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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Twenty years ago, I wrote a book on loneliness. I was young then, lonely myself, restless like all young people, and still searching for many things. So, despite leaning heavily on Augustine, Aquinas, John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner for my insights, the book was probably as much autobiography as spirituality or theology. I’m still proud of it though. It’s a book on the loneliness of youth and none of us, regardless of age or achievement, ever really outgrows that.

Loneliness haunts you in a very particular way when you’re young. It comes turbo-charged with a restlessness that can beat you up like the playground bully, especially on a Friday or a Saturday night when it seems like the whole world is doing something exciting and you have been left out. When you’re young it always feels like you’re missing out on something. You ache to drink in the whole world and make love to it, but are stuck in a very confining situation where your life always seems too small. You want a larger connection to the world, more sex, deeper intimacy, and a soulmate that you have not yet found. At that time of life, you’re also overly-romantic, driven by fantasies of finding perfect love, perfect sex, and a one-in-four-billion soulmate who will finally fill in every lonely spot inside you. When you’re young it’s easy to be besotted by Romeo and Juliet: Find perfect love, make perfect love, and then die together. Surely the most noble exit off the planet!

Youth and restlessness go together. It is never easy to find simple rest when you’re young. You resonate naturally with Augustine’s dictum: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” and you can feel what Scripture means when it says: “God has made everything beautiful in its own time, but has put timelessness into our hearts so that we are out of sync with everything from beginning to end.” Yes, when you’re young you know exactly what “timelessness” feels like inside you.

None of this really changes as you get older, but a new kind of loneliness begins to break through inside. This kind doesn’t hit you broadside, like the turbulent restlessness of youth. It comes on more like a painful, bitter realization that, at first, you try to block out and deny. What is this loneliness?

It’s the realization that, at some level, there will always be a distance between yourself and others, even from those nearest and dearest to you. This hits as part of the realization of your own mortality. To realize that you are mortal doesn’t just mean that you more realistically accept the fact that some day, perhaps even soon, you will die. The brute fact of mortality also brings with it the realization that there will always be some areas of life where you will be all alone, alienated from others, separated by differences that seem, as the classical divorce formula puts it, irreconcilable. The ache in this kind of loneliness dwarfs the pain of youthful restlessness and often leads to bitterness of soul. It is helpful to understand this, precisely so as not to become bitter.

Where do you feel this kind of loneliness? You feel it in those silent areas that exist between your and your spouse, your families, your friends, and your community. There are always things that can’t be spoken, can’t be understood, can’t be harmonized, even in your most intimate relationships and especially inside of family and community life. This is the loneliness you feel when you drive away from the family gathering, finish that long talk with your spouse, stand trying to explain something to your own child, or are left muttering to yourself after that church or civic meeting. At those moments you can feel like a minority-of-one, unanimity-minus-one, alone morally with most of what’s deepest in you.

And it’s messy feeling too – far, far from that bitter-sweet romantic taste that comes with longing when we are young or that satisfied spiritual feeling you get when you’re suffering, but know that this is doing you good. This kind of loneliness makes you feel like there’s something wrong with you, morally and otherwise: “I’m out of sync here. Perhaps I’m just too stubborn or too stupid or too-proud or too-sinful or too-selfish!” Worse still, as William Stafford says, this kind of feeling opens up the floodgates inside you where all of your old wounds begin to seep through.

But, like the loneliness of youth, it too has much to teach us. As the Persian poet, Hafiz, puts it:

Don’t surrender your loneliness
So quickly
Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you
As few human
Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight
Has made my eyes so soft,
My voice
So tender.
My need of God
Absolutely
Clear.

There’s a story in the Jewish scriptures that is both fascinating and shocking in its earthiness.

A king named Jepthah is at war and things are going badly. In desperation he prays to God, promising that if given victory he will, upon returning to his kingdom, sacrifice the first person he meets.

Jepthah is granted his wish, as often happens in these kinds of archetypal stories, but upon returning home is dismayed because the first person he meets is his own daughter, in the full bloom of her youth. He tells her of his foolish promise and offers to break it rather than sacrifice her.

She, however, insists that he go through with it, though on one condition: She is unmarried, a virgin, and will now have to die inconsummate, unfulfilled, her fertility wasted. She asks him for forty days to go into the desert with her maiden companions and bewail the fact that she will die a virgin. Her request is granted and she goes into the desert to mourn. Afterwards she returns and allows herself to be put on to the altar of sacrifice. (Judges 11).

Despite the terrible patriarchal nature of this story and the fact that it speaks of primitive religion is one of its worst forms, this is a parable with a profound lesson. This is its wisdom: In order to give ourselves to others in a love that’s mature and altruistic (“to offer ourselves on the altar of sacrifice”) we must first have mourned our virginity, namely, made peace with the fact that our lives will always fall far, far short of our desires and dreams.

In the end, we will all die like Jepthah’s daughter, virgins, un-embraced, never fully consummated, denied the fullness of life, never having given birth to that for which we are so fertile, still awaiting the full symphony. We are always, in some way, unconsciously bewailing our virginity. This is just as true for married people as for celibates. At the end of the day, we all sleep alone.

What the parable teaches is that this has to be mourned, however we do that. At some point, each of us must go into the desert and bewail our virginity. If we don’t, we will never acquire the maturity to genuinely give ourselves over in selflessness. Instead, like the child or adolescent still gearing up for life, we will always be waiting for others to bless us, to admire us, to carry us, to feed us, and to give us life. We can only give ourselves in selflessness if we ourselves have, through a grieving process of whatever sort, first made peace with the fact that we sleep alone, that we will die as virgins, denied the full symphony in this life.

