Following Jesus – Be ready for some Surprises

July 16, 2000

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.

Giving up Your Gun

July 9, 2000

In a rather remarkable series of autobiographical essays, the late Andre Dubus writes about his struggle to give up his gun. For most of his adult life, he had carried a small handgun, convinced that it provided the security he needed for himself and his family. He was a big man physically, more than capable of taking care of himself in an hostile situation, and yet he felt the need to carry a firearm. His rationalization through all these years was that, by carrying a gun, he would be able to save innocent people in any situation should trouble break out. Indeed he shares an incident when, emerging from a restaurant one night, he, by using his gun, is able to back away two drunken, racist bullies who were about to beat up a man.

A couple of years before he died however, Dubus was hit by a car (while trying to help some people at the scene of an accident) and spent the rest of his life in a wheelchair. Now, curiously, in this situation within which he is more helpless, he gives up his gun and lives without it. What changed?

At one level, it’s simple: As an older man, mature, in touch now with both his vulnerability and his mortality, he begins to understand more deeply the dynamics of non-violence (which holds no place for guns). True, but there is more. In the end, he gave up his gun because he didn’t need it any more. He could now rely on the security promised by that Someone who invites us, at a certain stage of our lives, to trust in that safety provided by a divine shield. What is meant by this?

Perhaps an example can help: There are stories told both of Dorothy Day and Catherine Doherty (two woman of extraordinary faith) pertaining to their seeming lack of concern for their own safety while they were living and ministering in some of the tougher areas of New York city. Sometimes they would venture into areas where even the police, carrying guns, were nervous about entering. Warned about the danger, they would say something to this effect: “God will protect me!” And God always did. Neither was ever attacked, despite their seeming imprudence. I suspect the same was true for Mother Theresa. She didn’t need to carry a gun. She had divine protection.

This is not the stuff of fairy tales, but the stuff of mature faith. Scripture assures us that faith works fully when it is fully mature. Thus Jesus tells us that if we believe strongly enough we will be able to pick up deadly snakes and not be harmed and drink poison and not feel its effects. There is a catch to the whole business however, the not-so-little caveat “if you believe strongly enough”. The problem is that, for most of our lives, we don’t believe strongly enough. When this is the situation, we still need to protect ourselves against snakes and poison and thugs. When we lack a strong faith, a gun can be a valuable thing. Why?

John of the Cross makes a distinction that sheds some light on this: For him, the demands of the gospel deepen and become more radical (and literal) the more we mature in faith. Ultimately God asks the same thing of everyone – “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” However how literally that applies to us at a given moment depends upon our maturity in faith. John of the Cross sees three levels here: the neophyte, the essentially mature, and the fully mature. The full literalness of the gospel kicks in only for the last group. Prior to that we lack the faith-maturity to turn the other cheek (without getting bitter and resentful), to pick up snakes and drink poison (without losing ourselves in the process), and to give up our gun (without an irresponsible free-fall into some abyss).

This is a critical insight. For John of the Cross there is indeed a time for healthy fundamentalism, a time to take the written word of scripture and apply it literally in our lives, but that time may not be too early. If we take scripture too literally when we are still immature in faith we are more likely to end up like the man in the gospels who set out to build a house but did not first calculate how many bricks he would need to finish the job and ended up with everything crashing down on him or like the older brother of the prodigal son who did all the right things but inside became bitter and angry.

If we aren’t able to carry the cross without sending the bill, perhaps we aren’t ready yet to follow Christ at a radical level. Likewise, if we don’t have the faith of a Dorothy Day, a Catherine Doherty, a Mother Theresa, or of a mature Andre Dubus, perhaps we aren’t ready either to give up our gun and walk purely in the safety of God.

Love’s DNA

July 2, 2000

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.

The Church in Europe – Lessons to be Learned

June 25, 2000

Recently I attended a meeting of the major superiors of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate in Europe. More than a dozen countries, from both Western and Eastern Europe, were represented. My job was only to listen and there was a lot to hear. Each superior made a presentation on the state of the church in his country. Two things were immediately evident: First, there is no one Europe, culturally or ecclesially. Europe is a place of great diversity, of different ethnic groups, different histories, different standards of living, and different geographies. Each of these shapes a different soul. Second, there is too no simple perspective on the state of the church in Europe. It is a very mixed bag.

What specifically was shared? Again and again, the same things were said: Secularization rules, the churches are greying and emptying, and the church itself is viewed by many as tired, past its time, and akin to an interesting but irrelevant museum. But … Western Europe has just enjoyed fifty years of peace, no small thing; religious tolerance is better than ever before, there has been steady progress in terms of overcoming racism and sexism, some countries have all but eliminated poverty within themselves, the iron curtain has fallen, and most everywhere we find cultures that for the most part defend fairness, justice, decency, and good manners. Europe is hardly a place where the law of the jungle reigns.

Ecclesially though things are difficult in most countries. With a few exceptions (notably Poland and parts of Italy, Spain, and the Czech Republic), most everyone spoke of greying and emptying churches, of few or no vocations to the priesthood and religious life, of more and more people ignoring the church’s theology of sexuality and marriage, and of a “post-ecclesial generation” which no longer even understands the classical language of the church. As the Swedish provincial put it, “most of the people in my country can no longer find in the classical language of scripture and tradition a way to tell their own stories.”

Several of the presenters used the term “post” to prefix more than just the words “modern” and “ecclesial”. They spoke too of being “post-communal”, in that the church, and indeed society as a whole, struggles to create community as it once did. As one man put it: “We do well individually – we have wonderful individuals – but we aren’t very effective in generating much in the way of lasting community.” Several of the former Eastern bloc countries spoke of the reality of living in a “post-communist” world, namely, a world that still contains pockets of very hard atheism as well as a general population that, at this time at least, is too enthraled by what it perceives as the salvific potential within affluence and Western consumer items. For every one of them, there was the memory of a time when the church in their country “worked” better than it does now. Listening to this was like hearing, in echo, a particularly astute comment made by the Canadian bishops at the 1997 Synod on America. They stated that in Canada we know how to be Catholic when we are immigrant, poor, and under-educated, but we struggle when we are main-stream, affluent, and educated.

How are they, the European Oblates, trying to address this? France spoke of creating “communities of proximity”, wherein Christians simply offer their own way of life and hospitality as a means of preaching. The motto here is: “Don’t speak of God unless you are asked, but live in such a way that people might ask, as they asked Jesus, `Where do you live?'” Both Spain and Italy talked of various lay, prayer-movements that were transforming some communities, while England, Ireland, and Germany spoke of the hope they felt in seeing lay people moving more and more into leadership roles in ministry. In every country there were pockets of hope within a greying church.

