In a recent issue of AMERICA magazine, John Donahue makes this comment: “Virtually no Christian group has adopted Jesus’ teaching on love of enemy as the critical test of orthodoxy. Yet Jesus issues four ringing commands: love your enemies; do good to those who hate you; bless those who curse you; pray for those who mistreat you.”

That remark deserves to be highlighted, especially at a time when Christian circles are so painfully polarized and so many individuals and groups, from both the left and the right, are trying to impose on others their own view of what constitutes a true Christian.

For example, within conservative circles there is the perennial itch to draw very hard and clear lines in regards to what constitutes a genuine following of Christ. Some people are defined as real Christians and others are deemed to be in heresy, in error, or lacking in some essential of the faith. Some are seen as “in” and others are seen as “out”. But who’s “in” and who’s “out” is generally judged along these lines; intellectual adherence to a very clearly defined set of creedal statements (about Jesus and the church); acceptance of a number of moral precepts to do with church-going, prayer, and private morality; and, in the neo-conservatism of many of today’s young, a re-emphasis on canon law and rubrics as a test of one’s catholicity.

Liberal circles, despite their protests, are generally no less dogmatic. For them, the critical test of what defines who’s “in” and who’s “out” generally has to do with social justice. Those who try to live the gospel demand for justice are understood as true followers of Jesus. The rest are seen as caught up in a distracting piety. How they apply this as the litmus-test for Christian orthodoxy might look different from what the conservatives do, since liberals aren’t much into accusing others of heresy, but in terms of attitude, there is little to choose between the left and the right. Both are highly selective and exclusive as to whom they define as actually living the gospel. There is more commonality between liberals and conservatives than first meets the eye.

Sadly, what is too common to both circles is anger, accusation, a giving back in kind, and a not-so-subtle hatred of those who hold a different view. What one sees too little of (both in terms of actual practice as well as in terms of any kind of theoretical enshrinement of it as the guiding principle for Christian orthodoxy) is love of enemy, forgiveness, and compassion. One might also mention that very little humour emanates from either circle. What conservatives and liberals share today is certain grandiosity which makes them both believe that their causes are so cosmic and serious that all humour and playfulness are ex officio excluded. Thank God, both still drink wine; at least we haven’t abandoned Jesus on this!

All of this can be said without in any way denigrating the critical importance of the issues that liberals and conservatives put so much energy into defending. The right is right in defending the importance of proper dogma and private morality, just as the left is correct in singling out justice as a central piece in Jesus’ message. These things aren’t politically correct – they are correct. Jesus, as we know, makes both private morality and social justice non-negotiable. Neither may be down-played. Likewise, as history has painfully taught us, bad dogma invariably makes for bad religion and intellectual heresies all too often become viral heresies that infect real life in bad ways. There is need for some clear and defining lines.

But in the end, the acid-test for Christian orthodoxy is something else, something more demanding, and something that lies closer to the heart of what is most unique and novel within Jesus, namely, his call to love our enemies, to not give back in kind, to wish good and do good to those who are unkind to us.

That is also the message that comes through in Jesus’ death and resurrection. What is revealed in Jesus’ death and resurrection? A number of things: God can be trusted, God delivers on hope, what’s dead can be redeemed, dead bodies can come back from the grave (even physically), and God’s patience and love are infinite and outlast all else. All of that, the vindication of ancient hope, is revealed in Jesus’ dying and rising. But the resurrection also has a startling new message. Because God can be absolutely trusted to love and redeem us, we need to love and forgive our enemies. We may not give back in kind, but must love those who hate us, bless those who curse us, and do good to those who do bad to us.

To love one’s enemy is the acid-test of who’s a Christian and who isn’t. Everything else is an old tape, simply replaying itself over and over.

Ten years ago, I spent six months on sabbatical at Graduate Theological Union in Berkeley, California. During that time, I lived at our Oblate parish in inner-city Oakland. It was a contrast of worlds. Most days I would attend classes and seminars at the University and find myself very stimulated and enriched by what happened there (for GTU is a very good school). But each day too I would attend the noon-day mass in our parish where I would find myself surrounded by the poor, by devotions, by vigil lights, statues, holy water, rosaries being said during Eucharist, and piety of every sort. It was a contrast of worlds, both socially and ecclesially, but I felt pretty much at home in both worlds.

