Privileged Communication within the Communion of Saints

November 24, 2002

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.

Twenty Years In Exile

November 17, 2002

November 15th marked an anniversary of sorts for me, twenty years of writing this column. I began it in 1982, as a bi-weekly piece, while I was doing doctoral studies in Louvain, Belgium. Initially it ran in just one newspaper, the WESTERN CATHOLIC REPORTER, out of Edmonton, Alberta. Glen Argan was the editor there. Twenty years and several peregrinations later, he’s back at that same post. He was my first editor, took a chance on me, and I’ll always be grateful to him and the Western Catholic Reporter for that. Today, twenty years later, the column runs weekly in more than 40 newspapers in Canada, the United States, England, Scotland, Ireland, and New Zealand.

Initially I called the column “IN EXILE”. Why? What’s behind the title? Superficially, I was living abroad and was young enough and full enough of youthful grandiosity to like the feel of being an outsider. When you’re young, it can seem romantic, noble even, to be the one who’s gone from home, missed by your loved ones, seemingly on some heroic journey. Of course you’re only trying to get some university degree, hardly the stuff of heroic journeys; but that was before instant communication and the internet, when you didn’t fly across the Atlantic every holiday. It was my first time being a long ways from home, I was young, alone, restless, and it was nice to luxuriate a bit in that loneliness. It had a nice feel to it. I wanted to fancy myself (though just a little) as a Robert Browning, writing “HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD”, or a Thomas Wolfe, spinning a beautiful pathos from an exile’s pain, but that was more of an amateur’s thrill than anything real. Playing at being alienated isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.

For far more significant reasons, I chose this title because all of us live in exile in a real way. As St. Paul puts it, we see as “through a glass, darkly”, through an enigma, separated always partially from God and each other. We experience some love, some community, some restfulness, but never these in their fullness. In this life, as Henri Nouwen puts it, there’s not such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. Rather even in our most happy moments, there is a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limit. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every embrace, there is loneliness. In every friendship, distance. In all forms of light there is some knowledge of surrounding darkness. Karl Rahner once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that here, in this life, there is no finished symphony.”

Yes, we do live in an enigma. The God who is omnipresent cannot be sensed, only known at some deeper level; others, who are as real as we are, are always partially distanced; and we, in the end, are fundamentally a mystery even to ourselves. We’re a long ways from home.

Some of the newspapers that carry the column have kept that title, others haven’t. Throughout the years, I’ve often been asked why – Why IN EXILE? Sometimes editors haven’t been keen on it and have asked to change it. I’ve stuck with it though, whenever the choice was mine, wanting still, ideally, to speak my little truth from under that umbrella. Occasionally a particular comment from a reader helped keep me firm in my initial intuition. I remember one such letter from a woman who shared with me that she much appreciated the title because she had been suffering for years from mental illness and had always felt, precisely, an outsider, separated from others. I think St. Paul had just this in mind when he said that we live life “as through a glass, darkly.” Each column has tried in its own little way to get an exile home.

In the initial column, all those years ago, I quoted Margaret Atwood: “What touches you is what you touch!” The column has touched on many things, stuff of all kinds, mostly on different issues within spirituality, often in a more bland and unoriginal way than I dare admit. It’s been a good ride though and as I look back there’s only gratitude, to editors and lots of others who have helped me and, especially, to readers who have been, for the largest part, wonderfully affirmative. Each year I’ve done one column on the issue of suicide and probably the single most gratifying thing through the 20 years has been the response of readers to those particular pieces. I’ve a huge file-folder full of letters from people who have lost loved ones – children, spouses, parents, friends, loved ones – to that painful disease and were grateful that someone spoke out on it.

T.S. Eliot once said: “What we call the beginning is often the end – and to make an end is to make a beginning.” Twenty years at this business – hopefully it’s just a beginning.

Turning our Eyes Toward Heaven

November 10, 2002

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!”

