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.

On Hearing the Voice that Soothes

April 14, 2002

Inside each of us there is a deep, congenital restlessness. We are not restful beings who sometimes get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience rest. Karl Rahner, I believe, had it right when he said that we do not have souls that get restless, but that our souls themselves are lonely caverns thirsting for the infinite, deep wells of restlessness that make us ache to sleep with the whole world and all that is beyond.

Because of this we can find it difficult to concentrate during the day and to sleep at night. We go through life feeling like we are missing out on something, that life is more exciting and fulfilling for others than it is for us. Our achievements rarely satisfy us because we are always aware of what we haven’t achieved, of missed chances and failed possibilities. Always too, it seems, that we are inadequate to the task, that we cannot not disappoint those we love.

We are always a bit dissatisfied. As Henri Nouwen puts it, in this life, it seems that there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy, but that even our happiest moments come with a shadow, a fear, a jealousy, a restlessness. Inside us, no matter what our age, we are always somewhat lost and full of a sadness that we don’t quite know what to do with. Thoreau was right, we do live lives of quiet desperation. What are we meant to do with that?

An analogy might help us here: We can learn something valuable, I believe, by comparing these feelings to what a baby feels, at a certain moment, in the presence of a baby-sitter in the absence of its mother. As many a frustrated baby-sitter has learned, there can come a moment, usually later in the evening, when the baby grows tired of being titillated by flashy toys, extra sweets, and the continued cooing of the baby-sitter. The baby becomes irritated, cranky, weepy, and finally disconsolate. At point nothing will soothe its aches, except the voice and the touch of the mother herself. The baby needs to hear the mother’s voice and only the mother’s voice, no attempt by the baby-sitter to replace the mother or even to imitate the mother are of much avail. The baby will not be fooled, there comes a moment when only the mother can soothe and comfort. The baby’s disquiet will disappear only when she again hears the mother lovingly call her name.

It’s no different for us really, as adults, in trying to come to grips with our congenital restlessness. We can distract ourselves for awhile, be titillated by flashy toys, be soothed and lulled by sympathetic voices, and momentarily even be content in the absence of our real mother. But there will come a time, usually a little later on in the proceedings when we are a bit more tired and cranky, when these things will soothe no more. We will begin to miss, in the very depths of our souls, the one voice and one presence that can ultimately bring us rest.

Of course that one voice that can soothe, that one voice that we search for among all the others, is the voice of God, the primordial Mother. Ultimately we reach a point in life when there is an ache and a sadness inside us that no one can still and comfort, other than the one who ultimately brought us to birth. Like the baby frustrated with its baby-sitter, we too need to hear our mother lovingly pronounce our names.

The Gospel of John opens very differently than the other Gospels. There are no infancy narratives. Right at the beginning we already meet the adult Christ and the first words he speaks are a question: “What are you searching for?” John’s whole Gospel tries to answer that, but the full answer is given only at the very end, by Jesus himself.

What are we ultimately searching for? On the morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdala meets the newly-risen Jesus, but she doesn’t recognize him. He approaches her and asks (in words that repeat his question at the opening of the Gospel): “What are you searching for?” She explains that she is searching for the body, the dead body, of Jesus. He says just one word to her in response: “Mary”. He calls her by name and, in that, she not only recognizes him, but she hears precisely what a disconsolate baby cannot hear in the voice of her baby-sitter, the voice of the mother, lovingly pronouncing her name.

In Jesus’ response to Mary Magdala, we learn the answer to life’s most fundamental question: What do we ache for? Ultimately all our aching is for one thing, to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this, hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God.

The Gaze of Sheer Admiration

April 7, 2002

The older I get the more convinced I am that spiritual maturity lies in the simple capacity to admire – to admire beauty, admire talent, and admire youth, without trying to possess them.

It takes years and lots of restless sadness to come to understand that. Happiness doesn’t come from achieving great things, being the centre of attention, or being recognized for being exceptional in some way. Paradoxically, the near-reverse is true, real joy lies in being able to admire another, in focusing attention away from self, and in being able to enjoy the beauty and giftedness of others without trying to possess them.

That’s easily said and very hard to do. Our congenital metaphysics militates against it. Soul and the body resist it. We want to possess what’s beautiful, press it against ourselves, make it our own. The heart wants to capture, possess, and control what attracts it. That’s the way we’re built.

And it’s the reason too why we often find it so painful to experience beauty. Strange, rather than filling us with joy, the experience of beauty often makes us sad and restless. Beauty attracts us, even stuns us sometimes, but, too often, leaves us with the bitter-sweet feeling: “This is beautiful, but I can’t have it, and so it accentuates everything I am not!” The experience of beauty, more often than not, leaves us restless and sad, incapable of joyful admiration.

