Having a columnist around for a number of years is a little like having a neighbour around for a while. Even if you don’t like him, you can’t help but be a little curious about his life and appreciate being told if he’s making any major moves. With that in mind, I risk, in this column, sharing about a major new move in my own life.

Last month, I attended a General Chapter of the religious order to which I belong, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Among other things, that meeting concerned itself with electing new leadership for our order. I’m not sure who guides the Holy Spirit, or whether that Spirit was indeed guiding us, because I was elected to serve on our General Council in Rome as Councilor for Canada for a six-year term. 

Practically, it means that for the next six years I will have two addresses, one in Rome and one in Canada. For five months of the year, I will be in Rome (or in some other country within which our General Council will be meeting) and for the rest of the time I will be in Canada, with residence in Toronto.

What’s involved in the job?

As a member of our General Council, I will be part of a team of ten persons who will try to direct, animate, and otherwise lead our congregation, the Oblates. We serve in nearly 70 countries around the world. As the councilor who represents Canada, my more specific task will be to try to bring the agenda of the Canadian church to Rome and to try to help Rome deal with those concerns, even as I take the Oblate concerns of Rome back to Canada. 

I have mixed feelings about the job: On the one hand, it is a marvelous opportunity. Administration, properly imaged, is really the task of community building. As a congregation that is trying to serve the poor we, the Oblates, are facing two major challenges right now. In the developing world, we are literally exploding with growth and the task there is to help initiate this growth, help give it the resources it needs, and help solidify it ecclesially. Serving on our General Council gives me the opportunity to put my gifts, such as they are, at the service of the these young communities. In the Western world, as we know, we are facing the virtual collapse of nearly every kind of community, including the family and church. Trying to be a bit of an ecclesial liaison between Canada and Rome will, I am sure, demand of me every energy and talent I possess. 

The job will give me the privileged opportunity to live with and meet with people from all over the world. On our General Council alone there are persons from nine different countries and from every continent. Living in community with these people will give me, first-hand, an experience of world-church. As well, though our administration is based in Rome, we have meetings all over the world. Hence, for six years, I will get the chance to be (somewhat at least) more of a citizen of the world than of any one country.

On the other hand, this job means some other things too: It means postponing my return to teaching and the academic world (where my heart still lies and where most of my natural gifts lie). Teaching is coded into my very genes, I have worked my whole life to become an effective teacher, love teaching, and now, it seems, that is not to be for now and perhaps for never. Letting go of that will mean some grieving.

Also, the job involves constant of travel. Rarely will I be at one place for more than a month at time.  I have had a small taste of this  (life on the road) while I served as provincial and already know that the road gets both stale and lonely  real quickly. Travelling all over sounds a lot more exciting than it really is. In effect, most of the time you are alone in that you are away from family, friends, and the people you know, as well as being away from your own space,  rooms, bed, routine,  and support  systems. Travelling constantly soon enough makes you long for its opposite, home and stability.

All of that notwithstanding, on balance, I feel more enthusiasm than hesitation as I begin this new chapter in life.

Of course, I intend to keep on writing, all kinds of things, including this column. Hopefully meeting persons from all around the world, living in an international community for good parts of the year, and visiting different continents and cultures will enrich what I have to say each week.

When I left the office of provincial, I told my successor that I was open to being sent anywhere because, to my mind, there are no uninteresting persons or places on this planet. 

Well … this new challenge is a little more interesting than I either dreamt or wanted, but it1s a good challenge. I ask for your prayers so that God might give me the spirit, health, humour, and generosity needed to serve with gratitude.

The key to remaining within a marriage, a family, a friendship, a neighbourhood, a church, or a religious community, is not so much communication as it is transparency. Nothing destroys community as much as does lack of transparency. 