The Anthropological Function of Gossip

November 2, 2002

In his novel, OSCAR AND LUCINDA, Peter Carey, offers this colourful image of gossip. In a small town there are rumours about the priest and a particular young woman. Here’s the image:

“The vicar of Woolahra then took her shopping and Society, always feeling shopping to be the most intimate activity, was pleased to feel the steam pressure rising in itself as it got ready to be properly scandalized – its pipes groaned and stretched, you could hear the noises in its walls and cellars. They imagined he paid for her finery. When they heard this was not so, that the girl had sovereigns in her purse – enough, it was reported, to buy the priest a pair of onyx cufflinks – the pressure did not fall, but stayed constant, so that while it did not reach the stage where the outrage was hissing out through the open valves, it maintained a good rumble, a lower note which sounded like a growl in the throat of a smallish dog.”

Wonderful! Gossip does resemble steam hissing from a radiator or the growl of a small dog. And yet it’s so important. We form community around it. How so?

Take this example: Imagine going out for dinner with a group of colleagues. While there isn’t overt hostility among you, there are clear differences and tensions. You wouldn’t naturally choose go out to dinner together, but you’ve been thrown together by circumstance and are trying to make the best of it.

And so you have dinner together and things are quite pleasant really. There’s harmony, banter, and humour at the table. How do you manage to get on so well, despite and beyond differences? By talking about somebody else! Much of the time is spent talking about others whose faults, eccentricities, and shortcomings we all agree upon. Alternatively, we talk about shared indignations. We end up having an harmonious time together because we talk about someone or something else whose difference from us is greater than our difference, at least at that moment, from each other. Of course, you’re afraid to go to the bathroom because you already know whom they will be talking about when you get up from the table! Your fear is well-founded.

Until we reach a certain level of maturity, we form community largely around scapegoating, that is, we overcome our differences and tensions by focusing on someone or something about whom or which we share a common distancing, indignation, ridicule, anger, or jealousy. That’s the anthropological function of gossip – and a very important one it is. We overcome our differences and tensions by scapegoating someone or something. That’s why it’s easier to form community against something rather than around something and why it’s easier to define ourselves more by what we are against than by what we are for.

Ancient cultures knew this and designed certain rituals precisely to take tension out of the community by scapegoating. For example, at the time of Jesus within the Jewish community a ritual existed that essentially worked this way: At regular intervals the community would take a goat and symbolically invest it with the tensions and divisions of the community. Among other things, they would cloth it with a purple drape and put a crown of thorns on its head as a sign of their sins. (Notice how Jesus is vested in exactly these symbols when Pilate shows him to the crowd: “Ecco homo … Behold your scapegoat!”) The goat was then chased off to die in the desert. It’s leaving the community was understood as taking the sin and tension away and the community was seen to be washed clean by its blood (as we are “in the blood of the lamb”.)

Jesus is our scapegoat. He takes away our sin and division. How? He takes away our sins by taking them in, carrying them, and transforming them so as not to give them back in kind. Jesus takes away the sin of the world in the same way as a water-filter purifies, by holding the impurities within itself and giving back only what’s pure.

Jesus took away the sin of the world this way: He took in hatred and gave back love; he took in curses and gave back blessing; he took in bitterness and gave back graciousness; he took in jealousy and gave back understanding; and he took in murder and gave back forgiveness. By absorbing our sin, differences, and jealousies, he did for us what we, in a less mature and less effective way, try to do when we crucify each other through gossip.

And that’s his invitation to us: As adult women and men we are invited to step up and do what Jesus did, take in the differences and jealousies around us, hold them, and transform them so as not to give them back in kind.

Only then won’t we need scapegoats any more. And only then will the steam-pipes of gossip cease hissing and the low growl of that smallish dog inside us be silent.

The Dream of Fewness

October 27, 2002

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!

