Loneliness and the Second Half of Life

February 3, 2002

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.

Sexuality and Creativity

January 27, 2002

A friend of mine recently left the priesthood. He loved being a priest and was a good one. His problem? He was a man who worked with hands and fashioned beautiful things out of wood. At a point, rightly or wrongly, he felt that he couldn’t be really creative if he remained celibate: “I can’t be creative without sex!” is how he put it. That was more than hormones speaking. He was an artist, with an artist’s temperament. Most artists, I suspect, will understand exactly what he is saying, even if they don’t necessarily agree that this necessitates his particular decision.

There’s a creativity that is released by sex, just as there’s a sterility (“dried-upness”) that can come about by its suppression. Artists know this, too well in fact. It’s one of the reasons they’re so prone to artistic license in this area. Countless artists have expressed this, creativity and sexuality are linked at the very source of things.

Anne Michaels, for example, in her recent book, Fugitive Pieces, makes a virtual spirituality of creativity out of sex. Her two main characters, both male, have their personalities and creativity opened up only through sex. The intimation of course is that this is true for everyone. This is not a simplistic thesis. Artistic license in the area of sex is fired by more than hormones, ego, or irresponsibility, though one would have to be blind to not see that these often too play a role. What drives artists here is the connection between sex and creativity. There is a powerful link. And why shouldn’t there be? All life is after all created through sex, in some fashion or other of that word.

Given this background, we see that Mary’s question to the Angel, Gabriel, at the time of the Annunciation, is more than a simple query in biology: “How can this be since I am a virgin?” She had just been told that she was to be the most creative of all artisans, the artist of artists, the mother of the fountain of creativity itself. So her question is a good one, a deep one: “From what source can this life spring, given the limited way that I am living out my sexuality?”

This is indeed the real meditation for celibates like myself: “How can I be creative without sex?” It is also just as crucial a meditation for everyone else, even for those who do enjoy healthy sexual lives. Given our congenital propensity for polymorphous embrace, we still all have to live out a certain sexual asceticism. Ultimately everyone has Mary’s question: “How can I truly bring forth new life, given that I can’t sleep with the whole world?”

There’s no easy answer to that question – for artists, for married people, for celibates, or for anyone else. Sometimes, in terms of Christian spirituality, we have been too simplistic in our answer. We’re paying the price for that. Too prevalent is the artist who finds our theology of sexuality stifling and anti-life and has walked away from the church (and sometimes the faith) for just that reason. What is the answer? How can any of us be creative, given that we may not give ourselves irresponsible license in the area of sex?

I’m not sure that there is a theoretical answer, some clear spiritual formula that can be articulated, canonized, and then applied in each case. We have, of course, a few non-negotiable principles, like the ten commandments, but these only define the outside parameters. Inside, innate within the very concepts of love, sex, respect, and responsibility themselves, lies a deeper set of moral principles that are much less easy to name and codify. We learn these more by living morally than by studying anything. So how should we live so that our sexuality properly fuels our creativity?

The answer to that, I suspect, will involve three things: a certain grieving, a certain mysticism, and a certain trust.

Grieving: We can’t be God, neither in our talents to create nor in our capacity to sleep with the universe. At a certain point, we have to accept limit. We’re creatures, not God. And what we can’t have, must be grieved or it will make us bitter.

Mysticism: Sex is earthy, real, and produces life. But there are other, real, forms of love-making. These too produce life. The Body of Christ is, at one and the same time, radically physical and radically mystical. Even as sex plays such a life-producing role in this world, there are deep, invisible embraces inside the body of Christ where seed and womb too meet and produce life in ways beyond what we can phenomenologically trace.

Trust: Maybe, as we see in Mary’s response, the real answer is trust, faith that if we live out our lives according to what we deeply believe, no matter how far from human fertility that may seem at times, God will make us creative in ways that we cannot now imagine. The Holy Spirit too makes us pregnant.

Mourning our Inconsummation

January 20, 2002

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.

The Empathetic Gaze of God

January 13, 2002

Recently I was visiting a family who have a four year-old daughter. Some of her friends were over at the house playing with her and her siblings. There were about six kids in total, all under the age of eight. Kids can play cruel games and these kids did just that. At a certain point, the others began to tease this young girl because she still occasionally wets her bed. They had a little jingle that they sang within which they rhymed part of her name with the word “pee”.

The poor kid! She flinched every time they repeated the rhyme and yet she was helpless to protect herself. She was exposed and ashamed. You could also see that she was angry, not so much at the other kids and their teasing as at herself, at her weakness, at her inability to not do that for which she was being taunted. Sometimes kids are powerless to stop wetting their beds, long after they’ve matured enough to experience great shame in doing it.

To such as these belongs the kingdom of God. Jesus had just such a child in mind when he made that statement. But generally we misunderstand why the kingdom belongs to children. We tend to idealize the innocence of children – and, indeed, childlike innocence is a beautiful quality. That is not what Jesus most idealizes in a child however. The quality that makes children so apt to receive the kingdom is not so much their innocence as their helplessness, their powerlessness to not wet their beds, among other things. Very young children cannot even feed themselves, let alone provide for themselves. And certainly they cannot protect themselves, especially against their own weaknesses.

There is more than one fruitful theological reflection that can be spun off of the phenomenon of bed-wetting. At a more obvious level, of course, we have St. Paul’s great dictum in the Epistle to the Romans: “Woe to me, weak and inept, bed-wetter that I am! The good I want to do, I can’t do; the thing that I most don’t want to do, I end up doing.” What a pity our young four year-old couldn’t have quoted Romans to herself in the face of their cruel teasing.

There is a congenital ineptness inside of all of us and, try as we might, we cannot always or often protect ourselves against our own weaknesses. That’s basic biblical anthropology. But there is something even more important theologically here. It’s how God sees us in our weakness. I was one of the adults in the room as this child was being teased, as was her mother. What an adult brings to this situation, beyond a pretty immediate call to the kids to stop it, is understanding and empathy: A three year-old cannot always help herself, cannot be responsible for herself as an adult can, and should not be subjected to this kind of cruel, wounding judgement. Any adult not jaded in the soul, witnessing something like this, will spontaneously feel a burst of tender empathy for the one who is little, who cannot protect herself against her own weakness.

