The McVeigh Execution

May 6, 2001

In his masterful book, Violence Unveiled, Gil Bailie picks up on a passage from the diaries of Captain Cooke. Cooke had landed on one of the Polynesian Islands and befriended the chief there. One day the chief took him to a ceremony where a man was killed on an altar as a sacrifice to the gods. Afterwards he asked Cooke what he thought. Cooke was horrified. He said to the chief: “This is barbarian! In a civilized country, we’d hang you for doing this!” The irony shouldn’t be missed.

On May 16th, Timothy McVeigh, the infamous Oklahoma City bomber whose deadly terrorist blast killed 167 people is scheduled to be executed. From all that is reported it seems too that he remains unrepentant, arrogant, publicity-driven, and living within the delusion that his terrible act was a thing of courage and high morality. It’s hard, emotionally, to be against this execution.

If we were truly honest, I suspect, most of us would have to confess that we want him to die. The heart, as Pascal said, has its reasons: “He has it coming!” “He’s an arrogant brute!” Something there is in us that wants to see arrogance snapped at its neck. Who among us doesn’t taste a delicious satisfaction when, at the end of a book or movie, the good folks finally rise and kill the bad?

These feelings seem particularly strong in this case. Timothy McVeigh, at least to this point, isn’t exactly Karla Tucker, the woman executed in Texas a couple of years ago who went to her death repentant, apologizing, asking God to use her death to bring healing to her victim’s loved ones. Sincere repentance can help to undercut that righteous fever that so spontaneously grips us, making us long for a morally superior violence to come and eradicate the bad.

It has, it would seem, ever been thus. When the prophet Isaiah spoke about what would happen when God finally came to save us, he announced not just that the hungry would be fed, that the brokenhearted would be consoled, and that those who are oppressed would be set free, but he announced too that part of the joy would be “a day of vindication”, where we would get to watch the bad get their just desserts. Heaven, in this view, includes the making even of old scores (Isaiah 61, 1-3) However, in Luke’s gospel, when Jesus is in the synagogue in Nazareth and is asked to read this text, he omits the part about “vindication”. The heaven he proclaims does not include, as part of its joy, the emotional pleasure of watching the suffering of those who made us suffer. (Luke 4, 16-19)

Given all of this, what might be our attitude towards the execution of Timothy McVeigh?

This execution is wrong, not because it might serve to make Timothy McVeigh a martyr in his own eyes, but because all killing is wrong, pure and simple. As Matthew Ponselet, the condemned man in Dead Man Walking, puts it in his final words: “Killing is wrong; and it doesn’t matter whether I do it or you do it!”

Killing begets more killing and violence begets more violence, always. There’s a circle of death, just as there’s a circle of life. Capital punishment is part of the circle of death. There is no morally superior violence. Capital punishment abdicates its moral ground precisely because it mimics, however unconsciously, the very violence it’s sincerely trying to subdue. Killing is killing, no matter who does it. Jesus wouldn’t pull the switch on a death-machine and we shouldn’t pull it in his name.

So what should we do on May 16th? We might pray – for Timothy McVeigh and for his victims and their families. Moreover, if we really want to “light a candle”, we might write a letter to McVeigh’s family, telling them that we feel for them, that we know how complex life can be, and that we don’t blame them for what happened. But I suggest another thing too: Timothy McVeigh pulled a switch that killed 167 people because he was morally incensed, outraged, convinced that the government of the USA had committed an atrocity against innocent people and he wanted to see “a day of the Lord”, “a day of vengeance”. He tried to use a violence he understood as being morally superior to make a statement. His execution, if there’s to be any good in it at all, can be the occasion for us to get in touch with precisely those same misguided, morally-fevered feelings inside us. Our feelings, like his, are easily murderous, and murderous in the name of all that’s good. In executing him we are, however much we don’t want to admit, somehow mimicking him, helping perpetuate the circle of death.

Yes our spontaneous feelings favour this execution and these feelings are understandable, justifiable, and morally-grounded, but, but … they give us a certain pleasure in another man’s death and if we feel good because someone else is dying, what ultimately is this saying about us?

Praying Lauds and Vespers

April 22, 2001

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.

Living Beyond our Crucifixions

April 15, 2001

Every dream eventually gets crucified. How? By time, circumstance, jealousy, and that curious, perverse dictate, somehow innate within the order of things, that insures that there is always someone or something that cannot leave well enough alone, but, for reasons of its own, must hunt down and strike what is good. The good will always be envied, hated, pursued, smudged, killed. That’s true even of dreams. Something there is that needs a crucifixion. Every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus. There’s no smooth ride for what’s whole, good, true, or beautiful.

But that’s only half the equation, the bad half. What’s also true, what the resurrection teaches, is that, while nothing that is of God can avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ ever stays in the tomb for long either. God always rolls back the stone and, soon enough, new life bursts forth and we see why that original life had to be crucified. (“Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should so have to suffer and die?”) Resurrection follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again.

