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

040298

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

031998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gifts of the Spirit: Fortitude

March 12, 1998

Many of us are familiar with the story Dead Man Walking. It’s about a Catholic nun, Helen Prejean, who is working among prisoners on death row, helping prepare them for death.

Her work isn’t easy. There is opposition on every front. She has to challenge the prisoner facing death to own up to what he has done, to forgive society and himself, and to die without bitterness.

And she needs to do this in the face of near-universal misunderstanding. The prisoners themselves initially suspect her intent, the victims’ families cannot accept that she is trying to help the killer of their loved ones, the existing chaplains do not want her, the people she used to work with cannot understand how she can abandon them for this, many look upon her as an adolescent do-gooder, and many within society hate her simply for her stand against capital punishment.

Save for a few friends, she is unanimity-minus-one.

Despite this all, she sustains herself, but there is a cost, constant strain and an unspeakable loneliness. At one point, standing in the warden’s office, she collapses – from tiredness, exasperation, an untreated flu and a coldness that results not just from poor heating in a building but, at a deeper level, from the chill that issues out of the calculated coldness of capital punishment. She recovers, perseveres and continues to walk by her own principles and spirit.

Among other things, this story illustrates what one of the gifts of the Holy Spirit, fortitude, looks like when we see it in real life.

What is the gift of fortitude? Biblically, fortitude is the gift of the Holy Spirit that is given to us that we might have the courage to defend our communities, the poor, our faith and the truths of God by which we live.

Biblically, we defend these through prophecy – and prophecy requires courage. Fortitude, in essence, is courage for prophecy.

Rather than attempting to define fortitude abstractly, I would like, here, to give a picture of it, by looking at how we see it lived out in the actual lives of some prophetic persons.

Who are the prophets of our time and how do they illustrate fortitude? We have already seen the case of Sister Helen Prejean. Let us look at some others:

Dorothy Day was a picture of fortitude. She called her autobiography The Long Loneliness and that pretty well describes what fortitude demanded of her. She kept to her principles, to non-violently serve God and the poor, even when this meant losing a relationship she had to a man she deeply loved, the father of her child; even when it meant risking the love and support of the very community who had joined her cause, as happened several times in her building of the Catholic Worker; and even when it meant arrest, ridicule, loss of her former friends and unspeakable loneliness. That is fortitude.

Henri Nouwen is another example of prophetic fortitude. He never wrote a formal autobiography with loneliness in its title, but, like Dorothy Day, he lived that loneliness. He was a man of tortured complexity, but also a man of real faith.

He believed in the reality of God, the unfathomable compassion of Jesus and the transformation this would bring into our lives if we ever gave ourselves over to it. He lived that and tried to share it with others, especially the poor – he left the academic world for them, used to re-write his books to try to make them simpler and openly shared his own brokenness with the whole world.

He did all this, even though it constantly brought him deep interior crisis and to the edges of emotional and physical breakdown. He was accused of neurosis, egoism, narcissism, ambition and of not having an unpublished thought, but he persevered and, like Kierkegaard, his early mentor, helped millions of people by sharing his own pain. That is prophetic courage, biblical fortitude.

Oscar Romero demonstrated fortitude when, instead of accepting the privilege and place among the powerful which the president of the country was offering him, he rightly accused the president of lying and betraying himself and the poor. He was shot for that, but he died knowing his death would ultimately bring about what his words could not, more justice for the poor.

Mother Teresa showed prophetic fortitude in the direct way she reached out to the poor and the direct way she lived the Gospel, in spite of all the accusations suggesting that she was too simplistic, naive, counter-productive to social justice, too pious and too blindly obedient to the church. She lived out her principles in spite of this and gave a concrete face to biblical fortitude.

It is never easy to live out what is truest within us, nor is it easy to defend what needs to be defended. Fortitude is always necessary and we might all do well to pray with Ignatius of Loyola: “Passion of Christ, strengthen me!”

The Gift of Counsel

March 5, 1998

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Gifts of the Holy Spirit

February 19, 1998

The American poet, Robert Frost, once wrote that there is a congenital something in us that hates a wall. Well, there is also something, just as non-eradicable, that loves a list, especially in us who are cradle Catholics.

