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.

In her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows makes an interesting comment on Therese of Lisieux. Looking at photographs of her, Burrows points that there is a quality of separateness, of being alone, that Therese’s face always exhibits, even when she is in a group. Something always set her apart, even though she was a very sociable person. There was a loneliness inside her that nothing quite ever erased.

Robert Coles makes essentially the same comment about Simone Weil and coins an apt term to describe this quality. He suggests that she suffered from “moral loneliness”.

Some years ago, I wrote a book on loneliness, suggesting that there are four essential kinds of loneliness: alienation, restlessness, rootlessness, and psychological depression. Were I to write that book today, I would add another category, moral loneliness. What is this?

Loneliness lies at the very centre of our lives. Feeling lonely, restless, and set apart isn’t something we experience at the edges of our lives. It’s a fire that burns at the heart. We aren’t restful beings who occasionally get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience some rest. And this is true at every level of our being: body, psyche, soul, sexuality. We are perennially restless, driven, hungry, longing creatures, never perfectly in union with others.

In this life, we never fully overcome this. Always we are somewhat alone, separate. Sometimes this restlessness is more inchoate, we can’t really name what we need or want, and sometimes it is so painfully focused that it becomes an obsession. Always it is there.

Today it is all too easy to believe that, at the end of the day, this is simply about sexual hunger. Powerful voices insist that what we’re really lonely for, what we really want, is sex. The rest is camouflage. The final solution for loneliness, we are told, is romantic sexuality. For us, the expression “lover” simply means “sexual partner”. Sex is seen as a panacea, the ultimate answer to our loneliness.

There is some truth in this, albeit it’s far, far from the whole truth. Sexual union, when the proper conditions are met, is indeed the “one-flesh” consummation decreed by God to overcome loneliness: “It is not good for the man to be alone.” Outside of sexual union, we are, in the end, always somewhat more radically alone, single, lonely, a minority of one. However, as experience has taught us, sexual union of itself is no guarantee of overcoming separateness. Why? Because we are lonely at levels that sex alone cannot touch. Our deepest loneliness is moral.

Where we are most alone is in the moral part of our souls, namely, at that place where we feel most strongly about things and where all that is most precious to us is held, cherished, and guarded. It is precisely in this place, a point-vierge, that we feel violated when what is precious to our integrity is attacked.

Rarely does anyone penetrate that dwelling, whether in love or in violation. Why? Because we are rightly very cautious about whom we admit to the place where all that is most precious to us lies. Since this is the place where we are most deeply vulnerable, it’s also the place where we are most deeply protective. Thus, most often, in that place we are alone. A fierce loneliness results, a moral loneliness. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity, for someone to be with us in that deep part where all that is most precious to us is cherished and guarded.

Our deepest loneliness is for someone to sleep with morally, a kindred soul, a soulmate in the truest sense of that phrase. Great friendships and great marriages always have moral affinity as their real basis. Persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the deepest sense because they sleep with each other where it most counts, irrespective of whether or not they have sexual union. In the experience of moral affinity we have the experience of “coming home”. Sometimes this is coloured by sexual attraction and romantic feelings and sometimes it is not. Always though there is the sense that the other is a kindred spirit, that he or she holds precious what we hold precious. Biblically, we are feeling what Adam felt when he first saw Eve: “At last, flesh of my flesh, bone of my bone!”

Most of us spend our lives looking for this and perhaps, like Simone Weil and Therese of Lisieux, we never quite find it, despite a good marriage, a healthy family, and close friends. What’s to be done? Therese of Lisieux suggests that, in the end, we are all “exiles of the heart” and that we can only overcome this separateness through a certain mysticism, that is, by sleeping with each other in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, fidelity, mildness, and chastity. There is a loneliness even beyond sex, moral loneliness. Overcoming it asks for a higher love-making, a sleeping together in the Holy Spirit.

