The Domestic Monastery

January 7, 2001

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commandments for Making Friends

January 1, 2001

More than twenty-five hundred years ago, Moses gave us the ten commandments. The centuries since, the Enlightenment notwithstanding, haven’t given us a single reason to doubt the validity and importance of any of those precepts. However, as we struggle to live out them out, it might be helpful if Moses again descended from that same mountain with two new tablets of stone, spelling out some rules for better befriending each other, God, life, and ourselves. Perhaps this second set of commandments might read like this:

1) Befriend humanity …

To be human is to be fallible, wounded, scarred, sinful, and living in a far-from-perfect history, body, family, church. Don’t look for anyone to blame, to sue, to be angry at. This is called the human condition. Make friends with it. Grieve, don’t rage. Think of chaos, not blame. Our parents called this “original sin”. We talk of “dysfunctional families”. It has ever been thus. Don’t live in a sulk.

2) Befriend what’s best in you …

As long as we look out at the world through our wounds we will always fill with self-pity, bitterness, and jealousy. If, however, if we look out through the prism of what’s best in us, our jealousy can turn to appreciation and we can again be astonished at others’ goodness. We have two souls, a grand soul, where we carry the image of God and the memory of our blessings, and a petty soul, where we carry the bitterness and jealousies that comes from our wounds. We need to attach our eyes, our ears, our speech, and our attitudes to our grand soul. We need to be better friends with what’s best in us.

3) Befriend those who love you …

There are only two potential tragedies in life: To go through life and never love and to go through life and not express love and affection to those who love us. We need to make better friends with our friends, to express more readily our affection, our gratitude, our appreciation, and our contrition. Thank those who love you for loving you. Never take their love for granted, or as owed. Give out a lot more compliments. Say thank-you constantly.

4) Befriend chastity …

So much of our pain and restlessness comes from our lack of chastity and much of our subsequent rationalization and bitterness come from not admitting this. We have sophisticated ourselves into unhappiness. For all of our knowing, we aren’t happy. Make friends with chastity. Children and virgins, scripture assures us, enter the kingdom easily. Be post-sophisticated. Learn to believe in Santa and the Easter-Bunny again. Enjoy second-naivete. Ride a merry-go-round. Make a searing, honest confession soon.

5) Befriend your own body …

Don’t be afraid of your own body, of its goodness, its sexuality, its pleasures, its tiredness, its limits. It’s the only one you’ve got in any case. Befriend it. Don’t punish it, don’t spoil it, don’t denigrate it. It’s a church, a temple. Give it enough rest, enough exercise, enough discipline, and enough respect.

6) Befriend the other gender …

The mothers and the fathers, the wives and the husbands, are fighting. Small wonder the children are suffering. Never trivialize the issues of gender. We are being called to a new level of mutual respect and mutual sympathy. Make friends with what seems most threatening to you in the other gender.

7) Befriend your father …

Father-hunger is one of the deepest hungers in the Western world today. Reconcile with your own father, with other fathers, and with God the Father. Your father’s blessing will de-constrict your heart. Forgive him his inadequacy. Acknowledge your hunger.

8) Befriend your mortality …

Death comes to us all. Make friends with aging, with wrinkles, with grey hair, with a body that is no longer young. Accept, let go, grieve, move on. Bless the young. Share your wisdom with them. Give away what’s left of your life. Let the zest, beauty, and colour of young people enliven you.

9) Befriend humour …

In our laughter we taste transcendence. Humour takes us above the tragic. Laughter gives us wings to fly. Thomas More cracked a joke to the man who was about to behead him. That’s a quality of sanctity that we too often neglect.

10) Befriend your God …

The gospel is not so much good advice as it is “good news”, it tells us how much God loves us, what God has already done for us. God is as proud of us as is any mother of her children. Peace comes to us when we can enjoy that favour. Befriend the God of love and the God of the resurrection, the God who is completely relaxed, whose face beams like a marvellous symphony, whose power to raise dead bodies from the grave assures us that in the end all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being well be well. Befriend the God who tells us 365 times in scripture not to be afraid. Walk in that confidence.

