It draws very different reactions. Liberals see it as a dangerous move by the religious right. The National Organization for Women in the U.S. calls it “the greatest danger to women’s rights.”

Thousands of other women praise it. Tens of thousands of men flock to its gatherings where they weep tears of repentance and pledge to rejoin family and church. What is Promise Keepers and what’s to be said about it?

Promise Keepers is an ideology, a spirituality, a program and an organization (all wrapped into one) that is sweeping North America and attracting thousands of men (from every Christian denomination). The men gather, usually in football stadiums, to spend whole weekends praying, reading Scripture, listening to biblical exhortation, weeping, confessing their sins to each other and promising to begin to live life anew, mainly by giving up habits of infidelity and returning to their families and churches and assuming responsibility and leadership there.

The concept of Promise Keepers was conceived and developed by Bill McCartney, a former football coach and an Evangelical Protestant, who feels that many men can be helped religiously by “a masculine context that allows them to come clean.” Thus, the all-male rallies are designed precisely as a type of communal penitential service where men will admit their sins to each other and then pledge to keep the promises they once made.

Analogous to 12-step programs, the men make a series of seven promises which themselves should not make anyone anxious. However, underlying those promises is the concept that as men return to their families and their churches they should return there as leaders, as heads, as the ultimate authority within the family (as St. Paul once prescribed this). This is the part that makes some critics nervous.

So what’s to be said for Promise Keepers?

My own view is that it is a good starting point for many men and is both potentially a very good and a very important religious movement. The worries of its critics are more legitimate within the circles those critics move than it is in the cities from which Promise Keepers draws its adherents. What is meant by this?

Malcolm X, although very sympathetic to the teachings of Christ, once explained that one reason he became a Muslim was because he felt that, given the state of most inner cities, the harsher, clearer disciple of Mohammed had more of a chance to work some transformation (in that particular context) than did the gentler dictates of Jesus. Most people who have ever worked at overcoming an addiction have a good idea of what he meant. Gentle persuasion, challenges to a higher sensitivity and liberal idealism, however good in themselves, will not get an addict to kick a habit. A strong, clear, fundamentally-based discipline (like Alcoholics Anonymous or like Promise Keepers) has a better chance.

Hence, Promise Keepers is not a program for ministers, theologians, feminists, persons writing books and newspaper columns on spirituality, and those who already have the habit of fidelity to family and church. It is not a program for its critics, just as Alcoholics Anonymous is not for those who do not have a drinking problem.

Moreover, those of us who do not have a drinking problem should not criticize Alcoholics Anonymous for its rather harsh, simple and uncompromising discipline, nor fear that this discipline will, by virtue of its success in this circle, become normative for everyone. The rigor, simplicity and clarity of that discipline is meant to do a specific job, bring one to sobriety – an important first step (without which all other steps are superfluous).

Promise Keepers should be understood in that light.

Thus, the spirituality that I write about might well have its place in the circles wherein it is read, but I doubt it will be very helpful in socially transforming our inner cities. Bill McCartney, I suspect, will be more helpful there than Ron Rolheiser – and virtually everyone else who moves in the social, ideological and ecclesial circles that the critics of Promise Keepers move within.

If Bill McCartney were ever to write a treatise criticizing current social and theological theory, I suspect he would miss the point rather badly. Most criticisms of his movement from those forging those theories are equally off the mark.

Carol Shields ends her recent novel, Larry’s Party, with a scene depicting a dinner party. Larry, the bungling hero of her story, has invited a motley group of persons to join him for a Saturday night dinner party.

The guests include his two ex-wives, his present girlfriend and an array of disparate individuals, each equipped to illustrate all the sins and bunglings in the world.

The party goes as go all dinner parties. There is banter, jealousy and every kind of argument about politics, religion and life. Old wounds raise their ugly heads and new wounds are created even as the evening progresses.

People are reminded in subtle ways of their past stupidities and infidelities, even as these are being washed clean by the celebration taking place. Food and wine get passed around and, underneath it all, despite everything that has been wrong and still is wrong, there is a deep joy present. Un-holy as this all looks, a little messianic banquet is taking place. Some redemption is happening.