Living in a Moral Diaspora

October 20, 2002

In an autobiographical novel entitled, My First Loves, Ivan Klima, a Czech writer, talks about a pain he endured as a young man. Growing up without religious training and living amidst a group of young men and women who weren’t much inclined towards sexual and other restraints, he sometimes found himself very much alone and isolated in terms of his feelings. For reasons he couldn’t explain, and which certainly weren’t religious, he, unlike his friends, simply couldn’t give himself over to certain forms of youthful revelry. His conscience was reticent and he was haunted by a feeling that solitude should be carried at some high level.

And all this came on him as a loneliness, as a painful feeling that he was somehow out-of-step with others, a misfit, unanimity-minus-one, a cog out of sync with a contented world, a frigidity within lake of freedom. His refusal to give in to various things, when his friends were less willing to carry tension, left him aching in a curious way, lonely for moral companionship, for someone to sleep with in terms of his reticence. He sensed that there were others like himself out there, kindred spirits, soulmates, whom he needed to find in order to alleviate his pain. He states the pain as simple fact, but underneath there’s a search for moral companionship. (What is any book besides a note in bottle tossed out to sea in hopes of finding someone who thinks like you?)

The pain that Klima articulates is a pain that is more-and-more felt today by anyone who has strong faith and deep moral convictions. Increasingly, to believe in God, is to find yourself within a moral diaspora, seemingly a minority-of-one, awash in a world that, while wonderful in so many other ways, is non-supportive in terms of what’s deepest and most important to you. To carry real faith and moral conviction today is to feel yourself part of a cognitive minority, a deviant of sorts, isolated, morally lonely.

What is moral loneliness? It’s the pain of feeling alone in one’s deepest beliefs. There are various types of loneliness, but this inconsummation is perhaps the most searing. Painful as it is to not have a sexual partner, it is even more painful not to have a moral one. More deeply than we ache to sleep with others sexually, we ache to sleep with them morally. What exactly does this mean?

Inside each of us there is a moral centre, a place where all that is most precious in us is rooted. It’s this centre we call our truest self. It’s here we guard what’s sacred to us and it’s here we feel most violated when someone either enters irreverently or doesn’t properly honour what we hold there. It’s here that we feel most vulnerable. It’s this centre too that keeps us from falling apart. If this spot is violated in a significant way, through major betrayal, sexual abuse, or other such soul-searing experience, the soul begins to unravel and we have the sensation of falling apart. Our moral centre is the glue that holds the soul together.

And what nurtures this centre is moral companionship, the sense of having found a soulmate. Sometimes we misunderstand this simply as sexual, as a longing that can be assuaged through sexual union, but it’s more. Sex only does its healing if its embrace caresses our moral centre and honours it. Deep down, we know that. For example, when Thomas Moore released the book, SOULMATES, a few years back, it’s title held such a powerful attraction precisely because it intimates that real intimacy has a moral centre that goes deeper than even emotion and sex and is more properly spoken of in terms of soul and destiny.

All of this has an important faith and ecclesial dimension. Today, at least in the Western world, we live in a moral diaspora. More and more people are finding that their faith and moral convictions are not shared by their families, their friends, their colleagues, the arts, the mainstream media, the popular ethos of the culture, and sometimes even their own spouses. In what’s most precious to them, many people today are very much alone, lonely, forced to look outside their own families and circles for the companionship and support for which they ache. Moral diaspora makes for more loneliness.

What’s to be done? Among other things, people of faith need more to seek each other; mystically, within the body of Christ, and practically, within supportive ecclesial communities. Small, intentional, faith communities, operating outside the regular ecclesial structures, can too be part of the answer.

Moreover scripture points to still another answer: When Jesus, Paul, Stephen, and others felt lonely and isolated in their faith, when they had a reticence that others couldn’t understand, they “looked upward, towards heaven”. It brought peace, even when they faced persecution, stoning, or death because of their beliefs. They looked to God and trusted. I think that’s called prayer.