Our classical catechisms had lists for everything – sacraments, commandments, deadly sins, cardinal virtues, minor virtues and even types of angels. There are two such lists for the Holy Spirit, one listing the fruits and the other listing the gifts. These gifts are not simply a catechetical invention arbitrarily created for pedagogical purposes; both have a solid biblical foundation.

Thus, the fruits of the Spirit are based on a list of virtues that Paul (Galatians 5:22-23) describes as coming from the Spirit. Our Catechism lists 12 of these: charity, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, generosity, gentleness, faithfulness, modesty, self-control, and chastity.

The gifts ascribed to the Spirit are based upon two biblical lists; the first given by the prophet Isaiah (11:2) and the second revealed by Paul in 1 Corinthians (12:4-11). Our catechisms, both old and new, summarize these gifts in a list of seven: wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.

Since, in preparation for the millennium, this year has been designated as the year of the Holy Spirit, my next six columns will be devoted to speaking about the Holy Spirit, specifically about the gifts of the Holy Spirit. However, in order to understand what these gifts are and what precisely they bring to us, it is necessary to first situate them within their ultimate source, their generation within the life of the Trinity.

How is the Holy Spirit generated within the Trinity and how do the gifts of the Spirit flow out of that? It might seem daunting to try to describe, but we are not without help from divine revelation and human analogues in doing so.

The Holy Spirit has classically been defined in theology as “the love between the Father and the Son.” This is not simply an abstract formula but a phrase that tries to express, however inadequately, what results anywhere, here or in heaven, whenever there is a genuine reciprocal flow of love.

Thus, simply within the normal flow of human love, we can see the following dynamic: Someone, out of love and gratitude, gives a gift to another.
That gift helps fire love and gratitude in that other who then, in gratitude, reciprocates.
This reciprocation fires a deeper love and gratitude within the initial giver who can now give in an even deeper way to the other.
This in turn fires a still deeper love and gratitude in that other who can then respond even more deeply in love and gratitude to the giver.
As this dynamic works, an energy, a fire, a certain palpable force, a spirit, begins to build which affects and infects for the good everything it comes into contact with, drawing it into its own joyous energy.

That is, by way of analogy, how the Trinity works and how the Holy Spirit is generated. Thus the Godhead can be described:

God, the Father, the source of everything, is always creating life and is giving it in love to the Son.
The Son is lovingly receiving that life and is, in gratitude, giving it back to the Father.
This enables the Father to give that life back in an even deeper way.
The Son then is able to respond even more deeply to the Father.
As this reciprocal flow of love and gratitude deepens and intensifies, an energy, a fire, a palpable force, a person, the Holy Spirit, is born and that force infects everything around it, drawing it into a palpable charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, fidelity and chastity.
That very ambience, in turn, affects perception. (“Love is the eye,” as Hugo of St. Victor puts it.) The gifts of the Spirit flow from its fruits: When one’s heart and mind are colored by love, joy, peace, patience, goodness, gentleness, fidelity and chastity (as opposed to anger, bitterness, fear and lust) one will also understand things and react to them from a different wisdom, understanding, counsel, fortitude, knowledge, piety and fear of the Lord.

The Holy Spirit is now working.

The Myth of Redemptive Violence

February 12, 1998

Few things warm the heart as does the myth of redemptive violence. This myth, very different than that taught us by Jesus, lies in the root of the Western soul. It forms the basis for countless, heart-warming novels, movies, songs and children’s stories, and is generally substituted for the actual story of God’s redemption.

In short-hand, it might be rendered this way: Good people. Living in peace. Bad men arise. Bad men harass good people. Good people helpless. Much pain and sadness. No hope. Good people, but bad future.

Good man rides into town. Good man grasps situation. Bad men feel his presence. Bad men harass good man. Good man doesn’t fight back. Everyone curious. Why doesn’t good man fight back? Bad men hound good man. Bad men seem strong. Good man seems coward. Good man humiliated. Bad men poise for kill. Suspense unbearable.

Bad men push things too far. Eleventh hour comes. Good man says: “Enough!” Good man is calm. Locks doors. Slowly rolls up sleeves. Sacred violence ensues. Good man calmly beats bad men to pulp. Bad men humiliated. Good man vindicated. Good people vindicated.

