Dark Memory

October 16, 1997

Inside each of us, beyond what we can name, we have a dark memory of having once been touched and caressed by hands far gentler than our own. That caress has left a permanent mark, the imprint of a love so tender and good that its memory becomes a prism through which we see everything else. This brand lies beyond conscious memory but forms the centre of the heart and soul.

This is not an easy concept to explain without sounding sentimental. Perhaps the old myths and legends capture it best when they say that, before being born, each soul is kissed by God and then goes through life always, in some dark way, remembering that kiss and measuring everything it experiences in relation to that original sweetness. To be in touch with your heart is to be in touch with this primordial kiss, with both its preciousness and its meaning.

What exactly is being said here?

Within each of us, at that place where all that is most precious within us takes its root, there is the inchoate sense of having once been touched, caressed, loved, and valued in a way that is beyond anything we have ever consciously experienced. In fact, all the goodness, love, value, and tenderness we experience in life fall short precisely because we already know something deeper. When we feel frustrated, angry, betrayed, violated, or enraged it is in fact because our outside experience is so different from what we already hold dear inside.

We all have this place; a place in the heart, where we hold all that is most precious and sacred to us. From that place our own kisses issue forth, as do our tears. It is the place we most guard from others, but the place where we would most want others to come into; the place where we are the most deeply alone and the place of intimacy; the place of innocence and the place where we are violated; the place of our compassion and the place of our rage. In that place we are holy. There we are temples of God, sacred churches of truth and love. It is there too that we bear God’s image.

But this must be understood: The image of God inside of us is not to be thought of as some beautiful icon stamped inside of the soul. No. The image of God in us is energy, fire, memory; especially the memory of a touch so tender and loving that its goodness and truth become the energy and prism through which we see everything. Thus we recognize goodness and truth outside of us precisely because they resonate with something that is already inside of us. Things “touch our hearts” when they touch us here and it is because we have already been touched and caressed that we seek for a soul mate, for someone to join us in this tender space.

And we measure everything in life by how it touches this place: Why do certain experiences touch us so deeply? Do not our hearts burn within us in the presence of any truth, love, goodness, or tenderness that is genuine and deep? Is not all knowledge simply a waking up to something we already know? Is not all love simply a question of being respected for something we already are? Are not the touch and tenderness that bring ecstasy nothing other than the stirring of deep memory? Are not the ideals that inspire hope only the reminder of words somebody has already spoken to us? Does not our desire for innocence (and innocent means “not wounded”) mirror some primal unwounded place deep within us? And when we feel violated, is it not because someone has irreverently entered the sacred inside us?

When we are in touch with this memory and respect its sensitivities then we are feeling our souls. At those times, faith, hope, and love will be spring up in us and joy and tears will both flow through us pretty freely. We will be constantly stabbed by the innocence and beauty of children and pain and gratitude will, alternately, bring us to our knees. That is what it means to be recollected, to inchoately remember, to feel the memory of God in us. That memory is what is both firing our energy and providing us a prism through which to see and understand.

Today, too often, a wounded, calloused, cynical, over-sophisticated, overly adult world invites us to forget, to move beyond this childishness (which is really child-likeness). It invites us to forget God’s kiss in the soul. But, unless we lie to ourselves and harden ourselves against ourselves, the most dangerous of all activities, we always remember, dimly, darkly, the caress of God.

On God’s Gender

October 9, 1997

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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!”

Chastity: Not Our Virtue

October 2, 1997

Sublimation, waiting, and chastity, these are not the virtues of our time. American educator, Allan Bloom, in his controversial book, The Closing of the American Mind, suggests that lack of chastity is, among young people, the leading cause of unhappiness. What helps make this statement interesting is that he is a purely secular analyst with no religious agenda whatsoever. The Catholic Church has always linked chastity and happiness, but lately, that message has been largely ignored and even ridiculed.

Bloom’s thesis runs something like this: “I look at the students that I teach, young twenty-year olds, and I see most everything, except happiness and erotic energy. This is a great irony; young people today tend to be erotically lame, old, even while still young. They have been everywhere, experienced everything, but they have never had anything sublime in their lives, because sublimity depends upon sublimation and sublimation depends upon waiting and waiting depends upon chastity and, whatever else they may have had in life, they have never had these: sublimation, waiting, and chastity.

Much of our unhappiness comes from our lack of chastity. But to understand that, it is important to properly define chastity.

Chastity is not celibacy and it is not primarily even a sexual concept. It has to do with how we experience things in general, not whether we have sex or not. My father and my mother were two of the most chaste persons I have ever known. Yet they were married and had sex. Conversely, I know celibates, who do not have sex, but are not chaste.

Chastity is not so much about sex as it is about reverence and respect. To be chaste is to experience in such a way as to be fully reverential and respectful. When this not done, when one is not chaste, then experience fragments and disintegrates the soul rather than builds it. Hence it is important to know that we can violate chastity as much by prematurity as by substance. Chastity is not just about what we experience, but also about when we experience it. An experience can be wrong simply because it is premature.

Thus, chastity is about waiting for the right moment for something, about living in tension and accepting incompleteness and inconsummation in life.