Speaking to a group of theologians in Chicago recently, Cardinal Francis George offered this critique: “Liberal Catholicism is inadequate in fostering the joyful self-surrender called for in Christian marriage, in consecrated life, in the ordained priesthood, even in discipleship itself. … A sociological theory that defines the central value as autonomy is only with great difficulty able to hear a doctrinal or gospel call to surrender.”

Among the many criticisms made of liberal Catholicism, this one is perhaps the most stinging. It sears the hypothalamus. More than one is the liberal who, upon hearing this, reacts a bit like Herod in the face of John the Baptist: “He was greatly upset listening to John, yet he liked to listen to him.” Of course, such a reaction doesn’t say that Cardinal George’s criticism is necessarily fair, but it does indicate a rather direct hit of the achilles heel. Liberal ideology, whatever its other strengths, is not strong on this point, it doesn’t easily bend the knee in joyous doctrinal and gospel surrender.

But it has its own strong points. It fosters other gospel values. Precisely because it does so much value human autonomy, it has been a major prophetic force in helping overcome intolerance, bigotry, narrowness, and rigidity of every sort. The fight, and it is a gospel fight, against racism, sexism, ecological insensitivity, and undue privilege for the rich, has, more often than not, been led by the liberals. Liberty, equality, and fraternity, despite the baggage these words carry, are in the end gospel values. The enlightenment, as Louis Dupre puts it, like a struggling adolescent, is not bad, just unfinished. Human autonomy and the gospel are not at odds.

The same type of criterion might also be applied to conservative Catholicism. It too has its strengths, along with an achilles heel. Conservative Catholicism is strong on doctrinal and gospel surrender and, in theory at least, emphasizes that this surrender be a joyful one. The problem is that too often, in practice, that surrender is anything but joyful. The achilles heel of conservative Catholicism is that it often produces the older brother of the prodigal son, namely, someone who can, in truth, say: “All these years I have been faithful. I have never done anything seriously wrong to put myself outside God’s house, but I will not enter the house and celebrate with my younger brother.” Like his or her biblical counterpart, this person too often stands outside the circle celebration, outside the dance, outside the circle of gratitude. Too many conservatives are bitter, jealous, angry at the faults of others.

But conservative Catholicism also has its strengths, not the least of which is the one that Cardinal George intimates in his critique of liberalism, namely, that it can inspire a healthy genuflection to something higher than the individual and collective ego. Moreover its emphasis on the fact that, here in this life, we mourn and weep in a valley of tears and live without the final symphony, helps make its devotees a bit more willing to sweat the blood of self-sacrifice, even if that means sacrificing autonomy and private dreams. For us, adult children of the enlightenment, the call to self-sacrifice is not easily embraced. Conservative Catholicism has an important prophetic voice.

So where does that leave us? Cardinal George is, I submit, basically right in his comment on liberal Catholicism, too often it cannot induce joyful self-surrender. However, my own experience with conservative Catholicism leads me to believe it also has a congenital weakness, too often it produces angry, rigid people. Both ideologies have their innate dangers: one can easily make for “prodigal sons”, just as the other can easily make for “older brothers”. We can be outside the Father’s house through wilful-pride or through jealous-bitterness. There’s more than one way to put ourselves outside the circle of gratitude and celebration.

Perhaps this is all a bit strong, since I very much doubt that most liberals and conservatives are outside the Father’s house. Sincerity, integrity, and goodness abound, despite weakness. What’s more true, I suspect, is that ideology, on both sides, more often than not, puts us outside the circle of full compassion. As Jim Wallis puts it: “It is time for left and the right to admit that they have run out of imagination, that the categories of liberal and conservative are dysfunctional and that what is needed is a radicalism that takes us beyond the selective sympathies of both the right and the left. Such a radicalism can be found only in the gospel which is neither liberal or conservative but fully compassionate.”

