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!

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.

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.

Kathleen Norris, commenting on her own faith-journey, makes an interesting comment regarding the ambivalent way in which faith and church have come down to us. Her words:

“As its Latin root, the word `religion’ is linked to the words ligature and ligament, words having both negative and positive connotations, offering both bondage and freedom of movement. For me, religion is the ligament that connects me to my grandmothers, who, representing so clearly the negative and positive aspects of the Christian tradition, made it impossible for me to either to reject or accept the religion wholesale. They made it unlikely that I would settle for either the easy answers of fundamentalism or the over-intellectualized banalities of a conventional liberal faith. Instead, the more deeply I’ve re-claimed what was good in their faith, the more they set me free to find my own way.” (Norris, Dakota, A Spiritual Geography, N.Y., Houghton-Mifflin, 1993, p. 133.)

That’s an excellent insight, given the struggle many have today in regards to their own religious background. More and more, we see people who are bitter about how they were raised religiously and see the tradition that was handed them as warped, unhealthy, and positively harmful in terms of how they feel about God and themselves. Yet, curiously, those same people generally find themselves incapable of simply shedding that tradition and walking away. What happened to them in terms of religion and church has a positive grip on them, even as they deeply resent a lot of it.

This isn’t, of course, everybody’s experience. Some of us have less to resent. For myself, religiously I drew a luckier straw. Religion and church were mediated to me with less shadow. I had good parents, a good parish, a good school, good nuns who taught me, and good priests who ministered the sacraments to me. In my crucial years, growing up, I was never once thoroughly betrayed by a significant other in terms of the faith. My parents, my teachers, and the priests who ministered in our parish had their faults, but at the end of the day they essentially lived out what they professed. Consequently, the faith they handed me was credible, real, free of undue legalism and guilt, and, very importantly, a faith that has the capacity to see real fault and sin within the community and yet know that the grace of the community far overrides that.

Not everyone has been so lucky. More than a few of my friends, as well as many others that I have encountered in my ministry, have had a very different experience. They were handed the same faith that I was, but often with as much shadow as light. Sometimes what was handed them was warped by harshness, guilt, authoritarianism, or an unhealthy patriarchy. They were given the truth, but not with any balance or purity. Worse still, sometimes they were horribly betrayed by those who were supposed to embody trust and were left with the message: “Do as I say but not as I do!” They were being handed the truth and were being simultaneously betrayed. In the end this has left them with a painful ambivalence. The truth has a divine grip on them, even as the trauma of being betrayed or the pathology of trying to live out a warped truth can make that grip seem like something sick.

Hence the dilemma of many (often bitter) Christians today: “I’ve been given faith and church so strongly that it’s in my very DNA. I can never leave the church, yet I can’t simply accept wholesale the tradition that’s been handed me either. I can’t buy the whole package, no matter how I try. So I am left in this painful ambivalence – I can’t take the full plunge and I can’t walk away either!”

That’s not a bad place to be. If you feel like that then your elders have done their job, however imperfectly. They’ve given you the faith and left you free at the same time, though that might not feel like freedom. Tradition is meant to do exactly this – hook you enough so that you can’t just walk away from conscience and truth and yet leave you free enough to have some critical distance. God and truth, faith and church, never overpower nor underpower. Classical theologians and spiritual writers have always assured us of this.

Thus religion is indeed a ligament, offering bondage and freedom, both at the same time. Many of us have been given the Christian tradition (faith and church) in such a way that, as Norris so aptly puts it, we now find ourselves unable either to simply reject it wholesale or to buy unqualifiedly the flawed version of it that was handed to us. Where does that leave us? Where any free, adult church or family member should want to be, stamped indelibly with the DNA of the family, yet free enough to offer criticism in the face of the family’s faults and history.

The opposite of faith in scripture is not doubt but anxiety. To lack faith is not so much to have theoretical doubts about God’s existence as it is to be anxious and fearful at a deep level.

How is this possible? We cannot help but be full of anxiety and worry about many things – our loved ones, our health, our work, our future: “Will I pass this examination?” “Will my son come home this evening?” “Will my medical check-up be okay?” “Will this person reject me?” “Will I lose my job?” “Will I get this promotion?” “Can I pay my mortgage?” “Are my daughter’s new friends good for her?” “Is my spouse being truthful?” “Do people like me?” “Are my clothes right ?” “Will I be stuck in traffic and miss my appointment?” There is rarely a moment in our lives that is not clouded by a worry of some kind or other. We are always somewhat anxious. Is worrying about so many things bad for our faith?

Not necessarily. What opposes faith is not so much worry about this or that particular thing as worry that God has forgotten us, worry that our names are not written in heaven, that we aren’t in good hands, that our lives aren’t safe, and that there is every reason to fear and be anxious because, at the core of things, there isn’t a benevolent, all-powerful goodness who is concerned about us.

