Energy Meets Wisdom

August 4, 2002

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.

Three Things for Conservatives to Ponder

July 28, 2002

Last week’s column suggested three areas for liberal self-scrutiny. It’s time for the flip-side. What three areas might conservatives ponder?

1) Jesus’ admonition that truth alone is not enough.

For Jesus, truth needs a certain aesthetics: “Speak your truth in parables,” he cautioned, “lest people might look but not perceive, listen but not understand.” Among other things, this means that the truth is not a sledge-hammer. It’s not enough simply to have the right truth, we need the right energy and patience as well.

As conservatives, we sometimes forget that. In our itch to defend the truth and protect proper boundaries, too often we try to impose truth by law and subdue opposing voices by legislative force. Contrary to Jesus’ advice, we aren’t content to let the weeds and the wheat grow together, but are habitually over-eager to uproot opposing views.

Passion alone is not enough. Neither is truth. The occupational pitfall for us, conservatives, is this: Not infrequently we end up like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing all the right things, not straying, but standing outside the circles of the celebration, unable to dance because we are angry that someone else has strayed. Too often our passion for truth has us bracket Jesus’ call for patience, wide tolerance, and a mellow heart.

2) One issue does not make for a whole gospel.

The litmus test, biblically, as to one’s Christian orthodoxy is love of one’s enemies.

This isn’t always our position as conservatives. In our passion for truth, we too frequently judge others’ orthodoxy and good-will on another basis, namely, on how they stand on a given moral or doctrinal issue: abortion, sexual ethics, homosexuality, euthanasia, feminist ideology, papal infallibility, intercommunion, or even liturgical rubrics. The point is not that these issues aren’t important. They are. The point rather is that, too often, we are focused so exclusively on one issue that we no longer see the larger moral picture.

For example, as conservatives, it is easy for us to look at a culture such as exists in Holland and assess it very negatively from a Christian point of view: Holland has legalized abortion, euthanasia, prostitution, and various drugs. Church attendance is very low, many people no longer bother to get married inside of the church or even inside of a courthouse, and, from many points of view, things look very post- Christian.

Yet, on the other hand, Holland has established one of the most compassionate, peace-loving cultures in the whole world. They take care of their poor better perhaps than any other country in the world, are peace-loving, solicitous that everyone have equal rights, anxious about the environment, and display a wonderful religious and ethnic tolerance. These are no small moral achievements. Too often we don’t see this because obsessive focus on one moral issue blinds us to the larger moral picture. Sadly, this is also true, in reverse, when we assess more conservative cultures.

Another example might be our reaction to feminism. Too often we blame it for our culture’s struggle with marriage and family life, not seeing at all that many of its tenets are a direct challenge to certain principles in the workplace (which creates too little place for family life) that are the real culprits in the dissipation of so many marriages and families. It was Gloria Steinem, not the corporations we trust, who let her employees bring their children along to the work and let them be parents and workers both at the same time.

3) The social gospel is just as non-negotiable as the sexual one.

As conservatives, we can be proud that, in a culture not given to accepting much in the way of challenge in terms of sexual ethics and private morality, we have remained prophetic in terms of affirming a higher sexual ethos, the road less-taken. Our culture owes conservatives a huge debt here, not that it will ever pay it.

But sometimes our vigilance has been one-sided. We have been healthily vigilant about sexual morality and what it protects (marriage, family life, emotional stability, social order, personal integrity, proper transparency, the capacity for trust) without, at the same time, being equally (or at all) solicitous about the other half of the gospel, justice and feeding the poor. Like our liberals colleagues, we too are selective in our morality, able to compartmentalize, and able to feel comfortable with neglecting important parts of the gospel because of our passion for one area of it.

Jesus, however, makes social morality and private morality equally non-negotiable. In the gospels, we don’t go to heaven if we break the commandments, but we don’t go there either if we don’t feed the poor.

Sally Bingham was recently asked how she adjusts herself in terms of speaking to either a conservative or a liberal congregation. Her reply: “I don’t look at whether a congregation is liberal or conservative; I look at how devout they are.” Sound advice for us all.

Three Things for Liberals to Ponder

July 21, 2002

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.

Bewailing our Virginity

July 14, 2002

Scripture is often shocking in its earthiness. The Book of Judges gives us an example: A certain king, Jepthah, is at war and things are going badly. He prays to God in desperation, promising that if God lets him win this battle he, Jepthah, upon returning to his kingdom will offer on the altar of sacrifice the first person he meets. God takes him at his word. Jepthah wins his battle and is overjoyed. His joy quickly evaporates. Upon returning home, he sees his own daughter, in the bloom of her youth, running out to meet him and he, conscious of his promise to God, now faces a horrible dilemma – break an oath to God or sacrifice his own daughter.

He tells his daughter of the promise and is ready to break his vow. She, however, offers to die in sacrifice … except there is one thing (as there always is in every great story of the soul). What is the one thing in her case? She’s a virgin and will now die in non-consummation and barrenness, never having achieved wholeness and never having given birth. So she asks her father to grant her a period of two months to go into the desert and bewail her virginity. Her father agrees and she and her maiden companions go out into the desert to grieve the fact that she will die unwhole, barren, never having been granted the full symphony. She does her grieving in the desert, returns, and dies on the altar of sacrifice.