That, I suspect, is how God looks at us. We grow up, grow more responsible, and grow more capable of taking care of ourselves, still we never quite achieve adequacy. We simply humiliate ourselves in other ways, though we become more adept at hiding this from others. Or, at least, we think we do. But, to use Jesus’ own metaphor, the beam in our eye is always evident to others. We are never whole and adequate, nor do we look it.

Physically, our bloom is pretty short-lived and, long before we are ready for it, our bodies begin again to betray us. Wrinkles, fat, and the humiliating sags of mid-life appear in ways that cannot be hidden. Our friends don’t tease and taunt us about these weaknesses, as very young kids do. They don’t need to, we are painfully aware of our inadequacies.

That is true too for us emotionally and morally. There are mid-life wrinkles, fat, and sagging in these areas too. When we are young, the beauty of a youthful body and youthful spirit helps compensate for, and partly camouflages, our hidden and not-so-hidden selfishness, bitterness, and envy. These become more and more evident in us as we grow older and are a lot more shameful than bed-wetting. In the end, none of us can protect ourselves against our own weaknesses, nor indeed can we forever hide them from the view of others.

But, and this is the point, in the face of our inadequacies, we must begin to see ourselves as God sees us, a child who cannot yet be fully responsible for his or her life. Then our shame can give way to tender compassion. We are all bed-wetters and live in that humiliation. But, as Jesus assures us, to such as these belongs the kingdom of heaven.

Coping with the Imago Dei

January 6, 2002

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.

Commandments for the Long Haul

January 1, 2002

Daniel Berrigan once wrote a wonderful little book entitled, “Ten Commandments for the Long Haul”. It was intended as spiritual sustenance, sustaining food, for those who walk the lonely, long road of faith and often find themselves discouraged and running out of gas. Berrigan doesn’t offer a quick fix, but points out the right direction within which we should be walking and where, at key junctures, if we cast our eyes at the right spot, we might find Elijah’s jug, God’s food for the journey.

As we begin a new year, filled with new hope and new resolutions, here are ten such commandments that might serve us well as we walk the long road:

1) Acknowledge your contingency, your helplessness. You are a creature, not the creator.

You are not God, but a creature. Only God is “ipsum esse subsistens”, self-sufficient being. Like all creatures, you’re dependent and interdependent. Life works when you acknowledge this, when you accept that you can’t give yourself life. All is gift. If you try to live the illusion of self-sufficiency and try to guarantee your own immortality, you mimic the sin of Adam and Eve, complete with all the futility of effort, the lording-it-over, and the alienation from nature that ensues. Proper living begins with the words: “I am not God!”

2) Pray, prayers of helplessness, gratitude, and praise.

Pray always! Also pray formally each day. By your baptism you’re a priest. Pray as priest: Hold the world up each day to God. Hold up both its wonders and its pain. Pray in gratitude, thanking God, not just for “this or that”, but for life itself, for light, for this earth, for those who love you.

Pray from your weaknesses and helplessness: “Lord, hang on to me lest I slip away from you. Do for me what I cannot do for myself.”

3) Welcome and accept the present moment.

Life is what happens to you while you’re planning your life. Don’t let the busyness, pressures, and heartaches of life steal the present moment from you. Only it is real. Drink it in, with all it carries. It’s the only place you will experience love and joy. If not now-when? If not with these people-with whom? If now here-where?

4) Give yourself permission to be inadequate.

Both God and nature give you permission not to be perfect. Don’t be too hard on yourself and, especially, on others. Everyone falls short. God doesn’t keep you from falling and failing, but redeems you when you do fall. You’re loved as you are. Fear not, you are inadequate!

5) Be sufficiently loving and critical, both at the same time.

If you’re critical without being loving, you’re destructive. If you’re loving without being critical, you’re weak. Your loved ones, your church, and your community need you to be loving and critical, both at the same time. Don’t blackmail community by constantly threatening your withdrawal. Love, be critical, and stay. Pull from your bag the new as well as the old.

6) Be post-ideological, post personal-history, post-conservative, post-liberal, post-naive, and post-sophisticated.

Be non-classifiable. Have an unlisted number as regards being liberal or conservative. Admit that the right and left have both run out of imagination and that their sympathies are highly-selective. Don’t be naive, but don’t be sophisticated either. See both as phases to pass through.

Forgive your past.

7) Bless what’s good and beautiful, even as you stand where the cross of Christ is erected.

Bless what’s good in the world. Never, for the sake of cause, orthodoxy or justice, denigrate beauty. All that’s good and beautiful has God as author. Honour it, before speaking any word of challenge to the world. Imitate Christ: First bless the world and its goodness and, only then, go stand where the cross is perennially erected, where the excluded ones in the culture find themselves.

8) Be shockingly “Catholic” – earthy and wine-drinking.

Bask in the goodness of life. We have divine permission to be happy. God invented wine. Jesus scandalized people with his capacity to enjoy life. He drank wine and let his heart be warmed by friends. Don’t confuse John the Baptist with Jesus. John was the ascetic, not Jesus.

9) Accept aging.

Rely more on the paschal mystery than on cosmetics. All that dies brings rich new life, even our own bodies. Paschal wisdom will do more for your joy than a face-lift. Aging needs to be defined aesthetically. Your soul must be properly aged before it leaves and your body, like an old wine-barrel, takes on a different function and beauty as you age. Aging is an art form.

10) Serve the right God!

God, as Julian of Norwich assures us, “is completely relaxed and courteous, himself the happiness and peace of his dear friends, his beautiful face, radiating measureless love, like a marvellous symphony.” Don’t serve any other God than this One. Don’t bow to any molten calf, created in the image and likeness of our own tensions and bitterness.

