare cases) is a trapped person, caught up in a fiery, private chaos that has its roots both in his or her emotions and in his or her bio-chemistry. Suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, akin to one throwing oneself through a window because one’s clothing is on fire.

Many of us have known victims of suicide and we know too that in almost every case that person was not full of ego, pride, haughtiness, and the desire to hurt someone. Generally it’s the opposite. The victim has cancerous problems precisely because he or she is wounded, raw, and too-bruised to have the necessary resiliency needed to deal with life. Those of us who have lost loved ones to suicide know that the problem is not one of strength but of weakness, the person is too-bruised to be touched.

I remember a comment I over-heard at a funeral for a suicide victim. The priest had preached badly, hinting that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault and that suicide was always the ultimate act of despair. At the reception afterwards a neighbour of the victim expressed his displeasure at the priest’s homily: “There are a lot of people in this world who should kill themselves,” he lamented bitterly, “but those kind never do! This man is the last person who should have killed himself because he was one of the most sensitive people I’ve ever met!” A book could be written on that statement. Too often it is precisely the meek who seem to lose the battle, at least in this world.

Finally, I submit that we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide. God, as Jesus assures us, has a special affection for those of us who are too-bruised and wounded to be touched. Jesus assures us too that God’s love can go through locked doors and into broken places and free up what’s paralysed and help that which can no longer help itself. God is not blocked when we are. God can reach through.

And so our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide are now inside of God’s embrace, enjoying a freedom they could never quite enjoy here and being healed through a touch that they could never quite accept from us.

Recently I participated in an International Conference on vocations. It gathered a wide assortment of persons to reflect upon why less people in the Western world are entering the priesthood and consecrated religious life.

It was a wonderful event, filled with prayer, hope, and energy. It was too a time of reflection on strategy: What might we be doing, practically, in terms of attracting more people into priesthood and religious life?

What became clearer as the conference went on is that, in terms of drawing people into a deep religious commitment of any kind, strategy is not what is ultimately at issue. What is? Depth of commitment and sanctity within our own lives.

Simply put: Those of us who profess to be committed need to give our lives over to God in a deep enough way so that we have the right and power to call others to give themselves over in the same way. Only someone who has, without bitterness and too much compromise, given over his or her life in self-sacrifice has the power to ask something similar of another. What this means is that we shouldn’t expect anyone to follow us in faith, in church, or in vocation if we, in our own lives, are half- hearted, self-pitying, bitter, and forever whining. No strategy can compensate for that.

The concept can best be explained by an example. Mother Theresa had great power in drawing young women into her community and in drawing others, both women and men, into a deeper faith and church commitment. She didn’t do this by any clever strategy, nor by any exceptional theology. She did it by the power that was created by the depth, honesty, and joy of her own commitment. She had the power and right to call others because she had given herself over deeply enough. Only someone who has laid down his or her life in self-sacrifice has the right and, more importantly, the power to ask the same thing of another.

This is an important principle of spirit, even if it is only understood at the level of feeling. This is an equation that works under the surface. People have sensitive radar screens and they are forever picking up and knowing things that they are not aware of consciously. Hence others are always looking at us (who profess faith and commitment) and making deep, unconscious (and valid) judgements about us: Has this person really put his or her life on the line? Is he or she at peace with this? How much blood is this person really sweating? Is this about God or about self-interest and self-protection? Is this about God or about some cause (however noble)? Has this person the right to ask me for my life?

There’s often an interesting irony here: At a conscious level, someone might well like us and be attracted to us and what we stand for, even as, at a deeper unconscious level, they (on the basis of our witness) are unwilling to give anything over that costs real life. The reverse can also be true. For example, a lot of people didn’t particularly like Mother Theresa and wouldn’t have picked her as someone they wished as a friend (though they wanted her as a photo opportunity, to write into their curriculum vitae). Yet, personal attraction aside, underneath they were moved so that she could ask for their blood and they would give it. The power to ask for real life and full self-sacrifice depends not upon the attractiveness of my person, nor even on the truth of my causes, but on the depth of my commitment. Only if I have actually given my life over do I have the power to ask the same of someone else.

That’s a scary thought in terms of vocations today. Don’t get me wrong: For the most part, we (clergy, committed laity, vowed religious) are very good-hearted and generous. The problem is that often we are also half-hearted and given over to a self-pity, bitterness, infighting, ideology, and various modes of private compensations that have us claiming back for ourselves too much of what we once vowed to God. We all know, too well, the truth of Michel Quoist’s famous prayer on commitment: “Lord, I gave myself over to you in the fervour of my youth. I’m your priest. But every day the man in me tries to take back what the priest once gave you!”