Indeed, theology and piety are different worlds. Yet we need both. Theology needs to protect us from piety, even as piety needs to protect us from theology. What is meant by this? Without constantly being corrected by good theology, piety invariably turns God into little more than chicken soup for the soul, liturgy into little more than private devotion, and spirituality into little more than private sentiment. Conversely, without the constant corrective of real piety, theology invariably puts us on a diet of antiseptics, provides no real vitamins for the soul, and makes the gospel inaccessible to the poor. A healthy spirituality needs both.

Without theology, piety invariably runs amuck, turns faith into a sentimentalism that can slide in any direction, and, soon enough, replaces God with other things. The last time the church didn’t balance off piety sufficiently with good theology, we ended up with the Reformation. Michael Buckley, whose study on modern atheism is of singular excellence, once made this comment: “The problem with atheism is that it is not a problem, It is a situation, an atmosphere, a confused history.” Modern atheism is, as he puts it, always a parasite that feeds off of bad religion. Without the constant corrective that good theology brings, we always slide into bad religion. Without good theology, piety cannot protect itself sufficiently from falling into literalism, imbalance, distortion, excess, knee-jerk sentimentalism, false devotions, or any combination of these.

But that is only half the story. There is an equal danger in reverse. Without piety, the danger is always that theology degenerates into an art form, aesthetically pleasing enough, but now something cold and distant. Daniel Berrigan, hardly an anti-intellectual, expresses this well (and in his usual style): “Any and all claims attached to academe, regarding superior moral discernment or development are universally false. … It is rare to find, in theology departments for example, that scripture or a given religious code, is considered binding, or a call to faith. Theology, like every other discipline, is often considered an object of competence, not of faith; dry grist for the mill. Religious traditions, which have historically nourished heros and saints, are treated as matters of `speciality,’ `expertise,’ Their outcome in a given instance is nothing like a unitive conscience, political sense or passion, wisdom. None of these. But a small-minded, cold-fish attitude toward the world.” Such is the danger of attempting salvation through theology alone.

It is very important therefore that we recognize the importance and legitimacy of both, theology and piety. They aren’t in opposition, but a healthy corrective of each other. They are different languages and different energies, one intellectual, one affective. We shouldn’t be surprised then that a certain tension perennially exists between the two. Each of them, like every great energy, is imperialistic, it wants all of us. But we need to resist the temptation to give ourselves wholly to one or the other.

You see the fruitfulness of properly carrying this tension between theology and piety in the lives and writings of many of our great recent theologians and spiritual writers: Karl Rahner, Karl Barth, Hans Urs von Balthasar, Henri Nouwen, Jean Vanier, Richard Rohr, Daniel Berrigan, and Dorothy Day, to name just a few. What you see in them is good theology and real piety, constantly balancing each other off.

Several years ago, I was on a board that was interviewing a young man, a Masters of Divinity student, who had applied for a scholarship. One of the panel asked him: “Where to you attend church?” He replied: “During the week, I attend mass at the College and on Sundays I go to the local parish with my wife and kids.” “And are those liturgies different?” asked the interviewer. “Oh, yes,” the young man replied, “The one at the college is quite liberal, very inclusive of women, very sensitive to not being patriarchal, and very sensitive to ecumenism and proper language. The one at the parish is more traditional and not very sensitive at all to many of the issues we talk about in our classes.” “And which do you like better?” baited the interviewer. “I like them both,” said the young man. “They’re both good, they feed different parts of me.”

There’s wisdom in his answer.

CARRYING ECCLESIAL DISPRIVILEGE

January 21, 2001

Circumstance and history ask each generation to carry a certain pain and to redeem it through suffering. We, of course, are no exception. Our generation, in the Western world, is being asked to carry a certain pain, the pain of ecclesial disprivilege. What is this pain?

Simply put, today in the Western world we live in a culture that is, at a point, anti-ecclesial, especially towards Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. In the name of open-mindedness, the moral high-ground, liberal sophistication, and political-correctness, one can manifest a fairly open bias and intolerance today against certain church groups.

What’s to be our reaction? Self-pity? Anger? Legal challenges through various anti-defamation organizations? Luxuriate in being victims? Give back in kind? What’s the adult Christian response?