But where do we meet the resurrection? Where does the resurrected Christ meet us?

Scripture is subtle, but clear. Where can we expect to meet the resurrected Christ after a crucifixion? The gospel tell us that, on the morning of the resurrection, the women-followers of Jesus, the midwives of hope, set out for the tomb of Jesus, carrying spices, intending to anoint and embalm a dead body. Well-intentioned, but misguided, what they find is not a dead body, but by an empty tomb and an angel challenging them with these words: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Go instead into Galilee and you will find him there!”

Go instead into Galilee. What a curious expression! What is Galilee? Why go back? In the post-resurrection accounts in the gospels, Galilee is not simply a physical geography. It is, first of all, a place in the heart. Galilee is the dream, the road of discipleship that they had once walked with Jesus, and that place and time when their hearts had most burned with hope and enthusiasm. And now, just when they feel that this all is dead, that their faith is only fantasy, they are told to go back to the place where it all began: “Go back to Galilee. He will meet you there!”

And they do go back, to Galilee, to that special place in their hearts, to the dream, to their discipleship. Sure enough, Jesus appears to them there. He doesn’t appear exactly as they remember him, nor as often as they would like him to, but he does appear as more than a ghost or a mere idea. The Christ that appears to them after the resurrection no longer fits their original expectation, but he is physical enough to eat fish in the presence, real enough to be touched as a human being, and powerful enough to change their lives forever.

Ultimately that is what the resurrection challenges us to do, to go back to Galilee, to return to the dream, hope, and discipleship that had once inflamed us but that now is crucified.

This too is what it means to “be on the road to Emmaus”. In Luke’s gospel, we are told that on the day of the resurrection, two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, their faces downcast. That single line contains an entire spirituality: For Luke, Jerusalem, like Galilee for the other gospel writers, means the dream, the hope, the kingdom, the centre from which all is to begin and where ultimately all is to culminate. And the disciples are “walking away” from this, away from the dream, towards Emmaus. Emmaus was a Roman Spa – a Las Vegas and Monte Carlo of human consolation. Their dream has been crucified and the disciples, discouraged and hope-emptied, are walking away from it, towards human consolation, muttering: “But we had hoped!” They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of the crucifixion, and turns them back towards Jerusalem.

One of the essential messages of Easter is this: Whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Galilee and Jerusalem, that is, to the dream, to the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before everything went wrong. The temptation of course, whenever we feel this way, whenever the kingdom doesn’t seen to work, is to abandon discipleship for human consolation, to set out instead for Emmaus, for the consolation of Las Vegas and Monte Carlo.

But, as we already know, we never quite get to Emmaus. In one guise or another, Christ always meets us on the road, burns holes in our hearts, explains the latest crucifixion to us, and sends us back – to Galilee and to our abandoned discipleship. Once there, it all makes sense again.

Eucharist as Vigil

April 8, 2001

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.

The Eucharist as Washing Each Other’s Feet

April 1, 2001

In his rather provocative, though always interesting, autobiography, Angela’s Ashes, Frank McCourt tells of a confession he once made as a young boy in Limerick, Ireland. His mother had just given birth and their in-laws from the North had sent five pounds to buy milk for the new baby. But his father, an alcoholic, had taken the money and was drinking it up in the pubs. His mother had sent him, a young boy, to find his dad and bring him home. But young Frankie can’t find his father. What he finds instead is a drunken sailor in a pub, asleep, with a largely untouched plate of fish and chips in front of him.

Ravenously hungry, he takes the fish and chips outside and eats them. Then, feeling guilty for stealing, he decides he had better go to confession. It’s Saturday afternoon and he goes to the Dominican church and confesses to a priest that he stole fish and chips from a drunken man. The priest asks him why he did this and Frankie answers that he was hungry, that there is not a scrap of food in their house, and that his mother is raging by the fire because his father is drinking away the money meant to buy milk for the new baby. The priest hearing all this suddenly becomes quiet. Instead of scolding Frankie and giving him a penance, he does something else [McCourt’s words]:

“I wonder if the priest is asleep because he’s very quiet til he says, My child, I sit here, I hear the sins of the poor, I assign the penance. I bestow the absolution. I should be on my knees washing their feet. … Go. Pray for me. He blesses me in Latin, talks to himself in English and I wonder what I did to him.”

These words wonderfully describe one of the central meanings of the Eucharist. We should be on our knees washing each others’ feet because that is precisely what Jesus did at the first Eucharist and he did it to teach us that the Eucharist is not a private act of devotion, meant to square our debts with God, but a call to and a grace for service. The Eucharist is meant to send us out into the world ready to give expression to Christ’s hospitality, humility, and self-effacement.

