In a recent book, New Catholics for a New Century, Arthur Jones, an American analyst, makes an interesting comment. He says that when liberals and conservatives argue today in the church both try to claim Generation X (those who under 40 years of age) as an ally. Not a good idea, he suggests, because “Cardinal Ratzinger and Richard McBrien have more in common with each other and their experience of church than either have” with today’s Generation X.

That’s an insight worth highlighting because we haven’t recognized enough that a certain shared experience of church has been breaking down. Today’s young people, to a large extent, have had a fundamentally different experience of church than was had by those of us who are now over 45 years of age. There are some good things about this, they haven’t our hang-ups and neuroses, but there is a less positive underside, a certain “Catholic literary” is breaking down. What is meant by that?

Recently a woman, the mother of four young adults, shared with me this assessment of her own children. She’s a dedicated, highly-educated, Roman Catholic, fully complemented in this by her husband, and yet she has been, at least up to now, unable to impress into children her deep, cherished sense of God and church. Her children, while not particularly negative towards religious values are lackadaisical. Their attitude? Religion and church are a bit like world hunger, an issue that needs to be dealt with sometime, but, for now, other things (relationships, friends, plans, not to mention a bag of Doritos and a baseball game) mostly blot this out. She ended her assessment with the words: “What bothers me most is that they seem to have missed out on something our generation had, a certain Catholic literacy. They’re wonderful kids, but they aren’t literate in that old sense.”

“They aren’t literate in that old sense.” What this woman means is not so much that her kids don’t know the basics of the faith (although certainly that isn’t their strong point) but that a certain shared religious language and conversation hasn’t permeated their consciousness as it did her own when she was their age. For her generation, Catholicism wasn’t something you learned, it was something you breathed in. It was a family you joined and it, all of it, beauty and stain equally, showed on you like a birthmark, made you recognizable. Partly this was an intangible thing, a gnosticism of sorts, an inexplicable sense of something, a certain badge of mutual recognition, that cradle Catholics had but couldn’t explain (paralleled, I suspect, by most cradle Protestants, Orthodox, and Jews). Partly though it was something very tangible, a common experience that brought you inside a well-defined circle of conversation, understanding, and humour.

A theologian friend of mine, occasionally tries to explain this by using the analogy of a joke (which unfortunately can easily be taken out of context and misconstrued). When someone tells a joke, you either get it or you don’t. Most of us who were raised Catholic in the previous generation, like the woman I just quoted, “got it”. It, the sense of being Catholic, didn’t always come to us pure, we didn’t always agree with it, we didn’t always like it, and we didn’t always live it out, but we “got it”. And we could share it with everyone else, at least with those others who also “got it”, because they were with us inside of a common something, in a way that our kids no longer are. Joseph Ratzinger and Richard McBrien may not agree on a lot of things, but they have this immense thing in common, they both “got it”. They both understand Catholicism from the inside. They’re both part of the same literary circle.

No doubt, as already suggested, the same thing holds true within many Protestant churches and Jewish synagogues, a common literacy that they once had is breaking down. Generation X, for all its other moral and religious strengths, and it does have these, does not have this. Most of its members are no longer really literate within their own religious traditions. Moreover, this is a thing that cannot simply be remedied by more catechetical and theological studies. I know students, in various traditions, who have graduate degrees in theology, but have never quite “got it”, at least in the sense of which my theologian friend speaks. They still lack some essential literacy within their own traditions.

Why? Because this kind of literacy is not something you learn in graduate school. It’s something you absorb through you skin, beginning with your mother as she cradles you and begins to speak to you of God, and then extending through those countless hours of Sunday masses, Sunday school, Sunday services, family prayer, rosaries, catechism lessons, bible memorization, bible camps, and all those other religious events and conversations that together conspire to eventually bring you inside of one family that has a common heart, speaks a common language, and even has the same sense of humour.

A couple of months ago, I wrote a column suggesting that we still have too many misconceptions about suicide. Among other things, I stated that many, perhaps most, people who die from suicide are, in the really meaning of those terms, not morally or otherwise responsible for their own deaths but are victims of a disease, not unlike cancer or heart failure. Suicide, understood in this way, is not the act of despair that it has too often been seen to be. Moreover, if this is true, then we need have no extra anxiety about the eternal salvation of those who are its victims.

