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.

Chastity’s Challenge

December 16, 1998

In her marvelous little book, Holy the Firm, Annie Dillard describes how she one learned a fundamental lesson about life simply by watching a moth emerge from its cocoon. She had been fascinated watching the nearly-imperceptible process of metamorphosis but, at a point, it because too slow for her. To speed up things a little, she applied a tiny bit of heat from a candle to the cocoon. It worked. The extra heat quickened the process and the moth emerged a bit sooner than it would have otherwise. However, because nature had not been able to take its full course, the moth was born damaged, its wings were not able to form fully.

What Dillard describes here is a violation of chastity. Properly understood, chastity is precisely a question of having the patience to bear the tension of the interminable slowness of things. To be chaste is to not prematurely force things so that everybody and everything, each within its own unique rhythm is properly respected.

That is normally not the way we think of chastity. Generally we relate to chastity to sex, more particularly, to the lack of it. For most of us, chastity means celibacy – and celibacy, in our culture, suggests an unenviable innocence, an ignorance, really, a missing out on the most central thing in life. Chastity, as we know, is not very popular in our culture, partly because we conceive of it so badly. What is it?

Chastity is not first and foremost a sexual concept. It has to do with the way we relate to reality in general. In essence, chastity is proper reverence and respect. To be chaste is to stand before reality, everything and everybody, and fully respect the proper contours and rhythm of things.

To be chaste then means to let things unfold as they should. Thus it means, among many other things, to not open our gifts before Christmas, to not rush our own or our children’s growth, to not experience things for which we aren’t ready, to not lose patience in life or in sex because there is tension, to not violate someone else’s beauty and sexuality, to not apply a candle to a moth emerging from its cocoon because we’re in a hurry, and to not sleep with the bride before the wedding. To be chaste is to let gift be gift. Biblically, to be chaste is to have our shoes off before the burning bush.

Chastity is reverence and respect. All irreverence and disrespect is the antithesis of chastity.

Chastity as a practical virtue is then predicated on two things: Patience and the capacity to carry tension.

Patience is basically synonymous with chastity. To fully respect others and the proper order of things means to be patient. Something can be wrong for no other reason that that it is premature. To do anything too quickly, whether that be growing up, or having sex, does what applying extra heat does to the process of metamorphosis. It leaves us with damaged wings.

Allan Bloom, the renowned philosopher of education, in describing lack of chastity in today’s youth, put things this way: Premature experience is bad precisely because it is premature. In youth, for example, yearning is meant precisely for sublimation, in the sense of making things sublime, of orientating what aches in us towards great love, great art, and great achievement. Premature experience, like the false ecstasy of drugs, artificially induces the exaltation naturally attached to the completion of some great endeavor – victory in a just war, mature consummated love, great artistic creation, real religious devotion and the discovery of deep truth. Premature experience has precisely the effect of clipping our wings in that it drains us of great enthusiasm and great expectations. Great longing then becomes little more than being horny. Only sublimation, tension, and waiting (the proper definition of patience) allow for the sublime.

The capacity to carry tension is too an integral part of chastity. To properly respect others, to have the patience to not act prematurely, requires that we be willing and able to carry tension and to carry it for a long time, perhaps even for a lifetime. To wait in tension, in incompleteness, in longing, in frustration, in inconsummation, and in helplessness in the face of the interminable slowness of things, especially in the face of how slow love and justice seem to appear in our lives, is to practice chastity.

When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane he was practicing chastity; just as when Mary stood under the cross, unable to stop its senselessness and unable even to protest Jesus’ innocence, she too was practicing chastity. Unless we are willing to carry tension, in the same way, we will, precisely, never wait for the wedding night.

Chastity’s challenge reads this way: Never short-circuit the process of metamorphosis. Whether you are dealing with sex or with life in general, wait for the wedding night for the consummation.

A Child is Born

December 14, 1998

“A child is born to us.” Why a child? Why would God choose to come into this world as a baby? Why not as some superman or superwoman? Why not as someone who could simply overpower evil with a superior strength? The world is in desperate need of help and God’s response is to send a child. What is the logic?

Sometimes we make to simplistic a judgment here. We look at the sweetness and innocence of a baby and conclude that it makes sense for God to be born into our world in this way. That is not entirely wrong, there is indeed a godliness in innocence and sweetness, but that is not the point. What God’s birth as a baby underlines is not so much the sweetness of love and the virtue of innocence as the power of vulnerability and helplessness to put us on the road to life. In that sense, the manger and the cross say the same thing, namely, that vulnerability, not power, is what brings life.