What’s to be gleaned from all of this? Several things: The church’s situation in Europe, as in Western world in general, is both good and bad. Thus we must not be too quick to either condemn or bless things in an unqualified way. We are not, it seems, so much post-Christian as we are post-ecclesial (not that this is good). Things are very mixed. We are experiencing some real religious and moral gains, along with some losses. Christianity is more like a detached retina (through which we used to see and through which we originally formed our vision of things) than something that is past its time. However, the road ahead cannot be simply “steady as she goes”, something new needs to happen. As one superior put it: “For many in Europe, it’s as if they had never heard the gospel at all (period). We need again a first-evangelization, one that announces the gospel as for the first time.” I suspect that this is true, not just of Europe, but of most of the affluent world.

On Sex And The Unsurrendered Life

June 18, 2000

The task of life is ultimately to surrender, as the gospels define this. If you were to take all of Jesus’ teachings, all that’s said about belief, morality, and piety in the gospel, and boil that down to a single precept, you could put it into one word: surrender. The gospel asks us to surrender. But to surrender what exactly? Our individualism, our fears, our security, and our need to stand out and be special. It asks us to surrender our agendas, ambition, anger, bitterness, and all those things that keep us standing alone, apart. In the garden of Eden, Adam and Eve were naked, vulnerable, surrendered. To get back into that garden we need again to be in that state – the importance of creed, morality, and piety notwithstanding.

Nothing within human life is as ideally structured to bring this about as is sexual intimacy. In its ideal, sexual intercourse effects this kind of surrender. Its very structure is geared to bring about a state where people are again naked and unashamed, free of fear, anger, private agenda, separateness, and loneliness. This is what scripture means when it says that it’s not good for us to be alone.

So what about us then when we are alone? What about the single life and celibacy? Where does that leave those of us who don’t have sex? Clearly in some danger of living too-non-surrendered a life. The real danger in the single life and celibacy is not that someone might sometime break a vow or a commandment, though that is a danger. The bigger danger, that potentially inflicts a greater damage, is that a single person can too easily become self-absorbed, individualistic, non-surrendered, and be far from naked in anything, especially intimacy. Of course, married people and many others have sex and that doesn’t always and easily translate into gospel-surrender (though the very structure of sexual intimacy is set up for it).

So what’s to be learned from this? That married or single, the inner dynamics of sexuality are meant to bring about gospel-surrender. In marriage we are meant to surrender to the many through the one, just as in a healthy single state we are meant to surrender to the one through the many. Both married people and singles need to look at their lives and see if this is happening. I see it happening in married couples where, in effect, they have become what lovers really are, namely, empathic confessors to each other. There is a point in intimacy – I saw this in my own mother and father – where people hide nothing from each other, where there is biblical nakedness. When this happens, a certain gospel-surrender has taken place. Sadly this isn’t often seen in marriage nor in the lives of those of us who are single and celibate. Too often we have no confessor, in that sense, and no real intimacy either. We stand unsurrendered, resistant to the nakedness of intimacy in most anything.

Obviously this begs some hard questions: Obviously too it begs for more surrender. But where and to whom exactly? Whom do we trust enough to surrender ourselves to? Perhaps no one. But then we need to keep looking because our health and salvation are largely contingent upon actuating that kind of trust. As we age, the dynamics of sexual intimacy mature too and the function of sex changes.

From puberty until our mid-thirties, the need for sex, genital intimacy, dominates much of our sexuality. Then, without that imperative diminishing all that much, another need begins to take over, the need to have children. By nature and by God we are hard-wired to be parents, to get ourselves into the gene-pool. Not to have children is dangerous, anthropologically and spiritually. The need for intimacy still remains, blunted sometimes by tiredness and routine, but sex now has a different purpose. In a young person the big danger is loneliness, being left out, being marginalized with nobody to love. Sex is meant to get us beyond this. As we age though, the danger reverses. We begin to claim more and more private space for ourselves. The opposite concern then become important: Are we becoming too comfortable being alone? Is it healthy to want your own bed for yourself at night, your own space for yourself during the day, and especially your own privacy in ambition, agenda, work-schedule, projects, and dreams? Is it healthy to want so unshared a life?

It’s a human tragedy when an adolescent is so lonely and desperate for someone to love and surrender to that he or she turns to self-destructive behaviour or even to suicide. It’s a biblical tragedy when those of us in middle-life and beyond are so comfortable being alone that we want intimacy only as a satellite addendum to a carefully guarded private world.

Socrates warned that the unexamined life is not worth living. The gospel warns that the unsurrendered life is not biblical.

Pagan Beauty

June 11, 2000

In his book, The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin confesses that throughout his life he was haunted by two great loves, God and pagan beauty. Both had the power to take his breath away. To feel the reality of God, he says, is to be overwhelmed by something so profound that all else is dwarfed. However, to look at pagan beauty, the loveliness of this earth and so much of what’s in it, is also to be held captive by a power so great that, for a moment at least, all else seems unimportant. In this world, he submits, there are two great enticements, the reality of God and the stunning beauty of paganism.

The stunning beauty of paganism! How fierce its attraction! How near to God its power! But the reality of God is also real and enticing, even more so than the grip of this world. To live with open eyes and an open heart is, as Teilhard submits, to find oneself painfully torn between two worlds that are not easy to keep in harmony. Invariably we sell one out for the other. How? In one of three ways:

Distortion. If we are religious, the danger is that, in the name of God, we will ignore and denigrate the real beauty of this world and see its glories and achievements as superficial and unimportant, crass and ignoble in comparison to eternal things. There is always the danger of living a one-sided religion that sets God against this world. God and pagan beauty are made out to be competitors and we are forced to choose one over the over. Teilhard calls this distortion since, in such a view, the true order of things is indeed distorted because created beauty is denigrated or denied in the name of claiming a place for God.

Passing strange, but it is not just religious people who are prone to this type of distortion. We see this all over, whenever some value is seen to be so important (godly) that in its face simple beauty is judged to be superficial. To offer one such example: Camille Paglia, an iconoclast feminist, made this particularly poignant, insightful comment on her generation of feminists. A paraphrase: “What’s wrong with our generation, the fifty-something radicals, is that we can’t accept the fact that we have all this learning, all these degrees, have written all these books, have all this maturity, but if a seventeen year-old girl walks into the room she has more power (in that particular moment) than any of us – because there’s a beauty in a seventeen year-old body that in a given situation is more powerful than all the degrees and learning in the world. So we want to change the rules, as if it were possible to change this! But, and this is the point, that beauty, the beauty of that young body, should be honoured, because it’s beautiful and it’s temporary.”