How to become fully compassionate or, at least, more compassionate? My advice? Become post-ideological … post-right, post-left, post-middle, post-liberal, post-conservative, post-anti-modern, post-modern, post-post-modern, post-sophisticated, post-angry, post-neurotic, and post-classifiable. Sound a bit complicated? Maybe Jesus put it more simply: “The good scribe reaches into the bag and pulls out the new as well as the old.”

In his recent novel, Anil’s Ghost, Michael Ondaatje creates a character named Ananda. Ananda’s wife had been brutally murdered in the civil war in Sri Lanka and Ananda is trying to save himself from insanity and suicide in the face of this. His refuge? His tonic? Art, creativity, building something.

Near the end of the story, Ondaatje has him refurbishing a smashed statue of a Buddha. Ananda deliberately changes the eyes to make them the eyes of a human being, not of a god: “He looked at the eyes that had once belonged to a god. This is what he felt: As an artificer now he did not celebrate the greatness of a faith. But he knew if he did not remain an artificer he would become a demon. The war around him was to do with demons, spectres of retaliation.”

We are either creative or we give ourselves over to some kind of brutality. Become an artist or become a demon. This, it would seem, is our only choice. Is this right?

A good theology of grace, I believe, agrees with that. Why? Because we cannot will ourselves into being good people. We can’t just decide that we will from now on be loving and happy, any more than we can decide never again to be angry, bitter, or jealous. Willpower alone hasn’t got that kind of power. Only an influx into the very marrow of our souls of something that is not anger, bitterness, or jealousy can do that for us. We call this grace. Grace, not willpower, is what ultimately empowers us to live loving lives. Creativity, both in what it spawns within the artist and the artifact, can be a vital source of that grace.

But is this true? Are artists and creative persons less violent than others? Do we see any special grace operative there? Generally speaking, yes. Whatever their other faults, rarely are artists war-makers. Why? Because violence despoils the aesthetic order which artists value so much and, more importantly, because creating beauty of any sort helps mellow the spirit, not least inside of the person who is creating it.

Simply put, when we are creative, we get to feel a bit of what God must have felt at the original creation and at the baptism of Jesus, when, looking at the young earth spinning itself out of chaos and the head of Jesus emerging from the waters, there was the spontaneous utterance: “It is good, very good!” “This is my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased.”

Being creative can give us that same feeling. The experience of being creative can help instil in us the gaze of admiration, an appreciative consciousness, a divine satisfaction.

Obviously too there is a real danger in this. Feeling like God is also the greatest narcotic there is, as many artists and performers and athletes, tragically, have learned. In the experience of creativity, it is all too easy to identify with the energy, to feel that we are God or that art and creativity are themselves divine and an end in themselves. The greater the achievement, the harder it is to disconnect properly, to not identify oneself or it with God. Creativity comes fraught with a fierce danger. But, that risk notwithstanding, we need, every one of us, to be creative or else we will, as Ondaatje warns, grow bitter and violent in some way.

However we need to understand creativity correctly. We tend to be intimidated by the word and to see ourselves as not having what it takes to be creative. Why? Because we tend to identify creativity only with outstanding achievement and public recognition. Whom do we judge to be creative? Only those who have had their songs recorded, their poems published, their dances performed on Broadway, their achievements publicly noted, and their talents talked about on the TV talk shows.

But 99% of creativity hasn’t anything to do with that. Creativity is not in the end about public recognition or outstanding achievement. It’s about self-expression, about nurturing something into life, and about the satisfaction this brings with it. Creativity can be as simple (and as wonderful) as gardening, growing flowers, sewing, raising children, baking bread, collecting stamps, keeping a journal, writing secret poems, being a teacher, being cub-scout leader, coaching a team, collecting baseball cards, doing secret dances in the privacy of your own room, fixing old cars, or building a deck off the porch. It doesn’t have to be recognized and you don’t need to get published. You only have to love doing it. William Stafford, the American poet, suggests that we should all write a poem every morning. How is that possible, someone once asked him, we don’t always feel creative? His reply: “Lower your standards!”