Our anxiety opposes faith when, however vaguely we might have this feeling, we have the sense that God is not fully trustworthy or powerful enough to assure that, as Julian of Norwich so wonderfully puts it, in the end all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

Perhaps this can be best explained by looking at its opposite. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is surrounded by darkness and betrayal. He has, it seems, every reason to be deeply anxious. Yet, he begins his prayer with the words: “Father, all things are possible for you!” On the surface, all is terror, but underneath there is a rock-solid trust. He senses God’s graciousness and power, despite the darkness. Our problem is often the opposite. We are surrounded with light (love, trust, health, good cheer, and no immediate danger or threat) yet underneath are racked with fear, guilt, and distrust. Jesus stood inside of darkness and was secure in the light, we stand in the light and are anxious about a darkness underneath; Jesus was being put to death by sick forces and he rooted himself in the sense that things are still good, we stand inside of health and feel guilty about life’s goodness; Jesus was dying and he assured himself that God had not forgotten him, we wake up to sunshine on any given morning and worry that we have been forgotten.

Have you ever had the experience of going to your closet and noticing an item of clothing that you had forgotten you still possessed? You see a shirt or a blouse that you haven’t worn for a long time and you say to yourself: “I still have this! I had completely forgotten about it!” It had simply slipped off your radar screen. Anxiety of this sort is what haunts faith, the fear that we have slipped off God’s radar screen, that we have been forgotten, that God will look down on earth sometime and realize with a start that we are still here: “My God, she’s still there. I had completely forgotten about her!” It is this kind of anxiety, the deep fear that we have been forgotten, that so much pushes us to make an assertion of our lives. Nobody wants to live and die unnoticed, insignificant, forgotten. We are always somewhat anxious about that. This anxiety is the opposite of faith, not so much the fear that God doesn’t exist as the fear that God does not notice our existence.

What is faith? Faith doesn’t have you believe that you will have no worries, or that you will not make mistakes or betray, or that you and your loved ones won’t sometimes too fall victim to accident, sickness, and suicide. What faith gives you is the assurance that God is good, that God can be trusted, that God won’t forget you, and that, despite any indication to the contrary, God is still solidly in charge of this universe. Faith says that God is real and God is lord and, because of this, there is ultimately nothing to fear. We are in safe hands. Reality is gracious, forgiving, loving, redeeming, and absolutely trustworthy. Our task is to surrender to that.

Faith assures us that there is really nothing to fear. We see this in scripture: Virtually every time that God appears in revelation, when heaven speaks to earth, the opening words are: “Do not be afraid! Be at peace!”

Those words capture what faith ultimately invites us to.

We can never be challenged too strongly with regards to social justice. A key, non-negotiable, component of the gospel is precisely the summons to reach out to the poor, to the excluded, to those whom society deems expendable.

The huge, global issues of justice should pre-occupy us. The world is not working very well. The majority of people still live in hunger, millions are dying of AIDS, countless lives are torn apart by war and oppression, and we are still, as a planet, a long ways from dealing properly with racism, sexism, abortion, and the integrity of physical creation. These are major moral issues and we may not escape into a private world and simply ignore them.

However, precisely because they are so mammoth and important, we can get the impression that the other moral issues we have to deal with, issues of private morality, are not as urgent. It’s all too easy to conclude that, given the mega-problems of our world, it doesn’t matter much how we live in the deeper recesses of our private worlds, as long as we are doing correct battle on the big front.

Our private, little moral concerns can look pretty petty when weighed against the problems of the world as a whole. Do we really believe that God cares much whether or not we say our morning prayers, gossip about a colleague, reconcile with someone over a petty dispute, or keep our sexual lives fully in line with the biblical ideal? Does God really care about these things?

Yes. God cares because we care. Large, global issues notwithstanding, issues of personal integrity are generally what make or break our happiness, not to mention our character and our intimate relationships. In the end, they aren’t petty concerns at all. They shape the big things. Social morality is simply a reflection of private morality. What we see in the global picture is simply a magnification of the human heart.

When ego, greed, lust, and selfishness are not dealt with inside the private recesses of the heart, it’s naive to think that they will be dealt with at a social, global level. How are we to build a just, loving world, if we cannot, first of all, tame selfishness inside us? There can be no moral transparency at a global level when we are hiding private secrets. The global simply mirrors the private. The failure to recognize this is, to my mind, the biggest single factor working against social justice groups. It is also a dangerous naivete.

