Re-Imaging Jesus

September 3, 2000

My teenage years were a time of considerable loneliness. I remember myself only too well as a teen, driven by restlessness, haunted by unspoken dreams, full of youthful grandiosity, unsure of myself, shuffling hesitantly in the stag-line at the local dance.

It was at this time in my life that I was fascinated by Shakespeare’s Hamlet. I read the play over and over again and watched it almost a dozen times at school. The figure of Hamlet spoke deeply to my mood at the time for I was restless and lonely and I admired precisely this kind of anti-hero – the loner, the figure haunted by deep melancholy, the man of secrets so paralysed by the world’s infidelity that he himself could never be happy and dance. Hamlet provided me with this, someone enigmatically silent, apart from others, sarcastic, unhappily at odds with all that is warm, domestic, and normal. Youthful restlessness and grandiosity want this kind of hero, the archetypal trickster, the wounded romantic, the embittered Christ-child, and the hero who is alone. The man or woman who radiates this is the perfect idol for the lonely teen. Literature and movies thrive on just this kind of hero, the Clint-Eastwood-type Christ figure.

There is something perennially intriguing in this image. So it is no accident that we often project it onto Jesus and define him precisely as the enigmatic Hamlet, the loner, the man haunted by hidden dreams, the one unable to dance. This kind of image doesn’t just colour the way teenagers think of Jesus, it is present as well, too much so, within our mainstream conception of Christ. Small wonder we often struggle to have a personal relationship with Jesus, to pray to him, and to have him as our confidant. Loners intrigue us, but what they radiate is the antithesis of the kingdom. No Hamlet inspires or invites prayer. We need an image of Jesus that does.

Philip Cunningham recently wrote a book on Jesus that he accurately entitled: A Believer’s Search for the Jesus of History (Paulist Press, N.J., 1999). What Cunningham does, and does very well, is to summarize the research of the major academic books on Christ that have been written in the last ten years as these pertain to what can be said about the actual person of Jesus. What can be said? Kind of person was the Jesus of history (as the person who undergirds the Christ of faith)?

Cunningham suggests that if we take the words of Luke (2,52) that describe Jesus’ hidden years (“He increased in wisdom and in years, and in divine and human favour.”) and read them in the light of Jesus’ public life a certain picture emerges. Far from being a loner and a Hamlet, everything about Jesus radiates the opposite. It seems that he grew up happily, quite comfortable in the rhythms of family, community, and rural life. When he began his ministry, he already knew how to celebrate at table with family, how to banter, argue, tell stories, share food, drink wine, and be part of the ordinary follies, tragedies, and joys of everyday living. All his preaching (whose very health and robustness set it apart) suggests that he, Jesus, was no stranger to intimacy, community, and enjoyment. The Jesus who stepped onto the world stage at age thirty, unlike Hamlet or any other tragic anti-hero, radiated a vigorous health, a capacity to fully share in community, an extraordinary resiliency, a rare capacity to forgive and let go, and an ability to enjoy life that could scandalize others.

As Cunningham puts it, by every indication, “he grew up in the midst of family, friends and fellow villagers. Like his father before him, he pursued the trade of a woodworker, but there were also animals to care for, most likely fields to cultivate, bartering to do, all the daily tasks that make up peasant life. … He was part of his world, not set apart from it. Later we will see him constantly surrounded by people. This did not mark a change in his lifestyle; he had lived that way for thirty years or more. Frequent scenes will show Jesus at table with disciples, even enemies, engaged in the banter that characterizes such gatherings. These were continuations of the “family” meals he had been part of during his hidden years.” (pp. 28-29)

Jesus has been depicted in many ways, more recently even as a laughing Christ whose laughter mocks death and tragedy. There is truth in that image, though we must be careful too to not make Jesus, who knew only too well the depth of loneliness and suffering, into someone who is distant from depression, exclusion, tragic circumstance, and death. On the other hand, we must be equally as careful not to confuse Jesus with Hamlet or any other tragic anti-hero who lives without the resiliency, hope, faith, forgiveness, capacity for enjoyment, sense of humour, and abandonment to the dance that come from believing in God and the resurrection.

