Our Real Loss of Innocence

October 22, 1999

Within all of literature few tragedies compare with the biblical story of Saul. The story begins with a young man, Saul, who at this time in his life has no equal in terms of being handsome, gracious, and good. The people recognize this and make him their king. But, and this is the tragedy, the story doesn’t end there. We read on as this young, good, gracious man, blind to what is happening inside himself, slowly becomes a petty, bitter, jealous man who eventually commits suicide in anger.

What happens here? How does this happen? Can someone, in a way that is imperceptible to himself or herself, turn from being gracious, idealistic, and good to become bitter, petty, jealous? It seems so.

In the book of Revelations there is a haunting passage where God speaks to a certain church. He tells it that he is pleased with its dedication, its zeal, its commitment to truth, and its generosity, but He has this one thing against it: “You have less love in you now than when you were young!” _{(Revelations 2,4)}

This is our real loss of innocence – “You have less love in you now than when you were young!” How sad that we can move from being the young Saul, full of the natural idealism and goodness of youth, to being the old Saul, full of all the anger and bitterness that comes from the debilitating self-awareness of age. It is funny how when we are young and immature we are often free of bitterness. I remember as a young man, living in a seminary-community of some forty other young men, all roughly the same age, how, despite the handicap of being confined within a rather cramped physical space (and an even smaller psychological one) and having to deal with each others’ immaturity, we got on rather splendidly. We were all rather raw and naive, but we enjoyed each other’s company. Today, with all of us in mid-life, for all of our maturity, if we tried to live together we would end up killing each other because now all of us have within us too much of the old Saul, namely, the bitterness, anger, and jealousy that so naturally beset the heart in mid-life and old age.

Of course, we can rationalize and justify this bitterness by linking it to cause, concern for justice, concern for orthodoxy or political correctness, or by seeing it as prophetic, a passion for truth. In the end, however, it is only what it really is – spite, bitterness of spirit, the old Saul jealous of the young David (“He has his ten thousands when I only have my thousands!”). What’s refreshing in young people is that while they aren’t wise, mature, or particularly responsible, they aren’t angry either, at least not with the ugly anger of mid-life and old age. Aging, it would seem, takes its toll.

There’s a cruelty in nature. Aging has this bitter rhythm. As we get older, slowly, imperceptibly, the body begins to lose some of its natural fragrance. We snore more loudly, and slowly a subtle sourness begins gradually to seep through the pores, the breath, the feces. That’s nature’s way, of no moral consequence. What is of consequence is that, too often, the same process happens in the soul. Here too a subtle sourness can begin to seep through when in fact the opposite should be happening. As we age a mellower fragrance should to seep through the pores of the soul. The real task of the second half of life is to stop this sourness of spirit.

In her powerful novel, The Stone Angel, Margaret Laurence tells the story of one Hagar Shipley, a once-beautiful, bright, young woman who has gradually through the years grown into a shapeless, dour, bitter, spiteful woman who, while having already lost almost all of her friends, still considers herself a gracious, good, and beautiful person. One morning, reduced to delivering eggs from door-to-door as a way of making a living, Hagar rings a doorbell and is greeted by a bright young child who, upon seeing Hagar, hollers to her mother: “That nasty, old egg-woman is here again!” Stunned at this description of herself, Hagar, immediately upon leaving the house, goes to a public toilet where she examines her own face at length in a mirror and is stunned at what she sees … stunned that she no longer recognizes herself, stunned at what others must be seeing and what she herself has been blind to, and stunned at how imperceptibly it can all happen – how we, blind to what others are seeing, can become the old Saul, full of all the bitterness, spite, and jealousy we so detest in others.

All of us who are in the second half of life need periodically to spend some time scrutinizing our faces in a mirror, courageously discerning whether it is the young Saul or the old Saul that is staring back.

Peace To Those Who Enjoy God’s Favour

October 17, 1999

At one point in her novel, Men and Angels, Mary Gordon describes a young mother who, each day has a little ritual as she waits for her children to come home from school. She sets a chair by the window so she can lean on it. In that way she can see her children as they run up to the house but she can also use the chair to steady herself. For indeed, some days, she needs it because when she sees her children running up to the house, with their coats undone and with their books and back-packs flying all about, she is so overcome with love, so overwhelmed with the need to protect, that she feels her heart is about to erupt and she gets weak and needs something to lean on to keep her balance.

That picture can serve as an icon for it is an image of how God loves us. God is looking at us in just that way right now. Why do I say that? Because this is what scripture reveals.

When the angels announce Jesus’ birth, they say this: “Glory to God in the highest and peace to those on earth who enjoy God’s favour.” (Luke 2, 14) The last part of that sentence might more accurately be translated like this, “and peace to those who receive God’s pleasure, who realize that God takes pleasure in them.” Given Mary Gordon’s image, we might paraphrase this to read: “Life will come to those who realize that God, when he looks at us, is so overcome with tenderness that he needs a celestial chair with which to steady himself.”

That is an incredible belief, but it is part of the essence of our creed. To say that we believe in God, as Jesus revealed God, is to believe that God takes pleasure in loving us, that it gives God delight to be our parent, and that God takes joy in continually offering us forgiveness and love. To believe that God sees us in this way is to make an act of faith in the God that Jesus revealed. Moreover, what is important is that we draw life from believing this. How? How does the realization that God takes pleasure in loving us give us life? We see the illustration in Jesus himself.

When Jesus’ head emerged from the waters of the Jordan as he is being baptized by John, the gospels say the skies opened and a voice from heaven said: “You are my beloved son, in you I take delight.” In many ways, this was the turning point in Jesus’ life. Prior to this, he had lived his “hidden life”; hidden not just in that his years of anonymity in Nazareth opposed his public life, but hidden especially in that, until hearing those words, Jesus’ real identity was as hidden from him. Now, with these words searing his soul and circumcising his heart, Jesus knows his true identity. He is the beloved child who gives God pleasure. From that realization, that he so enjoys God’s favour, he draws his stability, his unique capacity for altruism, his exceptional courage, and that deep joy that nobody and no event can ever take away from him. Jesus knows that he gives God pleasure and from that he draws his life.

Mary Gordon’s description of the young mother contains essentially the same idea: Imagine if these children could ever appropriate what that mother feels when seeing them. If they could ever really accept this, they would draw from it an identity, a stability, a capacity for altruism and courage, and a joy that nothing could ever strip them of. If they realized what their presence did for their mother they would then (this is the biblical term) begin to enjoy her favour. From that, life would begin to well up within them for they would know blessing.

Biblically this is what it means to be blessed. You are blessed, receive a blessing, when you draw life from someone else’s pleasure in loving you. As the angels themselves put it at Jesus’ birth: “Peace on earth to those who can receive God’s pleasure.”

But how to believe that? What is so difficult in the act of faith is not to believe that God exists or that the world of spirit is just as real as the physical world or that Jesus rose from the dead. What is harder to believe is that, right now, at this moment, despite everything that suggests that we are unworthy and despite all sin and infidelity, God is looking at us in the exact same way as the young mother Mary Gordon describes looked at her children – with a heart so full of tenderness and pleasure that He/She feels dizzy and must lean on some celestial chair for support. Such is God’s pleasure in loving us. Such is what Jesus revealed. If we could ever accept that we would begin to understand more exactly what the angels meant when the announced Jesus’ birth.