Where do we get such a notion? It lies at very the heart of the Eucharist itself. Jesus tells us this when he gives us the Eucharist, with the words: “Receive, give thanks, break, and share.” The Eucharist invites us to receive nourishment from God, fill with gratitude, and, on the basis of that, to break open our lives and serve the poor in hospitality, humility, and self-donation.

This is everywhere evident in the Gospels, though John’s Gospel puts it the most clearly. Where the other gospels have Jesus speaking the words of institution at the last supper (“This is my body. This is my blood. Do this in memory of me.”) John has Jesus washing the disciples feet. But, for John, this gesture replaces the words of institution. It specifies what the Eucharist is in fact meant to do, namely, to lead us out of church and into the humble service of others.

An old church hymn, often used to send people forth from church, puts it well:

Called from worship into service
Forth in His great name we go
To the child, the youth, the aged
Love in living deeds to show.

This wonderfully expresses what the Eucharist is meant to do. It is a call to move from worship to service, to take the nourishment, the embrace, the kiss, we have just received from God and the community and translate it immediately and directly into loving service of others. To take the Eucharist seriously is to begin to wash the feet of others, especially the feet of the poor. The Eucharist is both an invitation which invites us and a grace which empowers us to service. And what it invites us to do is to replace distrust with hospitality, pride with humility, and self-interest with self-effacement so as to reverse the world’s order of things – wherein the rich get served by the poor and where the first priority is always to keep one’s pride intact and one’s self-interest protected. The Eucharist invites us to step down from pride, away from self-interest, to turn the mantel of privilege into the apron of service, so as to help reverse the world’s order of things wherein pride, status, and self-interest are forever the straws that stir the drink.

It is no accident that, among all the potential scripture texts it might have picked for liturgy on Holy Thursday, the feast that marks the institution of the Eucharist, the church has chosen to use John’s account of Jesus washing the feet of disciples. A splendid choice. Indeed, nothing better expresses the meaning of the Eucharist than does that gesture.

The Eucharist as Reconciliation

March 25, 2001

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.

The Eucharist as Sacrifice

March 18, 2001

Once upon a time there was a Rabbi. Whenever he wanted God’s presence, he went to a special place in the woods, lit a fire, said some prayers, and did a dance. Then God would appear to him. When he died, his disciple did the same. If he wanted God’s presence, he went to the same spot in the woods, lit the fire, and said the same prayers, but nobody had taught him the dance. It still worked. God appeared. When he died, his disciple carried on the tradition. If he wanted God’s presence, he went to the same spot in the woods and lit the fire, but he didn’t know the prayers, nor the dance, but it still worked. God came. Then he died. He also had a disciple. Whenever he wanted God’s presence, he too went to the same place in the woods, but nobody had taught him how to light the fire or say the prayers or do the dance, but it still worked, God appeared.

In the end, he died, but he too had a pupil. One day this pupil wanted God’s presence. So he searched for the place in the woods, but couldn’t find it. And he didn’t know how to light the fire or say the prayers or do the dance. All he knew was how to tell the story. But it worked. He discovered that whenever he told the story of how the others had found God, God would appear.

In essence, this story explains how sacred ritual, liturgy, works. Judaism calls this “making zikkaron”. Christians call it “making memorial”. The idea is that a past event can be remembered, ritually recalled, in such a way that it becomes present again and can be participated in. How is this possible? We have no models in physics, metaphysics, or psychology by which to explain this. Like all ritual, it is beyond simple phenomenology. Ritual is best understood through metaphor, through story, as with the tale just told. God appears whenever certain stories get told.

This idea of making memorial can be helpful in understanding a very important aspect of the Eucharist, namely, the Eucharist as sacrifice. Among other things, the Eucharist is a memorial, a ritual re-enactment of Christ’s sacrifice of himself for us. Among all the dimensions of the Eucharist, this one, sacrifice, is perhaps the least understood. How is the Eucharist a sacrifice?

A sacrifice is any act of selflessness, of self-denial, which helps someone else. For example, the mother who freely gives up her own dreams of achievement so that her children might have her needed presence during their critical, nascent years is making a sacrifice for her children. They will mature more fully and healthily because of it. As Christians, we believe that Jesus, not unlike a loving mother, sacrificed his life for us, particularly in the way he gave himself for us in his death. Indeed we believe that we are “saved” by his death, by his sacrifice on Good Friday. But how? How can one person’s death help someone else, centuries later?

Through the Eucharist. The Eucharist, among other things, is a memorial of Jesus’ sacrifice for us, of his great act of “being broken”, of giving himself over in love. Properly understood, the Eucharist, as a ritual, gives us another kind of “real presence”. It makes present for us the reality of Christ’s dying as well as God’s response to that, the resurrection, and invites us to participate in that event. What the Eucharist makes present is not an iconic Christ to be adored or even consumed, but the reality of Christ’s dying nd rising as an event to be participated in. But how can we participate in an event now long past in history?