Giving Birth to God

December 25, 2001

I did my doctoral thesis on the classical, philosophical proofs for the existence of God. The concept had always intrigued me: “Can you prove that God exists?” After researching the thought of Aquinas, Anselm, Descartes, Leibnitz, and Spinoza (all of whom assert that you can “prove” the existence of God through rational argument) what was the conclusion? Can you prove that God exists?

No, at least not in a way that would compel anyone to make an act faith on the basis of a mathematical or scientific argument. God can’t be proven in that way, albeit these “proofs” point to some important things. The existence of God can’t be empirically proven because God doesn’t work that way. God doesn’t appear in the world as the conclusion to a mathematical equation. God, as we know through the way Christ was born, comes into our lives at the end of a gestation process.

That also describes how faith is born in our lives. God never dynamites his way into to our lives with a force so powerful that we can’t resist. The divine never takes us by storm. No. God always enters the world in the same way that Jesus did on the first Christmas. God is gestated in a womb and appears as a helpless infant that has to be picked up, nurtured, and coaxed into adulthood. The presence of God in our world, at least within the dynamics of the incarnation, depends upon a certain human consent and cooperation.

For God to take on real flesh and power in the world we must first do something. What? The answer to that lies in the way Jesus was born. Mary, Jesus’ mother, shows us a certain blueprint, a pattern for how God is born into our world and how faith is born in our lives. What’s the pattern?

When we look at how Mary gave birth to Jesus, we see that there are four moments in the process: Impregnation by the Holy Spirit; gestation of God within one’s body and soul; the stretching and agony of giving birth; and the nurturing of an infant into adulthood. What’s implied in each of these?

Impregnation by the Holy Spirit: Mary, we are told, became pregnant by the Holy Spirit. What an extraordinary notion! This doesn’t just mean that Jesus didn’t have a human father, but also that Mary so let the seed of God’s spirit (charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, mildness, faith, and chastity) take root in her that it began to grow into actual flesh.

Gestation of God within one’s body: As we know, pregnancy is not followed immediately by childbirth. A long, slow process first occurs, gestation. In the silent recesses of her heart and body (and surely not without the normal morning-sickness that accompanies pregnancy) an umbilical cord began to grow between Mary and that new life. Her flesh began to give physical sustenance to the life of God and this steadily grew into a child which, at a point, as in all pregnancies, demanded to be born into the world.

The agony of giving birth: Only with much groaning and stretching of the flesh can a child emerge into this world. It is always excruciatingly painful to birth something to the outside world, to take what’s precious inside and give it birth outside. Mary, despite all the over-pious treatises that would make Jesus’ birth something unnatural, experienced the normal birth-pains common to all mothers. Nothing secretly gestated is born into the world without pain, Jesus included.

Nurturing an infant into adulthood: Annie Dillard once suggested that we always find God in our lives as Jesus was found in Bethlehem on Christmas, a helpless infant in the straw who must be picked up and nurtured into adulthood: “God’s works are as good as we make them. That God is helpless, our baby to bear, self-abandoned on the doorstep of time, wondered at by cattle and oxen.” Mary gave birth to the baby, Jesus, but what she ultimately gave the world was the adult, Christ. Like all mothers she had to spend years nursing, cajoling, teaching, and nurturing an infant into adulthood.

In that pattern, the incarnation, in looking at how Mary gave birth to Christ, we are given a blueprint that invites imitation not admiration. Mary is the model of faith. What she did each of us too is called upon to do, namely, give birth to God in our lives. Christmas is for marvelling at what once took place, but it’s also for imitation, for continuing to give God flesh in the world.

How do you prove to anyone, yourself included, that God exists? You don’t. The object of our faith and worship doesn’t appear as a compelling proof at the end of a rational experiment. God has to be gestated into the world in the same way as Mary did all those years ago at the first Christmas.

Bridging the Unbridgeable Gap

December 17, 2001

How can the divine speak to us? How can God, who is infinitely beyond, touch us with divine tenderness in a way that we can understand?

Christmas, the birth of Jesus, the incarnation, is ultimately about bridging that unbridgeable divide. We generally don’t realize how beyond the imagination this all is. How can the infinite speak to the finite? How can God console us?

Carlo Carretto, in his book, In Search of the Beyond, offers a wonderful analogy that can be helpful in understanding what is required of the incarnation. Here’s his insight:

Carretto, as we know, was a Little Brother of St. Charles and lived for more than 20 years as a contemplative in Sahara desert. From there, he shares this story:

“At Tazrouk in the Hoggar, the Little Brothers had a fraternity among the ex-slaves of the Tuareg, poor families who lived by cultivating a bit of grain and few vegetables along the oued. The oued of Tazrouk was a haven of peace and the brothers too had their garden, where they worked the soil. But what a labour it was to draw something forth from that sand! If there was not a drought, the locust descended, and if one escaped the locusts there were caterpillars instead. And what is more, rabbits used to come in from round about and make short work of the little bit of green that had been acquired as the result of so much effort. By way of self-defense, therefore, one was compelled to set traps, and these became the source of a bit of meat which was generally not too bad – as long it was not fox or jackal. One evening a flight of storks appeared in the sky above Tazrouk, bound for the north: it was spring at the time. Descending in wide circles, the birds came to pass the night on the oued. In her efforts to find somewhere to alight, a beautiful female stork put her foot right into one of the traps. All that night she lost blood, and when the dawn came, and her companions realized what was happening, it was too late. All attempts to save the poor bird were useless: she died that same day and we buried her at the edge of the oued. But then began the drama which involved each of us intimately. The flight of the storks set out once more for the north, but the partner of the dead stork stayed behind at the oued. That evening we saw the wretched bird come down near the garden, in the same place that his partner had been trapped, and fly round and round, crying and showing by obvious signs that he was looking for something. The went on until sunset. The same scene was repeated next day. The flight of storks had probably reached the Mediterranean by now, and yet this lone bird was still there, searching for his companion. He stayed the entire year. Each day he would go off in search of food, and at sunset we would see his outline against the sky over the garden, as he came down in his usual place, crying, searching and finally going to sleep in the sand where, perhaps, he could still detect the smell of his partner’s blood. The brothers became accustomed to the stork, as he did to them. He would fly into the garden and come over to take whatever morsel of meat or moistened bread the brothers offered him. It was moving to see how sensitive this creature was to the love and attention of the brothers, who, feeling themselves to be somehow responsible for his bereavement, redoubled their attentions. I remember the look in his eyes, his habit of cocking his head on one side, the regular movement of his beak, and the way he had of staring at me, as if he was trying to catch hold of me and escape his solitude. I, for my part, tried to understand him, but I remained myself, and he remained a stork. I remained imprisoned within my limitations as he did in his – limitations fixed for us by nature. There was no possibility of communication.”