The Eucharist as Touch

October 13, 2002

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.

Polishing our Stones

October 6, 2002

There are times when we can only live by hope, when what confronts us is so overwhelming, so huge, so utterly beyond our strength, that it’s simply hopeless, or a joke, to try to muster any resources against it. Sometimes we need a magic wand, something supernatural and beyond us, to come and defeat what cannot be defeated. But that’s child’s fantasy! Or is it?

Our faith tradition abounds with rich images of hope, images that point precisely towards where that magic wand lies.

One such image is the image of David and Goliath, an image of how good perennially stands before evil, justice before selfishness, sensitivity before brutality, tenderness before what’s callous, blood and flesh before iron and concrete.

Here’s the image: At one point in her history, Israel, who in this story represents God’s cause, is in battle against the Philistines who (as the word “philistine” still connotes) represent brutality, injustice, lack of feeling, and lack of God.

Their champion is a giant, Goliath, a brute of unparalleled strength who, as presented in this image, has no feelings, no sensitivity, no goodness. He walks onto the battlefield clothed in iron, a seemingly inanimate force, sneering, arrogant, disdainful of anything that opposes him. Beside him stands his armour-bearer, also draped in iron.

On the other side stands Israel, looking infantile, intimidated by all this strength, this mindlessness, this iron, knowing that within her ranks nobody can be found to fight Goliath on his own terms. There’s no way to meet this challenge as it’s offered, but to refuse it is an even a greater humiliation.

So she changes the terms. Instead of taking her strongest man, clothing him with iron, and sending him out against Goliath, Israel send a young boy, David, with no armour. He goes out barefoot, bearing only a slingshot, more a boy’s plaything than a weapon for war.

And he cuts a pathetic figure, a naive child, on the battlefield, standing before the brute forces of war, a joke. And that’s how Goliath sees him. Not an opponent even worth fighting – “Am I a dog, that you come out against me with sticks? Come here and I’ll cut your head off and feed it to the birds!” What’s godless doesn’t exactly cower when it meets truth and goodness.

But we know the outcome! David takes his sling, reaches into his shepherd’s pouch for a smooth stone that will find the chink in all that armour and iron and penetrate the one place where the giant can’t protect himself. He selects such a stone and slings it at the giant. It finds its mark and all that arrogance and iron comes crashing to the ground. David finishes the job with the giant’s own sword.

A child fells a giant, the plaything of a young boy overpowers the weapons of war, naivete and innocence prove superior to an army, sensitivity proves more powerful than brutality. This is the stuff of fairy- tales, a story for kids before they must face hard reality. But, in the end, it is reality, hard reality. Hope brings it to awareness.

That image, David before Goliath, the child before the brute giant, depicts how God’s cause always stands before the world – seemingly hopelessly over-matched, naive, a child before a giant, the naive in front of the sophisticated, tender skin against iron, a joke, something not to be taken seriously.

But the victory belongs to the child, to God. The giant is the one who falls, it’s iron that’s vulnerable. But it’s vulnerable to a very particular thing – a smooth pebble from a shepherd’s pouch, a pebble that a shepherd has spend hours pressing, palming, practising with.

What’s the image here? What’s the shepherd’s pouch? What’s the pebble?

When David reached into his shepherd’s pouch and took out a sling and a smooth pebble, you can be sure that he wasn’t doing that for the first time. As a shepherd, in the fields by himself, he would have spent many hours practising with his slingshot, countless hours searching for just the right pebbles, and many more hours palming these pebbles to get to know their exact feel, to smooth off their edges so that their path would be straight, to make them an extension of himself.

That’s our task too. Long before we walk onto the battlefield to confront the giant, we need to spend long, lonely hours palming and polishing what’s in our shepherd’s pouch – prayer, the sacraments, our faith traditions.

