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.”

Turning the Other Cheek

June 20, 1999

One of the best-known but most-ignored lines in scripture is Jesus’ challenge to “turn the other cheek”. What did he mean by it?

First off, the text needs a careful reading. In Matthew’s version of it, Jesus says: “If anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn the other also …” (Mt. 5, 39-40) It is significant that he specifies the “right cheek”. Scholars point out that he is referring to a certain practice at the time where a superior would strike a subordinate with the back of his right hand (the left hand was considered unclean and never used in public, even for something as base as slapping another). Moreover, to slap someone in this way was intended for much more than simply inflicting physical pain. It was an act that asserted superiority, power over another, lording it over, arrogance. Masters slapped their slaves in this fashion and occasionally husbands struck their wives like this. To hit someone with the back of your right hand made a statement: “I am your superior! How dare you stand up to me in any way! This is the order of things! Know your place and stay there!”

So picture the scenario: Someone is standing in arrogance, facing the person he is about to hit. He strikes with the back of his right hand and thus the slap falls on the right cheek of the other. Now, if that other person turns her face so as to offer her left cheek, the attacker can no longer hit her in the same way. He can still strike her, but no longer with that same gesture that asserts superiority over her. Just that one shift fundamentally alters things. Moreover it alters a lot more than mere physical position. At a deeper level, the fundamental, taken-for-granted, chemistry of things is being challenged and redefined. The person who was formerly victimized has, by a simple shift of body, made the clear statement that the old order of things is now over. She has now placed herself in a position within which she cannot be struck again as a subordinate or slave. She can still be struck, but, to strike her now, in this new position, is very different than it was previously. To strike her now is to see yourself in a different light, as unjust, as ignoble, as someone whose time has past.

The key principle contained in all of this – to change your position so that you can no longer be slapped as a subordinate – can best be understood when it illustrated. We see it, first of all, in Jesus’ own life. During his passion, he is often struck, but never in such a way that it takes away his dignity. On the contrary. Jesus had so positioned himself (in every way) so that anyone who struck him found himself standing in front of a mirror that brutally exposed his own illusion, pettiness, violence, and distance from the truth.

You see this principle too at the very heart of the spirituality and strategy of non-violence. When we look at persons such as Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Dorothy Day, we see that they did not fight back when they were slapped, but they did not remain simply passive either so as to let a sanctioned injustice remain. What they did was precisely to turn the other cheek, they positioned themselves in such a way so that, if the aggressor continued the injustice and violence, he was no longer able to do it in the morally-sanctioned way that a superior (by divine right) can humiliate an inferior. By re-positioning themselves they became a mirror within which the aggressor was ultimately ashamed to see himself.

From this we see that the re-positioning of oneself so as not to be slapped anymore as a subordinate, ultimately means a lot more than the simple physical gesture of turning one’s head. What Jesus, Gandhi, Martin Luther King, Desmond Tutu, and Dorothy Day were able to do was, through the integrity of their own persons, to position themselves morally so that anyone who continued to strike them as before now found himself in front of a mirror that exposed him as cruel, unjust, and ignoble. For example, in the case of Dorothy Day, civil authorities became increasingly reluctant to arrest her. Their fear came not from any possibility of retribution on her part, she was not interested in striking back, but from the painful realization of what they were saying about themselves if they arrested her: “What does it say about us, if we arrest someone like Dorothy Day? What does it make us look like?”

Violence can never be defeated by a higher, morally-superior violence. It can only be exposed and shown to be what it is, ignoble and belittling to the soul of the person perpetrating it. Nothing highlights this better than “turning the other cheek”, as Jesus prescribed this.

Moral Discourse

June 13, 1999

Imagine you are an artist in your workshop, working on a mosaic artefact. Your four year-old daughter is watching with fascination as you glue tiny bits of pretty glass to a board. She decides to be helpful. She goes into the house, takes a hammer, goes to the cabinet containing your best wine glasses, smashes all your Waterford crystal into tiny pieces, places the shards of glass on a tray, and, with the sincerity of a four year-old, brings them to you, saying: “Here is some more glass for you to work with!” Did she do right or wrong?

The question allows no easy answer. On the one hand, she is sincere and trying to be helpful. On the other hand, your precious crystal is forever smashed, irreparable damage has been done. So you stand before your daughter unsure whether to kiss or scold her – or do both.

This little moral puzzle is valuable because it highlights the fact that something can be done in love and sincerity and still be wrong at another level. In essence, in this little scenario, we see the difference between objective wrong (a mistake) and subjective guilt (sin). Something can be wrong and yet not be sinful.

Too often we do not make that distinction. Instead we use a number of words with quite different meanings as if they were the same. Thus, for instance, we ask questions like: “Is it a sin not go to church on Sunday? Is euthanasia immoral? Is premarital sex wrong? Is artificial birth control unnatural? Is war evil? Does cheating on your taxes transgress any moral boundaries? Is this a mistake? Is this ideal? Is this tasteless? Is this aesthetically improper?” All of these are moral questions, but they are speaking of morality in a different way.

We have many words in our moral vocabulary to suggest that something is not ideal. We speak of things as being bad, wrong, sinful, evil, immoral, unethical, corrupt, wicked, not right, unnatural, perverse, imperfect, abnormal, distasteful, tactless, aesthetically improper, impure, intrinsically wrong, an impropriety, a failing, a transgression, a mistake, a stupidity, an error, a blunder, an indiscretion, a faux pas. These do not all say the same thing. Too often though we tend to make them synonymous and many of our disagreements over moral issues result from that.

For example, to say that something is wrong is not necessarily to say that it is a sin. Conversely, just because something cannot be said to be a sin does not mean that it is not wrong. Take the question of sex outside of marriage: Is it a sin or not? Is it right or wrong? Is it a mistake? An impropriety? Immoral? Is it simply something that is less than ideal? These are different questions. If I were making the moral judgements, I would answer the questions separately.

