Some Principles for Justice

July 10, 1998

Two principles need constantly to be highlighted regarding social justice and our faith in Christ because both, albeit by very different groups, continually fall off of the spiritual radar screen.

The first of these principles is the non-negotiability of justice within our Christian faith and practice. Justice is not something we can choose to do or not to do as Christians. It is in integral part of the faith; in fact, as Jon Sobrino so well puts it, the practice of justice is ultimately the criterion that determines whether or not we in fact have real faith:

“if persons and communities follow Jesus and proclaim the kingdom of God to the poor; if they strive for liberation from every kind of slavery; if they seek, for all human beings, especially for that immense majority of men and women who are crucified persons, a life in conformity with the dignity of daughters and sons of God; if they have the courage and forthrightness to speak the truth … if, in the discipleship of Jesus, they effectuate their own conversion from being oppressor to being men and women of service … if in doing justice they seek peace and in making peace they seek to base it on justice; and if they do all this in the following and discipleship of Jesus because he did all this himself – then they believe in Jesus.” Jesus in Latin America”, Orbis, I982, pp. 53- 54)

This is not simply the opinion of a liberation theologian, but a recasting of some of Jesus’ key statements in the gospels. At the final judgment, we will be judged by God on the basis of whether we practiced justice or not. We end up at God’s right hand or left hand on the basis of our response to the poor. This truth must never be allowed to slip off of our spiritual radar screens.

The second principle that also too often falls off our moral and spiritual radar screens is one that more directly challenges those who are actively working for justice. This principle asserts that, in the struggle for justice, we may never, no matter how moral, passionate, or urgent our cause, mimic the very violence, disrespect, and egoism that we are trying to change.

This principle is compromised every time we fall into one of the following fallacies:

The urgency of my cause is so great that it is okay in this instance for me to bracket the normal laws that govern public discourse. Hence I can be disrespectful, arrogant, and obnoxious towards those who oppose me.

Only the truth of the cause is important here, not my own private life. My own private life, whether it pertains to anger, sex, or envy, is of no relevance to the cause of justice for which I’m fighting; in fact, focus on private morality is a hindrance to working for justice. “
Proper ideology alone can ground this quest- I don’t need talk of God and Jesus. I don’t need to pray for peace, I only need to work for it.

I judge success and failure on basis of measurable political achievement. I am less interested in a long-range kingdom of God than in real short-term political and social gain
I may exaggerate and distort the facts a bit to make the case for justice clearer, but the situation is so horrendous that I need not be very scrupulous about exact truth.
I am a victim and thus outside the rules!

These fallacies are dangerous because, as we are coming more and more to realize, one of the reasons why the world is not responding more to the challenge to justice is that our actions for justice themselves so often mimic the very violence, injustice, hardness, and egoism they are trying to challenge. Our moral indignation very often leads to the replication of the behavior that aroused the indignation. As Gil Bailie puts it in his masterpiece on non-violence: “Moral outrage is morally ambiguous. The more outraged it is, the less likely it is to contribute to real moral improvement. Righteous indignation is often the first symptom of the metastasis of the cancer of violence. It tends to provide the indignant ones with a license to commit or condone acts structurally indistinguishable from those that aroused the indignation.”

Two interrelated principles should never fall off our radar screens: First, that faith demands that we practice justice; and, second, that quest for justice may never bracket the very justice it is seeking.

Happiness and Paradox

July 5, 1998

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.

Tensions within Spirituality

June 28, 1998

Healthy spirituality has always been a question of putting a number of things into a delicate balance and then walking a tightrope so as not to fall off either side. Spiritual health is very much the task of living the proper tension between a number of things:

1) The tension between contemplation and action … How much of our lives should be given over to action and how much to prayer? What is the essence of religion, private prayer and private morality or service to others and social justice? What ultimately will save the planet – soul craft or statecraft? This tension is often depicted as the one that is described in the biblical passage of Martha and Mary. Martha engaged herself in the necessary task of serving others while Mary simply sat at Jesus’ feet, doing nothing, but loving a lot. Jesus commends Mary, saying she has chosen the better part. Christian spirituality forever after has had to struggle with those words. Is prayer really more important than active service?

