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!

A Child Not Fully Grown

October 14, 2001

Have you ever watched a typical, moody adolescent interact with his or her family in public? Picture a sixteen year-old girl in a restaurant with her parents and younger siblings. She’s at the far edges of both the table and the conversation, ashamed of her family. It’s obvious she’s simply enduring her family with less than a subtle patience. Her speech, manner, body language, most everything about her, suggests disaffection. Yet, we don’t take her attitude all that seriously. It’s common and natural. When you’re sixteen, your family can do nothing right, you’re ashamed of its faults, and your parents and siblings seem the prime agents blocking your freedom, potential, and growth.

What an apt image to describe how so many of us, wanting to be mature in a sophisticated culture, relate to our Judeo-Christian roots and its churches. Nurtured in a culture that was born out of a Judeo-Christian womb, many of us are at the edges of our religious heritage, hyper-critical about the religious family we’ve been born into, and convinced that our Christian roots are what stand between us and proper freedom, achievement, and enjoyment. Whether it is expressed or not, this is the spirit that undergirds much of the anti-Christian, anti-ecclesial, and anti-clerical feeling within our time.

The metaphor is taken from the writings of Kathleen Norris and captures more than what is evident at first glance. What it suggests is that in both a hypercritical, young person and in the attitude of many of us today towards our religious roots there is a lot of adolescent grandiosity, but that this is natural and something that is generally outgrown. A lively, struggling, iconoclastic adolescent, hypercritical of her family, is not bad, just unfinished. She only needs to grow-up more to come to appreciate who and what gave her the freedom, tools, and self-confidence to stand on her own and be critical.

Louis Dupre, the renowned philosopher at Yale, says the same thing, though in academic language. Answering the question, “Should modernism be reversed?” he replies: “I think not. Instead, we ought to return to, and elaborate, the fundamental principle of modernity as it was first enunciated half a millennium ago: human creativity must and can be developed in full integration with the transcendent and cosmic components of the ontotheological synthesis. Contrary to current anti-modernist theses I consider the program of modernity not obsolete or in principle wrongheaded, but unfinished.”

The intellectual disaffection with Christianity today is not bad. It’s just unfinished. It needs to grow-up more and become cognizant and appreciative of the fact that the heritage that it has been so critical of is the very thing that has given it the freedom, insight, and self- confidence to speak all those words of criticism. It can learn something from the young man or woman who at thirty-something, now carrying real responsibility, begins more and more to appreciate and drink from the wellsprings of his or her family heritage, despite seeing the family’s faults. We see this all the time, the bitter, distrustful adolescent, mouthing criticism of the family from the edges, growing into the responsible adult at the centre, grateful for how the family has shaped his or her soul.

A Roman Catholic feminist (I think it was Rosemary Ruether) was asked: “How can you be a Christian theologian and a feminist? Aren’t these incompatible?” Her answer: Christianity gave us feminism! The roots of feminism and of most everything else in the Enlightenment which takes as non-negotiable the values of individual freedom, democracy, equality of opportunity, and respect for others, lie in the Judeo-Christian scriptures. It’s no accident that these values have arisen so strongly out of Western, Judeo-Christian, culture. It has simply taken us a long time to understand more deeply the demands of our own heritage.

Anyone doubting her answer might try reading Alfred North Whitehead’s famous study on the origins of science and technology, how the road for these was paved by the Judeo- Christian scriptures as well, and how it’s no accident that science and technology emerged in the West. In the end, despite current protests to the contrary, it was Judeo-Christianity that gave us the Enlightenment and its making sacred of the values of individuality, equality, democracy, tolerance, and rationality. But, like an adolescent feeling her oats, the Enlightenment, right into our own time and culture, believes that it has been its own source of wisdom, self-taught, a child without parents.

Gil Bailie has a little dictum that runs something like this: We didn’t stop burning witches because we stopped reading scripture; we stopped burning witches because we kept reading scripture.

A haughty adolescent girl is not bad, she’s just unfinished. That’s also true for the Enlightenment and so much of what it has spawned, including most liberal ideologies within our culture and the anti-Christian and anti-ecclesial spirit of our time.

Remaining in the Upper Room

October 7, 2001

Peter Maurin, the man who helped Dorothy Day found the CATHOLIC WORKER, used say: “When you don’t know what else to do, keep going to meetings!” Sound advice.

Jesus, it seems, would agree. At the end of Luke’s gospel, just before he departs this earth, he gives his rather shaky group of followers this counsel: “Return to the city and don’t leave until you feel yourself clothed with power from on high!” We find out later, in the Acts of the Apostles, how his followers interpreted that. They met and waited together in an “upper room” until they felt the fire of pentecost.