Everyone knows good man has been the strongest all along. Everyone ashamed. Tears flow. Hearts warm. Good wins. Everyone happy. Happy ending.

We all leave the theatre or put down the book at this point. That story is over. What we don’t know is that, not long after the glow of all this sacred violence has worn off, there is another chapter, in another book, one with a less-happy ending: Surprise! Nobody lives happily ever after. Nobody lives happily at all. Always more bad men. Bad men’s children grown up. Story is repeated again . . . and again . . . ad infinitum.

It is easy to confuse this story, up to its happy ending, with the story of our redemption in Jesus Christ. But Jesus’ story, while having some similarities, is, at a point, completely different. In short-hand, his story runs like this:

Good people. Living in peace. Bad men arise. Bad also exists in good people. Bad men harass good people. Good people helpless, partly because bad is also in them. Much pain and sadness. No hope.

Good man comes down from heaven. Rides into town. Good man knows situation. Bad men feel his presence. Good people too feel his presence – wicked demons howl, innocent babies leap. Tide is turning. Good people become gleeful. Much anticipation. Bad men soon to get theirs.

Bad men ignorant of new power. Stupidly continue to harass. Bad men especially harass good man. Good man does not fight back. Everyone curious. Why doesn’t good man fight back? Bad men poised for kill. Bad men seem strong. Good man seems weak. Good man humiliated. Suspense unbearable.

Bad men push things too far. Eleventh hour arrives. Bad men seize good man. Good is bound by evil. Bad men beat up good man. Good people think: “Surely now. Now is the time!” Good people anxious for good man to act.

Good man never says: “Enough!” Good man gets nailed to a cross. The whole world says: “If you are strong, come down off cross. If you are good, come down off cross!” But good man seems more concerned with private battle. Good man deaf to crowd’s jeers.

Unthinkable happens. No sacred violence. Only human violence. Good man dies. Good man humiliated. Good humiliated. Good man dead. Goodness buried. Tragic story. Hope exposed. No warm feelings.

But . . . God opens grave. More curiosities still: No bad people beaten up. Dead man alive, but nothing looks changed. Years pass. Centuries pass. People see empty grave. Bad still rapes good. Some people think good man’s visit not very helpful.

But . . . other people, growing in number, begin to sense that everything has changed. Defeat is victory, humiliation, glory. Good man alive. Good man standing always where anyone, good or bad, gets beaten up.

Strange logic. Where victims are, God is; where weakness is, strength lives. Stranger logic still: God is strong, yet God beats no one up. God never overpowers. God lies helpless, powerful, a wounded child in the world.

Choosing Against Happiness

January 29, 1998

Some years ago, counseling a young nun who was trying to make sense of her struggle with religious life, I learned something about religious ambivalence. Her life embodied it. On the one hand, she had genuine faith. She believed in God and, moreover, believed that God had called her to be a nun. Seeing her life through the eyes of faith, she felt that the signs were clear and that she was where God wanted her to be, in a convent. Even though she struggled mightily with all three vows – poverty, chastity and obedience – she could still see how these made sense, even for her.

But that was half the story: Inside of herself she also felt a gnawing restlessness and erotic pulse for life that made life inside a convent pretty hard to take.

She told me once: “Most of the time, I think I’m in the wrong place. I’m too full of life and sex to be very religious, especially to be a nun. I want so much more out of life. Maybe I need to leave not just the convent, but the church as well. Perhaps that would be the honest thing to do. I love life too much; I’m too physical, too full of earth, eros and sex to ever be very spiritual.”

When she first began talking to me, the physical and sexual within her were clearly beginning to gain the upper hand emotionally.

But something else was also going on, even as her more earthy pulls, as she described them, were making it clear that their demands would not be subdued. God’s grip on her was tightening at some deep place. She no longer knew what she really wanted and what real freedom for her would mean. Too many, seemingly contradictory, things were vying for her soul, her body and her future.

So she was caught in a storm: There were voices in her emotions and voices in her soul; they weren’t saying the same thing. There were desires in her body and desires in her spirit; they wanted quite different things. There was the omnipresent ache for sexual consummation, even as other parts of her wanted to fly away from the earth and the physical altogether.

