In Defense of Chastity in a Post-Chaste Culture

February 20, 2000

Allan Bloom, the famed educator, with no religious agenda whatsoever, once suggested that lack of chastity is, singularly, the biggest reason why there isn’t a stronger passion for life among people, especially the young, in the Western world. In his view, our “eros has gone lame”, flat. We are without high ideals, our horizons are narrow, cynicism has replaced passion (even about sex), nothing is sublime any more, and we relate to each other under a rather paltry symbolic hedge. He stated the issue in a graphic way: “Plato’s students talked about their `immortal longings’, our own children talk about `being horny'”. That speaks volumes about a difference in ideals and passion. The problem, he suspects, is not that we are post-modern but that we are post-chaste.

It’s interesting to see chastity so defended by a purely secular analyst because today, in Western culture, chastity is for the most part denigrated and vilified in the arts, in education, in intellectual circles, and in the popular culture. There are degrees to this: First, chastity is commonly seen as a timidity. To be chaste is to be frigid, uptight, asexual, lacking in nerve. Chastity then is seen as something which is backwards, anti-erotic and anti-delight, an unhealthy hangover from our religious past. This is common in the popular mind. However, lots of critics go further: In their view, the defensive of chastity is not only wrong because it’s an abusive moralizing intrusion into people’s private lives, but, more importantly, it’s bad because it continues to inject unhealthy guilt about sexuality into the collective unconscious: How wonderful the world could be if fundamentalists didn’t forever perpetuate hangups about sex! Among many of the novelists, critics, and even religious people that I read, preaching chastity isn’t just backwards and naive, it’s evil, a kind of reverse pornography.

So what’s to be said in its defense? First of all, that any chastity worth defending has to be a healthy one. So much of what is said against it does in fact make a valid point, given that chastity is often presented precisely as anti-eros, anti-sex, and anti-life. A chastity that would make sex bad or unimportant is a reverse pornography. Chastity is not frigidity. To be frigid is to denigrate sex, to fear it, and see it as being less than fully wholesome and grace-giving. A healthy chastity radiates the opposite. It believes so much in the goodness and sublimity of sex that it refuses to short-circuit any of its boundaries so as to diminish it and make it anything less what it is meant to be, sublime.

To surround sex with chastity is like surrounding anything of importance with its proper reverence. Generally we understand this more with our hearts than with our heads. For instance, the classical symbols that surround a wedding ceremony – a church, sacred vows, rings, a white dress, maids and gentlemen of honour, a minister of church and state presiding, a banquet and toasts afterwards – heighten the sublimity of the event and make it special. We feel this. Weddings that cheat on the symbols don’t evoke the same measure of honest tears. Proper symbols raise the mundane and make it sublime. And all of our major rituals around the ceremony of marriage are in fact symbols that, in that context, are predicated on chastity. They celebrate initial sexual union and highlight its importance both for the couple marrying and for society at large. The bride’s white dress, for example, is a symbol of chastity and its task (which it does well) is to heighten, not lessen, the passion for sex. A bride’s dress speaks of the sublime. So too does chastity. It’s task is to assure that what is sublime is not seen to be mundane, to assure that eros doesn’t go lame. You can get married in old blue jeans and a torn t-shirt and the ceremony can be over in two minutes, but such a ceremony will be a fault in chastity because it will do little to heighten your passion, highlight the sublimity of sex, or mark this exchange of vows as a pivotal moment within your life. Sleeping with the bride before marriage is akin to getting married in old blue jeans and a torn t-shirt … and it’s no accident that, not occasionally, the two in fact go together.

Chastity is, in the end, about waiting, about patience, about reverence, about respect, about trying to carry things, all things, not just sex, at a more sublime level. To surround anything with proper reverence is to say that it’s important. The reverse is also true. For anything to be sublime there must first be some sublimation. Nobody creates a masterpiece or writes a great thesis in a day. Achieving anything great, including a great relationship, requires patience, hard work, and especially the willingness to carry great tension so that what is sublime does not become mundane.

Colour and Wisdom in God’s Face

February 13, 2000

If you were to construct a composite of God’s face, how would you picture this? What features should go into this face? Should God look like Mother Teresa or Alanis Morisette, Henri Nouwen or Michael Jordan, John of the Cross or Jerry Seinfeld? Should God’s face speak more of maturity or raw energy, depth or colour, old age or youth, chastity or sex, creed or eroticism, obedience or creativity, tradition or novelty? Would God’s eyes be heavy under the pain of the cross or would they flicker with the mischievous gleam of a comedian?

Since Scripture tells us that God is the author of all that is good, of energy and colour as well as of wisdom and depth, the task, it would seem, is to bring all of these together in God’s face. A genuine composite then should include traces of each: Mother Teresa, Alanis Morisette, Henri Nouwen, Michael Jordan, John of the Cross, and Jerry Seinfeld – given that these represent precisely both mature wisdom and raw energy, meaning and colour, chastity and sex. God is both the crucified one and the comedian. It can be shocking to think like this, especially if we have been conditioned to think of God and spirituality in a way that sets them against sex, colour, wild energy, and comedy, but that is the challenge – just as there is an equal challenge to see God in creed, chastity, obedience, tradition, old age, and the cross.

Perhaps a distinction made by the ancient Greek philosophers can be useful in helping us here. They distinguished between two great energies within the universe, Eros and Logos. Eros, for them, meant more than sex. It was their word for the billion and one different desires within us that ache for love, intimacy, connection, immersion, sex, creativity, sensual pleasure, colour, humour, and bodily contact. Eros, for them, meant raw, un-initiated, wild, creative energy and was seen as the fire inside of all things, the straw that stirs the whole drink, the life-principle inside of everything. Its opposite was death. But, in their view of things, eros needed always to be balanced off by the other great force, logos. Logos (which literally means “word”) was what infused meaning, understanding, and depth into things. Its task was to initiate, shape, mould, and channel eros. Thus, while eros constantly fires us towards immersion in the physical, in sex, in colour, in taste, in touch, and in sensual pleasure, logos directs us, beckons us towards some separation, points out various depths and meanings, and cautions us towards some chastity and asceticism. Eros gives touch and taste, logos gives separation and meaning. The belief was that these two primordial forces needed always to be kept in balance: too much of one without the other and you were living dangerously.

The key for our spiritual health, I believe, lies precisely in having these two in a correct tension. No easy thing. Invariably we fall off one side or the other of a precariously narrow roof: If we give logos too much place, we fall into puritanism. This is often taken simplistically to mean a fear of sex, but it is something wider. To be a puritan is to give in to the temptation to want life without complication, mess, and the complexities that necessarily follow from real immersion into energy, sex, and colour. Most of us suffer from this in one form or other. For example, Henri Nouwen, in his typically honest, confessional way, once expressed this particular fear: “Maybe I am afraid to touch the wet soil from which new life comes forth.” (Sabbatical Journey, p.10) That’s puritanism speaking, just as it also speaks through Marxism’s century-long fear of real colour and through so many of our own fears of the raw energy of youth. Colour and youth, like sex, invariably mess up life, even as they provide some of the major ingredients that make it worth living. Conversely, however, if our itch is only for eros, we can too easily access only raw energy, denigrate logos, have too little fear of immersion and the mess, lose all meaning and the capacity to separate ourselves (another phrase for addiction) and end up literally killing ourselves with the goodness of life itself. Such, sadly, is the lot of too many artists and creative people, just as colourlessness is too often the lot of religious people.