What does this mean? Essentially transparency is a question of being trusted. The most transparent person you know is not necessarily the one who is the most friendly, extroverted, articulate, or has the best communication skills. It is the person you trust the most.  Transparency is a question of trust and one is worthy of trust when one’s private life is in harmony one’s public persona. Allow me a rather  poignant example: 

Many of us, I am sure, remember the incident when Cardinal Bernardin of Chicago was accused of sexually abusing a young man. The accusation was later proven false and the young man who made it confessed that it was a complete fabrication. However on one particular day in November of 1993 Cardinal Bernardin stood before television cameras, microphones, and reporters from all of the world and, given the nature of the accusation, the suspicion was clearly that he was guilty. I am not sure how many of us still remember the words he spoke then, but they were words that define transparency. Essentially he said this:

“The accusation against me isn’t true. I have no idea as to why it is being made or what the motives behind it are, but I can say this: Anyone who knows me, knows that this isn’t true. My life is an open book. People who know me know too that I don’t do things like that.” 

“My life  is an open book!’ If we can say that to our spouses, families, friends, fellow church members, and communities,  and have them believe us, then we are transparent, irrespective of stammering and unskilled we might be socially. The reverse is also true. I can be the most skilled communicator, socially at the centre of things, and the person who has revealed the most about himself, but, if others do not trust my private life, I have no transparency whatsoever. For example, how different the public confession of Bill Clinton (“Even a president has a private life!”) than that of Bernardin?

Transparency is about being trusted, being trusted is about being trustworthy, and being trustworthy is ultimately not a question of explaining ourselves clearly but of living our lives correctly. My life has to be an open book, not that I cannot have a private life, but my private life must be such so that within it there is nothing radically at odds with my public persona. It is not good enough to have private addictions, affairs, and other such betrayals of community as long as these are not found out. These things are equally destructive of community whether they are ever revealed or not. Whenever anyone’s private life is out of sync with his or her public persona, the community immediately begins to intuitively feel the contradiction and at that precise moment also begins to die.

Some years ago, on a retreat, a recovering alcoholic shared with me this story:I am an electrician. For all the years that I was drinking, I used to be surprised at how naively people trusted me. They gave me keys to go inside their apartments and homes, trusting I would not snoop around or touch anything that I wasn’t supposed to. How often I betrayed that! Now, since I stopped drinking, they can trust me in their homes. I don’t go through their drawers or touch anything that is theirs. That’s what sobriety means, being trustworthy. Alcoholism is only 10% about alcohol. It’s 90% about honesty- about what you do when nobody sees you, about being trustworthy when someone gives you their keys. 

D.H. Lawrence once wrote a poem called “Healing”. In it he tells us that he is not a machine and that what is wrong with him cannot be fixed by adjusting or fine-tuning some mechanism. When something is wrong with us, he says, it is because the soul is sick or wounded and what is then required for healing is never just some skill of communication, but repentance. The same is true, doubly so, of our relationships with each other. When something goes wrong within our marriages, our families,  our friendships, our churches, and our communities, it is never just a question of seeking the right counselling, developing the right communications skills, or of re-adjusting the rhythms of our lives to make for greater compatibility, albeit these can be important. More important than any of them is transparency. To be in community, I have to be able to stand before the family and, like Cardinal Bernardin, say:  “My life is an open  book!”

Only if they believe me can they live with me.

What is the crucial agenda facing the church today? What issues should the church be addressing? The answer depends a lot upon one’s perspective. 

Presently I am attending a General Chapter of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. This, month-long, meeting is being held in Rome and has brought together delegates from every region in the world. More than 65 countries are represented. One of the interesting things to observe is our differences. Each region comes with different needs, different priorities, a different mentality, and even a different rhythm of time. Perhaps the biggest difference of all however, the one that undergirds most of the others, is the different social, political, and economic world from which each of us comes. This, perhaps more than anything else, is what shapes what each of us considers important. We spent several days listening to various regions of the world tell us what they consider to be the major issues confronting them as church communities. I offer here a sampling of what each said: 

The Latin Americans focused on the suffering of their people. This suffering, they told us, is exacerbated today by globalization and a world economy that is driven by unchecked neo-liberalism. In their words: ‘We are living a dark night of the soul and, at times, it feels like the resurrected Lord has taken leave of our land. For us the key virtue right now is hope.” They suggested that what we need to fight this amoral globalization of the economy is a counter, confederate, solidarity of global justice, a multi-national community of advocacy for those who are being victimized by globalization.