Is sex outside of marriage a sin? That is not a judgement that I, nor anyone else, can make. Sin is always a question of the heart and only God reads that. Nobody can ever look at an action done by another and say that it is a sin. Sin is a subjective thing, something between an individual and God, something dependent upon many personal things that cannot be judged from the outside – motivation, knowledge, background, responsibility, maturity, the degree of felt-love in one’s life, mental and emotional health. All the moral theology books, old and new, agree on that.

However, the question of moral right or wrong is something else. One can, and should, say that sex outside of marriage is not morally right. Such a statement does not judge the subjective intent, goodness, or relationship to God of another person. It accuses no one of sinning. It is only a judgement, but a necessary one, about the moral order of things. It simply says that some “Waterford crystal” has been broken, irrespective of the private goodness and sincerity of the one doing the breaking.

This kind of distinction is equally unpopular among conservatives and liberals. Neither is comfortable with saying that something can “be wrong” but “not sinful”. For the conservative, if it’s wrong it’s also sinful. For a liberal, if it isn’t sinful then one shouldn’t say it’s wrong. Both these positions are unfortunate, hurt people, and confuse moral discourse.

We hurt people and do not do any favour for religion when we impute sin all over the place and make judgements on peoples’ private consciences. Nobody can tell anyone that he or she has sinned.

Conversely, we also hurt people and do no favour to religion, however well intended our efforts, when we collapse the entire moral order into peoples’ private intentions. If I paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa because I naively think it will improve the painting, I do something wrong, whether I am well intentioned or not.

Something can be innocent but wrong, sincere but hurtful, well intended but a mistake, pleasant but tactless, honest but stupid. It is important that all of us, liberals and conservatives alike, admit both sides of these equations.

Choosing A Different Kind Of Heaven

May 30, 1999

In a recent novel, Anita Brookner tells the story of a seventy-something widow named Dorothea May. Dorothea lives by herself in a comfortable flat in London. Materially she wants for little, but emotionally her life is not so rich. As she ages, her circle of friends and influence grows ever smaller. She copes by relying on the familiar, on comfortable routine: She buys a newspaper at the same newsstand each day, eats her lunch in the same restaurant, has her coffee on her terrace at a regular time each day, makes and receives the same phone calls each Sunday, and takes the same walks each week. These rituals, all that regularity, steady her and keep her growing old gracefully, peacefully, and comfortably.

Things change, however, when one summer, to accommodate her sister-in-law who is receiving a number of visitors, Dorothea reluctantly agrees to lodge a young man in her flat for a couple of weeks. The young man, Steve, is bright, gay, and irreverent. Most everything about him is an affront to her and his presence upsets her routine, yet she likes him and he admires her. No real friendship develops, but his presence stirs something in her, making her realize that she has been too long out of the sun.

One night she has a dream that she has died and gone to heaven, but heaven is not exactly what she expected. It is dull, orderly, and seems perpetually overcast, sunless. People are walking around in a large garden, mostly silently, one of them wearing a tweed cap. They are all friendly, non-threatening, and have impeccably good manners.

The whole scene, in her mind, is very English, not unlike Hyde Park on a Sunday afternoon – “It was an English Heaven, framed precisely to satisfy the expectations of those who had grown up in a Welfare state, sparse decent people who wore hats and took healthy walks.” There is no judgement, no punishment, no fear. Everything is comfortable, except in dull light. Heaven is an extension of her present life.

The dream stays with her and haunts her for several days, not with any threat of death, but with the fear of eternity as an extension of her present sunless life. This prospect appears pretty depressing to Dorothea. However the dream also stirs a fire inside her. She senses that this kind of heaven (Heaven as a comfortable, friendly stroll in Hyde Park on a sunless Sunday) is not inevitable. She realizes that heaven need not be an extension of our present lives and it is not in our best interests to let it be.

So she begins to reflect upon certain women, widows, her own age, who, at a certain age, threw convention and comfort to the wind to live different kind of lives, to find the sun again.

Moreover, it wasn’t that these women were endowed with great material riches or opportunities for travel. The opposite: “These people too lived modestly, making do with small rooms, with pensions, having happily divested themselves of most of their worldly goods. They were returning to nature, which was perhaps a lesson worth learning. The revelation – for it was nothing less – was that one did not have to sit down and wait to be transformed. One could, and should, go out to meet nature half way.” (Visitors, Toronto, Doubleday, 1997, p.211)

I am not sure how accurate it is to depict heaven as a Sunday stroll in Hyde Park (though the part about the tweed hat certainly does offer some reassurances about taste and character in the next life) but what is important here is Brookner’s insight about meeting nature half way. What exactly does that mean?

Brookner herself answers this: Dorothea remembers an old woman she had met years ago in Paris. This woman wore shapeless clothes and kept her legs bare. She hung around the same restaurant every day, drinking black coffee and declaring to whoever would listen that she lived in a small cheap apartment, with too many stairs, and that she nearly died of exhaustion each day just climbing those stairs. However, once in her little room, “she had the same view as Diderot had once had.”

Dorothea now remembers that woman in envy, wishing she might somehow be taken under her wing, admitted to the company of such an astute and self-sufficient elder – for whom heaven would obviously not be some sunless extension of aging.

This woman had gone out to meet nature half way. She had given up pretensions, accumulation, possession, seizing things and hoarding them, so as to live again like a child, delighting in the immediate, unashamed to be naked, in a shapeless dress.

Naked we have come into this world and naked we will go out of it. The task of the second-half of life is to begin meet nature half way, namely, to begin to shed things, especially those upon which we have built our security, so as to forsake a certain sunless comfort for a great view from our windows.

How Jesus Takes Away The Sin Of The World

May 23, 1999

Jesus is the lamb of God who takes the sin of the world! That formula, expressed in various ways, lies at the centre of what we believe about Jesus. What is meant by it? How does his sacrificial giving of himself take away our sins? How can one person take sin out of the world?

In trying to answer that, we should be careful not to fall into a common misunderstanding. Because of certain biblical and doctrinal ways of expressing this, the impression can be given that Jesus’ suffering and death took away the sins of the world by somehow paying off a debt to God, namely, that God took Jesus’ suffering as compensation for our sin – implying that God had lived in anger since Adam’s sin, waiting for someone to adequately pay the debt before that sin could be forgiven. The images and metaphors used to express Jesus’ expiation for sin can, if taken literally, give that impression, but that is not what they mean. What do they mean?