A second attitude is that of disgust, the opposite of distortion. It’s the attitude we take when we become so taken by pagan beauty so as to feel that other-world, especially its call for self-renunciation and for a perspective beyond the present moment, is repugnant and dehumanizing. The effort then is to try to live a full human life by deliberately pulling away from all that is not directly of the goodness and beauty of this life. This attitude too sets God and pagan beauty in opposition and forces us to make an unhappy choice between the two.

A third option is one that Teilhard calls division. We live this out when we give up the attempt to bring God and pagan beauty into harmony and simply live a divided, schizophrenic life. We compartmentalize the two, God and pagan beauty, keeping them separate from each other. We take God seriously and we take pagan beauty seriously, but never at the same time.

Neither of these is a happy solution. What is the solution? How do we take both God and pagan beauty seriously? How do we give them both their due? Karl Rahner affirmed that the secret here is to see created beauty against the horizon of the infinite. That’s correct, theoretically, but how do we do this practically?

By never denying, denigrating, or ignoring any beauty or any truth that we see, pagan or divine. By being honest, pure and simple. What takes your breath away takes your breath away! Never pretend otherwise. God and pagan beauty are both real, but they are not in our lives as two warring parties that must be brought to a neutral table for a negotiated settlement, but are two storms on a collision course. Be true to both and see what happens. Let the storm takes its course, trusting that the Author of all beauty, pagan and divine, will, while respecting both your struggle and the legitimate reality of pagan beauty, gently lead you into that great harmony within which nothing is lost and everything has its proper place and value.

In Praise of Skin

June 4, 2000

In her book, Nature and Other Mothers, Brenda Peterson has a marvellous little essay entitled: In Praise of Skin. Her reflections begin on a personal level. When she was thirty-five years old, for reasons that doctors were unable to properly diagnose, she broke out in a rash that left her skin dotted with red marks, like an adult with chicken-pox. For months she saw doctors and tried various remedies, including an unlimited prescription for cortisone cream. Nothing worked. Eventually she went to see her stepgrandmother who made a more primal, and accurate, diagnosis, skin needs to be touched.

Her stepgranddaughter told her: “Your body’s skin is harder-working and more wide-open than the human heart; it’s a sad thing to see how skin gets passed over, barely touched except in sex, or sickness, or deep trouble. Why, we pay so little mind to our skin, we might as well be living inside a foreign country.” Then she proceeded to cure her. How? By touching, massaging, and caressing her skin. Eventually the spots all disappeared and her skin became healthy again.

Our skin, as Peterson goes on to point out, is our body’s biggest organ. It breathes, filters, protects, and is more important than the heart in that it is possible to live with one-third of your heart blocked, but you will die if you lose one-third of your skin. It is not incidental, she submits, that the deadliest killer of our time, AIDS, begins not with some plaguelike virus invading the body, but with the breaking of skin. Skin, she insists, needs to be taken more seriously, caressed more often. (N.Y., Fawcett Books, 1995, pp. 13-18) It also needs to be better theologized-about.

Somehow our spiritualities have been slow off the mark and rather timid in doing this. We still want for a fertile theology of the body, of skin, of the eucharist, of the incarnation (and all of these are tied together). So much within spirituality, even when it tries hard to be holistic, is still dis-embodied, platonic, reluctant to take seriously the very foundation of Christianity, namely, that in the incarnation God takes on real flesh, skin. We are better, it seems, at honouring skin in theory than in taking it seriously in real life. How we honour the body in actual life never quite approximates our theologizing. We still struggle mightily when it gets to actually touching, caressing, and honouring our skin and we all live long seasons when our skin is too lonely for touch. Untouched skin is rife with fever spots, like the ones Peterson speaks of, save in our case these are visible mostly in our attitudes. Part of the problem is simple: we don’t get touched enough.

For Christians, among all the religions of the world, this shouldn’t be the case since we believe in that, in becoming flesh, God legitimizes skin, praises skin, enters it, honours it, caresses it, and kisses it. Among all the religions of the world, we stand out because, for us, salvation is never a question of stepping outside of skin, but of having skin itself glorified. That is why Jesus never preached simple immortality of the soul, but insisted on the resurrection of the body. Christian heaven is not a state beyond skin. This teaching, that salvation includes the body, was and remains scandalous, something difficult to accept. At any given time in history the vast majority of persons, if they believe in salvation at all, believe that it exists somehow in an escape from the physical body, a stepping outside of skin.

For Christians, however, the body is not something from which one is ever meant to escape. Rather the body is to be understood as a temple of the holy spirit, a church, a sacred place where God can come and make a home. Skin then is sacred, deserving of praise. This is true, especially true, when skin meets skin, in sacramental sex, and temple commingles with temple. Not an easy thing for us to accept. It seems too earthy to be spiritual. Consequently we generally lack the courage to accept a theology of sexuality that is earthy enough to do justice to how shockingly physical the incarnation really is. In sacramental sex there is eucharist, just as in eucharist, God enters, caresses, and kisses human skin. Andre Dubos, the Cajun essayist and novelist, used to say: “Without the Eucharist, God is a monologue.” Well put, especially in what is implicitly affirmed. With the eucharist, God becomes more than words, more than a belief, more than a teaching. In the eucharist, God, like Brenda Peterson’s stepgrandmother, becomes the great healer who touches, caresses, massages, and kisses our skin.

In praise of skin. A wonderfully-coined phrase that could serve as a subtitle for the incarnation! Karl Rahner once said that Christmas, God becoming flesh, gives us permission to be happy. He might well have added that it also gives us permission to praise and cherish the sacramentality of human skin.

Needed: Saints and Prophets within Secularity

May 28, 2000

Recently I attended a meeting at which religious leaders from a dozen European nations made presentations on the state of the church in their respective countries. Again and again, the same things were mentioned: “Our churches are emptying; we lack real contact with youth; we are not getting many vocations to the priesthood and religious life (or to marriage, for that matter); we are a post-ecclesial generation which no longer knows or understands the classical theological language; we need to announce Jesus again, as if for the first time, but we lack a language to do this in; our churches are facing marginalization in the wake of an ever-intensifying secularity.”