Understanding. To an anti-ecclesial culture we owe an understanding that is wholly human, historical, and biblical. What’s implied in this?

First of all that we see what is happening within a proper human framework. What’s happening is not an archetypal struggle between good and evil, but a misunderstanding within a family. There is no enemy here, only our own brothers and sisters whom history and circumstance have, on this issue, put at odds with us. What’s important is that we don’t look to take offense, don’t take things personally, and look always at the larger perspective. The very liberalism that has spawned this kind of anti-ecclesial attitude is itself a product of Judeo-Christian principle and is itself very much at the base of the very structures in our culture that protect our religious freedoms. In the light of the bigger picture, a few liberal pockets of anti-ecclesial bias are nothing serious really, mosquito bites. We are not in any serious way being deprived of our rights. Western culture is not the enemy.

Next, we need to accept our time in history. A season of privilege is invariably followed by a season of disprivilege. The chickens always come home to roost! Given that for generations nothing we said could be challenged, it shouldn’t be surprising that there will be a generation or two when everything we say will be challenged. For too long the churches were given privilege. Now we pay the price. We see this particularly in anti-clericalism, in the projection of so much of the problem of paedophilia onto the churches and the clergy, and in our culture’s intellectual bias against Evangelical Protestantism. In many ways this as a necessary purification, a needed pruning of our arrogance and false use of authority. We are being healthily humbled. It’s something to learn from, especially when we see so many ecclesial pockets again itching for privilege, moral superiority, and the false use of authority.

Finally, and most important of all, we must bring some key biblical perspectives to bear on this. Two things might be helpful here: First, Scripture takes for granted that each generation of Christians, as part of its normal living out of the gospel, will have a special suffering, some persecution for the sake of Christ, which it is asked to carry with understanding, patience, and even joy. The early apostles, upon returning to their communities after being physically beaten up by those who opposed them, were filled with gratitude in the realization that they, persons of such minor importance and virtue, were privileged enough to suffer significant redemptive pain.

Moreover, they understood their pain and its seeming unfairness precisely as redemptive, as bearing fruit for the world through their proper suffering of it. They understood something that for the most part we no longer understand today, namely, what it means to carry pain redemptively and what it means to practice understanding. What does it mean to carry pain redemptively and to practice Christian understanding?

Christian understanding is not bias in reverse. Nor is it stoicism that simply makes do or a condescending, elitist attitude that radiates a moral superiority. Christian understanding, by definition, is transformative. It changes things by absorbing negative energy and not giving it back in kind. It takes in the tension, holds it, and carries it until it can transform it into its opposite, compassion. Transformative suffering works like a water filter. It takes the impurities out by absorbing and transforming them. Transformative understanding takes in bias, bitterness, curses, and offense and gives back understanding, graciousness, blessing, and forgiveness. We see this in Jesus. He never played the victim and he refused utterly to create victims. He never gave back in kind, but took in the hurt of those around him, absorbed it, and transformed it. For him, no other human being was an enemy, there were no sides, them against us, only fellow human beings, who, like himself, were also victims, wounded, sincere, searching, loving when they could, tragically distanced from so much of what they would want to embrace, and yet carrying on as best they could in the light that had been given them.

This is the kind of understanding we owe our culture.

Carlo Carretto, one of the leading spiritual writers of the past half-century, lived for more than a dozen years as a hermit in the Sahara desert. Alone, with only the Blessed Sacrament for company, milking a goat for his food, and translating the bible into the local Bedouin language, he prayed for long hours by himself. Returning to Italy one day to visit his mother, he came to a startling realization: His mother, who for more than thirty years of her life had been so busy raising a family that she scarcely ever had a private minute for herself, was more contemplative than he was.

Carretto, though, was careful to draw the right lesson from this. What this taught was not that there was anything wrong with what he had been doing in living as a hermit. The lesson was rather that there was something wonderfully right about what his mother had been doing all these years as she lived the interrupted life amidst the noise and incessant demands of small children. He had been in a monastery, but so had she.

What is a monastery? A monastery is not so much a place set apart for monks and nuns as it is a place set apart (period). It is also a place to learn the value of powerlessness and a place to learn that time is not ours, but God’s.