The piece drew a mixed response. On the one hand, there were a number of sympathetic letters, particularly from people who had personally lost loved ones to suicide. Conversely a number of people wrote and challenged my view by quoting the Catechism of the Catholic Church which states that “suicide contradicts the natural inclination of the human being to preserve and perpetuate his life” and is thus “gravely contrary to the just love of self.” (Catechism, 2281)

What’s to be said about this? Does the Catechism of the Catholic Church contradict what I said about suicide? Is suicide an act that is always “gravely contrary to the just love of self”? There is no simple answer to that question because everything depends upon how we format the word “suicide”. What does it mean “to commit suicide”? Does it always mean the same thing or are there perhaps radically different things being referred to by one and the same phrase?

We could help ourselves, I submit, by making a distinction between something that we might aptly call “suicide” and something else that might more properly be called “killing oneself”. What’s the difference? In the former case (“suicide”), a wounded, over-sensitive person, is over-powered by chaos and falls fatally victim to an illness; while in the latter instance (“killing oneself”), an arrogant, pathological narcissist, acting in strength, refuses to submit to the commonalities of human existence. Not everyone who dies by his or her own hand dies for the same reason, not by a long shot.

We can speak of someone as “a victim of suicide”. The terminology is natural and apt. In a “suicide” a person is taken out this life against his or her will. Why do I say this? Because in fact most of the victims of suicide that you and I have known fit that description. They were claimed by a disease which they didn’t choose. The act that ended their lives was not a freely chosen one. It’s truer to say that suicide was something they fell victim to than to say that it was something that they inflicted upon themselves. Most especially it was not an act of arrogance, strength, or pride on their part. Every victim of suicide that I have known personally has been the very antithesis of the egoist, the narcissist, the strong, over-proud person who congenitally refuses to take his or her place in the humble, broken structure of things. It’s always been the opposite. In every case that I have known, the victim of “suicide” has had problems precisely because she or he was too-sensitive, too wounded, too raw, too bruised, or too weak to find the resiliency needed to absorb some of life’s harshness. In the end, they succumbed to a disease more than they actively did anything positively to harm themselves.

I remember a comment heard at a funeral of a suicide victim some years ago. The victim had been an over-sensitive young man, pathologically self-effacing, who suffered from clinical depression. The priest who presided at the funeral had hinted during the homily that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault. At the reception afterwards, I overheard a man make this bitter remark: “There are people who should kill themselves – but those never do! This boy was the most sensitive person I’ve ever known. He’s the last one of us who should have committed suicide!” The remark speaks volumes.

“Killing oneself”, as distinct from falling victim to “suicide”, is something quite different. It’s how a man like Hitler passes out of this life. Hitler was not a victim in any sense. By every indication, he killed himself. In his case, and in instances like his, the issue is not that a person is too-sensitive, too self-effacing, too-bruised, and too clinically depressed to cope with normal life (though obviously too we are dealing with a very wounded person whose heart only God can judge). Rather the opposite appears true. Killing oneself, in this instance, is an act of strength, an act that roots itself in a pride, an intellectual arrogance, and a pathological narcissism that, like Lucifer, sets itself before the schema of things and says: “I will not serve!” 

It’s in cases like these, but only in cases like these, that suicide fits what is condemned as morally deficient in the  Catechism of the Catholic Church.

The incarnation should never be confused with Disneyland. In the incarnation God enters into actual humanity – pain, mess, ambiguity, misunderstanding, crucifixion. There’s some purity there, on God’s side; but, on our side, nothing is pure, including the priesthood.

Earlier this year, Donald Cozzens, the rector of a large USA seminary, published an important new book entitled, The Changing Face of the Priesthood, (Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Mn., c2000).

This book, like the incarnation itself, distances itself from what’s fanciful. Cozzens is eminently qualified to write on the priesthood since he is himself a priest (and by every indication a faithful, talented, and generous one). Moreover, he has spent much of his priesthood ministering to other priests and seminarians. He speaks as an insider, a sympathetic one. Yet his book has not been everywhere well-received. Why? Because Cozzens names some of the painful, hard issues that face the priesthood today in North America and elsewhere.

What are those issues? He focuses particularly on five things: the relational immaturity of many priests; destructive, unspoken jealousy within clerical ranks; the disproportionate number of gay men entering priesthood and the subsequent growth of a gay subculture within some clerical circles; a growing anti-clericalism within the culture that can make priesthood  unattractive; and a radical drop in the number of men who are entering the priesthood, not to mention the number of men who have, within the past 30 years, left the priesthood.

