The Power of Helplessness

May 2, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Summer of my Discontent

April 25, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Least Glamorous of all Sicknesses

April 18, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Humiliation of God

April 11, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Holy Thursday and the Eucharist

March 25, 1999

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Commandments For The Long Haul

March 20, 1999

(last in a 6-part series on family)

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

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

1) Give up false messianism

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

2) Have a minister of defense

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

3) Open your family to others

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

4) Never ever say: “I’m bored!”

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

5) Let your family save your soul

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

6) Keep a sense of humour

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

Sustaining Family Life Today

March 14, 1999

(Fifth in a six-part series on family)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Family Life as Sacrament

March 4, 1999

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.

The Family As A School Of Charity

February 28, 1999

(3rd in a 6-part series on family)

Many classical spiritual writers used to espouse this. What does it mean to say that families are schools of charity?

As a young novice, reading books by Francis de Sales and Thomas a Kempis, I thought I knew. It made simple sense: When you live in a family, the give-and-take or life that you experience there, all the quirks and selfishness you have to life with, gives you (and every other member in the family) the opportunity to learn patience, forgiveness, understanding, and every other virtue under the sun. That idea, while not entirely wrong, is not quite what people like Thomas a Kempis (The Imitation of Christ) had in mind when they said that families are schools of therapy.

What they meant is in fact very close to what might be called “the therapy of a public life.” What is this? Negatively stated, it means that if I live without enough real give-and-take within a concrete family of some kind, there will be constant dangers and dangerous deprivations in my life.

The constant dangers will include an unhealthy fantasy about who I am, an illusion about what life is all about, a selfishness in terms of not sufficiently giving myself and what I have over to others, and a paranoia about guarding myself and my freedom. The dangerous deprivations will consist in the fact that nobody is really supporting me, even as nobody is helping me really deal with my pathologies and sins.

What a healthy family does is de-fantasize us, challenge us, dispel our illusions, demand unselfishness, and help us carry our pathologies. Practically, this means that if we give ourselves over to the rhythms of family and community life, we will constantly be corrected in how we perceive ourselves, deflated in our egoism and inflated self-importance, asked to be less selfish, stretched in how we see the world, and exposed in our faults. At the same time, if the family is healthy, we will also be met at that deep place in our hearts where we need the familiar, given a home (in the real meaning of that word), and helped to deal with our sickest secrets. This latter point is especially important.

Anthropologists tell us that one of the major functions of family is to help carry the pathologies of its members. They also point out that in previous cultures, where the family unit was much stronger than today, there was much less need for private therapy than there is now. Family life was the essential therapy for its members. That is an important truth. Without family, I am truly alone before my inner sicknesses and sins. Today that is often not understood. We have a virtual library of literature on dysfunctional families. Valuable as that is, it generally fails to point out that all families and communities (save the Trinity) are dysfunctional. Thus, the question is not so much, “Is your family dysfunctional?” but rather, “how dysfunctional is it and how are we helping to carry each others’ pathologies?” Families are schools of charity – and also our primary clinics for therapy. To live in a family is to be in therapy.

Perhaps an illustration can be helpful here: Several years ago, a woman came to me seeking counselling and spiritual direction. She was middle-aged, divorced from her husband, with grown children who no longer lived with her. She felt she was missing something in life, something she once had but now could not even name. It scared her. She described things this way: “I’m slipping! I don’t know what’s happening to me, I’m not even sure exactly what I want, but I’m just not moored any more, nor growing, nor happy. I need more anchors in my life.”

I only had one session with her because she was, in fact, quite a healthy woman who didn’t need counselling, nor particularly even spiritual direction. She needed the therapy of a public life. She needed to re-enrol in a school of charity. She needed family. Healthily, she herself sensed the dangers and dangerous deprivations inherent in not having a vital enough link to a living school of charity. Thus, I didn’t refer her to any counsellor or spiritual director. Instead I referred her to the registrar of a local Catholic theological school where she enrolled, met a group of persons much like herself, began to go to Eucharist several times a week, became involved in a series of prayer, discussion, and friendship groups … and blossomed. She found the steadying she sought and countless kinds of challenge through the therapy of a public life, through a family, through a school of charity.

We need desperately family, not just to meet our needs for intimacy and companionship, but also, like rocks being polished in a grinder, to jostle us around so that our rough edges get smoothed, our fantasies get dispelled, our selfishness gets derailed, our sicknesses get some attention, and our hearts get stretched enough to let us sit at the final family-table where everyone will lovingly and healthily be able to sit with everyone else.