On one level this is an awful story – a terrible commentary on God, patriarchy of a bad sort, and religion at its worst. At another level, though, it’s a profound story, worth meditating. Biblical stories of this genre, as we know, are neither historical nor meant to be taken literally. Rather they depict the inner dramas of the soul, of every soul, in every age. This is our story. We too are invited to mourn our virginity. What’s our particular virginity?

Henri Nouwen once said that here, in this life, “there is no such a thing as clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitation. 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.” That’s an important insight.

There is no such thing as a clear-cut, pure joy. This constitutes a kind of virginity. We are always somewhere unwhole, barren, unable to give full birth to what’s pushing for life inside us. This frustration takes various forms during the course of our lives, but it’s always there. Sometimes it’s there in the area of sexuality, irrespective of whether we are married or celibate. I remember a former colleague of mine, a married woman, challenging a group of priests: “You, celibates, feel too sorry for yourselves,” she said. “Do you know what’s worse than sleeping alone? Sleeping alone when you’re not sleeping alone!” Everyone, in some areas of life, is deeply alone.

More deeply though our frustration is with the limits of life itself. Art too has its martyrs, Iris Murdoch once remarked, and there is no greater pain in life than the inadequacy of self-expression. None of us ever finds adequate self-expression.

This stems not from idiosyncratic pathology, but from the way we are built. We are made for the infinite and are, as John of the Cross says, caverns without a bottom, infinite canyons that nothing can ever fill in. With a depth and a capacity for the infinite, we shouldn’t be surprised that we don’t find all we need within the finite. We’re over-charged for this life.

We experience this in our daydreams. There we feel the discrepancy between what we yearn for and what we can actually have, though there comes a day when we realize that, this side of heaven, our yearned-for consummation is not to be had. But the fire doesn’t die. We ache just as much after the realism soaks in. It’s then, when we realize that so much of what we yearn for is not to be, that, like Jepheth’s daughter, it’s time to head for the desert to make peace with our souls and with God for the infinite patience that is asked of us.

Karl Rahner once said that “in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.” Former spiritualities called this living “in a vale of tears.” There is nothing morbid about such a statement.

In the end, one way or the other we all die as virgins, never having fully experienced consummation, barren, never having given birth. Celibate or married, we all sleep alone. There comes a time to mourn this so as to find the joy that lies on the other side, after the grief, on the altar of sacrifice.

Suicide – When Someone is too Bruised to be Touched

July 7, 2002

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.

Taking our Rightful Place with the Scheme of Things

June 30, 2002

What do we need to achieve to make us happy? What brings us peace and meaning?

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once wrote this about his own life: “Some sort of essential instinct makes me guess at the joy, as the only worthwhile joy, of co-operating as one individual atom in the final establishment of a world; and ultimately nothing else can mean anything to me. To release some infinitesimal quantity of the absolute, to free one fragment of being, forever – everything else is but intolerable futility.”

For him, at the end of the day, there is only one worthwhile joy, the feeling you get from cooperating rightfully within the big picture of things, from taking your place within the great cosmic jigsaw puzzle. Joy and meaning come from being one tiny piece within the overall progress of the universe, nothing more and nothing less.

At first glance this might all seem a bit abstract, idiosyncratic, and applicable only to the spiritually elite, but what Teilhard says here is really true for everyone. We all feel this, deep down, though perhaps we are not as aware of it as he was. What he says is universally true. There is only one thing that can bring real meaning, only one joy that doesn’t bring as much anxiety as peace, and that joy is had only when we fill-in with our own lives that particular space within the universe that has been uniquely allotted to us and when we take no more space and no less space than is truly ours.

But how is this true? When and how do we feel these things?

We experience these things all the time in our everyday lives. Why do we feel good when we succeed at anything? Is it because we are admired for it, our ego gets stroked, or because we enjoy the satisfaction of doing something well? Yes, for all of these reasons, though none is the deepest one. Ultimately, though we aren’t generally aware of it, we feel good because, deep down, we have contributed our little piece to the big picture, filled in a piece of the jigsaw puzzle that only we can provide, been one necessary atom in the final establishment of things. That is why we feel good whenever we build something, help someone, give birth to something, help raise someone, teach something, complete something, nurse someone, perform a successful surgery, score a goal, clean a bathroom, cook a meal, do the dishes, or simply do anything properly. The satisfaction we feel at these times has a deep root. We have just filled in our little piece in the big picture, helped free up one fragment of being.

Conversely, why do we feel badly whenever we fail at something, betray someone, or realize that we have wasted some of our potential? Is this simply a feeling of wounded pride, frustration, shame? Yes, all of these things, but, again, it is more. Ultimately we feel a certain intolerable futility because we have not taken our rightful place in the cosmos, not filled in our proper piece of the jigsaw puzzle.

It can be helpful to recognize this more consciously, especially so as not to misread our own restlessness. Why do I say this?

Because we are born so restless, so incurably driven by the sense that we are special and meant to achieve something of significance. Nobody wants to live and not leave some mark in the world. “Have child, plant a tree, write a book!” says a popular axiom. Translated that means: “Make sure you do something to guarantee, a little at least, your own immortality.” We often lack the self-knowledge or honesty to admit this, but something inside us (the part that fuels our restlessness) understands exactly what that means. We want and need to leave a permanent mark somewhere. We are born for that reason.