Our home and our duties can, just like a monastery, teach us those things. John of the Cross once described the inner essence of monasticism in these words: “But they, O my God and my life, will see and experience your mild touch, who withdraw from the world and become mild, bringing the mild into harmony with the mild, thus enabling themselves to experience and enjoy you.” What John suggests here is that two elements make for a monastery: withdrawal from the world and bringing oneself into harmony with the mild.

Although he was speaking about the vocation of monastic monks and nuns, who physically withdraw from the world, the principle is equally valid for those of us who cannot go off to monasteries and become monks and nuns. Certain vocations offer the same kind of opportunity for contemplation. They too provide a desert for reflection.

For example, the mother who stays home with small children experiences a very real withdrawal from the world. Her existence is definitely monastic. Her tasks and preoccupations remove her from the centres of power and social importance. And she feels it. Moreover her sustained contact with young children (the mildest of the mild) gives her a privileged opportunity to be in harmony with the mild, that is, to attune herself to the powerlessness rather than to the powerful.

Moreover, the demands of young children also provide her with what St. Bernard, one of the great architects of monasticism, called the “monastic bell”. All monasteries have a bell. Bernard, in writing his rules for monasticism, told his monks that whenever the monastic bell rang, they were to drop whatever they were doing and go immediately to the particular activity (prayer, meals, work, study, sleep) to which the bell was summoning them. He was adamant that they respond immediately, stating that if they were writing a letter they were to stop in mid-sentence when the bell rang. The idea in his mind was that when the bell called, it called you to the next task and you were to respond immediately, not because you want to, but because it’s time for that task and time isn’t your time, it’s God’s time. For him, the monastic bell was intended as a discipline to stretch the heart by always taking you beyond your own agenda to God’s agenda.

Hence, a mother raising children, perhaps in a more privileged way even than a professional contemplative, is forced, almost against her will, to constantly stretch her heart. For years, while raising children, her time is never her own, her own needs have to be kept in second place, and every time she turns around a hand is reaching out and demanding something. She hears the monastic bell many times during the day and she has to drop things in mid-sentence and respond, not because she wants to, but because it’s time for that activity and time isn’t her time, but God’s time. The rest of us experience the monastic bell each morning when our alarm clock rings and we get out of bed and ready ourselves for the day, not because we want to, but because it’s time.

The principles of monasticism are time-tested, saint-sanctioned, and altogether-trustworthy. But there are different kinds of monasteries, different ways of putting ourselves into harmony with the mild, and different kinds of monastic bells. Response to duty can monastic prayer, a needy hand can be a monastic bell, and working without status and power can constitute a withdrawal into a monastery where God can meet us. The domestic can be the monastic.

“The only hope, or else despair
Lies in the choice of pyre or pyre –
To be redeemed from fire by fire.
Who then devised the torment? Love.
Love is the unfamiliar name
Behind the hands that wove
The intolerable shirt of flame.
Which human power cannot remove.
We only live, only suspire
Consumed by either fire or fire.”

T.S. Eliot, whose genius for being succinct remains unrivalled, wrote those remarkable words in his poem, The Four Quartets. Brief though they are, they capture an entire anthropology, a spirituality of longing, and a theology of Advent.

What do they say in terms of anthropology? They tell us that we are born congenitally dis-eased, incurably erotic, restless, consumed by a thirst that cannot be quenched and a fire that will not be stilled. To be human is to be on fire for a consummation, a love, a restfulness, an embrace, and a symphony that, in this life, forever escapes us. In every cell of our bodies and in the very DNA of our souls we ache for someone or something that we have not yet known, ache in a way that leaves us too dissatisfied and restless to live fully inside our own skins. Our lives always seem too small for us. Moreover, and this is the key, this is God’s doing. God is the hand behind this “intolerable shirt of flame”.

Hence the fire inside us is not necessarily a sign that we are doing anything wrong, that we have missed the boat somewhere, are sinful, are over-sexed, or are too-greedy for our own good. What Eliot suggests is that this is the normal order of things, God’s doing. The fire inside us comes from the way God made us, namely, to crave the infinite and to be dissatisfied with everything else until that wide embrace is consummated. Thus, the fire inside us will never be extinguished simply by attaining the right partner, the right job, the right city, the right set of friends, and the right recognition. We will always be on fire.