Eros and logos. They may never be separated. To lose eros is to become colourless, sexless, humourless, stagnant, unable to really taste life because we are so afraid of mess and complication that we would rather live on a diet of antiseptics than risk eating real food for fear of impurity. Conversely, to lose logos is to become so immersed in tasting the goodness and creativity of life so as to lose all proportion, meaning, creed, and purpose. God is both, eros and logos. The face that ultimately consoles, challenges, and beckons us looks a little like an archetypal elder and a little like a very mischievous youth.

A Lonely Place from which to Pray and Speak

February 6, 2000

Robert Coles once wrote a fine biographical essay on Simone Weil. In it, he coined a beautiful phrase to describe a quality which made her so extraordinary and which also caused her much suffering in her adult life. Moral loneliness, he called it.

Poets, novelists, mystics, and philosophers have always, in their different ways, spoken of this: Thus, for example, the German poet, Goethe, speaks of “the desire for higher love-making”; Ivan Klima, the Czech novelist, talks about “knowing how to bear your solitude at a great height”; Milan Kundera, another Czech writer, speaks of “resisting the great march”; and Jesus, the gospels tell us, used to go off “to the lonely place” to be by himself. Each of these expressions is speaking about a certain feeling, but it is also speaking about a certain place in the soul, namely, that part where you are most yourself, most true to yourself, most alone, and most lonely – that part of your soul where would you most need someone to sleep with but where generally you sleep alone. What is meant by all this?

Olivier Todd recently wrote a biography on Albert Camus, the French existentialist who won the Nobel Prize for literature. The portrait he gives us of Camus is not a particularly pious one; hardly the stuff of hagiography. Camus, it turns out, had his weaknesses, including his share of irresponsibility in personal relations. Yet, despite that, what emerges in the end is the picture of a noble man, a great soul, an extraordinary moral creature. Why? Precisely because, whatever his other faults, Camus, like Simone Weil, always bore his solitude at a great height, like Jesus (albeit in a different way) he often went off by himself to the lonely place. In Camus’ life there was always a structural innocence even when he wasn’t always innocent in his private life. Why do I say this?

Because throughout his whole life, he always stood apart from the crowd – not in the sense that he asserted his individuality so as to make a statement with his life – but in the moral sense. He was always the one defending the outsider against the crowd, a minority-of-one resisting the surge of mob. Thus, when the Nazis overran France and many of his colleagues, because of fear or personal advantage, collaborated, he held out, at great danger to himself. Later, after the war, when Marxism became fashionable among his intellectual friends (including Sartre), he resisted it, pointing out its inconsistencies, violence, and narrowness, even though this cost him a lot of popularity and some key friends. This was his pattern in everything, he took the road less-travelled. Against suffocating clerics, he asserted the freedom of the human mind; then, against narrow atheism, he turned around and asserted the central importance of the question of God’s existence. Always he stood against the mob, against the great hammer of popular acclaim, ever suspicious of the pervasive ideology, of the political correctness of both the right and the left. Because of this, most of the time he stood alone, without friends, unanimity-minus-one. There is an irony here. Camus was hardly a celibate, but, where it counted most, he slept alone. He was morally single.

It’s people like him, and Simone Weil, that we most need in the world and the church today. There is a want for persons, especially leaders, who can bear their solitude at such a height, who can stand solitary, against the prevailing ideologies and political correctness of both the right and the left, and speak and minister out of that lonely place; persons who can be unanimity-minus-one. We don’t have enough Simone Weils and Albert Camuses around today. We have enough pretence of high solitude – more than enough unhappy persons who confuse truth with personal anger, ideologies of the right and the left, political correctness, or the surge of a mob. It’s easy enough to be part of a great march, but, like Weil and Camus, can we be just as critical of our own, can we challenge our fellow-marchers with the truth in the position of those we are marching against? Not easily done; mostly because it’s a quick way to lose friends and popularity, not to mention your membership card in whatever movement within which you happen to be marching.

To bear one’s solitude at a high level is to exalt the freedom of the human spirit, even as you genuflect in obedience to a sovereign God; to celebrate the fire of passion, even as you defend the beauty of chastity; to defend what is best in liberal ideology about women, ecology, and racism, even as you defend what is best in conservative belief regarding the importance of family, sexual boundaries, and private morality. To bear your solitude at a high level is though to find yourself morally lonely, sleeping alone in that area where you would most need intimacy, and praying from that desert that Jesus frequented, “the lonely place.”

In Defense of Daily Eucharist

January 30, 2000

The long-standing Catholic practice of daily Eucharist is today being questioned: On the one hand, less and less people are going to daily Eucharist and many parishes in fact no longer even offer it. As well, more and more theologians, liturgists, and priests are becoming less enthusiastic about promoting it – indeed, sometimes even positively opposing its practice.

How is it being questioned? Some question its origins, suggesting that the practice has neither a sound biblical nor theological basis, but arose more as a private devotion within the Roman Catholic church. Eucharist, they argue, should ideally be the celebration of the larger community since its very function is to form and mould that larger community, and not to give individuals a little shot of private grace. Eucharist, properly understood, they contend, really only fully occurs when the larger community gathers – which happens precisely on Sundays, big feast days, and on occasions such as funerals, weddings, and the like. The Eucharist should not be turned into a private devotion and its celebration daily – often done in a quick, rote-like ritual attended by a very small number of pious faithful – tends to make it just that. Moreover, this argument continues, such an over-emphasis on celebrating Eucharist tends to downplay the importance of celebrating the Word, thus creating a situation wherein it seems we cannot gather and celebrate unless we have the Eucharist. In their view, you can be “over-eucharist-itized”.

What’s to be said in response? Is the practice of daily Eucharist on shaky theological ground? Does celebrating the Eucharist daily run the risk of turning the Eucharist into a private devotion? A strong critique can be made in reverse:

First, one can make an argument from the testimony of the saints. The practice of daily Eucharist is a time-honoured, saint-sanctioned, tradition. From many of the saints of old, through the Mother Theresas and Henri Nouwens of our own time, many of our most gifted spiritual persons have spoken of it as the central force within their own lives. It has also sustained many of our monasteries and convents throughout their histories. In my own life, most of the people who have been most influential in giving me the faith believed strongly in daily Eucharist – from my parents and grandparents, to the nuns who taught me in my youth, through my theological and spiritual mentors in the seminary and beyond. Not bad as a criterion. But there are also theological reasons.

Biblically this practice draws upon John’s Gospel. As we know, there is not only one theology of the Eucharist in the Christian Scriptures. In the Synoptic Gospels, the institution of the Eucharist is situated within the context of the Last Supper and grounds itself strongly there. It is no accident that some Christian groups still call it “the Lord’s Supper”. John, however, presents things differently. In his Gospel, he does not connect the Eucharist to the Last Supper in the same way. For John, the Last Supper is in fact not so much a supper at all, but a long farewell discourse by Jesus. Into this context, John inserts a powerful Eucharistic motif, the washing of the feet of the disciples by Jesus, suggesting that what this gesture symbolizes is the true meaning of Eucharist. However, he also links the Eucharist to Jesus’ discourse on the bread of life, suggesting that the Eucharist is the new manna, the new bread that God gives us as a daily feeding. Scholars, such as Raymond Brown, suspect that John’s community celebrated the Eucharist daily, while some other first-century communities had it less frequently – quite parallel to the differences in Christian practice today. The Roman Catholic practice of daily Eucharist takes it theological foundation from John’s Gospel.