Most of our family gatherings pretty much mimic this. Thus, for instance, take your typical family Christmas dinner:

The family is home for Christmas, but the long-anticipated celebration ends up depressingly similar to last year’s fiasco. Your spouse is in a sulk, you’re fighting tiredness and anger, your 17-year-old is pathologically restless and doesn’t want to be there, and your aging mother is phoning every half-hour. You’re not sure how you are going to handle this.

Your Uncle Charlie, who’s not invited but has decided to drop around anyway since he has no other place to go, is batty as an owl. You need to keep your eye on him in case he wanders off to some bedroom by himself. Your 30-year-old unemployed son has spent most of the day sitting in the bathroom with the Reader’s Digest, but you are beyond irritation on that one. Everyone, it seems, is either too lazy or selfish to help you prepare the dinner and you don’t even want to think about who’s going to clean up after.

You had looked forward to this (at least you think you had) but the reality of your family – which you’d been able to idealize somewhat in the months that you’d been apart – brings you back down to earth with a thud.

Yours is not the holy family, nor a Hallmark card for that matter. It has enough pathologies to provide its own study for abnormal psychology and its Achilles heel lies exposed not far below the surface. Twenty minutes after the initial hellos and all the old patterns and wounds re-emerge. There is no soul-sharing taking place, only superficial exchange, arguments mostly, about sports, politics, movies and popular trends.

So you set an extra place for Uncle Charlie (he’s not going to go away), your son must be finished with the Reader’s Digest because he finally comes out of the bathroom, everyone is at the table (save your 17-year-old who is on the phone) and your dinner is set.

The grace is rote, rushed and stupid. Your spouse shouts: “Thank you God for being born – Let’s eat!” and there is a chorus of laughter.

And so you celebrate Christmas, somewhat irritated and disappointed. Yet, underneath this all, there is a deep joy present. A this-side-of-eternity version of the messianic banquet is taking place and your very real family is meeting around Jesus’ birth.

That is what church and our Eucharistic gatherings, in this world, perennially look like – Larry’s Party at its best, your family dinner at its worst. Your parish community will never be confused with the holy family, nor with that idyllic first Christian community as described in the Acts of the Apostles.

We meet around the word of God and the Eucharist, but our communities have more than their share of Uncle Charlies, bored adolescents, unemployed 30-year-olds who are reading the parish bulletin during the celebration, and others whose spiritual interest and depth stops at “Thank you God, let’s eat!” And it has each of us – who are an Uncle Charlie, a restless adolescent, a bathroom hogger and spiritual clod all tied up in one.

And so, as we meet, there is jealousy and boredom and we are reminded of our stupidities and sins, even as we sneak an occasional glance at our watches to see how much of the life we can still catch, after missing so much by coming this Sunday morning. And all the while, underneath it all, redemption is happening. Our wounds and sins are being washed clean by so gathering and, at one level inside us, we know the pure joy of it.

Church is funny. Most of the time, it is so frustrating that we do not see the joy that is, in fact, underneath.

In the end, we go to church for the same reason that we continue to have Christmas dinners together – for the pure joy of it!

Karl Rahner once said that the time is fast approaching when one will either be a mystic or an unbeliever.

He’s right. None of us can rely much longer on the fact that we were once given the faith and that we still walk within a community that, seemingly, has some faith. These things are no longer, of themselves, enough to sustain faith in an age which is as agnostic, pluralistic, seductive, and distracting as is our own. In the past, a certain cultural (sometimes, ethnic-based) faith was still very powerful and could carry individuals in a way that is no longer possible today.

Twenty-five years ago, Henri Nouwen had already said something similar. While teaching at Yale, he commented that even among the seminarians he was teaching the dominant consciousness was agnostic. God had essentially no place in their normal consciousness, even within the very discussion of religion. That is basically true of all of us today, not just of seminarians, though it should be affirmed with more sympathy than sarcasm.

Faith is not easy today for any of us. To have real faith, an actual belief in God, requires something more than simply continuing to roll with the flow of our own particular faith communities. I say this because it is becoming clearer that today it is much is easier to have faith in Christianity, in a code of ethics, in Jesus’ moral teaching, in God’s call for justice, in an ideology of Christianity, and even in the value of gathering for worship, than it is to have a personal and real relationship to God.