Thus, when Jesus says that little children enter the kingdom effortlessly, he is not idealizing so much the innocence of children as he is their helplessness. Children enter the kingdom of God easily because they are helpless and have no power. A child cannot even feed itself, let alone earn the food it eats. In such helplessness, one can only cry out and it is this precise poverty that is the opening where life can be given.

What precisely is meant here? How are vulnerability and powerlessness the keys to life? Sometimes a thing can be understood better by seeing it against its opposite. With this in mind, allow me to present the antithesis of the Christmas scene.

When one looks at a Christmas crèche, one sees a baby surrounded by a woman (Mary), a man (Joseph), a few shepherds and kings, some angels, and an assortment of animals (sheep and camels). Everything in the scene speaks of peace, of joy, of healing, and of calm. Moreover the scene suggests that it is something flowing out of the baby, a silence and a helplessness, that lies at the root of all this peace and joy. What might its opposite look like?

In a recent novel entitled, Our Father, Marilyn French tells the story of four half sisters who are attending to their father who has recently been incapacitated by a stroke. He, their father, had been a man out of whom power flowed. Gifted with a great intelligence, a handsome appearance, a vigorous health, a rich family inheritance, an excellent education, a very prestigious job, and a natural arrogance, he had been a man whom everyone met with a mixture of respect, fear, and envy. He was now eight-two years old and for all of his life he had always had wealth, power, attention, health, sex, an important job, and the respect of his peers. What he had wanted from life he had simply taken. In fact, during the prime of his life, he didn’t even have to take what he wanted; it was simply given to him by those around him. As one of the daughters described it: “He never even rang for a servant when my mother was alive – they had the bells then. She did it. He was so powerful things just appeared before him when he wanted them, everyone around him made sure of that.” (Marilyn French, Our Father, Penguin Books, London, p.304)

His four daughters, each from a different mother, are now attending to him. None of them has had a happy experience of him. His power has deeply wounded each of them, abused each of them, and helped alienate them from each other. One daughter is frigid and angry; the second is spoiled and unable to care for herself; the third is well meaning but insecure; and the last is lesbian and bitter. As they keep vigil together around his sickbed, an interesting thing happens: Whenever they feel his power (his money, his influence in history, his status with others, his power over their mothers, his capacity to control others, and his indifference to and abuse of them when they were children) they fill with bitterness, hurt, and jealousy of each other. His power is a poison, the opposite of a Christmas crèche.

Conversely, however, whenever they sense his helplessness and vulnerability a certain silent healing flows out and they begin to feel a certain calm, peace, and healing. His power had wounded them, his helplessness helps heal them; his power had brought death, jealousy, and bitterness, his helplessness finally helps bring some life.

That is why God chose to be born as a baby. Helplessness and vulnerability are where life enters. Had God sent a superman or superwoman to clean up the world things would have ended up in even more of a mess. So God sent a baby. In that powerlessness our healing can begin.

Waiting for Christmas to Come

December 13, 1998

Everything about the season of advent speaks of desire and waiting. Our advent songs are nothing but cries really, begging for someone or something to come and ease our burdens, slake our thirst, calm our restlessness, take away our tiredness, and fill in the empty spots inside us. But what do we desire? For what do we long? What would finally calm the restlessness within us?

Desire is not a simple thing at all. Most of the time, we do not know what we really want even when we think we do. We pursue certain persons, possessions, achievements, and experiences, but, in the end, we always find that we want more. We live in chronic dissatisfaction, no matter what we actually attain or achieve. Nobody lives a fully fulfilled life. Rather we experience only very brief moments of relative fulfillment. Ninety-eight percent of life is spent waiting- waiting for this moment to end and something else to come; waiting for a season of life to pass; and waiting to still meet those persons and circumstances whom we hope will bring us the love and happiness for which we yearn. For about 98% of our lives we live in advent, waiting for the “Messiah”, for “Christmas”, to come.

So what would fulfill us? Medieval philosophy answered the question this way: The adequate object of the intellect and will is union with all Being in knowledge and love. At first glance, that appears rather abstract and sterile, but, unpackaged, it tells us what Christmas must bring. And what does it tell us?

Simply put, it tells us that no one person, no one thing, no one achievement, no one experience, and no one combination of persons, things, and achievements, will ever fully soothe what aches inside us. What would quench those fires, what would be, in their terms, “adequate”? In a word, everything! But how is this “everything” to be defined? What constitutes “Christmas”?

Medieval philosophy saw human desire as operating at six interpenetrating levels. It described them as follows:

1) As a being of soul and spirit we ache for transcendence. At a deep level, we rarely know exactly what we want, but we always know that life should to be more than what it is at present. Always there is the desire to burst limits. Always something is suffocating us. Our lives are never enough for us.