Advent: Curing Fire by Fire

December 17, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advent: Gestating Hope into Reality

December 10, 2000

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, as even his critics admit, was a man of hope. Indeed his whole vision of things is generally criticized for being too hopeful. So, in trying to explain hope and advent, allow me a Teilhard story:

Teilhard was a scientist, and a good one, but he was also a Christian, a priest, and a man whose ultimate vision of things was formed by the gospels. Central to his whole system of thought was his rock-bottom belief that ultimately all of history, cosmic and human, would come together, in Christ, into one community of life and love (as promised by Jesus and as summarized in the early Christian hymn, Ephesians 1, 3-10). This vision was the wide framework within which he ultimately set his scientific theories. But he was surrounded by colleagues, both Christian and secular, who had a far-less hopeful view of things. One day he was challenged this way: “You have an enchanted view of history, believing that everything will one day culminate in a wonderful `kingdom’ of peace and love, but suppose we blow up the world in a nuclear war, what happens to your schema of things then?”

His response to that question is a textbook definition of hope: “If we blow up the world it would be a great tragedy because it would set things back millions of years. But history will still one day culminate in a kingdom of peace and love, not because my theory says so, but because God promised it and in the resurrection has shown the power to bring this about, despite the things we do.” That’s hope, to be able to say: “It might take a million years or so longer, but it will happen because God promised it.”

By what is this characterized? Let’s begin with a certain via negativa. Hope is not wishful thinking, natural optimism, or an educated theory based upon CNN.

Indeed, hope is not wishful thinking, the simple longing for something wonderful to happen to us. I can wish to win a lottery, marry the most beautiful person in the world, or score the winning goal in the world cup, but that isn’t hope. It’s pure wish. Similarly, hope is not optimism; a natural temperament, however pleasant, which is perennially upbeat and always sees the positive side of things. Finally, hope is also not a positive diagnosis based upon a shrewd assessment of the facts. Jim Wallis once quipped: “Put not your faith in CNN!” The same holds true for BBC, CBC, NBC, ABC, ITV, SKY NEWS, and WORLD NEWS. One does not ultimately ground hope on whether the world situation seems to be improving or worsening. Hope does not go up and down like the stock market because, in the end, it is not based upon the empirical facts as these are reported on the news.

Hope is believing in the promise of God and believing that God has the power to fulfil that promise.

What is that promise? God has promised that history (our private histories, our communal history, and cosmic history) will one day come together in an ecstatic oneness, a heaven, a paradise, a community of life around Christ and in God within which there will be no tears and no death. This will not be a community of life focused on “food and drink” but one that takes it very breath from love, justice, peace, friendship, affection, and shared delight in a common spirit, the Holy Spirit.

And what power will bring this about? The power that God showed in the resurrection of Jesus, the power to bring a dead body back to life, to redeem what’s been lost, to write straight with crooked lines, and to bring people together, despite and beyond hatred, sin, selfishness, mistakes, tragedy, resistance, death, and all that will ever be seen on CNN.

To live in hope is to live in the face of that promise and that power and, in that light, to fundamentally shape both our memories and our future. As regards memory, to hope is to look back on our lives and see no need to count the losses, underline the hurts, play the victim, or stew in bitterness because all our wounds and losses can be redeemed as part of a greater promise. The same holds true for our future. All our plans and schemes must reflect the wider plan of God and we, like Teilhard, should be prepared to live in great patience as we wait for the finished symphony.

Mary, Jesus’ Mother, is the pre-eminent figure of this. She shows us hope: Not only did she believe the promise, she became pregnant with it, gestated it, gave it her own flesh, went through the pains of childbirth to give it reality, and then nursed a fragile new life into a powerful adulthood that saved the world. In that, she needs imitation, not admiration.