At one stage, for meditation, I gave her a reflection from Nikos Kazantzakis. Reflecting on the double pull of Christ and the world, he once wrote: “Every person partakes of the divine nature in both spirit and flesh. That is why the mystery of Christ is not simply a mystery for a particular creed: it is universal. The struggle between God and human nature breaks out in everyone, together with the longing for reconciliation.

“Most often this struggle is unconscious and short-lived. A weak soul does not have the endurance to resist the flesh for long. It grows heavy, becomes flesh itself and the contest ends.

“But among responsible men and women, persons who have their eyes riveted day and night upon the Supreme Duty, the conflict between flesh and spirit breaks out mercilessly and may last until death. The stronger the soul and the flesh, the more fruitful the struggle and the richer the final harmony. . . .

“The Spirit wants to have to wrestle with flesh that is strong and full of resistance. It is a carnivorous bird which is incessantly hungry; it eats flesh and, by assimilating it, makes it disappear. Struggle between flesh and spirit, rebellion and resistance, reconciliation and submission, and finally-the supreme purpose of struggle-union with God: this was the ascent taken by Christ, the ascent which he invites us to take as well, following in his bloody tracks.”

The tension, as Kazantzakis, writes it up here, reflects the language and concepts of his Greek background. Hence, there is more than a little classical dualism (body versus soul) in his expression.

But the struggle he describes, despite the limits of his Greek dualism, still captures the heart of the issue. All sensitive persons should expect a life-and-death struggle within their souls and the harmony that needs to be established there between world and God, flesh and soul, earth and transcendence, will be long, painful, full of competing voices and will often, seemingly, pit life against life.

What is said too is that, just because it is natural to feel that the world and God (flesh and soul, full life and church) are opposed to each other and seemingly demand that we choose one over the other, does not mean that they are, in fact, irreconcilable. The point is not to choose between them, but to hold them both in a way that fully respects their respective values.

That will not be easy, nor quick, but God wants to wrestle with resistance – and the more bitter the struggle, the richer the final harmony.

Sacred Violence

January 21, 1998

In October 1993, Robert Latimer, a Saskatchewan farmer, looked at his severely handicapped daughter, Tracy, and decided she should no longer have to live with her constant pain. He gently carried her to the family truck, hooked a hose from the exhaust to the cab, and watched as his daughter died of carbon monoxide poisoning. He did not hide the fact that he had killed her, telling the police that he had done so out of compassion, in love, to free her from her suffering.

Few legal and moral issues have so galvanized a nation. Fierce debates have ensued at every level. From kitchens, to national radio phone-in shows, to the highest courts in the country, this issue has been debated: Was what he did a crime? Was what he did an act of compassion and, indeed, courage? Should he be punished? Should he be lauded? What does this say about the value we place on the lives of those who are disabled?

Two criminal trials ended with a jury convicting him of second-degree murder, but recommending clemency. The jury of public opinion, however, has ruled otherwise. No formal polls have been taken, but if newspaper commentaries, phone-in shows on radio, talk on the streets, and the reaction of most academic moralists is any indication, it would appear that public opinion is considerably more sympathetic than critical.

Again and again, we hear the words: “This is not a criminal act in the normal sense. He’s not a criminal. What he did was an act of compassion. He killed out of love. You just have to know the man, he is good, and he loved his daughter.”

Whatever the other merit of those statements – and those among us who have physical disabilities are understandably not much swayed by them – what is disturbing about them is the fact that, generally, those making them are not just trying to exonerate a man who had to make an excruciating decision in a very painful situation, they are claiming the moral high ground – and seeing anyone who opposes them as narrow and lacking in compassion.

In today’s culture, it is seen as enlightened to support what Latimer did and backward to oppose it.

Few things could be further from the truth. I do not want to harshly judge Latimer – personally I think that he is very sincere, though equally as misguided – but I do want to make some rather harsh judgments about our culture, about its hidden violence and its blindness to the fact that its violence often kills precisely people like Tracy Latimer.

For all of our talk of being sensitive and enlightened, what our culture does not yet see is what anthropologists like Rene Girard have long tried to teach us, that our culture still sustains itself by scape-goating certain persons. We too kill, but always under that sanctioning dictum of the high priest, Caiaphas, who once said, “Far better that one person should die for the people.”