2) As an intellectual being we ache for knowledge, for experience. Here the ache is double: We ache to know and we ache to be known, to experience and to be experienced. Moreover, this ache is universal in scope, we ache to know and experience everything and to be known and experienced by everybody. Small wonder we are so often willing to sell our very souls for fame! We throb with the feeling that if we are known by everyone, then our existence will somehow also enlarge and become universal.

3) As a being of will, a being with a heart, we ache for love. Here too the ache is two sided and imperialistic: The heart wants to sleep with everyone. We long to love everybody and to be loved in turn by everybody. No love in this life is ever enough.

4) As an emotional being we ache for affirmation, for warmth. Again the ache goes both ways. We ache to be affirmed and we ache to affirm, to be warmed and to make others warm .As well, just as at every other level, this ache is insatiable. No amount of affirmation, in this world, is ever enough.

5) As an aesthetic being we ache for admiration and beauty. Again, the ache is insatiable and two-sided: We ache to be an object of beauty and admiration, just as we ache to surround ourselves with beauty so that we can admire it. It is no mystery that we spend so much energy and money on cosmetics, on looking good. We have within us an incurable ache for admiration and thus it is no accident that a first sign of clinical depression is a lack of concern about one’s personal appearance.

6) As a sexual being we ache for consummation. There is an near-overpowering longing in each of us to join body and soul with another so as to be made whole and so as to help make that other whole. This ache too is imperialistic, as we well know.

We can see from all of this that it is not easy to find peace and rest in this life, given that desire is strong and waiting is hard. Every love song really is an advent song and all human longing echoes Augustine’s words: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. ” Advent is the season that celebrates this, both by pointing desire towards its adequate object and by teaching us to wait.

The Moral And Spiritual Gain Within Our Generation

December 6, 1998

Is the world getting better or worse? Are we making moral and spiritual progress on this planet or are we sliding ever further into a moral and spiritual abyss?

This is not an easy question to answer. It is easy, too easy in fact, to look at our world today and condemn it. Certainly there are many things that, from a moral or spiritual point of view, seem to be regressing. Globalization is creating even a further gap between the rich and the poor; greed and self-interest have been elevated to the level of virtue; family and community are breaking down at every level; there is little in the way of sexual responsibility to be seen anywhere; and our everyday consciousness is becoming daily more agnostic. Things, it would seem, are beginning to slide.

And yet, this is too simple a judgment. No doubt, in comparison to our parents’ and grandparents’ generations, we have lost some ground morally and spiritually, liberal protests notwithstanding. However we have also gained some moral and spiritual ground, conservative protests notwithstanding. What are the moral and spiritual gains of our generation?

Some years ago, Carol Gilligan wrote a particularly insightful book entitled, In a Different Voice. In this book, she offers a critique of the patriarchy and hierarchy, which she sees as having propped up the power structures of most of the world up to now. In that system of patriarchy and hierarchy, somebody invariably had power over somebody else and life was not as fair to the person on the bottom of this as it was to the person on top. Thus, for the most part, in terms of power and privilege, the men were over the women, the rich were over the poor, the healthy were over the sick, the historically privileged were over those with less historical privilege, those with white skin were over those with coloured skin, those without physical handicaps were over those with physical handicaps, and humanity itself was over nature. In effect, someone was always over somebody else.

Former generations, for all their superiority to us in terms of family life, fidelity, sacrifice, duty, sexual responsibility, and worship of God, were far from perfect. Theirs was no golden age. Life was a lot fairer, filled with freedom, and filled with opportunity for some more than for others. Crassly put, in former generations you did a lot better if you were male, healthy, rich, white, historically privileged, and physically without handicap. You did not do as well if you were female, poor, coloured, sick, handicapped, or born into the world without connections. As Carol Gilligan would put it, one set of voices dominated over the others and life was a lot fairer for some than for others.

None of this, of course, denies the real goodness, faith, and moral fiber that existed then. In some areas of morality and spirituality, clearly those generations were superior to our own. But, and this is the point, while they were superior to us in some areas, there are other areas, important moral and spiritual ones, within which they clearly stand second to today’s generation. They had a sense of God, of family, of community, of neighbourhood, of sacrifice, of fidelity, of chastity, and of service that our generation for the most part lacks.

But they were also more racist, more sexist, more intolerant, more rigid, more imperialistic, and more given over to historical privilege than this present generation. These are not small, incidental moral things. I suspect that how we answer the question of whether we are progressing or regressing morally and spiritually is coloured considerably by our gender, race, health, place in history, and access to education, power, and money.