And this is not something at which we are very good. We have never been taught how to wait for things. Former generations, whatever their faults, were much better at this than we are. Perhaps it was not so much a question of virtue as of lack of opportunity, but, irrespective of whether it was by choice or conscription, they knew how to wait, certainly better than we do. They used to incorporate as part of their understanding of life and as part of their daily prayer the idea that, here in this world, we live and mourn in a valley of tears, that we are not to expect full fulfillment. We judge this negatively, see it as morbid, and then wonder why our kids live together before marriage and are ever so under-prepared for the frustrations that their lives and marriages invariably bring. We have given them neither the discipline of chastity nor any system of symbols by which to comprehend and accept that in this world all symphonies remain unfinished.

And they do remain unfinished. We spend 98% of our lives waiting for something else to happen to us. Very rarely do we have a moment that is fully pregnant, fully satisfying; always we are waiting. We are in one moment, but waiting for something else to happen: for the bus to come, for the meeting to end, for this day to be over with, for this season of life to be done with, for our vacation to come, to meet the right person to love and marry, to be less tired, to be in a better time and place than we are in now. Here, in this life, there is no such a thing as a clear-cut pure joy. We are always still waiting for it.

Sadly we have not been taught how to do this, how to be chaste. Sadly too, our culture lacks the honest courage to stare this square in the face. So we are paying the price, not least in the fact that today it is considered sophisticated to be cynical and nihilistic. Happiness is seen as a naiveté. So is chastity.

Bloom is right. Few things contribute as much to our unhappiness, and indeed to the breakdown of community, as does our lack of chastity. We need to learn the art of waiting, of understanding again how every tear brings the messiah closer.

Remembering Mother Teresa

September 25, 1997

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.

Balancing Action And Contemplation

September 18, 1997

It is never easy to find the balance between being and doing, prayer and work, contemplation and action, interiority and external involvement, soul craft and statecraft, mysticism and politics, piety and social action, family life and our jobs, pampering self-care and compulsive workaholism. Balance among these things is like looking for the Kingdom, a question of searching for a narrow door that few find.

Mostly we suffer from one or the other, burnout or rust-out. I know only of two kinds of persons, those with too much to do and those who do not have enough to do. I know no one whom I can look at with genuine envy and say: “He or she has it just right!” Everyone I know, myself included, is either over-pressured or is frustrated because they would like to be doing more. We lack for good models here. Balance … to have just the right amount of work coupled with the right amount of prayer, to have a healthy combination of pressure and leisure, is a thing rarely seen.

And there are dangers here both ways, in being overinvolved and in being under-involved:

If I do not have enough interiority in my life, if my fault is over-action, then these will be my faults: I will have no identity outside of my work; I will be a workaholic, compulsive, driven, un-free; I will have no genuine prayer life; my work and social action will eventually become soulless; I will struggle with charity, patience, courtesy, and chastity; and, eventually, my life, albeit packed with many things, will contain not a thimbleful of genuine delight. I will be so absorbed with the business of making a living and establishing myself that I will never really get around to actually living and enjoying myself.

Conversely, if I do not have enough work and external activity in my life, enough pressure and demands from family, work, and community, if my fault is over-piety and one-sided contemplation, then these will be my faults: I will be living in an unhealthy isolation, in perennial delusion and illusion; I will be spaced out, unhealthily disconnected from family and community, lonely, with escapism as my drug of choice; I will narrowly identify spirituality and morality with my own piety; and I will suffer acutely from the lack of a healthy self-image since I am not actualizing my God given talents. I will reverse the Socratic axiom so that, for me, the unlived life will not be worth examining.

Given this perennial struggle for balance, it can be useful to lay out some general principles which, while not necessarily all that practical, at least help show us where, theoretically, the balance lies. I offer these somewhat apologetically, knowing that, in this area, I can hardly present myself as a paradigm.

Nonetheless, for what they are worth, here are some principles for balancing our lives:

Have enough interiority in life to make for mysticism, but have enough family and disruption in life to make for healthy displacement.
Have enough interiority in life to make for soul, but have enough obligations and involvements to make for a sense of the corporate.
Have enough solitude in life to make for enjoyment but enough dutiful work to identify you with the poor.
Have enough withdrawal and self-care in life to safeguard health, but enough conscription and duty to let you know your life is not your own.
Have enough of God’s agenda to let you know that this world is not ultimate, but enough of the world’s agenda to let you know that your task here is to help God shape the earth.
Be enough at home to realize that your family is primary, but be enough in the world to let you know that the world is your ultimate family.
Have enough involvement in prayer and church groups to be considered pious, but enough concern about politics and justice to be considered radical.
Be enough Mary to sit, passively, at the feet of Jesus, but enough Martha to not have a privileged escape from the everyday, mundane duties of life.

The Death of a Princess

September 11, 1997

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.

The Way Of Trust

September 4, 1997

William Stringfellow was once addressing a group of social justice advocates on a day when they were particularly discouraged because a key project, to which they had given considerable time and effort, had failed.

Assessing both their sincerity and their discouragement, he said something to this effect: “I am old enough to scold you. I see your passion for truth and justice, and I laud that, but I hear your discouragement too. You lament the world’s hardness of heart, and you are correct there too. However, what I don’t hear in all this are many words about the Lordship of Jesus. We talk as if we need to save the world, as if everything depends on us. Well, it doesn’t. In the resurrection of Jesus the world is already saved, the powers of death and darkness have already been vanquished. We, we only need to live in such a way so as to show that world that we believe this.”