Through memorial, through “making zikkaron”. When we ritually tell the story of Jesus’ sacrifice (in the Eucharistic prayer, the very heart of liturgy) we experience the “real presence” of the event of Christ’s dying and rising. Moreover, that reality is given to us so that we might participate in it. How? We participate in Jesus’ sacrifice for us when we, like him, let ourselves be broken down, when we, like him, become selfless. The Eucharist, as sacrifice, invites us to become like the kernels of wheat that make up the bread and the clusters of grapes that make up the wine, broken down and crushed so that we can become part of communal loaf and single cup.

Occasionally when St. Augustine was giving the Eucharist to a communicant, instead of saying, “The body of Christ”, he would say: “Receive what you are.” That puts things correctly. What is supposed to happen at the Eucharist is that we, the congregation, by sacrificing the things that divide us, should become the body and blood of Christ. More so than the bread and wine, we, the people, are meant to be changed, to be transubstantiated.

The Eucharist, as sacrifice, asks us to become the bread of brokenness and the chalice of vulnerability.

Eucharist as New Manna

March 11, 2001

A friend of mine, an alcoholic in recovery, likes to explain the dynamics of an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting this way: “It’s funny, the meetings are always the same, the exact same things get said over and over again. Everything is totally predictable; everyone, except those who are there for the first time, know already what will be said. And we’re not there to show our best sides to each other. I don’t go to an Alcoholics Anonymous meetings to share my talents or to be a nice guy. No. I go because, if I don’t, I know, and know for sure, that I will start drinking again and eventually destroy myself. It’s that simple. I go there to stay alive!”

In a curious, but accurate way, that can also be a description of the Eucharist, at least of one important aspect of it. Among other reasons, we go to the Eucharist to stay alive. The Eucharist is meant to be God’s regular nourishment for us, daily manna to keep us alive within the desert of our lives.

We get this theology from John’s gospel. The gospels, as we know, do not have just one theology of the Eucharist. The various communities in the early church each emphasized different things about the Eucharist. John, unlike the other evangelists, does not set the Eucharist so saliently into the context of the last supper. He does set it there, but places it in another context as well.

In John’s gospel, where the other gospels have the institution of the Eucharist at the last supper, he has Jesus washing the disciples’ feet. Various scholars, Raymond Brown among them, suggest that John does this because, by the time his gospel was written, perhaps sixty to seventy years after Jesus died, Christians, not unlike today, were already arguing with each other about the Eucharist: How often should it be celebrated? Who should preside? What is its precise meaning? John, in placing the washing of the feet where the other evangelists put the words of institution, is reminding us that washing each other’s feet, service to and humility before each other, is what the Eucharist is really all about. But John also emphasizes another aspect of Eucharist.

While linking the Eucharist to the last supper and highlighting that it means service and humility, John also places it into Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life. In Chapter six of his gospel, Jesus says: “Unless you eat the bread of life, you will not have life within you.” In speaking of the bread of life, he links it to the manna, the daily feeding that Israel received from God during her years in the desert. For all those years, manna was Israel’s daily food and, often times, her only food. It had too a curious quality. When she ate it alongside other foods she had procured for herself or food she had brought out of Egypt, it tasted bitter, but if she took manna as her only food it tasted sweet. In either case, it was her daily sustenance.

In John’s gospel, Jesus tells us that the Eucharist is the new manna, the new bread from heaven, the new way that God gives us daily sustenance. The Roman Catholic practice of daily Eucharist takes its root here. That is why too, in Roman Catholic spirituality, unlike much of Protestantism, the Eucharist has not been called “the Lord’s Supper”, since it was understood not as an extraordinary ritual to commemorate the last supper, but as a ordinary, ideally daily, ritual to give us sustenance from God.

How does the Eucharist give us daily sustenance? As we saw in the earlier columns in this series, the Eucharist nurtures us by giving us God’s physical embrace (“the real presence”) and, like a Quaker-silence, it gives us a oneness with each other that we cannot give to ourselves. However it nurtures us in yet a further way. It provides us with a life-sustaining ritual, a regular meeting around the word and person of Christ that can become the daily bread of our lives and our communities. How?

Monks have secrets worth knowing. One of these is that a community sustains itself not primarily through novelty, titillation, and high emotion but through rhythm and routine, namely, through simple, predictable, ritual processes. For example, a wise family will say to itself: “We will all be home at regular times, we will all eat together twice a day, and we will all be together in the living room at least once a day – even if it isn’t exciting, even if real feelings aren’t shared, even if some are bored, and even if some are protesting that this isn’t worthwhile. We will do this because, if we don’t, we will soon fall apart as a family. To stay together we need regular, straight-forward, predictable, daily rituals. We need the manna of daily presence to each other. Otherwise we’ll die.”