There is a rich background to this concept: Many pre-Christian cultures had rituals involving a scapegoat. It was not enacted the same way in every place, but in essence it went something like this: At regular intervals, a community would try to purge itself of the evils that were besetting it (divisions, rivalries, jealousies, violence, warfare, theft, anger, murder, and the like) by a ritual designed to take these things out of the community. The ritual went like this: They would take a goat and would, through some symbol (which often included draping the goat in purple and putting a crown of thorns on its head), figuratively load on its back all that they felt was wrong inside of their community. The goat was then driven out into the desert to die. The idea was that the goat was taking the sin of the community away with it. Curiously, this generally had a certain effectiveness. For a time afterward, there would more unity within the group.

Of course no real transformation took place. Nothing really changed. Jealousies and anger remained as before, even if for a time people were able to live together more harmoniously. A goat, driven into the desert to die, does not take sin out of a community. How then does Jesus, as the lamb slain, take sin out of a community?

Jesus, as the lamb of God, does not take away the sin of the world by somehow carrying it off so that it is no longer present inside of the community. He takes it away by transforming it, by changing it, by taking it inside of himself and transmuting it. We see examples of this throughout his entire life, although it is most manifest in the love and forgiveness he shows at the time of his death. In simple language, Jesus took away the sin of the community by taking in hatred and giving back love; by taking in anger and giving out graciousness; by taking in envy and giving back blessing; by taking in bitterness and giving out warmth; by taking in pettiness and giving back compassion; he taking in chaos and giving back peace; and by taking in sin and giving back forgiveness.

This is not an easy thing to do. What comes naturally is to give back in kind: hatred for hatred, anger for anger, coldness for coldness, revenge for hurt. Someone hits us so we hit back. But then sin stays inside of the community and no amount of scapegoating, ritualized in liturgy or otherwise, is of any real value in changing things because we are not transforming anything but are simply acting as conduits, passing on the identical energy that is pressed on to us. Jesus did otherwise. He did not simply pass on what was done to him. Rather he took it in, held it, carried it, transformed it, and eventually gave it back as something else. This is what constitutes the sacrificial part of his love, namely, the excruciatingly pain (ex cruce, from the cross) that he had to undergo in order to take in hatred and give back love. But that is the only way that sin can ever leave a community, someone has to take it in, hold it, carry it, and, through a certain excruciating sacrifice of self, transform it into something else. For this reason Christianity, among all the religions and philosophies of the world, is the only one that worships the scapegoat.

Moreover this dynamic is not just something we are asked to admire in Jesus. The incarnation is meant to be ongoing. We are asked to continue to give flesh to God, to continue to do what Jesus did. Thus our task too is to help take away the sin of the world. We do this whenever we take in hatred, anger, envy, pettiness, and bitterness, hold them, transmute them, and eventually give them back as love, graciousness, blessing, compassion, warmth, and forgiveness.

God Sends The Rich Away Empty!

May 16, 1999

In her recent book, For the Time Being, Annie Dillard, although herself a woman of mature faith, raises a series of hard questions about faith. For example, at one point, she asks whether what is expressed in Mary’s Magnificat is in fact true:

Many times in Christian churches I have heard the pastor say to God, “All your actions show your wisdom and love.” Each time, I reach in vain for the courage to rise and shout, “That’s a lie!” – just to put things on a solid footing. “He has cast down the mighty from their thrones, and has lifted up the lowly. He has filled the hungry with good things, and the rich he has sent away empty!” … [Yes, but] I have seen the rich sit secure on their thrones and send the hungry away empty. If God’s escape clause is that he gives only spiritual things, then we might hope that the poor and suffering are rich in spiritual gifts, as some certainly are, but as some of the comfortable are too. In a soup kitchen, I see suffering. Deus otiosus: do-nothing God, who, if he has power, abuses it. (Penguin Books, Toronto, 1999, pp. 85-86)

Dillard herself, as is evident from the rest of this book and her writings in general, does not have a problem in understanding or accepting that God’s blessings flow into us mainly through our poverty (so don’t let this one quote put you off her excellent book). Her protest is precisely in view of, as she says, putting “things on a solid footing.” We believe that all God’s actions show forth wisdom and love, but that is not, as she points out, immediately and everywhere evident – which is not quite the same thing as saying that it is not everywhere true. It is.

How so? If in fact we do see people who are materially comfortable and also spiritually rich (and the reverse) then how is God sending the rich away empty and filling the hungry?

The first thing that needs to be said is that this cannot be understood except through faith and real faith does not share the shallow, cynical view that spiritual riches are in fact a feeble compensation for the goods of this world. The promise of a spiritual inheritance is not poor pittance when stacked against actual material comfort, the enjoyment of luxury, good looks, sexual attractiveness, achievement, fame, and admiration by the world; though from Marx, through Freud, through millions of people today, the view is out there that what the gospel promises is, if one has the courage to face it, a huge rationalization for missing out in life, a poor excuse for living. Dillard does not share that view. Neither do I.

Even outside of faith, simply with the eyes of this world, ultimately this truth already makes itself plain. The poor do get fed and the rich do go away empty. How?

What becomes more evident every day as one grows older is that, already in this life, happiness, meaning, family, love, and joy are dependent upon the acceptance of a certain vulnerability, an emptiness in the biblical sense. Whenever we have the sense that we are not poor and hungry – when we feel self-sufficient, rich, in possession of what we need, satiated, and in control – then, whether we want to or not, we begin to push people away and many of those closest to us, all on their own, simply begin to move away from us. That is why it is so often the case that after years of sweat and effort, when we finally arrive at where we have wanted to be for so long, we find ourselves frighteningly alone and surrounded by the wrong kind of people. At the summit of our successes, at our proudest worldly moments, we look around for real family, for old friends, and for the type of simple joys we once took for granted and find that these aren’t there any more as they once were. If we’re honest, we soon realize that we have, even if we didn’t want to, jettisoned these along the way because, in the illusion of strength, we began to travel alone.

