Piety is the enemy of humor, at least whenever something less than piety is masquerading as piety. Here’s an example: I once lived in community with an overly serious man who, after someone would tell a colorful joke, would bring us back to earth with the question, “Would you tell a joke like that in front of the Blessed Sacrament?” That not only deflated the joke and its teller, but it also took the oxygen out of the room.

There’s a response I would have liked to have given to his question, namely, a joke my Oblate Novice Master used to tell, one whose irony exposes false piety. The joke runs this way: A young woman was getting married and her family could not afford a venue for a reception for the wedding. The parish priest generously offered them the foyer at the entrance of the church, telling them they could bring in a cake and have a reception there. The father of the bride asked whether they might also bring in some liquor. “Absolutely not,” the priest replied, “you can’t drink liquor in a church!” “But,” protested the bride’s father, “Jesus drank wine at the wedding feast of Cana.” “But not in front of the Blessed Sacrament!” replied the priest.

Admittedly, humor can be impious, crass, offensive, dirty, but whenever that’s the case the fault normally lies more in the aesthetics than in the content of the joke. A joke isn’t offensive because it is about sex or religion or any other area we surround with sacredness. Humor is offensive when it crosses a line in terms of respect, taste, and aesthetics. Humor is offensive when it is bad art. Bad art crosses a line in terms of respect, either vis-à-vis its audience or its subject matter. What can make a joke offensive or dirty is when it is told, or how it is told, or to whom it is told, or the tone in which it is told, or lack of sensitivity to what is being told, or the color of the language as it is being told. Whether or not it can be told before the blessed sacrament isn’t a criterion. If a joke shouldn’t be told in front of the blessed sacrament it shouldn’t be told in front of anyone. There aren’t two standards of offensiveness.

Still, bad piety is the enemy of humor. It’s also the enemy of robust, earthy living. But that is only the case for bad piety, not genuine piety. Genuine piety is one of the fruits of the Holy Spirit and is a healthy reverence before all of life. But it’s a reverence that, while healthily respectful, is not offended by humor (even robust, earthy humor) providing the humor isn’t aesthetically offensive – akin to nudity which is healthy in art but offensive in pornography.

False sensitivity that masks itself as piety also strips all spirituality of humor, save for the most pious kind. In doing that, in effect, it makes Jesus, Mary, and the saints humorless, and thus less than fully human and healthy. One of our mentors at our Oblate novitiate told us, young novices, that there is not a single incident reported in scripture of Jesus ever laughing. He told us this to dampen our natural, youthful, rambunctious energy, as if this was somehow a hinderance to being religious. 

Humorous energy is not a hindrance to being religious. To the contrary. Jesus is the paragon of all that is healthily human, and he, no doubt, was a fully healthy, robust, delightful human person, and none of those words (healthy, robust, delightful) would apply to him if he hadn’t had a healthy, indeed earthy, sense of humor.

For fifteen years I taught a course entitled The Theology of God to seminarians and others preparing for ministry. I would try to cover all the required basis asked for in the curriculum – biblical revelation, patristic insights, normative church teachings, and speculative views from contemporary theologians. But, inside all of this, like a recurring theme in an opera, I would tell the students this: In all your preaching and teaching and pastoral practices, whatever else, try not to make God look stupid. Try not to make God look unintelligent, tribal, petty, rigid, nationalistic, angry, or fearful. Every homily, every theological teaching, every ecclesial practice, and every pastoral practice ultimately reflects an image of God whether we want it to or not. And if there is something less than healthy in our preaching or pastoral practices, the God who underwrites it will also appear as unhealthy. A healthy God does not undergird an unhealthy theology, ecclesiology, or anthropology.

Hence, if we teach a Jesus who is humorless, who takes offense at the earthiness of life, who is uncomfortable hearing the word sex, who flinches at colorful language, and who is afraid to smile and chuckle at irony, wit, and humor, we make Jesus appear as rigid and uptight, a prude, and not the person you want to be beside at table.  