Etty Hillesum, in her poignant memoir, An Interrupted Life, articulates this well:

“And here I hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful scenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual, I might also write that I was too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it. Hence the painful longing that could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works. It all suddenly changed, God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my short walk around the Skating Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past. Then all the beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart and I would not have known what to do with the pain. Then I would have felt the need to write, to compose verses, but the words still would have refused to come. I would have felt utterly miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have sapped all my energy. Now I know it for what it was: mental masturbation. But that night, only just gone, I reacted quite differently. I felt that God’s world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now filled me with joy. I was just as deeply moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow I no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated and got to work. And the scenery stayed with me, in the background as a cloak about my soul, to put it poetically for once, but it no longer held me back: I no longer masturbated with it.”

To admire someone attractive or something beautiful without trying to possess, that’s the real task, not just of aesthetics but, especially, of spirituality. When the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks: “What must I do to possess eternal life?”, Jesus gently corrects his verb. He tells him: “If you would receive eternal life, then open your hands and, in that posture of non-grasping, eternal life is free for you.” But, as we know, the story has an unhappy ending. The young man goes away sad, unable to do what Jesus asked of him.

That’s our problem too, generally, with sadness. We are unable to stand before beauty without trying, like the rich young man, to possess it, to close our hands over it. If only we could be content just to receive it, to admire it, to bless it, our restlessness and sadness could turn to joy.

The older we get, the more we know the truth of this, though we aren’t always up to the task. But it’s helpful, very helpful, to know in what direction peace and maturity lie. Hopefully one day, like Etty Hillesum, joy will catch us blind-side, as we look at a beauty that swells the heart and are able to say: “This is beautiful, and I don’t need to press it to my heart!”

God’s Resurrecting Power as Ultimate Truth

March 31, 2002

As children we believe in fairy tales and nurse the naive idea that there is somewhere a divine magic which can, and will in the end, swish away all evil, injustice, and pain and make a happy ending to everything.

The older we get, the harder it is for us to believe that. Reality is shock therapy. After seeing all the magic around us deconstructed and more than enough unhappy endings, we begin instead to believe George Orwell who said that “if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on the human face forever.”

But who’s ultimately right, the child or Orwell? What should we live our lives by, the child’s belief in magic or Orwell’s pan-adult realism? What’s to be the end of our lives and of human history, divine magic or a boot in the face? At the end of the final day, what’s reality and what’s naivete?

The more adult and sophisticated we become the greater the temptation to opt for the view of Orwell. We wish, of course, that it wasn’t so, that there was somewhere a divine magic that could make for happy endings, but, stoically or bitterly, we accept that things are otherwise. When all is said and done, the facts seem to say that darkness triumphs over light, loneliness over community, self-interest over love, egoism over altruism, injustice over justice, bitterness over compassion, tastelessness over beauty, and death over life. To believe the opposite, it would seem, is to be naive, whistling in the dark, setting oneself up for a massive disillusionment.

An acceptance of reality demands realism and this, in its turn, demands a certain despair. We don’t so much, to nuance Thoreau, live lives of quiet desperation as we live lives of quiet, practical despair. This takes various forms: For some, this is the unconscious attitude that, since nothing ultimately means anything anyway, we should try at least to get our share of riches, comfort, and pleasure in this life. For others, this expresses itself in a simple bitterness, that life isn’t fair and we have been short-changed. In its higher expressions, this shows itself (to use Albert Camus’ beautiful phraseology) in “metaphysical rebellion”, in an attitude which believes that ultimately selfishness, injustice, and death are paramount, but we can create some temporary dignity and meaning by fighting these in the meantime.

In the end, however, no matter how noble its visage, despair is despair. When there is no power or magic beyond our own a boot in the face is our final destiny.

The resurrection of Jesus, however, exposes this supposed realism for what it is, a naivete. In the resurrection of Jesus, things are turned upside-down and the supposed hard-facts are blown to hell, literally. What looks like naivete is in fact final truth and what looks like hard truth is naivete.

If we believe in the resurrection, then Orwell is wrong and the child is right, the hard empiricists are wrong and the pious are right, those who stopped believing in magic are wrong and those who profess the creed are right, fairy-tales are more true than the law of entropy, the law of love is more binding than the law of gravity, the Holy Spirit is more of a physical force than all the winds in the world, and the infinite horizon of eternity rather than the mortal limit of our world is what we need to look to and run our lives by.