In the Eucharist, God sustains us in just this way.

The Eucharist as Molding us into Community

March 4, 2001

There is a story told about a Jewish farmer who, because he was carelessness, had to spend a Sabbath day in his field. Preoccupied with his work, he had let the sun go down without going home. Now, being a pious believer, he was not allowed to travel until sunset the next day. So he spend the day in the field, by himself, missing both the Seder meal with his family and the services at the synagogue. When he finally did return home the next evening, he was met by an irate wife and an equally upset Rabbi. The Rabbi chided him for his carelessness and asked him: “What did you do in the field by yourself all day? Did you at least pray?”

“Rabbi,” the farmer answered, “I’m not a very smart man and I don’t know many prayers. All the prayers I knew, I said in five minutes. What I did the rest of the day was simply recite the alphabet. I left it up to God to make some words out of all those letters.”

We leave it to God to make the words out of the alphabet of our lives. There are few better ways to describe how the Eucharist works in terms of forming us into one heart in Christ. The Eucharist, as we know, is meant to form us into one body in a way that takes us beyond the differences and divisions of personality, ideology, theology, gender, ethnicity, history, social status, pre-occupation, privatized agenda, and jealousy. Often times it alone has the power to do this. Why? Why does the Eucharist have such unique power?

The Eucharist creates community in a way that cannot be explained in terms of normal group-process. Only the language of ritual sheds any light here. What happens at the Eucharist cannot be extrapolated and explained in terms of simple psychological dynamics. It transcends the purely psychological, as does all powerful ritual process. How? An analogy might be helpful in trying to understand this:

I entered the Oblate seminary in my late teens as part of a group of nearly fifty young men (with an average age of under twenty-five). We were housed in one small, over-crowded building which also served us for classrooms, library, cafeteria, and recreation. I lived in that situation, a potential psychological hot-bed, for six years and, overall, it was a wonderful experience. Despite our differences in background and personality and our youthful immaturities, we basically got on quite well with each other. Very few left the seminary, in those years, over relational difficulties with other seminarians.

However, one of the linchpins within our daily program was something we called “Oraison”. It worked this way: For half an hour each morning and for another half-hour each night, we would sit together, all of us, in complete silence in the chapel. No words were exchanged among us and nothing was expected of anyone except his silent presence. Looking back now, I see that this particular practice of sitting together in silence, in prayer, for an hour each day, did more to bring us together and keep us together than did all the community-building exercises we did at other times. It created a ritual container that held us together in a way that no purely psychological or emotional container ever can. What we had each day was akin to a “Quaker silence”; we sat together, before God, and asked God to give us something that we could not give to ourselves, namely, community beyond our differences. We asked God to make a single word out of the different letters of our lives.

And it wasn’t anything romantic, you can be sure of that! We sat in a chapel, which itself was no aesthetic prize, as a group of immature, young men, and we fought sleep, boredom, our hormones, tiredness, low-sugar, irritation with each other, full moons, growling stomachs, homesickness, emotional obsessions, scars from our sporting events, and jealousies. This wasn’t the holy family, not by a long shot. But it worked – marvellously so. God gave us, daily, something we couldn’t give to ourselves, a common heart and common spirit. So too, in Eucharist.

Recently I saw a satirical version of Leonardo de Vinci’s famous Last Supper. Mostly it looked like the original, except, in this updated version, one of the disciples is making a phone call on a mobile phone, just as Jesus is lifting the bread and wine to God for consecration. Not far off the mark at all!

One of our deepest, congenital longings is for community. But we come together, seeking each other, carrying huge differences: our wounds, our separate histories, our preoccupations, our sexual and emotional obsessions, our jealousies, our boredom, and (far too often) our cellular telephones. Such is our alphabet. On our own we cannot form ourselves into a single prayer or into a single heart. Only God can make those words. God does this for us in the Eucharist.

Eucharist as God’s Physical Embrace

February 25, 2001

There’s a story told of a young Jewish boy named Mortakai who refused to go to school. When he was six years old, his mother took him to school, but he cried and protested all the way and, immediately after she left, ran back home. She brought him back to school and this scenario played itself out for several days. He refused to stay in school. His parents tried to reason with him, arguing that he, like all children, must now go to school. To no avail. His parents then tried the age-old trick of applying an appropriate combination of bribes and threats. This too had no effect.

Finally, in desperation they went to their Rabbi and explained the situation to him. For his part, the Rabbi simply said: “If the boy won’t listen to words, bring him to me.” They brought him into the Rabbi’s study. The Rabbi said not a word. He simply picked up the boy and held him to his heart for a long time. Then, still without a word, he set him down. What words couldn’t accomplish, a silent embrace did. Mortakai not only began willingly to go to school, he went on to become a great scholar and a Rabbi.