Advent is the season for us to imitate Mary’s hope by, like her, gestating faith, God’s promise, into real flesh.

The Joy of Children as the Prophetic Message of Christmas

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Advent: Creating a Space of Chastity

December 3, 2000

In one of her early books, Annie Dillard shares how she once learned a lesson, the hard way, about the importance of waiting. She had been watching a butterfly slowly emerge from its cocoon. The oh-so-slow process of transformation was fascinating, but, at a point, she grew impatient. She took a candle and heated the cocoon, though only slightly, in order to speed up things. It worked. The butterfly emerged a bit more quickly, but, because the process had been unnaturally rushed, it was born with wings that were not properly formed and it was not able to fly.

The lesson wasn’t lost on Dillard. She understood immediately what was wrong, a certain chastity had been violated. She had short-circuited advent. How so?

One of the motifs we celebrate in advent is the idea that the messiah must be born of a virgin. Why? Is sexuality somehow dirty? Is it beneath Jesus to be conceived and born in the normal way? Sometimes those, false, understandings have been put forth. The real reason however for connecting advent and virginity is quite different: First, it underscores that Jesus, being the incarnate son of God, does not have a human father. Second, and key in terms of the spirituality of advent, is the idea that the messiah could only come forth from a virgin’s womb because for something “divine” to be born a proper time of waiting, a proper chastity, must first take place. But why? What has chastity to do with Jesus’ birth?

The answer lies in a proper understanding of chastity. What is it? Chastity is not, first of all, something specific to sex. It’s about how we experience all of reality in general. To be chaste is to live in such a way so as to be fully and properly respectful of others, nature, and God. Chastity, properly defined, means living in such a way that our own needs, desires, agendas, and impatience do not get in the way of letting gift be gift, other be other, and God be God. Obviously this depends upon proper respect and proper waiting.

We can learn this by looking at its antithesis. We lack chastity when, for whatever reason (lack of respect, lack of reverence, impatience, selfishness, callousness, immaturity, undisciplined desire, lack of aesthetics) we relate to others, nature, or God in such a way that they cannot be fully who and what they are, according to their own unique rhythms and preciousness. We do this when we short-circuit patience and respect.

If this is true, then it is no accident that, so often, the prime analogate for lack of chastity is seen precisely as irresponsible sex. Sex, because it so deeply affects the soul, speaks most loudly about chastity or lack of it. Sex, like all other experience, is only chaste when it does not short-circuit full respect. But it often does so in a variety of ways. Prematurity, unfair pressure, subtle or crass force, taking without giving, posturing an intimacy that one isn’t ready to enter, lack of respect for previous commitments, an unwillingness to include the whole person, disregard for the wider relationships of family and community, failure to respect long-range health and happiness, ignoring proper aesthetics, all of these make for a lack of proper respect within a sexual relationship. In essence, Annie Dillard’s metaphor says it all: There’s a fault in our chastity when we put a candle to the cocoon to unnaturally pressure the process.

And, as is obvious, the key element in all this is WAITING. Chastity is 90% about proper waiting. It’s for this reason that one of the rich metaphors of advent is that of preparing a virgin’s womb so that the divine can be born in a proper way. Advent calls us to patience, patience in carrying the frustration that we suffer when we have to wait for what we desire.

In Jewish apocalyptic literature there are a number of wonderful refrains that try to teach us this. They give us the idea that, before the Messiah can be conceived, gestated, and born, there must first be a proper time of waiting. In short-hand, these aphorisms express the theology and spirituality of advent: “People are always in a hurry; God is never in a hurry.” “Every tear brings the messiah closer!” “It is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth.”

Carlo Carretto, one of the great spiritual writers of recent times, spent many years alone, a hermit in the Sahara desert. During these long, quiet years, he tried to hear what God was saying to us. In one of his books, written from this desert solitude, he suggests that perhaps the most important thing that God is trying to tell us today, especially in Western culture, is this: Be patient! Learn to wait – for everything: each other, love, happiness, God. The message of the great advent figures (Mary, John the Baptist, Isaiah) is the same.