“Publish or perish!” God never gave us that dictum. The academic world did. God’s rules for creativity are different. Jesus expressed them in the parable of the talents: “Be an artificer of some sort or you will surely become a demon!”

One of the things asked of us by adulthood itself, and more especially by our baptism, is that we pray for others. Like the high priests of old, we need to offer up prayers daily for the whole world. Indeed we are all priests, ordained by the sacred oils of baptism and consecrated by the archetypal burdens that have given us wrinkles and grey hair. As adults, elders, we have both privilege and the responsibility to, as scripture puts it, “make prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, for ourselves and for the people.” All of us, lay and cleric alike, need to offer up priestly prayer each day.

But how do we do that? How do we pray priestly prayers? We pray as priests, as Jesus prayed in the 17th chapter of John’s gospel, every time we sacrifice self-interest for the good of the community. That’s priestly prayer in its widest sense. However, we pray that prayer, formally and sacramentally, whenever we pray the prayer of the church, namely, the Eucharist or the Divine Office. This kind of prayer, called liturgy, is what keeps incarnate the priestly prayer of Christ.

In priestly prayer we pray not just for ourselves, nor ideally by ourselves, but we pray as a microcosm of the whole world, even as we pray for the whole world. In this kind of prayer we lift up our voices to God, not as a private offering, but in such a way so as to give a voice to the earth itself. In essence, when we pray at the Eucharist or at the Divine Office, we are saying this:

“Lord, God, I stand before you as a microcosm of the earth itself, to give it voice: See in my openness, the world’s openness, in my infidelity, the world’s infidelity; in my sincerity, the world’s sincerity, in my hypocrisy, the world’s hypocrisy; in my generosity, the world’s generosity, in my selfishness, the world’s selfishness; in my attentiveness, the world’s attentiveness, in my distraction, the world’s distraction; in my desire to praise you, the world’s desire to praise you, and in my self-preoccupation, the world’s forgetfulness of you. For I am of the earth, a piece of earth, and the earth opens or closes to you through my body, my soul, and my voice. I am your priest on earth.

And what I hold up for you today is all that is in this world, both of joy and of suffering. I offer you the bread of the world’s achievements, even as I offer you the wine of its failure, the blood of all that’s crushed as those achievements take place. I offer you the powerful of our world, our rich, our famous, our athletes, our artists, our movie stars, our entrepreneurs, our young, our healthy, and everything that’s creative and bursting with life, even as I offer you those who are weak, feeble, aged, crushed, sick, dying, and victimized. I offer to you all the pagan beauties, pleasures, and joys of this life, even as I stand with you under the cross, affirming that the one who is excluded from earthily pleasure is the cornerstone of the community. I offer you the strong and arrogant, along with the weak and gentle of heart, asking you to bless both and to stretch my heart so that it can, like you, hold and bless everything that is. I offer you both the wonders and the pains of this world, your world.”

To pray like this is to pray liturgically, as priest. And we pray like this each time we go to the Eucharist or when we, with others or alone, pray the Divine Office of the church. It is particularly this latter prayer, the Divine Office (also called “Breviary” or “Liturgy of the hours”), that is available daily as the priestly prayer for those of us who are not ordained ministers in the church. And this is especially true for two of those liturgical hours, Lauds (Morning Prayer) and Vespers (Evening Prayer). They, unlike the other hours which are more the particular domain of monks and professional contemplatives, are the ordinary priestly prayer of the laity.

And what is important in praying them is to remember that these are not prayers that we say for ourselves, nor indeed prayers whose formulae we need to find meaningful or relevant. Unlike private prayer and contemplation, where we should change methods whenever praying becomes too dry or sterile, Lauds and Vespers are prayers of the universal church that are in essence intended to be communal and priestly. They don’t have to be relevant for our private lives. We pray them as elders, as baptized adults, as priests, to invoke God’s blessing upon the world.