Being born into a Christian family and worshipping within a Christian church can give us a relationship to a religion, to an ideology, to a truth, and to a community of worship; but these things, of themselves, are not the same thing as an actual faith in God. Just as we have people who believe but do not practice, many of us practice but do not believe. Subscribing to an ideology, however noble and inspirational it might be, is not the same thing as believing in and actually worshipping God.

To actually believe in God today, one must at some point in his or her life make a deep, private act of faith. That act, which Rahner equates with becoming a mystic, is itself difficult because the very forces that help erode our cultural, communal faith also work against us making this private act of faith.

These forces are not abstract. Nor are they the product of some conscious conspiracy by godless forces. What are the forces that conspire against faith? They are all those things, good and bad, within us and around us that tempt us away from being alone, from praying privately, and from taking the time and courage to enter deeply inside of our own souls.

 To make an act of faith requires an inner journey, a journey into the   deepest recesses of the soul where I must face:

·      My weakness, my sin, my infidelities, my lies, my rationalizations, my constant avoiding of the searing truth.

·      My fear that ultimately I am alone, that I will end up alone, unloved, and not worth loving.

·      My mortality, the fact that one-day I will die and that already my body is aging, my options are narrowing down, that my best dreams will never be realized.

·      My jealousies and angers, my bitterness that life has not been fair to me, that others have things I don’t have, and that I never forgiven them nor made peace with my loss.

·      My ambitions, my need to succeed, my need to create some immortality of whatever kind for myself before I die.

·      My sicknesses and addictions, the fact that I am not whole, that inside me there dark corners and dark demons that do not show up on my photographs, on my resume, and in the things my friends know about me.

·      My sensuality, my lust, the power of sex within me, my laziness, my pathological need for distraction, my incapacity to sit still.

·      My godlessness, that black hole of fear, insecurity, chaos, and emptiness within me.

British writer, Anita Brookner states in one of her novels that the great tragedy in most marriages is that the man and woman cannot, in the end, console each other and that what each really needs from the other, but generally never gets, is a good confessor, someone to whom each can reveal all the secrets of his or her life so as to let go of the tension and finally just be himself or herself without pretense and effort. 

Ultimately, that is what each of us needs from God – someone who can console us and someone to be for us that trusted confessor, that person before whom no secret need to be hidden.

To relate to God in this way is to have faith. And this means consistently sharing all of our secrets and fears in those lonely, private hours when there are just the two of us and nobody else is around.

To be baptized into the church is to be a consecrated, displaced person. What is implied here?

In John’s Gospel, there is a revealing exchange between Jesus and Peter. Three times Jesus asks Peter: “Do you love me?” Three times, Peter replies that he does.

On the basis of that confession of love, Jesus tells him: “In truth I tell you, when you were young you gird your own belt and you walked where you liked; but when you grow old you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will put a rope around you and take you where you would rather not go.”

What has just been described is, in essence, Peter’s baptism – and the dynamics of any real baptism into the church. Baptism consecrates us and consecration is a rope that takes us to where we would rather not go, namely, into the suffering that produces maturity.

This, however, needs explanation.

To consecrate means to set aside, to displace from ordinary usage, to derail from normalcy. Long before this has to do with sacred buildings, altars, chalices and vowed religious, it is descriptive of something within ordinary life.

Consider the following examples:

In the early 1960s, in New York City, there was an infamous murder. A woman was stabbed and murdered in Central Park while more than 30 people watched from their apartment windows. None of the onlookers called the police. They did not want to get involved.

Later, after this came to light, there was a debate as to how guilty these innocent onlookers really were. Were they not somehow guilty because they saw the murder and did nothing about it?

For a Christian the answer is clear. Seeing that woman being stabbed consecrated them, set them aside, displaced them, and derailed them from normalcy. At that moment, they lost their freedom and were conscripted to act.

If you look out of your window and see a person being stabbed in a park you are, in that instant, baptized and consecrated in the true meaning of those words. Up until that time, you could gird your belt and go where you liked, but now, seeing this, someone has put a rope around you and is taking you to where you would rather not go.

Tragically, that night, in New York, more than 30 people resisted their baptism. A woman died as a result.