Social action that does not have private morality as its base is not spirituality, but simply political action, power doing battle with power, nothing more. It is successful or non-successful only on the principle of “might is right.” The kingdom of God doesn’t work that way. It works by conversion and real conversion is an eminently personal act. Carlos Castanedo, the Native American mystic, writes: “I come from Latin America where intellectuals are always talking about political and social revolution and where a lot of bombs are being thrown. But nothing has changed much. It takes little daring to bomb a building, but in order to stop being jealous or to come to internal silence, you have to remake yourself. This is where real reform begins.”

Thomas Merton frequently makes the same point. During the 1960s, when so many intellectuals were involved in various social struggles, Merton was tucked away in a monastery, far (it would seem) from the real battle-fronts. Stung by outside criticism of his monastic seclusion, he admitted that to most outsiders it “must seem like small potatoes” to be engaged mainly in a war against one’s private demons. However, he still believed that he was fighting the real battle, that of changing hearts. When you change a heart, he says, you have helped bring about some permanent structural, moral change on this planet. Everything else is simply one power attempting to displace another.

Private morality and all that comes with it – private prayer and the attempt to be honest and transparent in even the smallest and most secret of things – is the core from which all morality takes its root.

Jan Walgrave, commenting on the social importance of mysticism, suggests: “You can generate more energy by splitting a single atom than you can by harnessing all the forces of water and wind on earth. That is precisely what Jesus, Buddha, and Mohammed did. They split the inner atom of love. Great energy flowed out.” John of the Cross, in teaching about the vital importance of honesty in small things, says: “It makes no difference whether a bird is tied down by a heavy rope or by the slenderest of cords, it can’t fly in either case.”

Private morality is not unimportant, an unaffordable luxury, a soft virtue, or something that stands in the way of commitment to social justice. It’s the real place where the moral atom needs to be split.

There’s a story told about Anna Akhmatova, a Russian poet. During Stalin’s purges, thousands of Russians had been imprisoned and she, along with others, was standing in line outside of a prison, waiting to leave food and letters for loved ones inside. The waiting was doubly frustrating because they didn’t know how long they would have to wait to see their loved ones and they didn’t know whether their loved ones were still alive or not. In the midst of this, a woman recognized Akhmatova and asked her: “Can you describe this?” “Yes, I can!” Akhmatova replied. Afterward she remembered that, as she said this, something like a smile passed between the other woman and herself. Just to be able to put words to what was happening was somehow freeing, an act of defiance.

To name something properly brings a certain peace of mind. We know this from experience. For instance, when a person we know falls victim to an accident, a crime, or a tragedy of any sort, we have no peace of mind until we know exactly what’s happened to him or her. No matter how painful the revelation might be (he or she might be the victim of an horrific accident, murder, torture, rape) we need to know what’s happened. The reality has to be named, described. This isn’t a question of morbid curiosity, but of peace of mind. The soul needs to know.

This is indeed the basis of spiritual direction. What good direction does is help us to name properly what we are undergoing. John of the Cross tells us that the process of spiritual direction works this way: First, there is raw experience itself, the flow of events in our lives that triggers a bevy of thoughts and feelings that both stimulate and perplex the soul. This is like uncut-dough, in need of shaping. Good direction begins with that uncooked material.

Next comes the objectification of that experience. The person seeking guidance must in some way give expression to his or her experience, however crudely, through words, a drawing, a dance, whatever. But this initial expression is not yet an interpretation. That’s the next step.

With the help of the director, the person now searches for a name to properly describe what is happening inside him or her. Using paradigms drawn from scripture and Christian tradition, the one being directed tests various images, like one would try on shoes in a store, looking for a good fit: “Could this be the same thing as Job experienced? Could this be an experience of the `desert’? Is God testing me as he did Abraham and Sarah?”

When there is a proper fit, peace ensues. The experience has been properly named and we have turned raw circumstance into shaped destiny. To name something properly is an act of faith, an act that manifests transcendence. Raw forces are forever impaling themselves upon us, but we get to determine their meaning. We do that by naming our experiences correctly.

Psychotherapy works in the same way, except that it uses psychological paradigms rather than faith-based ones in its efforts to name what is happening inside of a person.

If this is true, then putting proper names to what is happening inside our experience is the place were we can read the language of God. John of the Cross suggests that God’s daily word is written inside of ordinary experience. Our task then is that of examining our own experiences and trying to name, by using images from scripture and our faith tradition, what God is saying to us inside these.

For example, today, a group of believers today might ask itself: “What time are we living in? Is this the time of the desert? Is this again the time of the Babylonian exile? Are we on the road to Emmaus? Are we meeting Jesus, along with the Syro-Phoenician woman, on the borders of ethnicity, religion, gender? Are we in the upper room, awaiting a new pentecost, taking seriously Jesus’ counsel to not leave the city until we feel ourselves clothed with power?”