The choice, as Eliot puts it, is not between being restless or being restful, between being tense of heart or calm of soul. No. The choice is between two kinds of fire, two kinds of restlessness, two kinds of inner thirsts – “pyre or pyre”: With what kind of fire do we want our hearts to burn? We are destined to be consumed by one kind of restlessness or another, but the flames are very different. Do we want God’s flames or those of our own choosing?

Eliot suggests that we choose God’s fire because the solution to our deep-seated restlessness will not be found in some long sought-after experience which will finally soothe the last ache within us (“At last, the thing that has forever eluded me!”). Rather the solution lies in letting our thirsts be consumed by another kind of restlessness, a higher fire, a deeper eros, God’s eros. What this means is that the answer to our longing is to extend our longing, the answer to our eros is to deepen our eros, and the answer to our aching is to widen our aching. We can stew in our own fires or we can use those fires to enter the fire of God. How so?

The German poet, Goethe, in a piece entitled, The Holy Longing, suggests a couple of wonderful metaphors that can be helpful here. He speaks of something he calls “holy longing” and goes on to define it as “a desire for higher love-making”, a longing to embrace the world and make love to it as God does this. Such a desire, if correctly fostered, he assures us, will wreak a painful but wonderful spiritual havoc (he calls it “magic”) within us; it will is make us “insane for the light”, wild with the desire to transmute ourselves, grow wings like the butterfly, and fly off, not to escape the world, but to die to all the things that prevent us from, here and now, already making love to the whole world. Longing is meant to be a transforming mysticism within our lives. It creates the energy for metamorphosis.

John of the Cross identified this with “putting on the motivation of Christ.” For him, the desire for higher love-making was the spirit that burned inside of Jesus, the energy that motivated him and consumed, as by fire, all the more limited desires within him. He was insane for the light, on fire with God’s eros, willing to die so as to be transformed and so offer the world the widest love of all, God’s embrace. In Jesus, we see what it means to be redeemed from fire by fire.

Advent celebrates human longing. It asks us not to deny our longings but to enter them, deepen them, and widen them until we become insane enough for the light so that, like the butterfly, we open ourselves to undergo a metamorphosis.

Several years ago, just before Christmas, a young mother shared with me how, for her, one of the great joys of motherhood was that she got to see Christmas again through the eyes of her three young children: “It brings back the simple joys I no longer have as an adult, but that I once had as a child. It’s so beautiful to see and experience Christmas through the eyes, the anticipation, the excitement, and the innocence of my own children. It’s like being a child again myself.”

She found the joy of Christmas again, vicariously, through the happiness of her children. Most of us are not so lucky. As we get older, lose our naivete, fill with the angers of mid-life and old age, experience failure, and need more realistically to face death, we become daily more hardened and cynical. When this happens, and it happens to us all as adults, it’s not so easy to experience the simple joy of Christmas. Too much inside of us, and around us, protests. It’s not easy to be an adult and still have the capacity for simple joy.

So what do we do about Christmas? This feast is, after all, about simple joy, about child-likeness, about a baby, despite our sophisticated, adult attempts to somehow connect it and its message to the rawer, more adult, questions of life – injustice, war, wound, unhappiness, anger, alienation, divorce, brokenness, death. Christmas is not Good Friday. That’s another feast, a day with a different meaning. On Good Friday all of us wounded, unhappy adults get our chance to luxuriate somewhat in the brokenness of it all. But that’s not what Christmas is about and we should not try to turn Christmas into Good Friday.

Christmas is not about death, it’s about birth and birth needs to be celebrated in a manner quite other than death. Our children know this. We need, at Christmas, to look into their eyes to see what we should be doing. At Christmas trust the child more than the theologian (especially the theologian on a crusade to deconstruct the simplicity of Christmas and turn this feast into a statement of anger and unrest). Listen to that particular theologian on another day. I suggest that he or she get the podium during Lent. But keep him or her silent at Christmas. Let the children speak then. Better yet, let them scream and shriek with joy as they open gifts and plunge headlong into the Christmas pudding. That is the theological statement that more adequately expresses the meaning of Christmas.

And we, the adults, need to let the joy of our own children be a prophetic statement. Their naive, unbridled joy can be the voice that, as Sirach says, turns the hearts of parents towards their children, not to mention towards what’s still best inside of themselves. If we want to let the feast of Christmas prophetically unsettle us, I suggest we might best do that by first looking at the joy of the very young and then looking into a mirror to see how un-childlike and unhappy we have become.

