Our Interior Codes

September 3, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ideology makes for Strange Judgments

August 29, 1998

Jim Wallis once coined this phrase: ” The religious right thinks that to be religious you have to be extremist and fundamentalist … and the religious left agrees!”

Ideology makes for some strange judgments. Any pre-prejudice, and an ideology is certainly that, is like a set of glasses that lets you see only one room in a house. That is the case for all of liberals, conservatives and the alike. We make some pretty narrow assessments because of the ideological prism through which we see things.

Thus, for example, conservatives tend to see the quest for social justice as simply the liberal agenda: “It’s the feminists, Green Peace, socialists, and all those social-justice types, who are pushing for all of this, trying to foist their agenda on to the rest of us!” What’s absent here is any sense that the demand for social justice is universal, biblical, Christie, central to Jesus’ message, and as non-negotiable in terms of religion as are private prayer and private morality. The imperative to walk justly and to try to change all systems that do not reflect that is not a liberal agenda or a feminist cause, it is the gospel agenda.

Why are conservatives unable to see that? Self-interest? The way Christian spirituality has been focused in recent centuries? Over-reaction to inflated and simplistic social justice rhetoric? Probably some of each of these. But partly too it is a question of ideology, the conservative prism, which highlights certain key aspects of the gospel even as it fails to see others . One part of the agenda is being protected by refusing to let some other things be part of it. How tragic. Part of the gospel is being seen simply as liberal agenda.

But do the liberals fare any better? Hardly. Liberals today tend to see piety, devotion, obedience, concern for private prayer, concern for chastity, and conscientiousness towards private sexual morality as part of the right-wing agenda, as if piety, obedience, and chastity were somehow conservative virtues . So strong is this idea in some liberal circles that often there is a actual denigration of piety and the concern for private morality. These realities are sometimes seen as a positive hindrance to justice, as if social justice is somehow better served by persons whose private lives are not in order or as if a life of private morality ill-equips one for the cause of justice. Strange logic.

Part of that strange logic too is the idea that justice can be served without regard for how we do in certain areas of our private lives. For example, a recent commentary on the death of Danilo Dolci -a man who worked passionately for the poor but whose personal life didn’t always match his moral stature in the area of justice- attacked as narrow and conservative anyone who criticized Dolci for this and defended his lifestyle with a comment to the effect that a saintly work need not be matched by the prescribed life of a saint.

But, just as for their conservative counterparts, something is blocking full vision here. Isn’t saintly work contingent precisely upon living as a saint does? Can doing and being really be divorced that easily? Isn’t the gospel pretty much equally about both? Piety, chastity, a vigorous concern for private morality are not conservative virtues, the right-wing agenda. They, like social justice , are an integral part of the gospel agenda.

At the 20th anniversary celebration of Catholic New Times in Toronto in 1996, Jim Wallis pleaded passionately for both conservatives and liberals to move beyond these narrow judgments, based so strongly on ideology and self-interest , and integrate into their respective agendas those other parts of the gospel message that, right now, they are neglecting. Among other things, he suggested that “it is time for the religious left to be more religious than left. And it is time for both the left and the right to admit that they have run out of imagination, that the categories of liberal and conservative are dysfunctional and that what is needed is a radicalism that leads us beyond both the right and the left, with their selective categories. That radicalism can only be found in the gospel which is neither liberal or conservative but fully compassionate.”

The gospel agenda, as Wallis so rightly points out, is neither liberal nor conservative. It is more whole, more compassionate, and more demanding than the agenda of either the right or the left. And the following of Jesus calls us to that wholeness.

Mary Jo Leddy, speaking at that same celebration as Jim Wallis, presented this challenge in her address:

“We need to be on fire again, for our hope is nor longer an easy one. We live in a culture of despair within which Pentecost can no longer be taken for granted. Hence we must take upon ourselves the burden of the times and refuse to make the Holy Spirit a piece of private property, but a spirit that matters. The road is not clear but we must make our way by walking.”

The Poverty and Soul of Lavinia Andrews

August 22, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Self-Image and the Two Halves of Life

August 13, 1998

Several years ago, I preached a homily on the importance of taking our self-image from who we are rather than from what we do. The Gospel passage for that Sunday was the famous incident where Mary sits at Jesus’ feet, seemingly doing nothing, while Martha is consumed with the practical business of doing things. This has been a long favored passage for anyone trying to make the point that “being” is more important than “doing”, that our value likes in who we are and not in what we do, and that spiritual maturity lies in appropriating this important truth.

Not being satisfied simply with referring to the Gospel, I quoted passages, as well, from Mother Theresa, Henri Nouwen, and Jean Vanier to support this insight. How could one be on safer ground?

No ground is safe. After the liturgy a man came up and made this comment: “i don’t want to argue with you that being is more important than doing, but have you ever noticed that the people who say that are invariably persons of great achievement. Isn’t all of that a little easier to say if you are Mother Theresa and have just won a Nobel Peace Prize, are the most famous woman on earth, and get to fly all over the world and be admired by people? Or, if you are Henri Nouwen and have just published your 38th book and virtually every spiritual group in the world is trying to get you to come and speak to them, isn’t it a bit glib to say that achieving something isn’t important? It’s easy to say those things when you have already accomplished some things and everyone knows and admires you. But what about us nobodies who have never achieved anything of notice, how do we feel good about ourselves? “

This is not facetious comment. The objection this man raises helps highlight a too common fault in our preaching and teaching, namely, we have been too simplistic in saying that achievement is not important without differentiating between the first half of life and the second half of it. What is being said here?