What goes around comes around, so it would seem. Christians took a pagan feast and sacralized it as an occasion to celebrate Jesus’ birthday, and now the secular world is returning the favor.

The decision to celebrate the birth of Jesus on December 25^th was not based on careful calculations vis-à-vis the actual day that Jesus was born. Rather, it had these origins. In polytheistic Rome, December 25^th was a celebration of the Unconquered Sun, marking the return of longer days. It followed Saturnalia, a festival where people feasted and exchanged gifts. The church in Rome began celebrating Christmas on December 25^th (somewhere between 306-337) during the reign of Constantine the first Christian emperor, possibly to weaken pagan traditions.

Christians sacralized a pagan feast and today we are seeing the reverse. More and more the celebrations of Christmas are being shorn of all religious symbols and connotations: Santa has replaced the Christ Child; Rocking around the Christmas tree has replaced Come all ye faithful and I’m Dreaming of a White Christmas has replaced Silent Night. Merry Christmas has become Season’s Greetings. Why is this happening?

First, we are becoming ever more secularized as a society. Fewer people are drawn religiously to the Christmas story, even as they value the Christmas season as a very special time of year. They value the feast for its emphasis on love, gift-giving, color, specialness, and celebration, but prefer that the emphasis be precisely on these things without a reference to Christ.

However, within that secularization, there are a number of voices conspiring to positively strip the celebration of Christmas of its religious roots. Their fundamental critique goes this way. In essence, we are a secularized culture, not a Christian culture, and it is unfair to non-Christians to emphasize the religious (Christ) aspect of this feast. It is offensive to Jews, Moslems. Buddhists, agnostics, and non-believers. Given the pluralistic make-up of our society, saying “Merry Christmas” can be imperialistic, narrow, and not fully respectful of others.

How valid is this? It carries some legitimacy, though it is also deeply flawed. How so? First, this criticism doesn’t come mainly from Jews, Muslims, and the non-Christians. It arises mostly from some excessive and less-than-fully healthy sensitivities within Christians and ex-Christians. Yes, admittedly we are a secular, pluralistic culture. However, don’t Christians have a right to celebrate Christ’s birthday with all the appropriate language, symbols, and rituals? No one begrudges Jewish believers the right to celebrate Hanukkah or Muslims the right to celebrate Ramadan. Why should a Christian celebration be singled out?

And a critical question might be posed here. Is this expressed concern for fairness and the feelings of others being driven primarily by a genuine concern for the feelings of others or is it also being driven (however unconsciously) by certain feelings about ourselves, namely, by an unhealthy combination of self-hatred, hyper political correctness, and a certain adolescent grandiosity? It is easy to fall victim to a self-hatred, where we can be fair to every tradition except our own; to a hyper political correctness, where there are no common sense boundaries to our sensitivity; and to something that might be termed adolescent grandiosity, where we see only the faults in our parents and not their virtues or where we are indebted to them.

We need to be sensitive to others and realize and accept that we cannot impose a Christian celebration on those who don’t share our faith in Jesus Christ. But society must also be fair to us and allow us to celebrate Christ’s birthday as a religious feast. Indeed, there shouldn’t be any tension here. No one should begrudge another for saying Merry Christmas or Season’s Greetings. Silent Night can play alongside White Christmas. Jesus, no doubt, is on good terms with Santa. Love, joy, gift-giving, and colorful lights do their own work on the heart and what they do there is contingent upon what’s in that heart. To some hearts they will say, Merry Christmas, to other hearts they will say, Season’s Greetings, and to some hearts they will say both. We should be good with that.