Then too the practice of daily Eucharist makes senses anthropologically. The Eucharist is a family meal (not to mention that it is also a sacrifice). Family meals normally have a natural rhythm, big banquets (for high occasion and holidays) alternating with simple, quick family dinners on weekdays. Any family that tries to gather for each meal as if it is a major banquet soon finds that most everyone is trying to avoid the table. Not without good reason. No one has the energy to celebrate in big way on a daily basis. Yet we need to eat every day. The relationship between Sunday and daily Eucharist follows this same, sound anthropological pattern.

Finally there is the question of ritual itself. Some rituals, particularly certain initiatory ones, are designed to transform a community or a person precisely by over-heating the psyche, through a certain intensity. That is not always, nor even normally, true for the Eucharist. Like a family meal, the Eucharist has a certain rhythm that runs the gamut from high banquet to quick snack … and a family is as much formed and held together by a humdrum meal on an ordinary week-night as it is by a big banquet on its special days.

The Storm on the Lake

January 23, 2000

Several years ago I attended a seminar on religious experience where a woman shared this story:

A few years before this incident occurred her life had been rather settled. She had been happily married, her children were grown and on their own, and she and her husband were running a successful business together. Then it all fell apart. Her husband, a recovering alcoholic, began to drink. Within two years, they had lost everything, including each other. Their business went bankrupt, they lost their house, and their marriage fell apart. She moved to a new city and took a new job, but the pain of what she had lost lingered and she found herself constantly depressed and joyless as she sought to sink new roots, meet new people, and begin over again in mid-life.

Her frustration culminated one evening when, having worked late, she was driving home and stopped for a red light. While waiting for the light to change she was hit from behind by a drunken driver. (The irony wasn’t lost on her.) Her car was badly damaged and she, suffering from whiplash and a series of cuts and bruises, was taken to hospital by ambulance. After several hours of x-rays, examinations, and medical treatment, near midnight, she was released, to be driven home by a policeman. As they drove up to her townhouse she noticed that the front door was wide open. Getting out of the car she realized that her home had been ransacked and vandalized. It was the last straw: All that penned up frustration, anger, loss, and grief finally burst, she lost control, began to scream hysterically, and ran across the lawn shouting curses at God and life in general – the policeman chasing her.

As she recalled this, she told us that she remembered exactly what was running through her mind as she ran across that lawn at midnight, hysterical, cursing, a policeman giving chase. Her anger and her questions were about God: “Where is God in all of this? Why is God letting this happen? Why is God asleep?” Then, just as she heard her own curses as an answer, suddenly, in one instant, everything became calm. She ceased running, stopped shouting, because she felt inside of herself a flood of calm and a peace such as she had never experienced in her life before. No magic lights went on, no divine voices were heard, and she made no claims of “miracle” afterwards, but, for one second she realized that, no matter the storm, no matter the loss, and no matter death itself, God is still in charge of this universe. One second of realization was all it took. Calm returned. She sent the policeman home and began cleaning up her house. She has essentially remained in that calm since.

The Synoptic gospels record the story of Jesus calming the waters during a storm on the lake. As Mark has it: With the coming of evening that same day, Jesus said to them, “Let us cross over to the other side”. And leaving the crowd behind they took him, just as he was, in the boat; and there were other boats with him. Then it began to blow a gale and the waves were breaking into the boat so that it was almost swamped. But he was in the stern, his head on a cushion, asleep. They woke him and said to him, “Master do you not care? We are going down!” And he woke up and rebuked the wind and said to the sea, “Quiet now! Be calm!” And the wind dropped, and all was calm again. Then he said to them, “Why are you so frightened? How is it that you have no faith?” They were filled with awe and said to one another: “Who can this be? Even the wind and sea obey him.” (Mark 4, 35-41).

The parallel between these two stories is clear. The deeper lessons contained within them though are perhaps less obvious, at least during the more stormy moments in our lives. In essence, both stories tell us that God is still in charge of this universe, every counter-indication notwithstanding. The first Christian creeds had only one line: Jesus is Lord! Ultimately that says enough, says it all. God still rules, even in death and darkness. But, as these stories also make clear, during the stormy moments of life, when our very souls are in fear of drowning, it will seem like God is asleep, comfortable, his head on cushion. But, and this is the real challenge of these stories, calm is only a second of realization away. What calms the storm in life is not that all of our problems suddenly disappear but that, within them, we realize that, because God is still in charge, all will be well – whiplash, bruises, ransacked houses, alcoholic spouses, lost houses, lost jobs, loneliness, and the shadow of death itself notwithstanding. All will be well because, even asleep with his head on a cushion, God is still lord.

Facing up to the Chaos

January 8, 2000

Michael Ford, in his biography on Henri Nouwen, tells us how brutally honest Nouwen was emotionally. Sometimes when loneliness, depression, and chaos would threaten to overwhelm him, Nouwen would go to a friend’s house and ask that friend to hold him while he cried. Not an easy thing to do, but in it there is a lesson: When we stare life’s chaos and our own demons fully in the face, someone or something had better be holding us or that darkness will destroy us rather than make us stronger.

Often we are naive about this. Today the idea is omnipresent that we must constantly forsake what is safe and move into the unknown, with all the chaos and demons we will meet there. Hence, we hear voices from all sides telling us that it is bad to play safe, that we must face the chaos, the desert, the dark night, the demons within and around us. This challenge tells us to risk, to abandon safe havens, to face our addictions and fears, to move always towards a greater horizon, and thus surrender ourselves beyond the narrow controls of our own wounded, pride-filled egos. Sound advice? Perhaps.

It is quite true that ultimately this is what is called for. T.S. Eliot once said that home is where we start from and as we move away the pattern becomes ever stranger and more varied. He is right and the pain and confusion that result are a necessary part of growth. To grow is to leave the womb, home, all that is secure. To play safe is to eventually asphyxiate. The gospels tell us that we can reach eternal life only by undergoing the darkness and death of Gethsemane and the cross. The mystics call this the dark night of the soul and assure us that real transformation of soul will not happen at Disneyland but at Calvary. So far the advice is sound.

However there can be a dangerous naivete in all this. The idea is too much that you should just let yourself free fall into the great unknown, with all its darkness and chaos, and growth and happiness are assured. That isn’t always true; far from it. To enter the darkness, to go into the desert, to face your demons, you must first have the assurance that you will be held by someone or something – God, a loved one, a family, a faith that is strong enough to see your through – while undergoing this journey. To let go of a safe haven without this is in place is naive and foolish.

When you let yourself free fall, two things can happen … and one of them is bad. You can fall apart, pure and simple, with no one and nothing to ever set you back together. In the desert, if you are all by yourself, you can be overwhelmed, lose yourself, and die (literally) of depression, dissipation, hopelessness, fear, and loneliness. When you have been through the desert, but now stand before a mirror and no longer know who you are or can no longer find any positive energy to live, laugh, and love, the journey away from safety has done you no favour. Conversely, of course, the journey through chaos can be paschal, it can bring about a wonderful new resurrection. But, to pass through the darkness and chaos, to abandon yourself in trust, you must be sure that you will be held by someone or something when you are falling through the darkness.

We see this in Jesus’ own paschal journey. He entered the darkness and chaos of Gethsemane and the cross, just as he had once entered the desert, not alone but with another. He was being held by his Father, just as Nouwen, during his depressions, let himself be held by his friends. Jesus was in the dark night, free falling, but he wasn’t alone. He surrendered himself and jumped over love’s cliff, but only because he trusted that someone, his Father, would catch him before he hit the ground. All of us might want to ponder that before we counsel ourselves or others to too hastily abandon safety for chaos. The journey from Disneyland to Calvary should not be naively undertaken.

