Words give us meaning. We can’t make or remake reality, but the words we choose to name our reality can lift us out of the humdrum of everyday experience.

Unfortunately, today many of the words we need to give us proper meaning no longer have much power to do that. We’re like D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley. Of her world, Lawrence writes: “All the great words were cancelled for her generation. Love, joy, happiness, home, mother, father, husband, all these great dynamic words were half dead now.” That’s true too for us. More and more, the words we need to give us meaning are anemic so that deep things aren’t deep anymore. Why?

The meaning we give to things depends upon the words with which we surround them. For example, suppose you suffer from chronic backache. Your doctor can tell you that you have arthritis, a biological way of explaining your pain, and you feel better because a symptom suffers less when it knows where it belongs. However, you can see a psychologist about the same symptom and she can tell you that your pain is more than a medical condition: “You’re in mid-life crisis,” she says. And it’s consoling to know that you suffer from more than the simple creaking of age. But this can go deeper. Talking to a spiritual director, you are told that this pain is your cross to carry, your Gethsemane, your dark night of the soul, your exile to Babylon, your desert experience. Ordinary pain now becomes something with a religious meaning and significance. What something means depends upon the words we use to describe it.

The same holds true for love. What does it mean to “fall in love”? That you have “great chemistry” with someone? That you have found a “soulmate”? That last interpretation doesn’t exclude “great chemistry”, but it adds the rich dimension of soul. A deeper set of words frames your experience against a much wider horizon and that is the secret to deeper meaning.

In his book, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom gives us this example. An admirer of Plato, Bloom shares how Plato tells of his students sitting around and sharing about the meaning of their “immortal longings”. Bloom shares how his own students are prone to sit around and share about “being horny”. Such is the difference in meaning! Plato’s words for desire are half-dead now in our culture and the words we use to replace them often lack depth.

When we surround our everyday experiences with deeper words, these experiences – love, joy, sex, pain, happiness, marriage, being a father, being a mother, being a husband, being a wife, making coffee, drinking it, doing our ordinary chores – will contain something of the timeless, the eternal. Meaning and happiness are less about where we are living and what we are doing than about how we view and name where we are living and what we are doing. An experience is only sublime when it’s given its proper name.

There’s a famous story of a journalist interviewing two workers at a construction site where a new church was being built. She asked the first: “What do you do for a living?” His reply: “I’m a bricklayer” She asked his co-worker: “What do you do for a living?” He replied: “I’m building a cathedral!” Perspective changes everything, and it comes from how we understand and name what we’re experiencing.

Canadian poet, J.S. Porter, once wrote: “When you take away the sky, the earth wilts!” He’s right. When we don’t surround our ordinary activities with the proper words and symbols we soon lose all enchantment and our experiences become precisely half-dead. We need a wide vision, high symbols, and the right words to turn our ordinary, seemingly mundane, lives into the stuff of poetry and romance.

Rainer Maria Rilke once received a letter from a young man who complained that it was difficult for him to become a poet because he lived in a small town where life was too domestic, too parochial, and too small-time to provide inspiration for poetry. Rilke’s answer was something to this effect: If your daily life seems poor to you, then tell yourself that you are not poet enough to call forth its riches, because there are no places or lives on earth that are not rich. Every life is potentially the stuff of poetry, of romance, of the sublime.

What’s the secret to calling forth those riches?

G. K. Chesterton, I believe, had it right when he said that we need to learn to look at things familiar until they look unfamiliar again. We have an unhealthy itch for salvation through novelty alone, when in fact the words we need to lift us to the heights of poetry and the sublime are often found in the ancient wells of faith, on old parchments of scripture, and in over-familiar hymns and confessions we call the creeds.

When our words are half-dead, we may need to relearn some older languages.

There are different ways of being excluded in life.

Earlier this year, one of my older brothers died. By every indication he had lived an exemplary life, one lived mainly for others. He died much loved by everyone who knew him. His was a life lived for family, church, community, and friends.