But generally we misread this restless and what it is asking of us. The logic runs this way: We know that we need to leave a permanent mark somewhere. But we think we can only do this by becoming famous in some way, a person known to the world, a household word, someone with his or her name in lights, on the cover of TIME magazine. That is why we are always trying to achieve something of significance, something that will stand out, something that will last. Most often though our lives do not seem to measure up. We feel ourselves small-town, ordinary, unimportant, and so our restlessness begins to eat us up.

Our everyday satisfactions and disappointments though can teach us something. We need to listen closely to what makes us feel good or bad. Our lives can seem small, but we do not especially enlarge them through fame and recognition. You don’t get immortality – nor restfulness – for being a superstar. You get these for filling in that little piece of the big picture, that one wee atom, that is uniquely yours.

The Right to Call Another to a Vocation

June 23, 2002

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.

Carrying a Scandal

June 16, 2002

The Catholic church in North America today is undergoing a crisis of soul, perhaps the most severe one in its young history. Sex scandals among the clergy and the less-than-ideal way the bishops have, at least up to now, dealt with this, have left the church shaken, humbled, and humiliated. It’s dark hour, a painful dark night of the soul.

It’s also high season for those who dislike organized religion in general and Roman Catholicism in particular. These revelations would seem to confirm their most hopeful suspicions, namely, that organized religion is ultimately all about self-interest and the celibacy of the Roman Catholic clergy is a charade.

What’s to be said and done in the face of all of this?

There’s no easy answer, though there is a biblical one. We must see this as a pruning from God, a needed cleansing, a season of purification, and an invitation to grow to a new maturity. We are being humbled and we must understand this biblically and carry it in a that fashion. What would our scriptural tradition say about this? Given how it always sees God as Lord and as speaking through every event, good or bad, I suspect that a biblical writer would say something to this effect: “This crisis has not been provoked by the media, but comes from God and is an invitation to grow to a deeper level of faith, compassion, and love.”

What’s being asked of us? How do we carry this scandal biblically?

First of all, by striving for a deeper compassion for the victims and a deeper understanding of how devastating sexual abuse is to the soul of its victim. God is asking us to never again trivialize something that so destroys a soul, especially of a defenceless young person.

Second, we are being asked for more courage and honesty in facing and acknowledging our sin. We have, indeed, betrayed a trust and we need to apologize for that, publicly and without rationalization. Moreover, we need to build up a new immune system, an ecology of health within the body of the church, so that this can never happen again. As well, this humiliation should teach us something about the dangers of clerical privilege. The chickens inevitably come home to roost. A season of nasty disprivilege will always follow a time of privilege. We misused power, took too many things for granted, enjoyed privilege, and kept too many things secret and in-house too long, however sincere we may have been. Now we are paying the price. We must never again let ourselves fall into the trap of privilege.

Third, we need too to widen our compassion so as to include the perpetrator, that person who suffers from the most unglamorous of all illnesses, paedophilia. It’s easy to have a selective compassion, to reach out for those whose weakness or illness is clean, uncompromised, and doesn’t taint us in any way. Gospel compassion, however, radiates the heart of God and has a special love for those who are the most unglamorous, outcast, and seen as unfit for normal life.

Finally, carrying this scandal biblically also means that we must resist the temptation to personally distance ourselves from it by taking the attitude: “Don’t look at me! I’m innocent! Don’t paint me with that brush!”

We’re family and this has happened inside our family. A biblical faith and Christ-like compassion does not link itself to the family’s graced moments, its saints, martyrs, and proud achievements and then distance itself from it dark history, its compromises, its betrayals, and its sin. Jesus didn’t do that. His love for us and his solidarity with the family made for a very painful conscription. He was crucified between two thieves and was judged, at the moment of his humiliation and death, by association to be as tainted as those who died around him. People present at the crucifixion were not making distinctions as to who was guilty and who was innocent. Jesus was seen as tainted, pure and simple. Perhaps that was the most painful aspect of all for him as he underwent the crucifixion. This too is what’s asked of us. The sex scandals re-make present the original scene at Calvary – Christ dying between two thieves. We are, each, all three of those characters.

To carry all of this in not easy, especially in the short run. We have to be prepared for a season, perhaps a long one, of continued pain and embarrassment and a further erosion of trust. We need to accept this without self-pity and without being overly self-protective. Partly we are ill (though everyone is) and, like a virus that has infected the body, this has to run its course and the body, in fever and weakness, has to build up a new immune system. In a situation like this, there is only one thing to do and the Book of Lamentations spells it out graphically: “Put your mouth to the dust and wait!”

Moving Beyond Our Little Rule

June 9, 2002

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.

Giving up our need to be right

June 2, 2002

Jesus left us the Eucharist as the source of our unity. Sadly, often, it’s the cause of our division, both among Christian denominations and within them. We tend to do battle with each other about most everything connected to the Eucharist: What’s its precise theology? Who may preside? How often should it be celebrated? What’s the precise role of the presider? How is the presider to be vested? Where should the altar be placed? Which hymns are appropriate and which aren’t? How is Christ’s presence in the bread and wine to be understood? How inclusive must the language to be? What’s the relationship of the Eucharistic ritual to the celebration of the Word? Who may appropriately serve the Eucharistic species? The disagreements, it seems, never end.