It’s no secret that we admire the rich and the strong, but we hate them too, unless we sense in them a poverty and a vulnerability that lets us be close to them. At the end of the day, we can only get close to each other when we are vulnerable. It is no accident too, but rather a testimony to a deep truth at the heart of the gospel and at the centre of life itself, that material comfort, money, good looks, worldly success, and being admired by the world, do not translate automatically nor easily into happy family, reliable friends, peace of heart, and a sense of security.

When we are rich, we do go away hungry and mostly alone – unless, of course, our poverty, vulnerability, and emptiness remain the true ground of who we really are.

Celebrating the Jubilee Year

May 10, 1999

It only happens every thousand years! Millennium clocks around the world are already ticking down to zero time, midnight, December 31, 1999, the end of one millennium and the start of another. Celebrations will break out around the world.

What is a healthy attitude towards all of this? Should we take seriously all the apocalyptic hype and believe that January 1, 2000, will mean the end of the world or an intervention in our lives by some huge cosmic or divine force? Or should we take a cynical approach, shrug the whole thing off, and let January 1, 2000, be simply another day? Is the turn of a century to be doomsday, magic, or just another day at office? How might we approach the new millennium and the celebrations surrounding it?

We begin by acknowledging that there is no theology of millenniums. The turn of a century, in the end, means nothing special in terms of God’s revelation. For a Christian, there is no magic in numbers. In that sense, January 1, 2000, will indeed be just another day. Don’t expect fire from heaven, destroying angels, signs in the moon or the sun, nor beams of light or grace from the other world. Symbols can be very rich, but, at the end of the day, they are still only symbols. January 1, 2000, will dawn and end like every other day. You will still have to pay your taxes, do your laundry, brush your teeth, and deal with your boss the day after.

On the other hand, while there is no magic in numbers, an anniversary of this magnitude – Jesus’ two thousandth birthday, the two thousandth anniversary of the event by which we measure time on this planet – should not be ignored either. To let this event slide by without proper celebration would constitute not just a fault against Christianity but would be a virtual sin against anthropology, against humanity itself. As Eliade used to say, no community should botch its births, deaths, or founding events. To celebrate the millennium is to celebrate a birthday, except that in this case it is a very big birthday indeed. Moreover, as with all birthdays, while there is nothing magical about celebrating it on the particular day upon which you were born (you can celebrate it anytime or not celebrate it at all) highlighting the actual day heightens the symbolism and fires the imagination, thereby offering a rich opportunity for remembrance, for grounding yourself, for grace, for kairos in the biblical sense. What a birthday or anniversary celebration offers is a special opportunity to as a Saskatchewan poet, Harry Hellman, puts it “do what we should have been doing all along, just sitting on the grass and loving.”

That is essentially what the year 2000 and the Jubilee celebrations surrounding it are meant to be, a year for sitting on the grass and loving. Biblically we is call this a Jubilee, a year of Sabbath. What precisely is this? A Jubilee has to do with the biblical concept of time. The bible tells us that God created the world in six days and then rested on the Sabbath from all the work of creation. That original seventh day was the first Jubilee, the first sabbatical, and it was God who celebrated it. When the theology of this is fleshed out, we see that biblically time is meant to have a certain rhythm which works this way: You work for six days, then have a one day sabbatical; you work for six years, then have a one year sabbatical; you work for a lifetime, then have an eternity of sabbatical.

To celebrate a Jubilee therefore is to be on sabbatical in the biblical sense. We already have a miniature experience of this since we have one day of Jubilee every week, Sunday. But we are also meant to have the occasional whole year of Sundays. That is what a Jubilee year is meant to be, a year of sabbatical, a year of Sundays. Thus what we are invited to do for the Jubilee year, 2000, is to “go on sabbatical” for a whole year, not necessarily as this is understood in the world, but as it is defined in scripture, namely, as having a year of “un-ordinary time”, time set aside from normal activities to forgive debts, reconcile with enemies, give away surplus goods, focus on things beyond work and making a living, and to rest and celebrate in God. That is the agenda for the Jubilee year, the agenda for a true sabbatical. It is a time to practice for the life of heaven since heaven is reconciliation and resting in God.

So this is what the millennium clocks are really ticking down to, a Jubilee year, a biblical sabbatical for the world, a whole year for every person in the world to avail herself or himself of the opportunity “to just sit on the grass and love.” My suggestion is that we don’t let this chance slip by; for most of us this will probably be the only sabbatical we ever get!

The Power of Helplessness

May 2, 1999

In her book, Dead Man Walking, Helen Prejean describes her feelings as she watches her first execution. Everything inside her is sick and confused. She knows that what is about to happen, the taking of this man’s life, whatever his crime, is wrong and yet she can appreciate the feelings of those who are about to take that life. She understands the complex web of history and emotion that has led up to this moment and to the belief that we somehow serve justice through capital punishment. She doesn’t agree with the conclusion of course, but she knows that her protest of this is not the same as protesting Hitler; she can’t just throw her body in front of the executioners in an attempt to save this man, as you might do if you see a child attacked on the street. Thus, part of her frustration is not just that she is powerless to stop this killing, it also has to do with being helpless to even protest it effectively. So she is reduced to silence, to interior dissent, to prayer, to helplessness. In essence, what she does as she watches this execution is “to ponder” in the biblical sense.

As we know, in the Hebrew conception of things, the mindset out of which the Gospels were written, pondering meant something quite other than what it did to the Greek philosophers (Socrates, Aristotle, and Plato) and St. Augustine whose conception of things helped constellate what we call common sense in the Western world. The Gospel writers conceived of things very differently and so when they describe Mary as “pondering” they are not depicting her as cerebrally entertaining the kind of abstract, reflective thoughts that Socrates asked for when he said that “the unexamined life is not worth living.” What they are describing rather is that painful wrenching of heart, of soul, that you feel when you stand helpless in the face of suffering, sickness, death, misguided sincerity, or anything else that is so overwhelming so as to let you know that you are no longer in control. To ponder is to stand begging for God’s insight and strength when things overwhelm you.