What’s true of Europe is also, I believe, true of the rest of the secularized world. It seems we are good at being Christians when we are poor, unsophisticated, and oppressed. We’ve had centuries of practice at this. What we haven’t had much practice at is how be Christians when we are affluent, sophisticated, and part of the cultural mainstream. We need a new kind of missionary, a new kind of saint, a man or woman who can live and preach the gospel effectively within a secularized context. This is not a new insight of course, it’s been called for since the early 1960s. However, up to now, most of the literature on this has been longer on diagnosis than on prescription, better at deconstruction than reconstruction, good at analyzing but not at building. So where do we go from here?

The literature on refounding religious communities (which surely has parallels to the church as a whole) points out that one of the lessons of history is that genuine religious renewal, the type that truly reshapes the religious imagination, often does not come out of think-tanks, conferences, and church synods, but rather issues forth from graced individuals – saints, wild men and women who, like Augustine, Francis, or Clare, capture the romantic imagination. This literature also says that “the new lies elsewhere”, namely, what needs fixing in the church will not be mended simply by patching the old. There comes a time when things are beyond patching. Now is such a time.

What will be effective today in terms of proclaiming Christ anew in a secularized culture? My answer? I honestly don’t know. Neither, it seems, does anyone else. Given that we are searching sincerely for an answer, my belief is that if someone had that answer we would already be using it. We have no new answers yet. Instead we are at a wall, blocked, lacking the imagination for an effective next step. I say this in all sympathy. The type of imagination that reshapes history is not easily found and today we are still in search of it. In the meantime, we’ve come as far as we can along a road that used to take us there, but no longer does. We know how to do maintenance, but not how to be missionary – we know what to do once we get people into church, but we no longer know how to get them there. So we stand waiting for a new Augustine, Francis, or Clare to come along and show us how to re-evangelize our imaginations. We are experiencing a certain paralysis right now, but when someone with a genuinely new imagination steps up and begins to lead, I have no doubt we will follow.

I have no doubt too that such a new person will soon appear. The church has been at this spot before, several times. Every time the world thinks it has buried Christ for good, it’s in for a surprise; every time the polls tell us that the churches are on an irrevocable down-slide, the Holy Spirit intervenes and soon all bets are off; every time we despair, thinking that our age can now longer produce saints and prophets, some Augustine or Therese comes along and shows us that, for good and bad, our age is no different than any other; and every time our imaginations run dry, as they are now, we find that the scriptures are a spring of fresh insight. We only lack imagination, not hope, and there’s a remedy.

God provides. Christ promised that we will not be orphaned and we can take that at face value. Our age will produce its own prophets and saints. What’s asked of us is biblical patience, to wait on God. Christianity may look tried and tired to a culture within which affluence and sophistication are like a steamroller that is levelling everything, but the jury is still out. Our age has too its hope-filled face. As secularization marches so unswervingly forward we are beginning to see something we’ve not seen before, a growing number of men and women who are post-affluent and post-sophisticated. From these, the post-affluent and post-sophisticated will come, I believe, some great religious leaders who will teach us, and our kids, how to live as Christians in this new situation.

What makes for a practicing Christian?

May 21, 2000

There’s a national phone-in show on radio in Canada that I try to catch whenever I can. Recently its topic for discussion was: Why do so few people go to church today? The question triggered a spirited response. Some called in and said that the churches were emptying because they were too progressive, too sold-out to the culture, too devoid of old, timeless truth. These calls would invariably be followed by others that suggested exactly the opposite, namely, that the churches are emptying because they are too slow to change, too caught up in old traditions that no longer make sense.

And so it went on, caller after caller, until one man phoned in and suggested that the real issue was not whether the church was too progressive or regressive. Rather, in his view, less and less people were going to church because “basically people treat their churches exactly the way they treat their own families; they want them around, but they don’t go home to visit them all that much!” The comment reminded me of Reginald Bibby, the Canadian sociologist of religion, who likes to quip: “People aren’t leaving their churches, they just aren’t going to them – and that is a difference that needs to be understood.”

Indeed it does. There is a difference between leaving a family and just not showing up regularly for its celebrations. This distinction in fact needs to shape the way we answer a number of important questions: Who belongs to the church? What makes for a practising Christian? When is someone’s relationship to the church mortally terminated? What does it mean to be outside the church? As well, this distinction impacts on the question as to who is entitled to receive the rites of baptism, eucharist, confirmation, marriage, and Christian burial.

People are treating their churches just like they treat their families. Isn’t that as it should be? Theologically the church is family – it’s not like family, it is family. A good ecclesiology then has to look to family life to properly understand itself (the reverse of course is also true). Now if we place the questions we just posed within the context of family life, we have there, I believe, the best perspective within which to answer them. Thus, inside of our families: Who is in and who is out? When does someone cease being a “practicing” member of a family? Does someone cease to be a member of a family because he or she doesn’t come home much any more? Do we refuse to give a wedding for a son or daughter just because he or she, caught up in youth and self-interest, hasn’t come home the last couple of years for Easter and Christmas? Not exactly abstract questions!

Many of us have children and siblings who for various reasons, at this stage of their lives, largely use the family for their own needs and convenience. They want the family around, but on their terms. They want the family for valued contact at key moments (weddings, births of children, funerals, anniversaries, birthdays, and so on) but they don’t want a relationship to it that is really committed and regular. A lot of families are like that. They understand this, accept it, swallow hard sometimes, and remain a family despite it. In any extended family, it’s natural that, while everyone is a member of the family, there will be different levels of participation. Some will give more, others will take more. Some, by virtue of maturity, will carry most of the burden – they will arrange the dinners, pay for them, keep inviting the others, do most of the work, and take on the task of trying to preserve the family bond and ethos. Others, because of youthful restlessness, immaturity, self-interest, confusion, peer-pressure, laziness, anger, whatever, will carry less, take the family for granted, and buy in largely on their own terms. That describes most families and is also a pretty accurate description of most churches. There are different levels of participation and maturity, but there is only one church and that church, like any family, survives precisely because some members are willing to carry more of the burden than others. Those others, however, except for more exceptional circumstances, do not cease being members of the family. They ride on the grace of the others, literally. It’s how family works; how grace works; how church works.

Church must be understood as family: Certain things can put you out of the family, true. However, in most families, simple immaturity, hurt, confusion, distraction, laziness, youthful sexual restlessness, and self-preoccupation – the reasons why most people who do not go to church stay away – do not mortally sever your connection. You remain a family member. You don’t cease being “a practising member” of the family because for a time you aren’t home very much. Families understand this. Ecclesial family, church, I believe, needs to be just as understanding.