So, Christians, let’s celebrate Christmas as Christ’s birthday without apologies or apologetics. The secular world doesn’t have a right to stop us from saying Merry Christmas and celebrating Christ’s birthday with the creches, carols, symbols and rituals that speak of Jesus’ birth. Our Christian celebrations don’t preclude the secular celebrations, the Christmas lights, the special decorations, the Santa parades, the gift-giving, the season’s parties, and rocking around the Christmas tree. These are legitimate and in their own way are good ways to celebrate Christmas. Hey, we stole this feast from the pagans, they have a right to reclaim parts of it. Moreover, paganism and Christianity sometimes make for a rich mix. And let us not forget that the world does measure time by Jesus’ birth. We are in the year 2023 since the time-altering event. Doesn’t such a monumental event merit a double celebration? Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings.

In the days of apartheid in South Africa, Christians there used to light candles and place them in their windows as a sign to themselves and others that they believed that someday this injustice would end. A candle burning in a window was a sign of hope and a political statement. The government didn’t miss the message. It passed a law making it illegal to place a lit candle in a window, the offense being equal to owning a firearm; both were considered equally dangerous. This eventually became a joke among the kids: “Our government is afraid of lit candles!”

And well they should be! Lit candles, more than firearms, overthrew apartheid. Hope, not guns, is what ultimately transforms things. To light a candle as an act of hope is to say to yourself and to others that, despite anything that might be happening in the world, you are still nursing a vision of peace and unity that’s based upon something beyond the present state of things and upon deeper realities and powers than what the world admits. To light a candle is to state publicly that you believe that, at the end of the day, more than what you see on the evening news will shape the final outcome of things. There are other powers also at work.  To light a candle is an act of political defiance and an act of hope.

What is hope?

First, it’s not wishful thinking. I can wish to win a lottery, but that wish, in itself, contains no real power to make it happen. Second, hope is not simply temperamental optimism, an upbeat temperament that always sees the bright side of things. An unwavering optimism about things can sometimes be helpful, but it’s no basis for hope; like wishful thinking it lacks the power to make its own dream come true. Finally, hope is not simply shrewd observation and common sense, a talent for sorting out the real from the fluff. Useful as this is, it’s still not hope. Why not?

Because hope doesn’t base itself upon a shrewd assessment of the empirical facts, but upon belief in a deeper set of realities: God’s existence, God’s power, God’s goodness, and the promise that flows from that.

There’s a story told about Pierre Teilhard de Chardin that helps illustrate this. Teilhard wasn’t much given to wishful thinking or even to an optimistic temperament; he tended rather toward a lonely realism. Yet he was a man of real hope. For example, on one occasion, after giving a conference where he laid out a vision within which ultimately unity and peace will be achieved on earth in a way that parallels the vision of scripture, he was challenged by some colleagues to this effect: “That’s a wonderful, idealistic vision of things, but suppose we blow up the world with a nuclear bomb, what happens to your vision then?” Teilhard replied, “that would set things back some millions of years, but this will still come to fruition, not because I say so or because the facts right now indicate that it will, but because God promised it and in the resurrection of Jesus has shown that He is powerful enough to deliver on that promise.”

Hope, as we can see from this, requires both faith and patience. It works like yeast, not like a microwave oven. Jim Wallis, the founder of Sojourners, expresses this colorfully: “All politicians are alike,” he says, “they hold a finger up and check which way the wind is blowing and then make their decisions in that direction. That will never change, even if we change politicians. So, we must change the wind! That’s hope’s task – to change the wind!”

When we look at what has morally changed this world – from the great religious traditions coming out of deserts, caves, and catacombs and helping leaven whole cultures morally, to apartheid being overthrown in South Africa – we see that it has happened precisely when individuals and groups lit candles and hoped long enough until the wind changed.

We light Advent candles with just that in mind, accepting that changing the wind is a long process, that the evening news will not always be positive, the stock markets will not always rise, the most sophisticated defenses in the world will not always protect us from terrorism, and secular liberal and conservative ideologies will not rid this planet of selfishness.