Thus, pondering is what Helen Prejean did as she watched that execution, it is what Mary did when she stood under the cross and watched Jesus die, it is what Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsamane when he sweated blood, it is what we do whenever we stand helplessly by the bedside of a loved one who is dying of cancer or AIDS, it is what we do when we are unable to offer words of consolation to someone who has suffered the loss of a loved one, it is what we do when we see one of our own children misuse his or her freedom in destructive ways, and it is what we should do at all those times when we are inadequate to the task of love and forgiveness.

Pondering, in the biblical sense, is not so much active as it is passive (in the sense of the Latin verb, PASSIO). When we speak of “the passion of Jesus Christ” we are not talking so much about anything that Jesus actively did, but rather about what was done to him, what he endured, what he submitted to and what he carried in silence during his last hours on earth.

But what is the value of such “passivity”? How does silent suffering that does not actively intervene and alter a situation change anything? Why do we value so much Jesus’ passion when it was precisely the time in his life and ministry – and a very short time it was in fact – when he was not preaching, teaching, feeding, healing, and actively helping others? How can one help anyone by standing helplessly by as injustice unfolds? What is the value of these things: Sweating blood in a garden? Silent tears? Prayers that aren’t publicly manifest? Interior dissent that is powerless to change the actual situation on the outside?

Jesus answered this with another question: “Wasn’t it necessary?” Doesn’t defeat sometimes mean victory? Aren’t silent suffering, interior protest, and helpless empathy sometimes the real weapons for change? Isn’t the sweating of blood the key to sustaining all of our commitments? Isn’t the carrying of tension the key to love and family life? Isn’t it only when we admit our helplessness that God finally enters?

“Why is this necessary”? The answer to that questions lies at the heart of all wisdom, all Christian revelation, all depth, all maturity. But it is an answer that we will not find in books, nor in Socratic reflection. We will find it precisely when we ponder in the biblical sense, namely, when we stand helpless, muted, and frustrated, but listening, before a pain, an illness, or an injustice that so overwhelms us that we are unable to rely on any power save that of God. What is taught us there holds the key to everything.

The Summer of my Discontent

April 25, 1999

Nothing in my youth remains as clear in my mind and as formative of my soul as is the summer when I was fourteen years old. For any boy, that’s an awkward age, even at the best of times. For me, that summer was not the best of times.

It began ordinarily enough. The most important things in my young life then were sports and looking good. I was obsessed with trying to make the high school fastball team and the parish junior baseball team. To make those teams would be to look good, to be able to strut a bit, to have some confidence with the opposite sex, and to have a better place among my friends, to have, as it were, a bit of immortality, as fourteen year-olds define it. But that summer dealt me a different kind of immortality, not the kind a fourteen year-old wants to deal with.

I came to breakfast one morning at the beginning of May and was told that one of our neighbour’s sons, a young man in his twenties, had, the previous night, committed suicide by hanging himself in a barn. No event, no death, no tragedy, no loss of love, not anything, has ever rocked the foundations of my soul as did that suicide. It’s not that I fell to pieces and was unable to control my tears. The opposite, I went numb and never cried for years. But that was not the story, dealing with death was.

At fourteen, you have no understanding of death, especially of that kind, suicide. Years later, I would begin to understand that sometimes a man or woman can have so sensitive a soul that, at a point, something snaps and, not unlike a heart attack or stroke, it takes that person unwillingly out of this life. But on that day in May all those years ago, and through all that summer, I didn’t have that understanding, nor the peace that comes of it, and so my young thoughts and feelings churned in every direction but found no restful place to stop: When all you’ve experienced is life and all you can dream of is life, what sense can be made of death, especially the suicide of a young, healthy person whose athletically-endowed body I envied?

It was the fact of suicide (that black hole inside of human understanding and formerly even inside of our Christian faith) that so jolted, but it was more. It was the brute inevitability of death itself, especially of my own some day, that ate away inside of me. I had seen dead people before, though not many, but they were all already old, had lived long enough, to my young reasoning. This person hadn’t lived long at all and the seeming unnecessary character of his death was like an atom bomb to my young soul. What is the purpose of making a baseball team, of popularity, of all of my young dreams and plans, if this, after all, can happen?

I agonized and fretted, silently though. Curiously too my reaction was not, it seemed, a religious one. On the contrary, I wanted to think of nothing religious at all. Distraction, reading magazines about Hollywood stars and athlete’s exploits, seemed the route to go; after all, to a fourteen year-old, they, the rich, the glamorous, with their beautiful bodies and exciting, graced lives, offer an exemption from death and all its terrors.

And so went my summer – compounded further by two other young deaths in our district and school; first, the death of another young man in his twenties, killed in an industrial mishap and then the death, in a horseback riding accident, of one of my classmates. I remember spending more than one evening staring at a dark sky and wondering: “Where are they? Are they still alive somewhere? What really is behind those clouds? God? Another life? Terror and hell? Love and an ecstasy that I can’t imagine?” Such are the metaphysics of a fourteen year-old.

Slowly, as happens with these things, a calm returned. Life, with all its promises, demands, and numbing distractions, eventually brings you back to the ordinary with its health, aches, and pleasures. I stopped staring at the dark sky and asking those metaphysical questions. But, underneath, something had shifted. I had been through my first dark night of the soul and I’d learned something.

I knew now, in a way I never imagined before, that life is fragile, that everyone dies, that I too will die someday. I knew too that life is not just about life here, but about something bigger, infinitely bigger. I am a priest because of that – because of that summer of discontent, when my fourteen year-old soul was forced to do some metaphysics and my internal furniture was forever re-arranged. God, it seems, writes straight with crooked lines. I did make that team at school and we even won a game or two, but things had changed for good.

The Least Glamorous of all Sicknesses

April 18, 1999

Few things trigger as negative a feeling as paedophilia, particularly when its perpetrator is someone within a position of sacred trust. For many people, paedophilia is the ultimate horror. Outrage seems the only appropriate reaction. And why not? In the face of paedophilia, there should be outrage because few things do greater harm to a person than to be violated in this manner. The harm done to a victim in this kind of abuse can’t be overstated. Paedophilia is a horror, pure and simple, and the first sympathy must always be for its victim.