What Stringfellow is telling us is what Jesus tried to teach, namely, that the opposite of faith is not so much unbelief and doubt in the existence of God as it is anxiety and fretless worry. The opposite of faith is what Jesus cautions Martha against: “Martha, Martha, you are anxious about many things!”

We are not to be anxious about many things. Jesus keeps telling us not to worry – about what we will eat, about what we will wear, and about tomorrow and the problems it will bring. He tells us not to worry, not because there are no real threats to us, but because there is a Lord in charge of the universe and nothing happens, no sparrow falls from the sky or hair from a human head, that is outside the scope and care of that Lord.

We are in good hands, all the time. A gracious, all-powerful, loving God is solidly in charge and nothing will happen in the world and nothing will happen to us that this Lord is indifferent to. Our faith, at its core, invites trust, and not just abstract trust, belief that good is stronger than evil. No. To say the creed, to say that I believe in God – and originally the Christian creed was only one line, Jesus is Lord – is to have a very particularized, concrete trust, a trust that God has not forgotten about me and my problems and that, despite whatever indications there are to the contrary, God is still in charge and is very concerned with my life and its concrete troubles.

When we anxiously worry, in essence, we are denying the Christian creed because we are, in effect, saying that God has either forgotten about us or that God does not have the power to do anything about what is troubling us. It is then that we, like Martha, begin rushing around and fretting about many things.

We see the opposite of this in Jesus’ prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane. He truly says the creed. With all the powers of death and darkness closing in on him, just when it seems that God has abandoned him and the earth, he begins his prayer: “Abba, Father, all things are possible for you.” What Jesus is saying is that, despite indications to the contrary, despite the fact that it looks like God is asleep at the switch, God is still in charge, is still Lord of this universe, is still noticing everything, and is still fully in power and worthy of trust.

This is the essence of faith, to believe that someone benign and concerned with us is ruling the universe and we can we stop our unnecessary fretting. To have faith is to believe that mother and father are home, aware of the situation, and in charge.

The trouble though is that this is hard to do, even when we do believe in a God who is Lord of the universe. Our problem is that we project our limited, selective care onto this God. We feel that God is inadequate because often we are, that God falls asleep at the switch because we occasionally do, and that God forgets about us in our problems because we have a habit of letting certain persons and things slip off of our radar screens.

You know how we are as human beings, forever letting certain things slip! We look into our closet one-day and notice a shirt or a blouse that we forgot we had. Then, we suddenly remember an invitation we were supposed to, long ago, have responded to. Things slip our minds. Our capacity to care is limited and selective. Were we Lord of the universe, many a sparrow would be forgotten and many a hair would fall to the ground unnoticed.

And so we fear that God sometimes forgets and does not notice us, that God, like us, is an inadequate Lord of the universe. That is why we get anxious and fret, because, like one without faith, we can feel that we are in an unfeeling universe.

Prophetic Balance

August 28, 1997

A couple of years ago, while serving on a board seeking to hire a fulltime social justice director, we were discerning the pros and cons of hiring a particular person we had just interviewed. He was a man with a fierce passion for justice. Sadly, however, that passion, whatever its full motives, lacked balance, making him one-sided and unable to really hear or see anything that did not fit his vision. One of my colleagues, however, pushed strongly for hiring him: “He has the passion for it -that’s what’s important!”

At the time, I agreed with him, ardent passion seemed enough. I no longer agree. Prophecy is more, considerably more, than fiery passion. Anyone can be angry. Anyone can be one-sided. Anyone can be in somebody else’s face. Prophecy requires more. It requires the capacity to listen, to respect, to have critical balance, to carry complexity, to walk in unresolved tension, and to empathize with those who do not agree with us. Unfortunately, that is not the current vision.

Today we pride ourselves on, precisely, being one-sided, on being so on fire about something that we refuse all balance. This is equally true for both the left and the right. Everyone, it seems, is a warrior for truth and few, it seems, remember that one man’s freedom fighter is another man’s fanatic. The line between prophecy, as it is currently understood, and fundamentalism is thinly drawn.

Hence, if we move in conservative circles, we tend to identify prophecy with a one-sided passion for prolife causes, family values, sexual purity, and dogmatic orthodoxy. If we move in liberal circles, prophecy then becomes an equally one-sided passion for social justice, feminism, freedom of expression, and individual rights. Good as all of these are in themselves, they may never be taken one-sidedly, but are all part of a larger truth. Curiously, both circles have some glaring ideological inconsistencies. One would think that the left would be defending communal rights and the rights of government to govern and the right would be the champion of individual rights, but passion, all on its own, makes for strange anomalies.

Thus, when passion is everything and balance is nothing you get that curious situation wherein the religious right thinks that to be religious you have to be extremist and fundamentalistic – and the religious left agrees!

What is needed today is prophecy that is more than just one-sided passion. We need, curious as this may sound, prophets who can model balance and carry the tensions of the time. Hence we need persons who can be equally passionate about both individual rights and the laws that protect those rights; about both the value of institutions that foster community and about individual expression and charism; about both private morality and social justice; about both sexual purity and sexual passion; and about both feminism and family. We need persons who can speak for sexual responsibility even as they respect the rights of gays and lesbians.