What’s important in all of this is not who’s right and who’s wrong, but what ultimately we should guide our lives by. What is the ultimate truth? For a believer, that truth is not the empirical facts, further deconstructed and hardened, by the Enlightenment, but God’s power as revealed in the resurrection of Jesus. If the resurrection happened, and it did, the faith of hundreds of millions of men and women cannot be sustained for 2000 years on a wish or a lie, then to believe in divine magic and happy endings is right. To believe in the resurrection is to believe Julian of Norwich’s wonderful dictum: And all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being will be well. In the resurrection of Jesus we see that final end of the story, our story and the story of human history, will not be a boot in the face but, as we always sensed as children, the wonderful triumph of light, love, justice, graciousness, beauty, joyous-embrace, and God.

If we believe in the resurrection of Jesus, we can stare the empirical facts in the face, no matter how bad, and know that injustice, selfishness, violence, loneliness, chaos, and death are only an interim chapter in the story.

Beyond all pain and present frustrations, there is Someone who loves us more dearly than does any fairy-godmother and that Someone, God, has a magic wand that is infinitely more powerful than any fairy-tale has ever imagined.

The Cross as Revealing Christ’s Descent into Hell

March 17, 2002

There’s a curious line in our creed which says that, immediately following his death, Jesus “descended into hell”. What, possibly, can that mean?

Within the popular Christian mindset we have the conception that, as a consequence of original sin, the gates of heaven were closed so that, from the time of Adam and Eve until the moment of Jesus’ death, nobody could enter paradise. Only a divine act of reparation could again give human beings access to heaven and that act of reparation was Jesus’ death which “paid the debt of sin” and so opened the gates of heaven.

In this view of things, all the just who had died from the time of Adam and Eve until Jesus’ death were asleep somewhere, in a Hades of sorts. Immediately following his death, Jesus descends to that underworld and awakens these souls and then triumphantly leads them into paradise. That descent to the underworld to wake the souls of the dead and take them to heaven is what is understood as “the descent into hell”. The image of this is wonderfully captured in an ancient homily that the church now uses as one of its readings for the hour of vigils on Holy Saturday.

But that’s an image, something that captures, as might an icon, a deeper reality. It’s not a video-tape of an actual happening. How is it to be interpreted? How did Jesus descend into hell?

Let me try to explain this by combining three images:

The first is a story, a tragic one: Some years ago some family friends of mine lost a daughter to suicide. She was in her early twenties and away from home when she made her first attempt to kill herself. The family rushed to her, flew her home, surrounded her with loving solicitude, took her to doctors of ever kind, and generally tried every possible way to love and coax her out of her deadly depression. In the end, they failed. She killed herself, despite their efforts. All the loving effort and professional resources they could muster could not break through and bring her out of the private hell into which she had descended. Strong as human love can be, sometimes it stands helpless, exhausted, before a door it can’t open.

My second image is taken from John’s Gospel: After Jesus rises from the dead, he appears to the disciples who, as John describes, are huddled together in a room, in fear, with the doors locked. Jesus comes right through the locked doors, stands inside the middle of their fear, and breathes out peace. A week later, he does it again.

A third image: When I was a young boy, my mother gave me a holy card, an adaptation of a famous painting by Holman Hunt (“The Christ Who Knocks”) In the version my mother gave me, we see, behind a locked door, a man huddled and paralysed by a fear and darkness of some kind. Outside the door stands Jesus, with a lantern, knocking, ready to relieve the man of his burden. But there’s a hitch, the door only has a knob on the inside. Jesus cannot enter, unless the man first unlocks the door. There’s the implication that God cannot help unless we first let God in. Fair enough? Not exactly.

What the cross of Christ reveals is that when we are so paralysed by fear and overcome by darkness that we can no longer help ourselves, when we have reached the stage where we can no longer open the door to let light and life in, God can still come through our locked doors, stand inside our fear and paralysis, and breathe out peace. The love that is revealed in Jesus’ suffering and death, a love that is so other-centred that it can fully forgive and embrace its executioners, can precisely pass through locked doors, melt frozen hearts, penetrate the walls of fear, and descend into our private hells and, there, breathe out peace.

In the case of the young woman who committed suicide, she had reached a point where she was frozen inside of a private hell, behind doors that her family’s love and professional doctors could no longer open. They stood outside of her locked doors, like Jesus in Holman Hunt’s painting, knocking, begging for a response that she could no longer give. I have no doubt though that when she awoke on the other side she found Christ standing inside her fear and darkness, breathing out peace.

