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.

Being Born From Above

September 2, 2001

In a wonderful series of commentaries on Scripture, John Shea presents a powerful story on what it means to be born again, to be born from above, as Jesus says. A man he knows, tells how he was born twice of the same woman. This man’s story:

One day he was driving his aged mother to a funeral. She had been already at many funerals, having had to bury her own husband, a brother, and most of her friends. She also found herself without much money, in failing health, and on the edges of a serious depression, not exactly one of the “Golden Girls”, on the top of her game, spinning off laughs by the minute. As they drove along, she talked about her own funeral and was giving instructions on how she wanted it done. Then, quite unexpectedly, she said: “I’m giving up on fear. Everybody dies. Nothing is left.” Her son protested, telling her that giving up on fear isn’t easy to do, even as he realized at that very instant how much his whole life was bound up precisely by fear – fear of sickness, fear of death, and fear of losing his job, his good name, his good looks, his status, his friends. He looked at his mother and saw that she was beaming. He knew she meant exactly what she had just said.

They never had that conversation again, but from that moment on he noticed his mother began to change. She was no longer afraid to speak her mind on anything, and she spoke it calmly, wisely, without pomp, with great patience, and with an ever-growing compassion. She became stronger and more gentle, both at the same time.

People were attracted to her and drew strength from her. Her son was one of those people and he began to visit her more frequently, not out of obligation now but because he needed the nourishment she was giving him. It was like a new umbilical cord had been forged between them. Slowly, just as she had once given birth to his body, she now gave birth to his spirit. He felt himself begin to change, to have less fear. This second gestation took more than nine months, but a new life was slowly born in him. He was able to “give up on fear” and move into life with a freedom that, as Jesus says, comes only from above. (John Shea, Gospel-Light, Crossroads, 1998, pp. 94-95)

To be born again, to be reborn from above, is not something that we can do, at least not fully, in one instant or in one dramatic, religious gesture, no matter how deep our sincerity. There is more involved than falling at the feet of some evangelist or of answering an altar call, albeit these can be an important beginning.

To be born again, from above, involves a gestation process, namely, being hooked up to a new umbilical cord, one that begins to nurture us in such a way that our old support systems (the meaning and security we draw from our achievements, successes, material possessions, recognition, good name, good health, good looks, and sexual attractiveness) are no longer what ultimately gives us life. We still want these things, but we no longer build our lives around the fear of losing them. They still provide some life and nourishment, but we now begin, bit by bit, to draw life from something beyond them. We sense ourselves as hooked to something deeper, a spirit and a person who offers us a meaning that dwarfs what we now have.

The more we begin to draw life and nourishment from this new source, the more we begin to give up on fear because what we are now receiving is not experienced as precarious, as is the case with our present meaning and joy. We are being pushed through a new birth canal and as this happens we begin, little by little, to sense that in this new place we don’t need to possess things, defend ourselves, cling so desperately to health, youth, and good looks, or fear that joy and meaning can be taken away from us. Life in the spirit is not a precarious thing that can slip away from us like the things of this world. Like its Author, it is immune from threat. We can give up on fear.

But this doesn’t happen all at once, although there can be some dramatic, break-through moments along the way. Being born again is about seeds growing silently when nobody is watching, about unseen yeast leavening a batch of dough, and about an umbilical cord inside a dark womb supplying nutrients for an unknowing child to grow and be born. Gestation takes time. Growth works slowly. Life, whether in the body or in the spirit, has the same dynamics.

The comedian, George Carlin, once quipped that when he was born, he was so stunned that he couldn’t speak for two years! That, I suspect, is also the case when we are born again.

Receiving our Faith Tradition

August 26, 2001

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.

A Culture of Amazement

August 19, 2001

In the mid-1990s, a novel by Robert Waller, The Bridges of Madison County, took America by storm. It was the number-one, best-selling book for an entire year and eventually was turned into a popular film of the same title.

The story runs like this: A photographer for National Geographic, played by Clint Eastwood, is driving around in rural Wisconsin, looking for a set of historic bridges he has been commissioned to photograph. He’s lost and the story opens with him driving up to a farmhouse to ask for directions. As chance would have it, the unlucky husband has just left for a week to attend a cattle-show and his wife, played by Meryl Streep, answers the door. There’s instant karma, soul-connection. They both feel it. She invites him for dinner and before they meal is over they’ve fallen in love, deeply and irrevocably. Before the evening is over, they’re also in bed with each other.

What’s wrong with this? People can fall in love instantly, deeply, and permanently at first glance. It only takes 15 seconds for the whole world to change, Iris Murdoch used to say. What’s wrong is that we are supposed to believe that something sublime has taken place, something so profound and deep that the rest of us can only contemplate it in envy. But that’s the fallacy. When two people who have known each other less than six hours make love with each other, how sublime can that be? Isn’t that tantamount to gestating a baby in one evening, writing a doctoral thesis in two hours, or doing a painting or a novel at one sitting and purporting it to be a masterpiece? How sublime can something be when there hasn’t first been some sublimation (at least for more than a couple of hours)?

