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.

1998 The Year of the Holy Spirit

December 14, 1997

For a great number of people the date, January 1, 2000, is of immense significance. They conceive of this date as, literally, something that comes along only once every thousand years. Moreover many see this particular transition to a new millennium as more than just an extremely rare calendar event. Sectarian groups of all kinds, Christian fundamentalists and neo-pagans alike, are making special preparations, expecting either the end of the world or some kind of supernatural intervention that will usher in a new age of peace and harmony.

Being one of those persons who does not believe in the magic of numbers, I have no doubt that January 1st, 2000, will dawn and end just like every other day. However, while there is no magic in numbers, there is a symbolism in them and an occasion like this one, the turn of a millennium, just as any important birthday or anniversary, offers an important symbolic opportunity for renewal in commitment, gratitude, and reconciliation. We can ignore the symbolism of this date of course, just as we can ignore a birthday, but then we botch an opportunity for grace.

It is with this in mind, that our present Pope, John Paul II, has asked that, for Christians, the year 2000 be a Jubilee year. In biblical terms, this means it should be a year of sabbath, a year of special reconciliation, forgiveness, healing, and making peace. But none of this will happen without proper preparation. Hence, the pope has asked us to make, in a manner of speaking, a three-year advent leading up to the year 2000, with each of the years dedicated to celebrating one of the persons of the Trinity. Thus, last year, 1997, was designated as the year of Jesus Christ; this year, 1998, is to be the year of the Holy Spirit; and next year, 1999, is intended as the year of God the Father.

So this year, 1998, is to be the year of the Holy Spirit. How might we celebrate that? What might we do to make 1998, for ourselves and the world, a year of the Holy Spirit?

Thomas Aquinas once defined the Holy Spirit as “the love between the Father and the Son.” That definition is valuable, though more theologically than spiritually and pastorally. In terms of appropriating the Holy Spirit more personally, the biblical definition of the Holy Spirit is, I feel, more helpful.

Biblically, the Holy Spirit is more described than defined and there are various ways, all of them rich, in which the Spirit is described in scripture.

For example, St. Paul, in his letter to the Galatians, tells us that there are two kinds of spirit, the spirit of the sarx (a spirit that opposes God) and the spirit of God, the Holy Spirit. The former is the spirit of envy, anger, gossip, factionalism, idolatry, impurity, self-centredness, and bitterness. This spirit, he tells us in simple language, brings division and unhappiness. Conversely, there is the Holy Spirit, the spirit of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, mildness, faith, fidelity, and chastity. This latter spirit, he assures us, brings unity and happiness into our lives.

Hence, in terms of personal renewal, one of the things we might do to make 1998 more a year of the Holy Spirit is to stop deluding ourselves about what spirit we often live within. If my life habitually contains more envy than admiration, anger than joy, gossip than praise, factionalism than community, impurity than chastity, and impatience than perseverance, then I am not living in the Holy Spirit, irrespective of whatever religious or liturgical activities I am involved in and might feel good about. But that is the Holy Spirit at one level.

John, in his Gospel, describes the Holy Spirit as a paraclete, an advocate … a lawyer for the poor. What an interesting concept! John tells us that the crucifixion of Jesus will set free the paraclete and that it will convict the world of its wrongness in crucifying an innocent person, Jesus. Among other things then, the Holy Spirit in John is the defender of the accused, of the victim, of the scapegoat, of anyone whom society deems expendable for the sake of the culture. To live in the Holy Spirit, therefore, is to be an advocate, a lawyer, for the poor and for those who are being victimized and scapegoated by the culture.

Biblically the Holy Spirit is the person and the principle both of private renewal and of social justice. By living in the Holy Spirit we come to selflessness and joy in our lives and we become, as well, advocates for the poor.

Let us each make 1998 a year of joy and of advocacy.