The saints would have us do both. A healthy spirituality is not a question of choosing between Mary and Martha, but of choosing both – contemplation and action, soulcraft and statecraft, loving and doing, prayer and service, private morality and social justice.

2) The tension between the monastic and the domestic … Where is God most easily found, in the church or in the kitchen? In the monastery or in the family? In a celibate monk’s cot or in the marriage bed? At a shrine or in a sports stadium? The God we believe in is both the Holy God of transcendence and the Incarnate God of immanence. God is, in a privileged way, found in both, the monastic and the domestic, the church and the world, A healthy spiritual life keeps a robust respect for both.

3) The tension between passion and purity … What is the secret for depth in sexuality, passion or purity? What ultimately brings us a soul mate, eros or awe? Again, the saints would say it is both. Sexuality will only surrender its real depth and arouse its singular power to unite when it is surrounded with both the fire of passion and the reticence of purity.

4) The tension between duty and personal actualization … What ultimately is the higher call, duty or personal fulfillment? Are we in this world to serve others or to exercise fully the talents that God has put into us? Which call to us is the higher moral imperative – that which comes from family, church, and country or that which comes from those centres within us that ache for the personal in love, art, achievement, and immortality? Again, if the saints can be believed, it is a question of both, of balance, of walking a tightrope, of living a daily tension.

5) The tension between this life and the next … What is more important, this world or the next? Within what perspective do I make decisions, the span of my years here on earth or the horizon of eternity? How much potential happiness should I sacrifice here in this world in view of eternal life? Is this life a vale of tears or a valley of opportunity? The Christian view is that both are important. When Jesus said that “I have come so that you may have life he is referring both to life after death and life after birth.

6) The tension between intellect and will … What is more important, the head or the heart? By which should we guide our lives? What should be the ultimate basis for our decisions, thought or feelings? What is more valuable, insight or love? The wisdom of the saints suggests that a healthy spiritual life, not to mention a full humanity, demands both – head and heart, thought and feelings, the rational and the emotional.

7) The tension between community and individuality … Are we in this world primarily to fulfill a personal vocation or is our primary purpose a communitarian one? Might an individual1S personal freedom be sacrificed for the good of the group or should the common good be less important than personal freedom? Again, a healthy spiritual life walks the proper tension between these polarities. It refuses to sacrifice the individual for the group even as it asserts that we are essentially communitarian and that we have non-negotiable obligations towards community.

Contemplation and action, the monastic and the domestic, passion and purity, duty and self-actualization, this life and the next, intellect and will, community and individuality … all of these, like a complete set of keys on a piano, are needed if we hope to play all the tunes that the various circumstances of our lives demand. One is wise not to cut off part of one’s keyboard.

Promise Keepers

June 17, 1998

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.

Losing a Loved One to Suicide

June 7, 1998

There is perhaps nothing more painful in the world than for us to lose a loved one to suicide.

A couple of months ago, I received a letter from a woman, a mother, who had recently lost her 28-year-old son in this manner. The young man had been suffering from clinical depression for nearly eight years when he took his own life.

Her letter to me betrayed a healthy understanding (at some deep level) of what had happened as well as all the unhealthy fear and second-guessing we all do when we are confronted with the suicide of a loved one.

She recognized that his death was, in the end, due to illness (not to malice or weakness), that he had a gentle soul, and that God understands. She shared the intuition that her son is now in heaven.

At the same time, she worried, as we all do, whether her son had now found peace and where, if anywhere, she had failed him. She also worried that her faith was not strong enough because it was not giving her the type of consolation that she felt it should. Her pain is deep – but it is also wide.

Thousands of parents and families and friends of suicide victims around the world are enduring similar pain.

What’s to be said about suicide? What can be helpful to us when we lose a loved one in this way? There are, as for all the great mysteries of life, no definitive answers that dissolve all pain and questioning. But there are some important perspectives of which we must never lose sight.

First of all, at this time in our history, for all kinds of reasons, suicide is still perhaps the most misunderstood of all deaths. We still tend to think that because it is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not.

For most suicides, this is not true. A person dying of suicide dies, as does the victim of physical illness or accident, against his or her will. People die from physical heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS and accidents. Death by suicide is the same, except that we are dealing with an emotional heart attack, an emotional stroke, emotional AIDS, emotional cancer and an emotional fatality.