Ultimately, what we have taught is true, at the end of the day we must take our identity, self-worth, and meaning from who we are, independent of what we do or have ever accomplished. But that is at the end of the day. At the beginning of the day, in fact for the first half of our lives, it is not so clear-cut. There are some different spiritual rules for the first half of life than for the second.

Before we reach the age of fifty, a certain amount of doing and achievement is important. How can you give yourself away in self-donation if you do not have a healthy sense of self? And how do you get a healthy sense of self? Very few of us have been so perfectly loved and blessed that we feel worthwhile, loveable, confident, and beyond our own need for affirmation even when we are unable to do things that bring us respect and admiration. Moreover, as the parable of the buried talents makes clear, anyone who does not use his or her God-given talents to the full should be prepared for some unhappiness . Thus, there is a season for doing, for using one’s talents, for achieving, for taking some sense of worth from what one does. There is a time when doing and achieving things can in fact be very positive spiritually and when telling somebody that doing is not important can be harmful. An insecure, twenty year-old is not yet ready to be Mother Theresa; nor, at this point, is God necessarily asking her to be Mother Theresa. The spiritual rules are slightly different for the young and insecure than they are for those of us who are in our middle or later years. When a young flower is still moving towards full bloom one must be very careful with the pruning shears – and with what one preaches.

But the reverse is just as true. After fifty, during the second half of life, the major spiritual task is that of letting go, of shedding things, of precisely moving towards taking one’s sense of self-worth from what one is rather than from what one does. Achievement then is often more of a spiritual hindrance (tempting one towards becoming an old or an embittered fool rather than a holy fool) than an aid. It is at this time in our lives that we must recognize that the Gospel passages about letting go are speaking about us, post bloom. After fifty, the spiritual and psychological pruning shears have to come out and much of what we took meaning from before has to be cut away.

But timing is key. A tree can be pruned too early or too late. Before fifty, some of our self-image will necessarily come from what we do, and this can be spiritually healthy. Post-fifty, the rules change and so too should our message of challenge.

Why Church Attendance is Dropping

August 6, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Monks Have Secrets Worth Knowing

July 30, 1998

Daniel Berrigan, no stranger to confederate sources of wisdom, once suggested that monks have secrets worth knowing. This I learned, first-hand , recently when I spent ten days on retreat with a Trappist community in Oregon. One secret, among others, that this particular community revealed to me (certainly more clearly than I have ever understood it before) is what it takes to live Christian community.

The Abbey that I stayed at, fairly typical of Trappists I suspect, is made up of an extremely diverse group of monks. You find there every kind of temperament, background, age, and political and ecclesial bent. Monks, at least it is true of this group, do not comprise a simple homogeneity, nor anything simple for that matter. This is a very diverse group of men who , together, are equipped to illustrate every temperament and personality under the sun. They were obviously not all ordered from the same catalogue.

Moreover, seen a bit from the inside, monastic life does not so perfectly approximate its romantic ideal. We have, all of us, a rather simplistic, romantic caricature of monks as serene, faultless contemplatives, all of whom have beautiful voices. The reality is not exactly always that. These are men, ordinary men, subject to ordinary weakness and experience. They too have to live with pettiness, jealousy, tiredness, personalities which grate on each other, conflicting ecclesiologies, political differences, and frustrated sexual tension . As well, like the rest of us, each of these men carries with him into the monastery his own history of hurt, wound, and ungrieved deaths.

Yet, despite this, they live together in relative harmony, accord each other respect, make room for each others’ differences, faults, and eccentricities, and essentially live their lives for each other – not to mention the hospitality they create for others and the beautiful harmony they make together six times a day when they sing God’s praises. In the end, their differences make up their real richness. They are an inclusive community in the real meaning of the term, inclusivity. They make for a house with many rooms. Every kind of personality, temperament, and ideological bent can find a home here.

So what is their secret? What makes this all tick (when it generally does not tick for the rest of us)? Ora et labora (“Pray and work”) is the motto of monasticism. In both their work and their prayer, their focus is not on themselves but on the praise of God. Their centre, that place where they are directing all of their longings and energies, is a place outside of themselves . This is what makes their community possible and harmonious, beyond differences. Moreover it is our failure to see and understand this that lies at the root of why most of our own attempts at community (even in marriage and friendship) fail.

All of us long for community,all of us search for community, and most of us never really find it. Why? Because more often than not we try build community around ourselves, around a charismatic personality, around someone’s ego, around like-mindedness, around an ideology, around a cause, or around simple, adolescent romanticism. None of these, ultimately, can carry the load. None of them is powerful enough to bring us together and hold us together precisely beyond our own egos, hurts, past histories, ideological itches, natural jealousies, sexual need, different personalities, individual rhythms, and the many changes that we undergo as we grow. One cannot build inclusive or lasting community around any of these because, in every one of them, the centre (that should bind and hold things together) is not something beyond the human ego with its glories and wounds. When we try to build community on the basis of any of these things , we end up with a house with only one room and that room soon enough becomes too asphyxiating to hold us.

Monks have secrets worth knowing. One of these is that community is possible … but it is only possible when it is founded on the praise of God. We can live together as brothers and sisters as long as our focus is not upon ourselves – upon our own egos, needs, talents, and ideologies. We can love each other, despite our wounds and differences, only when we are not facing each other but are all facing in the same direction, eyes raised heavenward praising God.

Would that we understood this! It is the secret for a good marriage, a good friendship, a good parish, a good religious community, and ultimately even for good civic community. Community is possible, despite differences, when something more powerful and life-giving than human ego is given centre stage.

Shedding Things

July 23, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adulthood is contingent upon appropriating that.

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.