One of our adult slogans about Christmas says: May the peace of Christ disturb you! However, at Christmas time, where Christ should disturb us most is precisely in our itch to disturb everybody else. Christmas offers us the rare permission to be happy. We should take it.

Karl Rahner (and I do appreciate the irony of quoting a theologian at this point!) once put it this way: In Christmas, God says to the world: “I am there. I am with you. I am your life. I am the gloom of your daily routine. Why will you not bear it? I weep your tears – pour out yours to me, my child. I am your joy. Do not be afraid to be happy, for ever since I wept, joy is the standard of living that is really more suitable than the anxiety and grief of those who think they have no hope. … This reality – the incomprehensible wonder of my Almighty Love – I have sheltered safely in the cold stable of your world. I am there. I no longer go away from this world, even if you do not see me now. I am there. It is Christmas. Light the candles. They have more right to exist than all the darkness. It is Christmas. Christmas that lasts forever.”

We should not be afraid to be happy, to light the candles. They have more right to exist than the darkness. What our children feel at Christmas, however dark and inchoate that knowledge may be in them, is one of the deepest truths of all, God has given us permission to be happy. But now the choice is ours, as W.H. Auden says: It lies within our power of choosing to conceive the child who chooses us. It’s good be have been given permission to be happy.

A couple of years ago, Robert Waller published a book that became a runaway bestseller and an immensely popular movie. Entitled, The Bridges of Madison County, it stirred the romantic imagination in a way that few other stories have in recent times, especially as it was played out in its film version by Clint Eastwood and Meryl Streep. The story runs this way:

A photographer for National Geographic magazine is sent out to photograph a series of old bridges in Madison county. Lost, he stops at a farmhouse to ask for directions. As chance would have it, the man of the house has just left for a cattle show. His wife is home alone and she and the photographer instantly sense a deep connection and fall violently in love. Karma, soulmates, mysticism, whatever, they experience a rare and powerful affinity. Within hours they are in bed with each other, triggering a love-affair that leaves them both sacramentally scarred for the rest of their lives.

What the viewer of the movie or reader of this book is asked to believe is that something truly sublime has taken place, a masterpiece of love has been painted, and a noble thing worth more than life itself has just occurred. But can this be so? Can anyone paint a masterpiece in a couple of hours? Can a doctoral thesis be completed in two hours? Can sex with someone you met just two hours before be sublime?

To answer those questions, I suggest you watch another film which, ironically, was playing in theatres at nearly the same time. It’s a version of Jane Austin’s, Sense and Sensibility, and tells the story of a young woman who has to carry a very painful tension (one that includes the same feelings found in Bridges of Madison County) for a long time. But unlike the characters in Bridges of Madison County, she doesn’t move quickly to resolve it. Nobody is in bed with each other within a couple of hours. She carries the tension for a long time, years, and then finally when it is resolved there is true sublimity. Why? Because something can only be sublime if first there has been some sublimation (and for more than two hours!)

In essence, this expresses the meaning of Advent: For something to be sublime there must first be sublimation; fasting is the necessary prelude to feasting; greatness of soul is contingent on first nobly carrying tension; great joy is not experienced if one is not first properly prepared; and what’s truly divine can only appear after a certain kind of gestation. Advent is about proper waiting.

It should therefore not to be confused with lent. The crimson-purple of advent is not the black-purple of lent. The former symbolizes yearning and longing, the latter repentance. The spirituality of advent is not about repentance, but about carrying tension without prematurely resolving it so that what’s born in us and in our world does not short-circuit the fullness that comes from respecting love’s rhythms.

What is the connection here? How does carrying tension help lead to the sublime? It does it by helping to produce the heat required for generativity. An image might be helpful here. John of the Cross, in his book, THE LIVING FLAME OF LOVE, compares our pre-advent selves to green logs that have been thrown into a fire, the fire of love. Green logs, as we know, do not immediately burst into flame. Rather, being young and full of moisture, they sizzle for a long time before they reach kindling temperature and can take into themselves the fire that is around them so as to participate in it. So too the rhythm of love: Only the really mature can truly burst into flame within community. The rest of us are still too self-contained, too green, too selfish, too damp. We don’t burst into flame when love surrounds us. Rather our dampness helps extinguish the communal flame.