I recently met with a friend, a woman in her mid-thirties, who because of abuse in her childhood is suffering a debilitating addiction. She does not want to stay where she is but has a pretty clear intuition of the pain, chaos, and dangers she will face if she chooses to journey further. For now, she can not move because she is has no assurance that anyone or anything will hold her – as the Father held Jesus in the Garden and on the cross – when the chaos becomes overwhelming.

It is said that whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. True, though sometimes things will kill you, if you face them alone. We should therefore be careful and gentle with ourselves and others. The darkness about us is frighteningly deep.

The Death of Innocence

January 2, 2000

In 1987 an American educator, Allan Bloom, wrote a book entitled, The Closing of the American Mind. Its thesis is contained in its title. The book contends that today, in the Western world, we are becoming ever more shallow of soul, narrow of mind, and limited in horizon. Many analysts would concur with that. However what is more unique to Bloom is that part of his thesis is that the real culprit behind this flatness of soul (which, he feels, is bleeding us of passion, motivation, heroism, and all that is sublime) is the death of innocence. Innocence, he asserts, is the real key to depth, happiness, passion, and sublimity.

At one point, he shares a personal story. As a young man, enroled in a very prestigious university, he was greeted by his professor on the opening day of class with words to this effect: “You have come here from your various parochial backgrounds, with all your youthful biases and ignorance. Well, I am going to bathe you in truth and set you free!” Bloom comments that this professor reminded him of a little boy who solemnly informed him when he was six years old that there was no Santa Claus or Easter Bunny. But, adds Bloom, “he wasn’t setting me free, he was showing off!” So too was the professor.

Reflecting on this, Bloom tells us that what he learned from that professor was that he himself would forever teach differently. For his part, he would start his classes by pointing out to his students how experienced and sophisticated they already were and how, because of this, he would try to teach them to believe again in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny – so that they might have a chance of again being happy.

I share this story because we are a generation that is rich in everything, except innocence and happiness. We pride ourselves on our experience, our sophistication, our lack of naivete. We are ashamed to admit that we aren’t experienced, that we haven’t been everywhere, that we don’t know everything, that there is still an innocence within us. Innocence is identified with naivete and is generally looked upon either with condescension or with positive disdain. Lack of sexual experience particularly is stigmatized. We see innocence as ignorance.

Moreover our culture extends this equation to faith in God. Most of the culture, consciously or unconsciously, believes that contemporary experience, present development and insight, have unmasked faith as a superstition, an ignorance, a lack of nerve, a lack of sophistication, a narrowness, a fear, a bias even. The common perception, especially among intellectuals, is that contemporary experience has brought about a collective loss of faith because, at the end of the day, faith is an ignorance that is cast out by a fuller experience. To believe in God is to be naive, however sincere.

Thus we identify faith with innocence and innocence with ignorance and we are positively ashamed to be either of these. We pay a high price for this, as Adam and Eve did. Scripture tells us that the price of eating the apple was not that their minds were darkened (as our catechisms told us) but that their eyes were opened. After eating the forbidden fruit, Adam and Eve knew a lot more than they ever knew before. They just weren’t as happy. Something precious had been shattered, as is always the case in the death of innocence, and there was now the need to begin to hide things. Experience brings new knowledge and new sophistication, but, and this is the point, not everything we know and experience is good for the happiness of the soul. Nor, indeed, is innocence always an ignorance. Naivete is ignorance – but innocence is not necessarily naivete.

Paul Ricoeur, whom nobody could ever accuse of being naive, tells us that, as adults, the real goal of our lives is to come to something which he calls “second naivete”. Real maturity is ultimately about revirginizing and coming to a second innocence. This however is not to be confused with first naivete and natural innocence. We are born naive and innocent and the task of growing up is precisely to move beyond this childishness to adulthood. This is done, as our culture rightly intuits, by growing in experience and sophistication. For a while, this is good. First naivete in an adult is not innocence but ignorance.

However, and this is where our culture unfortunately misunderstands the thing, growth beyond the natural ignorance of a child, becoming sophisticated, is itself meant to be a temporary step. Our real task is ultimately to become post-sophisticated – childlike and virgin again.

At some point in our adult lives, we should again – in a different way and for different reasons – begin to believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. Then we have a chance at happiness. Jesus tells us that children and virgins enter the kingdom of heaven quite naturally. A world that prides itself on its adultness, sophistication, and experience might want to ponder that.

Celebrating a New Millennium

December 21, 1999

Certain occasions test a columnist. How to do justice to an event? What do you say at the turn of a millennium? What do you say to propose a toast at Jesus’ two thousandth birthday party?

The temptation of course is to let an event of this magnitude – and Jesus 2000th birthday, the event by which we date time on this planet, surely is an event of such magnitude – seduce you into a bit of grandiosity, where you feel called upon (and competent to!) to propose the religious agenda for the next hundred years (“The Spiritual and Ecclesial Agenda for the Next Millennium”). Too grandiose altogether, my Gaelic friends would say. Yet it’s even less forgivable to not address the event at all. Imagine ignoring the turn of a millennium and acting as if all was simply business as usual? Let the world have its hype and its parties, that’s nothing, let’s you and I talk about proposed new changes in the liturgy!

To my mind, the proper balance is struck by Pope John Paul II in his pastoral letter on the Millennium, Incarnationis Mysterium, where he shows what can lie between grandiosity, secular hype, and apocalyptic nonsense on one side and insensitivity, pseudo-sophistication, and post-Christian bias on the other. What the pope proposes in this letter is that, while there is no magic in numbers and there is theology of numbers, there are occasions that are unique in their symbolism and afford us unique opportunities for grace. The turn of a millennium is such an occasion, a Kairos. What Incarnationis Mysterium invites us to do is to turn the year 2000 into a Jubilee year. What is a Jubilee year? According to a biblical custom, based on Leviticus 25, there is to be, every fifty years or so, a year of Jubilee, a year within which slaves are given back their freedom and all the land reverts to it previous owners. The pope is inviting us to make the year 2000 that kind of year. But how to do this practically? How do we set slaves free and return land to its proper ownership?

The perfect can be the enemy of the good. If we try to do too much we may end up doing nothing. There is no perfect, literal, way of living this out; still there are many things we can do, both communally and individually, to help set slaves free and return land to is proper ownership. What are these?

Literalism can also be an enemy of the good. Jubilee is ultimately about forgiving debts, trying to set free those who are under restraint, ending dominance, and practising restorative justice. The means for this are always the same. To do this, each of us must try to reconcile with our enemies, live a simpler life, acknowledge the holy, respect the integrity of creation, admit our past mistakes and how these have hurt others, and acknowledge in gratitude the life and grace that have been given us.

In line with this, Incarnationis Mysterium then suggests that, next year, as faith communities, we might consider doing one, or several, of these things:

Have a dinner to which we invite the poor and homeless in our area
Have a special reconciliation service with another denomination, religion, or with some ideological group with whom we have had a less than cordial history.
Give away some of our material goods directly to the poor in our area.
Commit ourselves to a simpler lifestyle, in a tangible way.
Organize a pilgrimage or go on a pilgrimage to a holy place.
Do at least one concrete ecological project that manifests our concern for the integrity of creation.
Have a special, public, healing service to confess some aspect of our “dark past” as a community; analogous to the Pope’s acknowledgement of the church’s historical arrogance in treating Galileo.
Hold a special remembrance service for particular “martyrs” within our own recent faith history.