These are David’s pebbles, the magic wand, our weapons against the giant. We need, through many hours, solitary and with others, to palm them, press them, and give them the feel of our hands, the smell of our skin, so that when we fling them at the giant, they will find the chink in the armour of what’s senseless, brute, iron, mindless, opposed to God.

Such is the way of hope and, even if we doesn’t save the world, it can save our own sanity.

Kathleen Norris – An Augustine for our Time

September 29, 2002

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.

Amazing Grace

September 22, 2002

It was William Auden, I think, who wrote that when grace enters a room everyone begins to dance.

Would this were so! More often the opposite happens, grace enters a room and instead of dancing we become discontent and our eyes grow bitter with envy. Why? Nikos Kazantzakis, the great Greek writer, tells a story of an elderly monk he once met on Mount Athos. Kazantsakis, still young and full of curiosity, was questioning this monk and asked him: “Do you still wrestle with the devil?” “No,” replied the old monk, “I used to, when I was younger, but now I’ve grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me.” “So,” Kazantsakis said, “your life is easy then? No more big struggles.” “Oh, no!” replied the old man, “now it’s worse. Now I wrestle with God!” “You wrestle with God,” replied Kazantsakis, rather surprised, “and you hope to win?” “No,” said the old monk, “I wrestle with God and I hope to lose!”

There comes a point in life when our major spiritual struggle is no longer with the fact that we are weak and desperately in need of God’s forgiveness, but rather with the opposite, with the fact that God’s grace and forgiveness is overly-lavish, unmerited, and especially that it goes out so indiscriminately. God’s lavish love and forgiveness go out equally to those have worked hard and to those who haven’t, to those who have been faithful for a long time and to those who jumped on-board at the last minute, to those who have had to bear the heat of the day and to those who didn’t, to those who did their duty and to those who lived selfishly.

God’s love isn’t a reward for being good, doing our duty, resisting temptation, bearing the heat of the day in fidelity, saying our prayers, remaining pure, or offering worship, good and important though these are. God loves us because God is love and God cannot not love and cannot be discriminating in love. God’s love, as scripture says, shines on the good and bad alike. That’s nice to know when we need forgiveness and unmerited love, but it’s hard to accept when that forgiveness and love is given to those whom we deem less worthy of it, to those who didn’t seem to do their duty. It’s not easy to accept that God’s love does not discriminate, especially when God’s blessings go out lavishly to those who don’t seem to deserve them.

Allow me to share a story: When I as first ordained, I lived for a time in one of our Oblate rectories with a semi-retired priest, a wonderfully gracious man, who had been a faithful priest for fifty years. One evening, alone with him, I asked him: “If you had your priesthood to do over again, would you do anything differently?” The answer he gave me was not the one I’d anticipated. “Yes,” he said, “I would do some things differently. I’d be easier on people than I was this time. I’d risk the mercy and forgiveness of God more.” Then he grew silent, as if to create the proper space for what he was about to say, and added: “Let me say this too: As I get older I’m finding it harder and harder to accept the ways of God. I’ve been a priest for fifty years and I’ve been faithful. I can honestly say, in so far as I know, that in my whole life I’ve never committed a mortal sin. I’ve always tried my best and done my duty. It wasn’t easy, but I did it with essential fidelity. And you know something? Now that I’m old I’m struggling with all kinds of bitterness and doubt. That’s natural, I guess. But what upsets me is that I look around me and I see all kinds of people, young people and others, who’ve never been faithful, who’ve lived selfish lives, and they’re full of faith and are speaking in tongues! I’ve been faithful and I’m full of anger and doubt. Tell me, is that fair?”

In the end, we need to forgive God and that might be the hardest forgiveness of all. It’s hard to accept that God loves everyone equally – even our enemies, even those who hate us, even those who don’t work as hard as we do, even those who reject duty for selfishness, and even those who give in to all the temptations we resist. Although deep down we know that God has been more than fair with us, God’s lavish generosity to others is something which we find hard to accept. Like the workers in the Parable of the Vineyard who toiled the whole day and then saw those who had worked just one hour get the same wage as theirs, we often let God’s generosity to others warp both our joy and our eyesight.