Giving the homily at his funeral, I shared that, while he almost always brought a smile, a graciousness, and some wit to every situation, underneath he sometimes had to swallow hard to always do that. Why? Because, even though through his entire adult life he gave himself to serving others, for much of his life he didn’t have much choice in the matter. Here’s his story.

He was one of the older children in our family, a large second-generation immigrant family, struggling with poverty in an isolated rural area of the Canadian prairies where educational facilities weren’t easily available at that time. So, for him, as for many of his contemporaries, both men and women, the normal expectation was that after elementary school (an eighth-grade education) you were expected to end your school days and begin to work to support your family. Indeed, when he graduated from elementary school, there was no local high school for him to go to. Making this more unfortunate, he was perhaps the brightest, most gifted mind in our family. It’s not that he didn’t want to continue his formal education. But, he had to do what most others of his age did at that time, leave school and begin working, giving your entire salary over every month to support your family. He did this with good cheer, knowing this was expected of him.

Through the years, from age sixteen when he first entered the work force until he took over the family farm in his mid-thirties, he worked for farmers, worked in construction, and did everything from operating a backhoe to driving a truck. Moreover, when our parents died and he took over our farm, there were a number of years when he was still pressured to use the farm to support the family. By the time he was finally freed of this responsibility, it was too late (not radically, but existentially) for him to restart his formal education. He lived out his final years before retirement as a farmer, though as one who found his energy elsewhere, in involvement in ongoing education and lay ministries programs where he thrived emotionally and intellectually. Part of his sacrifice too was that he never married, not because he was a temperamental bachelor, but because the same things that bound him to duty also, existentially, never afforded him the opportunity to marry.

After I shared his story at his funeral, I was approached by several people who said: That’s also my brother! That’s also my sister! That was my dad! That was my mother.

Having grown up where this was true of a number of my older siblings, today, whenever I see people working in service jobs such as cooking in cafeterias, cleaning houses, mowing lawns, working in construction, doing janitorial work, and other work of this kind, I am often left to wonder, are they like my brother? Did they get to choose this work or are they doing it because of circumstances? Did this person want to be a doctor, or writer, a teacher, an entrepreneur, or a CEO of some company, and end up having to take this job because of an economic or other circumstance? Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing demeaning or less-than-noble in these jobs. Indeed, working with your hands is perhaps the most honest work of all – unlike my own work within the academic community where it can be easy to be self-serving and mostly irrelevant. There’s a wonderful dignity in working with your hands, as there was for my brother. However, the importance and dignity of that work notwithstanding, the happiness of the person doing it is sometimes predicated on whether or not he or she had a choice, that is, whether or not he or she is there by choice or because factors ranging from the economic situation of their family, to their immigrant status, to lack of opportunity, have forced them there.

As I walk past these folks in my day-to-day life and work, I try to notice them and appreciate the service they are rendering for the rest of us. And sometimes I say to myself: This could be my bother. This could be my sister. This could be the brightest mind of all who was not given the opportunity to become a doctor, a writer, nurse, a teacher, or a social worker. If in the next life, as Jesus promised, there’s to be a reversal where the last shall be first, I hope these people, like my brother, who were deprived of some of the opportunities that the rest of us enjoyed, will read my heart with an empathy that surpasses my understanding of them during their lifetime.

Harvard psychologist Robert Coles, in describing the French mystic Simone Weil, once suggested that what she really suffered from and what motivated her life was her moral loneliness. What is that?

Moral loneliness is what we experience when we ache for moral affinity, that is, for a soulmate, for someone who meets us, understands, and honors all that’s deepest and most precious inside us.  

We are lonely in different ways. We feel restlessness despite experiencing intimacy, and we feel a nostalgia for a home we can never quite find. There’s loneliness, a restlessness, an aching, a yearning, a longing, an appetite, a disquiet, a nostalgia, a timelessness inside us that never quite feels consummated.