Advent: Preparing for the Sublime

November 26, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culpable and Inculpable Ignorance

November 19, 2000

“Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!” Jesus said this of his executioners. But a question can be asked: Is this true? Were Jesus’ executioners really that naive? Did they really not know what they were doing? A lot indicates that they were far from innocent. They knew they were shedding innocent blood. So why does Jesus say what he said?

I like Karl Rahner’s explanation of this. He suggests that those who crucified Jesus knew exactly that they were doing, at one level. They knew that they were acting in jealousy, being dishonest, putting an innocent man to death. In one way, they weren’t innocent at all. But they were innocent in another, more important, way. How? How were they innocent?

There is a place inside us, a place we are rarely aware of, where each and everyone of us is being touched and held unconditionally in love by God. The people who crucified Jesus didn’t know what they were doing because they didn’t know how much they were loved. That is the real blindness, the real ignorance, that can excuse bad behaviour.

This is an insight with many ramifications. Far too often we crucify others and ourselves because of this ignorance. We feel unloved. For this reason we are harsh in our judgements of others and unaware of why we ourselves are so prone to weakness and to compromise our dignity. We are judgemental and weak because, at the end of the day, we don’t know any better. We don’t know how much we are loved. We have the innocence of the child who hurts herself in ignorance. This is not a new insight.

In classical theology there is a distinction between CULPABLE and INCULPABLE ignorance. The latter, also called INVINCIBLE ignorance, was seen to excuse one from sin and responsibility. The idea was that you could do things that were wrong but not sinful because you were acting in ignorance. The idea was that you acted morally and responsibly only if you actually knew what you were doing. To sin, you had to act “knowingly”. That’s a tricky caveat.

Looking at our world today, I would risk saying that in many important moral matters, we are acting in invincible ignorance. Simply put, we don’t know any better. Only the type of ignorance that allowed sincere people to crucify Jesus can explain why so many good, sincere people can be so massively blind, communally and individually, to the economic and social demands made by our faith. The real reason we can live so comfortably as the gap between the rich and the poor widens is because we don’t know how much we are loved by God, not because we are bad and without conscience. We feel unloved and so we feel we have to take life for ourselves.

The same holds true for our attitude towards sex. We have been able to trivialize sex, split it off from the sacredness of marriage, and turn it into a simple extension of dating (or something worse) only because of a certain invincible ignorance. We don’t know any better, not because we lack conscience, but because we lack any real sense of being loved.

We are like Jesus’ executioners. We have an astounding capacity to rationalize, trivialize, and compensate precisely because we don’t know what we are doing. We don’t feel God’s love for us. Instead we feel unloved and all that goes with that – the sense of being tired, discouraged, lonely, hurt, excluded, fearful, and in need of doing the things we do in order to survive. Small wonder we settle for second-best or for almost anything else that promises to fill an aching void inside us. Jesus, no doubt, is looking at us and saying: “Forgive them Father for they know not what they do!”

But don’t we? Can we really plead ignorance, innocence, say that we don’t know any better? I think yes. We are ignorant, inculpably unaware of how much God loves us. Too few of us, at any real, personal level, have ever heard God say to us: “I love you!” Too few of us have ever heard felt what Jesus must have felt when, at this baptism, he heard his Father say: “You are my beloved child, in you I take delight!” Indeed, most of us have never heard another human being saying this to us, let alone God. Is it a surprise then that, like Jesus’ executioners, we have this amazing capacity to rationalize, to be cruel, to be dishonest, to be unforgiving, and to sell ourselves out?

Darkness is only bad because there is light. Sin can only happen if first there is love. Betrayal is only possible if first one has heard the words: “I love you.” Morris West used to say: “All miracles begin with the act of falling in love.” Jesus’ executioners acted in a darkness that came from never having had that experience. The same is true for us.