Learning the Language of Rebirth

May 14, 2000

It was George Carlin, I think, who once quipped: “When I was born, I was so stunned that I couldn’t speak for two years!” There’s a homily in that.

Recently I received a letter from a young mother who described her delight in watching her new baby awake to more awareness. Her words: “She’s beautiful. She’s starting to vocalize a bit and smiles a lot when we talk to her. This morning, while her six year-old sister and I were having breakfast, I looked into the baby’s eyes and said: “Are you talking to me?” She replied with something that sounded like “yeah!” Her sister was so excited – “Mommy, She talked!” I didn’t have the heart to tell her that it was just a random utterance.”

This is a wonderful image, I believe, to describe what it will be like for each of us when we are born again into heaven. The maternal side of God will be looking us in the eyes, smiling, and trying to coax a smile and some words out of us, but we will be a bit too overwhelmed and underdeveloped to speak. The saints will be following our progress with joy, delighting in each of our little breakthroughs, as we awaken and struggle to learn the language of heaven.

A generation ago, C.S. Lewis wrote a brilliant little book on heaven, hell, and purgatory, entitled, The Great Divorce. In that book he stresses the moral continuity between this world and the next. However because Lewis wanted so much to emphasize that the way we shape our hearts in this world will determine how we respond to love in the next, the reader can easily get the impression that heaven is a lot like here, only nicer, that heaven will simply be our present life beautified. No doubt this is true, but our faith cautions us to not think of this too literally – Eye has not seen, nor ear heard, nor is the human person even capable of imagining what God has prepared for those who love him.

Heaven is going to be wonderful, no doubt. However it isn’t going to be a simple extension of this life. Rebirth will be as much of a stretch for us as was first birth. We will, I believe, wake up in heaven, like an infant again, too overwhelmed to speak, needing to be coaxed into a new language and a new consciousness by God’s smile and the delight of the saints. Some of this, learning this new language and consciousness, is already possible for us here. I knew an Abbott who died recently who, through the last 25 years of his life, used to sit in silent prayer for 4-6 hours a day, every day. He described this silent prayer as an attempt to enter into God’s stillness, into the divine quiet, into a silence that contains all words, all languages, all understanding, all compassion, all unity. Through silent prayer he was struggling to enter into a language that is beyond all languages. In a manner of speaking, he was spending 4-6 hours a day in a language lab. When he died, I suspect, he wasn’t as overwhelmed as he might have been. He had already been trying to learn heaven’s language for all those years.

Not all of us are abbotts, monks, or contemplative nuns, who have, by vocation, the chance of spending such quality time each day in silent prayer. We will, each of us, therefore have to try to learn that language, the language of God’s stillness and divine quiet, in our own way. Perhaps it might be through our intimate relationships within marriage and family, where words at a point become superfluous; or perhaps it will be in our loneliness and solitude, where silence breaks through both so painfully and peacefully; or maybe it will be through the very tediousness of our daily tasks, where burdens often reduce us to silence; or perhaps it might be through teaching our own baby how to speak. There are various ways of being a monk. All of them good.

Jesus told us that each of us needs to be born twice, once from below and once from above. We need also to be taught twice how to speak. Our mothers once gave us birth, from below, and they also coaxed, cajoled, and lured us into speech. Each of us has a “mother-tongue” (not ineptly named). Our second birth, our rebirth, our birth from above, will, I suspect, be somewhat similar. There will be time of having to leave the womb, the familiar, this life, and then a lonely journey down an unwanted birth canal into the greatest of all unknowns. Light, love, and community will greet us upon arrival. However it will be somewhat overwhelming, beyond language and imagination. We will be too stunned to speak, but God’s smile and the delight of the saints will, I don’t doubt, soon awaken within us a smile and evoke from us something that sounds like a “yeah!”

When Doing Nothing is Enough

May 7, 2000

What can you do in the face of powerlessness? What can you do in a situation where, it seems, anything you can say or do will only make things worse?

For instance, what can you do when you are standing in front of one of your own children, who no longer accepts your values or faith, and are powerless to say or do anything that will help? What can the church do when it stands before a society that no longer understands or accepts what it, the church, cherishes in terms of marriage and sexuality and it has no adequate words, convincing explanations, or ways of defending itself so that it isn’t seen as narrow and fundamentalist? What can anyone do when he or she is so wounded by an abuse of body, sexuality, or soul that, right now, he or she is paralysed and cannot move beyond that hurt?

What can we do in these situations? Nothing! Or, at least, so it seems. But perhaps nothing is enough! Let me explain:

All of us know the feeling of standing within a situation and being powerless, at least in that we are helpless to change anything practically. What can we do when faced with that? Nothing – except live with the powerlessness, carry the tension, try to transmute it into something else, and wait for a new day – a day of new opportunity for resolution of the pain (which is very much contingent upon a deeper love and compassion on our part). In terms of resolving the issue practically, we can do nothing. But nothing can be enough!

That might sound fatalistic, but is in fact the opposite of resignation. To stand powerless, in a biblical way, before a situation is to ponder. We see the prototype of this in Mary, Jesus’ mother, under the cross. Faced with the reality of the crucifixion, she “ponders”. What’s she doing exactly? On the surface, nothing; but, of course, we know that something very important is occurring underneath the surface. What precisely? That answer is not so immediately evident.

All scripture tells us is that Mary stood there. Standing, however, connoted strength. Thus, even in the face of the crucifixion, she was strong, not prostrate in helplessness (as artists sometimes depict her). And what’s she saying? Nothing. Mary said not a single word; not, I suspect, because she didn’t want to protest, but because there wasn’t anything that she could have said at that moment that would have made any difference. Under the cross, she was powerless both in that there was nothing she could do, not a single thing, to stop the crucifixion and in that she was just as helpless to protest her son’s innocence. Hence, she’s not standing under the cross protesting to the bystanders, trying to explain her view of things. She’s powerless. Silent. There’s no protest. All she can do is ponder, that is, hold the tension, stand silently amidst the misunderstanding, bigotry, and jealousy and, in that, try to gestate its opposite – understanding, compassion, and love.