But the best example of what church, baptism and consecration really mean is the example of having and raising children. A home is a church and, in a manner of speaking, we can say that most parents are baptized by their own children – and raised by them!

Imagine a typical scenario. A young woman and a young man meet, fall in love, and get married. At this stage of their lives they are fairly immature. Their agenda is their own happiness and, notwithstanding that they are good-hearted and sincere, they are both still selfish with the natural self-centredness of youth. Then, without realizing the implications of this for their lives, they begin to have children.

From the moment their first child is born, unless they are very calloused, they will, without necessarily wanting it, start to mature. What happens is that for the next 25 to 50 years, every time they turn around, a number of tiny and not so tiny hands will be stretched out, demanding something of them – their time, their energy, their money, their car keys, their understanding, their hearts. Whether they want to or not, they will mature.

For 25 years to 50 years they will be forced, by a clear conscription, to think of others before themselves. All those years of practice will eventually pay dividends. Normally, by the time their children are grown, parents are mature.

And, during all these years of having and raising children, they are, in the deep meaning of those terms, consecrated, displaced and baptized. They are at the scene of an accident that has usurped their freedom and made them put their normal, perfectly legitimate, agenda on hold.

Instead of their normal agenda, they are conscriptively asked to make sacrifices in lifestyle, career, hobbies, meals out, vacations and so on. Their children stand before them daily, like Jesus before Peter, asking: “Do you love me?”

If the parents say “yes” then, biblically speaking, the children reply: “Until now, you have gird your belts and walked wherever you wanted to, but now we are putting a rope around you and taking you where you would rather not go, namely, out of your natural selfishness and into self-sacrificing maturity.”

Such is baptism. When St. Paul became a Christian, Ananias was sent to him with the message: “Tell him how much he will have to suffer for the name.”

Love is baptismal. Immediately upon confessing it, our freedom is derailed and, painful though it may be, we are taken by conscription into maturity.

In the summer of 1985, I attended a church conference that brought together persons from every continent on earth.

In the group within which I was the recording secretary, there was a young nun from the third world who was very much in the mode of Mother Teresa. She wore a traditional religious habit, had a deep life of prayer, went to Eucharist every day, and nobody could have had the slightest doubt concerning private moral life.

She was no stranger to the church1s social teachings either. In sharing her story, she described how, she and her whole community, had made a decision to try to be in radical solidarity with the poor. Hence, they had abandoned many of the comforts they had formerly enjoyed. Now she lived in a convent where the nuns slept on beds with straw mattresses, had only two sets of clothing each (a Sunday habit and a work habit), fasted regularly, avoided luxuries of all kinds, and, as a ministry, worked full-time with the poor.

But that is not the end of what she would share with us.

Our conference was being held in a retreat center, near Brugges, Belgium, and the accommodations, while comfortable, were not palatial. Hence no one was scandalized that we were living too high, even as we talked about poverty in the third world.

On the fifth day, at the noon meal, Christiane Brusselmanns, who had organized the conference, stood up and announced that we had been working too hard and deserved a break. Accordingly she decreed a free afternoon. Our sole challenge for the rest of the day was to go into the beautiful city of Brugges, spend the afternoon shopping, taking strolls, having drinks, and then, at 7:00 o’clock, meet at a restaurant for a gourmet dinner. A general cheer went up … but not everyone, as we found out the next day, was so enthusiastic.

A number of the participants later complained that it was wrong that we, while talking about the poor, should spend time and money so frivolously.

The conference ended with a Eucharist at which there was an open microphone. People were invited to come forward and share if they had experienced some deep grace. Many people spoke, especially people from the first world, who shared what a grace it was for them to meet and share with their brothers and sisters from the third world. Near the end of this, the young nun also approached the microphone and shared in words to this effect:

“I too had a graced-experience these past days – and I was converted in a way that I never dreamed I needed to be converted. It began with the announcement of the free afternoon. From the second it was announced, something inside of me froze and I was angry. I kept thinking: What an insult to the poor! This is a waste of time and money. We are here with the money and time of the poor, and what do we do with it? We walk around terraces and drink alcohol and have a gourmet meal!’ I only went along because I wanted to stay with the group, but I was miserable all afternoon. We walked and looked at shops loaded with luxuries and then I was offered a drink on a cafe terrace. I was so miserable that I didn’t even refuse – I drank my first gin and tonic. Everything culminated when we got to the restaurant for the dinner. I walked in, saw all the silver knives, forks, and the linen serviettes, and I nauseated and couldn’t go through with it. I went out and sat on the bus and waited while everyone ate.