And, given our experience of being Christian within a post-ecclesial society, we might ask too: “What is God saying to us inside of a culture that is spiritual but not ecclesial, Christian but mostly bitter and grandiose about its own roots? Is this a time of pruning, of special humbling? What is our task in a time of ecclesial, historical disprivilege? What should our waiting consist in?”

To pray and struggle to name our experiences biblically and in faith is to “read the signs of the times”. It’s also good spiritual direction, as John of the Cross defines this. Moreover, it is too, in Anna Akhmatova’s words, “an act of political defiance”. When we get it right, a smile will pass between us.

I like a comment I once heard from Richard Rohr: “Not everything can be cured or fixed, but it should be named properly.”

Every generation needs to experience pentecost for itself. It needs God’s spirit and it needs it in its own particular way.

Indeed scripture assures us that the holy spirit is not a generic force, one-size-fits-all, but a person, a relationship, a spirit that has “particular manifestations” and gives itself to each of us uniquely so that the understanding and strength that we receive are geared to help us in our own particular struggles. If this is true, if Pentecost is so differentiating, an important question arises: Where in life today do we most need the holy spirit to transform us? What are our peculiar spiritual disabilities?

Our unique weaknesses, like our strengths, are legion. However, for our generation, a number of things might be singled out as particularly debilitating to the soul: Our propensity for distraction, our tendency to see individual fulfilment as salvation, our proclivity for ideology and fundamentalism, and our obsession with sexuality. We could use a particular infusion from the holy spirit to help us with these.

For example: Distraction is perhaps the most powerful narcotic on the planet. Simply put, what this means is that our daily communion, the manna that sustains us, is distraction – television, game-shows, sporting-events, sit-coms, talk-shows, entertainment-news, scandals reported in the daily papers, pop music, movies, theatre, and the like. Not that these are bad. What’s bad is that they eventually anesthetize us: We watch the late-night comedians on TV, scotch in hand, laugh as they spoof the day’s events, let the tensions of the day subside, and sleep pretty well. Not bad, not bad at all, except we do it again the next night and the night after and onwards ever after, slowly numbing ourselves to the deeper issues of meaning, pain, justice, self-sacrifice, love, death.

For our own pentecost, we need then to pray for the spirit of wisdom, the spirit of depth, the spirit of courage, and (given the over-sophistication of so much of today’s entertainment) the spirit of chastity.

Beyond distraction lies another struggle. Aidan Kavanaugh once said: “Today our icon is not a city, whether of man or God, but the lone jogger running through suburbia, in order, we are told, to feel good about himself.” We struggle today with individualism and the problem is not just with the obvious, the all too-common breakdown of our families, neighbourhoods, parishes, and communities, the “bowling-alone” syndrome. The deeper struggle is with what Dorothy Day used to call “the harshness of love.” What we can’t deal with is the painful give-and-take of ordinary community, the habitual slights and hurts that arise in every marriage, family, community, parish, and civil group. We can’t interrelate without hurting each other. So we withdraw, jog and bowl alone, not out of an ideology of individualism, but because we haven’t the resiliency needed to deal with the bruises and disappointments that come with bowling and jogging in a group.

What pentecost needs to pour into us today is the spirit of resiliency, the spirit of forgiveness, the spirit of patience, the spirit of long-suffering, the spirit of understanding, and the spirit to not go jogging or bowling alone.

We need too a pentecost that can help us cope with the idealogies and fundamentalism (social and ecclesial) that constantly beset us like so many nasty viruses. We are forever infected with ideologies, be they of the left or the right, that block us from living vital parts of the gospel. Whether we rationalize it as protecting proper values, defending a divine creed, or advocating an issue of justice, over and over again we compromise the hospitality, charity, respect, catholicity, and tolerance called for by the gospels, all in the name of sacred cause. Our hearts, unlike God’s, are forever wanting to lodge in just one room. We need a pentecost to mellow us with the spirit of mildness, stretch us with the spirit of catholicity, and especially fill us with the spirit of hospitality so as to take us beyond the hardness that we rationalize as creed or cause.

Finally, we need a pentecost to help us deal with our sexuality. In a world in which sexual intimacy is held up as salvation, we have lost the proper balance between what our sexuality’s DNA seems to demand and the place that marriage, family, friendship, fidelity, inclusive community, and innocence hold in the overall schema for meaning and happiness. We need new tongues of fire to bring us the spirit of chastity, the spirit of full respect, the spirit of fidelity, and the spirit for emotional martyrdom, so that, even as we defend the goodness of sexuality, we are able too, on any given night, to sweat blood in a garden so as to not violate the bigger picture.

1 Corinthians 12, 7 suggests that pentecost is “the particular manifestation of the spirit, granted to each of us.” We need to pray for such a particularized pentecost to happen.