Satan And The Devil

October 10, 1999

We need a healthier theology of satan. Rather a strange thing to say! Can there be a theology of the devil? Perhaps not in the strict sense. Theology after all is meant to be words about God (Theos-God; logos-word). However in the wider sense of the word (theology as a view of something through the prism of faith) we need a theology of the devil. Why? Because for the most part, today, the devil is either naively ignored, as some dark superstition from the past, or is falsely attended to, as some underworld force that can throw little girls into mustard-spitting convulsions, as in the infamous movie, The Exorcist. Indeed, most today people do not even believe in the devil, either as a person or a force. What is to be said about the devil?

The gospels name the forces of hell in two ways: Sometimes they speak of the devil (diabolus) and at other times of satan (satanus). Are the terms synonymous? Not exactly: Diabolus means to divide, to tear apart; whereas satanus, most curiously, means almost the opposite, it connotes a frenzied, sick, group-think that accuses somebody or something. In essence what the gospels tell us is that the powers of hell, satan and the devil, work in two ways: Sometimes they work as the devil by dividing us from God, each other, and from what is best within us. Sometimes they work in just the opposite way, as satan. Here they unite us to each other but through the grip of mob-hysteria, envy-induced hype, and the kind of sick unity that makes for gang-rapes and crucifixions.

And at the root of both lies the same thing, envy. It is no accident that, among the ten commandments, only envy has two inscriptions against it. Jealousy is the devil’s tool and satan’s weapon. Through envy, the devil works at dividing us from each other. From envy we get the kind of paranoia, jealousy, sense of being wronged, and bitterness that dissipates families, communities, churches, and whole nations. The devil tears us apart. Satan, using the same weapon, works differently. As satan, envy unites us so as to put us into the frenzied, mad pitch of the lynch mob, the crowd hell-bent on crucifixion. Satan uses envy to pit the crowd against an outsider. Thus, the devil causes us to be distant and distrustful of each other, whereas satan that causes us to be caught up in a sick unity that comes of scape-goating, vicious gossip, and the kind of group-hysteria that leads to blood-letting. The devil is always using envy to divide the house, whereas satan is always using envy to gear the whole house up for a crucifixion.

In Jesus we see the opposite. The first word out of his mouth (“metanoia“) is a word uttered against the power of the devil: “Be un-paranoid, do not let envy and suspicion divide you from each other, God, and what is highest inside yourself!” Everything else Jesus says and does is intended precisely to lead us beyond division, dissipation, and being apart from each other. The kingdom he preaches is about coming together (the opposite of the devil). As well, nearly everything that Jesus says and does is anti-satan. He resists always the amazement of the crowd, group-hysteria, and the type of hype (even when it is in his favour) that wants to over-exult someone and kill someone else. He, himself, always drew his vision and energy from a deeper source, his Father’s will; known, not through group-think, but through deep interiority and prayer inside one’s own heart. It is no accident either that Jesus so often warned: “Do not be amazed!” and that when he looked for guidance he lifted his eyes towards heaven, not towards the crowd. He knew the dynamics of Satan. When crowds are under the grip of amazement there is very thin line between wanting to make someone their King and wanting to crucify that same person.

In the novels of Czechoslovakian writer, Milan Kundera, there is invariably one major character, often an artist, whose role it is to resist something Kundera likes to call “the great march”, namely, a group-think that inflames itself through moral rhetoric and then sets off marching on some kind of crusade. For Kundera there is always something frightening, blind, indeed satanic, in any “great march”, no matter what the cause. When group energy takes over, he fears, there will soon be a crucifixion done in God’s name. Jesus, its seems, agrees.

The devil and satan are real. We should not be naive on this score. But the real danger is not little girls writhing on a bed and throwing up mustard. Rather it is our hearts writhing in a paranoia and a jealousy that tears us apart from each other and crowds writhing in a sick energy that wants, in God’s name, to spill some blood.

Critics And Artists

October 3, 1999

In the literary world a distinction is made between a critic and an artist. A critic assesses things, an artist produces them. Would that we made such a distinction within theology and church circles because what we most desperately need today is not more criticism but more art, not more theological critics but more gospel artists.

This is particularly true as regards the issue of evangelization within the Western world. It is pretty generally agreed upon that we need a new enculteration of the gospel, a new missiology, a new look at what communications technology is doing to us, and a new model for adult education. Everywhere there is a sense that the old ways are no longer working well enough and that we need a new breakthrough.

And we are not short on energy, effort, literature, workshops, and courses on the subject. We are just short on results. Despite our best efforts, we are nowhere near a breakthrough. Why? Because, first of all, it is easier to make a diagnosis than to find a prescription. Hence, the literature is long on diagnostics but short on real remedy. I say this with sympathy. It is not easy to know what we should be doing today to more effectively give the faith to our own children. As a result, most of the time we talk about the problem, point out how important it is, and go on to say that we must address it.

Valuable though this is, ultimately, it is still talk about the medium, about technique, about process, about starting conversations, about paradigm shifts, and about our present malaise. None of it is yet the gospel itself. It is criticism in the technical sense, valuable in its own way. But, as we know, the critic is not the artist. The critic talks about something that somebody else produces. In the end, he does not write the play, produce the movie, paint the canvas, carve the stone, or make the music, poetry, or dance. The artist does. He or she produces what the critic talks about. Too often in theology and church circles, because we do not distinguish between criticism and art, criticism passes itself off as theology with the result that we get ever more sophisticated analytical tools but do not produce very much at all.

Our poverty today as regards evangelization is not so much lack of good critical thought as lack of good artists, gospel artists. What we really lack are theologians, philosophers, preachers, teachers, song writers, painters, and the like who can reshape the imagination, make new images, and create a new language that can take the word of God, with all the timeless truth and revelation it carries, and give it positive flesh, genuine aesthetic expression within today’s actual experience. No easy task. Good art never is.

Moreover this involves more, infinitely more, than simply finding a better technique, a more sensitive process, or using the media in an ever more sophisticated ways. Good preaching or teaching (religious “art”) is never a question of being the cleverest, of using the most modern techniques or sensitive processes, of finding the really imaginative stories, or even of having a fertile imagination. It is, first of all, having within oneself a real integration of faith, personal integrity, genuine empathy, and the capacity to carry tension. That is the initial basis, though more is required to be a religious artist. To be a gospel artist, one has to create a new language. Unless, like a Mother Theresa, one’s very person has become a sacred word, it is not enough to simply repeat the classical words of scripture, dogma, Christian history, and classical piety – good and true though these be in themselves. To preach effectively is to make up a new language, as the original gospel writers did and as good art does. In this case, that language has to carry the truth of revelation, fire the imagination, speak directly to actual experience, and, like every other language, have such an inner rhythm and aesthetics, such an integrity of sound and image, that it implants itself naturally in the mind and heart as a software. Trying to do this is in fact like learning a foreign language, only more difficult, because in this case you have to create the language as you learn it. There are no short-cuts to this. Like learning how to play the piano or figure-skate, it takes countless hours of painful work to get anywhere and the initial efforts are generally discouraging.

The good news though is that some of it is happening. Slowly, partly in baby talk, a new language for preaching and teaching is emerging. We do not, as yet, have a new St. Augustine, but, among others, in the Henri Nouwens, Thomas Mertons, Daniel Berrigans, Jim Wallises, John Sheas, Elizabeth Johnsons, Robert Barrons, Richard Rohrs, and Mary Jo Leddys of our time we see some fragments of real gospel art. We need to show some of this to our children.