But I had to sit there a long time. Many thoughts ran through my head and I asked myself the question: Would Jesus be in there eating and drinking and having a good time? And l had the horrible realization that he would be! I realized that there was something wrong with me. There was coldness inside me. I had become like the older brother of the prodigal son, doing all the right things, but having no celebration in my heart.”

A most revealing story. Here is a young woman who is seemingly living out Jesus’ full praxis. She is praying, fasting, and giving alms, combining private prayer and a good moral life with a healthy concern for social justice. So what is missing in her life? Where is her spirituality inadequate? She, herself, gives the answer: “l was becoming too much like the older brother of the prodigal son.”

Fasting, as Jesus prescribes it, also includes fasting from bitterness of heart. Mellowness of heart is a non-negotiable within the spiritual life. Why? Because otherwise, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we might succumb to the temptation that T.S. Eliot describes: ” The last temptation that’s the greatest treason is to do the right thing for the wrong reason.”

We do not just need the right truth, we also need the right energy.

 040298

Easter is about many things. We celebrate God’s ultimate power to redeem death, sin, and injustice, but we also celebrate the now-glorified voices and wounds of the ones who died on Good Friday.

To this end, I would like to recount one such voice, that of an anonymous, young girl who was brutally raped and murdered by the Salvadorean military, at a place fittingly called La Cruz (the cross) in 1981 . The story is reported by a journalist , Mark Danner.

He describes how, after this particular massacre, some soldiers shared how one of their victims haunted them and how they could not get her out of their minds, long after her death.

They had plundered a village and raped many of the women. One of those was a young girl, an evangelical Christian, whom they had raped many times in a single afternoon and subsequently tortured. However, throughout this all, this young girl, clinging to her belief in Christ, had sung hymns:

“She kept right on singing, too, even after they had done what had to be done, and shot her in the chest. She had lain there on La Cruz with the blood flowing from her chest, and had kept on singing – a bit weaker than before, but still singing. And the soldiers, stupefied had watched and pointed. Then they had grown tired of the game and shot her again, and she sang still, and their wonder began to turn to fear – until finally they had unsheathed their machetes and hacked her neck, and at last the singing had stopped.” (The Massacre at El Mozote, N.Y., Vintage Books, 1994, pp. 78-79.) 

Gil Bailie, who makes this story a corner-piece in his monumental book on the cross and non-violence, notes not just the remarkable similarity between her manner of death and Jesus’, but also the fact that, in both cases, part of the resurrection is that their voices live on. In Jesus’ case, nobody witnessing his humiliating death on a lonely hillside, with his followers absent, would have predicted that this would be the most remembered death in history. The same is true for this young girl. Her rape and murder occurred in a very remote place and all of those who might have wanted to immortalize her story were also killed. Yet her voice survives and will no doubt continue to grow in history, long after all those who violated her are forgotten.

As both Jesus and this young girl illustrate, powerlessness and anonymity, linked to a heart that can sing the words: “Forgive them for they know not what they do” while being raped and humiliated, ultimately become their opposite, power and immortality. A death of this kind not only morally scars the conscience of its perpetrators and their sympathizers, it leaves something that can never be forgotten, a permanent echo that nobody will ever silence. What God raises after Good Friday is also the voice of the one who died.

A critic reviewing Danner’s book in the New York Times tells how, after reading this story, he kept “straining hopelessly to hear the sound of that singing.”

The task of Easter is re-enkindle the entire creed within ourselves. The earliest Christians , immediately after experiencing the resurrected Christ , spontaneously voiced a one-line creed: “Jesus is Lord!” That does say it all. When we say that Jesus has been raised from the dead and is Lord of this world we are saying everything really. We are saying that …

God is ultimately still in charge of this universe, despite many indications to the contrary; that, brutality and rape notwithstanding, at the end of the day, violence, injustice, and sin will be both silenced and overcome; that graciousness and gentleness, as manifested by Jesus, are ultimately what lies at the root of all of reality; that this young girl, who was so brutally violated, has now been raised and lives, joyfully, in the heart of God; and that her death, like Jesus’ death, is redemptive precisely because, like him, she too, in the face of utter helplessness before the worst brutality our world contains, could still say: “Forgiven them for they know not what they do.”