What that parable wonderfully expresses is how the Eucharist works. In it, God physically embraces us. Indeed that is what all sacraments are, God’s physical embrace. Words, as we know, have a relative power. In critical situations they often fail us. When this happens, we have still another language, the language of ritual. The most ancient and primal ritual of all is the ritual of physical embrace. It can say and do what words cannot.

Jesus acted on this. For most of his ministry, he used words. Through words, he tried to bring us God’s consolation, challenge, and strength. His words, like all words, had a certain power. Indeed, his words stirred hearts, healed people, and affected conversions. But at a time, powerful though they were, they too became inadequate. Something more was needed. So on the night before he death, having exhausted what he could do with words, Jesus went beyond them. He gave us the Eucharist, his physical embrace, his kiss, a ritual within which he holds us to his heart.

To my mind, that is the best understanding there is of Eucharist. Within both my undergraduate and graduate theological training, I took long courses on the Eucharist. In the end, these didn’t explain the Eucharist to me, not because they weren’t good, but because the Eucharist, like a kiss, needs no explanation and has no explanation. If anyone were to write a four-hundred page book entitled, The Metaphysics of a Kiss, it would be not deserve a readership. Kisses just work, their inner dynamics need no metaphysical elaboration.

The Eucharist is God’s kiss. Andre Dubos, the Cajun novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God becomes a monologue.” He’s right. A couple of years ago, Brenda Peterson, in a remarkable little essay entitled, In Praise of Skin, describes how she once was inflicted by a skin-rash that no medicine could effectively soothe. She tried every kind of doctor and medicine. To no avail. Finally she turned to her grandmother, remembering how, as a little girl, her grandmother used to massage her skin whenever she had rashes, bruises, or was otherwise ill. The ancient remedy worked again. Her grandmother massaged her skin, over and over again, and the rash that seemingly couldn’t be eradicated disappeared. Skin needs to be touched. This is what happens in the Eucharist and that is why the Eucharist, and every other Christian sacrament, always has some very tangible physical element to it – a laying on of hands, a consuming of bread and wine, an immersion into water, an anointing with oil. An embrace needs to be physical, not only something imagined.

G.K. Chesterton once wrote: “There comes a time, usually late in the afternoon, when the little child tires of playing policeman and robbers. It’s then that he begins to torment the cat!” Mothers, with young children, are only too familiar with this late afternoon hour and its particular dynamic. There comes an hour, usually just before supper, when a child’s energy is low, when it is tired and whining, and when the mother has exhausted both her patience and her repertoire of warnings: “Leave that alone! Don’t do that!” The child, tense and miserable, is clinging to her leg. At that point, she knows what to do. She picks up the child. Touch, not word, is what’s needed. In her arms, the child grows calm and tension leaves its body.

That’s an image for the Eucharist. We are that tense, over-wrought child, perennially tormenting the cat. There comes a point, even with God, when words aren’t enough. God has to pick us up, like a mother her child. Physical embrace is what’s needed. Skin needs to be touched. God knows that. It’s why Jesus gave us the Eucharist.

Love of Enemy as the Text of Orthodoxy

February 18, 2001

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.

Affective Prayer

February 11, 2001

One of the classic definitions of prayer tells us that prayer is raising mind and heart to God. In essence, that says it all. The problem is that often we raise our minds but not our hearts. Our prayer tends to be intellectual but not affective and we tend to think of prayer more as a way of gaining insight than as way of being touched in the heart.

But prayer is ultimately about love not insight. It is meant to establish friendship. Friendship, as we know, is not as much a question of having insight into each others’ lives as it is of mutually touching each other in affection and understanding. Friendship, as John of the Cross puts it, is a question of attaining “boldness with each other.” When we have touched each others’ lives deeply, we can be “bold” with each other. We can then ask each other for help, ask for each other’s presence without needing an excuse, share a feeling, share an insight, or even just share a joke. Good friendship inspires “boldness”.

The object of prayer is precisely to try to attain this kind of “boldness” with God, to try to reach a point where we are comfortable enough with God to ask for help, to share a feeling, to share an insight, or even to share a joke, just as we would with a trusted friend. But to reach this kind of trust we must first let God touch us in the heart, and not just in insight. This means that prayer is not so much a question of having beautiful thoughts about God as it is of feeling God’s affection for us. Sadly that is precisely what we generally miss in prayer, the experience of God’s affection.

What is common in prayer is the tendency to talk to ourselves rather than to God. For example: When we are at prayer and we begin to have various feelings and insights, the almost-automatic reaction is to begin to speak to ourselves about what’s happening in us, saying things like: “This is wonderful!” “This scares me!” “I shouldn’t be feeling this way!” “I can’t wait to write this down!” When this happens we end up speaking to ourselves rather than to God.