The Tyranny of Program

August 27, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A Spirituality of Parenting

August 20, 2000

Christian theology has generally been weak in its treatise on marriage. Somehow the earthiness of the incarnation, so evident elsewhere, has been slow to spill over into our thinking about marriage, sex, and family.

There are reasons for this of course, among them the fact that often those writing the books on marriage are themselves not married, but celibate monks and nuns. There are other issues as well. In the early church, the influence of manicheanism made the church somewhat reticent to genuinely celebrate the goodness of sex and marriage and, later on, the monastic ideal (of celibate life outside of marriage) came to be so identified with holiness that marriage, sex, and parenting were not seen as having within them the same inherent, privileged path to sanctity as celibacy and the monastic life. Monastic life was seen as a “higher state”, an elite path to holiness not available to anyone married. Granted, there was always a theology that taught that one’s duties of state, such as the demands inherent in parenting, were a certain conscriptive path to holiness, but, in the end, this didn’t add up to a full, wholesome theology of marriage, sex, and parenting.

Recently at a conference in Collegeville, I heard a talk given by Dr. Wendy Wright, a mother and theologian. She spoke wonderfully of a spirituality of parenting. In essence, she suggested that raising children, being a mum or a dad, is a privileged means to holiness and [my addition] a more natural path to maturity than is monasticism. Simply put, very few other experiences, perhaps none, are as naturally geared to break the casings of our inherent selfishness as is the experience of child-raising. To see your own child is to feel what God must feel when God looks at us. Parenting, in the end, is the most natural path to holiness and maturity, the conscriptive martyr’s belt around us that takes us where we would rather not go. Becoming a parent, submits Dr. Wright, reshapes the heart in a unique way, molding it more and more to be compassionate as God is compassionate. Here are some of her thoughts:

    Being a mother or a father stretches the heart, just as the womb is stretched in pregnancy. This is because, among all loves, parental love is perhaps the one that most pulls your heart out of its self-love. Parenting reshapes the core of your being to help you to love more like God loves. Seeing your own child’s fragility and morality, works to create in you feelings of inexpressible tenderness that help you feel what God must feel when God looks at us. To be a parent is to be formed in a school of love.

One of the first lessons this school teaches you is welcome: To be a parent is to have to permanently open your heart, life, and plans so as to create a unique space in them for someone else, your child. To be a mother or a father is to let your dreams and agenda be forever altered.

The next lesson this school of love teaches is flexibility: To be a parent is to nurture a child as he or she passes through very different stages of growth (infancy, toddler, kindergarten, elementary school, a teen with raging hormones and a raging attitude, a young adult, an adult with his or her own responsibilities and unique sorrows). Moreover, if you have more than one child, each has a very unique personality that you must adapt your love towards. All of this demands that you constantly grow, re-adjust, adapt, let go, learn to love in a new way.

A flexible heart is a discerning heart, it picks up each moment and discerns the true and the false voices within it. It asks, in each moment, “Where does love lie for my child in all this?” This is a demanding task for a parent, one within which (as Wright so well puts it) “looking good is not the point!”

Finally, being a parent should naturally lead you to shape your heart for reconciliation. Love is all about forgiving, again and again and again. Families survive only if this is happening. A parent is meant to be the compassion of God, the father and mother of the prodigal son and bitter brother who embraces the child not because the child is worthy, but in spite of all unworthiness. A parent must ever say in word and attitude: “Return as far as you can and I will come the rest of the way.”

All of these things can, of course, be done by anyone, not just biological parents. However for a mum or a dad, there is a certain naturalness in it, a conscriptive rhythm written by nature itself. To be a parent is to find oneself enrolled in an elite school of love, a true monastery that is every bit as ascetical and grace-producing as any monastery ever praised by the great spiritual writers.