Weeping in a Valley of Tears

November 12, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Being Present to God and Life

October 29, 2000

Shortly after his conversion, St. Augustine penned these immortal words: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unlovliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you.”

Augustine, sincere, but pathologically restless, had been searching for love and God. Eventually he found them in the most unexpected of all places, inside of himself. God and love had been inside of him all along, but he had hadn’t been inside of himself.

There’s a lesson here: We don’t pray to make God present to us. God is already present, always present everywhere. We pray to make ourselves present to God. God, as Sheila Cassidy colourfully puts it, is no more present in church than in a drinking bar, but we generally are more present to God in church than we are in a drinking bar. The problem of presence is not with God, but with us.

Sadly, this is also true for our presence to the richness of our own lives. Too often we are not present to the beauty, love, and grace that brims within the ordinary moments of our lives. Bounty is there, but we aren’t. Because of restlessness, tiredness, distraction, anger, obsession, wound, haste, whatever, too often we are not enough inside of our ourselves to appreciate what the moments of our own lives hold. We think of our lives as impoverished, dull, small-time, not worth putting our full hearts into, but, as with prayer, the fault of non-presence is on our side. Our lives come laden with richness, but we aren’t sufficiently present to what is there. A curious statement; unfortunately true.

The poet, Rainer Marie Rilke, at the height of his fame, was once contacted by a young man from a small, provincial town. The young man expressed his admiration for Rilke’s poetry and told him that he envied him, envied his life in a big city, and envied a life so full of insight and richness. He went on to describe how his own life was uninteresting, provincial, small-town, too dull to inspire insight and poetry. Rilke’s answer was not sympathetic. He told the young man something to this effect: “If your life seems poor to you, then tell yourself that you are not poet enough to see and call forth its riches. There are no uninteresting places, no lives that aren’t full of the stuff for poetry. What makes for a rich life is not so much what is contained within each moment, since all moments contain what’s timeless, but sensitive insight and presence to that moment.” Poetry is about being sufficiently alert to what’s in the ordinary.

Augustine was lucky, the clock never ran out on him. He realized this before it was too late: “Late have I loved you!” Sometimes we aren’t as lucky, our health and our lives must be radically threatened or taken from us before we realize how rich these in fact already are, if only we made ourselves more present to them. If everything were taken away from us and then given back, our perspective would change drastically. Victor Frankl, the author of Man’s Search for Meaning, like Augustine, also was lucky. He had been clinically dead for a few minutes and then revived by doctors. When he returned to his ordinary life after this, everything suddenly became very rich: “One very important aspect of post-mortem life is that everything gets precious, gets piercingly important. You get stabbed by things, by flowers and by babies and by beautiful things-just the very act of living, of walking and breathing and eating and having friends and chatting. Everything seems to look more beautiful rather than less, and one gets the much-intensified sense of miracles.”

The secret to prayer is not to try to make God present, but to make ourselves present to God. The secret to finding beauty and love in life is basically the same. Like God, they are already present. The trick is to make ourselves present to them. Rarely are we enough inside of our own skins, present enough to the moment, and sensitive enough to the richness that is already present in our lives. Our experience comes brimming with riches, but too often we are not enough inside of it. Like the young Augustine, we are away from ourselves, strangers to our own experience, seeking outside of ourselves something that is already inside of us. The trick is to come home. God and the moment don’t have to be searched out and found. They’re already here. We need to be here.

Karl Rahner was once asked whether he believed in miracles. His answer: “I don’t believe in them, I rely on them to get through each day!” Indeed, miracles are always present within our lives. Are we?