The doctrine of the “descent into hell” is singularly the most consoling of all doctrines, in any religion. As that ancient homily on Holy Saturday so wonderfully puts it, the love that Christ reveals in the cross is so strong that it can descend into any hell we can create, thaw out our frozen souls, and lead us into the light and peace of paradise, despite our fears and weaknesses. The cross of Christ does not stand helpless before a locked door.

The Cross as Revealing God’s Presence in the Poor

March 10, 2002

Several years ago, in Canada’s prairies, not far from where I was born and raised, a man named Robert Latimer killed his severely-handicapped daughter, Tracy. He put her into the family truck, hooked a tube to the exhaust-emission, sealed the windows and doors, and let her fall asleep. He wasn’t malicious in intent. He loved his daughter. In his mind, this was an act of mercy. He couldn’t bear to see her suffer any longer. Nobody doubted his sincerity. His daughter was almost totally disabled physically and mentally, lived in constant pain, and there was no favourable prognosis in terms of her ever getting better or of her pain ever lessening. So he, in as humane a way as possible, ended her life.

Her death became a huge national story, a drawn-out court-battle that lasted for years, ending up in the Supreme Court of Canada, and a country-wide moral and religious debate that has bitterly divided families and communities. The death of this young girl, Tracy Latimer, raises an issue we can’t agree on today: What’s the value of a human life that is severely disabled?

What’s the value of a life such as Tracy Latimer’s? Biblically, the answer is clear: When someone is deemed expendable, for whatever reason, at that moment she or he becomes the most important person, spiritually, in the community: The stone that is rejected by the builders is the cornerstone for the building. This means that the Tracy Latimers within our lives are a privileged place where the rest of us can experience God.

One of the central revelations of the cross is that there is a very privileged presence of God in the one who is excluded, in the one of whom society says: “better that she should die for the people.” Scripture is clear on this: Already in the Jewish scriptures, we see that the prophets emphasize the idea that God has special sympathy for “orphans, widows, and strangers.” At that time, these particular groups had the least status, the least power, and were deemed the most expendable. They could be left to die so that society could get on with its more urgent business. The prophets’ message was revolutionary: God has a special sympathy for those whom society deems least important and how we treat those persons is the litmus test of our faith, morals, and religiosity.

Jesus takes this a notch further: In his teaching, not only does God have special sympathy for those whom society deems least important and most expendable, but God’s very presence is identified with them: “Whatsoever you do to the least of these, you do to me!” Jesus identifies God’s presence with the outcasts, with the excluded ones, and he tells us that we have a privileged experience of God in our contact with them.

Nowhere is this stated more clearly than in Jesus’ death on the cross: The crucified one is the stone rejected by the builders, the one deemed expendable so that normal life will not be disrupted. But the crucified one is also God and there is a special intimacy with God that can be had only in standing, as did Mary and John, near the cross, in solidarity with the crucified one, the one who is being excluded.

Sometimes that’s hard to see and accept because, unlike Jesus, the excluded ones in our culture are not always innocent and loving. For example, the Oklahoma-bomber, Timothy McVeigh, was executed last summer. Our society, like the high priest of old, had pronounced its judgement: “Better that one man should die for the people!” But, unlike Jesus, Timothy McVeigh didn’t radiate innocence, love, moral integrity, repentance, nor most anything else that speaks of God’s presence. So how is he the cornerstone for our building?

By his exclusion, by his being deemed expendable, by being the one executed. At the precise moment when his executioners spread his arms and lashed them to a table and the lethal injection was brought in, Timothy McVeigh became the Christ-figure: a man helplessly stretched out, unanimity-minus-one, better off dead for the benefit of others, grist for those who need a scapegoat, the focus for moral reflection, the central figure in the community, and the one who, for that moment and in that situation, becomes a privileged presence of God because, as the cross makes plain, God is specially present in the excluded one.

Many of us are familiar with an incident recorded by Elie Wiesel. In one of the Nazi death camps, a prisoner had escaped and, in retaliation, the Nazis took a young boy, hanged him publicly, and forced everyone to watch this horrific spectacle. As the young boy dangled on a rope in front of them, one man cursed bitterly: “Where is God now?” Another man answered: “There, on that rope. That’s God!”

One of the revelations of the cross is precisely that, in the crucified one is the presence of God.

The Cross as Revealing the True Cost of Love

March 3, 2002

One of the best-selling books in England at present is a novel by Tony Parson, Man and Boy. In it, Parson reflects upon some of the strengths and weaknesses of today’s young adults, Generation X.