Not everyone would agree with this, but, whatever the moral failings of our generation, and they are many, we have also moved the needle on the moral and spiritual compass perceptibly in the direction of progress. In what way? Today, in comparison to former generations, we are less racist, less sexist, less bigoted, less timid, and more open to ecumenism. As well, and this is a real irony since we often have trouble believing in God, we have made some real strides in purifying some of the unhealthy elements within our practical theology of God. Moreover, for all their negative aspects, globalization and the communications industry have helped make information available to the poor as never before and have helped bring the world together as never before. They are helping create a global village.

In philosophy there is a dictum that says that something is gained when something is lost (and vice versa). This is true too regarding morality and spirituality. Our generation has lost some ground, but it has also made some extraordinary progress.

The Rejected One As Cornerstone

November 29, 1998

“There is a crack in everything; that’s how the light gets in. ” Whatever else Leonard Cohen had in mind when he coined that phrase, it says something about how wisdom, compassion, and morality seep into our lives.

There is a crack in everything. Our culture, of course, is no exception. Despite great technological progress and even some genuine moral achievement, all is far from well with the world. People are falling through its cracks and it is these persons – the sick, the unattractive, the broken, the handicapped, the untalented, those with Alzheimer’s disease, the unborn, and the poor in general – who are the crack where the light is entering. They give soul to our world. What does this mean?

In our culture there are some whose lives, for whatever reason, are considered inferior and deemed not worthwhile. Moreover we are convinced that we may on occasion even snuff out the heartbeat of these persons. Euthanasia, abortion, and various kinds of mercy killing are being promoted precisely in the name of compassion, open-mindedness, and human dignity. Those in favour of these things have, for the main part, been able to claim both the moral and intellectual high ground. To support euthanasia, abortion, and mercy killing is to be seen as enlightened, to oppose them is to be seen as morally and intellectually backward. In Canada, for example, the reaction to the death of Tracy Latimer (a severely-handicapped, young girl who was killed by her own father) provides ample evidence of this. The intellectually elite, for the most part, contend that this was a morally enlightened act. Abortion is viewed similarly.

Thus, we are moving ever more towards a mindset that sincerely believes that wisdom, compassion, human dignity, and morality can be served by snuffing out the heartbeat of someone whose life is not deemed worthwhile or who is living in such pain that this is judged to be sufficient cause to warrant death as a mercy. Is this wisdom and moral progress? Hardly. As Rene Girard puts it: What is anthropologically marginal is spiritually central. This is an academic expression for what scripture means when it says that the stone rejected by the builders is the cornerstone for the building. In simple terms, this tells us that those whom the culture marginalizes and sees as unimportant, those whom it deems disposable – the sick, the aged, the severely handicapped, the dying, the homeless, and the unborn – are in fact, spiritually, the most important people in the world. They are where the light gets in. How we value them is the true measure of our wisdom, compassion, and morality.

Imagine how soulless would be a world within which only the strong, the young, the healthy, the physically attractive, the intellectually bright, and the achievers have a place! Imagine how soulless would be a world that views the handicapped, the unborn fetus, the physically paralyzed, and the dying as having nothing to offer! Such a world would be able to recognize neither the birth nor the death of Jesus because, in both of these, compassion, morality, and wisdom seep in precisely through what is helpless and marginalized. Our present culture is drawing ever nearer this soullessness.

Too often, even in our churches, we no longer stand where Jesus stood, where the cross stood, namely with the helpless. We stand instead where vested interest stands, be that the vested interest of the business world, the academic world, or the pop culture.

A world that sincerely believes that killing someone, anyone – be it Tracy Latimer, an unborn fetus, or a criminal on death row – can be an act that enhances human dignity has let its compassion be coopted and commandeered by vested interests. We will never admit this of course, but it is true. The reason we do not see value in the lives of the severely handicapped, the terminally ill, those plagued by Alzheimer’s disease, and many of the other poor in the world is that these people precisely stand in the way of someone’s comfort, someone’s efficiency, someone’s rationality, someone’s supposed enlightenment, and someone’s limited compassion. Better they should die than that this should be disturbed! In both the world and the church today we are becoming blind to one of the deepest truths that Jesus taught us in the crucifixion, namely, that what looks useless and meaningless has the deeper value. Inferiority builds soul.

Those who fall through the cracks of the culture are indeed the crack where the light gets in. If our world has any real soul left, if indeed we still even understand the words wisdom, compassion, and morality, then it is because someone who has no power in the culture, someone who has been marginalized and rejected, has shared a gift with us.