The Mysticism of the Crib

December 12, 1997

When Pablo Picasso was a young child, a huge fire broke out in the city where his family lived. A night of chaos followed with people rushing about the streets shouting, commotion, and anarchy everywhere. Later, as an adult, Picasso recalled that night and described how, through all the commotion, he said snug inside a harness-vest on his father’s chest, watching everything around him, all the turmoil, from a secure, protected space. He felt no fear at all, only wonder, as he took it all in. People were fearing for their lives, but he was snug and safe on his father’s chest.

This was not without long-term effects in his life. Art critics have pointed out that, as an artist, Picasso painted from precisely that perspective – a safe perch from which he could look at bedlam and disorder while being quite secure himself.

My memories are not exactly those of Picasso, but I have a warm memory too about being a child and feeling snug and secure in a world full of cold and chaos. My memory has to do with Christmas eve and going to church and seeing in the crib at the front of the church, the baby Jesus. Our parish still has the same crib, all these years later, and when I am home at Christmas and celebrate mass in the local parish, I still see parents bringing their young children forward to the crib to look at the nativity scene.

What goes on in the mind of a child when she or he looks at the infant, Jesus, sleeping in a manger of straw, surrounded by Mary, Joseph, the shepherds and the various animals? As adults, it is easy to be cynical about Christmas cribs – a plastic doll, lying on plastic straw. The stuff of saccharine, not of mysticism. But what does go on in the mind of a child?

Partly I am guessing and vaguely I am remembering, but a child, at least one who is not yet deeply wounded by some kind of abuse, will feel, before the crib, some of the same things that Picasso felt on the night of that great fire, the security of seeing things from the perspective of being held snug on a loving parent’s chest.

To a child’s eyes, the Christmas crib is heaven frozen in time. All the peace promised by Isaiah’s vision is there: a little baby, the prince of peace, the God of the whole universe, asleep peacefully in the straw, surrounded by a loving mother and an attentive father and praying shepherds and animals who are too stunned by the very sight of it all to even move. To a child, the nativity scene is the snug-harness of safety on the father’s chest or the mother’s breast. The peace and security once felt at the mother’s breast returns.

When a child sees and feels this, and any innocent heart will, that child walks away from the crib with a mystic’s eye and a mystic’s heart. For a time, at least, he or she will see and feel things from the perspective of the crib – where the God of the poor, the peaceful, the little and the innocent rules the world.

At the last supper, the scriptures tell us the beloved apostle rested his head on Jesus’ breast, a gesture of unique friendship and intimacy. This is a mystical image that parallels what we have just been describing. When you put your head on another’s breast, you have your ear just above that person’s heart and are able to hear his or her heartbeat.

To see the world while hearing Christ’s heartbeat. This is the real Christmas invitation. When the gospels tell us that it was the same disciple who leaned on Christ’s breast who later looked into the tomb and “saw” that Christ had risen, it means much more than a simple physical registering of the fact that Jesus was no longer in the tomb. It means that the beloved disciple saw precisely as someone who is, at the same time, hearing the heartbeat of Christ.. As a result, it says, he understood – with his soul.

St. Bonaventure once said that God gave us three eyes: the eye of the body, a physical eye through which we see things; the eye of the mind, a capacity to see things through reasoning and thought; and the eye of the soul, a capacity to see, feel and understand the things of God.

Christmas wants us to engage the eye of the soul. It is about leaning our head on the crib, Jesus’ breast, in order to hear his heartbeat and then turning our eyes out to the world to see things from that perspective.

The crib is the harness-vest on the mother’s breast.

Wrestling With God

December 10, 1997

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, and 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 an 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.

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 the 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, stills capture 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 times, seemingly, pit life against life.

Longing At The Centre

December 4, 1997

At the core of experience, at the centre of our hearts, there is longing. At every level, our being aches and we are full of tension. We give different names to it – loneliness, restlessness, emptiness, longing, yearning, nostalgia, wanderlust, inconsummation. To be a human being is to be fundamentally dis-eased.