But that struggle points us in the right direction. Grace is amazing, by disorienting us it properly orients us.

Faults of the Parents in the Children

September 15, 2002

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.

Missionaries to Secularity

September 8, 2002

This past summer, the religious community I belong to, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, sponsored a symposium, “Missionaries to Secularity”, at St. Paul University, Ottawa. We’re a missionary order who are now convinced that the most complex and demanding missionary task in the world today is that of being missionaries within the culture of secularity.

In the Western world, as we know, our churches do pretty well with those who walk through our doors on Sunday, but, and this is the problem, less and less people are walking through those doors. We seem to know what to do with people once they come to church but we no longer know how to get them there.

With this in mind, we gathered a group of people, lay and clergy, all of whom brought a depth of missionary and pastoral experience, for three days of reflection. Our resource persons included John Shea, Richard Rohr, Gilles Routhier, Michael Downey, and Vivian Labrie.

We didn’t write up any manifestos at the end, but, based on our conversations and the insights of our resource persons, we did write up a series of “missiological principles” which can, we feel, point us in the right direction. What are these principles? Here are ten of them:

1) We are at a new place today in terms of the faith. Adaptation of what has worked in the past may not be enough. We need to re-inflame the romantic imagination within Christianity.

2) Secularity is not the enemy, it’s our own child, sprung from Judeo- Christian roots. Like any adolescent child, suffering from an understandable youthful grandiosity, it’s not bad, just unfinished. Our relationship to it shouldn’t be adversarial but one of solicitude. The “soil” of secularity is defined by Jesus in the parable of the Sower – some ground is good, some hostile, some indifferent – but the fact that some ground is hostile or indifferent does not absolve us from the mandate to keep on sowing.

3) Spirituality is peoples’ birthright. The secular culture hungers for spirituality, but is largely spiritually illiterate. People go where they get fed.

4) Recovering the tradition is a great labour. We must seek to recover the core, heart, of our tradition, beyond its encrusted accretions, and then put our own passion to that heart. We must work at finding our own faith-voice and then speak in an invitational way. Part of this must be a profound ascesis of listening.

5) A potentially fertile image of Christ for our time might well be Christ as the kenosis of God. This perhaps can be the place of contact with the secular world. Christ, in his self-emptying, expresses a love which gives itself and seeks nothing in return, incarnates God’s presence without pretence, reveals a God of total non-violence and vulnerability, a God of pure invitation, and a God who accepts the provisionality of everything. Jesus’ essential message is a universal message of vulnerability that all people need to hear.

6) Given this self-emptying God, we might remind ourselves that sharing in the mission of Christ does not always mean using words about Jesus. God can give us permission, when necessary, to take a holiday from religious language.

7) As a faith community we are in exile – from the power, possessiveness, and prestige of the past – but we should remember that all transformation happens in exile because that is the only time God can get at us. We need to stay with the pain, the exile, the kenosis, and hold the tension long enough until it changes us.

8) There are four aspects of the church that people still do accept: the church as an agency to serve the poor, the church as delivering the rites of passage, the church as a voice within ethical discourse, and the church as a “beautiful heritage”; but we must be careful to not let ourselves be identified with only these. Perhaps too we are asking our parishes to carry too many things, asking them to do some things they can no longer do. Parish and mission are not co-terminus. We need to ask ourselves: Do we need new structures, beyond and outside the parish, new “missiological” structures to supplement what parishes can do? Can we dream of new “ecclesial houses”?

9) The gospel is ultimately about God rescuing the poor. Part of evangelization is the movement to eliminate poverty. The church is a big international body and it could do a lot, internationally, as regards poverty. But, if we want to work for the poor, we must free ourselves from too much reliance on dogma and rely more upon human solidarity.