What helps change this is precisely the tension in our lives. In carrying properly our unfulfilled desires we sizzle and slowly let go of the dampness of selfishness. In carrying tension we come to kindling temperature and are made ready for love. Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as a scientist, noticed that sometimes when you put two chemicals into a test-tube they do not automatically unite. They only merge at a higher temperature. They must first be heated to bring about unity. There’s an entire anthropology and psychology of love in that image. In order to love we must first be brought to a higher psychic temperature. What brings us there? Sizzling in tension, not resolving things prematurely, not sleeping with the bride before the wedding, not trying to have the complete symphony within two hours.

The sublime has to be waited for. Only when there is first enough heat will there be unity. To give birth to what’s divine requires the slow patience of gestation. In short-hand, that’s the algebra of Advent.

My mother and father had a strong faith. They prayed every day and had us, as a family, pray with them. One of the prayers they said daily was the SALVE REGINA, an old, classic prayer which asks Mary to intercede for us. Many of us, I suspect, are familiar with it. At one point it describes our state in this life as “mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Is this a healthy way to describe ourselves? They never gave it a thought. For them, it made eminent sense to pray like that.

For many of us today, it would seem, it doesn’t make sense any more. More and more, I see people reacting negatively to this phrase (and others like it found in old prayers and hymns). To describe ourselves as “mourning and weeping in a valley of tears” seems for many of us to be morbid, bad theology, an affront to the spirit of wholeness, celebration, and joy that should permeate our lives. I know more than a few persons who in the name of good health, sound theology, and holistic spirituality refuse to pray the SALVE REGINA because of that single line. Is this right or wrong?

These things are not so much right or wrong as they are either beneficial or detrimental to our wellbeing. What’s the benefit or harm in conceiving of ourselves as living an a valley of tears?

My own feeling is that, properly understood, this can be very healthy. There can be a lot of value (ironically, holistic value) in praying in exactly this way. What a prayer like this does is give us permission to not feel abnormal precisely when we aren’t bubbling with happiness. What it tells us is that it’s okay to have a bad day, a lonely season, a life that somehow never fully gets free of tension and restlessness. It tells us not to be too hard on ourselves when we are out of sorts since this is in fact often the normal course of things. More importantly, it gives us permission to not have to find the full symphony in this life. And the consequence of accepting this is that we can then stop putting unfair pressure on our spouses, families, friends, vacations, and jobs to give us something that they can’t give, namely, happiness without a shadow, the full symphony. To accept that we live in an habitual state of incompleteness is to not let an unrealistic ideal crucify what’s good in our lives.

Henri Nouwen would agree. He puts it this way: Our life is a short time in expectation, a time in which sadness and joy kiss each other at every moment. There is a quality of sadness that pervades all the moments of our life. It seems that there is no such thing as a clear-cut pure joy, but that even in the most happy moments of our existence we sense a tinge of sadness. In every satisfaction, there is an awareness of limitations. In every success, there is the fear of jealousy. Behind every smile, there is a tear. In every friendship, distance. And in all forms of light, there is the knowledge of surrounding darkness. … When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he will have to leave you again. When you are moved by the quiet vastness of a sun-coloured ocean, you miss the friend who cannot see the same.

Karl Rahner, in his unique Germanic phraseology, has his own take on this. Rahner: In the torrent of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.

My parents understood that and for them this was expressed precisely in lines like: “We pray, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Praying like this gave them permission to accept the inevitable limitations that life imposes. It gave them permission too to not have to demand from this life something it can never give, clear-cut pure joy. Ironically, by saying the truth out loud (“There’s no finished symphony to be had in this life!”) they freed themselves to enjoy the very real joys that their life did offer them. They didn’t always have to be restless for more. They didn’t have to feel bad about feeling bad, about missing out on so much. They didn’t have to look at each other in disappointment because they couldn’t be God for each other. They didn’t have to do violence to life because it couldn’t give them everything they wanted. They accepted the unfinished symphony of their lives – and of all lives – and, because of that, were able to enjoy the beauty and joy that was there. They were equipped, in ways that we aren’t, to handle frustration.

For all of our emphasis on health, holism, and positive theology, and for all of our attempts to exorcize everything that suggests limits, how equipped are we really to deal with life’s inevitable frustrations?