And this dis-ease lies at the centre of our lives, not at the edges. We are not fulfilled person who occasionally get lonely, restful people who sometimes experience restlessness, or persons who live in habitual intimacy and have episodic battles with alienation and inconsummation. The reverse is truer. We are lonely people who occasionally experience fulfillment, restless souls who sometimes feel restful, and aching hearts that have brief moments of consummation.

Longing and yearning are so close to the core of the human person that some theologians define loneliness as being the human soul; that is, the human soul is not something that gets lonely, it is a loneliness. The soul is not something that has a cavity of loneliness within it; it is a cavity of loneliness, a Grand Canyon without a bottom, a cavern of longing created by God. The cavern is not something in the soul. It is the soul. The soul is not a something that has a capacity for God. It is a capacity for God.

When Augustine says: “You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” he is, of course, pointing out the reason why God would have made us this way. And, as his prayer indicates, the ultimate value of longing lies precisely in its incessant nature, by never letting us rest with anything less than the infinite and eternal it guarantees that we will seek God or be frustrated.

But beyond its ultimate purpose, to direct us towards our final purpose, the experience of longing has another central task in the soul. Metaphorically, it is the heat that forges the soul. The pain of longing is a fire that shapes us inside. How? What does the pain of longing do to the soul? What is the value in living in a certain perpetual frustration? What is gained by carrying tension?

Superficially, and this argument has been written up many times, carrying tension helps us to appreciate the consummation when it finally comes. Thus, temporary frustration makes eventual fulfillment so much sweeter, hunger makes food taste better, and only after sublimation can there be anything sublime. There is a lot of truth in that. But the pain of loneliness and longing shapes the soul too in other, more important, ways. All great literature takes it root precisely in this, how carrying tension shapes a soul. Longing shapes the soul in many ways, particularly by helping create the space within us where God can be born. Longing creates in us the stable and the manger of Bethlehem. It is the trough into which God can be born.

This is an ancient idea. Already centuries before Christ, Jewish apocalyptic literature had the motif: Every tear brings the Messiah closer. Taken literally, this might sound like bad theology – a certain quota of pain must be endured before God can come -but it is a beautiful, poetic expression of very sound theology: carrying tension stretches, expands, and swells, the heart, creating in it the space within which God can come. Carrying tension is what the bible means by “pondering”.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin left us a great image for this. For him, the soul, just like the body, has a temperature, and for Teilhard, what longing does is to raise the temperature of the soul. Longing, restlessness, yearning, and carrying tension raise our psychic temperatures. This, a raised temperature, has a number of effects on the soul:

First, analogous to what happens in physical chemistry, where unions that cannot take place a lower temperatures will often take place at higher ones, longing and yearning open us to unions that otherwise would not happen, particularly in terms of our relationship to God and the things of heaven, though the idea is not without its value within the realm of human intimacy. Put more simply, in our loneliness we sizzle and eventually burn away a lot of the coldness and other obstacles that block union.

Moreover, this sizzling, longing, brings the messiah closer because it swells the heart so that it becomes more what God created it to be – a Grand Canyon, without a bottom, that aches in lonely inconsummation until it finds its resting place in God.

One of Isaiah’s Visions

November 27, 1997

In this life there is no such a thing as a clear cut, pure joy. Everything comes mixed. As Henri Nouwen once put it: Every bit of life is touched by a bit of death. In every satisfaction there is limitation; in every embrace, there is distance; in every success, there is the fear of jealousy; behind every smile, there is a tear; and in all forms of light there is knowledge of the surrounding darkness. When you touch the hand of a returning friend, you already know that he or she will have to leave again, and when you are overwhelmed by the beauty of a sunset, you miss the friend who can not be there with you. Joy and pain are born at the same place within us and we can never find proper words to capture our own feelings.

It is because of this strange paradox, the fact that joy is always mixed with pain, that all the joyful mysteries and events within Christ’s life and within our own lives are experienced in such a mixed way.