Ernst Kasemann once said that the problem in the world is that the liberals aren’t pious and the pious aren’t liberal. That is both true and tragic. We tend to be one or the other and yet there are prophetic qualities in both. Just imagine, if you will, a world within which the pious would be socially committed and social activists would properly value private prayer and private morality. Imagine a world within which prolife and pro-family groups would value feminism and feminists would be prolife and pro-family. Imagine someone who could be critical of church authority and ecclesial institution even as he or she could deeply love and respect the tradition that grounds him or her. Imagine someone liberal and pious both at the same time, who can, in Jesus words, pull out of the sack the old as well as the new.

Impossible to do? A schizophrenic stance? Indicative of being wishy-washy and non-committed? This is someone who wants it both ways? No. This is prophecy. To be prophetic religiously is precisely to have this balance, this complexity, this capacity to carry unresolved tension, this ability to be both liberal and pious.

You see this in persons like Dorothy Day, Thomas Merton, Henri Nouwen, Jim Wallis, Richard Rohr, Gordon Crosby, Jean Vanier, and Mary Jo Leddy, just to mention a few. What you see in these people is passion, but not one-sided passion. Crassly put, in them, you see someone who can walk and chew gum at the same time – a prophetic quality no longer valued, it seems.

We have enough one-sided passion, ideology, and anger in the world and in the church. We need some prophets of balance.

The Good Samaritan

August 21, 1997

Who is my neighbour? What does it mean to be neighbour to one another?

Jesus once answered this by telling us the parable of the Good Samaritan. In essence, as he told it, the parable runs something like this: A man was taking a walk one day when he was beaten up by thieves and left for dead in a ditch by a road. A priest saw him there, but passed him by. Later still, a scribe also passed by without stopping to help him. Finally, a Samaritan, the kind of person you would have least expected to respond, saw him, was moved by compassion, and stopped and helped him.

One of the interesting things in this parable is that those who did not stop to help him, the priest and the scribe, did so for reasons that go far beyond the question of their individual selfishness and selflessness. They did so for certain ideological, religious reasons. Thus, the priest did not stop because he feared that the man was dead and, being a priest, if he touched a dead body he would be ritually defiled and thereby unable to offer sacrifice in the temple. The scribe had his own religious reasons for not stopping. The Samaritan, who had the least to lose religiously, was able to be moved by simple human compassion.

Given this background, the parable might, in our own language and categories, be recast to read like this:

One day a man was taking a walk in a city park when he was mugged, beaten up, and left for dead by a gang of thugs.

It so happened that, as he lay there, the provincial superior of a major religious order walked by and saw him. He realized instantly that the man was in a desperate way and he felt that he should respond. However, he thought to himself: “If I help this man, I will set a dangerous precedent. Then what will I do? Having helped him, where will I draw the line? Will I have to stop and help everyone who is in need? Will I then have to give money to every panhandler, every beggar, every charity? If I give to this one, then on what basis am I justified in refusing any charity? Where will it stop? This would be dangerous precedent. I simply cannot help everyone I see in need and, thus, it is best not to help this one. This is ultimately a question of fairness.” And thus he passed him by.

A short time later, a young woman, a theology student, happened to come along. She too saw the man lying wounded. Her first instinct was to stop and help him, but a number of thoughts made her hesitate. She said to herself: “In that course on pastoral care we just took, we were taught that it is not good to try to rescue someone. We must resist the temptation, however sincere and religiously motivated, to naively wade in and try to be someone’s rescuer. That’s simply a savior complex which doesn’t do the other person any good in the long run and comes out of a less than pure motivation besides. I would only be trying to help that person because it makes me feel good and useful. It would be a selfish act really; ultimately only this man can help himself.” She too, this person preparing for ministry, despite much good intention, passed by the wounded person.

Later still, a third person chanced to come along, the chairperson for the local diocesan commission on social justice. He too saw the wounded man and he too was, instinctually, moved. However, before he was able to reach out and touch the wounded man, a number of hard questions surfaced: “This man really is not the issue. The more important question is how he got here. What things within the larger picture – our social and economic system – produce the conditions that make for this type of violence and hurt. To help this man is simply a Band-Aid, solving nothing. It does not address the deeper issue of justice and why our society perpetually creates this kind of victim. To help this individual is simply to do the Mother Theresa thing, but it doesn’t solve anything really. It’s the old temptation really – it’s easier to give bread to a hungry person than it is to address the issue of hunger!” This man too, for all his dedication and sincerity, like the religious superior and the theology student before him, passed by the wounded man without stopping.

Finally, it so happened that the CEO of Texaco Oil happened to be out joy riding in the new BMW he had just purchased. He chanced to see the wounded man lying there and he stopped to have a closer look. When he saw the face of that wounded person, something in him suddenly changed. A compassion he didn’t even know he possessed took possession of him. Tears filled his eyes and, deeply moved, he got out of his car, bent over, and gently picked up the man. He carried him to his car and gently laid him in the back seat, oblivious of the fact that blood was staining the clean white upholstery. Arriving at the emergency entrance of the nearest hospital, he rushed in and hollered for the paramedics. After a stretcher had brought the man into the emergency room, they discovered that he had no medical insurance. The CEO produced a Visa Gold Card and told the hospital staff to give the wounded man the best medical attention possible money was to be no object. He promised to cover all hospital expenses.

Who was neighbour to the wounded man?