There is one consolation in all of this. Scripture scholars suggest that it has ever been thus, right from the beginning. Already within the earliest apostolic churches, these same questions were hotly debated and were the source of painful divisions.

Looking at the Christian scriptures we see that there is no single theology and practice of the Eucharist presented there. Rather there are already a variety of theologies, approaches, and vocabularies about it. Some communities, for instance, called it “The Lord’s Supper”, others, it seems, didn’t; some communities, John’s for instance, may have celebrated Eucharist daily while others may have celebrated it only on Sundays or even less frequently; some communities argued about who should sit where during the service, others about who should have their heads covered and who shouldn’t.

Hence, already by the time that the gospels were written there was not one precise, univocal view on the Eucharist and, seemingly, considerable variety in its practice, not to mention painful and sharp disagreements about it. Already then it was both a source of unity and a source of division within and among the various communities.

The Evangelist, John, tries to make an important point about all of this. By the time his gospel is written, there were already, strikingly parallel to today, many disputes about the Eucharist. More and more, the Eucharist was becoming as much a cause of division as a source of unity for Christians. What was John’s response?

Where the other gospels place the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper, John inserts a very different kind of “Eucharistic” text. In place of having Jesus take the bread and wine and say, “This is my body! This is my blood!”, John has Jesus washing the feet of his disciples – precisely as a “Eucharistic” act. How so?

To the popular mind, this gesture is understood as a lesson in humility, namely, Jesus, the master, turns the mantle of privilege into the apron of service. That lesson clearly is there, but there’s more. Jesus is also saying something important about the Eucharist with this gesture (which is why the church chose this text, rather than one recording the words of institution, as its gospel-text for Holy Thursday). What does the washing of the feet say about the Eucharist?

In essence, Jesus is saying this: “Acquiescing to each other in charity and service, in this way, is what the Eucharist really means. If we can’t do this for each other, perhaps we shouldn’t be celebrating the Eucharist at all. We can give up our right to be right!”

The Eucharist is an invitation to many things, but it’s also, as Jesus’ gesture of washing his disciples’ feet shows, an invitation to GIVE UP OUR RIGHT TO BE RIGHT, especially as regards our views about how the Eucharist must be celebrated. Simply put, Jesus tells us (shows us really) that it’s more important to be in union with each other than to be right!

That’s an important challenge. We simply fight too much about the Eucharist. Everyone, it seems, has an important, non-negotiable, truth that he or she feels may not, at any cost, be compromised: Catholics and Protestants fight over the real presence (at least over its vocabulary); feminists and traditionalists fight over language; liturgists fight with the common folk over how a service should be properly done; artists fight with the pious over liturgical aesthetics; choir directors fight with pastors over the choice of songs; priests fight with each other over the issue of concelebration; bishops fight with church boards over how liturgical space should be constructed, and people at Eucharistic services glare at each other and throw private tantrums because a certain song mentions dancing or names us as wretched sinners.

Too often what’s at stake under all this is more pride than truth, more the need to be right than the need to worship.

Jesus washing his disciples’ feet leaves this message: It’s more important to be in union in Christ and each other than to be liturgically, aesthetically, and politically correct. What the Eucharist asks of us, among other things, is to acquiesce to each other, to give up our right to be right!

Ten Tensions to Carry

May 26, 2002

The thought of some of the greatest and most influential persons in history seems, at times, riddled with inconsistencies. Jesus, Augustine, Socrates, Aristotle, among others, appear at times to contradicting themselves. It’s not always easy to see how everything squares with everything else in their teachings.

That’s why the great religions and philosophies of the world are so prone to multiple interpretations. For example, given the depth and scope of Jesus’ teaching, Christianity is particularly open to different kinds of understanding. It’s no accident that there are hundreds of denominations within Christianity and every variation of spirituality and worship inside of these. The teaching is so rich that none of us, the disciples, it would seem, can carry it off as did the master. We each pick our parts selectively, end up consistent, but also much narrower than the master.

Consistency, someone once quipped, is the product of a small mind, just as inconsistency is the mark of a great one. There’s a truth in that, though it must be carefully understood. For instance, sometimes we achieve a certain consistency, a view of things that holds together and has no contradictions within it, but at a high price, namely, we end up too narrow, too non-inclusive, too one-sided, impoverished, reductionistic. Racism, bigotry, fundamentalism, anarchy, and wantonness are, whatever else, consistent. But their consistency is based upon a fragile synthesis, too narrowly drawn, that eventually suffocates important areas of life.

Conversely, sometimes what looks like inconsistency is really a person holding together a number of important truths in a higher synthesis. She may look inconsistent, but what she is really doing is holding and juggling a number of different truths in a creative tension. The person who tries this juggling act, and it is a juggling act, will often find herself in great tension, but, she will also find that she has no blocked arteries and very resilient lungs, that blood flows freely to every part of her person and she is able draw life-giving oxygen from whatever kind of air she finds around her.

Jesus was like that. He held so many great truths together in one synthesis that he was misunderstood by just about everyone and he scandalized persons on both sides of the ideological spectrum. In his teaching, it’s more “both/and” than “either/or”. We struggle with that. It’s easier to carry one truth or another than try to carry them all.