This comparison is not an analogy. The two kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers and accidents are indeed identical. In neither case is the person responsible for his or her own death nor in neither case does the person leave this world of his or her own will.

Second, in most cases, we should not worry about the victim’s eternal salvation. God is infinitely more understanding than we are and God’s hands are infinitely more gentle than ours. Imagine a loving mother, having just given birth, welcoming her child onto her breast for the first time, and then you will have some image of how the suicide victim is received into the next life.

Again, this is not an analogy. God is infinitely more gentle, loving, understanding and motherly than even the most perfect mother on earth. We need not worry much when an honest, over-sensitive, gentle, over-wrought and emotionally crushed person leaves this world – even if that exit was far from ideal.

However, even given that truth, we should not expect that our faith will take away all the pain of losing a loved one through suicide. It is not meant to take it away, but rather to precisely give us the sense that the one we lost is in far gentler hands than our own and is now, after so much pain, finally at peace. Faith gives us insight but does not, of itself, take away the pain of loss and death.

Finally, we the living who loved that person must refrain from second-guessing ourselves with every kind of haunting question: What else might I have done? Where did I let this person down? If only I had been there? What if . . .

We are human beings, not God. People die of illness and accidents all the time and all the love and attentiveness in the world sometimes cannot prevent death. We must recognize that we are dealing with an illness which, like cancer or heart disease, can be terminal irrespective of every human effort to restore health. There are sicknesses that no humans can cure.

We can grieve our inadequacy as humans, but we are not God. Ultimately we must take consolation in the fact that we loved as best we could and that we have not really lost this person. He or she went back to God.

Our job now is not to second guess, but to trust – trust that God is far more gentle and understanding than we are and that God, who is adequate, can give this person a peace that we never could.

Church as Larry’s Party

June 1, 1998

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!

A Mature Sexuality

May 28, 1998

The Greek philosophers used to say that we are fired into life with a madness that comes from the gods and that this energy is the root all love, hate, creativity, joy, and sadness.

A Christian should agree with that, then add that God put that great power, sexuality, within us so that, ultimately, we might also create life and, like God, look upon what we have helped create, overflow with a joy that breaks the very casings of our selfishness, and say: “It is good; indeed, it is very good!”

A mature sexuality, is when a person looks at what he or she has helped create, swells in a delight that breaks the prison of his or her selfishness, and feels as God feels when God looks at creation.

How then might sexuality be defined?

Sexuality is a beautiful, good, extremely powerful, sacred energy, given us by God and experienced in every cell of our being as an irrepressible urge to overcome our incompleteness, to move towards unity and consummation with that which is beyond us. It is also the pulse to celebrate, to give and to receive delight, to find our way back to the Garden of Eden where we can be naked, shameless, and without worry and work as we make love in the moonlight.

Ultimately, though, all these hungers, in their full maturity, culminate on one thing: They want to make us co-creators with God … mothers and fathers, artisans and creators, big brothers and big sisters, nurses and healers, teachers and consolers, farmers and producers, administrators and community builders … co-responsible with God for the planet, standing with God and smiling at and blessing the world.

Given that definition, we see that sexuality in its mature bloom does not necessarily look like the love scenes (perfect bodies, perfect emotion, perfect light) in a Hollywood movie. What does sexuality in its full bloom look like?

When you see a young mother, so beaming with delight at her own child that, for that moment, all selfishness within her has given way to the sheer joy of seeing her child happy you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see a grandfather so proud of his grandson who has just received his diploma, that, for that moment, his spirit is only compassion, altruism, and joy you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see an artist, after long frustration, look with such satisfaction on a work she has just completed that everything else for the moment is blotted out, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see a young man, cold and wet, but happy to have been of service, standing on a dock where he has carried the unconscious body of a child he has just saved from drowning, you are seeing sexuality in it mature bloom.
When you see someone throw back his or her head in genuine laughter, caught off guard by the surprise of joy itself, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see an elderly nun who, never having slept with a man, been married, or given birth to a child, has through years of selfless service become a person whose very compassion gives her a mischievous smile, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see a community gathered round a grave, making peace with tragedy and consoling each other so that life can go on, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see an elderly husband and wife who after nearly half a century of marriage have made such peace with each others humanity that now they can quietly share a bowl of soup, content just to know that the other is there, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see a table, surrounded by a family, laughing, arguing, and sharing life with each other, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see a Mother Theresa dress the wounds of a street-person in Calcutta or an Oscar Romero give his life in defense of the poor, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see any person -man, woman, or child- who in a moment of service, affection, love, friendship, creativity, joy, or compassion, is, for that moment, so caught up in what is beyond him or her that for that instant his or her separateness from others is overcome, you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.
When you see God, having just created the earth or just seen Jesus baptized in the Jordan river, look down on what has just happened and say, ”lt is good; in this I take delight!’ ; you are seeing sexuality in its mature bloom.