This concept – of pondering, of silently carrying the tension so as to transform it – is both important and consoling. It’s important because, as we know, we often we find ourselves in situations not dissimilar to what Mary experienced under the cross. We are sometimes in situations within which all that is dearest to us is misunderstood and crucified and we are helpless to do anything about it. We are, in those moments, inadequate, powerless, mute. What can we say? What can we do? Nothing, except ponder. Like Mary under the cross, we can live without answers, without being able to justify ourselves, without being able to resolve things, bearing what seems unbearable. Can this be fruitful? Yes. When the unbearable is born, space is created for things to be resolved later, by a new circumstance and a new power. In the meantime, we agree to carry tension, not for its own sake, nor even because the fire of tension can forge a noble soul, though it can, but in order to transmute that tension into something else. Whatever pain we don’t transmute we will transmit. Mary didn’t make that mistake. Neither did Jesus. They pondered. Pondering, bearing the unbearable, is waiting inside of tension in order that own souls can grow so that we don’t give back hurt for hurt, bitterness for bitterness, hatred for hatred.

This can be consoling to know. We are too hard on ourselves because of our inadequacies. In many of the most intimate and painful situations of our lives we are precisely not able to fix things, be adequate, or redeem the situation. Sometimes there’s nothing to be done … but nothing can be enough, as it was for Mary, under the cross. Sometimes all we can do is to stand silently, in strength, bearing an bearable tension, waiting for our hearts do something our actions can’t, namely, transmute misunderstanding into understanding, confusion into insight, anger into blessing, and hatred into love.

Daily Resurrection

April 23, 2000

Gilbert K. Chesterton once wrote a poem he entitled, Second Childhood. It speaks of the resurrection:

    When all my days are ending
        And I have no song to sing,
    I think that I shall not be too old
        To stare at everything;
    As I stared once at a nursery door
        Or a tall tree and a swing. …

    Men grow too old for love; my love,
        Men grow too old for lies;
    But I shall not grow too old to see
        Enormous night arise,
    A cloud that is larger than the world
        And a monster made of eyes. …

    Men grow too old to woo, my love,
        Men grow too old to wed;
    But I shall not grow too old to see
        Hung crazily overhead
    Incredible rafters when I wake
        And I find that I am not dead. …

    Strange crawling carpets of the grass,
        Wide windows of the sky;
    So in this perilous grace of God
        With all my sins go I;
    And things grow new though I grow old,
        Though I grow old and die.

What the resurrection of Jesus promises is that things can always be new again. It’s never too late to start over. Nothing is irrevocable. No betrayal is final. No sin is unforgivable. Every form of death can be overcome. There isn’t any loss that can’t be redeemed. Every day is virgin. There is really no such thing as old age.

In the resurrection we are assured that there are no doors that are eternally closed, every time we close a door or one is closed on us, God opens another for us. The resurrection assures us that God never gives up on us, even if we give up on ourselves, that God writes straight with the crooked lines of our lives, that we can forever re-virginize, regain lost innocence, become post-sophisticated, and move beyond bitterness. In a scheme of things where Jesus breathes out forgiveness on those who betray him and God raises dead bodies from the dead, we can begin to believe that in the end all will be well and every manner of being will be well and everything, including our own lives, will eventually end sunny side up.

However, the challenge of living this out is not just that of believing that Jesus rose physically from the grave, but also, and perhaps even more importantly, to believe that – no matter our age, mistakes, betrayals, wounds, and deaths – we can begin each day afresh, virgin, innocent again, a child, a moral infant, stunned at the newness of it all. No matter what we’ve done, our future is forever pregnant with wonderful new possibility. Resurrection is not just a question of one day, after death, rising from the dead, but it is also about daily rising from the many mini-graves within which we so often find ourselves.

How does belief in the resurrection help us rise from these mini-graves? By keeping us open to surprise, newness, and freshness in our lives. Not an easy thing to do. We are human and we cannot avoid falling – into depression, bitterness, sin, betrayal, cynicism, and the tiredness that comes with age. Like Jesus, we too will have our crucifixions. More than one grave awaits us. Yet our faith in the resurrection invites us precisely to live beyond these. As John Shea once so aptly put it: What the resurrection teaches us is not how to live – but how to live again, and again, and again!

G.K. Chesterton, whom we quoted earlier, was also fond of saying: “Learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. Familiarity is the greatest of all illusions.” In essence, that captures one of the real challenges of believing in the resurrection. If the resurrection is to have power in our lives, we must give up the illusion of familiarity, particularly as this pertains to all that’s nearest to us because the most common cancer that eats away at our marriages, families, communities, friendships, and simply at the joy we might have in living, is precisely the cancer of familiarity. We think we know, we think we understand, we think we have things figured-out, and we end up psyching-out life and each other, leaving them no room for newness, for surprise, for the unfamiliar, for the resurrection.

Familiarity breeds contempt. Nothing robs us of joy more than that and nothing destroys our marriages, families, communities, and friendships more than a contemptuousness that is born of familiarity. The resurrection tells us that familiarity is an illusion, the greatest of all illusions. It invites us to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again because, in the end, a startling, delightful surprise is hidden in all that is familiar.

The Tearing of the Temple Veil

April 16, 2000

There are so many haunting lines in the passion narratives. Who of us, for instance, is not stirred in the soul when the passion story is read in church and we come to the part where Jesus takes his last breath and there is that minute of silence, where we all drop to our knees? No Good Friday homily is ever as effective as that single line (“he gave up his spirit”) and the moving silence that ensues.

Another such line that has always haunted me is the one that follows immediately after. Jesus dies and we are told that, at the very second of his death, “the veil of the temple was torn in two, from top to bottom.” My imagination, even when I was very little, has always been able to picture that. I have this picture in my mind of it growing dark in the middle of the day and then at the second of Jesus’ death, almost as if by lightening, the temple veil is ripped from top to bottom while everyone looks on stunned, convinced now, too late, that the person they’ve just mocked and crucified is the Christ. It’s a great picture. But, my imagination aside, what is really meant by that phrase that the veil of the temple ripped open at the moment of Jesus’ death?

Biblical scholars tell us that the veil of the temple was precisely a curtain. It hid the holy of holies. The ordinary worshipper in the temple could not see what was behind it. It shielded a person from the great mystery. Thus, when the gospel writers say that at the precise moment of Jesus’ death the temple veil was ripped apart from top to bottom, the point they are making is not, as my imagination would want it, that God shredded what was most precious to the those who crucified Jesus to show them how wrong they were. No. The point is rather this: The temple-veil was understood to hide the mystery of God from the people. In the crucifixion that mystery is laid open for everyone to see. Jesus’ death, understood properly, shows the inner workings of God. It rips away our false understandings of God and shows us what God really looks like. And what do we see behind the veil? Among other things, we see a God who spills his own blood to reach through to us rather than want us to spill ours to reach through to Him/Her. What is meant by this?