Risking God’s Mercy

October 15, 2000

Shortly after ordination, doing replacement work in a parish, I found myself in a rectory with a saintly old priest. He was over eighty, nearly blind, but widely sought out and respected, especially as a confessor. One night, alone with him, I asked him this question: “If you had your priesthood to live over again, would you do anything differently?” From a man so full of integrity, I had fully expected that there would be no regrets. So his answer surprised me. Yes, he did have a regret, a major one, he said: “If I had my priesthood to do over again, I would be easier on people the next time. I wouldn’t be so stingy with God’s mercy, with the sacraments, with forgiveness. You see what was drilled into me was the phrase: `The truth will set you free,’ and I believed that it was my responsibility to challenge people so as to protect something inside of them. That’s good. But I fear that I’ve been too hard on people. They have pain enough without me and the church laying further burdens on them. I should have risked God’s mercy more!”

I was struck by this because, less than a year before, as I took my final exams in the seminary, one of the priests who examined me, gave me this warning: “Be careful,” he said, “never let your feelings get in the way. Don’t be soft, that’s wrong. Remember, hard as it is, only the truth sets people free!” Sound advice, it would seem, for a young priest.

However, as the years of my ministry move towards middle-age, I feel more inclined to the old priest’s advice: We need to risk God’s mercy more. The place of justice and truth should never be ignored, but we must risk letting the infinite, unbounded, unconditional, undeserved mercy of God flow free. The mercy of God is as accessible as the nearest water tap, and so we. like Isaiah, must proclaim a mercy that has no price tag: “Come, come without money and without virtue, come everyone, drink freely of God’s mercy!”

What holds us back? Why are we so hesitant in proclaiming God’s inexhaustible, prodigal, indiscriminate mercy?

Partly our motives are good, noble even. Concern for truth, justice, orthodoxy, morality, proper public form, proper sacramental preparation, fear of scandal, and concern for the ecclesial community that needs to absorb and carry the effect of sin, these are not unimportant things. Love needs always to be tempered by truth, even as truth must ever be moderated by love. But sometimes our motives are less noble and the hesitancy arises out of timidity, fear, jealousy, and legalism – the self-righteousness of the pharisees or the bitter jealousy of the older brother of the prodigal son. No cheap grace is to be dispensed on our watch!

In doing this we are misguided, less than good shepherds, out of tune with the God that Jesus proclaimed. God’s mercy, as Jesus revealed it, embraces indiscriminately, the bad with the good, the undeserving with the deserving, the uninitiated with the initiated. One of the truly startling insights that Jesus gave us is that the mercy of God cannot not go out to everyone. It is always free, undeserved, unconditional, universal in embrace, reaching beyond all religion, custom, rubric, political correctness, mandatory program, ideology, and even beyond sin itself.

For our part then, especially those of us who are parents, ministers, teachers, catechists, and elders, we must risk proclaiming the prodigal character of God’s mercy. We must not spend God’s mercy, as if it were ours to spend; dole out God’s forgiveness, as if it were a limited commodity; put conditions on God’s love, as if God were a petty tyrant or a political ideology; or cut off cut access to God, as if we were the keeper of the heavenly gates. We aren’t. If we tie God’s mercy to our own timidity and fear we limit it to the size of our own minds. A bad game.

It is interesting to note in the gospels how the apostles, well-meaning of course, often tried to keep certain people away from Jesus as if they weren’t worthy, as if they were an affront to his holiness or would somehow stain his purity. So they tried to shoe away children, prostitutes, tax-collectors, known sinners, and the uninitiated of all kinds. Always Jesus over-ruled their attempts with words to this effect: “Let them come! I want them to come.”

Things haven’t changed. Always in the church, we, well-intentioned persons, for the same reasons as the apostles, keep trying to keep certain individuals and groups away from God’s mercy as this is expressed in word, sacrament, and community. Jesus handled things then; I suspect that he can handle them now. God doesn’t want our protection. What God does want is for everyone, regardless of morality, orthodoxy, lack of preparation, age, or culture, to come to the unlimited waters of divine mercy.

Religious Literacy

October 8, 2000

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.

