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. 

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.

“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!”

 110697

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.

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.

100997

The issue of God’s gender is not one that can be trivialized and seen simply as something arising from feminist ideological concern. “It is important for women that God not be conceived of as exclusively masculine!”  Much more is a stake than a feminist agenda. How we conceive of God has immense consequences for all of us, in ways that we rarely imagine.

Simply put, this is what is at stake: Until we can conceive of God in such a way that, within God, masculinity and femininity can be seen to be mutually and perfectly empowering, then masculinity and femininity in this world will not find a mutual harmony and happiness either. The analogy is to that of children who grow up in a house within which there is not both a strong and healthy father and a strong and healthy mother. In all likelihood, such children will have some struggles within their own marriages and within their own roles as fathers and mothers. Our parents have to model the mutuality of femininity and masculinity, otherwise we have problems later on. The same is true for God, our ultimate parent.

Unfortunately, there are huge problems when we try to conceive of God in terms both feminine and masculine. First of all, there is the emotional baggage that is tied to this question, with both feminists and anti-feminists often taking rigid or inflated positions that, outside of such an overcharged emotional context, they themselves would criticize. Then there is the whole history of this thing: We have, within Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, several thousand years of tradition within which we conceive of God primarily, though not exclusively, as male, a male celibate in fact. These complications however are not insurmountable.

What is seemingly insurmountable is the fact that God is ineffable and that all our concepts and words about God are more inadequate than adequate. Ultimately, we cannot conceive of God, given that God is infinite and our minds are finite. Try to think of the highest number imaginable? God can never be captured in imagination, thought, or words. As the 4th Lateran Council of 1215 defined, the difference between God and creature is always greater than the similarity between them. Anything we think or say about God is more inaccurate than accurate.

And yet we need to think of and speak about God, these limits notwithstanding. The issue of God’s gender is, in terms of imagination, concept, and language, a particularly difficult one. Why? Precisely because our imaginations and words fall short here. We simply do not have the symbolic tools to properly imagine and speak of God’s gender. That, however, is at the level of imagination and language. At the level of theological truth things are clearer.

Theologically, it is clear: God is not male, nor is God female. God is both – perfect masculinity and perfect femininity that mutually empower. When Genesis says: “God created man in the image of himself, in the image of God he created him, male and female he created them”, it is saying, despite its own inadequacy of language, it puts God in the masculine, that God is equally male and female and that both, masculinity and femininity, equally image that Godliness. The rest of Scripture is in accord with that revelation.

So is anthropology. Mircea Eliade tells us that, archetypally, reality is structured in this way: At its very centre, as the source of and power behind everything, sit two thrones. On one sits a King, on the other sits a Queen. The kingdom (reality) is ultimately ruled by both, both acting as one. And there is harmony between the two thrones, the King and the Queen. They never fight with each other, are never jealous of each other, are never threatened by each other, and never act against the other. They are in perfect harmony and perfect symphony. Yet they are different, one is male and the other female, and each brings something the other does not. 

In anthropology, as in great mythology, at the centre of everything, as the source of it, there is a King and Queen, a man and a woman, a masculinity and a femininity that are perfectly mutually empowering.

That is also true of the God. In God ,there is both femininity and masculinity but, unlike here, there are no jealousies, no power struggles, no misunderstandings, no competition, or anger. There is also no violence. Maybe when we can conceive of God more healthily, men and women who worship God might again be able, with joy, to shout: “Viva la difference!”

When I was in graduate school, an American feminist once shocked our class with the following comment: “There are three women who really irritate me: Mary, the Mother of Jesus; Mother Teresa; and the mother of a priest. What’s happened is that the church has developed such a cult around them that it is unable to ever genuinely deal with actual women. I know so many priests, who can preach an idealistic homily on Mary, or Mother Teresa, or on the mother of a priest, but invariably that same priest cannot deal with the actual women in his parish and that priest is simply a microcosm of the prevailing attitude within the church and society as a whole. We create idealistic cults around a few people… and then mistreat everyone else.”

Sadly, there is more truth in her statement than we generally have the courage to admit. We have made a cult around each of these women, to the detriment of other women and often to our own detriment. I say this not to disparage in any way the tremendous qualities of Mary, Mother Teresa, or the mother of any priest. The fault is not theirs, it is ours, and our over idealization of them in no way diminishes their real virtues.

I say all of this in the wake of Mother Teresa’s death. There can be no doubt about her greatness, her virtue, her sanctity. She deserves our admiration, but she deserves more, our imitation. Soren Kierkegaard once defined a saint as follows: A saint is someone who can will the one thing, God. This Mother Teresa did and did with a single-mindedness and a clarity that made the whole world take notice. God and the poor drove her. Nobody dared stand in her way. Her vision was clear to a fault, as was her boundless energy. She lived the gospel without compromise. This often irritated the rest of us.

We all know the stories of how, sometimes when her convents were being set up in various cities, well-meaning benefactors would equip her convents with some of the creature comforts the rest of us take for granted: automatic washing machines, clothes dryers, and rugs on the floor and how Mother Teresa would demand that these be removed, much to the frustration of their well-intended donors. For her, having these would mean compromising the radicalness of the Gospel. Something of discipleship would be lost. The machines and rugs were always removed. To her mind, this is what is asked for if one wants to live the Gospel without compromise.