Heaven’s Language

August 13, 1997

What language will we speak in heaven? A curious question perhaps, but one that might be profitably meditated. How will we communicate with each other in heaven? How, there, will we reach across the innumerable barriers of language, culture, and background experience which, here, so separate us?

If we can believe the saints, in heaven there will be no words needed, no distance between us that needs bridging through spoken words, through explanation, through assertion, through conscious self-expression, or through anything else. A single glance will tell all. Heaven will not be a place of silence exactly, but it will not be a place of spoken words either. Everyone will be singing and dancing and perfectly understood and understanding in an ecstatic, wordless embrace. Spoken words will be superfluous. The language of heaven, the language of peaceful embrace, is beyond spoken words.

In one way, all of us have already had this, in our mothers’ wombs. There we were at peace, held in an embrace that satisfied. As Karl Jung once put it, in the mother’s womb we are in heaven, except we are not conscious of it.

When we do become conscious that memory of heaven stays with us, as a longing, as a final daydream we nurse. When we are little children, we want to be held, especially by our mothers. Words mean less to us then than being held. We want to be held, precisely, so that we do not have to speak, explain ourselves, and take away our own loneliness and tiredness. What every child wants is to be picked up and held in such a way that he or she can be quiet, safe, understood, and yet part of the mother’s life and body. Ultimately that is the basic longing, daydream, of every child.

This does not go away as we get older, it only takes on other appearances. Through adolescence and adulthood, the basic daydream remains the same. At the end of the day, we want to be held, embraced, in such a way that we can be, as a child at its mother’s breast, quiet, safe, understood, and yet part of the life and body of someone (Someone) whom we love.

At a conscious level, this is not always so obvious. Our longing takes many forms and, as we go through life, different things will appear to us as offering the mother’s breast, the final peace of heaven. The fantasy takes many forms. At times, it might focus on a particular person and the daydream will be: If that person would just fall in love with me, if that person held me in honour, affection, and sexual embrace, then I would be in heaven. Or, at other times, it might be the desire: If I found the right person to fall in love with then I would be at peace.

There are times that the dream might focus on some kind of achievement, success, or experience: If I achieve such or such a goal, finish this or that degree, publish this work of art or literature, make this professional team or land that particular job, or simply have that long dreamed about vacation, then I will be happy. At still other times, the daydream might focus on material comfort, on buying this or that kind of house or material item, or on freedom, on freeing ourselves from a bad marriage or a bad situation. Whatever. Always, save for those times when we are in a clinical depression, we are driven by a dream, the dream of an embrace that will bring us quiet peace.

There are many lessons to be learned by getting in touch with the roots of our daydreams. The more we get in touch with what drives us, irrespective of how non-holy, irreverent, or sex crazed, that may be seem, the more we will begin to understand, and hopefully live by, Augustine’s dictum: You have made us for yourself, Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you. Better understanding our longings might too teach us the wisdom of a Karl Rahner who once said: In the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable we come to realize that here in this life all symphonies remain unfinished.

But at a deeper level still, better understanding what our longings mean might begin to teach us the language of heaven. What is that language?

It is the language of the silent embrace, the one we once spoke in our mother’s arms, a language that has no need for self-assertion, self-explanation, self-justification, achievements that impression anyone, or sexual seduction, but one in which all is given, understood, and accepted in a wordless, peaceful contact which connects more powerfully than any words. In true embrace we experience both the silence and the peace of heaven.

Ad Usum

August 7, 1997

A few years ago, a young Benedictine Monk shared with me how, for all the early years of his religious life, he had been resentful because he had to ask permission of his Abbott if he wanted anything: “I used to think it was silly, me, a grown man, supposedly an adult, having to ask a superior if I wanted something. If I wanted a new shirt, I would have to ask the Abbott for permission to buy it. I thought it was ridiculous that at thirty-five years of age I was reduced to being like a child.”

But his attitude changed: “I am not sure of all the reasons, though I am sure they have to do with grace, but one day I came to the realization that there was some spiritual wisdom in this, having to ask permission for everything. In this life, ultimately, we don’t own anything and nothing comes to us by right. Everything is gift, everything should be asked for, not taken as if owned. We should be grateful to the universe and to God, just for giving us a little space. Now, when I ask permission from the Abbott because I need something, I no longer feel like a child. No, I feel like I am more properly in tune with the way things should be, in a gift-oriented universe within which nobody has a right to ultimately claim anything.”

What this monk had, in his own way, understood is the principle that ultimately undergirds all spirituality, all morality, and every one of the commandments, namely, that everything is gift, nothing can be owned or claimed really as one’s own. We should all be grateful to the universe for giving us a little space and we should be most careful not to claim, as by right, anything more.

But this goes against much within our culture and within our private inclinations. Within both of these we hear voices which tell us: If you cannot take what you want then you are a weak person; weak in a double way: First of all, you are a weak personality, too timid to be fully alive. Second, you have been weakened by religious and moral scruples and you are, at the end of the day, unable precisely to seize the day, to be fully alive. You are uptight, frigid, infantile, nothing more than a child held captive by superstitious forces. Why don’t you grow up!

It was precisely those kinds of voices that this monk heard during his younger years and it because of what they were saying he was resentful and felt immature.