Moreover, this dis-ease lies at the center of our experience, not at its edges. We are not restful people who sometimes get restless, serene people who sometimes experience disquiet, or fulfilled people who occasionally get frustrated. Rather we are restless beings who sometimes find rest, disquieted persons who sometimes find solitude, and dissatisfied men and women who sometimes find satisfaction.

And, among all these many yearnings, one is deeper than the others. What we ultimately long for beneath everything else is moral affinity, for a soul partner, for someone to meet us in the depth of our soul, for someone who honors all that’s most precious in us. More than we long for someone to sleep with sexually, we long for someone to sleep with in this way, morally.

What does this mean?

It might be expressed this way: Each of us nurses a dark memory of once having been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, an imprint in us of a love so tender, good, and pure that its memory is a prism through which we see everything else. The old myths express it well when they tell that, before we were born, God kissed our souls and we go through life always remembering, in some intuitive way, that kiss and measuring everything else in relation to it and its original purity, tenderness, and unconditionality.

This unconscious memory of once having been touched and caressed by God creates the deepest place inside of us, the place where we hold all that’s most precious and sacred to us. When we say that something “rings true”, what we are really saying is that it honors that deep place in our hearts, that it coincides with a deep truth, tenderness, and purity that we have already experienced.

From this place issues forth all that is deepest and truest inside us – both our kisses and our tears. Paradoxically this is the place that we most guard from others, even as it is the place that we would most like someone to enter, providing that entry respects the purity, tenderness, and unconditionality of the original caress of God which formed that tender cavity in the first place.

This is the place of deep intimacy and deep loneliness, the place where we are innocent and the place where we are violated, the place where we are holy, temples of God, sacred churches of reverence, and the place we corrupt when we act against truth. This is our moral center and the aching we feel there is aptly called moral loneliness. It’s here that we long for a soulmate.

And it’s in this longing, in this unyielding ache, that we are driven outward where, like the Biblical woman in the Song of Songs, we achingly search for someone to sleep with morally.

Sometimes that longing is fixed on a certain person, and that fixation can be so obsessive that we lose all emotional freedom. As well, we can conclude, as does our culture, that this at its root is a longing for sexual union. There’s some truth in that, despite its one-sidedness. Sexual union, in its true form, is indeed the “one-flesh” consummation decreed by the Creator after the condemnation of loneliness – “it is not good for the man to be alone.” Outside of sexual union, in the end, one is always somewhat alone, single, separate, cut off, a minority of one.

But, ultimately, we are lonely at a level that sex alone cannot satisfy. More deeply than we long for a sexual partner, we long for moral affinity. Our deepest longing is for a partner to sleep with morally, a kindred spirit, a soulmate in the truest meaning of that phrase.

Great friendships and great marriages invariably have this at their root, namely, deep moral affinity. The persons in these relationships are “lovers” in the deep sense because they sleep with each other at that deep level, irrespective of whether or not there is sexual union. At the level of feeling, this type of love is experienced as a “coming home”.  

Therese of Lisieux once suggested that, as humans, we are “exiles of the heart” and we can only overcome this by moral communion with each other, that is, through sleeping with each other in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, and faith.

You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you.

No single line, outside of scripture, has ever spoken to me as powerfully, as persistently, and as hauntingly, as that line from St. Augustine. In essence, it’s Augustine’s life story – and the story of each of our own lives as well.

As I read and study, I am often struck by a powerful line in some author which I immediately underline and copy. I have a whole booklet of quotes from Shakespeare, Aristotle, Plato, Aquinas, Teilhard, Einstein, Albert Camus, Steve Hawkings, Doris Lessing, Milan Kundera, John Steinbeck, Karl Rahner, John of the Cross, Ruth Burrows, James Hillman, Anne Frank, and Ivan Illich, among others. Yet, Augustine’s haunting line stands out among all these. 