The Africa-Madagascar region told us that their churches were young and literally exploding with growth, how they have a surplus of vocations to the priesthood and the religious life, but lack of facilities and resources to handle them. This is so bad that in some places, they have had to institute a quota system regarding receiving vocations; for example, in Nigeria, several hundred young men apply each year to join the Oblates and they can only accept about 10 of these. They spoke too of how globalization is adversely affecting them, especially since most of their countries have just come out of an era of slavery and imperialism and have only had a very brief recess before having to face globalization. 

The Asian region too highlighted the tremendous negative impact of globalization. In their words: “Asia is being strip-mined for the benefit of the first world.” Their entire approach to church is coloured by that fact that, as Catholics, they are less than 2% of the population, dwarfed on the one side by Buddhism and Hinduism and on the other by Islam, both of the benign and militant variety. Religious life too is seen as being too much of a Western import, not yet truly Asian. They feel strongly a need for their own Asian theology and ecclesiology. They have not yet, in their view, been able to shape Christianity in a way that draws deeply on the rich wells of Asian religious tradition and is truly Asian in its temperament.

The United States centred their report on the need for a second evangelization in a post-Christian culture and the need to reach out to the new poor in the USA. Among other things, they openly addressed the painful issue of sexual abuse.

The group representing Europe, both West and East, spoke of how Europe is moving towards an economic and political unity, but the churches are lagging behind and are slower to form a “European mentality”, beyond their present national and ethnic mentalities. They spoke as well of the negative impact of globalization and triumph of neo-liberal economics. A new poor is developing, as the rich get richer. Also, they are faced with the problem of huge international migrations, including hundreds of thousands of refugees. Religiously the big issue for them is modernity, the absence of God in ordinary consciousness.

The Canadian region spoke of how the churches in Canada reflect the multi­culturalism of the country, with the newer immigrant churches thriving while most of the others are undergoing a certain paschal death. It addressed the issue of women, stressing that there must be movement towards more mutuality of gender in the church, especially as regards decision making. It suggested that in the Canadian context the issue of women in the church cannot not (deliberate double negative) be talked about since the present ecclesial silence on the matter constitutes a certain negative taboo.

In those sundry statements one hears what, I believe, should be the agenda for the church today. One notices too that this agenda varies significantly, depending upon the social and economic conditions in the various parts of the world.

During the past few years, a trio of American authors, James Hillman, Michael Meade, and Thomas Moore, have given us a number of books which are as brilliant as they are provocative. The books have different titles – The Soul’s Code, Soulmates, Care of the Soul, Men and the Water of Life, and so on – but they have a common theme. They suggest that when we are born into the world our souls are not blank pieces of paper, infinitely malleable, to be shaped simply by the experiences that life hands us. Rather the soul has its own internal code and this accounts for many of those fierce pressures (often irrational), which so frequently obsess us and so desperately complicate our lives. Our souls, as Hillman puts it, contain all kinds of daimons, angels and demons that haunt us, which generate most of our real energy, and keep us perpetually restlessness with their incessant demands.

It is because of these things that our souls often try to lead us in ways that leave our bodies, heads, moral instincts, families, spouses, friends, and churches wondering what exactly is going on. The heart has its reasons, Pascal once commented. The soul has it code, Hillman would echo.

Few persons dispute the brilliance of these books. What leaves some persons uncomfortable however, is their seeming amorality. A superficial reading of these authors can give the impression that there is no moral order, only certain non-negotiable needs within the soul. Right and wrong are simply a question of being true to one’s soul, irrespective of the consequences. What’s right is what the soul wants, pure and simple. If an affair widens your personality, have one. If your soul feels suffocated in this or that particular commitment, leave the commitment. The soul’s code alone, it would seem, dictates what makes for happiness, meaning, and truthful living.

But that is not exactly what these men are saying. They are not denying the moral code, neither its existence nor its legitimacy. They are only saying that the soul’s code is not the moral code and that we will all be much wiser and more in tune with the actual complexity of our own lives when we realize that.