To believe in the resurrection is to know that all of this is true. But the task of Easter asks still something else of us.

Easter asks us, as the critic in the New York Times so aptly put it, to strain to hear the sound of that girl’s singing, to struggle to keep her, and her song, alive in our hearts. She is alive in God’s heart, but we must keep her alive in ours as well. 

Why? Not for sentimental reasons, nor simply because hers is an exceptional story. No. We must keep her alive in our hearts because her song is the leaven, the yeast of resurrection, that alone can raise up our own hearts so that we too might become exceptional. One of the tasks of Easter to strain to hear the voice of Good Friday.

 031998

Ernst Kasemann once commented that the problem with the world is that the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. A wise comment, one that puts some perspective on the sixth gift of the Holy Spirit, piety. What is piety? 

Piety is generally identified with a certain temperament. We speak of someone as being of a pious nature and when we say that we generally use the word to designate a mixture of three things: a certain natural religiosity, a certain sentimentality of soul and a certain softness of heart, both as this pertains to a person’s general sympathy for things as well as to his or her intellect and its reluctance to ask hard questions.

Oftentimes too we identify piety with certain pietistic practices: popular devotions, charismatic prayer, pilgrimages to Marian shrines, lighting vigil lights in a church, praying the rosary, singing certain kinds of sentimental hymns and so on. Sometimes too we notice that this attitude and these practices are maintained at the expense of biblical, theological and doctrinal principles. Such is the common sense notion of piety. Such too is its common practice. 

And so we have certain expressions that designate piety: “It is natural for her to believe!” “Tears come to his eyes so easily; he wears his heart on his sleeve!” “She’s so soft-hearted!” “He’s afraid of ever asking the hard questions!” “She’s living in a dream world!” “He’s spaced out on devotions!”

But what is piety really as a gift of the Holy Spirit? What is its value to an individual and to the community?

Piety, as a gift that God gives through the Spirit to build up the community, is not natural religiosity coupled with sentimentality and a certain softness of heart and head. It is rather a passion for the faith, a burning, emotional counterpart to stoic, intellectual belief and commitment.

Piety is to faith what falling in love is to a relationship, what romance is to love. The tradition of piety within Christian literature is analogous to the tradition of romanticism within literature.

And, as we know, in both love and faith, romantic feelings can easily create an emotional vortex that can, and usually does, strip the person inside it of all healthy balance and not a little sanity. Hence, we see the many imbalances that piety can trigger in people’s lives. Piety is dangerous.

But, as Goethe once warned, the dangers of life are many and safety is one of those dangers. Falling in love is dangerous, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t good – and oftentimes the single thing that can bring real transformation. 

Most of us could, I submit, use a little more piety in our lives, especially those of us who, for whatever reason, have a certain disdain for it. Why do I say this?

I have spent the last 30 years moving within various ecclesial and theological circles, among very good people, but among whom piety is not given much regard, save of the negative sort. I have been in a lot of theology schools and have never there seen a rosary, attended a Benediction, heard a Marian devotion praised or heard a vigil light referred to with anything but disdain.

If any of us there practises piety, we do it at night, in secret, like Nicodemus. 

In fairness though it should be pointed out that theology schools exist for the purpose of critical thinking, not to promote piety. The danger, though, as Eric Mascall once put it, is that we, the theologically critical, are so afraid of contamination by impurities that we put ourselves on a diet of antiseptics – we will never die of food poisoning, but we often suffer from severe malnutrition.

Faith sustains itself through mysticism and piety is the mysticism of the poor – always has been and always will be. We must be careful not to disdain this, nor distance ourselves from it. It was the poor, with their mysticism, piety, who recognized and accepted Jesus, while those who disdained the impurity of their approach to God, with its imbalances, also disdained the earthly Jesus. 