Sexuality is not simply about finding a lover or even finding a friend. It is about overcoming separateness by giving life and blessing it.

Thus, in its maturity, sexuality is about giving oneself over to community, friendship, family, service, creativity, humour, delight, and martyrdom so that, with God, we can help bring life into the world.

Faith through Mysticism

May 21, 1998

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.

Carrying Tension

May 14, 1998

When I was in graduate school, in class one day the professor was lecturing on sexuality and morality, the issue of masturbation was raised and a student stopped him dead in his tracks with the question: “Do you masturbate?”

The professor’s first reaction was one of anger at the impertinence of the question. He turned away from the class towards the black board and his body language said what his words did not: ‘‘you are out of order with that question!”

However, he recovered himself soon enough and turned and faced his questioner and the class with these words: “My first reaction is to tell you that you’re out of order and that you’ve no business asking a question like that in this class, or anywhere else. However, since this is a class in moral theology and in the end your question has some value, I will in fact answer you: Yes, sometimes I do – and I am not proud of it. I don’t think ifs very wrong and I don’t think ifs very right either. I do know this though … I’m a better person when I don’t because then I am carrying more of the tension that w all of us, should carry in this life.”

Whatever its merits or lack of them in moral theology that answer says something important humanly and spiritually. We are better persons when we carry tension, as opposed to always looking for its easy resolution.

We see examples of this in great literature. What makes for a great hero or heroine? What do we call nobility of soul?

Usually we ascribe that quality precisely to the person who, mindless to his or her own comfort, need, and pain, is willing for a higher reason to carry great tension for a long period of time. We sense greatness of soul when we see someone who is sweating blood and not acquiescing to the temptation to prematurely resolve things.

Thus, for instance, we see in the heroine of Jane Austen’s, Sense and Sensibility, a certain greatness of soul. Why? Because she carries a great tension for a long time. She puts other peoples’ needs and the proper order of things above her own need to have her tension resolved. We see too in that story, as well as in many others of its kind, what makes for sublimity – the fact that first has been some sublimation. Generally, the more prior sublimation there is the more sublime the experience is. Great ioy depends upon first having carried great tension.

And this is true for every area of life, not just for sexuality. Nobility of soul is connected to carrying tension. The great illustration of this is, of course, Jesus sweating blood in the Garden of Gethsemane. There we see the necessary connection between suffering and resurrection. Understood fully, we also see in this the necessary connection between sweating blood in a garden and keeping our commitments and our integrity. Nobody will ever remain faithful in a marriage, a vocation, a friendship, a family, a job, or just to his or her own integrity without sometimes sweating blood in a garden.

After his resurrection, on the road to Emmaus, in trying to explain the connection between carrying tension and attaining what is sublime to his disciples (who slept through the lesson in Gethsemane) Jesus asks them the question: “Wasn’t it necessary … ?” It seems it was necessary – there is a necessary connection between carrying tension and fidelity.

We see this clearly illustrated too in the figure of Mary in scripture. The gospels tell us “She pondered these things in her heart”. Pondering, in the gospels, however, does not mean what it meant for the Greek philosophers like Socrates who cautioned us that the unexamined life is not worth living. In Hebrew thought, pondering did not mean a certain intellectual contemplation of life’s great mysteries. It meant rather a painful helplessness before a certain suffering that leaves us wondering.