But I am not so sure that Jesus would agree with these voices. I am not so sure that Jesus would look on so much that is assertive, aggressive, and accumulative within our society, despite the admiration it receives, and see this as what is meant, in the healthy sense, by the expression that suggests we seize the moment. I am not so sure that Jesus would share our admiration of our rich and famous who claim, as by right, their excessive wealth and status. When Jesus states that it is harder for a rich person to go to heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle, he might have mitigated this by adding: “Unless, of course, the rich person, childlike, asks permission from the universe, from the community, and from God, for every new shirt!”

When I was a religious novice, our novice master tried to impress upon us the meaning of religious poverty by making us write inside of every book that was given us the Latin words: Ad Usum. Literally, that means: For use. The idea was that, although this book was given to you for your personal use, you ultimately did not own it. It was just for your use, your temporary use, real ownership lay elsewhere. We were then told that this was true of everything else given us too for our personal use, from our toothbrushes to the shirts on our backs. They were not really ours, but merely given us for our use.

One of the young men in that novitiate eventually left the order and is today a medical doctor. He remains a close friend and he once shared with me how, even today, as a doctor, he still writes those words, ad usum, in the front of his books: “I don’t belong to a religious order. I have no vow of poverty, but the principle our novice master taught us is just as valid for me in the world as it is for a religious novice. Ultimately we don’t own anything. Those books aren’t mine, really. They’ve been given me, temporarily, for my use. Nothing belongs to anybody and it is good never to forget that!”

It is not bad being an adult who, like a child, has to ask permission to buy a new shirt. It keeps us attuned to the fact that the universe belongs to everyone, to God ultimately, and all of us should be deeply grateful just for a little space.

The Way Of Surrender

July 31, 1997

The gospel is not as much about worthiness as it is about surrender. What God wants from us is not a million acts of virtue, but a million acts of surrender, culminating in one massive surrender of soul, mind, and body. When we have given up everything and are completely helpless to give ourselves anything, as we will all eventually be when we face death, then salvation can be given us.

And that is the key, salvation can only be given us. It can never be taken, earned, or possessed by right. Hence nothing we have or can accumulate in this life – fame, fortune, health, good looks, a good name, or even moral virtue, religious fidelity, personal sanctity, or the practice of social justice – tips God’s hand towards us. What tips God’s hands is helplessness, surrender in grace.

This idea is everywhere in the Christian and Jewish scriptures, but let me illustrate it with just one, clear example, the exchange between Jesus and the rich young man, complete with the subsequent reaction of the disciples.

In terms of a paraphrase, this is what transpires: A young man, rich in material possessions, approaches Jesus and asks: “What must I do to possess eternal life?” In Jesus’ reply there is a subtle, gentle correction that is often missed: “If you would want to receive life (you can never possess it) then go, sell all that you have, give the money to the poor, and come and follow me.” The rich young man, however, is not able precisely to surrender his possessions and declines Jesus’ offer. For his part, then, Jesus turns to his disciples and explicates the moral of this story: “It is harder for a rich person to enter the Kingdom of heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle.”

And the disciples are stunned: “If that is the case, who then can be saved? If that is the case, we are all hopeless to give ourselves salvation!” Ironically, even though the disciples’ reaction might seem rather limp and uninspiring, this is one of the few times in scripture where they get things right. They surrender, they admit their helplessness, and thus Jesus is able to tell them the real moral of the story: “For humans, it is impossible, but all things are possible for God.”

I suspect that all of us understand part of this: No amount of material or physical wealth will give us heaven. However, what Jesus is saying, and what is harder for us to grasp, is that no amount of virtue, either, will give us heaven. Heaven is given us not for anything we possess but when we surrender everything we possess.

C.S. Lewis, in his little masterpiece on heaven and hell, The Great Divorce, makes this point in a very simple way. He has a fantasy of some (ten) interviews between someone in heaven trying to coax someone not there to come to heaven. Each of the ten persons seeking entrance into heaven is blocked by some major flaw, pride, anger, idolatry, the incapacity to forgive, shame, lust, and the like. In each case, irrespective of the flaw, the person in heaven keeps telling the other: “All you have to do is to give me your hand and let me lead you there. All you have to do is surrender!”

All you have to do is surrender! For the first forty or so years of our lives perhaps this is not so true because we are still seeking to come to bloom. We are young and looking to grow and thus are like a flower that still needs to take in things in order to bloom and come to seed. There is then more place for assertion, ambition, achievement, for accumulating. The rich young man was still young. His case would be infinitely more tragic had be been an old rich man who declined Jesus’ offer.

In the ideal order of things, surrender is for the mature, for the flower that has come to bloom and needs to give off its seed. That is less true of us during the first half of our lives, for we are still building, but it becomes the deepest truth of the second half of life. After forty, understood religiously, life is not about claiming worthiness, or about building things, especially our own egos, but about getting in touch with helplessness.

Age brings us physically to our knees and more and more everything we have so painstakingly built up begins to mean less and less. But that is the order of things: Salvation is not about great achievements, but about a great embrace and, as C.S. Lewis puts it, all we have to do is surrender.

Post-Modernism And Our Children

July 17, 1997

Twice in my life, once just before I was ordained a priest and then again just before I was installed as provincial superior of the Oblates, I had to take an oath against Modernism. It was not a big thing really; essentially it meant publicly professing the creed of the church. But there was a time, not that long ago, when this was considered a big thing and Modernism was seen as the archenemy of the church.