There is a centuries-old question that asks why Jesus had to die in so horrible a manner. Why all this blood? What kind of cosmic and divine game is being played out here? Is Christ’s blood, the blood of the lamb, somehow paying someone off for the sin of Adam and Eve and for our own sins? Why does blood need to be spilled?

This is complex question and every answer that can be given is only a very partial one. We are dealing with the greatest of all mysteries here. However even mysteries can be partially understood. One of the reasons why Jesus dies in this way – one of the reasons for all the blood – is clear and its implications are profound. It has precisely to do with blood.

From the beginning of time right up until the crucifixion of Jesus, all cultures sacrificed blood to their gods. Why blood? Because blood is so identified with the life-principle. Blood carries life, is life, and its loss is death. Thus it shouldn’t be surprising to us that everywhere in ancient cultures the idea was present that what we owe to God is blood, that God needs blood. In their view of things, blood was the only language that God really understood. So they felt that they should be offering blood to God. And they did. For a long time, this included human blood. Humans were killed on altars everywhere. Eventually however many cultures eliminated explicit human sacrifice and used animals instead. By the time of Jesus, the temple had become a giant butchery with priests killing animals nearly non-stop. Some scholars suggest that when Jesus upset the money changers’ tables in the temple about 90% of commerce in Jerusalem was in one way or the other connected with animal sacrifice. No small wonder Jesus’ action was perceived as a threat!

So why all that blood at Jesus’ death? Because, as Richard Rohr so aptly put it, for all these centuries we have been spilling blood to try to get to God and, in the crucifixion, things get reversed: God spills his own blood to try to get to us. It’s this reversal that rips open the old veil of fear, the false belief that God wants blood. God does not want us to spill blood to get to Him/Her. We are not meant to live in fear of God. All the blood in the crucifixion of Jesus is meant to tell us that.

The Desert of Gethsemane

April 9, 2000

There’s a remarkable expression in popular language that describes one of the most painful moments within Jesus’ life, his “agony in the garden”. The phrases describes his inner struggle the night before he died. That struggle and venue, the garden, are the ultimate desert and our response to what we do battle with there becomes our defining moment. We see this clearly in Jesus’ life:

The evangelists tell us that, after the last supper, Jesus went out into the garden of Gethsemane where he prayed in great agony and, in the face of every kind of resistance within himself, ultimately accepted what his Father was asking of him, sacrifice and death. But it wasn’t easy. He is described as “sweating blood”. Why? What is he struggling with in Gethsemane?

Sometimes devotional literature idealizes this. It tells us that Jesus suffered so greatly in Gethsemane because, albeit he was God, he was tasting our sins and foreseeing that his death, so brutal and painful, would not be appropriated by all people. These are pious thoughts, not quite in line with scripture. What we are told in scripture is that his agony takes place in a garden, an archetypal place. As we know from anthropology and fairy tales, the garden, in its real sense, is not a place where one goes for onions and cucumbers. It is the place of love, the place where the prince and princess meet to kiss in the moonlight, the place of our dreams, the paradise that Adam and Eve lost for us. It is there, in the garden, the place of love, that Jesus sweats blood. Thus he sweats blood not as the great teacher or magus, nor as the great king or shepherd, nor even as the great conqueror of sin and death, the divine warrior. No. He sweats blood as the great lover. That is too why the gospel accounts of his sufferings that follow emphasize not his physical sufferings, which surely were horrific, but his abandonment by his friends. It is Jesus the lover who sweats blood in the garden and who is betrayed, abandoned, and crucified.

So what happens to him in the garden? Partly this is obvious, partly it is not. In the garden, Jesus has to make a decision to accept something. What? A sacrificial death? Surely. But something else as well. The garden is too the place where he has to make a choice as to what his love will ultimately be guided by. It’s this decision that costs him blood. What’s being said here?

My own dad, who taught me many of the things I trust most deeply about faith and life, used to say: “If you want to keep a commitment, any commitment, you can do it only if you are willing to sweat blood in a garden. To be true to what’s asked of you, sometimes you have to make a decision for value that goes against every emotion in your heart.” He understood what’s at stake in the garden. Tragically, for the most part, we no longer do. Allow me a paradigmatic illustration:

Several years ago, I sat with a friend who was trying to explain to me the reasons for his impending divorce. He was thirty-five years old, the father of three children, and had been married for nearly ten years. By all indications his marriage had not been a bad one, in fact, it had generally exhibited signs of considerable health. Moreover he was good-hearted and sincere, a person who would have been horrified to hear himself described as a womanizer, as unfaithful, as calloused, or as irresponsible. What had happened? Quite simply he fell in love with someone else and now this new relationship was negating his marriage. So he spoke in this way: “This new love is more important than everything else in my life, including my wife and kids. It would be inhuman not to actualize it. I didn’t ask for this. It just happened! I know there are some awful consequences but this is what I have to do. I have no real choice now – I’m in love!” Sound case? Good logic? Yes. Cupid can be cruel. He’s a victim of love after all, isn’t he? Or is he?

Somewhere between the spontaneous flirting and the stolen dinners and lies to his wife and the initiation of a physical and sexual relationship, this man would have needed to spend some time in garden, bleeding blood, subjecting what comes naturally to a higher truth, lying prostrate in helplessness and grief as Jesus did, in order to sweat out his marriage vows and be taught almost against his will what is the price of real commitment. Time in the love’s desert, the garden of Gethsemane, might have changed his decision. But he didn’t go there. So today he is married to someone else.

Agony and ecstasy. Gethsemane and paradise. Love and infidelity. Betrayal and heroism. These things happen in the garden. Every lover makes his or her defining decision there.

The Desert – the place of God’s Closeness

April 2, 2000

In her biography, The Long Loneliness, Dorothy Day shares how, shortly after her conversion to Catholicism, she went through a painful, desert time. She had just given birth to her daughter and her decision to have the child baptized, coupled with her profession of faith, meant the end of her relationship with a man she deeply loved. She suddenly found herself alone. All her old supports had been cut off and she was left with no money, no job, few friends, no practical dream, and no companionship from the person she loved the most deeply in this world. For a while she just stumbled on, trusting that things would soon get better. They didn’t. She remained in this desert.

