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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Those words capture what faith ultimately invites us to.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!”