Thus, when Mary stands under the cross of Jesus and watches him die – and there is absolutely nothing she can do to save him or even to protest his innocence and goodness- she is pondering in the Hebrew sense. She is carrying a great tension that she is helpless to resolve and must simply live with. From such a soul we get the Magnificat.

In Jesus’ message there is a strong motif of waiting, of pondering, of chastity, of having to carry tension without giving in to premature resolution. The idea is that the resurrection follows only after there has been an agony in the garden.

But why? Why is there value in carrying tension?

Carrying tension, if it is carried as Jesus, Mary, and Jane Austen’s heroines carried it (as something one does for others), is a gestation process. Something grows in us. What? Compassion, eventually forgiveness. To carry tension is to be in labour for birth because it is with much groaning of the flesh that the life of the spirit is brought forth.

Baptism As The Conscriptive Rope

April 30, 1998

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.

A Report From The Jesters Annual Convention

April 23, 1998

The best comments overheard at the recent International convention of Court Jesters:

*A seven year-old girl, explaining why her daddy, a Ph.D in philosophy could not give medical advice: “He is a doctor, but not the kind that can do anyone any good.”

*Anonymous remark in the corridor: “Nero thought he had defeated the Christians but ever since he died there have been millions of dogs named Nero and millions of people called Paul.”

*Mary to Jesus, as he arrives dressed as the Infant of Prague: “I don’t care who you are, you’re not going out dressed like that!”

*A Dene Native, to an American tourist who asked him whether the Dene thought their way of life was a good one: ‘We don’t know. We’ve never had anything worse to compare it to!”

*Professor to a student: “Even though you’re exceptionally well qualified, I’d say that ‘Victim’ is not a good career choice.

*The author of 2 Kings laying the biblical foundation for men being asked to do the dishes: “I will scour Jerusalem as a man scours a dish and, having scoured it, turns it upside down.” (21, 13)

*A narcissist on his over-powering propensity for revenge: “It’s an I for an I!”

*Saul Bellow to the academy of learning: “The visions of genius always seem to become the canned goods of the intellectuals.”

*Christina Crawford on the poor man’s dark night of the soul: “Lost is a place too!”

*Tim Allen on the difficulties of gender: ”You can’t turn a man into a woman; well, actually you can, but it is expensive, and in the end you still can’t do anything about the large hands and Adam’s apple.”

*Albert Camus on taking revenge against intellectual critics: “The best revenge you can have on intellectuals is to be madly happy!”

*David Tracy on the mixed blessing of the internet: “On the one hand, modern communications can cross all boundaries and disrupt and level all totalitarian regimes and oppressive structures and subvert all political, cultural, and ecclesial hegemonies. But on the other hand, they can also cross all boundaries and level all traditions, subvert all communities, and dis-empower all memory of suffering.

*D.H. Lawrence on the naiveté of our faith in modern technique for solving relational questions: “I am not a mechanism, an assembly of various section. And it not because the mechanism is working wrongly, that I am ill.”

*A feminist philosopher with another take on the old metaphysical conundrum: If a tree falls in the woods and there is nobody present to hear it fall, does it still make a sound? … “If a man speaks and there is no woman there to correct him – is he still wrong?

*A contemporary theologian explaining some of the new options being given in hell: ‘‘you have a choice between the classical hell fire … or watching Golf videos for all eternity!”

*Neurotic explaining himself: “I always feel bad when I feel good for fear that when I don’t feel this good I will feel worse!”

* James Hillman on the achievements of pop culture: “When the tradition of Romantic grandeur, with its cast of lunatics, lovers, and poets, is down-sized by egalitarianism deconstructed by academic cynicism or labeled grandiosity by psychoanalytic diagnostics, then the vacancy in the culture is occupied by pop-star squatters, trumped up magnificoes, and Batman, civilization left with only tinsel celebrities to model its culture.”

*Post-feminist philosopher, Camille Paglia, to the culture: “Prozac is the drug of choice for glum politically correct sentimentalists unable to face the spiritual deficiencies at the heart of their own decaying liberalism … what a bore.”