One day, not knowing what else to do, she took a train from New York to Washington to spend a day praying at the National Shrine of Our Lady. Her prayer there was wrenching, naked. She describes how she laid bare her helplessness, spilling out her confusion, her doubts, her fears, and her temptations to bitterness and despair. In essence, she said to God: “I have given up everything that ever supported me, in trust, to you. I have nothing left to hold on to. You need to do something for me, soon. I can’t keep this up much longer!” She was, biblically speaking, in the desert – alone, without support, helpless before a chaos that threatened to overwhelm her – and, as was the case with Jesus, both in the desert and in Gethsemane, God “sent angels to minister to her.” God steadied her in the chaos. She caught a train back to New York and, that very night, as walked up to her apartment she saw a man sitting there. His name was Peter Maurin and the rest is history. Together they started the Catholic Worker. We should not be surprised that her prayer had such a tangible result. The desert, scripture assures us, is the place where God is specially near.

Martin Luther King shares a similar story. In, Stride Towards Freedom, he relates how one night a hate-filled phone call shook him to his depths and plunged him into a desert of fear. Here are his words:

An angry voice said:”Listen, nigger, we’ve taken all we want from you; before next week you’ll be sorry you ever came to Montgomery.” I hung up, but I couldn’t sleep. It seemed that all of my fears had come down on me at once. I had reached the saturation point. I got out of bed and began to walk the floor. Finally I went to the kitchen and heated a pot of coffee. I was ready to give up. With my coffee sitting untouched before me I tried to think of a way to move out of the picture without appearing a coward. In this state of exhaustion, when my courage had all but gone, I decided to take my problem to God. With my head in my hand, I bowed over the kitchen table and prayed aloud. The words I spoke to God that midnight are still vivid in my memory.

“I am here taking a stand for what I believe is right. But now I am afraid. The people are looking to me for leadership and if I stand before them without strength and courage, they too will falter. I am at the end of my powers. I have nothing left. I’ve come to the point where I can’t take it alone.” At that moment I experienced the presence of the Divine as I had never experienced Him before.

God sends his angels to minister to us when we are in the desert and in the garden of Gethsemane. This incident in Martin Luther King’s life demonstrates how.

The desert, as we know, is the place where, stripped of all that normally nourishes and supports us, we are exposed to chaos, raw fear, and demons of every kind. In the desert we are exposed, body and soul, made vulnerable to be overwhelmed by chaos and temptations of every kind. But, precisely because we are so stripped of everything we normally rely on, this is also a privileged moment for grace. Why? Because all the defense mechanisms, support systems, and distractions that we normally surround ourselves with so as to keep chaos and fear at bay work at the same time to keep much of God’s grace at bay. What we use to buoy us up wards off both chaos and grace, demons and the divine alike. Conversely, when we are helpless we are open. That is why the desert is both the place of chaos and the place of God’s closeness. It is no accident that Dorothy Day and Martin Luther King felt God’s presence so unmistakeably just at that point in their lives where they had lost everything that could support them. They were in the desert. Scripture assures us that it is there that God can send angels to minister to us.

Facing our Demons in the Desert

March 19, 2000

We live lives of tortured complexity. Inside each of us there is both a saint and a sinner and enough complexity to write our own book on abnormal psychology. Our hearts are a murky caldron of grace and sin, angels and demons. Always, it seems, we are torn in a way that leaves us feeling unsure, guilty, and tense. It is no simple task being a human being.

Henri Nouwen, in commenting on this, once described himself this way: “My fears and resulting fatigue over the last three years might well be diagnosed as a lack of single-mindedness, as a lack of simplicity. Indeed, how divided my heart has been and still is! I want to love God, but also to make a career. I want to be a good Christian, but also have my successes as a teacher, preacher, or speaker. I want to be a saint, but also enjoy the sensations of the sinner. I want to be close to Christ but also popular and liked by people. No wonder that living becomes a tiring enterprise.” (The Genesee Diary). This could be a description of any soul, yours, mine. Jung was right, energy is not always friendly. It brings with it a host of demons.

Demons, Jesus tells us, are to be confronted in the desert. The desert is that place where one does battle with satan. What exactly does that mean? Is satan, the devil, to be conceived of as a personified force, a fallen archangel, Lucifer? Or is satan a code name for that vast range of inner disturbances (addictions, scars, paranoia, fear, bitterness, and sexual wounds) that habitually torment us? What exactly are the principalities and powers that are beyond us? That question is not so important here. Whether the devil is a person, an addiction, or a paranoia, in the end we still need to do battle at exactly the same place. Most of us are not called upon to confront the satan of classical exorcisms. Rather we meet satan in the same way that the prodigal son and his older brother met him, in weakness and bitterness. Ultimately these are the demons that must be met. The venue for that meeting, scripture tells us, is the desert.

To go into the desert means to stare our inner chaos in the face. What demons live inside this chaos? The demons of the prodigal son and his older brother – the demons of grandiosity, loneliness, and unbridled sexuality and the demons of paranoia, woundedness, and joylessness. What faces do these take?

Grandiosity is the demon that tells us that we are the centre of the universe, that our lives are more important than those of others. This is a demon manifest in our daydreams, in those inner cassette tapes we play where we are always the special one, the superstar, the one singled out for greatness. This is the demon of self-preoccupation and self-centredness, forever urging us to stand out, to be special. Loneliness is the demon of unhealthy restlessness. This is a demon of fear which torments us by telling us constantly that, at the end of the day, we will be alone, unloved, excluded, outside the circle. It makes us pathologically restless and desperate, looking always for someone or something that can take our loneliness away. Unbridled sexuality is the demon of obsession, addiction, lust. It makes us believe that sex (or some such pleasure) is a panacea, the final salvation, or, if not that, at least the best this world can offer. Its urges is to bracket everything else – sacred commitment, moral ideal, and consequences for ourselves and others – for a single, furtive pleasure. It is a demon with ten thousand faces obsessing us all, whether we admit it or not.

Paranoia is the demon of bitterness, anger, and jealousy. It makes us believe that life has cheated us, that we have not been given our just place, that the celebration is always about others and never about us. This demon fills us with the urge to be cynical, cold, distrustful, and cursing. Woundedness is the demon that tells us that our innocence and wholeness is irretrievably broken and that, for us, it is too late. The best we can do now is to take consolation in comfort, food, drink, pornography, drugs, or some such thing. Finally, the last demon in this family is that of joylessness, the demon of self-pity which tells us that joylessness is maturity, that cynicism is wisdom, and that bitterness is justice. This is the demon that keeps us from entering the room of celebration and joining the dance.

All of these demons are inside every one of us. To stare them in the face is to enter the desert. A scary thing? Yes, but the scriptures assure us that, if we do muster the courage to face them, God sends angels to minister to us and these angels bring along calm, restfulness, patience, empathy, humility, solicitude, joy, playfulness, and humour.