God’s nature is not ours, just as God’s language is not our own. Indeed the gap between a human being and a stork is minuscule in comparison to the chasm between God and ourselves. Carretto’s analogy is weak, though for the opposite reason we might suppose. The metaphysical gap between God and ourselves is so much greater than the distance that Carretto sensed between himself and the stork that the comparison should perhaps not be made.

It’s a good analogy nonetheless, not because the metaphysics transfers easily and accurately, but because the tenderness and sympathy do. God, no doubt, perhaps most times, must feel exactly that same sympathy that Carretto felt as he looked into the eyes of that stork and saw its wound, its helplessness, and its desperate need for a connection that would help it escape its solitude.

Haunting Each Other’s Dreams

December 9, 2001

In his Booker Prize-winning novel, The Famished Road, Nigerian writer, Ben Okri, describes a mother chiding her overly-restless, ten year-old, son for haunting her dreams: “Stay out of my dreams! That’s not your place! I’m married to your father!”

What a curious thing, scolding someone for stalking your dreams!

Yet there’s a part of us that understands exactly what’s being said here. The mystic inside us knows what this means, knows that there are ways we touch each other beyond the contact of everyday encounter, knows that we can connect beyond distance, time, and even death. There’s a unity, touch, and intimacy beyond what we can physically explain. It’s called mysticism.

We need, of course, to be careful whom we talk to about this, given, as someone quipped, that the only difference between a mystic and a psychotic is that the mystic is more careful about whom she talks to. Our scepticism notwithstanding, mysticism is real. Things touch and affect us in ways that we can’t explain and we touch and affect each other in ways that cannot be explained within the categories of everyday life. Even science admits this. Physics, for example, with an hypothesis such as “Bell’s Theorem”, assures us that there are connections inside of reality, real physical connections, that cannot be explained by the normal categories of touch, contact, and contiguity. Things affect each other in ways that go beyond the usual categories of physical causality.

As Christians we have a concept for this. We call it “the body of Christ”. What is “the body of Christ”? Union with each other in ways that we cannot really explain. St. Paul tells us that, in the great mystery of things, we are in a union with each other and with the world that is beyond what we form through the normal interaction of our everyday lives, where community and intimacy depend upon mutual physical presence, talk, touch, and embrace. Paul tells us that there is a deeper order of things within which we are in union and intimacy with each other in a way that is just as real as the unity we experience through physical discourse and embrace. We are in a community of life with each other and with nature beyond the normal categories of unity and community.

Mystics have always believed in this and have told us that our loneliness is a privileged means of entering that communion. One such mystic was Soren Kierkegaard, the great Danish philosopher. As a young man, he fell deeply in love with a woman and planned marriage with her. However, at one stage, at great emotional cost to himself (and, as history would suggest, at even a greater emotional cost to the woman concerned) he broke off the engagement and set himself to live his life as a celibate. Why?

His reasoning was simple, perhaps too much so. He felt that what he had to give to the world came mainly from his own loneliness and the pain he incurred in dealing with that loneliness. He could share deeply, he felt, because, first of all, he felt deeply. Loneliness was his entry into depth. Rightly or wrongly, he judged that marriage would re-arrange this tortured chemistry and leave him with less to give to others.

Many of us, I suspect, will react to this reasoning with either a condescending smile or with strong condemnation. Marriage is hardly a panaceas for loneliness. Celibacy is not superior, morally or emotionally, to marriage. But the mystic within us draws another conclusion. It understands what, wisely or stupidly, Kierkegaard did here. He befriended loneliness and, there, was able to enter the heart of the world. In his loneliness, Kierkegaard was able to enter our dreams.

And touch our dreams he did! In recent centuries, few persons have touched our hearts as deeply as has Soren Kierkegaard. Therese of Lisieux did much the same thing. She entered the heart of the world mystically, secretly, without splash, from the inside. She lived the hidden life, tucked away in a small monastery in a remote town. She died young, at 24, and at her death she was probably known to less than 200 people. Yet as she lived in that isolated spot, slept alone at night on her celibate cot, and prayed by day with her community and by herself, the world lay inside her heart and, as events since her death have made clear, she lay inside the world’s heart. Like Kierkegaard, from the silence and solitude of her own loneliness, she began to haunt our dreams. Today, like Kierkegaard, she continues to touch and help heal our hearts.

“What is a poet?” Kierkegaard once asked. His answer: “A poet is an unhappy person who conceals deep torments in his or her heart, but whose lips are so formed that when a groan or shriek streams over them it sounds like beautiful music.”

Poets of faith and loneliness, Kierkegaards and Thereses of Lisieux, will always stalk our dreams.

Purgatory Revisited

December 1, 2001

Several weeks ago I wrote a column in which I mentioned “purgatory”. Here’s what I said: “Purgatory is not a geography, a place distinct from heaven, but is the pain that comes from being in heaven, without having fully let go of earth. Love, even as we know it in this life, already teaches us that.”