What we have here is an instance of what the gospels call “amazement”. What is this?

In the gospels, we see a number of instances where Jesus does or says something that catches people by surprise. The evangelists then tell us: “And they were amazed.” Almost immediately, Jesus says: “Don’t be amazed!” He has a deep suspicion of amazement. Why? Because he knows that the same people who are so impressed with him one day so as to want to make him king, need very little altering of circumstance to begin the chant: “Crucify him!”

What is amazement? We are amazed (in the biblical sense) when we simply let energy flow through as a wire conducts an electrical current, when we simply take in the energy of the group around us or the energy that spontaneously arises within us and, without holding, carrying, or transforming it in any way, act on it and let it flow through us. That’s good at rock concerts and football games, but it’s also the root of selfishness, bigotry, shortsightedness, group-think, mob-mentality, gang-rapes, and crucifixions. Ultimately, it’s the opposite of compassion.

Compassion begins with what the gospels call “pondering”. To ponder, in the biblical sense, is to resist having energy simply flow through you and instead hold, carry, and transform it so as to not give it back in kind. When I’m amazed (as opposed to pondering) I give back in kind: If someone comes up to me and says: “I like you!” my spontaneous response will be: “And I like you too!” Conversely, if someone comes up to me and says, “I hate you!” my response will also be in kind: “And I hate you!” When I react in this way, I simply let energy flow through me, like a conduit. This is what Jesus calls the virtue of the scribes and pharisees: “What virtue is there in loving those who love you? Can you love those who hate you?” Virtue requires the transformation of energy. But …

We live in a culture of amazement. Sometimes this is wonderful, when we all get caught up in an energy that draws us together in community and celebration, as when our football team wins the national championship or we have all seen and enjoyed the same movie or television series. Mostly though amazement fuels mindlessness, narrowness, and the suffocating group-think of both the right and the left. And this has many apparitions: I remember a pastor of a local parish phoning me one day, when I was acting-dean at a theological college. His words: “Your students often do more harm than good! They take a few classes and then come back to their parishes and roll their eyes in disgust at everything. I don’t doubt that they’re right, but don’t you teach them any compassion?” What’s the problem here? These students are amazed. Amazement is the opposite of compassion.

When Mary stood helplessly under the cross, she was silent. Why? Because had she spoken that day, hers would have been words of amazement. Instead, unlike the characters of The Bridges of Madison County, she held, carried, and transformed a great tension into something truly sublime, full compassion.

Anxiety as the Opposite of Faith

August 12, 2001

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.

Real and False Humility

August 5, 2001

In his inaugural address, Nelson Mandela suggests that false humility hurts us just as much as false pride. His words: “Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our light not our darkness that frightens us. We ask ourselves, “Who am I to be brilliant, gorgeous, talented, fabulous?” Actually, who are you not to be? You are a child of God. Your playing small doesn’t serve the world. There’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. We are born to manifest the glory of God that is within us. It’s not just in some of us. It’s in everyone, and, as we let our light shine, we consciously give other people permission to do the same. As we are liberated from our own fear, our presence automatically liberates others.”

That’s an important, gospel corrective to our common misunderstanding about humility. Spontaneously we tend to think of humility as self-effacement, self-deprecation, as never blowing our own horn, as always first waiting to be asked before we step forward to offer our gifts. We identify humility with non-assertiveness.

There’s a lot of truth in that but, as someone once said, a heresy is something that’s 98% correct. The other 2% is what hangs us. That’s the case here. Humility is, in fact, a healthy self-effacement and non-assertion. But then it becomes complicated. Self-effacement is not self-deprecation and indeed there’s nothing enlightened about shrinking so that other people won’t feel insecure around you. Why not?

Because our gifts and talents are meant to help others, just as their gifts are meant to help us. To hide our light under a bushel basket serves no one – others, God, ourselves. That’s precisely what Jesus warns us about in the parable of the talents. When God gives us a gift, God expects a certain return. To hide our talents, as the parable makes clear, is perilous to self and not very pleasing to the one who gave those gifts.

We already know this through experience, painful experience. When we self-deprecate in the name of humility, or for any other reason, we might fool people around us into thinking this is virtue, but we never fool ourselves. Whenever we hide our light, we generate a lot of rage, bitterness, and envy inside of ourselves. When we play small, however moral and noble the intent, another part of us begins to enrage. Why? Because what we are doing fundamentally belies who we are. We are in the image of God, special, unique, fabulous, gorgeous, talented. When that part of us, that deep part, is bullied by a good moral idea gone awry (humility gone false) it does not acquiesce in calm and serenity. It enrages, becomes bitter, jealous, and frustrated at being forced to live a lie – even if it still says all the right things.