When one tries to name the present moment in the church, few metaphors are as penetrating, as fertile a field for reflection, and as descriptive of what is actually happening as is this biblical image – a formerly-confident-but-now-somewhat-deflated group of disciples is huddled together in an upper room, confused and out of gas, needing to be recharged with power from above. That’s us; except our upper rooms are legion – church meetings of every kind, diocesan synods, ministerial associations, congresses on how to refound religious life, ecumenical meetings, pastoral institutes, social-justice commissions, efforts in missiology, institutes on spirituality, and men and women all over the world (in kitchens and monasteries) feeling powerless and praying for God to come anew into our world. Our church meetings are “the upper room”.

Like the original upper room, our venues too are humble, church basements and church conference-centres, with their plastic chairs and disposable cups. The upper room is never glamorous, a de Vinci painting. It’s more like the meeting-room in your local church.

But that’s where we are today, by necessity, waiting for a new health and joy to return after a painful period within which we are being humbled and purified. This is not a time of pride for the church. Secular forces are increasingly marginalizing us; humiliating church-scandals, to the delight of the culture, frequently headline the front pages of our newspapers; and it’s fashionable to be anti-ecclesial and anti-clerical. This isn’t a time to hold one’s ecclesial-head very high.

Much of this, however, can be understood biblically, as a time of pruning, a time in the “upper room”. Much of what is happening in the church today is deserved, the chickens coming home to roost. We lived too long in a time of ecclesial and clerical privilege, forgetting that what we falsely idealize we will soon enough demonize. How we love to see the gods fall! A time of disprivilege will always follow its opposite. There was a time when the church couldn’t do anything wrong. Now it can’t do anything right. So Jesus has sent us back into the upper room, to pray and to wait, to sort out our confusion, and to re-root ourselves in the basics, so as to prepare to receive a new fire.

But that’s only half of it. We are in the upper room today for another reason too: Like the first-followers of Jesus, immediately after his departure, we also don’t know any more what we should be doing. So much of what used to work no longer does. We are finding it ever-harder to pass on our faith to our own children, to fire the religious and romantic imagination of our culture, and to make a religious and moral dent of any kind in the ever-hardening secularity of ordinary consciousness. What should we be doing in the face of declining church attendance, the emptying and greying of our seminaries and convents, the growing agnosticism of our world, and the ecclesial indifference of so many of our own children?

Biblically, this is our answer: Return to the city and remain in the upper room! What is meant by that? In Luke’s writings, “the city” refers to Jerusalem which, itself, is an image for the church, the faith, the dream that Jesus had instilled. To walk away from Jerusalem, as the disciples were doing in walking towards Emmaus, was to walk away from the church, the faith, and the dream. So now, like then, Jesus tells us: “Return to the city, to the dream!” And what is the upper room? The fundamentals. Our faith has some basics, some elementals, a rock-bottom foundation that we need always to fall back on. Too often, for every kind of noble reason, we forget that (irrespective of the importance of the moral or religious struggle we are engaged in) what God ultimately wants of us is charity, patience, understanding, hospitality, humility, prayer, community with each other, forgiveness, and a non-judgemental attitude. To enter the upper room is to re-root ourselves in these and then trust that God will save all those people that we can’t.

And we support others and ourselves in all of this by going to meetings! When you don’t know what else to do, return to the upper room – keep going to meetings!

God’s Risk…..Our Freedom

September 30, 2001

Why doesn’t God make things easier?

Perhaps the most vexing faith-question of all-time is the problem of God’s silence and his seeming indifference: Why does God allow evil? Why do bad things happen to good people? If there is an all-powerful and all-loving God, how do you explain that millions of innocent people can suffer and die under Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, in massacres in Rwanda, Algeria, and the recent terrorist killings in the USA? Where is God in all of this?

And the presence of evil in the world poses a deeper question: Why is God (seemingly) hidden? If God is so massively real, why do so many people not recognize, acknowledge, or care about his existence? Why do believers have to live, almost always it seems, on the edges of doubt? Why doesn’t God make his (her) existence clear, a fact beyond doubt? Why doesn’t God silence his critics?

There’s no satisfying answer to that question, not theoretically, and there never will be. No definitive faith textbook can ever be written that will soothe every doubt and answer every critical objection. Why not? Because making peace with this mystery, the mystery of God’s hiddenness, is a question of a relationship in love and trust and not simply a question of right theory. Faith, like love, matures through relationship not just theory. Understanding God’s hiddenness, God’s way, is like a child coming to understand his or her parents. You have to relate long enough, live in patience long enough, and develop enough maturity so that, at a point, understanding arises out of a certain co-empathy. Love is the eye, Hugo of St. Victor used to say. When we are loving enough we begin to understand.