Times have changed and today modernism is itself under fire, from the secular world. This is making for some curious happenings: More and more, today we are seeing the phenomenon wherein the children of people who once rejected religion in the name of Modernism are taking their own oath against Modernism. The jury is still out as to whether all of this is good or bad, but, undeniably, it is interesting.

So what is happening? What is this phenomenon that many are calling Post-Modernism?

Post-Modernism is a reaction against Modernism, that is, a reaction against the belief, the ideology, that reason, critical, informed reason is the ultimate and only arbiter of truth and that it, and not religious truth, is the ultimate authority. In essence, it is a distrust of all that is not explicable in purely rational terms. This faith, the belief that critical reason is the final authority, ushered in what we call Modern Western history.

And it was a mixed blessing, both religiously and secularly. On the one hand, Modernism is good. With its faith in the rational, it has helped allay countless superstitions and groundless fear and thus has helped free the Western mind. Moreover, it lies at the basis of the scientific method and the Western science and technology would not be understandable without it.

But there was another side to it that was less freeing and it is this side that the churches feared and against which they fought. Modernism’s faith in the rational was so powerful that, in the end, it did not allow for faith in anything else. Efficiency, pragmatism, and science became the ultimate authorities and they ruled as ruthlessly as any god ever has. The facts, as science established them, became God. With that, reality flattened out and lost much of its mystery. Contemplation, ritual, and mysticism, save for a few small pockets of resistance within the churches, essentially died. Further, any kind of faith in or contact with the invisible, the non-empirical, the world of spirit, was seen as suspect or as outright superstition. Christian faith came to be seen as a naiveté, like believing in Santa and the Easter Bunny. Most of us grew up in this climate and, for many of us, it is still the basic air we breathe. We are adult children of the enlightenment.

But a curious thing is happening today, not all over, but in significant parts of the culture. More and more, reason itself is under fire and is being questioned as to how much truth and meaning it can deliver. You see this skepticism of reason everywhere, but most notably in people who once rejected religion in the name of rationality. Hence, for example, among so many persons who once rejected religion because they somehow regarded it as superstition, we see an increasing fascination with horoscopes, astrology, neo-pagan rituals, and new age religion. We see the same kind of fascination with typology: Myers-Briggs, Enneagrams, archetypes and with books that promise deeper meaning through our getting in touch with the non-rational and the mystical. Just a perusal of the titles of recent bestsellers tells you that a lot of people are looking for meaning in creeds beyond the rational: Running with Wolves; Fire in the Belly; Iron John; Women are from Venus, Men Are From Mars; The Celestine Prophecies; Goddesses in Every Woman. An hour of MTV will tell you the same thing and leave you wondering why rock artists, and their fans, find chaos so bewitching.

Each of these things, in its own way, is an oath against Modernism. Perhaps they do not always sound like the Christian creed, but they share with it the faith that our lives are not fully explained, nor fully circumscribed, by the empirical and the rational. Each of these believes in its own angels, devils, spirits, and gods, and each of these is an expression of Post-Modernism.

What goes around comes around. Some of the children of the children who once rejected religion because they thought it was too un-freeing are now rejecting their parents’ rationality because they find it too un-freeing. Welcome to post-modernity!

On Praying The Hours

July 9, 1997

Recently I read a book that was so good it made me resolve never to miss praying the hours of the church again. Its author, David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk, does not attempt to guilt us into praying. He comes at it differently. Praying or not praying, for him, are not questions of guilt or merit. What is at stake is rather the poverty or richness of life. God does not need for us to pray, but we need for us to pray.

His book is entitled, The Music of Silence (San Francisco, Harper, 1995) and its thesis is simple: If we do not pray, at regular intervals each day, we will not meet the angel of each hour and our lives will be much poorer for that fact. How so?

Steindl_Rast begins by explaining the rhythm of the church’s liturgical hours of prayer. These hours, a combination of psalms, scriptural readings, and liturgical prayers, are the prayers that have been for centuries chanted by contemplative monks and nuns in monasteries and recited more simply by priests and other religious. In many Protestant traditions, some of these hours form the basis of church services and, more recently within Roman Catholicism, many lay persons have picked them up and begun praying them. While many of us have some familiarity with two of these hours, Lauds and Vespers, few of us are familiar with the others: Vigils, Prime, Terce, Sext, None and Compline.

These hours form an ancient rhythm of prayer which, whether we are professional contemplatives or not, should be the essential prayer-rhythm of everyone’s day. It works this way: An hour, thus defined, does not mean a simple hour on the clock. A liturgical hour is more a measure of soul than of chronology. It is like a season of the year: spring, summer, fall, or winter. These, our seasons, are as much a feeling, a temperature, a shade of light, and a colour as they are a date on the calendar. Each is a mood and, mythically speaking, each brings its own particular angel.

But that angel can be missed. A moment can pass us by for nothing. All of us have had this experience. And how often it happens. Because of heartaches and headaches, the pressures and pains that so chronically plague us, we can miss a season. A summer, a fall, a winter, or a spring, passes and we never really attune to its mood. It comes and goes unexamined, unable to really give us anything. We never seize the moment, its colours, its smells, its temperature, its particular shades of light, and the moods these stir in us. We miss greeting its angel.