Beyond the communal, there is of course the private. We need, each of us, to do some individual things too in each of these areas. Again, this will be, most times, not a question of literally setting slaves free and restoring land to its rightful owner, but of a deeper, inner, circumcision-of-the-heart. We can, for instance, celebrate Jubilee by:

Forgiving a long-standing grudge.
Celebrating the sacrament of reconciliation more frequently and more honestly.
Writing off a debt that someone owes us.
Giving away some of our own money directly to the poor.
Adopting a poor person into our life.
Taking a homeless person out to dinner.
Simplifying our lifestyle.
Going on a pilgrimage or making within our own home a place for pilgrimage and worship.
Attending a prayer service within another church.
Recognizing, in gratitude, those who have suffered to give us both faith and maturity.

The turn of the millennium is a privileged opportunity for grace. Is this statement a divine counsel or a worn cliche? That depends … entirely upon each of us!

The Christmas Symbols

December 14, 1999

My fiftieth year has come and gone, but, at Christmas, I’m a child, delighting in the creche, the lights, the carols, the Christmas tree. I’ve always loved Christmas, loved everything about it. Partly this is simple luck and has nothing really to do with Christmas as a religious event. I’ve always been handed the long straw as regards Christmas joy. As a child, this was the most special time of the year for our family. At Christmas, everyone came home and the family had its major reunion for the year. All the stops were pulled. We got to spend a week eating all the best foods we could afford (and some which we couldn’t!), a tree and beautiful lights livened up our old house, peaceful old carols played non-stop on our Fleetwood phonograph, and we enjoyed unpressured time with each other, doing nothing but enjoying life. What kid, or adult, shouldn’t love this? Part of the luck too, unlike for some of my friends, is that none of my Christmas days, so far, have ever been interrupted by tragedy, the death of a loved one, or by serious illness (touch wood! the Christmas crib is made of it).

Moreover, our family was also religious and Christmas was, first of all, a spiritual time for us. There was special food, but there was also special prayer. Santa never visited our home (he was only allowed to do his thing at school). Instead the Christ-child brought us our gifts and his visits were just as ingeniously arranged by my parents as Santa’s visits are arranged by other parents.

So, given this history, the Christmas symbols are still very meaningful me. I love the creche, the lights, the carols, the tree. Moreover, as I get older, the meaning of these things, which as a child I simply felt in my heart, is becoming more clear, and dear, to me. What do these symbols – creche, crib, tree, lights, and carols – represent?

The creche? It’s an image of heaven. Everything about it radiates peace, love, fulfilment, the end of longing, the lack of tears. It’s an icon of Isaiah’s vision of the lion lying down with the lamb, of God wiping away every tear. The baby, appropriately enough, is always asleep because the whole scene depicts eternal rest, namely, what it means to sleep “in heavenly peace”. Silent Night, beautiful song, combined with a creche is a good a holy picture of heaven as you’ll get this side of eternity.

The crib itself? The crib is a trough, a place where cows, sheep, oxen, and horses come to eat. It’s appropriate that Jesus – who is food for the life of the world – should be lying in a trough, a wooden one too. The wood of the crib will later on become the wood of the cross, that place where Jesus gives himself completely as food for the life of the world.

The Christmas tree? Its job is to join heaven and earth, to be a ladder for the incarnation, a vehicle God can use to climb down to earth. That is why there should always be either an angel or a star on top of it (for what else do you find in the sky than stars and angels?) and why the presents are under the tree. In the German tradition of Christmas within which I was raised (O Tannenbaum has Germanic origins) it is not Santa who comes down the chimney and puts gifts into a stocking by the fireplace, but it is Jesus, as Christ- child, who comes down the tree and puts gifts under the tree.

The Christmas lights? They represent the light and warmth of God, but in a special way. The custom of putting up Christmas lights originates in the Northern Hemisphere. Here Christmas comes just after the winter solstice, that is, pretty well on the coldest, darkest day of the year. Originally, before electricity, lights were real fire, bringing both heat and light. The idea then is that, just when it’s darkest and coldest, God’s light and warmth break into the world. The custom of having midnight mass, which some trace to Francis of Assisi, has the same rational. At the coldest, darkest hour on the coldest, darkest day of the year the warmth and light of God break through.

Christmas carols? What are they trying to do? Obviously they celebrate our joy at Jesus’ birth but they are also meant to mimic the song of the angels at the first Christmas.

Beautiful symbols. Joyous symbols. Sometimes over-commercialized, it is true. But even this, is it all bad? If huge department stores, public buildings, and multi-national head-offices choose to spend millions of dollars putting up colourful lights to celebrate Jesus’ birth, to help announce that God’s light and love have come into the world, should I complain? Karl Rahner, fine theologian that he was, used to say: In Christmas, God gives us permission to be happy! Why decline the offer?

Readying Ourselves For Christmas

December 12, 1999

John the Baptist tries to prepare the way for Jesus by calling people to repentance: “Repent for the kingdom if heaven is near.” Whatever else that means, it includes the idea that one of the best ways we can prepare for Christmas is by making a good, honest, searing confession. To repent means to confess our sins.

This notion has fallen out of favour. The idea of confession is very much challenged today. At a practical level, less and less people are in fact going to confession. The old line-ups at the confessional box are becoming shorter and shorter. As well, more and more people are challenging, theoretically, the idea of sacramental confession. Arguments against it take many forms: “I don’t find it meaningful!” “It’s too privatized!” “There isn’t any need to do this to have one’s sins forgiven! God doesn’t need our mediation.” “It gives undue power to the priest!” “This is an affair between God and myself.” “It’s adolescent!” “The priests don’t have time to do it properly.”

Whatever the objection, and there are many, less and less people are going to confession.

This is an unfortunate development because private confession is one of the pillars of the spiritual life. At a certain point in one’s growth, there is no progress without it. Why? Why confession? Why the need to tell ones sins to a priest? Surely the radical mercy and forgiveness of God are not contingent upon telling our sins to a priest? Surely God’s mercy cannot be controlled by or limited to one prescribed ritual? In both scripture and church tradition it is clear that our sins are forgiven through sincerity of conscience and through touching the body of Christ (and this has many forms). The Christian community itself is the radical sacrament of reconciliation and God’s mercy can never be tied down to just one vehicle of grace. So why confession?

Simply put, confession is the sacrament of the mature and one grows mature by confessing one’s sins. Mature people face themselves and apologize explicitly – and people grow mature by apologizing. The critics of the sacrament of reconciliation are right in saying that God is not tied down to one vehicle as an avenue for the forgiveness of sins. They are wrong however when they denigrate the importance of private confession. One may not have to confess one’s sins explicitly to another human being to have them forgiven, but one does have to confess them explicitly if he or she hopes to live a transparent life, free of addictions, rationalization, and dark skeletons in the closet.

“You are as sick as your sickest secret!” That’s an axiom popular among people working in 12-step programs. They know the truth of that through personal experience. They also know that until one faces oneself, in searing honesty, before another human being and there acknowledges openly his or her sins, there will always be addictions, rationalization, and lack of real transparency. It has taken us a long time to understand the nature of addictive behaviour and even longer to learn how to deal with it. One of the things we have learned, and this is a pivotal and non-negotiable step in every 12-step program, is that there has to be an open, honest, and searing admission of sin, face to face, before another human being. Without this, at a certain point, all real growth stops. The church has always had its own version of this. We called it confession, the sacrament of reconciliation.

It can of course still be argued: Why before a priest? In the letter of James in the New Testament, we are encouraged simply to confess our sins to each other. So why a priest? Because a priest symbolically represents the whole community. In confessing to a priest, we are, in a manner of speaking, confessing to the entire community. A friend of mine is fond of saying that sacramental confession, as presently practiced, is an unhappy compromise, far from ideal. That is correct, though not in the way my friend thinks. We owe our confession to the whole community (since it is the entire community that is wounded by our sin) and the ideal way to confess would be to go in front of a packed church on a Sunday morning and begin our confession be saying: “Bless me community – for I have sinned!”