Being In Solidarity With A Mixed World

September 26, 1999

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, in his Mass for the World, shares how he personally understands the offering of the bread and wine at the Eucharist. When the bread is held up in offering, he says, we are holding up this world, with all its achievements, legitimate glories, real progress, and many strengths. In offering the bread, we identify with the world’s triumphs, celebrate them, and ask God to bless them. Conversely though, one second later, we hold up the wine, crushed grapes symbolizing blood. In the wine, we hold up all that has been crushed and brutally trampled on as human progress moves forward. In offering the wine, we identify ourselves with what is broken, crushed, crucified, and dying in this earth and we ask God to empathically identify with it and bring divine power to bear upon it. Thus, in the central ritual of Christianity, we offer to God both the glorious and the crushed bodies of this earth. We bless and celebrate the former, even as we identify with the latter.

There is more in that understanding then merely a rich theology of the offering at the Eucharist. In Teilhard’s insight, I believe, there is also a secret that can help us to maintain a proper attitude towards the world because, as we know, our world is a very mixed place and it is not easy to keep things in proper perspective. Why?

Because on the one hand, undeniably, our world is full of a beauty, goodness, and love that honours its creator and accords dignity to its inhabitants, us. There is so much around us and within us of which we can rightly be proud. Humanity is not without its legitimate achievements. More obviously, we see these in the areas of technology, communications, the arts, sports, entertainment, food, and health. Daily we see progress, fabulous achievements, beautiful things, advances in health and beauty as these pertain to the human body, and a myriad of other steps forward in terms of the quality of our lives and the opportunities that life can offer. Moreover this is true too in the areas of love, worship, and morality. There is a history, even in the present, of altruism, prayer, and sanctity on this planet. Today too, like in every other age, saints and moral martyrs stalk the planet.

On the other hand, just as undeniable, is the fact that our world is full of greed, crass egoism, blind selfishness, the drive for power and privilege, unspeakable cruelties, hardness, constant betrayal, and straight old-fashioned sin. Evil too stalks the planet. Daily on our newscasts, we are made aware that millions of human beings suffer from hunger, violence, exclusion, and injustices of every kind. There is more than enough within us and around us of which we cannot be proud and which dishonours both the creator of this world and its habitants, us. We also have a history, even today, of selfishness, godlessness, and sin.

Hence, as we can see, progress is not without its price … but the price is also not without its progress. As some of our world moves forward, other parts are crushed; and as some parts are crushed, others move forward – all as part of the same movement. There is something within this that speaks of more than simple moral ineptitude on our part, though that obviously is part of it. The dynamics of nature, it seems, are themselves cruel, brutal, almost Darwinian; nature all on it own is ruthless enough to make one wonder about a creation within which some parts have to eat others to remain alive and grow. But this innate brutality within nature is a mystery for which there is no full answer. Rather a certain attitude is asked of us.

What Teilhard so brilliantly captures in his understanding of the offering of the bread and wine at the Eucharist is the attitude we might ideally have in the face of so mixed a world. Simply put, unlike the one-sided view of so many today, we may not simply see our world as cesspool of evil, ignoring its real beauty, goodness, moral and technological achievements, and legitimate triumphs. To be blind to these is to be dishonest. It is also to ignore many seeds of hope. Conversely, we should not unequivocally bless this world either, as if millions were not being crushed as part of the very cost of progress and as if all the blood that is spilt, all the lives that are crushed, and all the hearts that are broken might be deemed an acceptable price for progress. In a Christian, another attitude is called for, one which takes into account both the triumphant and the crushed bodies on this planet. So what are we to do?

Like Teilhard we must recognize and celebrate our world’s progress and achievements, even as we identify with those parts that are being crushed – and then hold them both up to God.

Three Prophetic Challenges for our Generation

September 19, 1999

Our world stands in need of prophecy. No one doubts this. It would seem too that there is no shortage of voices which claim to be prophetic. From every kind of religious and ideological camp there issue forth numerous voices, each one claiming to bring the particular challenge needed. But what does our generation most need to hear in terms of prophetic challenge? Which voices resonate with the great prophets of Israel? Which voices are most consistent with the challenge left us by Jesus?

The first thing that distinguishes the prophetic voice, long before any criticism issues from it, is love. A prophet does not make a vow of alienation, but of love. The role of a prophet is not first of all to be angrily in your face, but to reveal God’s challenge, but only as this first finds itself inside of God’s blessing, love, and forgiveness. More would need to be said about this because all of us know the negative impact of criticism when it is divorced from love. Given that background, and with the hope that what follows radiates more love than anger, this column will try to name those issues on which our generation most stands in need of prophetic challenge. Where are we as a generation particularly blind, morally and spiritually? We need, I believe, to be prophetically confronted on three counts:

On how we treats our widows, orphans, and strangers.

Beginning already hundreds of years before Christ, the Jewish prophets laid down a singular principle: The quality of our faith depends upon the quality of justice in the land and the quality of justice in the land depends upon how we treat three special groups of people – widows, orphans, and foreigners (those with the least status in the society). Christ not only endorsed this, he deepened it and made it a condition for entry into the kingdom. In Christ’s vision of things, the last are first, the poor are central, there is no place of privilege, and the person who is the most marginalized and least powerful in any group is the cornerstone that binds that community together.

Our culture, despite a growing rhetoric to the contrary, does not do very well either in understanding this or in living it out. Simply put, widows, orphans, and foreigners still do not fare very well, anywhere in our culture. Hence we must try to make ourselves see how our present cult of affluence, celebrity, glamour, sexual attractiveness, achievement, physical health, and eternal youth blinds us to the poor. And indeed we are blind to them. Our culture offers nothing more than scraps to anyone who is not somehow economically, physically, or intellectually endowed. Widows, orphans, and foreigners (those who cannot work the system to their advantage and privilege) are still everywhere the crucified ones.

On our lack of courage to look at personal sin.

Beyond our culture’s insensitivity to its poor, we also suffer from a concomitant callousness within personal conscience. More and more, we have less and less courage to look at personal sin; and indeed to even mention the word itself. Crassly stated, when we feel the need to write long, angst-laden, treatises on why it is therapeutically dysfunctional for us to sing the timeless words of AMAZING GRACE (“that saved a wretch like me”) it is time for some biblical prophet to step up and call us not just to conversion but simply back to sanity. Each of us needs to be challenged to appropriate the words of Paul: “I cannot understand my own behaviour. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the very things I hate.” Anyone who feels that these words do not apply to him or her is rationalizing. Moreover, when private conscience is calloused, so too will be our social action; when private conscience makes moral exemptions, so too will we discriminate in the way we act socially; and when private conscience rationalizes, we cannot hope to have real integrity at a wider level.

On our tendency to see things only against a temporal horizon.

To live in faith is to see things always against an infinite horizon. We do not do well on this particular score. The weighty realities of death and eternal life are rarely factored into any of our equations, let alone our personal, life decisions. Even within church circles, death and eternal life are rarely talked about. It has become both easy and fashionable (so long as we feel healthy, strong, and not greatly threatened) to slide into a comfortable nihilism – within which distraction becomes a functional substitute for religion and we live as practical atheists in regards to having any real sense that this life is not all that there is. Our narrow horizon needs to be challenged.

Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, where are you?