The Family as Church and Religious Community

February 21, 1999

“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.

The Deconstruction of the Family

February 12, 1999

(First in a six-part series on family)

The family today is a kingdom under seige. It is nearly impossible to exaggerate the importance of this fact.

Many forces within our culture are conspiring against the family. What is happening? Simply put, at virtually every level, community is breaking down: Marriages are breaking up at unprecedented rates, families are moving apart as never before, neighbourhoods in essence no longer exist, civic life is fragmenting to the point where politics no longer work, and whole countries are breaking up. Clearly there is a certain cancer within the human community. Why is family life breaking down?

A number of simplistic answers abound: Conservatives tend to blame it on a false sense of freedom in the culture, on feminism, on gays, and on the liberal media. For liberals the blame is attached more to the high rate of mobility, geographical and social, in the culture. What are the real reasons? What forces today are working to deconstruct the family?

The family today is being derailed by a conspiracy of circumstances. However, what is working against it is not so much any conscious ideology or new concept of family, but a blind, brute flowing together of a number of forces: narcissism, an overly-romantic notion of family, the descralization of sexuality, and the loss of sustaining prayer and rituals within family life. What is implied here?

Narcissism … Today we live in a culture that puts its highest premium on private freedom, private choice, private goals, individual rights, and individuality. Much of this is healthy and is a moral advance, but there is a down-side to it as well, especially as it affects family. It is no accident that the word privacy takes its root in the word deprivation. To be private is to be deprived and, today, to a large extent, we live lives deprived of family. We have our private careers, private homes, private cars, private rooms, private televisions, private computers, private radios, and private space. Good and healthy as this is to a point, much of it takes us away from family. Moreover, an excessive attachment to privacy, imperceptibly but steadily, helps make it more difficult for us to make and sustain permanent commitments or to sacrifice ourselves (our dreams and our agenda) for others.

An overly-romantic notion of family … Tied to our excessive need for privacy is the notion that family takes its ultimate root in sexual and emotional intimacy. Intimacy, and it alone, is understood as the force that binds us together in family and community. Hence, we have begun to think of our spouses mainly in terms of lovers and our children very much in terms of what they can fulfil in us psychologically and emotionally. This a dangerous. When we do this, a number of things happen which often spell the death of a family: First of all, we ask our spouses and children to be what they cannot really be, namely, an emotional honeymoon without an end. When they can’t deliver this we tend to move on to seek it elsewhere.

Thus people are searching not so much for a family as for a lover. This has consequences. When we identify family too simplistically with intimacy, we tend to cut ourselves off from those precise supports (extended family, neighbourhood, public life) which could help sustain our marriages and families. “It takes a whole village to raise a child.” That’s true. But it also takes a whole society (especially an extended family) to sustain a marriage and family. One man and one woman in an isolated hut is a formula for divorce not for marriage and family.

The desacralization of sexuality … Today, in Western culture at least, sexuality is no longer understood as a sacred thing. Among other things, this means that we have severed the age-old connection between sex and marriage. Today sex can be had within a marriage or outside of it. It can be serious, sacred, and open to the creation of new life, or it can be purely recreational and closed to anything beyond the feelings of those engaged in it. In our culture, hormones are not seen to have a sacred character or social consequences. Family struggles to survive in such a situation.

The loss of sustaining prayer and rituals within family life … Today family life not just under a certain seige from the outside, it is also in danger of disintegrating from within because it generally lacks common prayer and those sustaining rituals that can serve to bond a family in ways that the family cannot induce through their own efforts. The old axiom: “The family that prays together, stays together”, is not a pious slogan but an empirically tested principle. Without common prayer and regular rituals families tend to fall apart.

Families today are, all too often, falling apart. How might family be imagined and re-imaged in our time? The subsequent articles in this series will attempt to answer that question.

Bill Clinton – A Baby-Boomer Parable

February 5, 1999

A couple of years ago, out of a job and looking for work, one of my nephews was bouncing from one family member to the next, accepting whatever free room and meals might be given to him. He was young, travelling light, resilient, with a good attitude, and content enough to sleep on sofas and eat whatever anyone gave him. He wasn’t one to panic quickly. One day, at a family dinner, one of my sisters told him: “If you ever get really desperate, you can move into my house for awhile.” His reply: “How would I know if I’m desperate?”