His hero is a young man who has just celebrated his 30th birthday. Like so many people of his generation, he has a lot of admirable qualities: He’s sincere, genuine, likeable, humble enough, generally honest, and essentially moral. He wants all the right things, but, all this good-will notwithstanding, his life takes a painful twist. Happily-enough married and the father of a young son whom he much loves, our bungling hero unthinkingly sleeps with one of his co-workers on the night of his 30th birthday. The action itself, he feels, is meaningless. He doesn’t love the woman, nor she him. For him, it’s an episodic act, pure and simple, one night of irrationality.

His wife, though, takes a different view. She finds out and, for her, it is anything but meaningless. Having been betrayed before by significant men in her life, her father included, she is unwilling to accept and forgive this. She moves out and eventually divorces our hero who is left wondering why an act of such, seeming, little significance has so great a consequence. Slowly, painfully, he begins to see that actions have far-reaching consequences, whether we intend that or not. What he learns too through this bitter lesson is that love costs something, demands hard choices, and asks us to sweat blood at times. It cannot be had without paying a price.

There’s a real price to be paid for love. The cross tells us this. The language we use to speak about the cross might sometimes not give that impression. We speak of Jesus’ suffering on the cross “as paying a debt”, “as washing us clean with blood”, “as making expiation for sin” and “as breaking the power of satan.” These expressions, metaphors essentially, might give the impression that Jesus suffers on the cross as part of some divinely-scripted plan and that the purpose of his sufferings is to pay off a debt within the divine realm. What has all of this got to do with us?

What Jesus’ suffered on the cross and what he suffered just prior in the Garden of Gethsemane, is not something that is too much in the realm of divine mystery to be understood. It’s something we are asked to imitate. What Jesus’ suffering on the cross reveals, among other things, is that real love costs and costs dearly. If we want sustained, faithful, and life-giving love in our lives, the kind of pain that Jesus suffered on the cross is, at a point, its price-tag.

“Love is a harsh thing,” Fyodor Dostoevsky once said, costing “not less than everything,” T.S. Eliot adds. That’s one of the messages of the cross. Simply put, the cross says: “If you want real love beyond romantic daydreams, if you want to keep any commitment you have ever made in marriage, parenting, friendship, or religious vocation, you can do so only if you are willing to sweat blood and die to yourself at times. There is no other route. Love costs. What you see when you look at the cross of Jesus is what committed love asks of us.”

This is not something our culture is keen to hear. Today we have many strengths, but sweating blood and dying to self in order to remain faithful within our commitments is not something at which we are very good. We find it very difficult to make choices and then to do the hard things that need to be done in order to stick with those choices. Our problem is not ill-will or ill-intention. Like Parson’s bungling hero, we are sincere, likeable, and moral. We want the right things, but every choice is a renunciation and we would love to have what we have without excluding some other things.

We want to be saints, but we don’t want to miss out on any sensation that sinners experience. We want fidelity in our marriages, but we want to flirt with every attractive person who comes round; we want to be good parents, but we don’t want to make the sacrifice this demands, especially in terms of our careers; we want deep roots, but we don’t want to forego the intoxication that comes with new stimulus; we want stable friendship, but we don’t want duties or obligations that tie us down. In short, we want love, but not at the cost of “obedience unto death.”

And yet that is the message of the cross. Love costs, costs everything. To love beyond romantic daydreams means to “sweat blood” and “to be obedient unto death”. The cross invites us to look at the choices we made in love, see how they narrow our options, and, in that pain, say: “Not my will, but yours, be done.”

The Cross as Revealing the Inner Life of God

March 2, 2002

There’s a particularly poignant line in the account of Jesus’ death which says that, when he died, “the veil in the sanctuary was torn from top to bottom.” I remember, as a boy, hearing that read in church, picturing it literally, and thinking: “Now they’ll know what a terrible thing they’ve done!”

But that line doesn’t refer to some ominous, dark sign at the moment of the crucifixion, meant to stun the world and prove it made a gross mistake. It refers to something else, not dark and fateful at all. The sanctuary veil was the curtain that hung between the ordinary people and the holy of holies, the most sacred of all places, and prevented them from seeing what was behind. What the gospel-writers are saying is that, at the moment of Jesus’ death, the veil that sits between us and the inner life of God was ripped open so that we can now see what God looks like inside.

The cross, then, is the ultimate icon, the real depiction of the Holy. It shows us God’s heart, the inner life of the Trinity. How is this so?

On the cross, there is not just one person, Jesus. Ultimately all three persons in the Trinity – Father, Son, and Spirit – are on the cross.