What are some of the great truths that Jesus carried in tension that we tend to reduce too easily? Allow me to name ten of these, chosen precisely because a healthy spirituality must always carry both ends of these:

1) A strong sense of individuality, a focus on private integrity and private prayer – coupled with an equally strong commitment to community, family, civic and ecclesial involvement, and social justice.

2) A healthy capacity to drink in life and enjoy it without guilt – but one that befriends an equally healthy capacity for asceticism, selflessness, and discipline.

3) A healthy development of the individual gifts that God has given us, a healthy self-assertion, complete with a certain healthy exhibitionism – held always in tension with a healthy sense of duty, a capacity for obedience, and an habitual self-effacement.

4) An itch for the prophetic, an eye and a sympathy for what lies outside the centre, for what is marginalized, a challenging voice for the excluded – even as one recognizes the importance of the institutional, defends against anarchy, and helps nurture what’s sacred within family, church, and tradition.

5) A perpetual openness to what’s new, what’s strange, what causes discomfort, to what’s liberal – even as one works to ground oneself and others in the familiar, in routine, in what conserves, gives rhythm, and makes for family and stability.

6) A eye and a love for the sacred, for God, for the other-world, for the eternal horizon – coupled with an unabashed love for this world, for its joys, for its achievements, its present moment.

7) A passion for sexuality and a defense of its goodness – coupled with an equally strong defense of purity and chastity.

8) An eye for world-community, for stretching all the boundaries we were born into, for an ever-widening hospitality – even as one is deeply loyal to family, personal roots, and the fact that hospitality begins at home.

9) An idealism and a hope that defies the facts, that relies on God’s promises and does not let the deep, inchoate desires of the human heart be deflected by the accidents of history – held together with a realism that is pragmatic, programmatic, and doing its share of the work.

10) A focus on the next-life, on life after death, on the fact that our lives here are but a short time in expectation of something else – even as we focus on the reality and goodness of life after birth, this life, its importance.

Jesus held all of these as one, playing every kind of tune and breathing every kind of air, both human and divine.

From the House of Fear to the House of Love

May 19, 2002

Henri Nouwen, in his writings, frequently asked this question: “How can we live inside a world marked by fear, hatred, and violence and not be destroyed by it?”

At a certain point in life that becomes the real task of spirituality: How do we stop ourselves from being sucked into the house of fear so as to live in the house of love? What’s meant by this?

We live in a world of division, hatred, and violence. One only has to watch the news to see this. Daily we see fear and hatred translated into violence and death all over the world. What’s true at this level is true too, in a less pronounced way, in our ordinary lives. Inside our families, churches, and communities we see the problems of the world played out on the small-screen of our daily lives. Bitterness, suspicion, the sense of injustice, anger, jealousy, hatred, division, and subtle forms of violence eventually penetrate even our most intimate relationships. We often don’t recognize these for what they are and consider them simply part of the normal give and take of everyday life, but gossip, slander, cynicism, cutting remarks, coldness, and resentment are really the public events of the evening news manifest in our private lives. What we see on the big-screen of the evening news, fear and its consequences, is pretty much too what we have lived during our day.

What this does is keep us, almost always, inside the house of fear. Because we live inside of families, churches, and communities where there is suspicion, gossip, cynicism, jealousy, and bitterness, it’s natural that our first instinct so often is to protect ourselves, to be suspicious, to be hard, to be cynical, to be angry. We live, as Nouwen puts it, inside the house of fear rather than inside the house of love.

How do we save ourselves from getting lost there? How do we remain tender when so much around us is hard? How do we remain free of fear when we there is so much anger around? How do we continue to share what is deep and intimate inside us when we live inside of circles rife with gossip, cynicism, and jealousy? Indeed, how do we continue to even strive to deal with this when, so often, we are just a guilty as everyone else?

There are no easy answers. Moreover this is not, as Nouwen himself points out, something that we can ever accomplish once and for all. The world is not divided up between those who have conquered fear and those who haven’t. Rather our own days and hours are divided up between those times when we live more in fear and those times when we live more in love. There are times when our fears take over and we act out of them, just as there are other times when grace opens us beyond fear and we can act in graciousness and love.

The task of coming to spiritual adulthood is very much linked with moving from fear to love. This is partly what Jesus meant when he urged us to save ourselves from this world and when, in his priestly prayer, he prayed that we might be where he is, in love, free of fear.

To be free of fear, suspicion, and the need to protect ourselves is a major spiritual task. One of the great ironies is that, both in spirituality and human life in general, this is often easier for us when we are young and immature than when we are older and supposedly wiser. Why? Because when we are young, totally independent of maturity, we are still naturally more idealistic, more wary of cynicism, more trusting, less jaded, and less in touch with our wounds. Deep neuroses, as Freud pointed out, hit us with a vengeance in mid-life and beyond. It’s then that it becomes harder to live inside of the house of love, free from bitterness and distrust. It’s there too that the air that we breathe can be so bitter and jaded.

The spiritual task of mid-life and beyond is to resist hardness, cynicism, bitterness, and fear and to become childlike and trusting again. But this isn’t easy, as any therapist or spiritual director will tell you. Alice Miller, the great Swiss analyst, suggests that the spiritual task of mid-life and beyond is that of grieving, grieving until the very foundations of our lives shake. Grieving, she suggests, is the only thing that can save us from bitterness – not a bad phrasing really for a key element within paschal transformation.