When Bill Clinton apologized on world television last summer for abusing the trust of his family and country, many doubted his sincerity. A lot of people said: “He isn’t sincere. He isn’t really sorry, he just got caught!” Was he sincere? I raise the question because his struggles here are so much in fact the struggles of our generation. Bill Clinton is the first “baby- boomer” president of the United States. What is interesting is that both the virtues and the faults he brings to that office are quite typical, archetypal even, of that generation, my generation.

Hence, listening to him apologize and explain himself last August 17th, and other times before and after, I believe that he spoke with sincerity, that is, with as much sincerity as he, and our generation, can muster. But the problem is that our generation, analogous to my cash-strapped nephew not knowing what it means to be truly desperate, doesn’t know what it means to be really sincere. If he were asked: “Are you sincere?” Clinton (like the rest of us) should probably answer: “How would I know if I’m really sincere?” This isn’t a facetious comment. Sincerity, for us, has a certain shallowness, a certain blindness, and a certain rationalization to it, even as it has a certain genuineness too. Thus, Clinton’s struggle to be sincere is very much our generation’s struggle in that area. In a way, he is our generation incarnate, both its good and its bad.

First, the good: He was sincere. Even though he was cornered, he meant it when he said he was sorry. Underneath it all, reluctant to confess or not, there was sincerity, contrition, he felt badly about betraying trust, as does our generation. However, even though he was sincere, a number of things colour that sincerity and these things are also typical of our generation – so typical in fact that Bill Clinton’s affair with Monica Lewinsky and his reaction to it constitute a certain parable of the baby-boomer generation. What is typical and archetypically here?

*For our generation, it is more important to look good than to be good. Image and public persona are everything. Style is more important than substance, good looks than character, popularity than integrity. Despite a base sincerity, image and persona are always guarded over truth and substance.

*Our generation has the “talent” to morally compartmentalize our lives. To have an area within our private lives (a major one) that is not in line with what we profess publicly is no big deal. It is also understood to be nobody’s business. If we do good work and are socially progressive, then we should be allowed our private compensations. Besides these private compensations are not nearly as bad as being privately trustworthy but conservative in terms of social change.

*Our generation does not like to look at or accept that there are real consequences to behaviour. Clinton, no doubt, loved his family and did not want to betray them. Neither did he want to lie or betray anyone’s trust. Our generation never does. But we want certain pleasures and experiences and, by refusing to accept that actions have real consequences, it seems we can have them without betraying anyone. There is a certain innocence and naivete in this, a dangerous one. Afterwards, confronted with the consequences, like Clinton, we don’t quite know what to say. We’re sorry, but we’re not; we’re sincere, but we’re not; we really don’t want to betray our deepest commitments for a passing affair, but we don’t want to pass up the affair either, and so, like Bill Clinton, we end up sincerely sorry, but angry that somebody exposed us.

*Finally, Bill Clinton represents our generation’s schizophrenia about sex. On the one hand, we claim we are liberated and that the old rules (sex only within a monogamous marriage) are the product of frightened minds. Yet, we still feel the need to lie about affairs, to hide a truth we defend.

Bill Clinton has much to apologize for and repent of, but then so does our whole generation. Few things so nakedly expose the moral achilles heel of a whole generation as does the Clinton-Lewinsky affair. Is there something to be learned here?

Waiting

January 31, 1999

In her recent novel, The Underpainter, Jane Urquhard offers some thoughts on waiting. Her main character, a brilliant artist whose capacity to live and relate healthily does not parallel his aesthetic talents, tells of a conversation he has had with Sara, his woman-friend of sixteen years:

“Sometime during August of 1935, the last month of the last summer I spent at Sliver Islet, Sara told me what it was like to wait. She said that there were two kinds of waiting: the waiting that consumes the mind and that which occurs somewhere below the surface of awareness. The latter is more bearable, but also more dangerous because it manifests itself in ways that are not at first definable as such. She told me that over the period of the last winter she had finally realized that everything that she did or said – every activity – was either a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting and therefore had no relevance on its own.” (McClelland & Steward, Toronto, 1997, p. 95.)

An interesting reflection. Henri Nouwen used to say that 98% of our lives are spent in waiting. At a superficial level, we experience this in the amount of time we spend waiting at check-out counters, in airports, for buses, for somebody to arrive, or for something to end – our workaday, a class, a church service, a meal, a family discussion, a bout with the flu. But that is the superficial part of it.

More important is the fact that almost all the time we are waiting for a fuller season for our lives. Rarely do we have what Nouwen calls “a fully pregnant moment”, namely, a moment when we can say to ourselves: “Right now, I don’t want to be any other place, with any other persons, doing anything else, than what I am doing right now!”