And whenever we do pray them, we are, in microcosm, the voice, body, and soul of the earth itself, continuing the high priesthood of Christ, as we offer prayers and entreaties, aloud and in silent tears, to a God who can save us.

In her novel, The Underpainter, Jane Urquhart describes a particularly painful time within the life of a woman named Sara. Sara’s life is at a crossroads. A long-standing relationship has soured, she is unable to draw energy from much of what once gave her meaning, and she senses that she must move on, but is unsure of where to go and what to do. She needs something new to happen to her, some new person or event to appear and redefine her life. But what? Who? She doesn’t know. She only knows, and very dimly, that she is waiting, keeping vigil somehow. Here is Urquhart’s poignant description:

“Sometime during August of 1935, the last month of the last summer I spent at Silver Islet, Sara told me what it was like to wait. … She told me that over the period of the last winter she had finally realized that everything that she did or said – every activity – was either a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting and therefore had no relevance on its own.”

So too within each of our lives. We are always waiting. The Eucharist is meant to help us with that. Among other things, it is meant to be a vigil, a coming together to wait for someone or something new to happen to us. We meet in Eucharist to wait with each other. The Eucharist is meant to be a vigil. As Gerhard Lofink puts it: “The early apostolic communities cannot be understood outside of the matrix of intense expectation. They were communities awaiting Christ’s return. They gathered in Eucharist for, among other reasons, to foster and sustain this awareness, namely, that they were living in wait, waiting for Christ’s return.”

But what does that mean exactly? How is the Eucharist a vigil, a gathering together to wait? How, indeed, does any vigil work?

We keep vigil whenever we live our lives in the face of the fact that we are, consciously or unconsciously, waiting for someone or something new to come into our lives and give us a completeness that we are now missing. For example, we speak of a funeral-vigil: A loved one has died. So we come together, usually in a chapel, to remember and celebrate the person who has died, but also to console each other as we wait for the sting of death to pass so the joy of life can return.

As mentioned, the sense of vigil can be conscious or unconscious. For example, when we sit at an airport or train station, waiting for a loved one to arrive, we are quite conscious that we are keeping vigil, waiting. Often though, as in Urquhart’s description of Sara’s waiting, we have only an inchoate sense of keeping vigil. We are, it would seem, doing other things, but, underneath, we are keeping vigil. For example, picture this: Three women, each single and in her late thirties, meet every Friday night to digest their week, let off some steam, and enjoy each others’ friendship. What they do varies: Some nights they share a bottle of wine and reminisce about old college days as they watch a video, other nights they go a movie, and sometimes they simply go from work to a pub and make an evening of it. They do different things, but they meet weekly, ritually. What is happening here? A number of things:

At one level, they are simply celebrating friendship, pure and simple. At another level though, like Jane Urquhart’s Sara, they are keeping vigil. They are helping to sustain each other as each of them, single and approaching mid-life, is waiting for something or someone new to come into her life to help redefine and reshape its next chapter. They aren’t necessarily looking for husbands or kids, though a powerful imperative within their DNA no doubt pushes them in that direction, but they are waiting. However dim that awareness, they know that a chapter of their lives is winding down, that things cannot stay as they are, that something or someone new must enter and help them redefine their meaning. Their coming together is partly to sustain each other as they wait for this new something to appear.

What is true for these women is ultimately true for everyone of us. At the end of the day, we are all, each in our own way, single, inconsummate, waiting. None of us has the complete symphony. Ninety-nine per cent of the time we are waiting, longing for something new to appear in our lives.

The Eucharist is a vigil, a ritual, that brings us together, like those thirty-something singles, so that we can console and sustain each other within the mutual inconsummation of our lives. In the Eucharist we assure each other that we still have each other, that we still have God, and that we still have Christ’s promise to, one day, wipe away our every ache and give us the ecstacy we so painfully crave.