Faith and the Imagination

September 12, 1999

While doing graduate studies in Belgium, I was privileged to have as one of my professors, Jan Walgrave, a Dominican scholar, now deceased, who was a rare, precious combination of childlike simplicity, warmhearted holiness, and daunting scholarship. One day he asked me: “Do you ever sit on a park-bench and ask yourself: Why is there something instead of nothing?” I was young at the time, not much given to metaphysics, and answered honestly: “No! I don’t spontaneously ask myself that question. I’ve asked it sometimes studying or praying, but it’s not something that comes to me all by itself on park-benches.” He looked at me and said: “Then you aren’t a real philosopher.” Then, smiling, he added: “I ask myself that question every day!”

Indeed, why is there something instead of nothing? I didn’t ask myself that question much when I was younger but now, in mid-life, I have begun more and more to spontaneously ask it (though not because I want to be seen as a philosopher). No. I ask it now because whenever I try to imagine the existence of God, something that’s natural for a believer to want to do, I eventually run into this question: Why is there something instead of nothing?

It emerges this way: If we try to imagine that God exists, immediately a bevy of questions will leap to the fore: How can someone always have been? Where did God come from? How can an all-good, all-loving, all-powerful, personal Being of this kind have come into existence? How can such a Being exist? But the imagination is pretty powerless in the face of these questions. For it to grasp something, it has to make a certain picture of it and it cannot do so in this case. Faced with these questions, it runs dry, draws a blank, has nothing within its bag of tricks with which to make a satisfying picture.

And so the danger is this: Because the imagination cannot give us a satisfying picture as to how God can exist, we easily confuse this with doubt. Our failure to picture the existence of God, to imagine it, can give the impression that God in fact does not exist. How can God exist, we feel, if we are unable “picture” this existence? That’s a valid logic, to a point, but we must be careful not to identify a weak imagination with a weak faith; or, worse still, decide (as many have done) that since we cannot satisfactorily know God in our imaginations, by that token God does not exist. God’s existence does not depend upon the power of the human imagination, or on anything else.

The human imagination, for all its marvels, is quite limited and is not, in the end, the primary tool through which we know the deeper things. We know many of the truths that are most dear to us – truths about love, trust, and faith – in darker, more inchoate, ways. And this isn’t just true in terms of our sense of whether or not God exists. The limits of human imagination are manifest even when contemplating finite things. For example, it is not easy to imagine the magnitude of our universe. Scientists today offer the educated guess that there exist about five billion universes for every person who is now alive on this planet. That makes for about twenty-five billion universes! Trying to picture this tests the limits of the mind and imagination, though, being finite, this is still imaginable.

What isn’t imaginable is what ultimately lies at our origins and posits the question: Why is there something instead of nothing? Because even if we bracket the question of God and simply try to imagine the origins of ourselves and our universe, we find that, just as in the case of trying to picture God’s existence, the imagination runs out of room: What lies at the origins of everything? Where did things start from? From where did the primordial atom which was the source of the big bang itself originate? How did reality first come into existence? How can it always have been? In the face of these questions too the imagination cannot make any satisfying constructs. When contemplating ultimate origins, it draws a blank.

So, in essence, the existence of our universe (and us within it) is as mysterious, inexplicable, and beyond the imagination as is the existence of God. In neither case can we imaginatively picture its origins. In both cases, we posit a knowledge and a trust on the basis of something beyond the imagination, namely, a faith of some kind. At a certain point, whether we are talking about God, the universe, or ourselves, the question is the exactly the same: “Why is there something instead of nothing?”

Somewhere Jan Walgrave is smiling. So too, I suspect, is any philosopher worth that name.

Powerlessness and Frustration

September 5, 1999

Several years ago, at a retreat, I witnessed an interesting exchange between two men. The first man was white, a clinical psychologist by profession, physically slight, short of stature, and rather timid by nature. The other man was black, an unemployed labourer, athletically endowed, tall, powerfully built, with a slight air of aggression about him.

These men, so different from each other, were in the same discussion group and the psychologist had just shared a story that was particularly humiliating for him. He had been at a party with his wife, dancing, when a very rude and somewhat inebriated man pushed them and then made a lewd remark to the psychologist’s wife. Reacting spontaneously, the psychologist pushed the man and told him to get away from his wife. The drunk, a physically huge and powerful man, already in a snarly mood, advanced menacingly towards the psychologist who, in turn, knowing he was no match for him physically, began to apologize to the drunk, telling him he was sorry for pushing him. He concluded the story this way: “There’s the great irony. The guy pushes my wife and insults her and I end up apologizing to him so I don’t get my nose busted. You’ve no idea how humiliating that is for a man!”

Then turning to our unemployed, black friend, he said: “I envy you, envy your muscles. There are so many times when I hate who I am because I am powerless in these kind of situations.”

The other man offered an interesting reply: “You envy me? Yes, it’s nice to have muscles in situations like that. In fact I welcome those kinds of situations. Circumstances like that I can handle! I’d love to punch a guy like that and I wouldn’t even care if he was stronger and busted my nose. That kind of pain I can handle, I’m used to it. What hurts me is words. I’ve no power there. My whole life – I’ve always been the excluded one, the one who doesn’t understand what’s going on. That’s where I hurt, the way everyone can use words and I can’t, the way people can put me down and I’m too helpless to do anything about it and I just have to stand there and take it. That hurts a lot more than getting your nose busted! I’ve had mine busted. It’s no big deal, a punch in the mouth, nothing more. That I can handle. But you’ve don’t know how much words can hurt. Not a day goes past when I’m not standing in front of someone who is putting me down in some way, even when they don’t want to. My wife does it to me all time and doesn’t even know it. I’m happy when I get a chance to fight someone physically because that’s about the only time I don’t feel ashamed.”

Then, turning to our psychologist, he said: “You shouldn’t be complaining. About 100% of the time you’re in control. I mean, how often does anyone try to punch you in the nose? Whereas I’m frustrated and ashamed all of the time. It’s hard not to want to hurt someone or hurt yourself. I envy you, what you can do with words. I’d trade my muscles for that!”

An interesting, and rare, exchange – two men sharing feelings of inadequacy, powerlessness, and shame! I print up this little verbatim because, I believe, it contains a lesson for all of us. Simply put, there is no person on the planet – woman, man, or child – who doesn’t in one way or other daily face the shame of being inadequate, powerless, and humiliated before someone else, apologizing to someone who should be apologizing to them. So what do we do? We absorb, make do, and, through tears or bitterness, somehow cope with the feelings. Small wander we all struggle to maintain a healthy self-image and that hatred and violence are never far from the surface in our relationships. We all live not-so-quiet lives of desperation, daily feeling a lot of inadequacy, helplessness, and shame.

Painful as this all is, it’s a cloud with a biblical lining. A sense of our own powerlessness is one of those privileged places where grace and the kingdom can break through. When Jesus tells us that little children enter the kingdom of heaven naturally, he is not idealizing a child’s innocence (though it is beautiful) but is highlighting a child’s helplessness. A little child cannot even feed herself or go to the bathroom on her own. She needs help for everything. In the end, so do we.

Inadequacy, powerlessness, and humiliation, like death and taxes, await us all. Invariably we envy each other’s strengths and feel shame in our own particular inadequacies. The choice for bitterness is easy, but the far better choice, as Virginia Woolf says, is use these feelings to help adopt an attitude of compassion for others, knowing that life is hard for everyone, including those who can use words and those who can use muscles.

God’s Unconditional Love

August 29, 1999

Recently I had lunch with a former student of mine, a very idealistic young man who teaches religion in a Catholic High School. He shared with me about his struggles in trying to teach young people about God. One of the major problems, as he sees it, is that his students’ idea of God invariably contains too much of the notion that God is a petty tyrant, that God can easily be offended, that God is threatened by our joys and successes, and especially that somehow we have to earn God’s love by being good.