The full answer of course lies in prayer, sustained daily prayer. God is always inviting us into the house of love, but, given the hardness we so often experience in our everyday circles, it is only in intimate prayer that we can hear a voice gentle and trusting enough to entice us to let go of fear and move beyond the need to protect ourselves.

God’s Gender

May 12, 2002

God is ineffable. What this means is that everything we imagine, think, or say about God is, because of the very nature of God, highly inadequate, poor theology at best. That’s the first thing that always needs to be said before weighing anything we affirm about God. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in fact, defined as dogma the fact that all language about God conceals more than it reveals and is more inaccurate than accurate. All language about God largely misses the mark.

Nowhere is this more evident, or problematic, than in our efforts to conceive of and speak of God’s gender. We speak of God as “He”, as “Father”, as masculine, but scripture assures us that God is not just masculine, nor just feminine, nor some neutered entity. God, as revealed in the Judeo-Christian scriptures, is eminently personal, gendered and sexed; but, as the first chapter of Genesis makes clear, God is equally male and female since both masculinity and femininity image God equally.

But how can this be conceived of or captured in language? Essentially, it can’t. All concepts and language are inadequate here. This is one of the reasons why, for so many centuries, we commonly conceived of and spoke of God as exclusively masculine. It solved a lot of problems. God, as masculine, is the dominant (though not exclusive) image of God in Scripture. Given that we have no nouns and pronouns that capture both genders, for better and for worse, we opted to speak of God as “He” and “Father”, rather than as having no personality. Conceiving and speaking of God as exclusively masculine was one-sided, but it helped save us from something even more debilitating, namely, a God without gender, sex, or personality (“The force be with you!”). So where do we go from here?

Mircea Eliade, in his mythical schema of things, suggests that, archetypally, at the center of things there sit two thrones. On one sits a King, on the other a Queen. But the two work as one, always in perfect harmony, in perfect mutuality, empowering each other. They rule as one and the kingdom and everything in it is safe because those two thrones sit at the center and the two together can create the energy and power needed to order, feed, and bless the people.

The center of things is, of course, where God sits. What Eliade is proposing, in fact, is a concept of God as perfect masculinity and perfect femininity, in perfect harmony, in perfect mutuality, in full adulthood, empowering each other so that the graciousness that is thus generated flows out and feeds, blesses, and protects all the people. What a wonderful image of God! How full of personality and gender! And yet, how beyond language!

Beautiful as this is, some of our mystical images go even further: How to conceive of God? Imagine perfect masculinity and perfect femininity making perfect love. That’s what’s happening inside of God and all the creativity and fertility within the universe is the result of that. Billions of galaxies, billions of people, and gracious energy beyond imagination is constantly being generated because, inside of God, loving embrace is happening.

Such an image is perhaps more poetic than theological, but, in the end, isn’t all theology just that, poetry meant to inspire? More crassly, isn’t all orthodox theology simply a set of words that God has given us permission to use without threat of being killed for blasphemy?

This image of God, as perfect masculinity and femininity making love, can, I submit, be a rich mine-field for prayer and reflection. Of itself, it won’t solve the problem of the equality of the sexes, nor the struggle to find a more inclusive language about God, though it might serve as a valuable backdrop for these issues. Such a concept of God though can help us to see and contemplate more clearly what St. Augustine called, the “vestiges of the Trinity”, namely, images of God within nature and human life.

If God can be conceived as perfect, fully-adult, masculinity and perfect femininity making love, then vestiges of God can be seen everywhere. The ecstatic embrace of the great King and the great Queen leaves traces everywhere: in the dew on the grass, in the flowers growing in a garden, in the interplay of light and smell that enchant a forest, in the peace that settles in as an elderly couple silently shares a meal, in the passionate embrace of lovers, in the respect and holy fear one sometimes sees between the sexes, and, of course and especially, whenever you see, in this world, femininity and masculinity empowering each other for the good the kingdom and the kids.

All good fairy tales end with a marriage, a prince and princess marry each other, become the King and Queen, and then “live happily ever after.” That’s an image that tells us what’s happening inside of God and what, because of this wonderful marriage, God has in store for us.

Where Faith Resides

May 5, 2002

Daniel Berrigan was once asked: “Where does your faith reside, where’s its real seat?” His answer is wonderful, both in colour and insight: “Your faith is rarely where your head is at and rarely where your heart is at. Your faith is where your ass is at! Inside what commitments are you sitting? Within what reality do you anchor yourself?”

Faith, in his view, is not anchored in the head or the heart. But how is that possible? If it isn’t in the head or the heart, where is it?

From Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas, through contemporary philosophy and psychology, analysts have generally agreed that, as human beings, we have three major spiritual faculties: HEAD, HEART, and GUT, each with a special function. In our heads, we think. In our hearts, we feel. What happens in the gut? In the gut, we know, just simply know, in a way beyond thoughts and feelings. The gut has to do with intuition, it lets us know what we “have to do”. It’s there that we experience the categorical imperatives within our lives.