However, theory is still important. An old philosophical axiom suggests that the heart follows the head, that love itself must be guided by intellectual vision. Thus some theological theory on the question of evil and God’s hiddenness can be helpful. What has classical, Christian theology taught on this?

Essentially this: Evil exists because God respects freedom, both in nature and in human beings. When we are confronted with the problem of evil in the world the conclusion we might draw is not that God doesn’t exist or doesn’t care, but rather that God respects and values freedom in a way that we don’t. What does this mean?

God doesn’t make things easier because God can’t make things easier, at least not without making us and the world into something far less than we are. When God made us he gave us as much freedom, creativity, and spunk as was possible. He didn’t play it safe, but gave us as much godliness as he could without making us into gods ourselves. Simply put, in making us, God went so far as to give us a freedom that even he won’t tamper with. A risky business, but, it seems, as a parent, God would rather risk than control, allow creativity outside of his influence than limit ingenuity, and tolerate the misuse of freedom than relate to robots. God is perceived as silent because he allows human freedom and ingenuity to be precisely what they are meant to be, non-coerced, even by God. God is not a frightened parent who needs to control, nor a threatened creator who kept what was best back for himself. God allows evil because God respects the freedom and ingenuity of creation and, as we know from elsewhere in our faith, can ultimately redeem whatever goes wrong.

This helps explain not only the question of evil, but also why life can be so distressingly complex and why we can sometimes boil over into a quasi-divine rage. We have been made, as scripture assures us, “as little less than God”. If God could have given us divinity, I believe, he would have. But the one thing God can’t do is to create another God. So, in creating us, God took us as close to divinity as possible. Given the incredible array of qualities that God put in us, it shouldn’t then be surprising that we are pathologically complex, that human grandiosity has a perpetual itch to set itself against God, and that, when frustrated, we are capable of becoming killers who can take life itself as if we were God. We should never be surprised at how messy life can get or how deranged we can be. What is surprising rather is that sometimes – in the pre-sophistication of a child or the post-sophistication of a saint – we do see simple happiness, simple meaning, and simple faith.

Things could only be simpler if God had made us Swiss clocks – wonderfully tuned to pre-set rhythms, with no mess, no sin, no evil, and the beauty of perfect crystal. But then there wouldn’t be any love, freedom, creativity, or meaning. No. God built us on a razor’s edge, so full of godly fire that we are capable of both martyrdom and murder.

Practical Hope

September 23, 2001

Karl Rahner once defined hope this way: A woman sees the tiny rivulet of her life and fears that it might not mean anything, that it might die out completely. Yet she somehow still believes it will flow significantly into the great ocean, despite the immeasurably huge, dry sand-dunes it must cross to get to an ocean it cannot even see.

What an apt image for hope. John Henry Newman affirmed that a person can be a “theoretical believer” even as he or she is a “practical atheist”, namely, someone who lives life in fact as if there wasn’t a God.

What Newman says about faith is true too for hope. We can espouse hope theoretically, confessing that because of what Christ did and revealed we can live in the assurance that we are significant, individually loved, put on this earth for a high purpose, and destined for eternal glory. That’s a theoretical expression of hope.

But hope is also practical. As such it is congenital, in the gut, a trust, not deflected by anything, that our lives are not mere accident, that we are more than brute chips fallen off the conveyor-belt of chance, that we have individual significance and destiny, that every small act of conscience and fidelity has meaning within the eternal schema of things, and that the tiny rivulet of our lives is flowing into the great ocean of meaning and eternity where, far from being absorbed or obliterated, we will enjoy perfect, self-conscious mutuality in love in an ecstatic, communal, yet individual, eternal fulfilment. This is hope, as we feel it practically.

If we could grasp and appropriate this, even inchoately, it would help us accept (in Rahner’s apt words) “that in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we eventually learn that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.” Hope is about making peace with the unfinished symphony that constitutes our lives.

We are fired into life over-charged with energy and desire, suffering from a perpetual disquiet. Life is never enough for us because what we want really is everything: to be everywhere, to know everything, to be known by everybody, to embrace and sleep with the universe itself and everyone and everything in it. Such is our desire, though never our situation. Always we find ourselves somehow fenced-in, on the outside, suffocating in some way, limited in our choices, not quite where we want to be. In our daydreams we attain the adequate object of our desires, but in our actual lives we find ourselves grounded, in one place, married to just one person, and not able to find a place where we can adequately express ourselves. Searching for our name among the stars, we find instead that we are unknown, not heard, a light-year’s distance from that of which we secretly dream.