Those of us who kick against the goad with piety, tantamount to the person who has a certain disdain for those caught up in the experience of falling in love, might do well to pray for it. Our very protest suggests something. Piety is not the only virtue, but an unwarm heart is not a virtue at all.

There is a striking parallel in the bible between two stories. In each, an innocent woman, threatened by crowd, is saved because one person intervenes, gives counsel, and alters things. The stories, however, end differently, one manifesting the gift of counsel considerably more than the other.

The first is the story of Daniel, saving the beautiful, innocent Susanna. It goes this way: One day, two elderly men see Susanna taking a bath and lust after her. They approach her with their evil intent, but she rejects them, holding firm to virtue. Bitter and jealous of her power, they falsely accuse her of committing adultery, turning both the crowd and the ancient law against her. She is condemned to die and is being led to her death when Daniel, seized by the Holy Spirit, confronts the crowd. He gives counsel.  He accuses the two men of lying and to prove his point has them separated and questioned separately. Of course, they contradict each other, proving Susanna’s innocence. Daniel, though, is not finished. He turns the crowd against the accusers, demanding their deaths, and the crowd, in a frenzy of emotion, oblige. The two men are stoned to death, the very death they had decreed for Susanna.

There is in this story a moment of true counsel, the moment when Daniel is seized by the Holy Spirit and protests the innocence of Susanna. But there is also a moment when the Holy Spirit is no longer offering the counsel, that moment when Daniel incites the crowd against the false accusers.

How parallel, yet different, is the story of Jesus, calmly backing down the accusers of the woman caught in adultery! A woman is condemned to die, accused of adultery. Unlike Susanna, this woman is guilty, but that is incidental to what is happening. Clearly, like Susanna, she is there because of jealousy and mob frenzy and is therefore structurally innocent, innocent of the mob frenzy, despite her guilt. And Jesus, like Daniel, confronts the crowd on the basis of the gift of counsel, the Holy Spirit working through him. His protest to the crowd is more powerful than Daniel’s – “Let the one who is without sin cast the first stone!’ – and it also has a different effect.

Like Susanna, the woman is saved, but no mob scene follows. What ensues is the exact opposite of lynch-mob hysteria: “They all went away one by one, beginning with the eldest” Jesus’ counsel not only saves a woman, but also, analogous to the defusing of a bomb, deflates a potential explosion. Nobody dies that day. The counsel of the Holy Spirit prevails. This gift, as Jesus manifests it, not only advocates for someone who is innocent {the role of the Paraclete), but it also, because it takes origins in the love within the Trinity, exposes the roots of violence – jealousy and a mob.

In these two stories we see the gift of counsel, the third gift of the Holy Spirit, manifest imperfectly in Daniel, perfectly in Jesus. What is this gift?

Theologically, counsel is the gift of the Holy Spirit that perfects the virtue of prudence, helping us to judge properly and giving us the insight to know what to do and say in all situations, especially difficult ones. Some manuals describe it as the gift of supernatural intuition.

At a street-level, this simply means giving good advice. Most of us identify counsel with prudence, which we then define as good judgment, common sense, or good practical judgment … and soon notice it is a rather rare commodity! Valuable though human prudence is, it is not exactly the gift of counsel.

As revealed in Scripture and manifest in the story of Jesus saving the woman taken in adultery, counsel has two interpenetrating aspects: divine wisdom in knowing what to say in a difficult situation (“When you are arrested and dragged before Kings on my account, don’t worry about what you will say. It will be given you in that moment”) and divine insight in understanding the roots of violence and where God stands within that. (”After I die, I will send you a Paraclete, an Advocate, to help you to understand all these things.”)

Prudence cannot be taught, counsel is a gift and one either has it or does not.

That is true, but there is more: The kind of prudence and counsel that Jesus revealed in diffusing the crowd and saving the woman taken in adultery, cannot be taught or learned. Scripture tells us it is something given only “when we raise our eyes to heaven” and, through deep prayer, put our hearts into the flow of compassion and gratitude that passes between the Father and the Son. To the extent we do this we will, first, begin to see and protest the innocence of others who are being persecuted; later, when the gift has grown, we will, like Jesus, be able to have the kind of insight and offer the type of counsel that defuses chaos because it points out exactly where God, and we ourselves, stand.