Several newspapers received critical letters, suggesting that this is not in line with Catholic dogma. A couple of these asked me to do column to try to clarify the issue. I’m grateful for this critique. So let me try to explain:

What is purgatory? This is a specifically Roman Catholic belief which holds that while heaven and hell, as scripture attests, are the only two permanent states after death there is a third state or condition, called “purgatory”, within which one is purified so as to be readied for heaven. Purgatory is understood to be a transition state, a state of intense sufferings, nearly as painful as hell itself, but, unlike hell, not permanent and the pains suffered are purifying and not embittering. What is central to the doctrine is that purgatory, as the word itself suggests, is a place of purgation and purification, not of punitive pain. As the New Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, purgatory is “a purifying fire … entirely different from the punishment of the damned.” Finally purgatory is commonly assumed, though not dogmatically defined, to be a place apart from heaven, a place you go to in order to get ready for heaven.

That’s the conception. What’s to be said for it?

Purgatory does exist, not because you can proof-text it from scripture, but because it is simply impossible to formulate a science of love and community without it. Likewise it is impossible to speak of the paschal mystery without some concept of purgatory. However these statements imply a certain understanding of what constitutes purgatory.

Purgatory is not a physical location, but a stage of loving. It’s the initial pain of entering into community in a pure and selfless way. Mystics have classically defined it as the pain of letting go of a lesser love and life in order to accept a deeper love and life. In the paradigm of Jesus’ life and teaching, purgatory is the pain and purification of the paschal mystery. It is what Jesus, as a man, endured during his agony in Gethsemane and his struggle during his passion and death. What’s interesting in Jesus’ case is that there was no personal sin from which he needed purification. Yet, he suffered purgative pain anyway. This helps clarify two things: Purgatory is not a place, a geography separate from heaven; nor is it necessarily even a purification from sin. It is the pain of entering heaven, of, as Jesus says, having the grain of wheat fall into the ground and die so as to come to a new fruitfulness.

Let me risk an example: Several years ago, I was counselling a young man who was experiencing a pain, of a pretty intense type, that was new to him. He had fallen in love with a wonderful young woman and was preparing to marry her. Prior to meeting her, he had been living rather irresponsibly, been sexually promiscuous, and had been comfortably smug and insensitive in that state. The woman he had fallen in love with was aware of his past but was not throwing this into his face. The opposite. She was loving and forgiving him unconditionally. But there was the rub! Being in love with this wonderfully good, generous, and moral person made him aware of himself in a fuller way. Her love was a prism through which he began to see his own immaturity (which is what unconditional love always does). Her love was a light that gave him new eyesight and what he saw inside of himself caused him a lot of pain. To his credit, he sought help – confession, spiritual direction, psychological counselling. Her loving him, purely and unconditionally, caused him the deepest pains he had ever endured. It was his first taste of purgatory. But note: it was love, embrace, warmth, and unconditional forgiveness that triggered that pain and the subsequent purification.

Purgatory always works that way. When we die, unless we have so totally hardened our hearts so as to reject the embrace of unconditional love itself, God embraces us – fully, affectionately, passionately, and unconditionally. To the extent that we are not yet fully saints or have not yet fully let go of those attachments that are now incompatible with us being in this new embrace, we will, like the young man whose story I just shared, experience intense, purgative pain.

Purgatory is the redemptive pain that follows falling in love, the pain of paschal purification. It is not a locale distinct from heaven, but the pain of entering heaven itself and, there, having to let go of all that prevents us from being there. In the ecstasy of embrace comes the agony of purification.

The Cosmic Christ

November 25, 2001

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin was once called to Rome and asked to clarify certain issues in regards to his teachings. At one point, he was asked: “What are you trying to do?” His answer, in effect: “I am trying to write a Christology that is wide enough to incorporate Christ. Christ isn’t just an anthropological phenomenon with significance for humanity, but Christ is also a cosmic event with significance for the planet.”

Scripture agrees. Christ is more than just an historical person who walked this earth for 33 years, though he is that. He is more than a great teacher, marvellous miracle-worker, and extraordinary moral-exemplar, though he is that too. Indeed Christ is even more than the God- man who died for our sins and rose from the dead, though that is a crucial part of his identity. Christ, the scriptures tell us, is also someone and something within the very structure of the cosmos itself, the pattern on which the universe was conceived, is built, and is now developing.

As the letter to the Colossians puts it: “Christ is the firstborn of all creation [physical and spiritual]; for in him all things in heaven and on earth were created … all things have been created through him and for him. He is before all things and in him all things hold together.”

This concept challenges the imagination, implying far, far more than we normally dare think. Among other things, it tells us that Christ lies not just at the root of spirituality and morality, but at the base of physics, biology, chemistry, and cosmology as well. This has many implications:

First of all, it means that the spiritual and the material, the moral and the physical, the mystical and the hormonal, and the religious and the pagan do not oppose each other but are part of one thing, one pattern, all infused by one and the same spirit, all drawn to the same end, with the same goodness and meaning. Simply put, the same force is responsible both for the law of gravity and the Sermon on the Mount and both are binding for the same reason.

All reality, be it spiritual, physical, moral, mathematical, mystical, or hormonal is made and shaped according to the one, same pattern and everything (be it the universe itself hurdling through space, the blind attraction of atoms for each other, the relentless push for growth in a plant, the instinctual hunt for blood by a mosquito, the automatic impulse to put everything into his mouth by a baby, the erotic charge inside the body of an adolescent, the fierce protectiveness of a young mother, the obsession to create inside an artist, or the genuflection in prayer or altruism of a saint) is ultimately part of one and the same thing, the unfolding of creation as made in the image of Christ and as revealing the invisible God.

The fact that Christ is cosmic and that nature is shaped in his likeness means too that God’s face is manifest everywhere. If physical creation is patterned on Christ, then we must search for God not just in our scriptures, in our saints, and in our churches, though these shape the boundless nature and energies of God into principles and dogmas in a way that allows us to somehow appropriate them as trustworthy and normative. However if Christ is also the pattern according to which the universe itself is unfolding, then what’s good and what’s inside of God is also somehow manifest in the raw energy, colour, and beauty of the physical, be that the beauty of sunset or a symphony, which we can more easily acknowledge as religious, or be it the more morally ambivalent, but undeniable, beauty that is manifest in the body of a movie star, the voice of a pop singer, or the colourful and lively sexual energy that bubbles inside the culture. Clear or ambivalent, everything reflects the same pattern.