From infancy onwards, we are nearly always waiting for something else to happen: As a baby, every time our mother leaves the room we wait anxiously for her to return. As a child, we wait for those special moments of play and celebration – “When will Gramma come? When will my friend visit again? When will it be time to eat? When will I get my treat? When will it be Christmas? When will we get to go to the park again?” Little children are not satisfied for long.

This changes somewhat during pre-adolescence. The years between starting school and puberty are perhaps the one time in life when we are more satisfied with the present moment. In those years before our sexual awakening, we see things less through the prism of dis-ease. However, even in this period, there is a constant restlessness for we want to grow up, be like the big kids, be independent, do grown-up things.

Then at puberty, the awakening of sexuality arouses within us a restlessness which makes the rest of our lives one painful exercise in waiting. From that moment onwards, every hormone in us longs for a consummation that, even if it is ever attained, is had only for the briefest of moments. Moreover sexuality also stirs the soul, rousing within us a longing (“below the surface of awareness”) that makes virtually every activity for the rest of our lives precisely “either a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting” and an activity that does not have full relevance on its own.

For awhile, of course, this is a waiting that consumes the mind: We want to meet the right person, fall in love, get married, have children, achieve something significant, create something lasting, gain the respect of family and peers, create some independence, and acquire the good things of life. But Urquhard is right. Something else, something under the surface of awareness, is driving all of this and the things we so long for on the surface, good in themselves, do not have full relevance on their own.

But if this is true, isn’t there something fundamentally wrong here? Isn’t the task of life precisely that of making the present moment enough? Doesn’t the wisdom of the ages tell us to seize the day? Isn’t it rather stoic and joy-killing to accept that life is 98% about waiting?

On the contrary, to accept that in this life all symphonies remain unfinished is not masochistic, but freeing. My parents’ generation did this by, each day, saying the prayer: “For now we live, mourning and weeping in this valley of tears.” Praying like this didn’t turn them into cold stoics. Instead, knowing that the full symphony for which we wait can not be had here, they were able to enjoy, perhaps more so than can our own generation, the real joys that are possible.

Karl Jung once said that life is a journey between the paradise of the womb and the paradise of heaven. Jesus said that while on earth we are on pilgrimage. Is it any wonder then that at a certain point in life we begin to realize that everything is a variant of, or a substitute for, waiting?

Divine Providence

January 24, 1999

Karl Rahner once said that one of the secrets to faith is to always see your life against an infinite horizon. My parents, and many of their generation, had their own understanding of this and their own recipe for doing it. For them, seeing your life against an infinite horizon meant having a sense of divine providence within every dimension and event of ordinary life.

For them, this meant that you always searched for the finger of God, some faith meaning, in every incident within your life. Thus, for example, if something tragic happened to you (sickness, the death of loved one, an accident, the loss of your job, or economic disaster) you would always ask yourself: “What is God saying to me in this?” Conversely, if something good happened to you (you met a marvellous person, you fell in love, you had a huge success, or you made a lot of money) you would ask yourself the same question: “What is God saying to me in this?” The idea was that, in every event of life, God spoke, said something to you, and meant this event to have spiritual significance for your life.

Part of the idea was that nothing was purely secular. Hence, my parents, who were farmers, would have a priest come and bless their land, bless their house, and even bless their marriage bed. Then, if they had a good crop, it was not interpreted simply as good luck, a lucky year, but seen as God’s blessing: “For God’s good reason, we are being blessed this year.” Conversely, if there was a poor crop, or no crop, it wasn’t written off as simple bad luck (“Rotten weather this year!”) but it was seen in the context of providence: “God wants us to live with less!” The idea was always that somehow God was behind things, if not actively arranging them at least speaking through them.

I remember one of my aunts, with the faith of a biblical matriarch, commenting on a tragic event in the community. The local parish in her town was painfully divided and fighting with each other over the question of the local Catholic school. In the middle of the all the fighting, their church, a beautiful new building, burned down. My aunt’s interpretation: “There! Now God has told us what he thinks of all our fighting!”

That might sound simplistic, but that’s real biblical faith. Abraham, Sarah, Moses, and Jesus would have said the same thing: In Scripture, for both Israel and for Jesus, there was no such a thing as a purely secular event, a pure accident. If Israel lost a war to the Assyrians it wasn’t because the Assyrians had a better army. Rather the event was seen this way: “Yahweh dealt this defeat to us!” Conversely, good crops, victory in war, and any other success were never understood to be simple good luck or the merited fruit of one’s own efforts. The idea was rather: “God has blessed us! God has done this!” Everything was seen against an infinite horizon.

