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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

(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.

The catechism from which I drew my religious instruction as a child stated that a Christian sacrament was an “outward sign instituted by Jesus Christ to give us grace.” Later on, in the seminary, the theology text we used on sacraments was written by Edward Schillebeeckx and he defined a sacrament in words to this effect: “A sacrament is anything that visibly, tangibly makes present or prolongs a saving action of God.” While both of those definitions are theologically very good, they are too abstract to, at times, give us a real sense of what precisely a sacrament is and where a sacrament is sometimes found. I prefer a more colloquial definition, one that simply defines a sacrament as “anything that gives skin to God.”  What is meant by this?  

There is a marvellous story told of a four year-old girl who woke up one night frightened, convinced that there were monsters and spooks in her room. So she ran to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother, however, brought her back to her own room, put on a number of lights, showed the child that there was nothing to be afraid of, put her back to bed, calmed her, and finally left her with the words: “There is nothing to be afraid of. When I leave, you won’t be alone in the room. God will be here with you.” But the young girl replied: “I know that God will be here with me, but I need someone in the room who has some skin!”

There is wisdom, and theology, to her response. As human beings we are creatures of the senses. We need something we can grasp tangibly, physically. Thus, a God who is everywhere is, at a certain point, nowhere. God, of course, already knows this and that is why we have been given God’s presence physically in sacrament. Understood in this sense then, there are more than seven sacraments. Family life is, or at least it can be, a sacrament. Like the Eucharist, or any other sacrament, it too can give concrete flesh to God. How so?

Partly this can be understood by contrast. Jean-Paul Sartre once said “the other is hell”. That, for a Christian and for every other major world religion, is the exact opposite of the truth. Hell is alienation, arrogant self-willed aloneness, the opposite of community, non-family. As John Shea so aptly puts it, hell is never a surprise waiting for a happy person, but the full-flowering of a life of arrogant alienation. Heaven is union with others and thus as long as we are somehow linked to a community and family we cannot go to hell.

Buckminster Fuller once said that God is not just a noun, but also a verb. That is true. God is not just a person, but also a certain flow of life, a flow of receptivity and gratitude between three persons. Inside of God there is a kind of family life going on and Jesus has assured us that when we give and receive from each other within a family, when we break open our lives and hearts and joys and frustrations and egos and agendas and finances and share these with each other, we are letting the life of God flow through us and we are giving skin to the inner life of the Trinity. In that sense, family life is a sacrament and, for many of us, the most important sacrament of all because it is the one that in fact touches our lives and transforms us the most deeply.

But all of this should not to be unduly romanticized. To say that family life is a sacrament is not to say that it will not be fraught with pettiness, frustration, anger, jealousies, selfish concern, pathology, and even at times real sin. Our families are never the holy family! I remember my mother, a truly pious and good woman, occasionally lamenting how in her idealism she dreamed of being the mother of the holy family – and she ended up getting stuck with us! Our families are never the romanticized stuff of our adolescent or pious dreams. Nor are they ever the idealized families of literature and movies, where people are still attractive, interesting, and worthy of our understanding and sympathy even when they are petty, selfish, jealous, unfaithful, and sinful. As we know, understanding and sympathy in the midst of the muck and grime of real family life is considerably harder to crank up. All of that notwithstanding, however, unless there is present the kind of abuse that violates the soul, family life remains a sacrament – sometimes indeed because of its imperfections rather than simply in spite of them.

It is in forming hearts that are big enough to love and forgive within imperfection that we ready ourselves for heaven.

For many of us, coming home from the hospital to join a family will be our first baptism, our family dwelling will be our primary church, our family table our primary place of Eucharist, our living room our first sanctuary, our marriage bed our deepest experience of Eucharist, and our reconciliation with each other after the pettiness and hurts of family life our ongoing sacrament of reconciliation. It is there that the flow of the life that originates within God, and finds its perfection there, will flow through us.

“God is love and whoever abides in love abides in God and God abides in him or her.” If that is true, and it is, then we can say the same thing about family: “God is family and whoever abides in family abides in God and God abides in that person.”  The theology of family roots itself here. Among other things, this means that a family is really a religious community, a church, the place where we participate in God’s own life. What is meant by this?

It is easy to misunderstand this because we tend to romanticize it. To define God as love is not to say that God is romantic love and that we abide in God only at those times when we feel in love. Rather what is affirmed is that God is a community, a trinity, a flow of giving and receiving between three persons. God is a family and when we participate in a family we experience the very flow of God’s life. Family life then is church life. To participate, in a healthy way, within a family is, in a manner of speaking, to go to church. But this too is often misunderstood.

What does it mean to live within a family? Too often we think of family mainly in terms of emotional intimacy. We imagine family (real family … not like our family!) as romance, warmth, like-mindedness, continual affirmation, deep mutual revelation, and constant support. In essence, we conceive of it in terms of our emotional and romantic needs. But those things, good as they are, are not ultimately what makes for family. What does make for family?

Someone once said that love is not two persons facing each other, but two persons facing in the same direction and living in the same spirit. Ultimately that is what makes family, both anthropologically and ecclesially. Ecclesially this is easy enough to explain: What makes for church is not, first of all, emotional intimacy (good as that is) but a gathering around the person of Christ and a common sharing of one Spirit – the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, faith, and chastity.

Similarly, in terms of ordinary family, a marriage and the family it produces is not so much grounded on a man and a woman coming together sexually and emotionally as it is in a man and a woman coming together morally, that is, at a level that precisely has them facing in a common direction rather than narcissistically fixated on each other. Moral intimacy, more so than sexual intimacy, is the foundation of family, just as it is the foundation of church. What are the component parts of it?

This too shouldn’t be falsely-romanticized. Moral intimacy is not, at its most important level, being kissed in the soul by that delicious feeling we sometimes get when we sense that another person holds as precious all the same things we do. There is value in this of course. To sense another person as a soulmate is to have family in a real sense because to be in family is to be at home and we are at home precisely when we are with another person who shares our deepest values.

However, family and home, as we well know, generally have more of an everyday than a romantic face to them. Home and family are more than romance. They are the everyday, sometimes dram, business of staying together, eating together, praying together, sharing money and material things together, celebrating occasions together, being mutually accountable to each other, challenging and correcting each other, and carrying each other’s pathologies and weaknesses. Such are the functions of home and family. Such too is the function of church.

In the end, family life and church life are part of the same thing; in both we participate in God’s life. Among other things, this means that family life is not like church life, it is part of it. To participate healthily in a family is to be part of a church. The family is not secular while the church is divine, mundane while the church is holy, and the place of ordinary life while the church is the place of worship. To be in a family is to be in a church; perhaps the most important church many of us will ever experience. Every family is meant to be a religious community and is meant to do for us exactly what a religious community or church does for its members. And what is that?

By abiding in family – by sitting down with each other around a kitchen table, by sharing the frustration of balancing a common cheque book, by celebrating each other’s joys and sorrows and everyday life, by offering each other consolation and correction, and by putting up with each other’s coughs, phobias, and sins – we experience church. In both, family life and church, our lives break open beyond ourselves and God can enter.