What he asserts is that there is an incurable restlessness inside each of us that keeps us perpetually dis-eased. I have always felt this strongly in my own life and, while still in my twenties, wrote a book, The Restless Heart, in which I tried to articulate a spirituality for the restless (and perhaps mostly for myself) on the basis of this line from Augustine. Through the years, I have kept my eyes open for comparable and complementary expressions of Augustine’s famous axiom. Here are some:

Karl Rahner, a renowned theologian of the late 20^th century, in writing to a friend who feared he was missing out on too much in life, offered this counsel: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable, we learn that in this life there is no finished symphony.

The biblical author, Qoheleth, expresses it this way. In a passage familiar to most of us (“there is a season for everything”) helays out for us the rhythm of nature as God set it up. He tells us there’s a beautiful rhythm to time and nature and that everything has its proper time and place. However, he then ends with this stunning statement: God has made everything beautiful in its own time, but God has put timelessness into the human heart so that we are out of sync with time and the seasons from the beginning to the end. We never peacefully fit into the rhythm of things because something inside us is outside of time.

And who can forget the haunting words of Anne Frank, writing as a teenager locked away in an attic, hiding from the Nazis, jumping out of her skin with the restlessness of an adolescent and the anxiety of an artist, sharing that she simply can never be fully in the moment because I want to be everywhere all at the same time.  

Doris Lessing, the British novelist, asserts that inside each of us there’s a powerful, relentless energy (“1000 volts”) which keeps us perpetually dis-eased. Writing outside of a faith perspective, she asks, what is this energy for? Her answer: For everything and for anything – creativity, love, sex, justice. Nobel prize winning writer, Albert Camus, also writing outside of any faith perspective, had this interesting way of understanding the human spirit. He compared being inside human nature to being a prisoner trapped inside a medieval prison. Medieval prisons were designed to break the prisoner’s spirit by putting him in a room too small for him to ever fully stand up or to ever fully stretch out. The ceiling was too low and the room was too narrow. The intent was that eventually this would break a prisoner’s spirit. For Camus, that’s how we experience ourselves inside our own nature. The world is simply too small for us to ever really stand up or to ever really stretch out, and this wears away on our spirit.

These are some poignant expressions of this dis-ease, but there are expressions of it everywhere. Hinduism speaks of a certain “nostalgia for the infinite”inside us; Plato speaks of a “divine madness” at the center of the soul; Shakespeare speaks of our “immortal longings; Ruth Burrows opens her autobiography by confessing that she was born with a pathological complexity which has made her life a struggle; James Hillman, in a brilliant book, Suicide and the Soul, submits that most suicides occur because the soul is not being heard and consequently kills the body; and Philip Roth speaks of the blizzard of details that constitute the confusion of human biography.

Literature, philosophy, poetry, art, psychology, biography, theology, and spirituality are replete with expressions of this insatiability inside the human soul which ultimately cannot come to full peace with anything in this world. But this is as it should be. For Augustine, writing some 1700 years ago, this restlessness, this timelessness, this homesickness, this divine madness, these 1000 volts of energy inside us, this pathological complexity, and this confusion of human biography which keeps us perpetually restless, is at the end of the day, our greatest attribute; it’s God’s gift to us of immortality and divinity as a constitutive part of our soul.

Someone once asked Therese of Lisieux if it was wrong to fall asleep while in prayer. Her answer: Absolutely not. A little child is equally pleasing to her parents, awake or asleep – probably more when asleep!

That’s more than a warm, cute answer. There’s a wisdom in her reply that’s generally lost to us, namely, that God understands the human condition and gives us sacred permission to be human, even in the face of our most important human and spiritual commitments.

This struck me recently while listening to a homily. The preacher, a sincere and dedicated priest, challenged us with the idea that God must always be first in our lives. So far so good. But then he shared how upset he gets whenever he hears people say things like: “Let’s go to the Saturday evening mass, to get it over with.” Or, when a celebrant says: “We will keep things short today, because the game starts at noon.” Phrases like that, he suggested, betray a serious weakness in our prayer lives. Do they?