Confession is not so much about having one’s sins forgiven as it is about coming to maturity within the community and being able to live a transparent life, free of dark secrets, addictions, and rationalization.

The Baptist’s message is as true today as it was 2000 years ago. To make straight the path for the coming of the Saviour, to make a proper advent, to prepare ourselves to have Christ born in our lives, we need to undergo a baptism for the remission of sin. In simple talk, that means, among other things, making a searing, honest, open, confession.

A Theology Of Longing And Desire

December 5, 1999

In our longing we intuit the kingdom of God. Our desires and our daydreams are what point us towards heaven. How so?

Nearly thirty years ago, Richard Bach wrote a little book, more metaphor than story, that became an instant phenomenon. Entitled Jonathan Livingston Seagull, it chronicled the flights of a bird named Jonathan. Jonathan was a seagull, though hardly a happy one. He found it too suffocating, too limiting, to remain simply a bird. For him, life had to offer more than just the basic struggle to eat, fight, and occasionally mate. He wasn’t exactly certain what else there was, nor indeed what he wanted, but he had the gnawing certainty that what he had right now was not enough. He wanted more, needed more, everything inside of him ached for more, and he decided he would try for more. So, without really knowing where it would lead him, he set out to fly higher and faster than any seagull had ever flown. From flights of speed to flights of fancy, he tried in every way to break the asphyxiating limits of being a seagull.

But the limits of this life are not so easily broken. His efforts wrecked the tranquillity of his life and nearly wrecked his body as he flew alone, in lofty solitude, often crashing into rocks even as he was trying to smash through the very barriers of mortality. He ended up a driven bird, congenitally restless, scanning always the distant horizons, haunted by an insatiable yearning for something he didn’t know, didn’t have, but couldn’t live without.

This something – something that we don’t really know, don’t fully have, but can’t live without – is what Jesus called the kingdom of God. Moreover scripture tells us that this kingdom is not a matter of eating and drinking, but is about being together in justice, peace, and community of life in the Holy Spirit. In our desires we intuit this. But how does desire lead us to this insight? How does desire work? What, ultimately, do we desire and long for?

Looking at desire and longing within us we see that, for a good part, we can name what we yearn for. We yearn for love, for intimacy, for friendship, for admiration, for success, for health and beauty of body, to be seen, to be known, to be noticed, to be famous, to leave a mark. We yearn too, powerfully and more than platonically, for consummation, for sex, for all-embracing union. We yearn for ecstasy, especially the ecstasy of sexual embrace. Our uncensored daydreams are not the stuff of platonic philosophy or ascetic spirituality. Rather, in them, we are as much mammal as angel, physical as spiritual, and considerably more sexual than celibate. In our daydreams we luxuriate in embrace. Moreover, in them, we are never petty, small, mean, ugly, and ungracious. In our dreams we are big persons, objects for admiration.

But, at the end of the day, daydreams are still only dreams, elusive horizons that keep slipping away from us. Thus, like Jonathan Livingston Seagull, we end up suffocating inside of lives, bodies, and relationships that are perennially too small for us. Our real lives pale in comparison to what we intuit in our daydreams. In our dreams we are always capable of flying, wonderfully beautiful, perfectly consummated, and locked in a dance, body and soul, with the deep rhythms of the universe. Reality however is not so kind. In our actual lives, we find ourselves always heavy, bound to the ground, limited, flawed in body, painfully alone, limping, out of step. In that tension, in the insufficiency of everything attainable, we come to know, as Karl Rahner once said, that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.

But it is the former, what we experience in our daydreams, not the latter, what we actually experience in our lives, that points towards the kingdom of God. In our longing we intuit that kingdom. In our daydreams, particularly in those that are far from platonic, we have a vision and a foretaste of the kingdom of God because it is here, in our daydreams, where the lamb lies down with the lion, where we are at the messianic banquet table, where the valleys are filled in, the mountains laid low, and where God wipes away every tear.

The kingdom of God is about immortality and consummation, about knowing and being known, about luxuriating in ecstatic embrace, and it is precisely these things that we dream of in our most uncensored daydreams. It is indeed towards these things that we are relentlessly propelled by every aching cell inside us. Yearning for the kingdom is written into our very DNA.

Thus, in our longing we intuit the kingdom and experience advent because the fantasy we have of the great embrace is ultimately predicated on the stable scene in Bethlehem, where, finally content, a quiet, peaceful child rests on the kind of loving breast that can provide all it ever longed for.

Two Concepts of Holiness

November 28, 1999

There are two classical concepts of perfection, one Greek and the other Hebrew. In the Greek ideal, to be perfect is to have no deficiencies, no faults, no flaws. Perfection, to the Greek mind, means to measure up to some ideal standard, to be completely whole, true, good, and beautiful. To be perfect then is never to sin. The Hebrew ideal of perfection is quite different. In this mindset, to be perfect simply means to walk with God, despite our flaws. Perfection here means being in the divine presence, in spite of the fact that we are not perfectly whole, good, true, and beautiful.

Our concept of holiness in the West has been, both for good and bad, very much shaped by the Greek ideal of perfection. Hence, holiness has been understood very much as a question of measuring up to a certain benchmark. In such a view of things, a view many of us were raised in, sanctity is understood very much as achieving and maintaining something, namely, moral goodness and moral integrity.

Such a view is not without its merits. It is a perpetual challenge against mediocrity, laziness, giving in to the line of least resistance, and settling for what is second-best. Such a view of perfection (and the spirituality it engenders) keeps the ideal squarely in view. The flag is always held high, ahead of us, beckoning us, calling us beyond the limits of our present tiredness and mediocrity. We are always invited to something higher. This can be very healthy, especially in culture that is cynical and despairing of ideals.

But such a concept of perfection also has a nasty underside. Nobody measures up. As John Shea so graphically puts it: “Nobody does God very well!” In the end, we all fall short and this leads a whole series of spiritual pitfalls: First of all, we beat ourselves up with the false expectation that we that can somehow, all on our own, through sheer willpower, fix all that is wrong with us. Willpower, as we now know, is powerless in the face of our addictions. Because we don’t recognize this, we often grow discouraged and simply quit trying to break some bad habit. Why try when the result is always the same? The temptation then is to do what we in fact so often do, namely, split-off holiness and project it onto to a “Mother Theresa” and let her carry this for us (since we are unable to do so). Worse still, when perfection means measuring up, we find it hard to forgive ourselves and others for not being God. When the dominant idea of holiness is something that only God can measure up to it is not easy to give others, or ourselves, permission to be human. We carry around a lot of discouragement, guilt, and lack of forgiveness because of this.

Hence, despite the positives that are contained in the Greek concept of perfection, we might well profit from incorporating into our lives more of the Hebrew ideal. Perfection here means walking with God, despite imperfection. How precisely do we do this?

The gospels abound with examples, but let me offer just one: The account of the rich young man who comes to Jesus seeking life ends with an interesting exchange between Jesus and the disciples. The young man has just rejected Jesus’ offer and, as the text so poignantly puts it, has gone “away sad.” Jesus then turns to his followers and says: “I tell you truly that it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of heaven.” Luke’s gospel then tells us that the disciples were stunned (literally). They understood clearly what Jesus was saying and they understood just as clearly that they were not capable of ever doing what was just asked. In simple terms, they understood then and there that they would never measure up. Peter gave voice to this consternation: “If that is the case, none of us will go to heaven!” This is one of the few times in the gospels that the apostles actually got things right. They expressed their helplessness, their inability to ever measure up, (“We aren’t capable of doing this!”) to Jesus and he was pleased with that: “For you, these things are impossible, but everything is possible for God.”