If we are really more enlightened than previous cultures then we would see that whenever a human heartbeat, any human heartbeat, is snuffed out – whether it be that of Tracy Latimer, a condemned murderer on death row, a fetus or a terminally ill person – there is some high priest somewhere, a cultural high priest whose voice is generally discernible in public opinion, saying: “Better that one person should die for the people.”

The result today is the same as it was back when those words were first intoned: Somebody is going to die, invariably someone without power. Cultures have always survived by scape-goating, by sacrificing people and considering this exercise as sacred. We have done it for centuries in capital punishment and today we are doing it in multiple forms. Thus children, particularly the unborn, do not fair well in our culture; neither do outcasts. Child sacrifice can have a subtle face, as can any form of human sacrifice. Abortion, capital punishment and mercy killing of all kinds need to be seen in this light.

Moreover, in the discussion of all of this, we need to highlight always the voice of the ultimate victim, the one whose life is being snuffed out, the one who is in that unenviable position of being (in Gil Ballie’s brilliant phrase) “unanimity-minus-one.” God’s voice is always present in that one.

From a Christian perspective this is clear. God always stands where the victim stands.

But this is also true anthropologically. The one who is socially marginalized stands in that place that the builders of the culture have rejected – “the cornerstone rejected by the builders.”

Victims stand outside the frenzy of the mob and the frenzy of the mob is seen precisely by standing where they are standing. A victim’s perspective is always the best critique of any culture.

Would we could stand where Tracy Latimer stood. It would help unmask the enlightened violence within our culture.

The Effects of Pornography

January 14, 1998

Some years ago, CBC TV aired a drama that ran something like this: Three middle-aged couples from Ontario decided to take a summer camping holiday together. The holiday was meant to be a middle-aged fling of sorts, a reunion of old college friends who had spent the last 25 years raising children and paying mortgages and doing the kinds of civic and church things that come with the turf.

Now after years of being tied down with commitments, their children more or less grown, they finally had some time again to spend with each other, travelling the country and renewing old friendships.

So they each rented some kind of motorhome, packed it with food and drinks, left their respective houses to the precarious care of their young adult children, and set out for a month to enjoy the vacation they had never had.

It started well. For the first two days and nights there were high spirits, lots of laughter and banter, and the table conversations sounded something like this: “Isn’t this great! Isn’t it great to be together like this again! Isn’t it great to have the freedom, the money, and the time to just enjoy ourselves and see our country in this way.” Even the weather was great.

Things changed on the third night. Parked in a campground near a resort, late in the evening as they sat around their campfire, they saw the campground fill with young people. A wild party ensued, loud rock music, booze and drugs of all kinds, and various couples having sex rather openly among the trees.

Initially, huddled around their own fire, the three couples said the type of things any middle-aged couple might say in a similar situation: “What’s the world coming to? Who raised these kids?

What they did not realize is what seeing such primitive rawness was doing inside of them. From that moment on, basically until the end of their month-long trip, each of them went into a depression. The real enjoyment of the trip, the sense of freedom and delight, was gone and the bantering and humor of the first days gave way to silence and feelings about their own marriages, bodies, sexual histories, kids and lives in general that often had them bickering and unhappy.

What had happened here? They had had a first-hand experience of the negativity of pornography. What is wrong with pornography is not that there is something wrong in seeing the sexual act. Sex is not dirty or sinful.

What is wrong with pornography is that it over-stimulates our archetypal erotic energies, leaving us no choice but to act out those energies or to go into a depression, namely, to turn on the cooling mechanisms inside of us to restrain those energies and then to sizzle in inchoate frustration as those energies slowly cool.

This is important to know because, today, in a culture that rightly fears unhealthy censorship, there is a lot of naiveté about pornography and its effects. Conservatives tend to give the impression that if a book or movie has any sex in it, it should on that basis alone be banned, irrespective of any wider moral context and constant.

Liberals, on the other hand, tend to be so paranoid about anything that would limit free expression that they can no longer acknowledge the obvious: There is nothing wrong with Aphrodite and Eros having sex under a tree, but this is not an event meant to be watched. It is too raw. Love is meant to be made behind closed doors.