A Not-so-subtle Return to the Survival of the Fittest

August 13, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Where the Cross is Forever Erected

August 6, 2000

Something inside us, a defective gene in the moral DNA of the planet perhaps, must account for the fact that we are forever crucifying what’s gentle, innocent, and guileless. Nature itself, is often brutal, rationalizing, generous only to the aggressor, disdaining of that which cannot, or will not, defend itself. Evolution is, after all, about the survival of the fittest, the calloused. It assigns a different role to the gentle and guileless. They are to be the lightening rods around which bitterness and cruelty can constellate and vent themselves. Consequently we generally erect the cross where it is least deserved. Allow me an example:

Twenty-five years ago, Toni Morrison, who recently won the Nobel prize for literature, wrote a book entitled, The Bluest Eye. The book, like the girl whose story it narrates, was originally trivialized, dismissed, and misread. However it eventually found its audience and its vindication, as sometimes happens to what gets crucified.

The Bluest Eye is the story of a young, black girl, Pecola, upon whom neither nature nor luck have smiled. She lacks physical beauty, self-confidence, a decent family, mentoring of any kind, and love of every kind. Yet she is gentle and innocent, a good person. She is also guileless, but with that particular brand of artlessness that attracts the bully, brings on scorn and pity, and makes canon-fodder for gossip. From the opening lines of the story, you already know that Good Friday soon awaits her.

You don’t have long to wait. Just after puberty, when she is a child still really, she is raped and impregnated by her own father. She bears the child, though it dies soon after birth, and she is left on her own to sort this out which, of course, she cannot. Eventually, and this is where the defective gene in the moral DNA of the planet comes in, she is herself seen as somehow morally defective, as of no consequence. Her escape is daydreams. She makes believe that she is beautiful, that she has the loveliest blue eyes in the world, but illusion, as we know, is not reality and she ends up alone, a used bottle, insignificant, discarded, another item in a garbage can.

In telling her story, Morrison, with her enormous talent, paints some truly memorable descriptions of how her poverty, the poverty of her kind, is generally perceived by us, the outsiders. In essence, to us, her poverty is an affront: “They were everywhere. They slept six in a bed, all their pee mixing together in the night as they wet their beds each in his own candy-and-potato-chip dream. In the long hot days, they idled away, picking plaster from the walls and digging into the earth with sticks. They sat in little rows on street curbs, crowded into pews in church, taking space from the nice, neat, coloured children; they clowned on the playgrounds, broke things in dime stores, ran in front of you on the street, made ice slides on the sloped sidewalks in winter. … Grass wouldn’t grow where they lived. Flowers died. Shades fell down. Tin cans and tires blossomed where they lived. They lived on cold black-eyed peas and orange pop. Like flies they hovered, like flies they settled.” (The Bluest Eye, p. 92)

Morrison ends the book with these lines: “And now we see her searching the garbage-for what? The thing we assassinated? I talk about how I did not plant the seeds too deeply, how it is the fault of the earth, the land, of our town. I even think now that the land of the entire country was hostile to marigolds that year. This soil is bad for certain kinds of flowers. Certain seeds it will not nurture, certain fruit it will not bear, and when the land kills of its own volition, we acquiesce and say the victim had no right to live. We are wrong, of course, but it doesn’t matter. It’s too late. At least on the edge of my town, among the garbage and the sunflowers of my town, it’s much, much too late.” (p. 206)

In the accounts of Jesus’ death in the gospels, we have that curious incident where Pontius Pilate, drawing on a law that allowed the governor to release a prisoner every year at the passover, brings Jesus out before the crowd and offers to release him. The crowd however prefers that he release to them Barabbas, a convicted murderer. Curious. They want a murderer released and the one whom they know to be innocent crucified. Why?

That’s the defective moral gene inside the DNA of the planet. Toni Morrison simply puts words to it: An entire country can be hostile to flowers in a certain year; the land can kill of its own volition; and we, like the crowd at the crucifixion of Jesus, can too easily say that the victim has no right to live and that we prefer instead to have Barabbas released to us.