The picture he paints of the priesthood in North America today looks anything but like the priesthood that has so often been idealized within Roman Catholicism. The picture you get is this: There are simply a lot less priests than there used to be, many of these are immature in that they haven’t properly integrated their natural hunger for romantic and sexual intimacy, leaving them too susceptible to aloofness, irresponsible emotional affairs, workaholism, and the misuse of power; a destructive jealousy often abounds within clerical ranks, crushing energy and goodness; a disproportionate number of men entering the seminary are gay, to the point where, sometimes, those who are not gay unconsciously feel out of place and leave; and a fierce anti-clericalism within the culture constantly slanders the priesthood itself, linking it with scandal. Not the kind of picture one would want to put on a vocation brochure! Or is it?

What’s valuable about this book is that Cozzens does more than simply name the issues. He points to where faith lies within all of this. His believe, which I endorse, is that the priesthood today is alive and well and a life-giving option for any young man, not in spite of these issues but because of them. What Cozzens does is crack open the shell of pious encrustment that so often surrounds the priesthood and then place it back where it belongs, inside a proper theology of the incarnation and theological anthropology that is not confused with angelology or The Bells of St. Mary’s. The incarnation always comes fraught with mess, misunderstanding, and ambiguity because it enfleshes the love of a God who embraces the bad with the good, the unredeemed with the redeemed, who loves us for nothing, meets us in our sin, and invariably ends up on a cross, looking compromised, hanging among thieves.

Cozzens concluding words say it well: “[The] reason for hope lies in the apparent purification and maturation the priesthood has undergone in the last two decades of the twentieth century. From their own pastoral experience, priests know something happens to the soul when it is subjected to ordeal upon ordeal, to unrelenting criticism, and to the anxiety that follows the loss of one’s place and identity. Either it surrenders to despair or chooses to hope against hope that life will go on, that mercy upon mercy will lift it up. Most priests have not given in to despair or lost their nerve. Their confidence has been shaken, to be sure, and their spirit bruised. But now, with status diminished and reputation questioned, priests have turned with renewed poverty of soul to the sustaining mercy and grace of God. In the midst of unprecedented crises, they stand as men without illusions, totally dependent on the strength of the Spirit. In the truth of their circumstances, their humility inspires freedom and courage.The strongest reason for hope, of course, is their faith in the power of the Spirit to be with them through the darkest hours. In the power of the Spirit they are reminded that nothing can separate them from Christ’s abiding love and the saving promise of their creator God. In this abiding love and saving promise they look, without fear, to the renewal and transformation of the priesthood. Behind the changing face of the priesthood remains the saving face of Jesus the Christ.”

Well put. The great mystery of priesthood is that it tries, however inadequately, to give a human face to a wondrous God who walks with us even when things aren’t all pure. What an awesome challenge!

During my graduate studies in Louvain, I had the good fortune of having Cristianne Brusselmanns as a professor. Many will recognize that name and recognize as well the pivotal role this woman played in restoring the adult rite of initiation (RCIA) in the West. Cristianne was an exceptional teacher, one-in-a-million, who radiated catholicity, graciousness, and depth. One of the things she would say again and again about the restored rite for adult initiation, was that it was not meant as the only way of entering the church. It was meant only as a way, an ideal way even, but never, never as the only way. God, she would always affirm, works outside of even good program. Sadly, we have fallen a long ways from both her catholicity and depth.

Today we are falling victim, I fear, to a new authoritarianism in the church, the tyranny of program. It may look different from the old authoritarianism, but it is not. Many of us remember only too well the days when all the power was concentrated in the hands of one man, the pastor, and where his ecclesiology, interpretation of church law, temperament, and whim pretty much decided everything. The oral tradition abounds with stories (both horrific and humorous) of the classical, old pastor or monsignor who ruled with an iron hand and by divine right.

But that kind of authoritarianism is now mostly the stuff of legends. Gone are the old pastor and monsignor of who could do this. There is a new church, though it seems that things haven’t changed much. People are still too much the victim of one narrow view of ecclesiology and church law. Sadly too temperament and whim still play a large a role in deciding who enters the church, how one enters the church, and who gets to receive the sacraments. The old patriarchy has largely been replaced by a new absolutism, the tyranny of good program. A narrow authoritarianism still rules, except now it is the authoritarianism of the parish staff, freshly-trained in theology and liturgy but is not nearly as deeply schooled in catholicity and compassion. The absolutism of the new parish staff has replaced the authoritarianism of the old monsignor.