For example, when the Virgin Mary, a young mother, comes before Simeon in the temple, he looks at her and her child and says: “This child is destined for the fall and rise of many, a sign that will be contradicted … and a sword too will pierce your own heart. ” An interesting thing to say to a young mother, deep joy and deep pain will come to you because of your child! We have our own experiences of this. Many is the mother who cries at her daughter’s wedding, even though it is a joyful occasion. A sword too is piercing her heart. Sensitive people often cry in the face of joy, not just because joy is often too gracious and raw to take, but because its light sends beams into many other places. Simeon understood this; revelation reveals pain even as it brings joy.

Why is this so? Why is it that every time joy reveals itself something painful also pierces the heart?

Revelation means precisely to unveil, to pull off masks, to lay secrets bare, to reveal things hidden, as scripture says, since the foundation of the world. Deep joy is a revelation. It uncovers things and lets us feel things hidden since the beginning of time. Joy is a light and, as a light, it shines into everything, showing us both our glory and our limits. In joy, just as much as in sorrow, we experience what Rahner describes when he says: “In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we realize that here, in this life, all symphonies remain unfinished.” Like Nouwen, Rahner too understands that, this side of eternity, there is no such a thing as a joy that comes pure and complete.

But again a series of questions arise: Why? Why does revelation, the truth, which is supposed to set us free, bring pain? Why does the gospel of Christ not bring us what we really want, joy without pain?

These are important questions because how we understand the relationship between joy and pain helps determine how we understand ourselves, happiness, and the gospel. Too often we have the false idea, very prevalent in our culture, that joy and pain are incompatible and that Christ came to rescue us from pain. Our culture tends to believe that if you are in pain you cannot be happy and to be happy you must avoid pain.

Nothing could be further from the truth. Joy and pain are not incompatible and Christ does not, as poor preaching sometimes wants us believe, promise us less pain. The reverse is closer to the truth, though any formula linking joy and pain must be very carefully worded since masochism is always a danger.

Careful wording aside, in this life, joy always comes with pain. Joy and pain both lie at the heart of what it means to be human. In terms of a biblical definition, the human being might well be defined as a being of joy, living in pain. And in the end that is what separates us from the rest of creation. The paradoxical connection between joy and pain, ultimately, points us towards eternity. By revealing to us our limits, it points us towards something greater, God’s kingdom, a higher synthesis of love and communion, within which, as the vision of Isaiah has it, there will be satisfaction without limit, embrace without distance, success without jealousy, smiles without tears, reunions without separation, joys without missing your loved ones, and life without death.

What Christ promises us is not a life on this earth without pain, but an eventual joy that will be clear-cut, pure, and which no one or no thing can ever take from us.

Purgative Embrace

November 20, 1997

“Let me be punished by a kiss.” That is a prayer Therese of Lisieux used to say.

What a curious, paradoxical phrase! Few of us, I suspect, pray that way, but it is a prayer rich in insight, containing within itself the rich theology of purgatory.

What can change a heart? What can melt bitterness, bring on remorse, and give us the courage to finally give up all the rationalization we do? What can move us beyond the moral muddles that so confound our lives? What single thing can move us to admit the misery and sin we live in? Not any kind of threat or punishment. The heart is moved, and purified, through a kiss. This, in essence, is the theology of purgatory.

Purgatory, as we know, is not a place separate from heaven. Protestant theology has always been right in rejecting purgatory when it is conceived of, precisely, as a place somewhere between heaven and hell where souls go to undergo some kind of punishment still due them because of sin. Scripture is clear, as is the teaching of Jesus: that in the end there are only two places or states, heaven and hell. One is either at God’s left or right, goat or sheep. Hence purgatory may never be conceived of as a separate place.