Every society has had taboos about sex – about having it and about exhibiting it. The wisdom in the taboo against exhibition is not, first and foremost, about morality and sin. It is about protecting people’s souls from the kind of unhappiness that our three Ontario couples experienced after they saw Aphrodite and Eros under a tree. Not everything is meant to be watched.

The truth of this concerns not just pornography in terms of sexual exhibition, but pertains to anything that is so raw as to over-stimulate our erotic energies. Karl Jung, in a warning that few of us ever heed, once cautioned us by saying that energy is not friendly and it is dangerously naive to think it is.

Energy is imperialistic. It can beat you up like the playground bully in the local schoolyard. If you don’t believe this, think about Jung’s comment the next time you can’t sleep at night.

Our culture is naive about pornography, even though it is right in saying that its net effect is not producing a society of sex-crazed people. Pornography’s real effect is infinitely more subtle and pernicious, and often shows no specific sexual face whatsoever. Pornography kills joy.

By over-stimulating us, it quickly depresses us, robbing us of the joy and delight we once had as children . . . and that we would normally feel as we rent motorhomes and set off with our middle-aged friends to finally have that joy-filled vacation we’ve dreamt about for 20 years.

Managing an Ascension

January 9, 1998

A friend of mine, who is somewhat bitter and cynical about the church, recently remarked: “What the institutional church today is trying to do is to put the beat face on the fact that it ‘s dying. Basically, it ‘s trying to manage a death.

An interesting expression, to manage a death! What he is suggesting is that the church, like a person adjusting a terminal disease, is trying to reshape its imagination to eventually accommodate itself to the unthinkable, its own dying.

He is right, I believe, in saying that the church today is trying to reshape its imagination. He is wrong about what it is trying to manage. What the church is trying to manage today is not a death, but an ascension. What needs reshaping in our imagination is the same thing that needed to be reshaped in the imagination of the first disciples in the forty days that stretched from the resurrection to the ascension. We need to understand again how to let go of one body of Christ so that it can ascend and let Pentecost happen. What is being said here?

Among the elements within the paschal mystery, the ascension is the least understood. We are clearer about the meaning of the death and resurrection of Christ and the descent of the Spirit at Pentecost. We have less understanding of the ascension. What happened at the ascension?

The forty days between the resurrection and the ascension were, as scripture makes clear, not a time of unadulterated joy for the first disciples. It was a time of some joy, but also of considerable confusion, despondency, and loss of faith. In the days before the Ascension, the disciples were overjoyed whenever they recognized again their Lord, but most of the time they were confused and despondent and full of real doubt as they were unable to find and recognize in what was happening around them the Jesus to whom they had once given their hopes and their lives. At one point, they gave up completely and, as John put it, went back to their former way of life, fishing and the sea.

However during that time leading up to the ascension, Jesus slowly reshaped their imaginations. They learned that something had died, something else, far richer, had been born, and now they had to give up clinging to what had been, Jesus’ former presence, so that they could receive him in a new way. The theology and spirituality of the ascension is essentially contained in these words: Refuse to cling to what once was, let it go and let it bless you, so that you can recognize the new life you already have with and within you and receive its spirit. The synoptic gospels teach that to us in their pictorial rendering of the ascension; Jesus blesses everyone and then rises bodily out of their sight. John gives us the same theology, in a different picture, in his description of the encounter on Easter morning between Jesus and Mary Magdala: “Mary don ‘t cling to me!”

Today, in the church, we are trying manage an ascension, not a death. I can easily see where my friend can be confused because every ascension presupposes a death and a birth can sometimes look like a death. So where, really, is the church today?

Edward Schillebeeckx has suggested that we are living in that time, and that despondency, that was felt by the early disciples between Jesus’ death and their realization of his resurrection. We are today where they were, feeling what they felt, walking on the road to Emmaus. The Christ we once knew has been crucified and we cannot yet recognize that he is alive, more alive then before, and walking with us, though in a new way. Hence, as on the road to Emmaus, we also frequently walk with faces downcast, in faith despair, needing Christ to appear in a new guise to reshape our imaginations so that we can recognize him as he is now present to us.

