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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.