Our own problem is considerably different. It is not that we want compromise or that our ideals are not high enough. No. We appreciate and admire Mother Teresa because we too will the same thing, God and the poor. Our problem though, as Henri Nouwen so nicely put it, is that we also will everything else at the same time. We want to be great saints, but we also want to experience every sensation felt by the sinner; we want to make an option for the poor, but we also want all the comforts of the rich; and we want to give our lives away selflessly, but we also want success, a career, and the admiration of the world. We want radical discipleship, but we also want automatic washing machines, clothes dryers, and beautiful rugs on nice hardwood floors. So we admire Mother Teresa, even as we are unable to imitate her.

Kierkegaard, who gave us that very useful definition of sanctity, also gave us another valuable insight. Speaking about Jesus, he once said: “What Jesus wants is not admiration, but imitation.”

Sadly, we often reverse this. We admire Christ, but we do not imitate him. We do the same thing with Mother Teresa. We admire her virtue, praise her dedication, speak glowingly of her radicalness, and basically threatened anyone who would dare criticize her, but we do not do what she did. We find hundreds of reasons to justify why we cannot live like she did, both in terms of her prayer life and in terms of her direct radical presence to the poor: “That’s good for her, and I admire her for it, but I can not, nor am I called to, live like that!”

Mircea Eliade always warned communities not to botch their deaths. We need to heed that warning just now. A great woman, a saint, a great 20th century Christian whom our generation had the privilege of living with, has died, Mother Teresa of Calcutta. The world and the church owe it to her, and to themselves, to reflect upon her life and meaning. Hopefully our reflection will not stop at admiration but provoke more imitation, more single-mindedness, more focus on what the gospel is ultimately all about, God and the poor.

Few events in recent memory have so emotionally caught the world, as has the death of Princess Diana. I was in Asia at the time and, even there, despite vast separation by language, culture, and distance, the entire media seemed taken up with her, as was the common person. When I stepped off the plane, the first person who met me, an Asian priest who has never been within three thousand miles of England, immediately asked me: “Have you heard about Princess Diana?”

The world’s reaction to her death, unimaginable in its magnitude, can only be described metaphorically as a kind of global warming. At no other time in recent history, has the whole world been so focused on one person and one sorrow and expressed such a singular affection. There were some similarities thirty four years ago when President Kennedy was shot, but the media then was not like the media now and the world as a whole as not as involved.

What’s to be said about this and what’s to be said about the person, Princess Diana, who inspired it?

One stream of reaction is negative: Without criticizing Diana herself, it sees in our mesmerization with her death a symptom for all that is wrong with the world. This is the “death of God” the theologians of the sixties talked about, except this God was not in heaven, but down here, young, beautiful, glamorous, carrying our hopes, and modeling an earthly salvation. When we no longer believe in a real God and no longer have real religious icons, a pop God and a pop icon will have to do. Diana did this well, better it seems than anyone else, and thus her death shattered something pretty deep inside of millions of people. Her death tore the temple veil from top to bottom, as most anyone could see, watching her funeral and seeing the hundreds of thousands of desolate mourners. Our reaction to her death, these critics point out, says little about Diana, since we in fact know little about her, but speaks volumes about ourselves  – not all of it good.

Some critics get more personal. In Diana, they do not see the stuff of saints. They point out that she was born rich, never had to work, married a prince, spent millions of dollars on clothing and jewelry, had affairs, and spent as much time on luxury vacations as she did working for the charitable causes she supported. They point too to a certain naive complicity with the very media frenzy that eventually helped kill her.

But the vast majority, including millions of the poor, is on her side. They point instead to her generous work for the poor, to her warmth towards everybody, to her religiosity (mixed as it was), to a more than token friendship with Mother Theresa, and to a certain radiance that so disarmed her critics and made her funeral the funeral of all funerals. She was, indeed, the peoples’ princess.

Who is right? Those who criticize her or those who canonize her? To my mind, both Diana herself and the phenomenon she helped create are complex enough to incorporate the truth of both views. She was not exactly Mother Theresa, as an editorial in USA Today puts it: “Two well known women died last week, Diana and Mother Theresa. One was a pop saint and one was a real one.” Diana’s cult was very different than Mother Theresa’s. It took its root in glamour, in advertising, in physical beauty, and in media hysteria. She may have visited the slums occasionally, but she didn’t exactly make her home there. She was loved because she was beautiful, graceful, glamorous, had sad haunting eyes, a shy disarming smile, wore the most beautiful clothes in the world, and was everyone’s mythical princess.

But that, true though it is, is not the full picture either. A lot of people are beautiful, glamorous, rich, famous, and have even more bewitching smiles than did Diana. There are Hollywood starlets out there whose beauty, grace, and smile can take your breath way and whose presence should massage those deep archetypal reservoirs where lives the mythical princess; except they don’t, at least not the way Diana did.

So why was Diana different? What accounts for such an incredible popularity? Is it simply our own need to have an icon? Does popular reaction to her death and the outpouring of grief of such a magnitude simply say something about us and not about her?

Yes and no. Mostly, I believe, no. Beneath it all – the hype, the glamour, the fame, the image of the fairy tale princess and all that triggers in us, beyond our need to idolize and make icons, there was, I believe, something truly special about Diana herself and it wasn’t, in the end, a thing of her physical beauty or of her choosing the right causes. What ultimately so endeared her to us was her poverty, her vulnerability, her weakness, her anxious desire to please, her insecurity, which helped gestate in her a genuine warmth. The poor see pretty straight and in her they saw a woman, a princess, who, despite being fabulous gifted, never got too big for her britches. They recognized one of their own and they loved her for it. They came to pay their respects, by the millions. Nobody should be surprised. She was their princess.