Our lives, these men rightly assure us, are not simple. And they are right. We are born into the world with a tortured complexity because we have been wired for more than just one kind of electricity. As Hillman, Meade, and Moore point out, the soul has its own secret design for our lives. It makes its demands accordingly and sometimes these demands are not the same ones that the Gospels ask of us. But these men do not deny that we have within us too other codes, which are also very powerful.

Thus, we have within us a genetic code, a powerful set of blind biological instincts that pressure us mercilessly, every second of our lives, to ensure that we go on living, that we protect ourselves, survive, and propagate. This code, in a manner of speaking, demands that we be selfish and that we immortalize ourselves by getting ourselves into the gene pool.

Then too there is within us a rational code, intellectual instincts. These give us that incurable itch to know, to understand everything, including ourselves, and to put a rational face on everything. Because of it, there is in all of us a constant need for clarity, for order , for numbers, for names.

Beyond this we all have within us an aesthetic code, a feel for beauty. Something inside of every healthy human being wants to be shaped by beauty, wants to admire the beautiful, and wants to be admired as somehow beautiful. This code too makes constant demands, openly and surreptitiously.

Finally, within us all there is too a moral code, a sense of the goodness things, the relativity of the self in relation that, and the need to respect the proper order of reality even if the cost of that is self-sacrifice and the loss of one’s own comfort and even one’s life. Inside of all of us there is a voice, which can never be silenced that tells us that there are more important things than even our own lives.

But these various codes are rarely friends with each other. Each is imperialistic and wants the final say. It can be helpful to understand this and thus to know that it is not a simple task to be a human being and that each of us has enough complexity within to write a couple of books on abnormal psychology. That is where these new perspectives on the soul, as spelled out by Hillman, Moore, and Meade, are of value. They are brilliant insights, albeit (they will be the first to admit this) one-sided, into some of the things that make us tick, make us whole, and help give us character, dignity, and happiness.

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In her brilliant, haunting book, Random Passage, Bernice Morgan describes the physical and psychological trials of the first families that journeyed from England to Newfoundland to settle at Cape Random.

Life was hard. Food was scarce and of only one kind, fish; drinking water was bad, the climate was harsh, and sometimes people died because there were no doctors or medicines. Everyone had to work constantly. There were no luxuries. The struggle was for life itself and starvation was ever a threat. Then there were the cold winters with inadequate housing.

Beyond all of this, there were other pains, not of the physical sort, but of the kind that come to a community that consists of less than 20 persons living in complete isolation. There were, of course, joys as well, but the reality of life in those early years was far different from the way it is often romantically depicted in books and films.

Near the end of the book, Morgan describes this scene: The women of the community, six of them, are making soap out of lye, ashes and lard. They are boiling this mixture over a fire and all of them are hot, dirty, tired and dressed in clothes (the only clothes they have) that should have been thrown away years ago.

A ship from St. John’s, that only came about twice a year, had docked briefly the day before. One of the women, Meg, whose daughter had left the Cape and is now living in St. John’s, has received a package from that daughter. As the women take a break from the work, she opens the package.

It is a big package and she had hoped it might be a lamp, something practical, but its contents catch her and the others by surprise. It contains an oblong wooden box holding a fan made of ivory and cream lace. It is the most beautiful thing any of them has ever seen. On it is painted a picture of a woman on a swing, wearing a pink dress, surrounded by roses, with blue ribbons and flowers in her hair.

All of the women, without knowing exactly why, are stunned into silence and a certain embarrassing vapid conversation. Suddenly one of them makes a gulping sound and begins to cry. Tears literally splash on the delicately carved fan depicting the imaginary, extraordinarily graced, woman on the swing. One of the women, whose soul is what Morgan is really describing in this book, is named Lavinia Andrews. She is somewhat younger than the others and she is particularly stunned by the beauty of the fan and especially by what is depicted on it, a woman seemingly living without poverty, need and limitation.

Lavinia looks at the woman on the fan and wonders: “Does she cry, go to the outhouse, does she bleed, eat, does she love someone?” (Random Passage, p. 189). 