We, all on our own, can never measure up. We can never be perfect in the Greek sense. But that is not what God is asking of us. What God is asking is that we bring our helplessness, weaknesses, imperfections, and sin constantly to him, that we walk with him, and that we never hide from him. God is like a good parent. He understands that we will make mistakes and disappoint him and ourselves. What he asks simply is that we come home, that we share our lives with him, that we let him help us in those ways within which we are powerless to help ourselves.

Descartes’ Children

November 21, 1999

For nearly ten years, I was part of a pastoral team that conducted a program for young couples preparing for marriage. My job was to give the talk on the sacrament of marriage. The scenario was always the same. We would meet, about fifty couples and myself, in church basement on a Monday evening. There would be the standard introductions and then I would give a fifty-minute lecture on the theology of marriage, followed by a question period.

The first question was always the same: “Why do we have to take this course?” This was fair enough given that, of the fifty or so couples present, only about four or five of them actually wanted to be there. The rest were there conscriptively, with reluctance, meaning they came only because they had been told that if they didn’t take this course they could not get married inside of their respective churches. So their first question usually reflected this resentment. But it reflected something more as well, namely, the near total absence in them of any sense of the corporate body of humanity, of our interdependence in that body, and of the body of Christ. Invariably they would justify their reluctance to be there in this way: “Why do we have to take this course? Whose business is this anyway? Why are my parents, the church, and society trying to interfere in my life? This is my life, my choice, my marriage, my honeymoon, and skin off my teeth if it doesn’t work out! This is not your business, the church’s business, my parents’ business, or society’s business! What’s your stake in my life?”

In that objection one hears the lonely voice of Rene Descartes (1596-1650), all those centuries ago, settling on the one thing that he could be sure of and build upon: “I think, therefore I am!” These young people, for all their sincerity and goodness, were, at least at this stage of their lives, more children of Rene Descartes than of Jesus Christ.

Rene Descartes, the seventeenth century French philosopher whose ideas helped to shape both the enlightenment and many of our modern ideas, began his philosophy with the idea that the only thing we can be sure of as real is our own reality (Cogito, ergo sum). We are inside of ourselves and our own reality is massive, real, and undeniable. Everything else appears less real and is real mainly in relationship to us. In common sense language, what this says is: I am real. My life, my thoughts, my feelings, my heartaches, my headaches are real. Everything else is outside of me and less real. I can relate to it, but it is separate from me. I am independent of it and it is independent of me. In the end, we are all separate from each other, lonely little subjects floating in space, able at times to temporarily penetrate each others’ reality, but ultimately separate, alone, independent. What’s real is me – my life, my experience.

In the Western world today, we are very much the children of that idea. Moreover it has its positive side: Our belief in this idea is one of the reasons why we cherish and defend equality and individual rights. Western democracy and the various charters of freedoms that we so much take for granted have, to some degree, been underwritten by Rene Descartes’ influence within Western history. For this we should be grateful. However Descartes’ emphasis on individuality has a less healthy underside. This is reflected in the false freedom and lack of a sense of interdependence that is so manifest in the objections those young people have to being asked to take a marriage course. In their minds, nothing is necessarily owed to family, community, and humanity. Why should there be? After all we stand independent of these and we can decide, all on our own, to what degree we want to buy in, get involved, give ourselves over, participate in, and acquiesce to others’ expectations of us. Others have their lives and I have mine!

We see this, in spades, in the cavalier attitude people (of all ages) have towards marriage today: “Why do we need to get married? This is just between the two of us. We have our own commitment to each other and that is enough. Who needs a piece of paper? This is nobody’s business but ours.” Such an attitude could be valid, if we weren’t in our very make-up social beings, irrevocably bound to each other for life itself. How different from Descartes and the modern world is the Christian idea that we are all parts of one body, a single organism, within which one part can’t say to the other: “This is my life and it is no business of yours?”

Two voices, two choices, two visions of individuality … Rene Descartes and Jesus Christ: One speaks of freedom, loneliness, and private reality; the other of interdependence, community, and shared life.

Praying for the Dead

November 14, 1999

Why pray for the dead? Does this make any sense? What possible difference can our prayers make to a person once he or she has died?

These are valid questions. A number of objections can be raised against the practice of praying for the dead: Do we need to call God to mercy? Does God need to be reminded that the person who died was in fact a decent, warm-hearted, person? God already knows this, is already as merciful as mercy allows, and needs no nudging from us to be understanding and forgiving. Cynically, the objection might be put this way: If the person is already in heaven he doesn’t need our prayers and if he is in hell, our prayers won’t help anyway! So why pray for the dead?

We pray for the dead for the same reason we pray for anything, we feel the need and that is reason enough. Moreover the objections raised against praying for the dead are just as easily raised against all prayer of petition. God already knows everyone one of our desires, everyone of our sins, and all of our good will. So why remind God of these? Because prayer builds us up, changes us, not God.

This is the first, though not foremost, reason why we pray for the dead. Prayer is meant to change and console us. We pray for the dead to comfort ourselves, to stir and celebrate our own faith, and assuage our own guilt about our less than perfect relationship to the one who has died. In praying for the dead we do two things: We highlight our faith in the power of God and we hold up the life of the person who has died so as to let God take care of things, let God wash things clean. That is one of the purposes of a funeral liturgy, to clearly put the dead person and our relationship to him or her into God’s hands.

But this is not the most important reason why we have funeral liturgies and why we pray for the dead. We pray for the dead because we believe (and this a doctrine, the communion of saints) that we are still in vital communion with them. There is, death notwithstanding, still a vital flow of life between them and us. Love, presence, and communication reach even through death. We and they can still feel each other, know each other, love each other, console each other, and influence each other. Our lives are still joined. Hence we pray for the dead in order to remain in contact with them. Just as we can hold someone’s hand as they are dying, and this can be an immense consolation to them and to us, so too, figuratively but really, we can hold that person’s hand through and beyond death.

Perhaps the words and prayer forms we use seem to indicate something else, since they are addressed to God and not directly to the person for whom we are praying. Thus, for example, in praying for the dead we use words like: “Lord, have mercy on her soul!” “Lord, we place her in your hands!” “She loved you in life, radiated your gentleness, Lord, give her peace!” The words are addressed to God because it is in and through God that our communication with our loved one who is deceased now takes place: God’s bosom is the venue for our communication, God’s power is what is holding both of us in life, and God’s mercy is what is washing things clean between us. We can of course also talk directly to the person who has died, that too is valid enough within the doctrine of the communion of saints, but given the critical place of God’s love, power, and mercy in this situation, our prayer is generally addressed to God so as to highlight that it is within the heart of God that we have contact with our loved ones who are deceased. Hence, our prayers for the dead generally take this particular form.

And classically, within Roman Catholic theology at least, we have believed that our prayers help release this person from purgatory. What’s to be said about this?

Purgatory, properly understood, is not a punishment for any imperfection nor indeed a place distinct from heaven. The pains of purgatory are the pains of adjusting to a new life (which includes the pain of letting go of this one) and the pains of being embraced by perfect love when we ourselves are far from perfect. By praying for the dead, we support them in their pain of adjustment, adjustment to a new life and to living in full light. Purgation eventually leads to ecstasy, but the birth that produces that ecstasy requires first a series of painful deaths. Thus, just as we tried to hold their hands as they died, so now, in praying for loved ones who have died, we continue to hold their hands, and they ours, beyond the chasm of death itself.