On the surface, of course, we see Jesus, the Son. What’s he doing? He’s suffering and dying, but in a particular way. He hangs on the cross in anguish, dying, alone, humiliated, misunderstood, but he also hangs there in trust and fidelity, giving his life away without resentment, recrimination, and bitter questioning because he knows and trusts someone deeply enough to, literally, believe in the sun even when it isn’t shining, in love even when he isn’t experiencing it, and in God even when God is silent.

We see Jesus on the cross, but we see him there clinging to someone else with a trust that turns hatred into love, curses into blessing, bitterness into graciousness, recrimination into understanding, and God’s silence into faith. On the cross we see one person, but as being held and empowered by somebody else.

Less visible, but clearly there as the recipient of this trust, present as the one about whom this drama is ultimately about, is the Father. He is also on the cross, suffering with the son, holding the son in this darkness, showing himself worthy of trust, and trusting the son not to short-circuit the tension so that God’s response, the resurrection, can be what it should be, not an act of vengeance, nor a bullying definition of whose in charge, but an act of unfathomable redemption, understanding, forgiveness, and love, an act that, more than anything else, defines God. The Father is there too on the cross, suffering, waiting in patience, empowering another to trust.

Finally, the Holy Spirit is also on the cross, uniquely generated and released by what unfolds there. As the drama of the crucifixion, this deep interplay of giving and receiving in love and trust, is taking place, a forgiving warmth, a healing fire, and an unfathomable patience and understanding are being produced, revealed, and released. That energy, the ultimate oxygen, which the gospels depict as spilling out of Jesus’ pierced side as blood and water, is the Holy Spirit and that Spirit reveals precisely what is going on inside of God. What is happening there?

Inside of God, as we can see from the cross, there is no bitterness, vengeance, loss of patience, or lack of graciousness (not a single trace). When the veil inside the temple is torn, when the side of Jesus is pierced, what we see, what flows out, is only forgiveness, patience, gentleness, understanding, and warm invitation.

We have an analogy for this, however inadequate, inside human relationships. Whenever two people love each other so deeply that the power of that love enables them to trust enough so as not to grow embittered, recriminating, and questioning of God in times of pain and darkness, than that love becomes an energy, a warm spirit, an oxygen, that empowers everyone who comes into contact with it. You see this in a good marriage, where the love and trust that a man and a woman have for each other become something akin to a warm fireplace that warms everyone around them. From their side too flows “blood and water”, a spirit and a baptism. But that only happens when their love for each other is of the kind that enables them both to sweat blood in the garden rather than give in to bitterness, recrimination, and the temptation to make God prove himself. A good love empowers both parties to carry the burdens of others as well as the burden of doubt, without resentment.

The cross is an icon of this kind of love. It defines God as love and gives us a picture of what that kind of love looks like.

The Cross as Revealing the Passion

February 24, 2002

We speak of one section of the Gospels, that which narrates Jesus’ life from the Last Supper until his death and burial, as chronicling his “Passion”. On Good Friday, the lector begins the Gospel reading with the words: “The Passion of Our Lord Jesus Christ According to John”.

Why do we call Jesus’ suffering just before his death his passion?

Generally this is not properly understood. We tend to think that “passion” here refers to intense sufferings, as in “passionate suffering”. This is not wrong, but misses a key point. Passion comes from the latin, PASSIO, meaning passiveness, non-activity, absorbing something more than actively doing anything. The “Passion” of Jesus refers to that time in his life where his meaning for us is not defined by what he was doing but rather by what was being done to him. What is being said here?

The public life and ministry of Jesus can be divided into two distinct parts: Scholars estimate that Jesus spent about three years preaching and teaching before being put to death. For most of that time, for all of it in fact except the last day, he was very much the doer, in command, the active one, teaching, healing, performing miracles, giving counsel, eating with sinners, debating with church authorities, and generally, by activity of every sort, inviting his contemporaries into the life of God. And he was busy. He is described at times as being so pressured by people that he didn’t even have time to eat. For almost all of his public life Jesus was actively doing something.

However, from the time he walked out of the last supper room and began to pray in Gethsemane, that activity stops. He is no longer the one who is doing things for others, but the one who is having things done to him. In the garden, they arrest him, bind his hands, lead him to the high priest, then to Pilate. He is beaten, humiliated, stripped of his clothes, and eventually nailed to a cross where he dies. This constitutes his “passion”, that time in his life and ministry where he ceases to be the doer and becomes the one who has things done to him.

What is so remarkable about this is that our faith teaches us that we are saved more through his passion (his death and suffering) than through all of his activity of preaching and doing miracles. How does this work?