Suicide – Some Misconceptions

July 30, 2000

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Amazement as Blocking Compassion

July 23, 2000

Some years ago, when I was still a professor of theology, I received a phone call from one of the local parish priests, complaining about the unsettling effect that some of our students were having in his parish. His words: “They’re a pain in the neck! They take a few courses, come back to their parishes, and are elitist and condescending, no liturgy or parish program is good enough for them any more. I don’t doubt that they’re right in their principles, but … don’t you teach them any compassion!”

The priest here cannot accurately name what the problem is, but the gospels do. This is what the gospels would call an incident of amazement; a minor one surely, but a real one nonetheless. These students are amazed in the biblical sense because they are caught up in an energy, however positive, without holding and compassionately shaping that energy before giving it expression. They are letting an energy simply act through them, as if they were mindless electrical conduits rather than hearts and minds meant to gestate compassion. To be amazed, biblically, is to let energy (be it positive or negative) simply flow through you without holding, pondering, and transforming it.

We see many examples of this in the crowds that follow Jesus in the gospels. Frequently, just after Jesus has performed some great deed or spoken with particular power, we hear the gospel say: “And the people were amazed.” Almost always Jesus is quick to say: “Don’t be amazed!” In the gospels, amazement is not a good thing. That is also true for life in general; with a few exceptions, sporting events and rock concerts. What is wrong with being amazed is that while it makes for zesty group-spirit and some spirited events, it also makes for mob scenes, group hysteria, and crucifixions. It almost always works against compassion. Jesus knew this well and feared amazement. He knew that the same people, caught up in good energy, who wanted to make him king could just as easily five days later be caught up in a different kind of energy and that could prompt shouts of: “Crucify him!” When one is simply a conduit for whatever energy happens to be in the air, things can change rather quickly. The cheers of football matches can, as we know, very easily turn into the mindlessness of rioting and destruction.

In his outstanding book on violence, Gil Bailie, quotes a Salvadoran officer who had ordered the rape and massacre of some 767 people in 1981. After the massacre, that officer is reported to have said to his troops: “What we did yesterday, and the day before, this is called war. This is what war is. War is hell. … Now, I don’t want to hear that, afterward, while you are out drinking … you’re whining and complaining about this, about how terrible it was. I don’t want to hear that. Because what we did yesterday, what we’ve been doing on this operation – this is war, gentlemen. This is what war is.” Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, commenting on this in the New York Times, simply says: “You can only stare in dumbfounded horror. There is no one to blame but the gods of war.” (Violence Unveiled, pp. 266-268)

Who or what indeed are the gods of war? They are precisely the forces of amazement – non-questioned and non-pondered energy that is never held long enough so as to be transformed by somebody’s heart. Such energy, since it is then precisely heartless, takes on a life of its own and is just as easily the force that makes for gang-rapes as it is the force for any positive spirit.

Biblically the opposite of amazement is pondering. This is what Mary does under the cross and what Jesus does in the Garden of Gethsemane, they ponder. To ponder is to take in energy, hold it in tension (in agonizing tension sometimes), and then carry it until it can be transformed so as not to be heartless. To ponder is to take the energy the enters us and shape it by compassion.

We see this in Jesus: He took in hatred, but gave back love; took in curses, but gave back blessing; took in violence, but gave back forgiveness; and took in bitterness, but gave back graciousness. Energy did not blindly and heartlessly flow through him as it does when there is a thunderous cheer at a football game, as it does when a group of hormonally-charged teens vandalize a building, as it does when the starry-eyed first fervour of a new theology student (where a little learning is a dangerous thing) expresses itself in arrogance and condescension, or as it does when “the gods of war” unloose rape and massacre. Rather, by sweating blood, Jesus always first held the energy long enough so that he was not a simple conduit of group-energy, responding in kind, hate for hate, love for love, amazement.

Amazement is the antithesis of compassion. Don’t be amazed! That warning comes from Jesus.

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.