This point was clarified for me recently on a retreat given by Bob Michel, of St. Paul University, Ottawa, a highly-respected mentor in the art of prayer. He suggests that perhaps the number one problem in prayer, among those who seriously try to sustain private prayer, is precisely the tendency to constantly talk to ourselves rather than to God. Quoting Leon Bloy, who once said: “There are persons who adore themselves before the Blessed Sacrament,” he suggests that too often in prayer we say things to ourselves that we should be saying to God. In prayer, he says, we should never say things like this to ourselves: “This is wonderful!” “This scares me!” We need to say them to God. The key to prayer, in his view, is to turn from ourselves to God.

And the pivotal part of that turning is that we must ask God to touch us affectively and not just intellectually. When we go to pray what we most need to ask for is to hear God’s voice within us saying: “I love you!” Nothing would heal us more and nothing would make us more “bold” before life’s mystery and goodness than hearing those words from God. Our very capacity to love depends upon it.

Thomas Merton, commenting upon our struggle to love and forgive each other, one said: “The beginning of the fight against hatred, is not the commandment to love, but what must necessarily come before in order to make the commandment bearable and comprehensible. It is the prior commandment to believe. The root of Christian love is not the will to love, but the faith that one is loved … until this discovery is made, until this liberation has been brought about by the divine mercy, men and women are imprisoned in hate.” The gospels agree. The first words out of Jesus’ mouth in John’s gospel, are a question, the most timeless of all questions, “What do you want?” (Also translated as “What are you searching for?”). Jesus asks the question at the beginning of the gospel, but doesn’t fully answer it until the end. His answer? The word he speaks to Mary Magdala early on the morning of the resurrection. She has been searching for him, is bewildered, and now when she finds him doesn’t recognize him. He repeats for her question he began the gospels with: “What are you searching for?” and then supplies the answer himself. With deep affection, one-to-one, he pronounces her name: “Mary”.

In the end, that’s what we are all searching for and most need. We need to hear God, affectionately, one-to-one, pronounce our names. Nothing would heal us more of our deep restlessness and bitterness than to hear God call us by name and say: “I love you!”

The Tension Between Theology and Piety

February 4, 2001

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.

In Praise of Silence

January 28, 2001

Many of us could use more silence in our lives. I say this cautiously because the place of silence within a healthy spirituality isn’t easy to specify.

We have an ambiguous relationship to silence. There are times when we fear it and try to avoid it and there are other times when we are tired and over-stimulated and positively long for it. Generally, though, we have too little of it in our lives. Work, conversation, entertainment, news, distraction, and preoccupations of every kind seem to fill up our every waking minute. We have become so used to being stimulated by words, information, and distraction that we feel lost and restless when we find ourselves suddenly alone, without someone to talk to, something to watch, something to read, or something to do to take up our attention.

Not all of this is bad, mind you. In the past, spiritual writers were generally too one-sided in extolling the virtues of silence. They tended to give the too-simple impression that God and spiritual depth were only found in silence, as if the joys of human work, conversation, celebration, family, and community were somehow opposed to spiritual growth. Former spiritualities, in speaking of the place of silence, generally penalized extroverts and let introverts off too easily. They didn’t sufficiently take into account that all of us, extroverts and introverts alike, not only need silence but also the therapy of a public life. Silence can sometimes be an escape, an avoidance of the stinging purification that often can happen only through the challenge of interacting within a family and a community.

Moreover, silence is not always the best way to deal with heartaches and obsessions. Ultimately these are a form of over-concentration and sometimes when a heartache is threatening our sanity the best thing we can do for it is not go to the chapel but rather go to the theatre or to the pub with a friend. Preoccupation with work or a healthy distraction can sometimes be just the friend you need when your heart is fighting asphyxiation. There is a story told about the famous philosopher, Hegel. Immediately after finishing his monumental work on the phenomenology of history, he realized that he was on the edge of a major breakdown because of the intensity of his concentration over so long a period of time. What did he do to break out of this? Go on a silent retreat? No. He went to the opera every night, dined every day with friends, and sought out every kind of distraction until, after a while, the strangling grip of his inner world finally let go and the sunshine and freshness of everyday life broke in again. Sometimes distraction, not silence, is our best cure, even spiritually.

But there is still a need for silence. What great spiritual writers of all ages tried to teach on this can perhaps captured in a single line from Meister Eckhart: “There is nothing in the world that resembles God as much as silence.”

In essence, Eckhart is saying this: Silence is a privileged entry into the realm of God and into eternal life, there is a huge silence inside each of us that beckons us into itself, and the recovery of our own silence can begin to teach us the language of heaven. What is meant by this?