Biblical Metanoia

November 7, 1999

“Repent and believe in the good news!” These are the first words out of Jesus’ mouth in Mark’s gospel and they are meant as a summary of the entire gospel. But what do these words mean?

In English, the word “repent” is often misunderstood. It seems to imply that we have already done something wrong, regret it, and now commit ourselves to live in a new way. Repentance, understood in this way, means to live beyond a sinful past. Biblically, this is not quite what is meant. In the gospels, the particular word used for repentance is metanoia. Literally this means to do an about face, to turn around, to face in an entirely new direction. But what direction?

Robert Barron, a young theologian out of Chicago, offers a simple, yet profound, understanding this. In his view, within each of us there are two souls, a little soul (a pusilla anima) and a great soul (a magna anima). On any given day we tend to identify more with one or the other of these and we are a very different person depending upon which soul is reigning within us.

Thus, if I take my identity from my little soul I will inevitably feel bitter and angry. It is here, in the pusilla anima, where I am petty, afraid, aware of my hurts, and constantly nursing the sense of having been cheated and short-changed. In my little soul, I am paranoid and defensive. When I relate to life through it, I am short-sighted, impatient, despairing, and constantly looking for compensation.

But I also have within me a great soul. When I let it reign, I become different person altogether. I am relating out of my great soul at those moments when I am overwhelmed by compassion, when everyone is brother or sister to me, when I want to give of myself without concern of cost, when I am able to carry the tensions of life without a breakdown in my chastity, when I would willingly die for others, and when my arms and my heart would want nothing other than to embrace the whole world and everyone in it.

All of us, I am sure, have had ample experience of both, identifying with the great soul and with the petty soul within us. Sometimes we operate out of one, sometimes out of the other.

When Jesus asks us to “repent”, to do metanoia, what he is asking is that we cease identifying ourselves with the little soul and instead begin to live out of our other soul, the magna anima. The very etymology of the word metanoia implies this. It takes its root in two Greek words: meta – beyond; and nous – mind. Literally, metanoia means to move beyond our present mindset, beyond our present way of seeing things.

When one looks at the miracles of Jesus, it is interesting to see that so many of them are connected to opening up or otherwise healing someone’s eyes, ears, or tongue. These miracles, of course, always have more than a physical significance. Eyes are opened in order to see more deeply and spiritually; ears are opened in order to hear things more compassionately; and tongues are loosened in order to praise God more freely and to speak words of reconciliation and love to each other. To put it metaphorically, what Jesus is doing in these miracles is attaching the eyes, ears, and tongue to the great soul so that what a person is now seeing, hearing, and speaking is not bitterness, hurt, and pettiness but rather compassion, gratitude, and praise.

Many of us are familiar with a famous passage in Thomas Merton within which he describes a revelation he had one day while standing on the corner of Fourth and Walnut in Louisville. Among complete strangers in the middle of a shopping district on a very ordinary day, Merton had the sense that his eyes, ears, and tongue were suddenly attached to a bigger soul: “I was suddenly overwhelmed with the realization that I loved all of those people, that they were mine, and I, theirs, that we could not be alien to one another even though we were total strangers. It was like waking from a dream of separateness … Then it was as if I suddenly saw the secret beauty of their hearts, the depths of their hearts, where neither sin, nor desire, nor self-knowledge, can reach the core of their reality, the person that each one is in God’s eyes. If only we could all see each other that way all the time! There would be no more war, no more hatred, no more cruelty, no more greed. I suppose that the big problem would be that we would all fall down and worship each other.”

To repent is let the great soul, the image and likeness of God, reign within us so that, like Merton on the corner of Fourth and Walnut, we are so overwhelmed with compassion that indeed we do turn and face in a completely new direction.

Needed: Three New Saints

October 31, 1999

If I had a wish-list for the church today, it would include a request for three saints of old to re-appear in a new guise. What the church needs today is a new Augustine of Hippo, a new Francis of Assisi, and a new Thomas More.

First, we need a new Augustine: St. Augustine was a rare genius, an intellectual, an artist, a brilliant person who, before his conversion to Christianity, looked upon Christianity as a superstition, a naivete, a gentle myth which, while it sustained his mother whom he loved, lacked the intellectual rigor to be real truth. His original attitude towards Christianity was one of condescension, he saw it as something beneath him, beneath his intellectual and artistic dignity. Slowly, through the very honesty of his own intellectual search, he came to see the truth of Christ. A day came when he dropped to his knees, committed himself to a truth that he had once despised, and then for the rest of his life put his great genius at its service.

What he did then was to marry Christian revelation to the experience, language, art, and intellectual life of his time. In terms of an image, he wrote a software for Christianity that has, for the most part, lasted for nearly 17 hundred years. Bill Gates may have given us Windows 98, but Augustine gave us Christianity and Common Sense 400 AD. In the Western world, this software has endured essentially intact down to this very day.

A new Augustine is called for today. What the church would most need is for some young, post-modern genius, an intellectual and an artist, to convert to Christianity and, right by the dynamics of his or her own conversion, show that the enlightenment and what follows from it is not what it espouses itself to be, namely, something intellectually beyond Christianity, but rather that it, in its best expressions, is simply a cousin in truth. We need too for that person to write a new software for Christianity. We need a new Augustine to again make Christianity an intellectual and aesthetic option for a culture that perceives it as lacking in both.

Then too we need a new Francis of Assisi: We need someone, man or woman, who can re-inflame the romantic imagination of Christianity. Francis was a saint, but he was more than that. He was also a man of rare imagination. He was someone who, like a great artist, could reshape the collective imagination. What Francis was able to do, among other things of course, was to give to the world a new and a more attractive vision of how Christianity is connected to nature, how a life of simplicity itself can be an aesthetic, and how the altruism which lies at the heart of Jesus’ message can be more attractively imaged and lived. What he said, did, and founded became, almost instantly, something analogous to a great work of art, it drew people to itself and inflamed their imaginations. Hundreds of years later, it is still doing the same thing. But his images no longer fire the imagination as powerfully as they once did. We need a new Francis, a post-modern man or woman, who can again inflame the romantic imagination of world in the same way that Francis once did. This is badly needed in an age that all but militates against simplicity, altruism, and nature. In a time of morally-authorized greed, where celebrity is divinity, and where restlessness and grandiosity have been taken to new levels, in a world of high-rise living, some great artist must again show us that what we really want is to live simply, altruistically, and in harmony with nature.

Finally, we need a new Thomas More: We need someone, woman or man, who is a top-level lawyer, a politician, a great humanist, a lover of the arts, fully immersed in the affairs of culture, and yet is able to combine all of these involvements, and such a love of the world, with a simple faith, an uncompromising integrity, human attractiveness, an enviable wit, and a capacity for moral martyrdom. This woman or man too, unlike Augustine and Francis, needs to be married, with children, not a monk, priest, or nun. We need models of non-celibate sanctity. Thomas More was driven by two great loves and two great loyalties – love of the world and loyalty to it and love of God and loyalty to God. His life – that of a great humanist and a great Christian – continually radiated both those loves and both those loyalties. In the end, of course, they weren’t equal. God was given a certain priority, but, even then, love for the world was never denigrated. He loved both, God and the world, solidly to the end, modelling what a healthy, full, joyfilled and faithfilled life can look like. We need a new Thomas More today.

And so the want-ads are out: Wanted – A new Augustine of Hippo. Wanted – A new Francis of Assisi. Wanted – A new Thomas More. Applications anyone?