Soren Kierkegaard gave the keynote address and he closed with these words: “Something wonderful has happened to me. I was caught up in the seventh heaven. There sat all the gods in assembly. By special grace, I was granted the privilege of making a wish. ‘Wilt thou,’ said Mercury, ‘have youth or beauty or power or a long life or the most beautiful maiden or any of the other glories we have in the chest? Choose, but only one thing.’ For a moment I was at a loss. Then I addressed myself to the gods as follows: ‘Most honorable contemporaries, I choose this one thing, that I may always have the laugh on my side.’ Not one of the gods said a word; on the contrary, they all began to laugh. From that I concluded that my wish was granted, and found that the gods knew how to express themselves with taste; for it would barely have been suitable to have answered gravely. ‘Thy wish is granted.”‘

The Importance of Mellowness of Heart

April 19, 1998

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.

Forgive Those Who Trespass Against Us

April 13, 1998

When one reads Helen Prejean’s, Dead Man Walking, what is often lost in the sheer power of the story is what she recounts at the very end of the book and intends precisely as the real ending to the story.

The book ends with the story of Lloyd LeBlanc, the father of the boy who was murdered, and his struggle to forgive his son’s killer.

After the execution of the man who killed his son, Prejean describes how she would occasionally meet Lloyd LeBlanc at a chapel which holds perpetual adoration. Kneeling with him, in the middle of the night in a silent chapel, they would say the rosary together. Prejean describes how, at a point, he shared with her his struggle to forgive his son’s killer.

When he arrived with the sheriff’s deputies in the deserted field to identify his son’s body, he had knelt down beside the body and prayed the Our Father. When he came to the words: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us,” he had not stopped praying or made any mental reservations. Instead he added the words: “Whoever did this, I forgive them.”

There, beside his dead son’s mutilated body, he had forgiven the man who had done that to his son.

This is truly extraordinary. To be kneeling beside the dead body of your own child and be able to say: “Whoever did this, I forgive them,” requires a big faith and even a bigger heart.

But Lloyd LeBlanc admits that it has not been easy to sustain that forgiveness. Bitterness continues to well up inside of him, especially on days like his son’s birthday and other days when the memory of his son and the senselessness of his death simply overwhelm him. He confesses that the struggle is constant and the forgiveness he once gave must be given over and over again.

But obviously forgiveness is winning out because, among other things, he was even able to go and visit the mother of his son’s killer, when she herself lay dying, and offer her comfort.

I bring up the example of Lloyd LeBlanc because forgiveness is the one thing that we do not do well. Lack of forgiveness is our Achilles’ heal. As much as we like to protest – and for all of our moral, intellectual and technological achievements, our political correctness and our espoused sensitivities – our world, our communities, our churches, our families and our personal lives are shot full of hatred, anger, resentments, grudges and long-remembered wounds.

Everywhere we turn, somebody is nursing a grudge; somebody has a history which justifies an anger; and somebody is protesting that, in his or her case, the call to forgiveness does not apply. All of which is an infallible sign that our hearts are not near the size of our faith.

We rationalize this non-forgiveness in every kind of way: If I am more crass, I simply say: “I don’t forget, I get even.”

However, if I am more sophisticated, or at least pretend to be, I rationalize the refusal to forgive by saying: “I have a fierce desire for justice and there can be no forgiveness until there is justice.” “I have been victimized and therefore am above the demand for forgiveness – at least right now, at least as it pertains to this particular thing, or at least as it pertains to this particular person or group.”

“Nobody knows my pain and pain such as mine justifies my bitterness and anger.” “The challenge to forgive is easily spoken by those in power and those who have done the wrong – I wonder how they would feel if they were on the other end!”

In each of these cases, unspoken but present, is the subordinate clause – “and thus I have the right to hate!” In each case too, unspoken but present, there is a bracketing of a key subordinate clause in the Lord’s Prayer “as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

To err is human to forgive is divine. Forgiveness is not something we human beings can do all on our own. Forgiveness is a non-human power that God gives to the world in the resurrection of Jesus.

And it is here that all of us can learn a lesson, maybe the most important one of our lives, from Lloyd LeBlanc. He could have rationalized a perpetual bitterness under any of the slogans quoted above, but he didn’t. He forgave, immediately and without qualification, the killer of his son.

Prejean shares with us that Lloyd LeBlanc sustains his faith and his forgiveness in a rather simple, straightforward way: He goes to churches, kneels in adoration and prays the rosary, especially using the sorrowful mysteries, asking God to give him a strength that he knows he does not have. And he does this over and over and over again.