With that as a background, we can begin to understand the wisdom of Berrigan’s answer: To use just one example: There are times when each of us in the most important commitments within our lives (faith, family, church, morality) find ourselves in a situation where our heads aren’t in it, our hearts aren’t in it, but we are in it! Against the more spontaneous wisdom of our heads and against the more natural feelings of our hearts, we are anchored by another kind of thought and feeling which perhaps we can’t explain to anyone, even to ourselves, but which keeps us siting, standing, and walking solidly inside of a certain commitment. We are doing what “we have to do” because at some deep level we simply “know” that this is what we need to do, that this is what is right. That’s faith.

Faith is manifest in our decisions, our commitments, and our life-choices, more than in any intellectual beliefs or passionate feelings. It shows itself in decisions, in choosing certain commitments and in remaining within them. It’s helpful to know this.

How do I know whether my faith is weak or strong? By checking where my ass is at! Why am I inside certain commitments? Why am I remaining there? That, ultimately, is the criterion. The same holds true for assessment of others’ faith. What’s to be said of those among our own children, siblings, neighbours, and friends, who no longer go to church and seem, on the surface at least, to be rather cavalier about the faith?

How we assess their faith may not be based upon where their heads and hearts are at, but rather upon where they are at. Do they radiate charity, graciousness, respect, hospitality, honesty, generosity, moral integrity, concern for justice? To what are they giving their lives? What commitments are they sitting and walking within and why? Faith is judged by these things, not only by how someone thinks, feels, or expresses herself explicitly in the area of faith.

God, as Jesus makes clear, is a self-emptying God, and we live in the wonder and grace of that kenosis. God, it seems, is self-secure enough so as to not need to be always the centre of conscious attention, the acknowledged life of the party.

We see then that there is a real difference between the idea of faith and its reality. Too often we confuse these.

Faith is also an idea and that idea can sometimes be very stimulating intellectually. As well, the idea of faith can stir and inflame the heart. The reverse is also true. As a notion, faith can sometimes seem intellectually stifling and can feel emotionally crippling. Feelings and thoughts run a wide gamut and so we must be careful to not mistake how we think and feel about God on any given day for the reality of faith. Thoughts and feelings about God are not necessarily faith, as we all-too-quickly learn when our faith is challenged; either by the distractions of everyday life, the scandals in the church, or, more deeply, by personal tragedy, when we are cut down at our roots by terminal illness, the loss of health through aging, and other irreversible losses. It’s then that we find out, only too quickly, that the idea of faith, as distinct from the reality of faith, lacks the substance to truly let us believe in a deeper life than what the world can give us now.

C.S. Lewis, in recounting his own journey to faith, tells us that it was not, in the end, his thoughts or feelings that led him to faith. Rather it was God’s grip on him, an inchoate brand in his soul that wouldn’t go away, a nagging burn in his gut. As he puts it: “The harshness of God is softer than the kindness of men and God’s compulsion is our liberation.”

On Envying the Amoral

April 28, 2002

It’s hard not to envy the amoral, especially if you’re dutifully trying to be faithful to God, commitments, family, church, and the commandments.

Nikos Kazantzakis used to say that virtue sits on its high perch, surveys what’s around it, and then weeps for all it is missing out on. When we’re honest we know this is true, at least on our bad days. Duty brings its own kinds of crucifixion and more often than not, irresponsibility can look very attractive. It’s not for nothing that our society uses the word “cool” to describe the non-committed. Hanging loose outside the circle of commitment can easily pass itself off as the way, the truth, and the life, just as virtue can look and feel like frigidity, up-tightness, lack of nerve, nothing but feckless duty.

It’s one thing to be responsible and dutiful, it’s quite another be grateful for living that way. The danger is that, like the older brother of the Prodigal Son, we end up doing the right thing and then becoming bitter about having to do it. What happens then is that we stand outside the circle of the dance, angry, secretly jealous of the amoral, protesting that life isn’t fair, that God isn’t fair: “I’ve stayed home, done my duty, never seriously strayed, and now the fuss is all about others who have had a fling and haven’t been as faithful as I!”

Piet Fransen used to offer a little litmus-exam to test our attitude on this. His test? Check out your reaction to this, namely, a classical death-bed conversion:

You hear tell of a man who lives his life entirely oblivious to spiritual and moral affairs. He is interested rather in other kinds of affairs. A dilettante, irresponsible, selfish, he deems life only for the pleasure it can bring. He pursues the good life, pleasures of every kind, comfort, luxurious vacations, sexual irresponsibility, without a thought to God, the poor, or duty of any kind. And so he lives from his youth until old age. Then, just before dying, he repents, makes a sincere confession, and dies prayerfully, throwing himself into the arms of God at the last minute in genuine sincerity.

What’s your spontaneous reaction to that? Ah, the wonder of grace! Or … the lucky beggar! He got to have a fling and now he gets heaven besides!

Fransen comments that if we feel even a tinge of envy, and most of us probably do, then, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we have not yet understood God’s grace. If we understood the grace we live in then, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, we would be deeply grateful because someone who has missed out on so much of life has finally, again, come back to life (which is exactly what the person who makes a sincere death-bed conversion realizes and admits). What a sincere death bed conversion reveals is that going the way of the Prodigal Son does not constitute life, but is a stepping away from it, an abandoning of happiness, an act of despair.