Life Versus Wisdom

November 22, 1998

Some years ago, I was visiting a Benedictine monastery in Belgium when an episode occurred that still haunts me. What happened? Well, you need to picture a scene to get the full impact:

It was April, but still very cold and the chapel where we had just celebrated the Eucharist and the cafeteria to which we had retired for coffee lacked somewhat both for heat and light. There were about a hundred of us present, monks and seminarians mostly, along with a few lay people. All of us were somberly drinking coffee and making small talk, except for one child, a little girl of four. She, dressed in a smart, bright little coat, was skipping smack down the middle of the cafeteria, singing to herself, letting off steam after having been forcibly silenced during the long liturgy that had just preceded.

Maybe it was the cold and bad light or maybe it was the heavy monastic dress so much in evidence, but if the best Hollywood director in the world, or the devil himself, had choreographed the thing, it could not have been set up better. Everything about that little girl spoke of life, while everything about the rest of us spoke of soberness, lack of colour, lack of life, age, and dram duty. If God were running a public relations campaign, this would not be the film to show by which to draw anyone to church. At that moment, for all the world, it looked like there was more real life in one little girl, who had just been released from church, than in all the rest of us, God-fearing, duty-driven, church-going, wisdom-filled persons, none of whom could skip publicly if our lives depended on it.

I walked out of that cafeteria not knowing exactly what to make of this, given that I have some empathy for both sides of the equation, and I have noticed a lot of similar contrasts since. We all have. How often does it appear as though what is happening in our churches is dead, duty-driven and sterile, in comparison to that powerful pulse of life that literally surges out of our youth, our rock stars, our athletes, our secular comedians, our raunchy sitcoms, and so much else in our world that seems a lot freer and full of life precisely because, like that little girl, it has been released from church?

Time and time again, it seems that life, colour, and energy take their source elsewhere, not in the faith or in the church. For example, the very talented, powerful, young artist, Alanis Morissette, is, in effect, this little girl, grown up and with an attitude. A bitter, ex Catholic, Morissette complains of the “loveless priests” who run the faith and who stifle love and energy. Well, I’m one of those priests, stung by such criticism, even as I recognize some of its truth. A lot of the real energy that drives our world – and not just negatively in terms of greed and lust – does not emanate from the churches. A lot of joy, love, zest, and colour take their origins elsewhere.

There is a lot that needs to be reflected upon here, although in the end it is a considerably more complex than what is spontaneously suggested when we see a little girl happily skipping among sombre monks or hear Alanis Morissette whining about how erotically stifling was her Catholic upbringing. What this suggests is that we misunderstand the connection between life and wisdom and especially misunderstand how, lately, much of life is uninitiated by wisdom and much of wisdom is disconnected from life. What am I saying?

Too often today we confuse life and wisdom, or simply fail to distinguish between them. For example, we see a lot of life – raw energy, eroticism, colour, wit, intelligence, beauty, and health – simply divorced from wisdom, cut off from that which holds the community together at its heart. That is why something can be brilliant, funny, beautiful, healthy, and full of real energy and yet of itself be unable to deal with the real issues of meaning, community, family, suffering, death, wound, and forgiveness .You watch Seinfeld for fun, not for wisdom.

But the reverse is just as true. We often see a wisdom that is disconnected from life that precisely lacks any real connection to energy, eroticism, colour, wit, intelligence, beauty, and raw health. That is why sometimes someone can deal with the issues of meaning, pain, death, and forgiveness and yet be unable to radiate any real energy or health. You go to church for wisdom, not for fun.

It can be very helpful to know this. One should never confuse Alanis Morissette with Mother Theresa, nor Jerry Seinfeld with John of the Cross. In one, we see more the raw beauty and pulse of God’s life; in the other we see the maturity of God’s wisdom. Part of our task is to bring them together.

On Naming The Present Moment

November 16, 1998

A couple of years ago, David Tracy, a leading Catholic intellectual, wrote a particularly insightful essay which he entitled, On Naming the Present. In it, he tried to name the present moment by pointing out three major reactions.

The first of these, he calls modernity. This version of things sees what is happening today as simply more of the same, namely, more of what has been happening already for a long time. Rationality and technology are the ultimate values, Western life and culture are superior to the rest of the world, individual rights supersede all else, and evolution in some form continues to triumph in history despite problems. What is happening is inevitable and good, and the future will look much like the present, only better.

We recognize this view in many of the forces that are driving our economies, driving globalization, driving our governments and generally too driving our centres for higher learning. For modernity the present moment is good.

The second reaction is that of the anti-modern. This person sees the present moment as a time of trouble, a time within which many of the key traditions and values that have sustained us for thousands of years are being destroyed. Continuing in the direction we are going in will mean the death of all meaning and probably even of life itself.