Allow me an illustration: Ten years ago, my sister, Helen, an Ursuline nun, died of cancer. A nun for more than thirty years, she much loved her vocation and was much loved within it. For most of those thirty years, she served as a den-mother to hundreds of young women who attended an academy run by her order. She loved those young women and was for them a mother, an older sister, and a mentor. For the last twenty years of her life, after our own mother died, she also served in that same capacity for our family, organizing us and keeping us together. Through all those years she was the active-one, the consummate-doer, the one that others expected to take charge. She relished the role. She loved doing things for others.

Nine months before she died, cancer struck her brutally and she spent the last months of her life bed-ridden. Now things needed to be done for her and to her. Doctors, nurses, her sisters in community, and others, took turns taking care of her. And, like Jesus from the time of his arrest until the moment of his death, her body too was humiliated, led around by others, stripped, prodded, and stared at by curious passers-by. Indeed, like Jesus, she died thirsty, with a sponge held to her lips by someone else.

This was her passion. She, the one who had spent so many years doing things for others, now had to submit to having things done to her. But, and this is the point, like Jesus, she was able in that period of her life, when she was helpless and no longer in charge, to give life and meaning to others in a deeper way than she could when she was active and doing so many things for others.

There’s great lesson in this, not the least of which is how we view the terminally ill, the severely handicapped, and the sick. There’s a lesson too on how we might understand ourselves when we are ill, helpless, and in need of care from others.

The cross teaches us that we, like Jesus, give as much to others in our passivities as in our activities. When we are no longer in charge, beaten down by whatever, humiliated, suffering, and unable even to make ourselves understood by our loved ones, we are undergoing our passion and, like Jesus in his passion, have in that the opportunity to give our love and ourselves to others in a very deep way.

The Cross as Revealing God’s Unconditional Love

February 17, 2002

A number of years ago, a young man came to me because he was in crisis: He had been having an affair with his girlfriend and she had become pregnant. For a variety of reasons, marriage was impossible. The pregnancy would have an irrevocable impact on a series of lives, his girlfriend’s, his own, their families’, not to mention the child that would be born.

He was a sensitive person and knew that he had been irresponsible. He made no attempt to rationalize or to deflect blame from himself. He recognized that he had done wrong and that through his irresponsibility a certain innocence had been lost, trust had been betrayed, various lives had been permanently disrupted, and he would now live in a certain brokenness. This troubled him deeply.

He ended his story on a note of despair: “I was irresponsible and this has, forever, hurt some people because even God can’t unscramble an egg!” For him, it now seemed, there would always be a certain skeleton in the closet, a past ghost to haunt his happiness.

Even God can’t unscramble an egg! What a statement! And how true, except for one thing: The cross of Jesus reveals that we can live, and live happily and healthily, beyond any egg we have ever scrambled. That is the central message of the cross. How does the cross tell us this?

Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, used to say that we understand the make-up of things best when we see them lying in pieces, shattered. In the brokenness we see the underlying structure. That is also true of love and faith. We see how they are made up when we see them fractured. Jesus’ death shows us this. At the second he died, scripture says, the “curtain veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom.” The curtain veil, as we know, separated the people in the temple from seeing what went on in the holy of holies, it represented the veil between God and ourselves. The cross of Jesus tears apart that veil and lets us see inside the holy of holies, the heart of God. And what do we see there? Unfathomable love, unfathomable forgiveness, a compassion and tenderness beyond understanding. In the cross, God tells us: “You can do this to me – and I will still love you!”

I remember another young man who shared with me how he once so badly betrayed all that he believed in that he decided to commit suicide. Setting out to kill himself, he decided, first, to stop in a church and say some final prayers. He entered a church and sat down. The only thing lit up in that darkened church was a crucifix on the front wall. He looked at the cross and, in a second of sheer grace, understood what it meant.

Here are his words: “I looked at the cross and I understood: I was in hell and God hadn’t stopped loving me for one second. I saw that God loves me, no matter what. I’m not proud of what I did and it will always be part of me, but I can live beyond it, and be happy, knowing God’s love and strength are always with me, even when I betray them.” Unaware that he was doing it, he was tenderly fingering a cross he was wearing around his neck as he shared this.

An elderly nun, whom I much love and respect, is fond of saying: “I’m a loved sinner!” The secret to spiritual health is to acknowledge, in the roots of our souls, both parts of that equation: We are sinners without any need to rationalize or excuse ourselves, even as we have the sure knowledge that God loves us, deeply and irrevocably, in our weakness. The cross gives us that assurance by telling us, precisely, that God doesn’t stop loving us, even for one second, irrespective of weakness.