It can of course be argued that the parish staff of today is  certainly operating out of a better ecclesiology and theology of liturgy and sacraments than did the authoritarian monsignor of old. Point granted. However: Is Christ being made more accessible? Is our ecclesiology healthier in its Catholicity, depth, and compassion? Are many of the poor still being excluded from church and sacrament because of our misuse of power? Is a false use of authority still blocking the full compassion of the gospel and giving God a bad name? Are there really less horror stories than before?

Certainly new horror stories abound: “I wasn’t allowed to join the church in this parish and diocese, except through one program, the RCIA.” “There will be no eulogy at a funeral in this parish or diocese (no matter how painful the anthropological and emotional circumstances in this particular instance) because the funeral liturgy is complete in and off itself!” “All parents must take the pre-baptism program, even if they themselves have helped instruct those who teach these programs!” “No hymn that isn’t approved by the parish team will be sung a wedding in this parish, irrespective of background (religious, aesthetic, ethnic, and emotional) of the couple who are actually getting married!” The list goes on and on.

A new legalism is replacing the old and it parallels perfectly the old in its lack of compassion, catholicity, depth, and nuance – not mention how, just like the old, it echoes the personality of the person or persons who are doing the adjudication.

We might all take a lesson in catholicity and good pastoral theology from the incident in the gospels where Jesus is confronted by a Canaanite woman, asking that he cure her daughter. Transliterated, this text, Matthew 15, 21-28 might read like this:

It was the night of the Easter vigil. Jesus had just helped to conduct an eight-month RCIA program and was helping set up things for the candidates who were to be baptized at the vigil liturgy, when I woman, who hadn’t taken the program, came up to him and said: “Jesus, leader of this RCIA program, I would like to be baptized tonight, with these others.” Jesus replied: “You never took the program! This is only for those who took it. It isn’t fair to them to baptize you!” But the woman addresses Jesus a second time: “Jesus, you who are the compassion of God for the world and not just for this parish and program, I’m as ready as all those who did take the program!” And Jesus, after interviewing her, right then and there, concludes: “Amen. Indeed you are more ready than any of the candidates scheduled for baptism tonight. Step into line and be baptized … even though you didn’t take the program!” There’s a lesson here.

In Time Magazine there’s a column called Numbers. It’s purpose is to startle you by throwing out curious statistics that you could never have imagined. Reading these, I often find myself precisely surprised, not always happily so.

Recently, there and elsewhere, I have seen statistics that are indeed startling. They have to do with how globalization is widening the gap between the rich and the poor. Here’s a sample:

• 8 million. The number of millionaires in the United States. This has quadrupled in the last 10 years and that number now represents more than one-quarter of the population of Canada.
• 10,000. The number of millionaires in Seattle, Washington, alone.
• 1.3 million. The number of people who will find themselves homeless this year in the United States.
• 30 million. The number of people who will experience “food scarcity” (more commonly called “hunger”) this year in the United States.
• 22.4 percent. The percentage of USA children living in poverty, second highest (after Mexico) in a survey of industrialized nations.
• 2.6 percent. The percentage of Swedish children living in poverty, the lowest among all countries surveyed.
• 1 out of 5. The number of children who live in poverty in North America even as this continent is undergoing a record-breaking economic boom.
• 100 percent. The percentage that size of an average house in North America has increased in the last 10 years.
• 100 percent. The percentage that homelessness has increased in North America in the last 10 years.
• 100 percent. The number of shelters for the homeless, food banks, and soup kitchens that are over-strained and over-stretched in North American cities.
• Number 1. The place that the United States holds in the industrialized world both in terms of its number of millionaires and the number of its elders and children who are living in poverty.

   
These contrasts speak loudly about the differing effect of globalization of the economy on various groups within society. While the present economic boom has been wonderful for some it has been less wonderful for others. Our present prosperity has left too many people behind. What’s to be said this?

One must be careful not to make a moral judgement that is too-simplistic. Some things that are happening are in fact good, even as some others are cause for considerable concern. However as Jim Wallis, in a recent editorial in Sojourners states: “To put it in the plainest moral terms, this just isn’t right. Something is terribly wrong with this picture.”