That night in bed, unable to sleep, thinking about the woman on the fan, Lavinia is haunted by a sense of loss and longing stronger than she had ever felt. She clearly is not the woman on that swing, or any swing: “She is 32. She does not own a single pretty thing; had never heard another human being say he, or she, loved her; cannot remember a day when she did not have to work. She thinks about her life and the lives of the other women on the Cape and resolves she will leave in the fall. “Like Emma (the woman who had sent the fan), she will go away to St. John’s, or perhaps back to England. The idea fills her with such bleak despair that she cries herself to sleep” (pp. 189-190).

Like an extraordinary painting, this incident touches that intimate part of us where the brain, heart and gut commune without words.  What is pictured is how poverty makes a soul both more nameless and more precious all at the same time. What is Morgan showing us through the soul of Lavinia Andrews? There is always a danger in over-explaining a painting and perhaps even a greater one in moralizing about it. Jesus says, speak the truth in parables.

Perhaps he, Jesus, looking at the soul of Lavinia Andrews, might say this to those of us who do own beautiful things and generally live without gratitude: “Which of you, with a servant plowing or minding the sheep, would say to him when he returned from the fields, ‘Come and have your meal at once? Would he not more likely say, ‘Get my supper ready; faster your belt and wait on me while I eat and drink. You yourself can eat and drink afterwards’?

“Must the master be grateful to the servant for doing what he was told? So with you: when you have done all you have been asked to do, say, ‘We are useless servants; we have done no more than our duty'” (Luke 17:7-10).

Recently I was listening to a radio talk-in show that was debating the question: ‘‘why are less and less people going to church?” The question sparked a lively response and the phone-lines were busy as a steady series of callers voiced opinions.

But they kept cancelling each other out. Half the callers, more liberal in bent, made it clear that for them the reason people were not attending their churches was because the churches are too old-fashioned and not in step with the times. The other half of the callers were of a more conservative view and suggested the exact opposite, namely, that people were no longer going to church because the churches, in trying to be relevant to the world, had sold out. They did agree on one thing, attendance within all of the major churches is in a steady decline.

Exact numbers vary somewhat for different regions of the Western world, but, if statistics can be believed, church attendance has been dropping steadily for the past generation.

Precisely how bad are things? Interestingly enough, the news is quite mixed. While church attendance is dropping, belief in God is not in decline and neither is church affiliation. Less than 5% of people officially surveyed would say that they do not believe in God and less than 1 5% would say that they have no religious affiliation. People, it would seem, still believe in God and still link themselves to some church. They just do not go to church very much. As Reginald Bibby, a leading sociologist of religion, puts it, they aren’t leaving their churches; they just aren’t going to them. 

And why aren’t they going? Again the news is mixed – and suggests that our respective liberal and conservative theories on this generally miss the point. According to Bibby, less than 10% of persons who are not attending church regularly have serious angers with their church. The bigger problem is that of indifference, of individualism, of an a-la-carte approach to everything, including religion, and of the breakdown of community at every level of our society. Churches are in trouble because community is in trouble.

Simply put, we tend to treat our churches in the same way as we treat our families and neighbourhoods. We want them to be there (for when we need them) but we do not want them to make any regular or unconditional demands on us. Today, regarding our extended family and neighbourhood, we tend to buy in on our own terms. We pick, for our own purposes, what occasions we want to be present, how much we will be involved, and for the rest we remain free and non-committed, guarding our own time and interests. Generally, we want them, extended family and neighbourhood, to celebrate special occasions with, rites of passage. Christmas, Easter, Thanksgiving and the like; but, outside of that, we want to be left alone. We reject any sense of obligation to them and resent any active interference or challenge they might bring into our lives. Most of all though, we do not find them interesting. We look for life elsewhere.

I once helped give a marriage preparation course in a local diocese. The major dissatisfaction we experienced from the couples taking the course had little to do with content. Their resistance focused more on the necessity of having to take the course in order to get married in their churches: “Why do we have to take this course? Why is the church and society trying to control our lives? My marriage is nobody’s business but my own! Why are you interfering with my life?”

A generation ago, in a different social climate, in a time of strong and extended families, of strong neighbourhoods, and of stronger public life, hardly anyone voiced this type of objection. Today, in the reverse social situation, almost everyone does.