I think Schillebeeckx is right about this, save that I would put things a bit further down that same road. The church today is in that time between the resurrection and the ascension, feeling mostly despondent, with its imagination attuned to a former experience of Christ, unable to consistently recognize Christ in the present moment. The church we grew up in, that body of Christ has been crucified, but Christ is not dead, the church is not dead. Both Jesus and the church are very alive, walking with us, reshaping our imaginations, reinterpreting the scriptures for us, telling us: “Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ, the church, should so suffer ….”

To have faith today is to be in that time between the death of Christ and the ascension, vacillating between joy and despondency, trying to manage an ascension.

A Crisis Of Imagination

December 19, 1997

J. R. Tolkien, the famous novelist, was one of the persons who helped C.S. Lewis to accept Christianity. As a man of considerable imagination he was not one to easily denigrate this faculty.

Yet he clearly knew its limits. One night, after hours of listening to Lewis object to certain aspects of the faith, Tolkien suggested to him that his resistance was not so much a question of belief as it was of imagination: “Your inability to understand stems from a failure of imagination on your part.”

There is something very important in that statement. It tells us that the seat of our faith does not lie within our imaginations and that we cannot sustain our faith by our imaginations. To forget this can leave us open to a dangerous confusion. Let me try to explain this by way of an example:

Recently, at a retreat, a woman approached me for spiritual counsel. Her’s was a curious quandary: She felt both full of faith and full of doubt all at the same time.

She began by telling me that she was, in her mind, a very orthodox Roman Catholic; somewhat pious even. Yet, try as she might, she could not believe that Christ physically rose from the dead, nor that we will one day rise from the dead .

“I believe that Christ lived on after his death, in some way, but his body rotted in the grave. I don’t believe the tomb was empty. Likewise with us. I believe in immortality, but not in resurrection. If I can’t believe that, and I can’t, and I know I never will, does that make me an atheist? Am I losing my faith?

Looked at superficially, it might appear that she is losing her faith, at least in that she is unable to believe in some non-negotiable part of the creed. Such a judgment, though, can be quite simplistic.

My suggestion to her was somewhat in the line of Tolkien’s comment to C. S. Lewis. Her struggles were much more with her imagination and its incapacity to give her a mental construct of resurrection than they were with believing in the resurrection. What is the difference?

Contrast these two scenarios:

Imagine yourself lying in bed some night. You have just had a very good time of prayer. You are flooded with feelings and images about God. You have strong, clear feelings that God exists. On that particular evening you have no faith doubts – you can feel the existence of God.

Now … imagine another night, a darker one. You wake up from a fitful sleep and are overwhelmed by the sense that you don’t believe in God. You try to convince yourself that you still believe, but you cannot. Every attempt to imagine that God exists and to feel his presence comes up empty.

You feel empty and you feel the emptiness of the world itself. Try as you like, you cannot shake the feeling that you no longer believe. Try as you like, you can no longer regain the solid ground you once stood on. Try as you like, you can no longer make yourself feel the existence of God.

Does this mean that on one of these nights you have a strong faith and on the other you have a weak one? No! On the one night you have a strong imagination and on the other you have a weak one.

On the one night you can imagine the presence of God and on the other night you cannot imagine it. Imagination is not faith.

Daniel Berrigan, in his usual colorful manner, states the issue laconically, crassly, but accurately: Where does you faith live? In the head? In the heart?

Your faith, he assures us, is rarely where your head is at, just as it is rarely where your heart is at. Your faith is where your ass is at! Where are you living? What are you doing? These things – our actions, our charity, our morality – are what determine whether we believe or not.

Passing strange, and strangely true, the posterior is a better indication of where we stand with these than are the head and the heart. For we all have the experience of being within certain commitments (a marriage, a family, a church) where, at times our heads and our hearts are not there – but we are there!

The head tells us this doesn’t make sense; the heart no longer has the type of feelings that would keep us there; but we remain there, held by something deeper, something beyond what we can explain or feel. This is where faith lives and this is what faith means.

The woman who sought spiritual counsel from me did believe in the resurrection because, by almost all indicators, she lived her life in function of it.

Her problem was that her imagination could not picture it. She, like all of us, suffers the poverty of a finite imagination trying to picture the infinite. This, however, should never be confused with the loss of faith.