What’s wrong is pretty obvious at one level, the gap between rich and poor is widening and it is simplistic to suggest, as many do, that those who are left behind are themselves to blame since the rules, after all, are the same for everyone. This would be true (everyone has been given equal opportunity) if everyone was lined up in the same way and at the same starting gate. But that’s not the case. Some of us participate in the new world-economy from a position of privilege; be that historical, national, ethnic, gender, intellectual, or physical. We may well play fairly, but the rules favour us and we have started from a place far ahead of many of the others. An appeal to fair play is a dubious moral argument when we are playing on a field that is not level for everyone. Right now the economy grossly favours those who already have wealth or some other exceptional endowment. This is a good time, if you are even a little privileged, to get obscenely rich!

What is less obvious is the root of this thing, namely, a shift in moral thinking that is leaving us comfortable again with the most brutal of all evolutionary laws, the survival of the fittest. Initially this was true for our species biologically, now it’s becoming true economically. Good arguments can be made of course to extol globalization’s other virtues, to extol the amount of employment and wealth the present economy has generated, and to extol the real virtue inherent in personal initiative and hard work; but, at the end of day, there is a brutal Darwinianism at work too in all this. As Hank Zyp, Western Canada’s moral maverick, put it in a recent column: “Those who drop out of the race are written off as `genetically challenged’, unfit to participate in the booming economy. `They are dealt an unlucky intellectual or physical allocation from the roulette wheel of genetic inheritance,’ according to Michael Walker of the Fraser Institute. `That’s life,’ the new realists say.”

It may well be life. Nature has this brutality in it. The fittest survive so as to make for ever-stronger seed and progeny. But moral evolution, as both the Jewish and Christian scriptures assure us, works exactly the opposite. We evolve morally not by the survival of the fittest but through the survival of the weakest. This is what makes for an evolved moral offspring. The biblical gauge for morality within any culture is always how its weakest members fare. Lately that hasn’t been very well.

It’s always painful when someone close to us dies, but the pain is compounded considerably when the cause of death is suicide. Suicide doesn’t just leave us with a sense of loss, it also leaves us with a residue of anger, second-guessing, and fearful anxiety. Partly this is because we still have some unhealthy notions about it. What are these?

The first is the idea that suicide is an act of ultimate despair. We are only just emerging from a mindset that understood suicide as a final act of despair – culpable, irrevocable, and unforgivable. To commit suicide was to put oneself under the judgement that the early church pronounced on Judas Iscariot: “Better for that man if he had never been born.” Until very recently, victims of suicide were not even buried in church cemeteries. As G.K. Chesterton, the great apologist, once put it: “A person who commits suicide defiles every flower by refusing to live for its sake.”

What we didn’t understand of course when we still thought those things was that the propensity for suicide, most times, is an illness, pure and simple. We are made up of body and soul. Either can snap. We can die of cancer, high blood pressure, and heart attacks or from malignancies of the heart, emotional strokes, and mortal wounds to the soul. In most suicides, just as in any terminal disease, death is not freely chosen. Suicide is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, much like when a man who throws himself through a window because his clothing has caught fire. That’s a tragedy, not a sin; a succumbing to disease, not despair; a real death, not intended.

Given this truth, we must also give up the mistaken notion that in committing suicide, a person puts himself or herself outside of God’s mercy.

After the resurrection, we see Christ, time and again, going through locked doors to breathe forgiveness, love, and peace into hearts that are unable to open up because of fear and hurt. God’s mercy and peace can reach through when we can’t. This side of eternity, sometimes all the love, stretched-out hands, and professional help in the world can no longer reach through to a heart locked inside a prison of pain and illness. We try to reach through but our efforts are for naught and suicide claims our loved one anyway.

God’s compassion however can reach through where ours can’t. God’s love can descend into hell, where it can breathe peace and reconciliation right into the middle of wound, anger, and fear. God’s hands our gentler than our own, God’s understanding infinitely surpasses ours, and God is not, as scripture assures us, stymied by locked doors in the same way as we are. When our loved ones die of suicide and awake on the other side, Christ is standing inside their huddled fear, gently saying: “Peace be with you.” Jesus told us that God does not promise to eliminate pain, death, and suicide in this world. These remain. What God does promise is to redeem these, to write straight with their crooked lines, and to rescue us even beyond suicide.