10) There are human foundations, solid ones, for moral progress within our culture and we need to accept this and widen the pool of sincere people with whom we form one body to work for a better world. Excessive stress on denominational identification can narrow the body. Interreligious dialogue must lead us back to a common humanity. We need to commit ourselves not just to the baptized, but to all people of sincerity and good-will.

The Language of Soul

September 1, 2002

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.

The Tale of Two Flights

August 25, 2002

A couple of summers ago I booked an airline ticket from Seattle to London, a nine-hour flight. I fly enough to know that, to get a good seat in the economy section, you’re wise to book early and to reserve an aisle seat in the exit row. It’s the next best thing to business-class. I had booked just such a ticket – aisle seat, exit row.

I was comfortably settling in for the flight when I made an uncomfortable discovery. Beside me was a couple with a young child, a little boy just young enough so that they didn’t have to buy a seat for him and just old enough to need one for such a long flight. The plane wasn’t full and I could easily have given my seat to this child and, graciously, taken another. But all the good seats were already taken. What remained was a sorry selection of bad ones, seats that hemmed you in and left you no room to stretch or move about. And this was a nine-hour flight!

The couple was too polite to ask me to move, though I could tell that they very much wanted me to do the noble thing. I didn’t do it. All that’s unredeemed and selfish in me stubbornly resisted doing the right thing. I had, after all, had the foresight to book that good seat and I’d paid for it. It was owed me.

About an half-hour into the flight, just after the seat-belt sign had been turned off, an airline attendant, assessing the situation, approached and asked whether I would be willing to give up my seat for the young child. There were, after all, open seats on the plane. How could I refuse? The implied question was really; “Do you want to be selfish or do you want to do the right thing?” Pride, not virtue, dictated my decision. I did the noble thing, but not without resentment. I gave up my seat and took another which for obvious reasons (it was a bad seat) was not occupied. I sat in it for the next nine hours, pouting like a spoiled child. I should have felt good. I’d just done virtuous thing, given up something to help someone else, but there was no grace in it for me at all. I was bitter as a slave. Not exactly a proud moment in my life!

More recently I was flying from Toronto to Rome when a similar situation ensued. Toronto to Rome is a long flight, I’d had the foresight to book an aisle seat in the exit row, and I was looking forward to the extra comfort that this seat afforded. I boarded the plane and took my seat. Shortly before take-off, the man beside apologetically explained to me that he and his wife had booked their tickets late, had been unable to get seats together, and so his wife was sitting in a different section of the plane. I surmised what was coming next: “Would I be so kind as to exchange seats with her?” He pointed to where his wife was sitting, in the middle seat of a middle section, the last place you want to be for a long flight. But I’d learned something from my sorry flight a few years earlier, something biblical, Christological.

So I replied that I’d happily exchange seats with his wife and, leaning on further grace, refrained from pointing out that, given the difference in the seats, this was hardly a fair trade. I moved, gave his wife my seat, and, for the next eight hours, sat in a lousy seat and felt wonderful, having just done a godly thing, however minute that might appear in the great schema of things.

But it was the great schema of things Jesus was referring to when he stood before Pontius Pilate and refused to be moved by the threat: “Don’t you know that I have power over you! I can put you to death or set you free!” Jesus’ answer: “Nobody takes my life, I choose to lay it down freely! Nobody has that power over me!” Nobody can take by force what has already been freely given out of love. Love can make a preemptive strike.

And it is this preemptive strike that we are daily invited to make when duty calls. Our families, friends, communities, churches, and the poor are going to ask for our lives. We may as well give them over freely. The choice is not between giving our lives over or not giving them over, but rather between giving them over conscriptively in resentment or giving them over freely in love. They will be taken from us in any case.

Like Jesus, we should stand before noble duty and the endless conscriptive demands of living with others and say: “Nobody takes my life from me – I give it over freely.” That’s also true for seats on airplanes.