I have seen this quality in the great, selfless people that I have met. They have made peace with the inadequacy of life, no longer demand that others make them happy, and find real joy in being able to sacrifice their time, their dreams, and their lives so that others, especially the young, might have more life.

The opposite is also true. When I experience selfishness inside of myself or in another, it is because my inconsummation has become a bitter centre out of which I live. Not having mourned the perfect, fulfilled life that I can’t have, I go through life too demanding, too bitter, too disappointed, and too prone to blame others for my unhappiness. If I fail to mourn my virginity, then there is a constant pressure inside me demanding that someone or something – a marriage partner, a sexual partner, an ideal family, my own children, an achievement, a vocational goal, or even a vacation – take away all of my loneliness and make me whole. Of course, that’s a formula for disappointment and bitterness.

Nobody dies having had it all. In this life there is no finished symphony. We are built for the infinite and nobody, nor any achievement, can ever make us completely whole. We will always be lonely, restless, incomplete, still waiting (as Plato says) for that great embrace, for that unique immorality, and for real contemplation of the divine.

Our faith needs to give us the tools to handle that, namely, to help us come to grips with the fact that we live and die in incompleteness. Being lonely, having always to wait, and finding ourselves ultimately sleeping alone is our human lot. We have to make peace with that. If we do, we will be generous and happy. If we don’t, we will be selfish and demanding.

The daydreams of our childhood eventually die, but the source that fires them does not. We ache, just as much after we know that, this side of eternity, our daydreams can never come true, as we did before. Like Jepthah’s daughter, there comes a time then when we must go into the desert and mourn our disappointment for the fact that we will die a virgin.

There’s been an interesting phenomenon in literature these past few years. Looking at non-fiction books, we see a number of very popular, best-sellers, that draw their titles and substance from mythology and astrology: “Women who run with Wolves”, “Fire in the Belly”, “Iron John”, “A Blue Fire”, “The Wildman’s Journey”, “Women are from Venus, Men from Mars”.

All of these books make a common assertion, namely, inside us there is, at a place we can’t always access, a wild fire, an untamed centre, a divine madness, a chamber filled with gods and goddesses. Moreover that fire, that piece of the soul that can never be domesticated, is the best part of us. We want to be taken over and possessed by it because, therein, lies our real energy and creativity. If our lives are mundane, dour, duty-driven, compulsive, and depressed it is because we are out of touch with that part of us. Wonder and enchantment lie in re-establishing our connection with that fire.

That insight may be derived from mythology and other such studies, but it jives perfectly with Christian theology. Our scriptures begin with the affirmation that what’s deepest in us, what defines us, is the IMAGO DEI, the image and likeness of God. To be in the “image and likeness” of God, however, does not mean that we have stamped, somewhere in our souls, a beautiful icon. God, scripture tells us, is fire, wild, holy, undomesticated. To be in the image and likeness of God is to have this wildness in us. It’s this, God-fire, that these secular best-sellers are, each it its own way, referring to and they are so popular because essentially what they say is true. Moreover, they’re right too, though not novel, in affirming that this is the best part of us. From a Christian perspective we can affirm most of what is put forth in these books.

Where then does Christian theology differ from them? On one very critical point: What Christianity (and every other great religion in the world) affirms, and what is generally lacking in these secular books, is the all-important insight that, while this fire is good and godly, we must never try to cope with it without connecting it to the other world. There can be no strictly-secular, this-world-only, handling of this energy. Anyone who tries to handle this energy without referring it to a world beyond our own will find that, far from being a source of wonder and enchantment, this fire will be a source for destruction, restlessness, and depression. Why?

Precisely because this innate wildness over-charges us for life in this world. Divine fire trying to satiate itself solely within a finite situation, perhaps more clearly than anything else, explains why things don’t happen smoothly in our lives. Whenever the godly energies in us are not somehow related to God, one of the following invariably results: destructive grandiosity, numbing depression, frustrating restlessness, helpless addiction, or heartless ideology. What’s the connection?

This energy is so overpowering that it leaves us very few options: If we identify with it, thinking it is from ourselves rather than from God, we become less-than-wonderful ourselves, puff-up in grandiosity, believe that we are God, and begin to act as if we were God. People like Hitler and David Koresh took the IMAGO DEI within them very seriously, precisely without referring it to another world. Most of us don’t want to go that route, so we do the opposite. Either we don’t connect ourselves to that energy, and grow numb and dead, or we do connect to it but do not link it to the other world. Then, rather than puff-up when we find ourselves all fired up with no place to go, lacking adequate self-expression, and having to settle for third and fourth best, we douse the fire and live in the resulting depression.

Pathological restlessness and addictions work in the same way. Blue-fire within, not connected to God and the other world, will either leave us constantly dissatisfied with everything we can attain or it will tempt us to try to drink up the whole world. Our one other option is to link this godliness to a cause, as did Marxism and as do many ideologies. Whenever we do this, without real reference to the other world, these ideologies, like all false religion, exact human sacrifice and eat us up.

There’s a divine fire within each of us. If we link ourselves to it properly and connect it to the other world, it becomes godly energy, the source of all that’s wonderful in life. However, if we run with the wolves, sit under Venus or Mars, and enter into our wildness without reference to God and a world beyond, that fire will destroy us. Nobody can look at God and live! That’s not just a biblical statement, but a practical formula for survival.