Maybe yes, maybe no. Comments like that can issue out of laziness, spiritual indifference, or misplaced priorities. They might also simply be an expression of normal, understandable human fatigue – a fatigue which God, the author of human nature, gives us permission to feel.

There can be, and often is, a naïveté about the place of high energy and enthusiasm in our lives. For example, imagine a family who, with the best of intentions, decides that to foster family togetherness they agree to make their evening meal, every evening, a full-blown banquet, demanding everyone’s participation and enthusiasm and lasting for ninety minutes. Wish them luck! Some days this would foster togetherness and there would be a certain enthusiasm at the table; but, soon enough, this would be unsustainable in terms of their energy, and more than one of the family members would be saying silently, let’s get this over with, or can we cut it a little short tonight because the game is on a 7:00.  Granted, that could betray an attitude of disinterest; but, more likely, it would simply be a valid expression of normal fatigue.

None of us can sustain high energy and enthusiasm forever. Nor are we intended to. Our lives are a marathon, not a sprint. That’s why it is good sometimes to have lengthy banquets and sometimes to simply grab a hotdog and run. God and nature give us permission to sometimes say, let’s get it over with, and sometimes to rush things so as to not miss the beginning of the game.

Moreover, beyond taking seriously the normal ebb and flow of our energies, there is still another, even more important angle to this. Enthusiastic energy or lack of them don’t necessarily define meaning.  We can do a thing because it means something affectively to us – or we can do something simply because it means something in itself, independent of how we feel about it on a given day. Too often, we don’t grasp this. For example, take the response people often give when explaining why they are no longer going to church services, “it doesn’t mean anything to me.” What they are blind to in saying this is the fact that being together in a church means something in itself, independent of how it feels affectively on any given day. A church service means something in itself, akin to visiting your aging mother. You do this, not because you are always enthusiastic about it or because it always feels good emotionally. No. You do it because this is your aging mother and that’s what God, nature, and maturity call us to do.

The same holds true for a family meal together. You don’t necessarily go to dinner with your family each night with enthusiasm. You go because this is how families sustain their common life. There will be times when you do come with high energy and appreciate both the preciousness of the moment and the length of the dinner. But there will be other times when, despite a deeper awareness that being together in this way is important, you will be wanting to get this over with, or sneaking glances at your watch and calculating what time the game starts.

So, scripture advises, avoid Job’s friends. For spiritual advice in this area, avoid the spiritual novice, the over-pious, the anthropological naïve, the couple on their honeymoon, the recent convert, and at least half of all liturgists and worship leaders. The true manual on marriage is never written by a couple on their honeymoon and the true manual on prayer is never written by someone who believes that we should be on a high all the time. Find a spiritual mentor who challenges you enough to keep you from selfishness and laziness, even as she or he gives you divine permission to be tired sometimes. A woman or man at prayer is equally pleasing to God, enthusiastic or tired – perhaps even more when tired.

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for thirty years and, during all those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship. But, on the day her husband died, they had gotten into an argument about something very insignificant and it had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and cutting words at each other. At a point, agitated and angry, her husband walked out of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably, the woman was devastated, both by the sudden death of her spouse but by that last exchange. “All these years,” she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then we have this useless argument over nothing and it ends up being our last conversation!”

The therapist led off with something meant in humor. He said: “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die just then!” Obviously, the man hadn’t intended his death, but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no apparent avenue for resolution.

However, then the therapist went into a different mode. He asked her: “If you had your husband back for five minutes what would you say to him?”  Without hesitation, she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how good he was to me for all these years, and how our little moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second that means nothing in terms our love.”

The therapist then said: “You’re a woman of faith, you believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express that all to him!”

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that we should have spoken to them while they were alive.  As Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.

