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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

One of the great ironies in life is that, too often, success brings more unhappiness, jealousy, and destructiveness than joy, blessing, and harmony into the world. Daily our newspapers carry the familiar headlines: Millionaire superstar arrested on drug charges. Movie star found dead of overdose. Star football player hasn’t talked to parents in 15 years. Baseball star jailed for spousal abuse. Pop idol arrested for drunken driving. Rock star dead of unknown causes at age 33. Those are the big headlines, but these things happen in our lives at another level. Our successes and achievements are often the cause of self-centredness, arrogance, jealousy, and destructiveness both inside ourselves and within our relationships.

Why? Why is that the things which should bring us happiness, admiration, and harmony, so often bring us the opposite? Are success, admiration, and money bad? No. All good things come from God, success and money included. What is bad is that, too often, these are attained before a person has been sufficiently prepared to handle them. Then they destroy rather than build up. In biblical terms, what happens is that someone enters the promised land before spending sufficient time in the desert.

A bit grandiose perhaps? Why throw a biblical cloak over something that can be more easily explained by immaturity, addiction, too much money, arrogance, being a prima madonna, having an inflated ego, and the pressures of success?  Why dignify these with high biblical references? Because they so clearly illustrate the spiritual truth: Before possessing the promised land there must first be a time in the desert. What is meant by this? The desert, biblically and mystically, is not so much a physical place, a geography, as a place in the heart. The desert is that place where we go to face our demons, feel our smallness, be in a special intimacy with God, and prepare ourselves for the promised land.

The idea of the desert as a place of purification has deep biblical roots. The scriptures tell us that, before they could enter into the promised land, the Israelites had to first wander in the desert for forty years – letting themselves be led by God, undergoing many trials, and swallowing much impatience. A long period of uprooting and frustration preceded the prosperity of the promised land. This was God’s planning. Thus the desert came to be seen as the place that correctly shapes the heart and the idea developed that one should prepare oneself for major transitions by first spending some time in the desert. Initially this was taken quite literally and religious men and women looking for purification would often go off into some actual physical desert and stay there for a time. Jesus did this. After his baptism, he went off for “forty days” into the Sinai desert. 

Later, as the scriptures developed, the concept of desert was de-literalized. It was taken to mean more a place in the heart than a place on a map and was understood to be a mystical thing: Before you are ready to fully and gratefully receive life, you have to first be readied by facing your own demons and this means going “into the desert”, namely, entering that place where you are most frightened, lonely, and threatened. “Every tear brings the messiah closer!” This was a refrain in Jewish apocalyptic literature and expressed the belief that a certain quota of tears had first to be shed before any true joy could inhabit us. A quota of suffering must precede any worthwhile happiness. They understood this mystically, not literally. In order to be filled by God one must first be emptied.   

The desert does this for you. It empties you. Hence it is not a place wherein you can decide how you want to grow and change, but is a place that you undergo, expose yourself to, and have the courage to face. The idea is not so much that you do things there, but that things happen to you while there – silent, unseen, transforming things. The desert purifies you, almost against your will, through God’s efforts. In the desert, what really occurs is a cosmic confrontation between God and the devil; though this happens within and through you. Your job is only to be have the courage to be there. The idea is that God does the work, providing you have the courage to show up.

In terms of an image, this is what the season of lent is meant to be, time in the desert to courageously face the chaos and the demons within us and to let God do battle with them through us. The result is that we are purified, made ready, so that the intoxicating joy of Easter might then serve to bind us more closely to God and each other rather than trigger in us the kind of things that land our name in a headline: Charged with drunk-drinking!

Nihilism has a curious variety of faces. Generally we think of it as some gloomy, philosophical ideology within which God does not exist, nothing means anything, and suicide is explored as a positive option. Thus, we think of people like Nietzsche (God is dead!), Albert Camus (Everything is indifferent!), Art Schopenhauer (What are the pros and cons of suicide?), and our present-day deconstructionists who have shredded all the old agreed-upon canons of excellence and standards of heroism. This is nihilism’s sullen, abstract face, inviting us to a joylessness which it defines as maturity.

But nihilism also has another face, a rather pleasant one. This variety might be called “the nihilism of Seinfeld”, after Jerry Seinfeld, the brilliant American comedian who has made himself a household word and millions of dollars by, as he puts it, “being about nothing!” His celebrated sitcom and his stand-up routines are so popular precisely because of his exceptional ability to trivialize everything in a way that makes it light, funny, and disconnected from all the soul-scarring pain that betrayal, wounded sexuality, and death bring into the world. In this kind of nihilism, nothing means anything because everything is a joke. Nothing is heavy and sullen because nothing carries enough meaning to make it heavy and sullen. Life is a laugh: so, smile, cut your losses, and move on with some style. There will be more laughs in the future. This has become the literary genre for the television sitcom, the talk show, and the stand-up comic today. Jerry Seinfeld simply does it better than most others. However whether it’s Jay Leno’s monologues, David Letterman’s top-ten lists, or Monty Python’s the meaning of life, the bottom-line is the same, nothing means anything … and isn’t that a pleasant thought! In the end all will be well, and all will be funny, and every manner of being will prove itself to be a huge joke! Post-modern nihilism, in a nutshell.

Not all of this is bad, mind you. Wit, humour, and a pleasant face shouldn’t too quickly be dismissed. I learned this from my own mother. As a young, over-intense seminarian, at home during a break in my studies, I was rather shocked to see my own mother, a very pious woman, watching Laugh-In (a Monty Python-type, irreverent, television series which was popular in America in the late 1960s). To my young mind, this was a highly amoral program. I expressed my anxiety: “Mum, you’re watching this!” Her answer: “It makes me laugh when I’m feeling down!” She was sensitive enough not to point out that her over-pompous, uptight, dour, seminarian-son did always have that same uplifting effect on her. “It makes me laugh when I am feeling down!” Not a bad thing at all. My mother knew the value of the court jester.

But, the value of laughter and the brilliance of the Jerry Seinfelds of this world notwithstanding, nihilism is still nihilism and, pleasant face or not, it has a subtle, pernicious underside. In the end, it helps kill hope. As Seinfeld himself puts it: “I’m about nothing!” Tragically too, but in real life, so generally are the rest of us. That is the point: Too often we are about nothing. Everything is a joke and so we are a people without big dreams, without the capacity to really build anything, without a real sustaining vision, and without the capacity to sacrifice present comfort for anything beyond the immediate sweetening of life. Such is the effect when everything is trivialized.

That is the antithesis of hope. Hope, as a virtue, should never be confused with simple optimism (“The bottle is never half empty!”), an upbeat atmosphere (Disneyland), or with the capacity to laugh when things are bad (“Send in the clowns!”). Neither is it a gritty stoicism  (“I’ll not feel sorry for myself, even though everything is meaningless!”) or wishful thinking (“Believe in it long enough and it will happen!”). What is it?

To hope is to be nurtured and sustained by a great belief, by a great ideal that is based upon a promise made by a power beyond our own, God. To hope is to live in the belief that, all appearances notwithstanding, ultimately God will give us a world within which the lion and lamb will lie down together, where love and peace will triumph, and wherein all tears will be valued and wiped away. To hope is to let such a great ideal empower us so as to sacrifice private ego, private comfort, private embrace, and even life itself, if necessary, for some great future, communal embrace. Post-modern nihilism is helping kill such hope.

Humour is a wonderful thing. My mother drank its medicine, even when it sometimes made light of what she held dear. Unfortunately today we often aren’t as discriminating. We like what makes us laugh, but aren’t always careful enough with what we hold dear. The danger is that we end up like Nietzsche, except with a much more pleasant face.