Neither may it be conceived as a place or state within which something punitive occurs. What happens in purgatory is not that God positively punishes us for our sins thus readying us for heaven. Punishment, conceived in this way, never readies anyone for anything. Purgatory is not about paying a debt for anything or leveling accounts before getting to enjoy a just, earned, reward. Rather, as the word itself suggests, purgatory is about purgation, purification, about a cleansing of the heart and soul that is at once moral, emotional, psychological, intellectual, aesthetic, and spiritual.

What has to happen in purgatory? What readies a heart for heaven? Bitterness must melt, violence must be renounced, sin must give way to remorse, jealousy must be transformed, rationalization must be let go of, fears must be moved beyond, moral muddles must be clarified, anxiety must turn to peace, restlessness to restfulness, anger to forgiveness, compulsiveness to freedom, hostility to perfect hospitality, and the insubstantiality of being just one single lonely inadequate person must give way to the sense of being held in a great communion. There is also the painful adjustment needed to let go of an earthly life for a life beyond.

And all of this can happen only through love, through an embrace, a purging kiss, as Therese so rightly intuited. The Father’s embrace of the prodigal son is a picture of purgatory. And we should not naively romanticize the scene. What the prodigal son would have felt at that moment was not pure, unadulterated joy for much of his heart would still have been far from his father. In the unconditionality of that embrace he would have become, for the first time really, fully aware of all that was wrong with him. Thus, on the one hand, he would, undeniably, have felt an overwhelming sense of relief and release, knowing that he was overwhelmingly and unconditionally being embraced by heaven. However, given his history and where this would have left him, there would have been, along with the relief and joy, a lot of other things too in that embrace.

The embrace would have contained considerable agony along with the ecstasy. In it, he would have also grasped his own misery, his sin, his ignorance, his distance from his father. The kiss would have been like a bright light shining directly into his soul, revealing all, good and bad. It would have been, initially, almost as painful as it was joyful, but it would, in an instant or over a period of time, have completely purified his heart. It would have been purgative, purgatory, melting his bitterness, enlightening his ignorance, bringing true remorse for his sin, turning his anger to forgiveness, his lust to admiration, and his restlessness into restfulness. It would too have purged him from the root cause of what drove him from his father’s house to begin with: the deep fear that ultimately he was insubstantial and needed to seize life for himself. Purity is being content within God’s embrace. Eventually, though not immediately, that embrace becomes pure ecstasy.

Purgatory is the pain and the joy of being purged by God’s kiss. The mystics used to tell us that we can already, now before death, choose exactly how much purgatory we want. Thus they used to pray for it: “Let me be punished by a kiss!”

Living Beyond Doubt

November 12, 1997

There is a story about St. Christopher, probably more legend than truth, which runs this way:

As a youth, Christopher was gifted in every way, except faith. He was a big man physically, powerful, strong, goodhearted, mellow, and well liked by all. He was also generous, using his physical strength to help others. His one fault was that he found it hard to believe in God. For him, the physical was what was real and everything else seemed unreal. However, he yearned to believe in God and deeply respected those who did believe. And so he lived his life in a certain honest agnosticism, unable to really believe in anything beyond what he could physically see, feel, and touch.

This, however, did not prevent him from using his gifts, especially his physical strength, to serve others. This became his refuge, generosity and service. He became a ferryboat operator, spending his life helping to carry people across a dangerous river. One night, so the legend goes, during a storm, the ferryboat capsized and Christopher dove into the dark waters to rescue a young child. Carrying that child to the shore, he looked into its face and saw there the face of Christ. After that he believed, for he had seen the face of Christ. The very name, Christopher, contains the legend. Christopher means CHRIST-BEARER.

Fact or fiction? In either case, the story contains, within its very simplicity, a profound lesson. It gives us an answer, a practical one, to one of the most difficult questions of all: What should we do when our faith is weak? What should be our reaction in the face of the fact that God often seems silent, distant, dead? How do we move from believing only in the physical, from believing in the reality of only what we can see, feel, touch, taste, and smell, to believing in the existence of deeper, spiritual, realities?