And we desperately need that particular consolation, that second chance. No matter who we are, we’re always inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up. When Karl Rahner says that none of us ever have the “full symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring to the fact that in all our most important relationships none of us ever fully measures up. We cannot not be disappointing sometimes.

At the end of the day, all of us lose loved ones in ways similar to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished business, with bad timing. There are always things that should have been said and weren’t and there are always things that shouldn’t have been said and were.

But that’s were our Christian faith comes in. We aren’t the only ones who come up short. At the moment of Jesus’ death, virtually all of his disciples had deserted. The timing here was also very bad. Good Friday was bad long before it was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t believe there will always be perfect endings in this life, nor that we will always be adequate in life.  Rather we believe that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacies and weakness.

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity is special because in its belief in the communion of saints, “even the dead get a vote”.  They get more than a vote. They still get to hear what we’re saying to them.

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there was still something unresolved, where there was still a tension that needed easing, where you should have been more attentive, or where you feel badly because you never adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you might have, know it’s not too late. It can all still be done!

A colleague of mine, a clinical therapist, shares this story: A woman came to him in considerable distress. Her husband had recently died of a heart attack. His death had been sudden and at a most inept time. They’d been happily married for thirty years and, during all those years, had never had a major crisis in their relationship. But, on the day her husband died, they had gotten into an argument about something very insignificant and it had escalated to where they began to hurl some mean and cutting words at each other. At a point, agitated and angry, her husband walked out of the room, told her he was going shopping, then died of a heart attack before he got to the car. Understandably, the woman was devastated, both by the sudden death of her spouse but by that last exchange. “All these years,” she lamented, “we had this loving relationship and then we have this useless argument over nothing and it ends up being our last conversation!”

The therapist led off with something meant in humor. He said: “How horrible of him to do that to you! To die just then!” Obviously, the man hadn’t intended his death, but its timing was in fact awfully unfair to his wife, as it left her holding a guilt that was seemingly permanent with no apparent avenue for resolution.

However, then the therapist went into a different mode. He asked her: “If you had your husband back for five minutes what would you say to him?”  Without hesitation, she answered: “I’d tell him how much I loved him, how good he was to me for all these years, and how our little moment of anger at the end was a meaningless epi-second that means nothing in terms our love.”

The therapist then said: “You’re a woman of faith, you believe in the communion of saints; well, your husband is alive still and present to you now, so why don’t you just say all those things to him right now. It’s not too late to express that all to him!”

He’s right. It’s never too late! It’s never too late to tell our deceased loved ones how we really feel about them. It’s never too late to apologize for the ways we might have hurt them. It’s never too late to ask their forgiveness for our negligence in the relationship, and it’s never too late to speak the words of appreciation, affirmation, and gratitude that we should have spoken to them while they were alive.  As Christians, we have the great consolation of knowing that death isn’t final, that it’s never too late.

And we desperately need that particular consolation, that second chance. No matter who we are, we’re always inadequate in our relationships. We can’t always be present to our loved ones as we should, we sometimes say things in anger and bitterness that leave deep scars, we betray trust in all kinds of ways, and we mostly lack the maturity and self-confidence to express the affirmation we should be conveying to our loved ones. None of us ever fully measures up. When Karl Rahner says that none of us ever have the “full symphony” in this life, he isn’t just referring to the fact that none of us ever fully realizes her dream, he’s also referring to the fact that in all our most important relationships none of us ever fully measures up. We cannot not be disappointing sometimes.

At the end of the day, all of us lose loved ones in ways similar to how that woman lost her husband, with unfinished business, with bad timing. There are always things that should have been said and weren’t and there are always things that shouldn’t have been said and were.

But that’s were our Christian faith comes in. We aren’t the only ones who come up short. At the moment of Jesus’ death, virtually all of his disciples had deserted. The timing here was also very bad. Good Friday was bad long before it was good. But, and this is the point, as Christians, we don’t believe there will always be perfect endings in this life, nor that we will always be adequate in life.  Rather we believe that the fullness of life and happiness will come to us through the redemption of what has gone wrong, not least with what has gone wrong because of our own inadequacies and weakness.