However, we continue to light candles and hope anyway, not on the basis of a worsening or improving evening newscast, but because the deepest reality of all is that God exists, that the center holds, that there’s ultimately a gracious Lord who rules this universe, and this Lord is powerful enough to rearrange the atoms of the planet and raise dead bodies to new life. We light candles of hope because God, who is the ultimate power, has promised to establish a kingdom of love and peace on this earth and is gracious, forgiving, and powerful enough to eventually make it happen.

No community should botch its deaths. Mircea Eliade said that. What underlies his wisdom here is the truth that what we cease to celebrate we will soon cease to cherish.

With that in mind, I would like to highlight what we, both the religious and secular community, need to celebrate and cherish as we mourn the recent death of Richard Gaillardetz.

Richard, known as “Rick”, was a husband, a father, a friend to many, and (by most every assessment) the best ecclesiologist in the English-speaking world. He taught at Boston College, but lectured widely elsewhere, both as an academic lecturer and as a popular speaker. Beyond his stature as an academic, he had a humanity, a robust sanity, a keen intellect, a natural warmth, a friendliness, and a sense of humor that made him both pleasant and stabilizing to be around. He brought calm and sanity into a room.

What’s to be said in terms of highlighting his contribution? What should we not botch in processing his death? What must we celebrate so as to continue to cherish?

Many things might be highlighted, all of them positive, but I would like to focus on four extraordinary gifts he brought to us.

First, he was a theologian who worked actively at bridging the gap between the academy and the pew. Rick was a highly respected academic. No one questioned his scholarship. Yet, he was highly sought after as a popular lecturer in spirituality and never compromised his scholarship for the sake of popularity. That combination of being understood and respected both in the academy and the pew is a rare thing (it’s hard to be simple without being simplistic) and a huge risk (being a popular speaker generally makes you suspect among your academic colleagues). Rick took that risk because he wanted his scholarship to serve the whole community and not just those fortunate enough to be in graduate classrooms.

Second, he was an ecclesiologist who used his scholarship to unite rather than divide. Ecclesiology is about church, and it is church denominationalism that still divides us as Christians. The divisions among us are largely ecclesial. In most other things, we are together. We share Jesus; we share a common scripture; we share (in different modalities) the Eucharist; we share a common struggle in trying to be faithful to Jesus’ teachings; and we share many common human, moral, and social struggles. Spirituality unites us, but ecclesiology still divides. Rick’s work in ecclesiology is a breath of fresh air in terms of helping us move beyond centuries of division. He loved his own denomination, Roman Catholicism, even as he was fully appreciative of other denominations. His secret? He didn’t just do a theology of the church; he also did a spirituality of the church.

Next, he was a man who loved the church, even as, inside that love, he could be healthily critical of the church when it was merited. I attended his final public lecture in September of last year, and he began that lecture with these words: I was a Catholic by birth; then by choice, and now by love. He went on to share how the Catholic Church was the greatest love in his life and how, too, it has brought him continual disillusionment and pain. He challenged us to love the church and to be critical of it, both at the same time. That manifests a big heart and a big mind. Some can love the church and never see its faults; others can see its faults but never love the church. Rick could do both.

Finally, he was a man who faced his death with faith, courage, and dignity that can serve as a paradigm for the rest of us who, all, someday will have to face what he faced. About eighteen months ago, Rick was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer. He knew that, barring a miracle, he probably had less than two years to live. Whatever his own internal anguish and struggle to come to peace with that, everything he said, did, and taught during the eighteen months following that diagnosis manifested faith, trust, courage, and a concern for others. He kept a journal of his thoughts during this period and those journals are soon to be published and will constitute Rick’s last great gift to the church and to the world.

I’d like to end this tribute with a little anecdote which Rick himself, I’m sure, would appreciate as adding a bit of color to a tribute which otherwise would be too somber. Some years ago, I went to hear Rick give a public lecture at one of the local universities here in the city. He was being introduced by a well-known theologian, Marianist Bernard J. Lee. After listing off for us, the audience, Rick’s academic achievements, Lee turned to him and asked: “Richard, how the hell do you get the pronunciation ‘Gay-lar-des’ out of this spelling?”