Christopher’s answer? Live as honestly and respectfully as you can and use your gifts to help others. God will appear. Faith is not so much a question of feeling as of selfless service.

That is also the lesson in the biblical account of the apostle, Thomas, and his doubt about the resurrection of Jesus. Remember how he protests: “Unless I can (physically) place my finger in the wounds of his hands and stick my finger into the wound of his side, I will not believe.” It is noteworthy that Jesus offers no resistance or rebuke in the face of this remark. Instead he takes Thomas at his word: “Come here, and (physically) place your finger in the wounds of my hand and the wound in my side; see for yourself that I am real and not a ghost.”

That is an open challenge for all of us: “Come and see for yourselves that I am real and not a ghost!” The challenge, however, has a couple of conditions: honesty and generosity.

Skepticism and agnosticism, even atheism, are not a problem as long as one is honest, non-rationalizing, non-lying, ready to efface oneself before reality as it appears, and generous in giving his or her life away in service. If these conditions are met, God, the author and source of all reality, will eventually become evident, even to those who need physical proof. The stories of Christopher and Thomas teach us that and they assure us that God is neither angered nor threatened by an honest agnosticism.

Faith is never certainty. Neither it is the sure feeling that God exists. Conversely, unbelief is not to be confused with the absence of the felt assurance that God exists. There are, for everyone of us, dark nights of the soul, silences of God, cold lonely seasons, bitter times when God’s appearances to us cannot be truly grasped or recognized. The history of faith, as witnessed by the life of Jesus and the lives of the saints, shows us that God often seems dead and, at those times, the reality of the empirical world can so overpower us that nothing seems real except what we can see and feel right now, namely our own pain.

Whenever this happens, we need to become Christ-bearers, Christophers, honest agnostics who use their goodness and God-given strengths to help carry others across the burdensome rivers of life. God does not ask us to have a faith that is certain, but a service that is sure. We have the assurance that, should we faithfully help carry others without first thinking of ourselves, we will one day find ourselves before the person of Christ who will gently say to us: “See for yourself, that I am real, and not a ghost.”

No Exempt Areas

November 6, 1997

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One of the constants within the writings of the saints is the idea that spirituality and morality are all of one piece. Every area affects every other area and all areas are important. Nothing may be deemed exempt.

Great spiritual writers go on to affirm that one cannot progress beyond a certain point of maturity if any one area of life, however small, remains unredeemed because of conscious exemption. John of the Cross uses an interesting image here. He states that the soul is like a bird and a bird is bound to the ground just as effectively by a light thread as by a heavy chain. In either case it can not fly.

There is a lesson in that for both conservatives and liberals alike, though, in this column for reasons that will be given, I will pick more on liberals.

Today, on both sides of the ideological spectrum we are invited, always it seems for the highest reasons, to designate some areas of our lives as exempt from moral scrutiny and religious importance. Worse still, sometimes contemporary moral and spiritual writers positively pit legitimate moral areas against each other, creating illicit dichotomies of every kind.

Conservatives do this in their tendency to see private morality, private prayer, and church-going as the critical religious and moral areas, with the curious concomitant affirmation that economic justice, racism, sexism, capital punishment, and the like, are not of the same importance.

Further, not infrequent, is the conservative who positively sets one of these against another one: A challenge to economic capitalism is a challenge to some of the essentials of Christianity. Feminism goes against family life. The list goes on, illicit dichotomies forcing false choice; morality set against morality, with certain areas important and certain areas exempt.

Liberals fare no better … and it is to one area in particular that I want to really speak in this column, namely, the liberal tendency to exempt from moral scrutiny and religious importance the area of private sexuality:

I am not sure how many times, but it is many, that I have attended lectures and workshops given by respected liberal theologians, good theologians all of them, wherein the impression was given that a concern for sexual matters, especially private sexual matters, is an unhealthy hang up that is positively blocking movement towards an ethic that is more justice-oriented. My dispute has never been with the premise that we are not focused enough on justice within our moral agendas, that I accept. My disagreement rather is with the following:

Where do we get this curious logic that one aspect of morality is enhanced when we denigrate another legitimate moral concern? How is justice moved forward if we are less attentive to the importance of our sexual lives? Is this not at least a little tantamount to the person who feels affirmed only when someone else is put down?