For an anti-modernist, we need to retreat to the past and reclaim the values we once had but have since lost, including the value of sacrificing for community rather than inflating individual rights. The cry here is for old-time religion, old-time family values and old-time ways of organizing ourselves. For the anti-modern, the present is bad.

The third reaction, Tracy calls post-modern. The post-modern person is suspicious of both past and present. He or she does not share modernity’s enthralment with rationality, the West, technology, science, globalization, the Internet and everything else we identify with progress. Neither is he or she enthraled with tradition, as is the anti-modern.

For the post-modernist, there are many centres (not just the West), many meanings (not just rationality and what it produces), many avenues to the truth (and not just those espoused by liberals and conservatives), and indeed no clear way to know whether the present moment is good or bad. For a post-modernist, hope lies in otherness, in the marginalized, in the mystic, in the artist and in madness. The present moment is good and bad.

For Tracy, it is not a question of deciding among these as to right or wrong. Rather, for him, each of these perspectives is inadequate, even as it helps protect something valuable.

Modernity, for its part, has helped bring about and sustain individual rights, freedom of press, freedom of religion, freedom of association, freedom for multi-culturalism, freedom for scientific inquiry (including the area of theology), and it has been one of the driving forces behind democracy itself. Any anti-modernist, anti-liberal, view should take a hard look at the narrowness and brutality of fundamentalism before coming on too strong in its critique of modernity.

Conversely, though, despite all of its so-called enlightenment, modernity offers little community or salvation. In it, one sees a real poverty as regards memory, suffering and resistance.

The anti-modern, generally identified with the conservative, too brings much positive to the table. An emphasis on tradition, community and boundaries is something needed today. The popularity of fundamentalism indicates how deep is the fear in many people that we are headed for the survival of the fittest, nihilism, mindless power and catastrophe.

Conversely, however, anti-modernism has made a curious marriage with many of the forces (technology, capitalism and pragmatism) that are helping bring about the things that it most fears.

Post-modernity too brings both riches and poverty to the table: Its systematic deconstructions have helped to shatter the narrow complacencies of both liberals and conservatives. It has looked at idols on both sides and said: “The king has no clothes on!”

However, deconstruction is not exactly the same thing as construction. To say what is wrong within a community does not of itself tell us how to live together. Thus, post-modernism, in Tracy’s words, has deconstructed the status quo but left us with the fluxus quo. It is rich and poor, both at the same time.

Not everything can be fixed or cured, but it should be named properly. David Tracy’s naming of the present moment is, indeed, the work of a good doctor; helpful because before there can be any cure there must first be a good diagnosis.

Three Conversion Movements

November 6, 1998

In her masterful book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows has a section within which she lists the faults of those who are beyond initial conversion. What are these faults?

Burrows has her own list, what I offer here is the perspective that Henri Nouwen gives in his spiritual masterpiece, The Return of the Prodigal Son. Among many things in that book, Nouwen tells us that as persons who understand ourselves as already committed, we still need to make a three-fold conversion movement: i) We need to move from being a bystander to being a participant; ii) from being a judge to being a repentant sinner; and iii) from speaking about love to actually letting ourselves be loved. What is involved in each of these?

From being a bystander to being a participant: In essence, what we need to do here is to move from studying life, speaking about it, teaching about it, writing about it, and perhaps even at times mimicking it, to actually living it. I know this sounds very much like a cliché devoid of substance, but a lot of what is wrong in the world, the church, and within our personal lives today is precisely the fact that we study things, talk about them, strongly voice our convictions about them, but often, in fact, do little or nothing about them. For example, we do not lack for literature, moral rhetoric, or good analysis on social justice. But there is, in fact, very, very little being done. This is not so much because our passion for justice is insincere, but because at the end of the day we are bystanders not participants.

The same holds true for prayer. There is no shortage of literature in this area (and no shortage of workshops either). We talk enough about prayer. We just don’t pray a lot. In terms of deep private prayer, we pray very little. Again, we are much more in the position of the bystander than participant. Therese of Lisieux once wrote: “I always preferred to pray rather than to have spiritual conversations about prayer.” For most of us, the opposite is true.

Robert Moore suggests that this failure to move from bystander to participant is a disease that particularly afflicts those among us who do any kind of ministry or are in any teaching or healing profession. Invariably we end up studying life and speaking about it rather than living it. It is no accident that those of us in these vocations frequently feel anger towards anyone who actually does anything. It will also be no accident that when the last tree on the planet has been cut down there will have been libraries of studies written about the ill-effect of cutting down trees, but very little will have been done by a way of action by those who wrote all those books. We generally respond to the issue of violence against children and women in the same way – with yet another study. We are too much bystanders, not participants.