 Then too there is the myth about suicide that expresses itself this way: This could have been prevented if only I had done more, been more attentive, and been there at the right time. Rarely is this the issue. Most of the time, we weren’t there for the very reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn’t be there. Perhaps, more accurately, it could be said that suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness.

 Of course, this may never be an excuse for insensitivity to the needs of others, especially those suffering from dangerous depression, but it is a healthy check against false guilt and neurotic second-guessing. I have stood at the bedside of a number of people who were dying and there wasn’t anything I could do to stop the process. They died, despite my attentiveness, presence, and prayers. So too, generally, with those who have died of suicide. We were present in their lives to the end, though not (as we found out after the fact) in a way that could stop them from dying.

The Christian response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the victim’s eternal salvation, and guilty self-examination about what we didn’t do. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it for what it is, a sickness, and then stop second-guessing and worrying about the eternal salvation of its victim. In the pain of losing a loved one to suicide, we must affirm the bottomline of our faith, God redeems everything and, in the end, all will be well and every manner of being will be well – even beyond suicide.

Following Jesus is not without its surprises. It’s best to be forewarned. Here’s fair warning:

Soren Kierkegaard once said that what Jesus wants is followers not admirers. He’s right. To admire Jesus without trying to change our lives does nothing for Jesus or for us. Yet how exactly does one follow Jesus? Classically we have said that we do this by trying to imitate him. But that posits a further question: How do we imitate Jesus?

A negative example might be useful here: Many of us remember the “Jesus people” of the late 1960s, with their rather raw, literal approach to following Jesus. They tried to look like he looked. They put on flowing white robes, grew beards, walked bare-foot, and tried, in appearance and dress, to imitate the Jesus that centuries of Western artists painted for us. Obviously this is not what discipleship means, not only because we don’t know what Jesus looked like (although we do know that he was not the fair-skinned, fair-haired young man of Western art), but, more importantly, because attempts to mimic Jesus’ physical appearance miss the point of discipleship entirely.

More subtle is the attempt to imitate Jesus by trying to copy his actions. The algebra here works this way: Jesus did certain things, so we should do them too. He taught, healed, consoled the downtrodden, went off into the desert by himself, stayed up all night occasionally and prayed, and visited the homes of sinners. So we should do the same things: We should become teachers, nurses, preachers, counsellors, monks, social workers, and non-judgemental friends to the less-than-pious. In this view, imitation is carrying on the actions of Jesus.

This kind of imitation, however valuable as ministry, still is not quite what is required in terms of real discipleship. In the end, it too misses the point because one can be preacher of the gospel and not really be imitating Jesus, just as one can be a truck driver (not something Jesus did) and be imitating him. True imitation is not a question of trying to look like Jesus, nor of trying to duplicate his actions. What is it?

Perhaps one of the better answers to that question is given by John of the Cross, the great Spanish mystic. In his view, we imitate Jesus when we try to imitate his motivation, when we try to do things for the same reason he did. For him, that is how one “puts on Christ”. We enter real discipleship when, like Jesus, we have as our motivation the desire (“proper regnum Dei”) to draw all things into one – into one unity of heart, one family of love.

John of the Cross then offers some advice regarding how this can be done. We should begin, he says, by reading the scriptures and meditating the life on Jesus. Then we should pray to Christ and ask him to instill in us his desire, longing, and motivation. In essence, we should pray to Jesus and ask him to make us feel the way he felt while he was on earth.

Some surprises await us however, he points out, if we do this. Initially, when we first begin seriously to pray for this, we will fill with fervour, good feelings, a passion for goodness, and a warm sense of God’s presence. We will feel that we feel like Jesus – and that will be a very good feeling indeed. However, if we persevere in our prayer and desire to imitate him, things will eventually change, and in a way that we least expect. The warm feelings, fervour, and passion – that snug feeling that we feel like Jesus – will disappear and be replaced by something infinitely less pleasant. We will begin to feel sterile, dispassionate, dry. God’s presence will feel neither warm nor steady and we will be left wondering: “What’s wrong? How did I lose the way?”

However, as John of the Cross assures us, nothing is wrong. Rather our prayer has been answered. We prayed to Jesus, asking him to let us feel like he felt, and he granted our request. Exactly. For a large part of his life and ministry Jesus felt exactly as we are now feeling – dry, sterile, and not buoyed up by any warm feelings of God, even as he remained faithful in that darkness. Strange how it can feel, feeling like Jesus.