The Olympic Games

October 1, 2000

The Olympics have just ended. I wasn’t able to watch much of them, but did see the highlights most nights. What a curious, paradoxical mixture of things these games are. What’s all too evident, almost as a leit motif, is ego, brute competition, the cult of the human body, arrogance, strut, drugs, and a crass commercialism that exploits the athletes themselves. That’s one view on things. There’s another: Just as evident is a beauty and a grace that’s enough to take your breath away.

Each night, as I watched the day’s highlights, I was overwhelmed by the beauty, grace, and radiance of these young men and women, with their near-perfect bodies. What the Olympics present us with is not just an athletic event but the final showcase of beauty, the human body in all its glory. The Olympics is the ultimate fashion show on earth, near-perfect bodies vying with each other for applause, with the whole world as audience. Not an insignificant event at all.

What’s to be said about all of this? Is God smiling or frowning as this goes on?

One temptation is to look at all of this, see it against the horizons of world suffering and eternal life, and denigrate it, especially given its commercialism. It’s easy enough to see how what’s less pure stains its beauty. Most of these athletes are not the meek that are destined biblically to inherit the earth; the human body, no matter its health and beauty, is destined to sickness and decay; the vanity, pride, and ego present are like sets of dyes that smudge everything around them; and in the great scheme of things, this, the Olympics, at best, is a minor distraction, fireworks for a little distraction.

Things can be seen in this light, but, to my mind, that’s not the proper religious perspective. Why? Because despite everything that’s compromised and superficial what is exhibited is still real beauty. Beauty is beauty, wherever it appears. The object speaks. Nothing changes that and we must never, especially in the name of God and value, downplay such a wondrous manifestation of the beauty and glory of God. We can’t have God fighting God. God is the author of all beauty, especially the beauty that is so overwhelmingly evident in a young, near-perfect body. When we disparage this we are, at best, in denial; at worst, we are exhibiting envy and unhappiness at our own less-than-perfect bodies and situations.

I remember a particularly poignant comment that I once heard from Camille Paglia. She said something to this effect: “You know what’s wrong with us, mature adults in midlife and beyond? We’ve achieved so many things, including maturity, and now we can’t accept the fact that when a twenty year-old walks into a room there is (at least in one schema of things) more power and raw beauty in a twenty-year old body than there is in all our achievements and maturity. And we shouldn’t fight that. We should honour that beauty, because it’s real and it’s transitory.” Bravo, That’s correct, from both a human and a religious perspective. The beauty of a twenty year-old body is like the beauty of a freshly-cut rose. It won’t last long, but that’s precisely what makes it even more precious, more to be honoured, more beautiful. Plastic roses are not momentary and for this reason they aren’t of much value.

Quite by accident, the church’s readings during the last week of the Olympics were from Ecclesiastes – that old, existentialist preacher, Qoheleth: “Vanity of vanity, everything is vanity!” One wonders if he didn’t have the Olympics in mind when he wrote that, in the end, “the silver cord is snapped, the golden bowl is broken, and the pitcher is cracked at the fountain.” But, despite comments like this, we must be careful not to too-quickly psyche-out the old prediger’s attitude on all of this. “Vanity“, for him, means vapour, the wind, the breeze, something that’s here today and gone tomorrow. But that’s also true for the freshly-cut rose and it’s what makes it all the more precious.

I think this is true too for the beauty of our Olympic athletes and the pageant that they create in their coming together. It’s all the more precious because it’s fleeting, vapour, so wondrous and so soon gone.

Maybe it was the pagan in me, but I suspect it was the Christian, but looking at all those young athletes with their near-perfect bodies, drawn straight from God’s designer catalogue; seeing in Marion Jones’ smile an icon so beautiful that no human artifact can hope to approximate it; and seeing the event itself as one magnificent, though fragile, freshly-cut rose, I, for one, was touched in those parts of me where I yearn to be better person. After watching those wondrously beautiful young athletes, my yearning was to pray, to seek deeper communion with a God who is the author of such beauty and grace.

The Notion of Suicide Revisited

September 24, 2000

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.