Sometimes, of course, they overdid it. Rather than seeing God as speaking through an event, they saw God as actually causing the event. Thus, God was literally seen to be sending sickness, death, drought, and pestilence upon the earth; or, conversely, deliberately privileging some people over others. Beyond making for an awful theology of God, this sometimes led to an unhealthy fatalism: “It’s in God’s hands. I won’t take my child to the doctor. If God wants her to live, she’ll live. If God wants to take her home to heaven, then so be it. It’s God’s will!”

Bad theology sometimes crept in, but, overall, their sense of divine providence was very healthy. God was not seen to be actively manipulating things so as to deal out sicknesses, broken legs, victory in war, or bad crops to people, but it was understood that God did speak through these.

Divine providence might be defined as a conspiracy of ordinary accidents within which God’s voice can be heard. John of the Cross said as much when he wrote: The language of God is the experience that God writes into our lives. Karl Rahner, as we saw, suggests that it is a question of seeing against an infinite horizon.

My parents, and most of their generation, had some understanding of what this meant and searched always for the finger of God in their everyday lives. Sometimes they did this healthily and sometimes in less healthy ways. In either case, they prayed in a way that too often we do not.

When Scripture tells us to “pray always”, it doesn’t mean that we should always be saying prayers. Among other things, though, it does mean that we, like generations of old, should be looking at every event in our lives and asking ourselves: “What is God saying to me in all of this? What is providential for me in this event?”

Second Naivete

January 10, 1999

A spirited debate rages between liberals and conservatives today regarding what direction we should be moving in, both in terms of the world and the church. Both agree that we are far from happy. The disagreement is over what to do about it?

For conservatives, the itch is to return to the past, to move back to what once was, to what once worked, to what once held things together. The present moment is seen as a falling away, from a faith, from a set a values, from a stability, and from a happiness that we once had. What would fix things, in this view, is a certain retreat to old-time religion and to old-time values, especially family values. The liberals tend to have the complete opposite intuition. For them, irrespective of our present problems and unhappiness, we live in an enlightenment (social, religious, moral, and technological) that sets us over the past. We are simply awake in a way the past generations, whatever their goodness and sincerity, were not. Any move backwards would be a regression; a moral loss, a disaster. The correct path is forward and we must have the courage to travel forwards because, despite some present upheaval and disorientation, that road slowly but surely is taking us beyond the narrowness, bigotry, racism, sexism, and fundamentalism that lie at the base of so much injustice and violence in the world.

Who’s right? In what direction should we be moving? Where do we go? What will bring us peace, justice, stability, and happiness?

My own hunch is that we will get to where we should be going by following neither the itch of the liberal nor that of the conservative. Both ideologies have shown themselves inadequate to lead to much peace, justice, or happiness, though both contain valuable insights: The liberal is right in intuiting that moving back to the past is not the answer, just as the conservative is right in believing that simply becoming ever more sophisticated is no answer either. Both are right and both are wrong. Where should we be going? We must move forwards, though not in the way most liberals tend to conceive of this, that is, as always towards higher levels of sophistication. Rather we must move forwards, but in a way that leads not to more sophistication but to a new naivete, a second naivete. What is meant by this?

A short parable might be helpful in explaining it. If you ask a naive child: “Do you believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny?”, she answers: “Yes.” If you ask a bright child: “Do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny?”, she answers: “No.” But if you ask even a brighter child: “Do you believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny?” she answers: “Yes” … but for a different reason.

One sees in this little story a movement from naivete through sophistication to a certain post-sophistication, from childishness through enlightenment to child-like-ness. Notice that what is being affirmed though is neither the conservative belief that the right move is go back to something we once had, nor the liberal belief that we become ever more free and happy the more sophisticated we become. In fact, the reverse is generally true, namely, we become progressively more unhappy the less we believe in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny. However a return to happiness does not lie in an adult trying again to be a child or in a contemporary man or woman trying to simplistically mimic how his or her grandparents lived and dealt with things. But, as is becoming more obvious each day, it just as true to say that it does not lie either in simply becoming ever more sophisticated, critical, and experienced. Enlightenment, as defined by liberal ideology, is not the same thing as happiness at all, as Adam and Eve discovered. To have one’s eyes opened is a very mixed blessing. After naivete, happiness does not come easily and it comes only under some very curious conditions.