The Illusion of our own Innocence

August 18, 2002

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.

Praying the Psalms

August 11, 2002

“God behaves in the psalms in ways he is not allowed to behave in systemic theology.”

That quip comes from Sebastian Moore and should be highlighted at a time when less and less people want to pray the psalms because they feel offended by what they find there. More and more we see criticism of the psalms as prayer (or the desire to sanitize them) because they speak of murder, revenge, anger, violence, war-making, and patriarchy.

The objection to praying the psalms takes a number of forms. Some ask: “How can I pray with words that are full of hatred, anger, violence, and speak of the glories of war and of crushing one’s enemies in the name of God?” For others the objection is to the patriarchal nature of the psalms – where the divine is masculine and the masculine is too-much deified. For yet others, the offense is aesthetic: “They’re terrible poetry!” they say.

Perhaps the psalms aren’t great poetry and they do, undeniably, smack of violence, war, hatred of one’s enemies in the name of God, and the desire for vengeance. They’re also patriarchal in character. But does that make them bad language for prayer? No, to the contrary.

One of the classical definitions of prayer suggests that “prayer is lifting mind and heart to God.” Simple, clear, accurate. Our problem is that we too-seldom actually do this when we pray. Rather than lifting up to God what is actually on our minds and in our hearts, we treat God as someone from whom we need to hide the real truth of our thoughts and feelings. Instead of pouring out mind and heart, we tell God what we think God wants to hear – not murderous thoughts, desire for vengeance, or our disappointment with him.

But expressing those feelings is the whole point. What makes the psalms great for prayer is that they do not hide the truth from God and they run the whole gamut of our actual feelings. They give honest voice to what is actually going on in our minds and hearts.

Sometimes we feel good and our spontaneous impulse is to speak words of praise and gratitude and the psalms give us that voice. They speak of God’s goodness in all – love, friends, faith, health, food, wine, enjoyment. But we don’t always feel that way. Our lives have too their cold, lonely seasons when disappointment and bitterness spontaneously boil under the surface. Again the psalms give us honest voice and we can open up all those angry and vengeful feelings to God. Other times, we fill with the sense of our own inadequacy, with the fact that we cannot measure up to the trust and love that is given us. The psalms again give us voice for this, asking God to have mercy, to soften our hearts, to wash us clean, and give us a new start. And then there are times too when we feel bitterly disappointed with God himself and need some way to express this. The psalms give us this voice (“Why are you so silent? Why are you so far from me?”) even as they make us aware that God is not afraid of our anger and bitterness, but, like a loving parent, only wants for us to come and talk about it. The psalms are a privileged vehicle for prayer because they lift the full-range of our thoughts and feelings to God.

For a number of reasons, we struggle with that. First, because our age tends to eschew metaphor and, taken literally, some of the images within the psalms are offensive. Secondly, we tend to be in denial about our true feelings. It’s hard to admit that we feel many of the things we do feel, from our private grandiosity, to our sexual obsessions, to our jealousies, to our occasional murderous thoughts. Too often our prayer belies our actual thoughts and feelings. It tells God what we think God wants to hear. The psalms have more honesty.

As Kathleen Norris puts it: If you pray regularly “there is no way you can do it right. You are not always going to sit up straight, let alone think holy thoughts. You’re not going to wear your best clothes but whatever isn’t in the dirty clothes basket. You come to the Bible’s great `book of praises’ through all the moods and conditions of life, and while you feel like hell, you sing anyway. To your surprise, you find that the psalms do not deny your true feelings but allow you to reflect them, right in front of God and everyone.”

Feel-good aphorisms that express how we think we ought to feel are no substitute for the earthy realism of the psalms which express how we actually do feel. Anyone who would lift mind and heart to God without ever mentioning feelings of bitterness, jealousy, vengeance, hatred, and war, should write slogans for greeting-cards and not be anyone’s spiritual advisor.