I suspect that I will lose any status I still retain within the liberal community by saying this, but it is the one point within liberalism, both ecclesial and secular, that has always made me uncomfortable and made me less than a full ideological participant. We simply cannot, for whatever reasons – ideological, historical reaction, personal rationalization – exempt one area, as if it was not important, and then hope to develop an ethic of justice and community that can transform the world. It cannot be done. The testimony of the saints and human experience suggest otherwise.It is noteworthy that you do not see this in truly great liberals. Dorothy Day, for instance, founded the Catholic Worker on a double principle: justice and private morality, including sexual morality. Those two principles, working together, is what made Dorothy Day and Catholic Worker great. My fear is that Catholic Worker will not survive, long range, at least not as anything that offers any real alternative to the culture, if it compromises, even a little, on either of those two principles.

Morality is all of a piece. No one part is enhanced when another is made exempt or denigrated. We need, liberals and conservatives alike, to have a lot more courage and wisdom in facing this if we hope to offer the world anything more than the inconsistencies with which it is already engulfed.

God as Victim

October 30, 1997

“And there shone on them in that dark hour a light that has never darkened; a white fire clinging to that group like an unearthly phosphorescence, blazing its track through the twilights of history and confounding every effort to confound it with the mists of mythology and theory; that shaft of light or lightening by which the world itself has struck and isolated and crowned it; by which its own enemies have made it more illustrious and its own critics have made it more inexplicable; the halo of hatred around the Church of God.” (The Everlasting Man, Hodder & Stoughton, 1939, p.188)

G.K. Chesterton wrote those words more than sixty years ago. One of the things that, for him, gave the church credibility is the fact that, invariably, it is surrounded by a halo of hatred.

I quote his words not as an attempt to offer an apologia for the church today as it suffers through a period within which it is frequently an object of intense hatred. Defensiveness is not the purpose here since I am one of those persons who is not entirely sorry that a lot of anger is currently being directed towards us in the church. Some of this anger is justified, after a few centuries of privilege, and all of it will, I submit, be helpful in fuelling an important period of purification within the church. I would rather be a priest in a time of anti-clericalism than in a time within which priests and church are unduly privileged since it is far easier to live the gospel in the former situation. Thus, we, inside the church, should have a curious gratitude for all that anger that is being directed against us today. Besides, as Chesterton points out, paraphrasing Jesus, the church will always be hated.

The point here is not to defend the church, but to make a critical point about God and the theology of God – a theology which is often grossly misunderstood.

And the point is this: Christianity is the only religion which worships the scapegoat, the one who is hated, excluded, spat upon, blamed for everything, ridiculed, shamed, and made expendable. Christianity is the only religion that focuses on imitating the victim and which sees God in the one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred.

There are some important lessons to be learned from this, not the least of which has to do with where we see God, truth, and goodness. We need, today, some correctives since we live in a culture which, not unlike most cultures in the past, scapegoats some persons to the benefit of the others and then identifies God and holiness with those who have created the scapegoats.

God is not to be confusedly identified with the myths of success, power, glamour, and popularity. Never confuse God and what is holy with current cultural religion which, antithetical to Christ, worships the included, the glamorous, the ones who aren’t shamed and ridiculed, and the ones who seem important and indispensable. The God of our culture and the God that is preached in so many of our churches is not the God who dies on a cross, is hated, spat upon, and is excluded and scapegoated in ignorance. No, our culture does not worship a crucified God. The God Jesus revealed, is still, in our very own culture, excluded, mocked, scapegoated, made expendable, and often killed, mostly in the name of God and truth. Where do we see this?