These are the consequences: How can we have vibrant church life when there is no vibrant family life? How can we have strong parishes when we do not have strong neighbourhoods? Is it surprising that so many people go to church only once or twice a year when those same persons only visit their own extended families once or twice a year?

Fewer and fewer people are going to church and more and more people are divorcing their private quest for God (their spirituality) from any real involvement within the church. However, in addressing this, we should be dear that the issues go far beyond whether the fare being presented on a given Sunday morning is too liberal or too conservative. What must be renewed, more than liturgy, is community.

What must be challenged is the pathological individualism and excessive sense of privacy within the culture. Especially what must be challenged is the fallacy, as omnipresent as the air we breathe, that we are independent and not interdependent, that our lives are all our own, that we owe nothing to anyone beyond ourselves, and that we can buy into family and neighbourhood on our own terms, how and when we feel like it.

It is never easy to move, especially if we have lived in one place for a while.  We accumulate too many things and it is only when we set about the business of moving that we realize how much stuff we have collected, without really realizing it.

Every drawer is stuffed with things, every cupboard is overfull, and every shelf is stacked to the top. In our closets we find racks of clothing that we not worn for years  – clothing that was given to us but which we never wanted, clothing that no longer fits us, and clothing we bought but never liked in the first place. And all around the house there are stacks of books, old letters, photographs, music tapes, records, videos, magazines, bric-a-brac, and memorabilia. Then there is still all the furniture, the appliances, the dishes, the tools in the shop, and the puzzles, stereo and video equipment, and a variety of puzzles and games. We blink in unbelief. Where did all this stuff come from?  How could we have accumulated so many things?

I remember leaving home to enter the seminary at age seventeen. Everything I owned in the world fit into one medium-sized suitcase (and it wasn’t full). Now I can’t go for even a week carrying so little. From a certain point onward in our lives we begin to accumulate things, often without really realizing it.

But what we really become attached to and begin unhealthily to store is not so much the material stuff. Almost imperceptibly, just as is the case with all the things that slowly stack up in our drawers, cupboards, and basements, we also begin to store other baggage. This kind of baggage, much more so than the material things we accumulate, makes it hard for us to move, especially to move gracefully into final chapter of our lives. What, imperceptibly, begins to stack up inside of us?

All the things that we become attached to and draw life from, namely, our grandiosity, our wounds, our sexual fantasies, our creature comforts, our distractions, and our even our health and our physical life itself.

The first thing that generates surplus baggage in our lives is our grandiosity. It feeds off our achievements, successes, ambitions daydreams, and the recognition we receive in life. The more we achieve the more we store up. Next come our wounds – the hurts, resentments, and rejections that we have suffered through the years.  All of the times that life has been, or seemed, unfair to us leaves us with a basement virtually full of photographs, memories, videos, and tapes that we want to keep around – to look at or replay as needed. Then there are our sexual fantasies, our imaginings (both noble and coarse) of consummation, of sexual fulfillment, of physical and emotional ecstasy. These we store in boxes more discreetly tucked away. And there are those things that aid or help insure our comfort – the right living space, access to good food, good drink, good entertainment, good stimulation. Then there is the psychological bric-a-brac of our lives: our television sitcoms, the sports scores, the talk shows, and the current gossip and humour about the celebrities in the culture. Any extra space inside ourselves is crammed with these.

Finally there is health and life itself.  To ensure these, we have, literally, cabinets full of medicines, vitamins, and cosmetics, along with a basement full of exercise equipment – matching all kinds of internal baggage we have stored as a resource to insure health, youth, attractiveness, and life.

Like the rooms in our houses, every day that we live, our internal rooms too fill up with more and more stuff – valuable things, toxic things, and junk. We all carry a lot more baggage now than we did at seventeen and this makes travel difficult, especially the travel that is asked of us as we get older, namely, the journey to become a gracious older woman or man, an adult, an elder, one who has aged gracefully, can bless the young, and let go of life without anger or silly clinging so as not to end up an embittered, old fool, but a happy, holy  fool.