The cross of Christ is rich reality. Among other things, it tells us how God loves and redeems us even when we are unfaithful and our lives are broken.

It is not surprising that hundreds of millions of people, young and old, wear a cross in some form. These crosses, like the meaning of the cross itself, have an infinite variety of shapes and sparkles. From delicately cut, golden ear-rings, chosen to match an expensive evening dress, to rough, crude wooden crosses slung casually over a denim shirt, the cross of Jesus is everywhere evident. We see it on hillsides, on church spires, in cemeteries, and most everywhere where anything special, love or tragedy, has happened. Rightly so. The cross is the ultimate symbol of love. It shows what love is, what love costs, and what love does for us.

Most important of all, it shows us that God never stops loving us even for a second, no matter what we do, and that we can live, and live happily, beyond any egg we have ever scrambled.

The Cross as Revealing the Non-Violence of Christ

February 10, 2002

The cross of Christ is like a carefully-cut diamond. Every time you turn it in the light you get a different sparkle. It means so many things and its depths can never be fully fathomed, always more meaning spills over. We can never get our minds around it, but, and we sense this, ultimately the cross is the deepest word that can ever be spoken about love. No wonder it is perhaps the most universally-cherished symbol on earth.

How can one begin to unravel the multifarious levels of meaning carried by a cross?

The best place to start is with God. What the cross tells us, more clearly than any other revelation, is that God is absolutely and utterly non-violent and that God’s vulnerability, which the cross invites us into, is a power for community with God and with each other. What’s being said here? How does the cross reveal God as non-violent?

We are forever connecting God to coercion, threat, guilt, reckoning, and to the idea that a power should somehow rise up and crush by force all that’s evil. That concept is the main reason why so many of us either fear God, hate God, try to avoid God, or are disappointed in God (“Why doesn’t God do something about the world?”.) But what scripture reveals about God, and this is seen full-bloom on the cross, is that God is neither coercion, threat, guilt, nor the great avenger of evil and sin.

Rather God is love, light, truth, and beauty; a gentle, though persistent, invitation, that’s never a threat. God is like a mother, gently trying to coax another step out of a young child learning to walk (“Come on, try, just another step!”). God exists as an infinite patience that endures all things, not as a great avenger, Rambo and John Wayne, who kills all the bad guys when he has finally had enough. The cross of Christ reveals that God works far differently than do our movies and our imaginations. God never overpowers anyone.

Radically, of course, God could. God has all the power. However God’s power to create love and community, paradoxically, works precisely by refusing to ever overpower. It works instead through vulnerability, through something the Gospels call EXOUSIA. What is this?

The Gospels tell us that when people witnessed Jesus’ life and ministry they saw something that sharply differentiated him from others. “He spoke with great power, unlike the scribes and pharisees.” However they use a curious word to name that power. They never say that Jesus spoke with great ENERGIA (“Wow, is he energetic!”) or DYNAMIS (“What dynamism!”). Instead they use the (Greek) word, EXOUSIA, a word with no English equivalent, but whose meaning can be conveyed in an image:

If you would put the strongest man in the world into a room with a new-born baby which of these two would be more powerful? Obviously at one level, the man is more powerful, he could kill the baby if he wanted. But, the baby possesses a different kind of power, a far deeper one, one that can move things muscles can’t. A baby has EXOUSIA, its vulnerability is a great power. It doesn’t need to out-muscle anyone. A baby invites, beckons, and all that’s moral and deep in the conscience simply cannot walk away. It’s no accident that God chose to be incarnated into this world as baby.

It’s no accident either that Jesus died as he did on Good Friday. The cross reveals the power of God in this world, a power that is never the power of a muscle, a speed, a brilliance, a physical attractiveness, or a grace which simply leaves you no other choice but to acknowledge its superiority and bend your knee in obeisance. The world’s power works this way, movies end that way. God’s power is the power of EXOUSIA, a baby that lies helpless, muted, patient, beckoning for someone to take care of it. It’s this power that lies at the deepest base of things and will in the end, gently, have the final say. It’s also the only power upon which love and community can be created because it, and it alone, ultimately softens rather than breaks the heart.

And it’s a power that invites us in. It’s good to know this so that we don’t give into bitterness and grow vicious ourselves when we are slighted and can’t defend ourselves, when our dreams get crushed and there’s nothing we can do about it, when we so desperately want to do something that stands out but haven’t the talent to do so, or when we find ourselves a minority of one before a jeering crowd.

The cross of Christ tells us that, at those moments of painful helplessness, when we can’t impress or overpower anyone, we are acting in a divine way, non-violently, and in that vulnerability lies the secret to our coming to love and community.