Silence is a language that is infinitely deeper, more far-reaching, more understanding, more compassionate, and more eternal than any other language. In heaven, it seems, there will be no languages, no words. Silence will speak. We will wholly, intimately, and ecstatically hold each other in silence, in perfect understanding. Words, for all their value, are part of the reason why we can’t do this already. They divide as much as they unite. There is a deeper connection available in silence. Lovers already know this, as do the Quakers whose liturgy tries to imitate the silence of heaven, and as do those who practice contemplative prayer. John of the Cross expresses this in a wonderfully cryptic line: “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.”

Silence does speak louder than words, and more deeply. We experience this already now in different ways: When we are separated by distance or death from loved ones, we can still be with them in silence; when we are divided from other sincere persons through misunderstanding, silence can provide the place where we can still be together; when we stand helpless before another’s suffering, silence can be the best way of expressing our empathy; and when we have sinned and have no words to restore things to their previous wholeness, in silence a deeper word can speak and let us know that, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well.

“There is nothing in the world that resembles God as much as silence.” It’s the language of heaven and it’s already deep inside of us, beckoning us, inviting us to deeper intimacy with everything.

Carrying Ecclesial Disprivilege

January 21, 2001

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.

From Maintenance to Missionary

January 14, 2001

*We know what to do for someone who comes to church, but we don’t know how to get someone to come to church.

*We know how to be Christian when we are poor, under-educated, and culturally marginalized, but we struggle to be Christian when we are affluent, educated, and have a full place in the culture.

These over-simplifications speak volumes about the state of the church in the Western world. Simply put, today we are better at dealing with someone already sitting in our church pews than we are at getting anyone there in the first place. Our churches are strong on maintenance, weak on being missionary.

This is everywhere evident. We look at our churches today and we see so many wonderful things: faith-filled individuals, good liturgies, good preaching, good music, wonderful programs sensitivity to justice, faith-sharing groups, excellent theology, ecumenical openness, soul-work in our renewal centres, beautiful church buildings, and an ever-increasing lay involvement. It has been centuries since we have done so many things so well and maintained church life with such quality and balance.

But we see something else too, less positive: One-half of all baptized Christians rarely enter a church, our churches are greying, the culture is increasingly marginalizing the church, and, most serious of all, too often we cannot pass on our faith to our own children. Even as so many good things are happening within the church we are losing ground. The crisis, it seems, is not in the area of parish program, liturgy, or theology but in the area of the missionary dimension of Christianity. We know how to run a church, but we don’t know how to found a church.

What’s needed? We need to become more deliberately, reflectively, and programmatically missionary within our own culture, to our own children. We need to send missionaries into secularity in the very same way as we once sent them off to faraway countries. The church in the secularized world needs a new kind of missionary.

What will this new kind of missionary need to bring? Before anything else, real faith. What we need are men and women who can walk the workplace, the marketplace, the academy of learning, and the arts and entertainment industry, and radiate a faith that is not infantile, over-protective, paranoid, colourless, or compromising. We need men and women who are post-affluent, post-sophisticated, post-liberal, post-conservative, and post-fearful in their faith. Their faith needs to have a double strength: It must be strong enough not be defensive in the face of secularity, even as it has the capacity to sweat the blood of self-renunciation rather than compromise the great future for present consolation.

Beyond personal faith, the missionary to secularity will need these things too: A new language for a post-ecclesial generation, a new gospel-artistry to refire the romantic imagination of a secularized mind, a new way to connect the gospel to the streets, a new way of moving beyond personal gift and charism to the building of lasting community, a new way of connecting eros and spirituality, justice and piety, energy and wisdom, and a new way to combine God’s consolation with prophetic challenge. No easy task. In all these areas we are, right now, still searching for new ways.

Perhaps the person we can look to for guidance is Henri Nouwen. To the extent that our age has had a missionary to secularity, he fits the bill. His life and his writings touched people in all walks of life and not just inside church circles. His approach was deliberate and faith-filled, he was trying to speak to the heart of secular culture from the perspective of the gospel. Slowly, through many years of writing, he developed his own language. He re-wrote his books many times over in an attempt to be simple without being simplistic; to carry real feeling without falling into sentimentality; to speak the language of the soul without falling into psychological jargon; to be personal without being exhibitionist; to put forth Christ’s invitation and challenge without being preachy; to challenge towards community without being churchy; and to offer God’s consolation without falling into mushy piety.

He didn’t always succeed, but he did it better than the rest of us. And more so even than the popularity of his writings (that unique appeal and effectiveness of the language he developed) Nouwen is a model to us in terms of the quality of his faith. He walked inside secularity with a visible faith, raw, without fear and without compromise (albeit not without tears, heartache, and breakdown). In the end, what shone through was faith, his belief that God’s existence is real and is the most important thing of all.

We need to learn from people like him, learn the difference between providing church-maintenance and being missionaries. We know what to do with people once we get them into a church but we must learn again how to get them there.