G.K. Chesterton said that Christianity is special because in its belief in the communion of saints, “even the dead get a vote”.  They get more than a vote. They still get to hear what we’re saying to them.

So, if you’ve lost a loved one in a situation where there was still something unresolved, where there was still a tension that needed easing, where you should have been more attentive, or where you feel badly because you never adequately expressed the affirmation and affection that you might have, know it’s not too late. It can all still be done!

A number of years ago, I attended the funeral of a man who died at the age of ninety. From every indication, he had been a good man, solidly religious, the father of a large family, a man respected in the community, and a man with a generous heart. However, he had also been a strong man, a gifted man, a natural leader, someone to whom a group would naturally look to take the reins and lead. Hence, he held a number of prominent positions in the community. He was a man very much in charge.

One of his sons, a Catholic priest, gave the homily at his funeral. He began with these words: Scripture tells us that the sum of a man’s life is seventy years, eighty for those who are strong. Now our dad lived for ninety years. Why the extra twenty years? Well, it’s no mystery. He was too strong and too much in charge of things to die at seventy or eighty. It took God an extra twenty years to mellow him out. And it worked. The last ten years his life were years of massive diminishment. His wife died, and he never got over that. He had a stroke which put him into assisted living and that was a massive blow to him. Then he spent the last years of his life with others having to help him take care of his basic bodily needs. For a man like him, that was humbling.

But this was the effect of all that. It mellowed him. In those last years, whenever you visited him, he would take your hand and say, “help me”. He hadn’t been able to say those words since he was five years old and able to tie his own shoelaces. By the time he died, he was ready. When he met Jesus and Saint Peter on the other side, I’m sure he simply reached for a hand and said, “help me”. Ten and twenty years ago, he would, I’m sure, have given Jesus and Peter some advice as to how they might run the pearly gates more efficiently.

That’s a parable that speaks deeply and directly about a place we must all eventually come to, either through proactive choice or by submission to circumstance; we all must eventually come to a place where we accept that we are not self-sufficient, that we need help, that we need others, that we need community, that we need grace, that we need God. 

Why is that so important? Because we are not God and we become wise and more loving when we realize and accept that. Classical Christian theologians defined God as self-sufficient being, and highlight that onlyGod is self-sufficient. God alone has no need of anything beyond Himself. Everything else, everything that is not God, is defined as contingent, as not self-sufficient, as needing something beyond itself to bring it into existence and to keep it in existence every second of its being.

That can sound like abstract theology, but ironically it’s little children who get it, who have an awareness of this. Thy know that they cannot provide for themselves and that all comes to us as gift. They know they need help. However, not long after they learn to tie our own shoelaces this awareness begins to fade and as they grow into adolescence and then adulthood, particularly if they are healthy, strong, and successful, they begin to live with the illusion of self-sufficiency. I provide for myself!

And, that in fact serves them well in terms of making their way in this world. But it doesn’t serve truth, community, love, or the soul. It’s an illusion, the greatest of all illusions. None of us will enter deeply into community as long as we nurse the illusion of self-sufficiency, when we are still saying, I don’t need others! I choose who and what I let into my life!

G.K. Chesterton once wrote that familiarity is the greatest of all illusions. He’s right, and what we are most familiar with is taking care of ourselves and believing that we are sufficient onto ourselves. As we know, this serves us well in terms of getting ahead in this life. However, fortunate for us, though painful, God and nature are always conspiring together to teach us that we are not self-sufficient. The process of maturing, aging, and eventually dying is calibrated to teach us, whether we welcome the lesson or not, that we are not in charge, that self-sufficiency is an illusion. Eventually for all of us there will come a day when, as it was with us before we could tie our own shoelaces, we will have to reach out for a hand and say, “help me”.