Whatever the spelling and whatever the pronunciation, Richard Gaillardetz was a theological treasure whom we lost much too early.

Sometimes we are the most helpful and life-giving at the very times when we are most helpless. We’ve all been there. We’re at a funeral and there’s nothing to say that will ease the heartache of someone who has lost a loved one. We feel awkward and helpless. We’d like to say or do something, but there’s nothing to be said or done, other than to be there, embrace the one nursing the grief, and share our helplessness. Passing strange, but it is our very helplessness that’s most helpful and generative in that situation. Our passivity is more fruitful and generative than if we were doing something.

We see an example of this in Jesus. He gave both his life and his death for us – but in separate moments. He gave his life for us through his activity and his death for us through his passivity, that is, through what he absorbed in helplessness. Indeed, we can divide each of the Gospels into two clear parts. Up until his arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is the active one: he teaches, he heals, he performs miracles, he feeds people. Then, after he is arrested, he doesn’t do anything: he is handcuffed, led away, put on trial, scourged, and crucified. Yet, and this is the mystery, we believe that he gave us more during that time when he couldn’t do anything than during all those times he was active. We are saved more through his passivity and helplessness than through his powerful actions during his ministry. How does this work? How can helplessness and passivity be so generative?

Partly this is mystery, though partly we grasp some of it through experience. For example, a loving mother dying in hospice, in a coma, unable to speak, can sometimes in that condition change the hearts of her children more powerfully than she ever could during all the years when she did so much for them. What’s the logic here? By what metaphysics does this work?

Let me begin abstractly and circle this question before venturing to an answer. The atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment (Nietzsche, Feuerbach, Marx, and others) offer a very powerful critique of religion and of religious experience. In their view, all religious experience is simply subjective projection, nothing more.  For them, in our faith and religious practices, we are forever creating a god in our own image and likeness, to serve our self-interest.  (The very antithesis of what Christians believe.)  For Nietzsche, for instance. there is no divine revelation coming from outside us, no God in heaven revealing divine truth to us. Everything is us, projecting our needs and creating a god to serve those needs. All religion is self-serving, human projection.

How true is this? One of the most influential professors I’ve studied under, Jesuit Michael Buckley, says this in face of that criticism: These thinkers are 90% correct. But they’re 10% wrong – and that 10% makes all the difference.

Buckley made this comment while teaching what John of the Cross calls a dark night of the soul. What is a dark night of the soul? It’s an experience where we can no longer sense God imaginatively or feel God affectively, when the very sense of God’s existence dries up inside us and we are left in an agnostic darkness, helpless (in head, heart, and gut) to conjure up any sense of God.

However, and this is the point, precisely because we are helpless and unable to conjure up any imaginative concepts or affective feelings about God, God can now flow into us purely, without us being able to color or contaminate that experience. When all our efforts are useless, grace can finally take over and flow into us in purity. Indeed, that’s how all authentic revelation enters our world. When human helplessness renders us incapable of making God serve our self-interest, God can then flow into our lives without contamination.

Now, this is also true for human love. So much of our love for each other, no matter our sincerity, is colored by self-interest and is at some point self-serving. In some fashion, we inevitably form those we love into our own image and likeness. However, as is the case with Buckley’s critique of the atheistic thinkers of the Enlightenment, this isn’t always the case. There are certain situations when we can’t in any way taint love and make it self-serving. What are those situations? Precisely those in which find we ourselves completely helpless, mute, stammering, unable to say or do anything that’s helpful. In these particular “dark nights of the soul”, when we are completely helpless to shape the experience, love and grace can flow in purely and powerfully. In his classic work The Divine Milieu, Pierre Teilhard de Chardin challenges us to help others both through our activity and through our passivity.  He’s right. We can be generative through what we actively do for others, and we can be particularly generative when we stand passively with them in helplessness.

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.