Finally, if Christ is the structure for the cosmic universe itself, the question of the normativeness of Christ for salvation (“There is no way to salvation, except through Christ.”) poses itself differently. The famous, early Christian hymn in Ephesians speaks of “a plan to be carried out in the fullness of time to bring all things into one, in Christ.” What’s implied here, among other things, is that Christ is bigger than the historical churches, operates beyond the scope of historical Christianity (although admittedly he does operate within it), and has influences prior and beyond human history itself. It is Christ, visible and invisible – the person, the spirit, the power, and the mystery – who is drawing all things, physical and spiritual, natural and religious, non-Christian and Christian, into one. As Kenneth Cragg puts it: “It will take all the religions of the world to give full expression to the whole Christ.”

Teilhard was right. We need a Christology wide enough to incorporate the whole Christ and our imaginations need still to be stretched.

Wrestling with God

November 18, 2001

Nikos Kazantzakis, the author of Zorba, the Greek, was an extraordinarily complex man, especially religiously. An artist, a searcher, strongly independent, yet a man with a mystical bent, he often found himself involved in painful interior struggles in his relationship to God. Sometimes he would acquiesce in obedience, sometimes he would hold out in proud resistance. His is an interesting story.

In the preface to one of his major novels, as an hermeneutical key to the book, he writes the following:

“Every man partakes of the divine nature in both his spirit and his flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery of a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and man breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation. Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself, and the contest ends. But among responsible men, men who keep their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death. The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. God does not love weak souls and flabby flesh. The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh which is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. Struggle between flesh and spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally – the supreme purpose of the struggle – union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.”

This passage may smack of non-inclusive language and dualism, but the spirituality it expresses is biblical. Coming to peace with God and ourselves, once we reach a certain level in the spiritual quest, ultimately involves wrestling with God and putting up the proper resistance so that, when we finally do come to peace, the final synthesis may be rich, life-giving, and properly respect both God and our own complexity.

Scripture abounds with rich images of this: Jacob wrestling all night with the angel of God; (What an image! A human being and God, in hand-to-hand combat, rolling in the dust, with the human holding out and holding God to his promise.) Abraham arguing with God, talking God out of destroying a city; Moses initially resisting his call, telling God to take his brother instead; the older brother of the prodigal son, bitterly protesting to God that life is unfair; and, of course, Jesus himself, in the Garden of Gethsemane, asking God to change the plan. Rabbi Abraham Heschel, commenting on this, points out the great figures of faith didn’t always easily acquiesce to God’s plan for them, with the simple words: “Thy will be done.”. Often there was first an argument which began with the words: “Thy will be changed!”

In a poem, entitled, A Man Watching, Rainer Marie Rilke, suggests that it is healthy to wrestle with God because a defeat by the other world is better than a victory in this one, and that, while it is painful to be in the storm of one’s life, it is perhaps far worse if the storm never shows up. His words:

“When we win it’s with small things,

and the triumph itself makes us small.

What is extraordinary and eternal

does not want to be bent by us.

I mean the Angel who appeared

to the wrestlers of the Old Testament …

Whoever was beaten by this angel

(who often simply declined the fight)

went away proud and strengthened

and great from that harsh hand

that kneaded him as if to change his shape.

Winning does not tempt that man.

This is how he grows: by being defeated, decisively,

by constantly greater things.”

In his autobiography, Kazantzakis shares a wonderful anecdote: As a young man, he used to visit various monasteries on Mount Athos, interviewing the monks who lived there. In one rather memorable interview he engaged an old monk who had a great reputation for holiness: He asked this monk: “Do you still struggle with the devil?” “Oh, no,” the old man replied, “I used to struggle with him, when I was young, but now I’ve grown old and tired and the devil has grown old and tired with me. We leave each other alone!” “So it’s easy for you now?” asked the young Kazantzakis. “Oh no,” replied the old man, “it’s worse, far worse! Now I wrestle with God!” “You wrestle with God,” said the surprised young Kazantzakis, “and hope to win?” “No,” replied the old monk, “I wrestle with God and I hope to lose!”

For a believer, struggling with his or her complexities at a certain stage of the spiritual life, there are few definitions of prayer that are more helpful.

Giving our Deaths to our Loved Ones

November 11, 2001

The poet, Wendell Berry, once wrote:

“I almost understand,

I almost recognize as a friend

the great impertinence of beauty

that comes even to the dying,

even to the fallen, without reason

sweetening the air.”

In his last works, just before he died, Henri Nouwen began to speak of how the final task in life is to give one’s death to others. We are meant, he says, to give our lives for others, but we are also meant to give our deaths for them. Just as elders are meant to teach the young how to live they are also meant to teach them how to die. That’s the final lesson we are meant to give the young, to die in such a way that our deaths are our final blessing to them.

Nouwen’s words: “Yes, there is such a thing as a good death. We ourselves are responsible for the way we die. We have to choose between clinging to life in such a way that death becomes nothing but a failure, or letting go of life in freedom so that we can be given to others as a source of hope. This is a crucial choice and we have to `work’ on that choice every day of our lives. Death does not have to be our final failure, our final defeat in the struggle of life, our unavoidable fate. If our deepest human desire is, indeed, to give ourselves to others, than we can make our death our final gift.”

What does this really mean? At every funeral we have some sense of it. We feel what we don’t understand. When someone we know dies, we are left with a feeling, a tone, a colour, something in the air, of either guilt or blessing. The feeling isn’t based so much upon whether the person died accidently or naturally, was young or old, or whether or not we were present to him or her at the time of death. It takes root rather in how that person lived and how he or she related to life in general, more so than how he or she related specifically to us. That’s part of the mystery of death. It releases a spirit.