A couple of years ago, one of our Oblate provincials, in commenting about his struggle in trying to lead and animate a group of priests and brothers through a painful, dispirited time – lawsuits for sexual abuse, departures from religious life, aging personnel, community infighting, lack of people wanting to join our ranks, and the anger of some of those within our ranks – made this remark: “We would need a saint in a time like this!” How true! Our problem is not one of strategy and marketing, but of sanctity.

Among the desert fathers one finds this story: “Abbot Lot went to see Abbot Joseph and said: `Father, according as I am able, I keep my little rule, and my little fast, my prayer, meditation and contemplative silence; and according as I am able I strive to cleanse my heart of bad thoughts: now what more should I do?’ The elder rose up in reply and stretched out his hands to heaven, and his fingers became like lamps of fire. He said: `Why not become all flame?'”

Indeed, why not? There probably isn’t a better challenge that might be addressed to any of us. Abbot Lot describes us pretty well, we “keep our little rule”. We are what classical spiritual writers describe as “proficient” in the spiritual life, beyond initial conversion, staunch and solid in grace. We’re essentially good, prayerful, honest, decent, dutiful, generous, moral, and sincere persons.

But the operative word here is “essentially”. We are these things essentially, though not radically. Like Abbot Lot, we’re good, generous, prayerful, and honest “according as we are able”, though that isn’t quite true either. Deep down we know that we’re capable of more, that God is inviting us to more. but that we are fixated at a certain level of mediocrity. Simply put, there are still too many compensations, addictions, and accommodations to comfort in our lives. As well, there is the fear of moving beyond what disrupts our lives. We live faith, hope, and charity, to a point, and there was a time when that point was enough, was what God was asking of us. Now, however, we sense a deeper call and know that we are being asked to let go of many of the things, both good and bad, to which we are clinging for comfort and stability.

We reach a point in the spiritual life, and it is precisely at that point where we have attained a certain proficiency in goodness, generosity, and fidelity, where God invites us to make a more radical “leap of faith”, beyond our comfort and stability. Like everything else that comes from God, this is precisely an invitation, a beckoning, not a threat. What concretely does this mean?

Let me offer a simple, rather graphic, example: Several years ago, while preaching a priests’ retreat, I was approached by a group of young priests who asked me to join their faith-support group for an evening of prayer and sharing. During the course of the evening, they shared with me the origin and intent of their group. The priest who founded the group put it this way: “We were good priests before we formed this group. Essentially we did the right things, were generous ministers, lived in an basic sincerity and honesty, and were respected. But we compensated too much too. We drank too much, ate too much, fantasized about sex too much, complained too much, felt too-sorry for ourselves, and had too many compensations – from masturbation to drinking too much expensive scotch. One day, I simply said, `Enough! If I’m going to be a priest, why not be a more radical one!’ But I knew that I couldn’t do it alone. So I talked to two priest friends and that’s how our group started. We meet at least once a week, sometimes twice. That’s a lot of time, but it’s worth it. It’s been four years since we started and we have more sobriety now in everything. Life is more demanding, but also more fulfilling. I’m happy in a way I’ve never been before.”

He, and his group, had moved beyond their “little rule”, taken the leap of faith, become pure flame. This is precisely what Jesus asks of the rich young man in the gospels, the one who turns him down and “goes away sad.” Notice how the gospels describe this young man, precisely as a person who is proficient in the spiritual life – essentially very good, decent, honest, generous, faithful, but also as experiencing a deeper call, a clear invitation, a dissatisfaction with the level of his own generosity: “What still is lacking for me?” That’s also our question.

The poet, Goethe, in a poem entitled, THE HOLY LONGING, describes how, at a certain point in the spiritual journey, one is handed the invitation to become “insane for the light”. What is this insanity?

Jesus names it as the invitation to give up everything and follow him more radically, Kierkegaard calls it “the leap of faith”, John of the Cross sees it as the willingness to enter the “dark night of the spirit”, and the Desert Fathers call it “leaving our little rule so as to become pure flame!”

Whatever the name, the idea is this: Eventually we reach a point in the spiritual life where, precisely because we are proficient at being good and decent, we are invited, like the rich young man in the gospels, to give up our most-cherished comforts and securities and plunge into the unknown in a radically new way.