But that is precisely what his older brother and so many of us, dutiful Christians, tend to misunderstand. We get upset that someone has had a fling while we remained faithful. Virtue on its high perch weeping! Duty and fidelity, outside of a real understanding of grace, too easily make us bitter and envious.

But God, as the parable of the Prodigal Son makes clear, is equally as gentle with the bitter as with the prodigal. The Father’s words to the older brother as just as loving and forgiving (and revealing) as are his words to the prodigal son: “My child, you have always been with me and everything I have is yours.”

Inside God’s house, everything that belongs to God, including the burden of forgiveness and the burden of God’s anxiety for the world, also belongs to all the others. Only those who stay home with the Father get to become empathic with him because they alone are around enough to be aware of the family’s real situation. Only those at home hear the phlegm in their Father’s throat when he coughs in the morning. That’s a vital part of living in grace. Grace makes us empathic with God and that, more than anything else, can trigger a depth of meaning that dwarfs the pleasure of any prodigal fling. When one owns everything, he or she does not become bitter and jealous over someone else’s pleasure.

Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for literature, but lived most of his life in poverty, once wrote: Poverty taught me that not all was well under the sun, but the sun taught me that poverty isn’t everything!” Grace, like the sun, is free and its warmth and light dwarf all else. Too often we don’t understand this and we find ourselves standing outside the dance, bitter, angry that those who haven’t followed us in duty now seem happier than we.

A Rich Tradition of the Heart

April 21, 2002

There has probably never been a time in the church, certainly not in recent centuries, where we have had as healthy a theology as we have today. The past forty years have been time of great scholarship in scripture and theology. There are now more theologians studying and writing than ever before and they are more scholarly-conscientious than ever before. And their efforts haven’t been wasted. Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars alike, have produced libraries of excellent books. We’re swimming in good theology. In Christology alone, there have probably been more than 600 serious, scholarly, books written in the last forty years.

Wonderful as this is, it hasn’t easily translated into an invigorated church or faith life. While capturing the intellectual imagination of people, scholarly theology hasn’t always been able to inflame the romantic imagination. That’s not it’s fault. Theology does what it does and lately it’s been doing that well. God, however, is strewn in many pieces, across many places. To ingest the reality of God so as to have an invigorating faith requires not just that the part of us that does the critical thinking be involved, but also that the parts of us that are artist, mystic, saint, and magician be equally involved. Reality is many-layered and there are traces of the divine everywhere. Critical thinking uncovers some of this, but other parts of us must unearth the rest.

One of the great complements to theology (and, in the best of times, friends to it) has been the Roman Catholic devotional tradition. This tradition doesn’t trade on critical thinking, but on the romantic imagination. It aspires to inflame the heart. Admittedly, this is risky. Feelings can lead us in many directions, but faith-without-feeling is perhaps the greater danger. The heart also needs its due.

More recently, I fear, we haven’t always given the heart its proper due, either inside Protestantism or Roman Catholicism. For better and for worse, we’ve bet all our chips on the biblical and theological – solid homilies, solid theology, solid liturgy. What else could be needed? Well-intentioned as this is, it’s been reductionistic. Afraid of food-poisoning, we’ve put ourselves on a diet of antiseptics. Now we will never die of impurities, but we might well die of malnutrition.

Where might we go in all of this? Wendy Wright, a theologian at Creighton University in Nebraska, has just released a new book entitled: Sacred Heart – Gateway to God (Orbis Books, 2001). The book is partly autobiographical, solidly theological, and everywhere insightful. Her thesis? We need to become more attentive to the rich minefield that constitutes our devotional tradition to see how it might help fan the fires around a faith that often is dry and too much simply an act of the will.

Among other things, the book chronicles how she herself was led to faith and how she now sustains herself there. At one point she shares this story:

In a library one day with her husband, she picked up a book on the Saints to look up the saint of her husband’s middle name, Hubert. First she was fascinated by descriptions of him, as a scholar, a bishop, and a diplomat of sorts. But …

“I was chugging along just fine until I came to a description of Hubert’s ability to bi-locate. The historical narrative melded seamlessly into a matter-of-fact statement about Hubert’s simultaneous appearances in North Africa and continental Europe. This was followed by a nonchalant prose passage detailing the saint’s many miraculous exploits. Profoundly disoriented, I closed the book. I felt queasy. It was as though two subterranean tectonic plates had collided inside the structured universe in which I lived. In retrospect, I know this was one moment of many at the time that brought about my inexorable turning towards God and the Catholic faith. This was my introduction to a layered universe, to a conceptual world in which time and space ceased to have the boundaries that my empirically trained mind assumed. Here was a world suffused with a power that did not conform to necessity. Here was world drenched with grace. … A layered reality is part of the Catholic imagination. To possess this imagination is to dwell in a universe inhabited by unseen presences – the presence of God, the presence of saints, the presence of one another. There are no isolated individuals but rather unique beings whose deepest life is discovered in and through one another. This life transcends the confines of space and time. … We – and Jesus and the saints – exist in some essential way outside of the chronology of historical time. We have being beyond the strictures of geographical space. And we can sense this now, in the concreteness of our lives.” (Gateway to God, pp. 47-48)

The Catholic devotional tradition has long been helpful in making us aware of our many layered-universe. We need to continue to employ its imagination if we are to help our fleshy hearts feel more really what lies inside the eternal heart of God.