He, for his part, tries to correct these notions by presenting a picture of God as a God whose essential countenance is that of blessing and not of frowning, a God who is an extravagant, unconditional lover, the father of prodigal son, who cannot be put off by human infidelity. Among other things, he likes presenting Julian of Norwich’s picture of God as “sitting in heaven, smiling, completely relaxed, his face looking like a marvellous symphony.” However, when he tries to present this idea of God the response of his students is inevitably something to this effect: “Then why be good? If God loves us no matter what we do, then why keep the commandments? If we are not to be punished or rewarded for our efforts, then why make sacrifices?”

Why indeed? Why be good and try to keep the commandments if God loves us anyway? Simply put, we don’t try to be good so that God loves and rewards us. God loves us no matter what we do and heaven is never a reward for a good life. Are these glib statements? No. God’s love, as Jesus assures us, is always both unmerited and unconditional, nothing we do can ever make God love us, just as nothing we do can ever stop God from loving us. God loves just as God does everything else, perfectly. God loves everything and everybody perfectly. In fact, part of Christian belief (a dogma in fact) is that God’s love is what keeps everything in existence. If God stopped loving anything, it would cease to be. This (as the American theologian, Michael Hines, is fond of pointing out) raises an interesting question: If God loves everything and everyone perfectly, does God then also love Satan? Indeed, does God love Satan as much as he loves Jesus’ mother, Mary?

The answer can only be “yes”, God loves Satan as much as God loves Mary. The difference is not in how God loves them, but in how they, each in turn, love God. God loves each of them in the same way, namely, perfectly. But obviously Mary’s response is very different from Satan’s. In that difference we see what creates hell, a certain attitude in the face of love. However notice that in neither case is the love either merited or deflected. God just loves us, pure and simple. God cannot be offended. God’s love cannot be driven away. God does not reward or punish us on the basis of whether we have been good or bad. God simply loves us.

Then why be good? Why keep the commandments? What difference does our response make?

Our response makes a big difference, but not in terms of giving God offense, driving God away, or making God punish or reward us. It makes a difference in how we stand and feel in the face of love. We cannot offend against God, but we can offend against others and ourselves. We can, like Satan, live in bitterness and unhappiness right within love itself and we can deeply hurt others. The spiritual and moral precepts of the faith, all of them, including the ten commandments, are therefore meant to do a couple of things:

First, for anyone who is mature in the faith, living out what faith and morality asks of us is in fact a natural response of gratitude for being loved and a natural expression of sensitivity to others. The desire to be good and to keep the commandments, as Martin Luther once said, follows from genuine faith and love the way smoke follows fire. The intent is never to earn love or reward, but to respond properly to them. This is true in the case of mature love and faith. However, for those of us who are still struggling to be mature, the spiritual and moral precepts of the faith are meant as a discipline – precisely as a discipleship – that helps teach us what it means to be a spiritual and a sensitive human being. Trying to be good should still not be an attempt to somehow earn love or heaven, but rather an acknowledgement, a humble one, that one still needs a lot of help in knowing how to live in the face of love.

Why be good if God loves us anyway? For the same reason that an artist doesn’t deface a masterpiece and a lover doesn’t violate his or her beloved. Ethics follow naturally when truth, beauty, and love are properly appropriated.

Needed – A Theology of Original Sin

August 22, 1999

My parents had a working theology of original sin. Perhaps they weren’t exactly clear as to what original sin was, but they had, at the very core of their understanding of life, a deep sense of its substance.

Of course, they weren’t so naive as to take the story of Adam and Eve and the apple literally, but they did believe that this story contained a profound, archetypal truth both about history and ourselves. What did they believe? They believed that because Adam and Eve “ate the apple” history and our lives are now marked by certain things (and, for them, it didn’t much matter that the story of the apple was not a video-taped recording of history). For them, because of this primordial event, whatever it was, individually and collectively, we find ourselves helpless to save ourselves; only grace from outside can help us. Second, because of this initial “fall”, none of us is as morally whole as we would like to think we are in our more inflated moments. Rather, if we are honest, we all know the truth of Paul’s lament in the Epistle to the Romans: “Woe to me, wretch that I am, the good I want to do I end up not doing and the evil I want to avoid I end up doing.” Finally too, because of this primordial event, we live outside of the garden of Eden, in a world that is less than perfect and we can never find in this life a full, consummated symphony but rather are “weeping in a valley of tears.”

Today, we tend to react negatively, especially emotionally, to all these beliefs: We don’t like admitting helplessness, we balk at singing the famous line from Amazing Grace (“that saved a wretch like me”), and we think it morbid to consider this world a “valley of tears”. Curiously though, I submit, because of how they understood original sin, my parents’ generation had a certain peace, one that comes of wisdom, that we lack today. Among other things, their belief in original sin helped give them the capacity to recognize that they were weak, morally inept, and much in need of personal conversion. It also helped them accept that, here in this life, there are no finished symphonies and that death, chaos, and accidents, life’s nasty contingencies, can be accepted without having to blame or sue anybody and without having to grow angry and impatient with everything. In the end, their theology of original sin served them well. It helped them make peace with the fact that life is, more often than not, far from ideal.

One of our problems today is that we are trying to understand ourselves and our lives without the benefit of a theology of original sin. We would like to believe that we can be morally whole all by ourselves, that it is morbid to ever refer to oneself as “a wretch”, that a finished symphony can be had in this life (if only we are lucky enough or work hard enough at it), and that our efforts at changing the world need focus only on converting systems and never on purging personal fault. We would like to live our lives as if … as if selfishness and greed are simple learned behaviours; as if somewhere there are functional families, churches, and institutions, and our own are anomalies; and as if, in the end, we could save ourselves without God.

This is, I believe, a naivete. We are trying to understand life – and come to peace with it – without an adequate symbol to help explain how, at its very root, it is somehow un-whole. We admit of course that there is something wrong, for there always is, but we prefer to name it with lesser, less archetypal and less religious, symbols. Thus we speak of patriarchy, the corporate structure, capitalism, false freedom, non-conscientization, and the like, as if these actually were original sin and not just certain functional substitutes. Marxism as an ideology, for example, contains precisely this naivete. Ultimately it collapsed in Eastern Europe and is destined to fall elsewhere because it contains no concept of original sin. Instead it tries to convince us that we can adequately explain human nature and that there is sufficient reason to give ourselves away to community in altruism, without reference to a personal God (who alone can ask such things) and a theology of original sin (which alone adequately situates our resistance and points to its widest cause).

For my mum and dad, there was an adequate explanation for things: Adam and Eve “ate an apple”, whatever that meant, and since then we have found ourselves outside of the garden of paradise, in a valley of tears, un-whole, grieving something long lost, deeply in need of both collective and personal healing, but still standing gratefully before a gracious, ultimate power, the saving grace of God. That makes more sense than anything else I’ve read lately.

On Not Hiding From God

August 15, 1999

During the last year of her life, Therese of Lisieux corresponded regularly with a young man named Maurice who was preparing to become a missionary. This man, despite being very sincere and quite pious, had some rather serious moral struggles. While he greatly admired Therese, eagerly awaited her advice on things, and relied upon her prayers to help him, he was always afraid to tell her about his moral failures. Thus, for a long time, he would share with her only about the good things in his life, but never about his sins and failings. He feared that if he told her the real truth she would be shocked, lose respect for him, and turn away.