Julian of Norwich states that we will cling to God only when we no longer cling to everything else. Richard Rohr agrees with that, but expresses it this way:  As we get older, he submits, the real task of life, both in terms of human growth and life in God, is to begin to shed things, to carry less and less baggage, to slim-down spiritually and psychologically to match the meagerness of  the  possessions we  had  when we  were seventeen years  old and could still put  all we own  into  one little suitcase.

“Naked I came from my mother’s womb and naked I go back again. The Lord gives and the Lord takes. Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  

Adulthood is contingent upon appropriating that.

If you want to make yourself unhappy real quickly, ask yourself this set of questions:

Am I happy? Does anyone really love me? Does anyone really understand me truly for who I am? Is my life significant or am I simply another nobody? Who is giving life for me? Am I touched enough? Held enough? Loved enough? Is there real intimacy in my life? Is my sexual life fulfilling? Who has ever taken thorough, non-exploitive delight in me – in my body, my sexuality, my soul, my talents, my uniqueness? Who truly admires me? Who truly respects me? Is life fair to me? Is my work meaningful? Is there joy in my life? Is life slipping away from me without my having accomplished my real dreams?

Haunting questions, valid question, but the wrong questions, all of them. We torture ourselves by examining ourselves against them. They are in fact more of an instrument for unhealthy self-torture than any instrument for healthy self-examination. Why?

Because there will never be enough happiness, understanding, significance, love, recognition, touch, admiration, respect, sexual intimacy, and joy within our lives, no matter how ideal our situation. Moreover, most of us find ourselves so far from the ideal situation that simply to ask ourselves these questions is to bring tears to our eyes. We are wounded persons living in a wounded world. Perfection here can be the enemy of the good.

But that is not the real reason why these questions so torture us and why we shouldn’t ask them. The point is rather that, albeit they are valid questions, they are not the right ones. Why not? Because they invite us to come at happiness, love, meaning, understanding, and significance, head-on, as if these were something that one could attain through active pursuit and as if they were a treasure or resource that one could hold as in a bank. What these questions intimate, however subtly, is that life has somehow failed us and we have somehow failed it. But this is not the wisdom of scripture, the saints, nor indeed even of the great secular figures of wisdom.

What these persons suggest is that happiness, love, understanding, meaning, and joy are a by-product of something else, that they can never be had by going at them head-on, and that they can never be accrued and held as some treasure that one possesses. They don’t work that way and they can’t be had in that manner. They are paradoxical. They will be in our lives only when we are actively giving them away. There are many classical expressions of this, ranging from the famous prayer of St. Francis to the lesser-known, but equally compelling, poem on self-emptying that John of the Cross writes at the end of the First Book on the Ascent of Mount Carmel. It is too no accident that C.S. Lewis entitled his autobiography, Surprised by Joy. These things come into our lives not as the result of an active pursuit of them, but precisely as a surprise, as a by-product of something else. What is that something else?

That something else is precisely our effort to give these things away, our effort to bring joy, love, meaning, and significance into other people’s lives. We have these only by giving them away. Thus, the real questions we should ask ourselves are not whether we are happy, loved, recognized, respected, touched, held, admired blessed, treated fairly, and joy-filled. Rather, like Francis of Assisi, we should instead ask ourselves these questions:

Is the main effort in my life the attempt to make others happy? Am I constantly trying to love others more deeply? Am I stretching my mind, heart, and soul always in an effort to be more understanding of others? Am I tryng always to recognize the significance of others? Do I strive to see the uniqueness and preciousness of other people’s stories? Am I giving enough of my life away? Am I giving enough of my possessions away? Am I giving enough of my time away? Am I giving enough of my heart away? Am I flying, through empathy and carrying the tensions that come to me, to hold others in their pain and struggles? Am I trying to admire? Am I giving others the gaze of admiration? Am I blessing others? Am I blessing beauty? Am I blessing the young? Am I always fair to others? Do I try to create joy and delight in other people’s lives? Am I respectful enough of others? Do I, through my work, try to create meaning for others?

If questions of happiness, joy, love, intimacy, touch, significance, and meaning are so painful for me so as to bring tears to my eyes, perhaps I am asking the wrong set of questions.