We must also move from being judge to being repentant sinner. What is meant by this? All of us pray the prayer of the Pharisee – Thank God that I’m not like that other person! ” We are all self-righteous, it is only a question of what we are self-righteous about.

We used to stereotype self-righteousness in one phrase: “Holier-than-thou”. We are all “holier-than-thou”, except we each define holiness according to our own idiosyncratic preference, that is, as “more–sensitive-than-thou” ”brighter-than-thou“, “less hypocritical-than-thou“, “more-experienced-than–thou”, “less-bigoted– than–thou”, “less rigid–than-thou”, or “more-of-a-victim-than-thou”. In subtle and not so subtle ways, each of us is more judge than repentant sinner.

We stop being a judge only when we claim our proper place among the broken, among God’s little ones, the unfaithful, sinners. Only when we watch the news at night and recognize that every pathology, every act of violence, and every sin we see on our television screen is also inside of us will we lose all interest in making comparisons and be content to let God’s grace simply work in us.

Finally, we must move from speaking about love to actually letting ourselves be loved. Nouwen uses his own life as an example. For years, he went all over the world giving talks about love, even while not letting those around him really love him. Only after moving in with the physically handicapped, with people who were not interested in what he had to say about love, did he actually allow himself to be loved. What was true for him is true for most of us. It is far easier for us to speak about love than to let ourselves actually be loved.

Those around us, family and friends, already know all these things about us. It’s time we recognized them too.

What Is Religion All About?

November 1, 1998

There is a Jewish parable, quite famous, that runs something like this: Once upon a time there was a Rabbi who was old, wise, and very holy. One day he gathered his disciples around him and asked them this question:

“When is there enough light in the world?”

The first disciple answered him in this fashion: “Rabbi, there is enough light in the world when it is bright enough so that, from a distance, one can see whether a stream of water is moving or standing still.”

“That’s not enough light,” the rabbi answered.

A second disciple ventured another answer: “Rabbi, there is enough light in the world when it is bright enough so that one can tell the difference between an oak tree and a sycamore tree.”

“That’s still not enough light,” the rabbi replied.

A third disciple offered his opinion: “Rabbi, there is enough light in the world when it is light enough so that one can tell a sheep from a goat!”

Again the rabbi replied: “That is still not enough light.”

All his disciples were silent then. No other answers were offered. They looked at each other in wonder and then at the rabbi in a questioning way. “What answer could he possibly want?” they wondered.

At last the rabbi answered his own question: “There is enough light in the world when it is so bright that anyone can look in the face of anyone else and see in that face the face of a brother or a sister.”

This is a parable about the essence of religion, all religion, Christianity included. Religion, as the parable makes plain, is not ultimately about reading the signs of the times (telling flowing streams from stagnant ones), dogmatic or political correctness (telling oaks from sycamores), or even about morality (telling sheep from goats). Good as these things are in themselves they are not what religion is really about.

God is light and God’s light in this world is meant, first of all, to help us see each other’s faces correctly. Religion is about charity towards each other. Everything else, dogma and morals included, is secondary.

Jesus used his own parable, now also famous, to try to make precisely this point.

In the parable of the Good Samaritan, we see that the two persons who did not stop to help the man who was lying half-dead in the ditch did so for high reasons. The priest passed by and did not stop to help. Why? The parable does not say that he failed because he was hardened, mean, selfish, or lacking in goodness. He did not stop, it tells us, precisely because he was a priest. His motives were religious. Not knowing whether or not the man was dead, as a priest he could not risk touching the him because if he touched a dead body he would sustain ritual defilement and this would bar him from certain priestly duties. Hence, whether moved in compassion or not, he left a dying man lying alone in a ditch. He had religious considerations that outweighed his compassion. The scribe, I suspect, did not stop for similar reasons. The Samaritan, however, free from those same constraints, was able to follow his heart and let simple human compassion move him to reach through the distance that had been created by reputation, ethnicity, ideology, bad history, and religion. There was enough light for him to see that the face of the man lying in the ditch was the face of a brother, despite all that race, creed, and circumstance had placed between them.

We all need to let ourselves be challenged by this and the challenge it brings is not simplistic and saccharine (“Can’t we all just love each other?”). The challenge of these parables is to look at all the things that, for high reasons, block our basic compassion towards each other. The challenge is to look at the various ways we rationalize our lack of fundamental charity and respect for each other, how we use high (religious) reasons to block what charity asks of us. What should we be watching for?