Before he died, Jesus told his disciples that it was only after he was gone that they would be able to grasp what he really meant for them. That is true for everyone. Only after we have died will our spirits fully reveal themselves. And this works in two ways: If our spirits have been loving, death will reveal our real beauty (which, in this life, is always limited by wounds and shortcomings). Conversely, if our spirits, at the core, have been petty and bitter, our deaths will also reveal that. The death of a generous, gracious soul releases blessing and makes others feel free, just as the death of a bitter, clinging soul pours out accusation and makes others feel guilty.

How can I make my death a gift for others? By the way I live. If I live in bitterness and non-forgiveness, always full of accusation, then my death will pour those things out among my family and loved ones. That’s what people will feel at my funeral because that’s the air and colour that emanates from my soul, now made transparent. Conversely, if I live in graciousness, in admiration, in forgiveness, and am willing when it’s time to decrease so that others can increase then what will be poured out at my death is blessing. My death will mean new freedom and courage for those who knew me. They will be able to go on with their lives with less fear, less guilt, knowing that it is best for them that I go away and that, like Jesus, I am helping to prepare a place for them.

But this isn’t automatic, nor easy. It’s something we have to `work’ at, painfully, every day of our lives. And what do we have to work at? At blessing others, especially the young, at admiring their energy, beauty, and achievement without envy, bitterness, or cynicism. This involves, especially as we grow older, saying what John the Baptist said when Jesus appeared: “He must increase and I must decrease!” As we age, the real task of life and love is to continually hand over, without bitterness, regret, or envy, all the things that were once so much our own (power, attention, popularity, usefulness, turf of every sort). Part of this, the hardest part of all, is forgiveness. To exit gracefully, we have to first forgive others, God, and ourselves for the fact that our lives didn’t turn out the way they might have. That’s easier said than done.

Our deaths, like our lives, are either a source of blessing or frustration to those around us. Ultimately the choice is ours. The final task of life is to live in such a way that, when we die, our deaths, like our lives, sweeten rather than embitter the air.

Praying for the Dead

November 4, 2001

Recently I received a letter from a woman asking me to explain the Christian teaching about praying for the dead. Her son had been killed in an accident and she had been dissuaded from attending any special prayers for him. Her question: Does it make sense to pray for the dead?

The Christian answer is unequivocal, yes! It makes sense to pray for the dead and our Christian faith asks us to do so, both in liturgy and in private.

Why? What possible good can it do? To remind God to be merciful? God needs no reminders. To ask God to see a good heart beneath all the struggles of a human life? God doesn’t need a lesson from us on understanding. God is already perfect understanding, perfect love, and perfect forgiveness. As a cynic might ask it, why pray for the dead? If the person is already in heaven, he or she doesn’t need prayers; if he or she is in hell, our prayers won’t be of any help!”

So why pray for the dead?

For the same reason we pray for anything. We need to pray. It does us good. Objections to praying for the dead might, with equal logic, be raised against all prayers of petition. God already knows everything and there is no need to remind God of anything. Yet, God has asked us to pray and to pray in petition because prayer is meant to change us, not God. Thus, the first reason we pray for the dead is because that prayer helps us, the living. Prayer for the dead is meant to console the living.

Closely tied to this is a second reason: We pray for our dead loved ones to help heal our relationship to them. When someone close to us dies, it is natural, always, to feel a certain amount of guilt, not just because that person died and we go on living, but because, being human, we have had a less-than-perfect relationship with him or her. There is unfinished business between us. In praying for that person, among other things, we help wash clean those things that remain painful between us.

This takes us to the heart of the matter. We pray for the dead because we believe in the communion of saints, an essential Christian doctrine that asks us to believe that a vital flow of life continues to exist between ourselves and our loved ones, even beyond death. Love, presence, and communication reach through death.

We pray for the dead to remain in communication with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand as he or she is dying, and this can be an immense comfort to both of us, so too we can hold another’s hand beyond death. Indeed, since death washes many things clean, in our prayers for our loved ones who have died, often more so than our conversations with them when they were alive, the connection is purer, the forgiveness is deeper, the perspective is wider, and the distance between us is less. Communication with our loved ones after death is privileged, undercutting much of what kept us apart in this life.

Praying for the dead, our faith assures us, not only consoles us, but also offers real strength and encouragement to the loved one who has died. How? In the same way as loving presence to each other offers strength and consolation here in his life. Picture, for example, a young child learning to swim. The child’s mother cannot learn for the child, but if she is present and offering encouragement from the edge of the pool, the child’s struggle and learning become easier. Things are more easily borne, if they can be shared. This is true even for a person’s adjustment to the life of heaven.

By praying for the dead, we share with them the pain of adjusting to a new life. Part of that pain of adjustment (which classically Roman Catholics have called “purgatory”) is the pain of letting go of this life. In our prayers for the dead, we offer them our presence and love, as a mother on the edge of the pool, as they adjust to a new life. Purgatory is not a geography, a place distinct from heaven, but the pain that comes from being in heaven, without having fully let go of earth. Love, even as we know it in this life, already teaches us that.

From my own experience of having loved ones die, as well as from what others have shared with me, I have found that usually, after a time, we sense that our deceased loved ones no longer need us to pray for them. Now they just want us to connect with them. Prayer for the dead does that and even though our prayers might still to be formulated as if we are praying for them we are now simply connecting with them and what was formerly a cold, cutting absence now becomes a warm, comforting presence.

In Praise of the Ordinary

October 28, 2001

Something inside us despises the ordinary. There is something in the ordinary that tells us predictable routines, domestic rhythms, and conscription to duty makes for cheap meaning. Inside us there is the sense that the ordinary can weigh us down, swallow us up, and anchor us outside the more rewarding waters of passion, romance, creativity, and celebration.

We vilify the ordinary. I remember a young woman, a student of mine, who shared in class that her greatest fear in life was to succumb to the ordinary, “to end up a content, little housewife and mother, happily doing laundry commercials!”