On Not Overreacting to Criticism

September 17, 2000

In much of North America and Western Europe, we live in an intellectual climate that is somewhat anti-church and anti-clerical. In intellectual circles it is fashionable today to bash both Roman Catholicism and Evangelical Protestantism. In fact, this is done in the name of being open-minded, enlightened, and politically correct. It’s the one bias that’s intellectually sanctioned. Say something derogatory about any other group in society, and you will be brought to account; say something disparaging about the church, especially if you can work in the word “fundamentalism”, and you will be rewarded with invitations to speak on university campuses.

How serious is this? What’s to be our response? While it’s irritating, at the end of the day, it’s not that much of a cause for concern. Mosquito bites, basically. As a church, we are not fundamentally threatened by this and we shouldn’t overreact. Why?

First of all, because a certain amount of this criticism is good and does us good. We have our faults and our culture is generous in pointing them out. Bravo. Fiat. The present criticism of the church is healthily humbling us and pushing us towards a more courageous internal purification. Besides we have enjoyed for far too long a situation of privilege, never a good thing for the church. It’s far easier to live as a Christian in a time of disprivilege than in a time of privilege, even if it isn’t as pleasant. But there’s still something more at stake.

We must be careful not to overreact to the present anti-ecclesial climate because this will lead to an unhealthy defensiveness and put us too much in a position of adversary against the culture. That’s not where the gospel wants us to be, not a all. Our task instead is to absorb this criticism, painful though it is, gently point to its unfairness, and resist every temptation to be defensive. Why? Why not aggressively defend ourselves?

Because we are strong enough not to, pure and simple. We can withstand this without having to become hard and defensive. Current criticism of the church notwithstanding, the church is not about to go under or awry any time soon. We are roughly a billion Christians in the world, stand within a two-thousand-year-old tradition, have among ourselves a universally accepted scripture, have two thousand years of doctrinal entrenchment and refinement, have massive centuries-old institutions, are embedded in the very roots of Western culture and technology, constitute perhaps the biggest multi-national group in the world, and are growing in numbers world-wide. We are hardly shaking in the wind, reeling vulnerably, a ship about to go under. We are strong, stable, blessed by God, an elder in the culture, and because of this we owe the culture both a graciousness and an understanding.

Beyond that, and more important than any of these historical strengths, is the fact that we have Christ’s promise to be with us and the reality of the resurrection to sustain us. Given all this, I think it’s fair to say that we can absorb a fair amount of criticism without fear of losing our identity. Moreover we must not let this criticism make us lose sight of why we exist in the first place.

The church exists not for its own sake or to ensure its own survival, but for the sake of the world. We can too easily forget this and, in all sincerity, lose sight of what the gospel asks of us. Compare, for example, these two responses: At a press conference in Belgium in 1985, someone asked Cardinal Basil Hume what he considered the foremost task facing the church today. He said simply: “To save the planet.” Recently, I saw a television interview with the Cardinal of a major archdiocese. Asked roughly the same question, “What do you see as your first task in taking over this diocese?” he answered: “To defend the faith.” A different answer, clearly.

Everything about Jesus suggests that Hume’s view is closer to the gospel than is the other. When Jesus says, “My flesh is food for the life of the world”, he isn’t saying that the real task of the church is to defend itself, to ensure its continuity, to keep the world from gnashing it up. The church exists for the sake of the world, not for its own sake. That’s why Jesus was born in a trough, a place where animals come to eat, and it’s why he gives himself on a table, to be eaten. Being gnashed up is part of what Jesus is about. Everything about him suggests vulnerability over defensiveness, risk over safety, trust in a divine promise over any human defense and insurance.

The very essence of the gospel is a call to risk beyond defensiveness, to absorb unjust criticism without fighting back – “Forgive them for they know not what they do!” We are meant to be food for the world; not the food of defensiveness, but the food of understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness.

Christ’s Face in Today’s Priesthood

September 10, 2000

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!