Where does happiness lie? In moving to a place where we can again believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny; it lies in becoming post-sophisticated, in having open eyes but in seeing differently than did Adam and Eve after eating the apple. This can be expressed in a number of ways:

Naive – Sophisticated – Second naivete

First fervour – Disillusionment – Mature love

Pre-critical – Critical – Post-critical

Innocence – Loss of innocence – New innocence

Virgin – Experienced – Revirginized

Childish – Sophisticated – Childlike

Young fool – Old fool – Holy fool

Happy – Unhappy – happy

We once were young fools. Then our eyes were opened and we become old fools. The task now is to become holy fools.

Truth Is Found In Paradox

December 27, 1998

Niels Bohr, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist, once suggested that wisdom and science operate by different rules: “The opposite of a true statement is a false statement, but the opposite of a profound truth can be another profound truth. “

An important insight! Too often the problem we have within our theologies, spiritualities, ecclesiologies, and indeed with wisdom in general, is that we let profound truths cancel each other out, as if they were mathematical statements, rather than holding them together in paradox and in all the tension that this brings. Wisdom is not mathematics and, within wisdom, great “opposites” do not contradict each other but join each other, in ways that we cannot exactly fathom, so as to, together, help clarify a still larger picture. To let go of either pole of a paradox, to reduce the tension, is to fall from wisdom. Hence, as we struggle theologically and spiritually with certain key questions, we must be careful to always hold two, seemingly contradictory, truths together. The larger picture, the full answer, demands both. Thus, for example:

1) Is our wor1d good or bad? What is God’s attitude towards our world? In trying to answer that, two immediate, opposing, truths leap to mind: On the one hand, it must be affirmed that in the world, even within its purely secular mode, there are many good things, much good energy, and a fierce moral fibre that manifests itself for good in countless places. As well, since God is the author of all good things, these things are clearly from God. Thus, God continues to work in, love, and bless this world, even in its secularity. On the other hand, it is equally as clear that the cross of Christ, the rejection and crucifixion of the weak by the wor1d, which was manifest at the time of Jesus and is still clear today, shows that this world is rejecting God, light, and goodness. Darkness is still not open to light and accordingly God’s revelation is negatively judging the world. Thus God is blessing the world, smiling on it, affirming its goodness and energy, and laughing at the humour of its sitcoms, even as the central part of God’s revelation, the cross of Christ, stands in judgment of that world and that energy. Both realities are true.

2) What is more important, private virtue or social justice? Again, two great truths oppose each other: Nothing in this world is more important than private integrity, private morality, private prayer, and private charity. Nothing is ever sufficient cause to bracket these. However, revelation is equally clear that nothing is more important than the practice of social justice, including private virtue. Both affirmations are true.

3) What makes for a healthy person and a healthy self-image, radical self-renunciation or proper self-care? We have come to understand today, through a rich variety of sources, that we cannot be healthy, happy, and serving others in gratitude (rather than in bitterness) if we do not take proper care of ourselves. We cannot love if we do not let ourselves be loved, we cannot give if we are not ourselves receiving, and we cannot sustain ourselves in love and gratitude for the long haul if we do not place proper boundaries around ourselves and property protects ourselves. However, it is just a true to say, as did St. Francis and most every Saint ever, and as did Jesus, that unless we give ourselves away in total self-renunciation we will find no health, happiness, or peace. All active pursuit of happiness is doomed to produce its opposite, just as the giving away of our own happiness brings happiness.

4) What is more important within church life, fostering growth or protecting boundaries? Jesus makes it very clear that he came into this world, not to protect boundaries, but to “be flesh for the life of the world”. It is no accident that he was born in a trough, where animals come to eat, and that at the end of his life he gave himself away at a table, as food. Fostering life is more important than protecting proper doctrine and rule. However it is also true that boundaries are essential for the survival of any group – family, marriage, or church – and anyone who thinks otherwise is dangerously naive. Good laws, sustained commitments, and respected boundaries make community possible.

Real wisdom then, it would seem, is not for the faint-hearted, nor for those who want their truth clear-cut. Jesus sweated blood in a garden and, I suspect, the tensions he was carrying there contained enough paradoxes to inform most of the wisdom of the world. There are no simple answers. Great truth is found in paradox and those who try to find it will also find themselves having to sweat blood in the garden, not knowing on any given day which pole to honour, but knowing always that fidelity lies in respecting both sides in the paradox.