Eventually though he did muster up the courage and trust needed to share his weaknesses with her, though only after first expressing his fear: “I was afraid that in love you would take on the prerogative of justice and holiness and that everything that is sullied would then become an object of horror for you.”

Therese’s response to this comment is most noteworthy: “It must be that you don’t know me well at all, if you are afraid that a detailed account of your faults would lessen the tenderness that I feel for your soul.”

God should get more press like this. The fear that this young man experienced in his relationship to Therese is the exact one that all of us perennially have in our relationship with God. We are afraid that in the sight of goodness and holiness all that is sullied in us will be an object of horror. Simply put, we are afraid that God’s good opinion of us might change should all of our darkest secrets be laid bare. Thus Therese’s words could have come right from God’s own mouth: “You don’t know me very well, if you are afraid that baring your faults before me will lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.”

Those are words that, for all kinds of reasons, we find very hard to believe. Why? Because generally the experience we have with each other is exactly the opposite. As our faults become more manifest in a relationship, others’ affection for us often does lessen. So we do what comes naturally, we hide our faults and failures and try instead to reveal our strengths and achievements. This then carries over into our prayer lives, our church lives, and even into our most intimate relations with God.

How does this impact our prayer? Real prayer, as it is classically defined, is the lifting of mind and heart to God. Our problem, given the fear that what is wrong in us will somehow lessen God’s affection, amounts to this. While we find it easier to raise our minds to God, we rarely really lay bare what is actually inside of our hearts. Instead we treat God as we would a visiting dignitary, namely, we show God what we think God wants to see in us, tell God what we think God would want to hear about us, and hide all those things that we feel will lessen God’s affection. Silly as it sounds, we, like Adam and Eve after the fall, try to hide our faults from God, worrying that if we really bared our souls God would be displeased.

The same is true in our church lives: Invariably, when we most need God and the support of the community of faith, we stay away from church and community. This is manifest everywhere; sadly so. I know so many people, especially young people, who because something is wrong in their lives stop going to church. They stop going to church precisely until such a time when, all on their own, they can somehow rectify the problem and then they go back to church and present their “unsullied” selves, now seemingly more at rights with holiness and goodness. Generally this expresses itself this way: “Given how I’m living, I would be a hypocrite if I went to church! I’m too honest and humble to go to church right now.” That may sound noble and humble, but it betrays a false understanding of God and ultimately does us no favours. As Therese (and she might just as well have been speaking for God) says: “You must not know me very well if you think that a detailed account of your faults would in any way lessen the tenderness I feel towards you.”

In fact, on this score we might well learn a lesson from Adam and Eve. After they sinned, they too did what comes naturally, they hid and tried to camouflage their shame by their own efforts at clothing themselves. But their shame remained until God found them and gave them real clothing with which to cover their guilt.

We do not know God very well at all when we fear coming into God’s presence replete with all that is within us, weaknesses as well as strengths. Nothing we do can ever lessen God’s tenderness towards us.

Annual Thoughts From The Court-Jester

August 8, 1999

In humour there is the constant rumour that God exists.

Our ability to laugh and to laugh within any situation, no matter how dire and threatening it may be, suggests that we are somehow above any circumstance within which we find ourselves. In laughter we feel our immortality and feel too that there exists something which is beyond the here and now. Because of this, people have been able to laugh at their executioners, Thomas More was able to tell a joke on the scaffold, and ultimately everyone senses that nothing fully imprisons his or her spirit. By laughing at the imprisonment of the human spirit, humour implies that this imprisonment isn’t final. In humour we mock the here and now because we contuit that there is something beyond it. In the end, we can laugh precisely because, at the deepest level of our being, we know that God exists, that God is Lord, that God isn’t dour, and that eventually all will be well and so will every manner of being.

Thus, we shouldn’t always be so serious, especially about the things of theology and church. God has ordained this to be so, not by writing it into a set of dogmas but by hardwiring it right into our very genetic make-up. Knowing that the temptation to be pompous and over-serious, especially about religion, would constantly seduce us, God put a trickster, a court-jester, right into our bodies and souls. Whenever we get too serious, the jester inside us begins playing tricks on us, breaking wind, and we soon enough find ourselves healthily deflated – and looking into a bigger horizon wherein looms a transcendent God who doesn’t like pompousness. Joking is undignified, Chesterton once said, but that is precisely why it is so good for the soul.

With this as a high theological canopy, allow me to share some nuggets from a most motley group of jesters:

When the Angel, Gabriel, announced to Mary that she was to be the Mother of Christ, Mary replied: “Behold the handmaid of the Lord.” Apparently Joseph too had a conversation with the same heavenly messenger that goes this way: Angel: “Joseph you’ve been chosen to have a role in all of this. You’re to remain in the background, dress in brown always, be a humble carpenter, support the holy family, and not have much of a speaking part, but to be a general support to this divine project. Do you accept?” And Joseph replied: “Behold the handyman of the Lord!”
There’s been a long-standing theological dispute between Christians and Mormons. Christians claim that when Jesus died he spent the time between his death and resurrection “descending into hell”. The Mormons claim that during these three days he visited America. Maybe there is no contradiction here after all, both might be talking about the same thing. Besides you know how things sometimes go when you travel!
Aging is tough. When you reach a certain age it seems like you’re having breakfast every 20 minutes!
The second commandment is not so much a prohibition against profanity as it is against bad theology! (Michael Hines)
We should be careful so as not to make the wrong mistake. (Yogi Berra)
Advice to children: When your mom is mad at your dad, don’t let her brush your hair.
Have you ever imagined a world with no hypothetical situations?
A woman drove me to drink and I didn’t even have the decency to thank her. (W.C.Fields)
When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading. (Henny Joungman)
I have tried in my time to be a philosopher, but cheerfulness always kept breaking in. (Oliver Edwards
Perhaps one has to be very old before one learns how to be amused rather than shocked. (Pearl S. Buck)

And finally there is the advice of Ann Thornhill and Sarah Wells, court jesters both of them, on how to nourish your inner martyr. (Today I Will Nourish my Inner Martyr: Affirmations for Cynics, Ann Thornhill and Sarah Wells, Prima Publishing, Rocklin, Ca, 1998) Try repeating these mantras to yourself

Today I will ignore my inner child.
Today I will talk to my inner child using only “shoulds” and “have-to’s.”
Today I will second-guess myself as much as possible
Today I will acknowledge my inherent shame and try to be as inconspicuous as possible
Today I will practice looking forlorn
Today I will patronize an authority figure
Today I will use chocolate to fill my empty, inner wasteland
Today I will start by reminding myself that I used to be a lot younger, thinner, and happier
Today I will focus on one aspect of my body that displeases me
Today I will accept that, of all the seasons, winter best symbolizes my spirituality – dead and shrivelled
Today I will accept that I am aging very poorly
Today I will accept that I am a humourless wretch

Accepting our humourlessness is indeed a good starting point.

Christ As Wounded

August 1, 1999

There is a story told, a legend perhaps, about St. Theresa of Avila. One day the devil appeared to her, disguised as Christ. Theresa wasn’t fooled for even a second. She immediately dismissed him. Before leaving, however, the devil asked her: “How did you know? How could you be so sure I wasn’t Christ?” Her answer: “You didn’t have any wounds! Christ has wounds.”

