Faith and the Imagination

September 12, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Powerlessness and Frustration

September 5, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

God’s Unconditional Love

August 29, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Needed – A Theology of Original Sin

August 22, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

On Not Hiding From God

August 15, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Annual Thoughts From The Court-Jester

August 8, 1999

In humour there is the constant rumour that God exists.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Accepting our humourlessness is indeed a good starting point.

Christ As Wounded

August 1, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Suicide – Love Through Locked Doors

July 25, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Our Mystical Centre

July 2, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Transforming Power of Beauty

June 25, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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!