Forgiveness is the only thing that is new in the world, the one sure sign that there is a God. The example of Lloyd LeBlanc is an icon of that.

Resurrection and the Voice of Good Friday

April 2, 1998

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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.

Gifts of the Holy Spirit: Fear of the Lord

March 26, 1998

St. John of the Cross once proposed this axiom” “Learn to understand more by not understanding than by understanding.”

A curious statement, though obviously a profound one. What does he mean by this? How do we understand “by not understanding”?

Imagine the following: Someone who has known you, perhaps for only a short while, comes up to you one day and says: “You know, I’ve got you figured out. I understand you. You’re typically Scottish, the way all the Scots are. You’re stubborn like your father, uptight like your mother, an INTJ on the Myers-Briggs personality charts, and a number six on the Enneagram – that’s why you never think for yourself! You’re as predictable as fog in a Scottish winter. You hold no surprises!”

Would you feel understood? Would you not instead feel violated and angry?

Now imagine the reverse: Someone who has known you deeply for a long time (your spouse perhaps, or a brother, or sister, or a life-long friend) comes up to you and says: “You are a mystery to me. I’ve known you for most of my life and I still can’t figure you out. Sometimes I think I understand you, but you constantly surprise me.

“There’s a depth and a complexity to you, something beyond me, that I’ve never fully grasped and I feel good about that. It adds to your mystique! All these years – and I am still just getting to know you!”

Wouldn’t you fell more understood, in this case, by not being understood? Wouldn’t you feel freer to be yourself and more valued as a person?

When Scripture says “fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom,” essentially this is what it has in mind, namely, the kind of reverence and respect that backs off and lets others be fully who they are. To properly fear someone is to be afraid of violating them, of not respecting them properly.

That is what fear of the Lord is and that is why it is a gift from the Holy Spirit, a warm, positive energy that emanates right out of the joy and gratitude that lives within the Trinity. Yet it is a curious thing: how can fear be positive?

Fear is almost never seen as positive. Fear connotes repression, timidity, oppressions, lack of nerve and immaturity, all of which are bad.

Moreover, given that so many today are over-reacting to our religious backgrounds, there is in our culture a neurosis and a paranoia about fear of God. The term “fear of God” is today a lightning rod that constellates and draws upon itself a lot of free-floating anger. That is unfortunate and surely a sign of a certain adolescence within us.

A certain fear is not only healthy, it’s necessary for love, peace and happiness. A healthy fear is not a fear of punishment or of experiencing guilt. Nor, like Prometheus, is it a fear of stealing fire from the gods. God is not threatened by human creativity. God is trying to set us on fire.

A healthy fire is built right into the dynamics of love itself. It is a fear of violating others, of not fully respecting who they are in all their uniqueness and complexity. It is the fear of self-inflating, of being insensitive, of being boorish, of hurting those whom we love.

We experience this fear, and appreciate most its value, when we first fall in love with someone. In the glow of first fervor, that delightful feeling of finally finding that one person who will make us whole, we know healthy fear. At that point in the relationship, we are over-cautious, respectful, understanding and overly fearful that we might disappoint that significant other by doing something stupid or selfish.

When we first fall in love we do not take the other for granted, but respect his or her otherness, uniqueness and complexity. We also live in face of the fact that this person is a gift in our own lives.

But familiarity breeds contempt, and, soon enough, as we have all sadly experienced, that initial caution and respect disappear, replaced precisely by a lack of fear – and that one so-unique, so-rich person we fell in love with is now somebody familiar, someone we understand, and someone before whose love we no longer have any apprehensions.

Love shuts off at that moment. It has no choice. It is being violated.

Fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom. It is also the secret to love, harmony and respect. One of the greatest gifts any of us could receive from the Holy Spirit is the gift of healthy fear. Few things would help us as much to become more gracious, respectful, and loving.

If we each had the wisdom that comes from fear of the Lord, the face of the earth would be renewed because our marriages, families, churches and places of work would explode with new meaning as we began to understand more by not understanding and began to see things familiar as unfamiliar again.

Gifts of The Holy Spirit – Piety

March 19, 1998

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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.