Christ has wounds! So does anyone who stands where he stands. This is spiritual wisdom. To teach anything else is a sham. John of the Cross, the great mystical doctor of the soul, once laid out a series of spiritual counsels which, if followed, he believed, would lead to deeper intimacy with Christ. The first three of those counsels work this way:

Number one, study the life of Christ. We cannot move into deeper communion with Christ without first knowing who he is. Hence initially we must study his life, particularly as it is spelled out in the Gospels. Next, strive actively to imitate Christ. For John of the Cross, imitation is not a matter of trying to somehow mimic what we think Jesus might have looked like (as the “Jesus people” tried to do with their flowing-beards and white albs) or of trying to parallel what Jesus actually did (he taught, healed, and fed people; thus I will be a teacher, a nurse, or a social worker). All of these miss the point. For John of the Cross, imitating Jesus means trying to have the same motivation he had, trying to feel like he felt, and trying to do things for the same reason the did them.

His next counsel, however, has a strange sound to it. It reads this way: Endeavour to be inclined always: not to the easiest, but to the most difficult; not to the most delightful, but to the harshest; not to the most gratifying, but to the less pleasant; not to what means rest for you, but to hard work; not to the consoling, but to the unconsoling; not to the most, but to the least; not tot he highest and most precious, but to the lowest and most despised; not to wanting something; but to wanting nothing; do not go about looking for the best of temporal things, but for the worst, and desire to enter for Christ into complete nudity, emptiness, and poverty in everything in the world. (Ascent to Mount Carmel, Bk. I. Chapter 13)

Taken literally, this counsel contains all the elements for spiritual masochism (“Always choose what is more painful and distasteful”) but that is not what John is teaching. What is he trying to say? First of all, unlike the first two counsels, this one is not a question of actively choosing anything. John doesn’t say “choose” what is more difficult, but “endeavor to be inclined towards it”. It is rather a counsel for discernment. Ultimately what it is saying is that we know that we are actually imitating Christ (and not featherbedding our own agendas in his name) when humilation, the lowest place, emptiness, the unpleasant, pain, and wound actually enter into our lives. Reversely stated, if we are perennially standing on the side of glamour and success, admired, without wound and humiliation, we are probably not really following Christ – who is marked, first of all, by wounds – but are probably serving ourselves in his name. It is not incidental that, in Christianity, we worship the humiliated one.

This is a critical insight. Too often we think exactly in reverse. We look at pain, exclusion, humiliation, and shame as signs of not being blessed, as indications that a person is doing something wrong. And this isn’t abstract: It’s what we spontaneously think when we see anyone who, in our culture’s eyes, bears a certain humiliation because he or she is too fat, too short, not sexually attractive enough, has emotional problems, or has bad teeth or bad hair, isn’t in fashion, isn’t attuned enough to be politically correct, or for whatever reason stands outside of the circle of popularity, fashion, and acceptance. Our culture quickly identifies lack of physical, emotional, or social wholeness with lack of blessing. We identify Christ more with the unmarked body of youth (still taking more life than giving it) than with the stretch marks and middle-aged fat of life-giving adults. Thus, our real symbol for what constitutes life and blessing is a perfect body of a (ever-younger) Hollywood star, still unmarked by anything that might somehow humiliate it, rather than a stretched, misshapen body which has been scarred and made to sag by actually giving life. But the body of Christ is the humiliated body, permanently wounded by giving life.

When Jesus rose from the dead the first thing he did was to show his disciples his wounds, glorified now, but extremely humiliating to him before he died. To become as spiritually astute as was Theresa of Avila we must begin to understand what that means. Christ is ultimately recognized in his wounds.

Suicide – Love Through Locked Doors

July 25, 1999

About one year ago, I wrote a column on suicide. Among other things, I suggested there that suicide is the most misunderstood of all deaths. Given the positive response to that piece, I would like take things a bit further here, suggesting as well that our faith in God should give us ultimate consolation in the face of the suicide of a loved one.

I begin with a story: Some years ago some friends of mine lost a daughter to suicide. She was in her early twenties and had a history of clinical depression. An initial attempt at suicide failed. The family then rushed round her, brought her to the best doctors and psychiatrists, and generally tried in every way to love and coax her out of her depression. Nothing worked. Eventually she committed suicide. Looking at their efforts and the incapacity of their love to break through and save her life, we see how helpless human love can be at a point. Sometimes all our best efforts, patience, and affection can’t break through to a frightened, depressed person. In spite of everything, that person remains locked inside of herself, huddled in fear, inaccessible, bent upon self-destruction. All love, it seems, is powerless to penetrate.

Fortunately we are not without hope. The redeeming love of God can do what we can’t. God’s love is not stymied in the same way as is ours. Unlike our own, it can go through locked doors and enter closed, frightened, bruised, lonely places and breathe out peace, freedom, and new life there. Our belief in this is expressed in one of the articles of the creed: HE DESCENDED INTO HELL.

What is meant by that? God descended into hell? Generally we take this to mean that, between his death and resurrection, Jesus descended into some kind of hell or limbo wherein lived the souls of all the good persons who had died since the time of Adam. Once there, Jesus took them all with him to heaven. More recently, some theologians have taken this article of faith to mean that, in his death, Jesus experienced alienation from his Father and thus experienced in some real sense the pain of hell. There is merit to these interpretations, but this doctrine also means something more. To say that Christ descended into hell is to, first and foremost, say something about God’s love for us and how that love will go to any length, descend to any depth, and go through any barrier in order to embrace a wounded, huddled, frightened, and bruised soul. By dying as he did, Jesus showed that he loves us in such a way that his love can penetrate even our private hells, going right through the barriers of hurt, anger, fear, and hopelessness.

We see this expressed in an image in John’s Gospel where, twice, Jesus goes right through locked doors, stands in the middle of a huddled circle of fear, and breathes out peace. That image of Jesus going through locked doors is surely the most consoling thought within the entire Christian faith (and is unrivalled in any world religion). Simply put, it means that God can help us even when we can’t help ourselves. God can empower us even when we are too hurt, frightened, sick, and weak to even, minimally, help ourselves.

I remember a haunting, holy picture that I was given as a child. It showed a man, huddled in depression, in a dark room, behind a closed door. Outside stood Jesus, with a lantern, knocking softly on the door. The door only had a knob on its inside. Everything about the picture said: “Only you can open that door.” Ultimately what is said in that picture is untrue. Christ doesn’t need a doorknob. He can, and does, enter through locked doors. He can enter a heart that is locked up in fear and wound. What the picture says is true about human love. It can only knock and remain outside when it meets a heart that is huddled in fear and loneliness.

But that is not the case with God’s love, as John 20 and our doctrine about the descent into hell make clear. God’s love can, and does, descend into hell. It does not require that a wounded, emotionally-paralysed person first finds the strength to open herself to love. There is no private hell, no depression, no sickness, no fear, and even no bitterness so deep or so enclosed that God’s love cannot descend into it. There are no locked doors through which Christ cannot go.

I am sure that when that young woman, whose suicide I mentioned earlier, awoke on the other side, Jesus stood inside of her huddled fear and spoke to her, softly and gently, those same words he spoke to his disciples on that first Easter day when he went through the locked doors behind which they were huddled and said: “Peace be with you! Again, I say it, Peace be with you!”

Our Mystical Centre

July 2, 1999

Where does our faith lie? What’s its seat? Where does it take its ultimate root?