There’s a fervour that comes from the wetness of fertility that can make the soul swell with feelings of creativity, warmth, and immortality. God is in that. But there is also an aridity the comes from a deeper place, a heat that threatens to dry out the very marrow of the soul, a dryness that shrinks all swelling, especially pride, and leaves us vulnerable and mortal by bringing the soul to kindling temperature. God is in that dryness no less than in the wetness of fertility because in that painful longing we feel the eros of God and the motivation of Christ.

Recently, in a theology class, I was asked this question: “Why is it that whenever we talk about love we soon end up talking about rules and commandments? Invariably we end up talking about what we can’t do! And it’s the same thing with faith: We begin talking about faith and then end up talking about dogma, creeds, and heresies. Why can’t we just talk about love and faith without immediately bringing in a bunch of `dos’ and `don’ts’?”

Fair enough. A good question. This is not unlike the famous ecclesiological query of a century ago when a French theologian asked: “Jesus came preaching a kingdom, how did we end up with the church?”  Where do commandments, creeds, dogmas, and structures come from?

First off, we should admit that, sadly, sometimes they come from the wrong places. Rules, laws, and dogmas too frequently come from administrative offices that are too concerned with their own power. As well, they come from fearful, jealous, and petty places inside of ourselves. Small wonder that they do not always serve love and faith very well. However, in their best expression they come from love and faith themselves, just as an oak tree comes from an acorn and a mature man or woman develops out of a single set of chromosomes. Love and faith, like an acorn or a set of chromosomes, carry a clear, determined DNA.

We see this with faith: Bernard Lonergan once said that faith is the brand of the first principles inside the human soul. Henri Nouwen, using a different language, said the same thing. For him, faith is the primal memory of the kiss of God in the soul, the dark remembrance of true first love, of having once, before conscious memory, been caressed by hands far gentler than our own. These are wonderful, helpful images for faith. Faith is a brand, a kiss. However once we begin to try to touch that kiss in any way – through words, imagination, or even through feeling – we find that not all expressions of what we think this kiss is are true to its DNA and that only certain things can grow out of that acorn. The thing itself – however inchoate, dark, and beyond our imagination – dictates the lines within which it can validly be taken. As soon as we try to give expression to the kiss of God in us we find that some things we say are true to that kiss and others are not and soon enough that makes for creeds, dogmas, and heresies. We see this right in the way our Christian creeds developed. Immediately after the resurrection, the earliest Christians had only a one-line creed: Jesus is Lord! That’s a powerful little acorn! It says it all. However, as they tried to un-package what that meant, while all the time remaining true to its DNA, they eventually ended up with a couple of lengthy creeds and a whole series of dogmas that were needed to challenge a number of false understandings along the way.

Love works the same way. It too is a brand inside of the heart, an acorn with a unique DNA. Love can grow legitimately only in certain directions. What is its DNA? At one level this is clear. Love, in order to be love, must contain gratitude, respect, selflessness, and a willingness to let the other be free. Selfishness, envy, taking-another-for-granted, disrespect, and violation of all kinds can never pass themselves off as love. They are its antithesis. All of this is already written into the acorn. Hence there are some non-negotiable “dos” and “don’ts” within love. These are not arbitrary, humanly-imposed, dictates that limit love, but are rather the inherent lines for health and growth written right into love’s DNA. Thus, love, like faith, necessarily ends up with a number of commandments, creeds, and dogmas.

Sometimes today we are too easily seduced by a naive concept of love and freedom. This naivete would have us believe that faith and love can exist without boundaries, that there is not within them a defined DNA that may not be violated. The belief here is that love and faith can mean whatever we want them to mean. But, as we know, something that means everything means nothing. Love that is potentially anything, that exists without any non-negotiable protective principles, can also then mean incest, rape, and murder. The same is true of faith. Faith without boundaries, without creed and dogma to specify it, can then just as easily mean racism, Nazism, and bigotry.

Why do we inevitably end up talking about creeds, dogmas, commandments, and boundaries? Because love and faith have a set DNA. Every acorn is meant to be a very specific kind of tree. So too with love and faith. Already in their nascent forms, as in any tiny seed, there is present a fairly complete script for health and growth. Good creeds, dogmas, and commandments simply lay out that script so that it can be consciously read.