Our own culture, like every other culture past and present, creates a category of persons that it deems expendable and then subsequently victimizes through exclusion, ridicule, scapegoating, and often through actual death. Who constitutes that category shifts slightly from time to time, but there is always a common denominator, it includes always those who are the weakest.

Thus, for instance, our culture, marginalizes and scapegoats the sick, the poor, the handicapped, the unborn, the unattractive, the non-productive, and the aged. These we deem expendable and subsequently decertify in terms of full status within the human race. Worse still, we identify God and holiness with those who are doing the excluding. But that is antithetical to true religion – and true wisdom.

Where is God? God is on the side of the victim, standing with the one who is excluded, specially present in the one being ridiculed, and dying in the one who is being put to death.

True Christianity knows this: It worships the scapegoat – the one who is surrounded by the halo of hatred.

Some Christian Koans

October 23, 1997

Zen masters, when they teach meditation, occasionally give their pupils something they call a “Koan”. A koan is a puzzle which, prior to long hours of meditation, appears ridiculous, an expression of rare paradox or of something that appears as pure nonsense. For example, a Zen master might ask a student: “You know the sound made by two hands clapping, but what is the sound of one hand clapping?”

Recently, I made a retreat directed by Richard Rohr. In one of his final talks, he gave a series of aphorisms. He called these “five messages” that people in the Western world today need to hear and more deeply appropriate. They aren’t exactly koans, except perhaps for the last one, but, meditated upon, they can function in the same way. I share them with you:

1) Life is hard.

That might sound obvious, except for the fact that almost everything in our culture invites us to believe the opposite; or at least believe that if our own lives are hard we are doing something wrong. So much around us suggests that life should not be hard, but comfortable, devoid of pain, frustration, illness, and loneliness.

But life is intrinsically hard and all the efforts we make will not make it easy. If we could accept this fact we would be a lot less self-centred, impatient, and angry with our situation. When we are baptized we are signed with the cross to teach us precisely this.

2) You are going to die.

Again, this sounds so obvious that it appears nonsensical to say it, but it is not so obvious at all. Even though all of us know, theoretically, that we are someday going to die, we rarely live in the face of that mortality, that is, we seldom take the horizon provided by our own mortality, own impending death, as a perspective within which to live, love, work, and make our peace with what’s around us.

Most previous generations were better at this than we are. They felt more vulnerable before death than does our generation and that realization, that knowledge that their lives were so circumscribed and that they were so mortal, gave them both a wisdom and an adulthood that we often lack. Simply put, until we accept, really existentially accept, that we are going to die we will never fully sort out what’s ultimately important in life, we will never fully appreciate the lives we actually have, and we will never really grow up. Anyone who has ever been clinically dead and then revived will tell you exactly that.

3) You are not that important.

Understood correctly, this is not a statement that puts us down, but one which helps us to situate ourselves correctly within the universe and within human community.

As long as I understand myself to be the centre of the universe, the centre of importance, the one whom life is really about, all my efforts, even my spiritual ones, will ultimately be about self-aggrandizement, about my own successes, and about my own attempts to stand out from others. Conversely, when I accept that what is really special about me is not where I am different from others but where I am the same, then my efforts will not be to stand out, but to serve, to build up others, to melt ever more deeply into community.

4) You are not in control.

As long as I still think that I am in control of my life, I am living a great and a dangerous illusion. The mystery which I am part of – God, others, the cosmic world, my real self, love, sexuality, birth, creativity, meaning, joy, death, rebirth – is beyond me and beyond my control. I need to give myself over to it, learn its dance, deeply respect its rhythms, accept its limits, thank it for its joys, go where it asks me, and demand nothing more than it gives me. To let go is biblical faith.

5) Your life is not about you.

You are just an instant of what is everywhere happening. That is not a Zen koan. It’s adult, biblical, wisdom. Life is not about you. You are about life and your job is to listen, obey, and adore. Knowing this will help you give up the crippling illusion of private wholeness and private terribleness.