The philosopher Eric Mascall has an axiom that says we are neither wise nor mature as long as we take life for granted. We become wise and mature precisely when we take it as granted – by God, by others, by love.

In a 1990s movie, City Slickers, there’s a scene that sheds light on the importance of private integrity. Three men, New Yorkers, close friends, have gone off together for a summer to ride on a cattle drive in the hope that this experience will help them sort through their respective mid-life issues.

At one point, riding along on the trail, they are discussing the morality of having a sexual affair. Initially their conversation focuses mostly on the fear of getting caught, and two of them agree that an affair isn’t worth the risk. You’re too likely to get caught. But their friend poses the question again, this time asking them if they would have an affair if there was the absolute assurance that they wouldn’t be caught:

“Imagine,” he says, “that a spaceship touches down. A beautiful woman emerges from the spaceship. You make love and she returns to Mars. There are no consequences. Nobody can possibly know. Would you do it?”

Billy Crystal, who plays the lead role, answers that he doubts that this is ever possible. “You always get caught,” he submits, “people smell dishonesty on you.” “But,” his friend protests, “what if it was really possible to have an affair and not get caught. What if nobody would know? Would you do it?” Billy Crystal’s answer: “But I’d know, and I’d hate myself for it!”

His answer highlights an important truth. What we do in private, in secret, has consequences that are not dependent upon whether or not our secret leaks out. The damage is the same. What we do in secret molds our character and influences how we relate to others in more ways than we suspect. There is no such a thing as a secret act. One person always knows. We know. And we hate ourselves for it, hate ourselves for having to lie. And this gives off its own scent.

What we do in secret ultimately shapes what we look like in public. Dishonesty changes the way we look because it changes who we are. That’s the reason why so often those around us will intuit the truth about us, smell the lie, even when they don’t have any hard evidence on which to suspect us.

Doing something in secret that we can’t admit in public is the very definition of hypocrisy, and that forces us to lie. And, among all sins, lying is the most dangerous. Why? Because we hate ourselves for it, stop respecting ourselves, and when we stop respecting ourselves we will, all too soon, notice that other people stop respecting us too. That’s the intuitive place where we “smell” each other’s lies.

Worse still, lying forces us to harden ourselves so that we can live with our lie. Sin doesn’t always make us humble and repentant. We have the all-too-easy, popular image of the honest sinner, like the sinners in Gospels who more easily accepted Jesus than did the religiously upright. That’s sometimes the case, but not always.

The biblical image of the honest sinner humbly turning towards God is predicated on honesty, on a sinner not hiding or lying about his or her sin. But sin can have a very different effect on us. When we don’t honestly admit our sin, we move in the opposite direction, namely, towards rationalization, hardness of attitude, and cynicism. Moreover, it’s the lying, not the original weakness, that then becomes the real canker and constitutes the real danger. When we hide a sin, we are forced to lie, and with that lie we immediately begin to harden and reshape our souls. There’s a moral axiom that says: You can do anything as long as you don’t have to lie about it. That’s quite different than saying that you can do anything as long as nobody finds out about it.

The quality of our person depends upon the degree of our private integrity. We are as sick as our sickest secret, and we are as healthy as our most hidden virtue. We cannot be doing one thing in private and radiate something else in public. It doesn’t matter whether others know our secrets or not. We know and, when those secrets are unhealthy, we hate ourselves for them and our hearts harden so to live with our lie.

We should never delude ourselves into thinking that the things we do in private, including very small actions of infidelity, self-indulgence, bigotry, jealousy, or slander, are of no consequence since no one knows about them. Inside the mystery of our interconnectedness as a human family and as a family of faith predicated on trust, even our most private actions, good or bad, like invisible enzymes inside the blood stream, affect the whole. Everything is known, felt, in one way or another. There is no such thing as a private act, inside the family of humanity or inside the body of Christ. Others know us, even when they don’t exactly know everything about us. They smell our vices, just as they smell our virtues.