My own dad was not an educated man but, like many others whose souls have been forged in the desert of the prairies where a harsh beauty and a lonely isolation give everyone sufficient conscriptive time in the wilderness, he was a man of wisdom. One of his quips ran this way: “Whenever you see someone who’s always angry, take a look at that person. Because it’s always someone who’s very bright, with lots of talent … it’s just that he or she hasn’t found a way of offering that in a way that people can receive it.” A prairie perspective on Jesus’ parable of the talents!

It’s easy to misread this parable, thinking that the king arbitrarily punishes the servant who hid his talent. My dad’s angle suggests something else, namely, that the punishment is not arbitrary but intrinsic, like a hangover to drunkenness. The “beatings” the parable talks about are what we do to ourselves whenever we hide our light under a bushel basket because one part of us then finds it intolerable to be in a situation wherein we are all talented-up with nowhere to go.

What is genuine humility? Real humility self-effaces, but does not self-deprecate; it is not assertive, but it does not slink away in unhealthy passivity; it is not showy and exhibitionist, but it does not hide its light either.

We are humble when we live in the face of the fact that we are both dependent and interdependent. We are not ipsum esse subsistens, self-sufficient Being, God, nor the centre of earth, nor intended to be that centre. But each of us is a child of God, fabulous, unique, talented, asked to set forth our gifts on the table of life, as a gracious host might put food on the dinner table. Nelson Mandela is right, there is nothing enlightened, or God-serving, in false humility. Moreover, as Jesus’ parable of the talents suggests, hiding one’s talents doesn’t exactly produce happiness either.

Splitting the Inner Atom

July 29, 2001

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.

Our Misunderstanding about Suicide

July 22, 2001

Each year I write an article on suicide because so many people have to live with the pain of losing a loved one in this way. When someone close to us falls victim to suicide we live with a pain that includes a lot of confusion (“Why?”), guilt (“What might we still have done? Why didn’t we notice sooner?”), misunderstanding (“This is the ultimate form of despair”) and, if we are believers, considerable religious anxiety as well (“How does God treat such a person? What’s to be his or her eternal destiny?”)

What needs to be said about suicide: First of all, that it’s a disease, something that in most cases takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, we, the loved ones who remain, should not spend undue time and energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might still have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with a purely physical disease, we can love someone and still not be able to save them from physical death. God too loved this person and, like us, could not interfere with his or her freedom. Finally, we shouldn’t worry too much about how God meets a suicide victim on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, goes through locked doors, descends into hell, and breathes out peace where we can’t. Most victims of suicide will awake on the other side to find Christ standing inside their locked doors, inside the heart of their chaos, breathing out peace and gently saying: “Peace be with you!”

But there are always number of objections: “You are making light of suicide! Suicide is the ultimate act of the despair and must always be named as such! Wasn’t it G.K. Chesterton himself who said that, by killing yourself, you insult every flower on earth?” What’s to be said about these comments?

They’re correct, when suicide is indeed a despairing act within which one kills oneself. But in most suicides, I suspect, this is not the case because there is huge distinction between “falling victim to suicide”and “killing oneself”. They’re not the same thing.

In “suicide”, a person, through illness of whatever sort, is taken out of life against his or her will. Hence we use the term “victim” – “a victim of suicide”. Many of us have known “victims of suicide” and we know that in almost every case that person was someone who was the antithesis of the egoist, the narcissist, the over-proud, hardened, unbending person who refuses, through pride, to take his or her place in the humble and broken scheme of things. Usually it’s the opposite. The “victim of suicide” has cancerous problems precisely because he or she is too-sensitive, too-wounded, too-raw, and too-bruised to possess the necessary callousness needed to absorb life’s many blows. I remember a comment I once heard at a funeral. We had just buried a young man who, suffering from clinical depression, had committed suicide. The priest had preached badly, hinting that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault and that suicide was always the ultimate act of despair. At the reception afterwards a neighbour of the suicide victim came up and expressed his displeasure at the priest’s remarks: “There a lot of people is world who should kill themselves, but they never will! But this man is the last person who should have killed himself, he was the most sensitive person I’ve ever met!” Too true.

“Killing yourself” is something different. It’s how some of the Hitlers pass out of this life. Hitler, in fact, did kill himself. He wasn’t a victim of suicide. In such a case, the person is not too-sensitive, too self-effacing, and too-bruised to touch others and be touched. The opposite is true. The person is too proud to accept his or her place in a world that, at the end of the day, demands humility of everyone.

There is an infinite distance between an act done out of weakness and one done out of strength, even though on the surface they might look the same. Likewise there is an absolute distinction between being too bruised to continue to touch life and being too proud to continue to take one’s place within it, though these too might look the same on the outside. There is all the difference in the world between being falling “victim to suicide” and “killing oneself”. Only the latter makes a moral statement, insults the flowers, and challenges the mercy of God.

Our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide are now joyous and whole, inside of God’s embrace, where, as our faith assures us, all is well and every manner of being is well.