If you’re an artist or have an artistic temperament, you’re particularly prone to this kind of denigration. Artists tend to make a spirituality of creativity out of this kind of feeling. Doris Lessing, for example, once made the comment that George Eliot could have been a better writer “if she hadn’t been so moral.” What Lessing is suggesting is that Eliot kept herself too anchored in the ordinary, too safe, too secure, too far from the edges. Kathleen Norris, in her recent biographical work, The Virgin of Bennington, shares how as a young writer she fell victim to this ideology: “Artists, I believed were much too serious to live sane and normal lives. Driven by inexorable forces in an uncaring world, they were destined for an inevitable, sometimes deadly, but always ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom.”

The ennobling wrestle with gloom and doom! That does have a seductive sound to it, particularly for any of us who fancy ourselves as artistic, intellectual, or spiritual. That’s why, on a given day, any of us can feel a certain condescending pity for those who can achieve simple happiness. Easy for them, we think, but they’re selling themselves short! That’s the artist inside of us speaking. You never see an artist doing a laundry commercial!

Don’t get me wrong. Not all of this bad. Jesus, himself, said that we do not live by bread alone. No artist needs that explained. He or she knows that what Jesus meant by that, among other things, is that routine, dram-duty, and a mortgage that’s been paid do not necessarily make for heaven. We need bread, but we also need beauty and colour. Doris Lessing, who is a great artist, joined the communist party as a young woman but the left after she’d matured. Why? One phrase says it all. She left the communist party, she says, “because they don’t believe in colour!” Life, Jesus assures us, is not meant to be lived in black and white, nor is it meant simply to be an endless cycle of rising, showering, going to off to work, responsibly doing a job, coming home, having supper, getting things set for the next day, and then going back to bed.

And yet, there is much, much to be said for that seemingly dram routine. The rhythm of the ordinary is, in the end, the deepest wellsprings from which to draw joy and meaning. Kathleen Norris, after telling us about her youthful temptation to side-step the ordinary to engage in the more ennobling battle with gloom and doom, shares how a wonderful mentor, Betty Kray, helped steer her clear of that pitfall. Kray encouraged her to write out of her joy as well as her gloom and to “dismiss the romance of insanity as a sham.” As Norris puts it: “She tried hard to convince me of what her friends who had been institutionalized for madness knew all too well: that the clean simple appreciation of ordinary, daily things, is a treasure like none on earth.”

Sometimes the mentor that teaches us this is illness. When we regain our health and energy after having been ill, off work, and out of our normal routines and rhythms, nothing is as sweet as returning to the ordinary – our work, our routine, the normal stuff of everyday life. Only after it has been taken away and then given back, do we realize that the clean simple appreciation of daily things is the ultimate treasure.

Artists, though, are still partially right. The ordinary can weigh us down, outside the deeper waters of creativity, of one-in-a-million romance, and of the wildness that truly lets us dance. But anchors and weight also have a positive function. They keep us from being swept away. The rhythm of the ordinary is perhaps the most powerful anchor of all to hold us in sanity.

Paul Simon, in an old 1970s song entitled, An American Tune, sings about coping with confusion, mistakes, betrayal, and other events that shatter our innocence. He ends a rather sad ballad quite peacefully with these words: “Still tomorrow’s gonna be another working day, and I’m trying to get some rest. That’s all I’m trying, is to get some rest.” Sometimes obedience to that imperative is what saves our sanity. There’s a lot to be said for being a contented, little person, anchored in the rhythms of the ordinary.

The Prayer of Helplessness

October 21, 2001

In her autobiography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how she once prayed at a very low time in her life.

Dorothy Day, as you know, wasn’t raised into the faith, but came to it on her own after a certain romance with atheism. An intellectual, moving in Marxist and anti-church circles, she entered her twenties convinced that if anyone had the courage to look life square in the eye, she or he would not believe in God. She had support in that. The love of her life at the time was a man who shared her views. She moved in with him and bore his child outside of marriage. The birth of this child, a daughter, changed her in ways she had not foreseen. Holding her infant daughter, she was so overcome with awe and gratitude that she prayed spontaneously: “For so much joy, I need to thank someone!” Her faith was born from that, from the purest spring of all, gratitude.

She took some instructions, was baptized, and became a Christian. The father of her child, upset by the change in her, warned that if she had their child baptized he would leave her. Her daughter was baptized and he did leave her. Many of her friends reacted similarly. So, even as she was buoyed-up by her new-found faith, she found herself very much alone, without most of her former friends and support-systems, a single-mother, living on her own, lacking money, and without any practical vision of what she should now do with her life.

She floundered like this for awhile, feeling ever more lonely and unsure of herself. One day she couldn’t take it any more. She left her young daughter in the care of friends and took a train to Washington, D.C., where she spent the day praying at the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. Her prayer that day was one of utter helplessness. In essence she said to God: “I’ve given up a lot for you, and you haven’t done anything for me! I’m lost, alone, unsure of what to do, and running out of energy and patience. I need help – need it now, not in some distant future! Help me! Help me now! I can’t go on like this!”

When she got back to New York that night and walked up to her apartment, a man was sitting on the steps waiting for her. He told her he had heard about her, had an idea, and he needed her help. He then explained to her the concept of “The Catholic Worker”. The man’s name was Peter Maurin and the rest is history. From that moment on, she had a vision for her life.

Not everyone gets so quick and clear an answer in prayer, although more people than you would suspect have similar stories. Martin Luther King, for instance, shares how he once prayed at a low-point in his life:

“One night toward the end of January, I settled into bed late, after a strenuous day. Coretta had already fallen asleep and just as I was about to doze off the telephone rang. An angry voice said, `Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you, before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.’ I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point.

I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my cup of coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hands, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory:

`I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership, and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t face it alone.’

At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.” (MLK, Stride Towards Freedom)

Christina Crawford, commenting on a low-point in her life, says: “Lost is a place too!” She’s right. And lost is the place from where we are especially invited to pray. When we hurt all over, live in a shame we can’t bear, and are on our knees because we’re too weak to stand, we’re in the perfect posture for prayer. God hears prayers of helplessness. Lost is a place too!