And there comes a moment, whether we are conscious of it or not, when we say to ourselves: “I have all these dreams, all this energy, all this desire, this one and only life – and it finally comes down to this: this imperfect body, this individual person I’m married to, this particular family I’m part of, this small town, this less-than-fulfilling job, this house, this neighbourhood, these friends, this little place in history. That’s it. That’s my life. I’m to have nothing more.”

There’s an aphorism that speaks of seeing light at the end of the tunnel. Well, there comes a point in life – and what a critical, defining point it is – when what stares at us from the other end of the tunnel is crushing limit. Coming to peace with God, ourselves, our loved ones, the world, and our mortality has a lot to do with how we appropriate this moment in our lives.

One of the tasks of hope is to help us in this precise task. But hope takes root in different ways: Christian hope, as we profess it in our churches, takes its root in our creeds, in what Christ revealed and did for us. Practically, though, hope takes much of its root in the congenital impulses of the private soul. Ultimately why do we keep on – with our chins up? Because even as our insignificance and the brute facticity of our mortality try to stare us down, something deeper, underneath keeps directing our lives. What? A deeper part of us has retained the dark memory of having once been given a loving promise by a power more real and more trustworthy than anything in this world. The soul remembers that it was once caressed and kissed, individually, by God. Nothing erases that. Thus the soul knows that it means something, that it is known, that its private joys and heartaches are not insignificant, and that it is destined for an embrace, a glory, and a significance beyond the most grandiose of daydreams. Yes, the tiny rivulet of our lives will flow into that great ocean that we cannot yet see, but, deep down, we dimly sense that we came from there.

And the Whole World Changed

September 16, 2001

Iris Murdoch once said that the whole world can change in fifteen seconds. She was talking about falling-in-love. Hatred, it seems, can do the same thing: On Tuesday morning, September 11, the world changed. Two huge passenger planes, hijacked by terrorists, crashed into and collapsed the twin-towers of the World Trade Centre in New York, killing thousands of people, as television cameras recorded the event live, showing horrific, graphic scenes over and over again. Shortly afterwards, a third hijacked plane slammed into the Pentagon, even as a fourth crashed in an open field. Inside of what is supposed to be the most secure place on earth, thousands of innocent people were killed within the space of an hour.

Stunned, muted, we nonetheless tried to speak to the situation. Many of the voices we heard were hard, angry, calling for retaliation and vengeance. Most voices though were gentle, looking only for a safe, intimate place to cry, for someone to hang onto. One Internet media site simply had a blank screen, a silent gesture that spoke eloquently. What, after all, can be said?

The opening lines from the Book of Lamentations offer this haunting description:

How deserted she sits, the city once thronged with people! Once the greatest of nations, she is now like a widow.

Later on, this same book tells us that there are times when all you can do is to put your face to the dust and wait. Rainer Marie Rilke would agree. Here’s his advice on suffering:

O you lovers that are so gentle, step occasionally into the breath of the sufferers not meant for you. … Do not be afraid to suffer, give the heaviness back to the weight of the earth; mountains are heavy, seas are heavy.

The earth knows our pain. Sometimes silence is best.

Yet a few things need to be said, even in the raw immediacy of this thing. What?

First of all, that each life lost was unique, sacred, precious, irreplaceable. None of these persons had ever died before and none of them should have his or her name lost in the anonymity of dying with some many others. Their lives and deaths must be honoured, individually. This is true too for the suffering of their families and loved ones.

Second, clear voices must call us, especially our governments, towards restraint. Many see this as an attack on civilization itself. They’re right. Accordingly our task is to respond in a civilized way, re-iterating always our belief that violence is wrong, whether it be theirs or ours. The air we breathe out into the universe is the air that we eventually breathe back in. Violence begets violence. Terrorism will not be stopped by bitter vengeance. Catharsis won’t bring about closure. We shouldn’t be naive about that. Nor, indeed, should we be naive in reverse. These terrorist acts, with their utter disregard for life, offer us a very clear picture of the world these people would create were they ever given scope and license to do so. They must be brought to justice. They’re a threat to the whole world. In bringing them to justice, however, we must never stoop to their means and, like them, be driven by a hatred which blinds one to justice and the sacredness of life.

No emergency ever allows one to bracket the fundamentals of charity, respect, and justice. Indeed, horrific tragedies of this sort, call us to just the opposite, namely, to fiercely re-root ourselves in all that is good and Godly – to drive with more courtesy, to take more time for what is important, and to tell those close to us that we love them. Yes, too, it calls us to seek justice and it asks for real courage and self-sacrifice in that quest. We are no longer in ordinary time.