Few persons have understood the Eucharist as deeply as St. Augustine. His homilies on it are precious, particularly those he delivered to newly baptized adults who were receiving the Eucharist for the first time. In one of these he tells them that their sins are forgiven at the Eucharist:

“Next [at the Eucharist] the Lord’s Prayer is said. … Why is it said before receiving the body and blood of Christ? Because perhaps on account of our human fragility our minds have imagined something which is not becoming, our eyes have seen something which is not decent, or our ears heard something which was not fitting. If perhaps such things have been kept in because of temptation and the fragility of human life, they are washed away by the Lord’s Prayer at the moment we say `Forgive us our trespasses’ so that we can safely approach the sacrament.”

According to Augustine, when we stand around the altar at the Eucharist as a community and sincerely pray the Lord’s Prayer, any sins we have committed are forgiven. The Eucharist is ultimate sacrament of reconciliation. It is the ancient water of cleansing, now turned into the new wine of reconciliation, that purifies us so that we can enter the house and celebrate. How is this so?

In the second chapter of John’s gospel, we have the miracle at Cana where Jesus changes water into wine. Too often we see this simply as a gesture of hospitality: The hosts ran out of wine, Jesus felt sorry for them, and so changed six jugs of water into wine to spare them the embarrassment. Such an interpretation however misses the main point. Scripture scholars, Raymond Brown among them, tell us that in the early chapters of John’s Gospel there is a strong recurring theme of Jesus replacing the old with the new. That is the case here. He is replacing the old rite of cleansing with something new. What?

Key to grasping the significance of this miracle is the particular jugs of water that got changed into wine. The water that Jesus changed into wine was the wash-water, the water used to ritually cleanse yourself when you entered a house. At the door of every Jewish house there were a series of water-jugs, usually six of them, which were kept filled with water. Upon entering a house, you were obliged to first stop and wash your hands and feet, both because they were usually covered with dust and because you were obliged, ritually, to do this. By washing in this way, you made yourself “clean” so that you could join the household and sit at table with them. What Jesus does at Cana is change this water, used for cleansing, into wine. He replaces the old rite of cleansing with something new – the Eucharist.

The Eucharist is therefore both the sacrament that celebrates unity and the sacrament that cleanses us for it. At the Eucharist our sins are forgiven because to touch Christ is to be healed, even of sin. And we touch Christ, physically, in the Eucharist. But if this is true, if our sins are forgiven in the Eucharist, where does that leave the Catholic sacrament of confession? Is there still a need for explicit confession?

That we can have our sins forgiven by participating in the Eucharist in no way denigrates the need for private confession. The opposite. To touch the body of Christ is the greatest antidote to the rationalizing individualism that precisely tempts us away from explicit confession. A biblical text, the story of the woman who touches the hem of Jesus’ garment, can be helpful in understanding this. In her encounter with Jesus, we see that there are in fact two moments of healing, the initial touch and a subsequent, explicit, one-to-one conversation. Confession to a priest and forgiveness of sins through simply touching the body of Christ in the Eucharist are connected in the same way as that woman’s explicit exchange with Jesus is related to her initial touching of his garment. The person-to-person exchange brings the healing to a fuller moment, a fuller maturity, and a fuller peace. Explicit confession is to the sacrament of reconciliation what an explicit apology is to reconciliation with each other in our daily lives. Actions speak, just as words do, and we can apologize to each other simply by letting our presence speak. But something is left unfinished until an explicit apology is spoken. Mature people apologize, in words as well as in actions. Moreover, as the literature on addictions points out, there can never be a full healing of one’s past until one faces, with searing honesty, one’s sins and tells them, face to face, to another human being. Explicit, sacramental confession is an indispensable piece within the process of full reconciliation.

However, as both scripture and Augustine assure us, when we stand around an altar at Eucharist and pray the Lord’s Prayer, our sins are already forgiven.