If I am of a more conservative bent, I want to be careful that my legitimate concern for dogma and orthodoxy does not get in the way of my charity. The same holds true for my concern for morality, especially sexual morality. It is not that these things are not important; it is just that charity is more important.

Conversely, if my leaning is more liberal, I want to be careful that my legitimate concern for liberal orthodoxy (political correctness) does not derail a more primary religious demand, namely, to be charitable above all and to all. In the same vein, my passion for social justice, no matter how urgent the cause, does not give me permission to be selective in my charity.

The old rabbi was tight. In the end, God’s presence is this world is about charity. Let’s not kid ourselves about that!

Bill Gates and Albert Camus

October 25, 1998

Contrast clarifies vision. To set two things in opposition to each other is to see both more clearly.

With that in mind, it is interesting to contrast two views on God, religion, and the human soul. One is the perspective of Albert Camus, a Nobel Prize winning writer and an avowed atheist; the other is that of Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft (computer-software}, the richest man in the world, and someone who appears to be rather indifferent religiously.

Albert Camus, who died in an auto crash in 1960, was a very complex man. After one of his plays opened in Paris, some of the audience, knowing him to be an atheist but surprised by the religious tone of his play, asked him about his religious beliefs. He replied: “It’s true that I don’t believe in God, but that doesn’t mean I’m an atheist, and I would agree with Benjamin Constant, who thought a lack of religion was vulgar and even hackneyed” Meeting groups of students in Stockholm, after receiving the Nobel Prize, he engaged frequently in dialogues about God and Christ , telling them: “I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan.” (Quoted by o. Todd , Albert Camus,A Life, Alfr ed Knopf, 1997, pp. 356 & 380)

Bill Gates, in an interview with Time magazine last year, was also questioned about his religious concerns. His answers stand in sharp contrast to those of Camus. Asked whether there was anything special, perhaps even divine, about the human soul, he replied: “I don’t have any evidence on that” Earlier in the interview, he had stated: “I don’t think there’s anything unique about human intelligence. All the neurons in the brain that make up perceptions and emotions operate in a binary fashion. We can someday replicate that on a machine. Earthly life is carbon based and computers are silicon based and that is not a major distinction. Eventually we’ll be able to sequence the human genome and replicate how nature did intelligence in a carbon-based system.” Asked if he goes to church, he replied that his wife is Catholic and she goes, but, for himself: “Just in terms of allocation of time resources, religion is not very efficient. There’s a lot more I could be doing on a Sunday morning.” (Time, January 13, 1997, pp. 33 & 37)

An interesting contrast! Two very different men – Albert Camus, an atheist , but with a chronic , anxious itch for religious questions; Bill Gates, a believer, but seemingly indifferent to religious issues! Which is healthier?

My bias is clearly for Camus. But why? Is an anxious, neurotic, atheism really preferable to a calm, benign, religious indifference? Is a philosophical temperament and the interests that this engenders somehow morally superior to a more one-sided interest in technology and what it can do? Is it better to settle into your chair at night with the latest novel by AS. Byatt or Toni Morrison than with the latest manual on computer software?

Different people will answer those questions differently, but my vote is for Camus. However, my rap against Bill Gates is not about the value of technology, computers, or the Internet, nor indeed about the merit of the software he produces (which I both use and like). My knock on him is my censure against our culture in general (which so rewards Bill Gates because in many ways he is its prime analogate). What’s wrong with our culture, in terms of wisdom and depth, is not that it sometimes rejects God, soul, and religion, although I do see that as a fault. What is more serious is that our culture, like Bill Gates, too often treats questions of deeper meaning only in terms of empirical data, efficiency , and what can be found on the internet. The end result is that it often does not find religious questions even worth asking. This leads to a one-dimensional soul, dead of wonder, flat enough to think that if God is to be found it will be on the internet, cost-accounting the merits of spending an hour at church on a Sunday morning.

Bias or not, give me Camus’ atheism any time! For all its technical success, computer software is hardly the theory of relativity, let alone the theology of redemption. And Bill Gates? A very bright man indeed, but Albert Einstein he is not; at least not until, like Einstein, he begins to speak of realities and meanings that can’t be replicated in computer software.

There is an interesting twist in the answer Camus gave his audience in Stockholm: “I have Christian concerns, but my nature is pagan.” What’s wrong in our culture is that too often we have neither of these, Christian concerns nor a pagan nature. Nor do we realize that the two are inextricably linked. A true pagan might not believe in God, but that doesn’t mean that he or she is an atheist.

The culture of Microsoft, our culture, is the opposite. It might well believe in God, but it is atheistic because too much within it militates against believing in fire. We are too absorbed with the proper functioning of mechanics – and there is nothing wild, fiery, and divine inside a machine!