Bernard Lonergan once suggested that faith is God’s brand on us. God has seared our souls, as by a great fire, in a way that goes beyond what we can conceptualize, imagine, and even consciously feel. Ruth Burrows, in trying to define mysticism, says basically the same thing. For her, mysticism is being touched by God in a way that is too deep for words, thoughts, and even feelings. Real faith then, it would seem, takes root beyond thought, imagination, and feeling.

But how is this possible? How can something be real and touch us beyond thought, imagination, and feeling? Is faith something magical, para-normal? Not at all. All of us have experiences of being influenced by, and making decisions by, something beyond what we can explain. We know things that we cannot think, we sense things that we cannot consciously feel, and often make decisions based on something beyond the imagination. Faith tends to operate like this. It is not the stuff of thought or even of feelings, but something deeper. How does it work?

We commonly speak of three centres within the human person: head, heart, and gut. The first two are a bit easier to grasp: The head is where we think and imagine, while the heart is where we feel and experience emotion. So what does the gut do? Most of us spontaneously confuse the gut with the heart, thinking of the gut as simply a deeper centre for our feelings. It is a deeper centre alright, but not of conscious feelings. The gut is not so much a centre for feeling as it is precisely something beyond feeling. In the gut, we sense more than feel, intuit more than imagine, and are addressed more in the conscience than in the intellect and heart. The gut is our “ought” centre. It’s where we sense those things that we “have to” do rather than those we would want to do. Moreover, the gut is not much moved by our feelings but often goes against them.

All of us, I suspect, have had some experience of this: For instance, we sometimes find ourselves in a commitment to someone or something (in a marriage, in a family, in a church, in service to the poor, or even just in some civic duty) within which both our thoughts and feelings are not in agreement with what we are doing, but are overruled by something else. More simply put, we sometimes find ourselves in a situation wherein our heads aren’t in it; our hearts aren’t in it; but we’re in it. Why? What holds us there? Why are we staying within something for which neither the head nor the heart can supply adequate justification. Obviously something else is holding us, something beyond the head and heart, beyond thought and feeling. Clearly there must be something within us deeper than thought and feelings and it’s here where faith ultimately takes root.

It is important to understand this, not for theoretical reasons, but so that when we are pushed to the wall, as we all inevitably will be by the dark night of doubt, we will then not be too easily overcome, but, like Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, will know that God’s love is something beyond what fires the imagination and the emotions. Thus, we see that Jesus, even while he sweats blood in the Garden and then later on the cross feels as if God is absent, remains faithful and is able to surrender himself in love, despite everything in his thought and feelings telling him to do otherwise. Why was he able to do what he did? As Henri Nouwen puts it:

I can’t fully answer that question, except to say that beyond all the abandonment experienced in body and mind Jesus still had a spiritual bond with the one called Abba. He possessed a trust beyond betrayal, a surrender beyond despair, a love beyond all fears. This intimacy beyond human intimacies made it possible for Jesus to allow the request to let the cup pass him by become a prayer directed to the one who had called him “My Beloved.” Notwithstanding his anguish, that bond of love had not been broken. It couldn’t be felt in the body, nor thought through the mind. But it was there, beyond all feelings and thoughts, and it maintained the communion beneath all disruptions. It was that spiritual sinew, that intimate communion with his father, that made him hold on to the cup and pray: “My Father, let it be as you, not I, would have it.” (Can You Drink from this Cup, p. 37)

Faith, properly understood, is precisely a trust beyond betrayal, a surrender beyond despair, a love beyond fear, an intimacy beyond human intimacies, and a spiritual sinew and communion that holds beyond all disruption. Faith is as much present beyond the head and heart as within them.

The Transforming Power of Beauty

June 25, 1999

Few things in this life have the raw power of beauty.

What’s beautiful stuns us, holds us, draws us to itself, awakens us, and transforms us. Beauty enchants. Drawn by its power, we stretch beyond ourselves and grasp for more light and love. It is no accident that Confucius, perhaps the greatest educational expert of all time, based his whole system on the power of beauty.

In Christian thought, there have always been theologies of beauty, though rarely have they been utilized sufficiently. Most recently, Hans Urs von Balthasar has articulated such a theology, a “theological aesthetics“. Beauty, he feels, is the key to everything, including our journey towards God and each other. How does beauty work?

According to Von Balthasar, anything beautiful has a character of grace to it. Beauty disturbs us, catches us, entraps us. It does not let us be indifferent, but is inherently provocative. It makes us deal with it. But, unlike violence, which also disturbs and provokes, beauty challenges precisely what is mean, ugly, violent, and base. In beauty there is always an invitation.

What does it invite us to do? It invites us to wonder, that such a thing should exist. Implicit in all wonder is a search, however dark and inchoate, for the source of what is making us wonder. To see something beautiful is to have one’s horizon lifted, to strain one’s eyes to see something further. To stare at something beautiful is to be turned away from self (the opposite of sin). In the face of beauty we begin spontaneously to look for the ultimate source of all beauty. In contemplating beauty, we search for God, pure and simple.

Beauty therefore has a summoning power, an arresting quality. The language it speaks is as elemental as a heart attack. It chooses us, we don’t choose it, any more than we choose a heart attack. We know this from personal experience, beauty comes upon us as a command, an imperative, as a moral demand. To refuse beauty is to refuse what is best within us. To wilfully despoil beauty is to put a knife to one’s own soul. In this sense, even when we don’t consciously relate it to its ultimate source, beauty still works to expand us, to turn us outward, to make us more moral.

It does this by reminding us, in a deliciously palatable way, that everything second best is really second best because there is something beyond it, that is indeed first best. In doing this, beauty reminds us too, as does the first page of scripture, that it is not good to be alone, that living in sovereign aloneness and being lord to oneself, is also something second best.

And why is beauty so powerful? What gives it such power to enchant? Why does it so stun and haunt us? Why is it that, despite sin, violence, self-absorption, numbing distraction, third-degree tiredness, and plain stupidity, we can still fall, as Von Balthasar so beautifully puts it, into “aesthetic arrest“?

For Von Balthasar, as for scripture, the answer lies in the fact that, first of all, at the deepest level of our beings, we already know beauty and resonate sympathetically with it because we are ourselves beautiful. In the depth of our souls we carry an icon of the One who is Beautiful. We have within us the image and likeness of God, the source of all beauty.

That Imago Dei, that deep virginal spot within us, that place where hands infinitely more gentle than our own once caressed us before we were born, where our souls were kissed before birth, where all that is most precious in us dwells, where the fire of love still burns, and where ultimately we judge everything as to its love and truth; in that place, we feel a “vibration sympathetique” in the face of beauty. Beauty rouses dormant divinity within us. It stirs the soul where it is most tender.

In essence, what beauty does is kiss the soul in that same place where it still remembers, in some dark manner, having been kissed long ago, when it was still naked – before birth, before sin, before lost innocence, before being wounded, before tiredness, before shame, and before being buried under so much suspicion and callousness. Beauty awakens the soul by mirroring it. In beauty, the soul sees itself, it recognizes kin.

Beauty then has an immense power to transform us, to call us back from woundedness, tiredness, and sin to health, enthusiasm, and gratitude. All beauty – be it the beauty of nature, the masterpiece of an artist, the stunning grace of the human body at the peak of its bloom, or the more abstract, though no less real, radiance of virtue and truth – is equipped to do this. Beauty then should be honoured. Like love, it softens the heart and invites one out of oneself. Moreover, perhaps even more so than love, it is what reminds us, as Merton once said, that we are “all walking around shining like the sun.”