But with that being said, and it’s an important preamble before anything else may be said, something else should be added, namely, that it’s important too to have compassion for the person, man or woman, who is a paedophile. This is not an easy, nor popular, thing to say, but it needs to be said.

We must be careful to not think of ourselves as compassionate too quickly. Compassion is easy when it can’t be misunderstood and when it leaves us feeling fully righteous. It’s easy to be compassionate when it makes us feel clean and good, especially if it also makes us look good to others. It doesn’t take much depth of character to feel compassion for starving children, or for the tired and tortured faces of the refugees we see daily on our television screens, or for most anyone else who stands before us in crisis and tears. Compassion in these situations is so natural that, were we not moved, there would clearly be a certain moral and psychological deficiency in us. Any normal person feels sympathy in the face of innocent pain which reaches out to him or her. It’s natural to be compassionate when that compassion is wanted, understood, gives us a clean feeling, and makes us look good besides.

Things aren’t as easy when our compassion is misunderstood, when it makes us look compromised, tainted, unclean, and when it doesn’t give us a good feeling. It is far easier to have sympathy for a victim than for a killer. It is also far easier to be empathic with an innocent person who has been violated by an abuse of trust than it is to have those same feelings for the person who has breached that trust. Thus it is not easy to feel for, understand, or reach out in empathy to, a paedophile. To do so means not just risking misunderstanding, it also means reaching beyond that special abhorrence we reserve for those persons whom we feel the most moral distance from and against whose very weakness we can feel sane, whole, and good. Simply put, I don’t necessarily feel very good when I compare myself to Mother Theresa, but I certainly feel more healthy when I match myself against a paedophile. Similarly, I can feel pretty good about myself when I publicly display my concern and sympathy for starving children, oppressed refugees, and most every other kind of victim, but I don’t feel the same self-assurance when I publicly display empathy for a paedophile.

And yet that is precisely what mature compassion asks for, namely, empathy for that person in our society who suffers from the least glamorous of all sicknesses, paedophilia. Among all illnesses this is the least understood and the least glamorous.

To begin with, it must be understood that every paedophile was, first of all, himself or herself a victim, someone who as a child had his or her wholeness shattered by the sickness of an adult. It is not by choice or personal fault that he or she carries this sickness, anymore than anyone chooses to have a defective gene. Every abuser was first abused and a terrible part of that tragedy is that sometimes, though not always, the victim victimizes others. Thus we should have a special sympathy for a paedophile because, as a child, against his or her will, this person was infected with the least glamorous of all illnesses – and one that brings with it an ultimate stigma.

Each generation, by virtue of its place in history, is asked to carry some specific burden forward towards a new moral and psychological plateau. Part of our generation’s task, both in the church and in the world, is to carry the stigma of paedophilia, and to carry it without scapegoating it perpetrators by falling into a one-sided and immature compassion. To be caught up in all these “scandals” right now is not, as is the common thought, a disgraceful waste of time, energy, and money. To be part of this is rather to be part of a critical, defining, moral moment in history. That moment asks of us a number of things: to expose and understand something that has for too long been hidden, to recognize and deal with the real sickness this leaves in its victims, and, not least, to embrace in genuine compassion those who suffer from the least glamorous of all illnesses.

The Humiliation of God

April 11, 1999

One of the characteristics of divine revelation is that it often breaks through where you least expect. Grace invariably catches you unaware, a surprise. Frequently too the surprise is not a pleasant one for God shines brightly in our humiliations, unafraid to be embarrassed in this world.

Let me risk the following example: At age fifteen, Therese of Lisieux made the decision to enter a Carmelite monastery. She thought she had prepared herself fairly well for what she would meet there and indeed she had. She was under no illusion about what lay ahead for her, both in terms of the austerity of the life she was taking on as well as in terms of how some of the nuns would react towards her. She knew it would be hard: early rising, long hours in chapel, poor food, inadequate heating, a small cell with a straw mattress, days spent mainly in silence, hard menial work, rules forbidding her at times to talk to her own blood sisters, and little or nothing in the way of earthly compensation. She was even prepared for the fact that many of the nuns would react badly towards her – questioning her motivation, seeing her as a spoiled child, misunderstanding her vocation, treating her with coldness or, alternately, doting on her as the community baby. She had thought all of this through beforehand and felt ready for whatever met her in that monastery. Thus when she entered its gates, she was well-prepared, ready … for everything except what actually happened.

Shortly after she walked through the gates of that convent, her father, whom she had adored and who had loved her so purely and deeply and who had throughout her whole life radiated so much of the love and compassion of God, went insane. Moreover, his insanity (a form of mental illness not understood at the time) led him to do strange, humiliating things. He became as helpless as a child, constantly got lost, had inexplicable mood swings, grew silent, reacted angrily at times without cause, could not be trusted to be alone, did embarrassing things, and was once even caught carrying a revolver. Therese had so idealized this man and had been so proud of him. For her, until now, he had embodied God – as love, as stable, as predictable in goodness, and as utterly trustworthy. Initially, therefore, her father’s insanity shattered her world entirely (not just in terms of her family life but also, and especially, in her understanding of God). How could someone so trustworthy, good, stable, and loving suddenly become so different? Beyond that too, some of her relatives blamed her for her father’s illness, saying that her leaving him for the convent had broken his heart. It took a long time, a lot of pondering, and a much deeper understanding of God, before Therese was able to make her peace with all of this.

Eventually, however, she learned something from this experience that profoundly reshaped her spirituality. What she learned was this: to know God, one must begin to grasp the humiliation of God in this world. What is implied in this? Where do we see the humiliation of God in this world?

Whenever we see someone who is unable to protect herself or himself against pain, especially the type of pain that humbles and humiliates, we are witnessing the humiliation of God in the world and if we have the eyes of faith we are standing at that place where the deeper secrets of heaven are being revealed.