Most of all though, this calls us to prayer. What we learned again on Tuesday morning is that, all on our own, we are neither invulnerable nor immortal. We can only continue to live, and to live in joy and peace, by placing our faith in something beyond ourselves. We can never guarantee our own safety and future. We need to express that in prayer – on our knees, in our churches, to our loved ones, to God, and to everyone whose sincerity makes him or her a brother or sister inside the body of Christ and the family of humanity.

And we are called to hope. We are a resilient people, with faith in the resurrection. Everything that is crucified eventually rises. There will be a morning after. The sun will shine again. We need to live our lives in the face of that, even in times of great tragedy. I end with Rilke’s words:

Even those trees you planted as children became too heavy long ago – you couldn’t carry them now. But you can carry the winds … and the open spaces.

God Underneath – A Priest’s Diary

September 9, 2001

Several months ago, the religious editor at Doubleday sent me pre-release copy of a book by a young priest from New York named Edward Beck. Entitled, God Underneath, Spiritual Memoirs of a Catholic Priest, the book is an autobiography of sorts. The editor asked me to comment on it. Here’s the comment:

This is a wonderful book and the break-through, I hope, of an important new, religious voice in North America. That wasn’t my first impression though. Initially, reading the first couple of chapters, I didn’t much like the book. Beck seemed a bit to young to be offering this kind of a memoir and seemed too clever by far to be wise. That impression changed as I kept reading. Beck is clever, but he’s also wise, beyond his years.

His reflections centre very much on his life as a priest, but the book is for every kind of reader. If you are a parent, struggling to explain your faith to your own children in a credible way, this book can help you; or, more basically, if you are a person who sometimes wonders why you yourself still believe in God and go to church, this can be a good book for you.

Its substance? What Beck does in the book is to take ordinary incidents from his life, beginning when he was a child and progressing through his years of training for the priesthood into his present life and ministry, and hold them up in light of the gospel so that, through that prism, we are given a deeper insight into the human condition as a whole. It’s a technique Henri Nouwen utilized, a taking seriously of Karl Rogers’ suggestion that what is most personal is often too most universal. And, like Nouwen, Beck isn’t afraid to share some of the more humbling things. For instance, he has a chapter in which he describes his experience of being bullied at school. Now, years later, much more secure in his person, he can write: “Some of the insecurity I battle today is undoubtedly rooted in those early experiences. I sometimes wonder had they not occurred, would I feel more liberated from sentiments of inadequacy, self-doubt, and inexplicable fear? Though perhaps those feeling originate from many places, they are surely tied to being made to feel that I was never good enough.”

Beyond his insights, there’s his language. Kathleen Norris, in her book, Amazing Grace, suggests that today we searching for a new vocabulary for the faith. This book makes a modest contribution to that quest. Beck speaks of his faith, directly and from the standpoint of a committed Roman Catholic priest, but the language he uses (not unlike the language of Norris herself) is personal without being unduly exhibitionist, simple without being simplistic, descriptive of faith without being churchy, and confessional without sounding like the Jesus-channel.

Not to be forgotten is that this is also a book about the priesthood. Beck is young and talented with other options in life. But he has chosen to be a vowed religious, a Passionist priest within the Roman Catholic church. He writes as someone who has found and retained meaning, happiness, peace, and good humour within a vocation that is today much-maligned. He shows that the priesthood, even the celibate priesthood, can offer a rare fulfilment. But he doesn’t over-romanticize it. He writes too, with brutal honesty, about its pains and pitfalls.

The book has many positives, though perhaps what I like best is the sanity and balance that permeate its pages. This is not the memoir of a man who cashed-in his faith and good humour the first time he was bruised. Faith, as the book demonstrates, is about resiliency, picking up one’s couch and walking. It’s also about walking on a razor’s edge and never falling off into the selective sympathies of the right or the left. Beck walks this tightrope well. Rare. Especially today.

As a young boy, wanting to be an athlete and never being quite good enough, I used to envy some of my peers who did have the knack. It seemed as if they didn’t have to work at it, but that it simply came naturally. The right instincts, coordination, a certain vision, correct anticipation, the uncanny ability to make the right moves (that particular combination of things that make for a great athlete) can’t be taught, it would seem. Some have it, others don’t. Edward Beck, by every indication, has that kind of feel for the spiritual life. The night before he pronounced his first vows, a petty community-incident left him feeling ashamed and wondering whether, if things can be this ignoble, be should be making vows at all. His novice master came to his room and said to him: “Get used to it, the bullshit’s often part of the beauty. But I have a feeling you will be able to separate it.” He can. He does. This book’s a valuable read for everybody.