We see this clearly already when we look at little children. They are so helpless and needy that they cannot hide what needs to be hidden. Spittle, urine, mucus, feces, and tears are always in evidence around them. We see this too whenever we see anyone who, for whatever reason, is perceived by others as naive, unattractive, stupid, irrational, or in some other way is seen as an embarrassment to himself or herself, and we see it especially in those people who because of age or illness are being humiliated in their bodies. In an adult body ravaged by age, handicap, or terminal disease – unlike the case for babies where a stunning physical beauty and wholeness more than compensate for the embarrassment and even the smell of feces is sweet – there is real humiliation. Here the smell of feces is not sweet.

I recently visited a friend dying of cancer. Her fifty year-old body, once remarkably beautiful, was grossly disfigured, wasted, smelled of death, and, like the face of the Suffering Servant in Isaiah, was as much an object of revulsion as of attraction. A proud spirit, she lay humble, embarrassed, humiliated in her body. And God lay with her in that humiliation, shining forth, revealing secrets, tearing the temple veil from top to bottom and revealing what was revealed on the cross, namely, that faith and understanding begin at that exact dark point where the world thinks they must end.

Holy Thursday and the Eucharist

March 25, 1999

One of the things we celebrate during Holy Week is the institution of the Eucharist. This mystery, as we know, makes God present, real and physical, in the world in a multiplicity of ways. What happens at a Eucharist?

Among other things, what happens at every Eucharist is that, as a community, our reality as the Body of Christ is intensified. What is meant by that?

In Scripture, the phrase “the body of Christ” is used to connote three realities simultaneously: Jesus, the God-man who walked the roads of Palestine for 33 years; the Eucharist, which continues to give concrete physical flesh to God, as Jesus did; and the community of believers who also, like the Eucharist, continues to make the physical reality of God present in the world. All three of these are the body of Christ. Moreover when Scripture speaks of the latter two realities, the Eucharist and the Community of believers, as the Body of Christ it is not using the term metaphorically. It never says that we are like the Body of Christ, or that we represent the Body of Christ or replace it, nor even that we are the mystical body of Christ. It simply says that we are the Body of Christ.

This has implications beyond what we normally realize. It doesn’t just mean that in the Eucharistic species, the bread and wine, we have the real physical presence of Christ, but it means as well, and this is where we often water it down, that, in the community of believers too we have God on earth as really as that God was once physically present in Jesus. The community gathered for worship, and even when it is not at worship, is really the anointed, physical, real presence of God on earth. That sounds strong, and it is. Like the incarnation itself, this conception both stretches and scandalizes the imagination. It stretches it because we cannot conceive of what is so infinite and perfect in something so finite and flawed. It scandalizes because the imagination balks at the concept of a God that is so accessible, so tied to the ordinary, and so bound to human flesh with all its flaws.

Yet that is our belief and that is the mystery of the Eucharist. To try to explain it more simply: At the Eucharistic prayer at the liturgy, the priest says the words: “This is my body. This is my blood.” When he says those words, and in the invocation to the Holy Spirit that usually just precedes those words, he is not only asking that the bread and wine be changed into the reality of Christ, he is also, and just as much, asking that the people present, the congregation, be changed into the body and blood of Christ.

St. Augustine, in a homily he gave to Christians who were receiving the Eucharist for the first time, once said it this way: “You ought to know that what you will receive, what you ought to receive daily, the bread that you see upon the altar which has been sanctified by the word of God, is the body of Christ. The cup, or more accurately what the cup contains, sanctified by the word of God, is the blood of Christ. By these, the bread and wine, Christ wanted to entrust us with his body and blood which he shed for the forgiveness of our sins. If you receive this well, you are what you receive.”

Augustine goes on in the same homily to point out the meaning of the symbolism of the loaf of bread and the cup of wine that serve as Eucharistic species. A piece of bread is made up because individual kernels of wheat have been crushed and brought together and then, under heat and fire, baked into one loaf. Likewise for the wine: It is made up of individual grapes that have been crushed and thus brought together into one cup. The unity that results is, in each case, contingent upon a certain giving up of individualism. This is part of the transformation that the Eucharistic prayer asks of us, namely, the breaking down of our own egos, agendas, and bitter lack of forgiveness, so that we can be one with others in a community. Later on, in that same homily, Augustine tells those receiving communion that they should receive it in this way, “so that you have yourselves in mind.”

In another homily he uses even stronger words. He tells the neophytes who are about to receive communion: “Be what you see, and receive what you are.” (Estote quod videtis, et accipite quod estis.)

Receive what you are! That is the real imperative within the Eucharist. What Jesus wanted to give us at the last supper was not just his presence and God’s forgiveness under the species of bread and wine, but that same reality in the faces, hands, and bodies of those who partake of that bread and wine. At a Eucharist, we, not just the bread and wine, are meant to change.

Commandments For The Long Haul

March 20, 1999

(last in a 6-part series on family)

Some years ago, Daniel Berrigan wrote a little book called Commandments for the Long Haul. One of his commandments offers an important counsel: Never travel with anyone who expects you to be interesting all the time. On a long trip there are bound to be some dull stretches. So be easy on your fellow passengers! This is sound advice, especially for family life.

Living within a family is like running a marathon: You don’t do it like you do a sprint. You need advice about how to handle the long, dull stretches. With that in mind, allow me to offer a few commandments for living within a family, over the long haul:

1) Give up false messianism

Perfection is often the enemy of the good. Don’t let the your family’s faults blind you to its goodness. No family is perfect, particularly yours. This is called original sin. Make peace with it; else you will have no peace at all. Help your family to carry its pathologies, knowing that their helping you carry yours is the biggest grace within your own life. Forgive a lot because you will need to be forgiven a lot. Don’t be so upset that the conversations at your dinner table are rarely about anything besides gossip, sports, food, sit coms, and celebrities. Sacrament is contact nice beyond words. So too is the grace of family life. The deepest love is shown in fidelity, in just being there, in showing up at the dinner table. Your family will never look like the Holy Family, but that’s not what is required. Never look for the messiah outside of your own house nor for intimacy outside of your family, lest a cancerous restlessness beset you. In this world, all symphonies remain unfinished. You will never find the family of your romantic imagination. Accept your own. Find salvation there. Give up on false messianism.

2) Have a minister of defense

Your family is a kingdom under seige. It is naive to think that it can survive without clear boundaries that you are constantly defending. If you are not vigilant, you will be overrun. So have clear rules. Demand real things from each other; especially regular presence: Make sure everyone is home and at table for at least one meal a day. Make no exceptions. Pray together each and every day. Accept no accuses here. All arguments against this are rationalizations, enemies to family life. The game is won or lost at this level. Without regular, common, ritualized prayer and togetherness at table, a family dissipates. Have a minister of defense: Someone who rings the bell, challenges the absent, flushes out rationalization, exposes laziness, and is vigilant about boundaries.

3) Open your family to others

Have a large front door, a huge table, and a big, well-stocked refrigerator. Bring all the neighbours kids, the neighbours themselves, every kind of stranger, and especially the poor, to your table. Ply them with food, drink, humour, and talk of all kinds. Hospitality is an underrated thing. Take yourself and your family through others’ front doors as well. Don’t deprive your family of the therapy of a public life.

4) Never ever say: “I’m bored!”

To claim boredom is to publicly confess your own lack of depth. As Rilke says, to say that what is present to you is not rich is to admit that you are not a poet. If your family seems uninteresting to you then there is cause for painful self-examination: How interesting are you? Just how pompous are you anyway?

5) Let your family save your soul

To die within a family is to be assured of salvation. As Gabriel Marcel says: To say to another `I love you’ is to tell that person `You at least will never die!’ To stay in a family is to stay in a church. To eat at a family table is eat in a church. To die in a family is to die in a church. The laws of grace do not forbid that you never argue, fight, or grow jealous and resentful. They only demand that you never walk away from others in such a way so as to be without family. To be in a family is to touch the hem of Christ’s garment. To be touching that hem is to be forgiven your weaknesses. To deal with family prepares you for heaven. Small wonder it generally feels like purgatory. Accept this. It saves you from hell.

6) Keep a sense of humour

Not everything is what is looks like. A sense of humour clarifies this. Humour is the contemplative dimension within family life. Practice this ancient discipline for it makes for the grease that quiets the squeak in family life. A sense of humour deflates the tragic and the pompous. Read Irma Bombeck often. She is the great mystic on family life. Never despair. What seems so dire and hopeless to us is, in God’s eyes, often nothing more than a soiled diaper. Finally, when you stand before God, claim your status within a family. If you have stayed with them here, you will be them there.

Sustaining Family Life Today

March 14, 1999

(Fifth in a six-part series on family)

There is a story told of a Jewish farmer who, while ploughing in his field one Friday afternoon, was too distracted to notice the sun setting. Now, being a very pious man, he feared travelling on the sabbath and therefore spend the whole night and all of the next day, until sunset, in his field. Of course upon returning home the next day, he was met by an irate wife and a less-than-pleased Rabbi. The Rabbi especially chided him for his carelessness and finished his little diatribe this way: “What did you do all day in the field? Did you at least pray to God out there?” The man answered humbly, for he was a humble man: “Rabbi, I’m not a very bright man. All the prayers I knew, I said in five minutes. So what I did afterwards was just recite the alphabet over and over again. God is smart, I thought, he can make the words out of all those letters!”

This parable contains many lessons, including one about what it takes to keep a family together. Simply put, despite all of our best efforts and all the valuable things we know about family systems, we are, when we are all on our own, not able to sustain our families for very long. Too many things are beyond our control. God has to make the words! God has to give us something that we cannot give ourselves.

If that is true, and it is, then the key piece of advice we need in terms of sustaining family life has more to do with letting God work within our families than it has with attempting to create and sustain family life through our own techniques and practices, however good these might be. Families need to let God form and sustain them. How do they do this? Three practices undergird all else.

The first is family prayer. The family that prays together, stays together! This is not a soft piece of piety but a hard truth that can be empirically verified. Check it out in your own experience: If you are honest, you will admit that it is at that moment when you stopped praying together as a couple or a family that you began to lose some ground in terms of marriage and family. Certainly this is true in my own experience. When I think back on my own youth, growing up in a close family, I would single out one thing, more than anything else, that bound us together, namely, a common faith which expressed itself in family prayer. We went regularly to church as a family and, every single day, would pray the rosary (plus other prayers my parents would invariably add) together. That time of common prayer – when we would have liked to be doing anything else, when we were not talking about family things or our own concerns, when in fact we weren’t talking at all but were together in a “Quaker-type” silence – was the real glue that held us together. This was also true for many other families. Today, for the most part, we have lost the practice of family prayer, save perhaps for very brief (and rushed) prayers before meals. No wonder our families aren’t strong. A family that doesn’t pray together, regularly and at some length, will begin to dissipate.

The second underpinning to family life is chastity. This may sound curious or like a private hang-up, but, like prayer, chastity is a sine quo non for family life. This is easier to explain negatively: All lack of chastity effectively destroys family life. We see this most clearly in its strongest expressions, adultery and incest, which ravage the very foundation of family. But lack of chastity in its milder forms (pornography and lack of proper sexual respect and propriety) also despoil family. It is not incidental that chastity is included among those gifts of the Holy Spirit that lie at the basis of any long-term coming-together in family and community.

The last great non-negotiable of family life is forgiveness because it is simply impossible to be close to anyone for any length of time without seriously hurting him or her and without that person seriously hurting you. We cannot not hurt each other. The name of the game then is forgiveness. We must learn to live graciously in a situation within which life will not be fair, our feelings will often be bruised, our needs will often be neglected, and others will constantly disappoint us (even as we disappoint them). When we forgive, when we live beyond our hurts and hypersensitivities, God can enter our lives in a way that approximates what happened at the resurrection. Forgiveness is the force that rolls back the stone.

No family, however good, is able to sustain itself by its own efforts. God sustains families. God makes the words. Our job – through family prayer, chastity, and forgiveness – is simply to properly recite the alphabet.