Thus, for example, we say things like: “Because of mother’s death we had no Christmas this year.” “This year, with all the moving we had to do, we had no summer really.” “I have been so preoccupied and stressed at work that spring has made no difference to me this year.” Seasons come and go and often we simply miss them.

Coupled with this is the effect of pressure and worry within us. After awhile, we have the impression that time is limited, that there is never enough time to do all the things we are required to do. Many of us live with a constant feeling that we must hurry, that we are behind, that time is running too swiftly. Because of this, we too rarely notice, really, the season and the hour of day, with its changes of light, colour, and temperature. We miss its particular mood, its angel.

The church invites us to say Lauds and Vespers and whatever other canonical hours we can manage, precisely so that we do not miss our mornings, our afternoons, and our evenings. We all know what is at stake here because we have all missed countless mornings, afternoon, and evenings precisely because we did not pray. If I do not begin my morning with prayer, with a Lauds, which receives what the angel of each morning brings – the gift of a new day, the dawn of new light, refreshment after sleep, time and space for a renewed innocence and enthusiasm. I will soon find that it is noon and I have missed a morning. I won’t feel particularly guilty about not praying. I will just have missed a morning. The same will happen to me if I do not, through some Vespers, greet the angel of evening. I won’t go to bed feeling guilty about not praying. I will though, mostly likely, miss the evening, for I will not attune myself to that particular kind of peace and feeling of neighbourliness that can be received only as the light of day is fading.

Without prayer, we hurry compulsively through our days, missing most of them because we are missing the angels that God is sending each hour.

Children Of Our God – And Of Our Elders

July 2, 1997

Faith-wise, I was lucky and drew a long straw. My parents and the significant elders in my youth, while not perfect, walked their talk, at least essentially so. They raised me and my siblings to believe in God and in the church and then, by the way they lived their lives and treated us, gave us reason enough to believe that the trust they asked of us, towards God and church, was well placed. They made God and church credible.

How did they do this? By never essentially betraying us, their children. Their love was never perfect, nor unconditional, nor even adequate – nobody, save God, can do that, but neither did they betray us, or themselves, in so deep a way that it cast doubt upon the essential trust they asked of us. Today, I have faith in God and in the church, largely, because of that. My elders didn’t betray me.

I share this here not because it is significant or deep, or even typical, but for the opposite reasons. Many, many, persons have had exactly the opposite experience with a corresponding consequence. In their case, the parents and elders to whom they were entrusted and who tried to teach them to believe in God and church, themselves so betrayed that trust so as to leave their children, this side of eternity, in a situation wherein they will never be able to believe in God, and especially in the church, without a constant struggle with anger, bitterness, and suspicion.

For them, there was the prescribed talk about religion, God and church, but there were other things too, in the home and in the larger environment, which belied the trust that religion asked of them. Disrespect, neglect, physical abuse, sexual abuse, alcoholism, marital infidelity, or simply a parent who never grew up, these things, from a parent or a significant elder, uncut the trust that religion asked. Anyone who has been wounded in some deep way by the betrayal of a significant adult in his or her childhood will find it very difficult not to go through adult life without a lot of anger and doubt towards the church and its ministers.

Simply stated: If I have been deeply betrayed as a child, why trust now? If the words of my parents or a significant elder were essentially dishonest, why should I not suspect that this is the case with all authority, church or civil? If the religious talk and actions of my elders was more appearance than reality, why shouldn’t I think that all religious talk and action is simple appearance? Why should I not be suspicious of a dark confessional box when I will spend my life trying to get over what happened to me in some other dark place? And why shouldn’t I suspect that all authority, in the end, is self-serving, lying, and exploitive if that has been my primal experience? Why shouldn’t I believe that, ultimately, all human authority is dishonest and untrustworthy?

There is a Neo-Freudian axiom which suggests that most anger directed at institutionalized religion is ultimately anger directed at your own father. The reverse suggests that we are about as comfortable with institutionalized religion as we are with our own fathers. With a few exceptions, in my experience, this has shown itself to be true. If my dad was an alcoholic who only came home and dealt with me only when he wanted something, is it any wonder that I am habitually suspicious of the motives of virtually every authority figure, especially in the church?

Faith, especially faith in the church, is mediated by our parents and our significant elders. If they betray us when we are little, it will always be hard for us to have faith since faith, after all, is about trust – and trust once betrayed, betrayed at a primal level, is not easily restored, as any victim of sexual abuse will testify to. It is a whole lot easier to believe, without bitterness, if those entrusted with protecting and nurturing me as a child never fundamentally betrayed me. Conversely, if those whom I was supposed to trust, and who were supposed to protect me, abused me instead, I will carry more than my share of anger and suspicion, especially towards the church.

It is important to know that we come to the church with very different experiences and we have to be sensitive to each other because of this. For some of us, it didn’t hurt to be child and the blind trust we gave our parents and the church was a good investment. For others, though, too much of what church and church authority stand for can only seem like a big lie. If our parents or elders were immature, neglectful, self-interested, or, worse yet, positively abusive, that is the way the church and its leaders will also appear to us. Understanding this can be helpful in gestating compassion, on all sides.

Moving On

June 26, 1997

As a columnist, I rarely write about what is actually happening in my own life, given that my opinions already betray more than enough. I suspect that people who read this piece weekly know more about me than they really need to know to give them an adequate perspective on what I write. In this particular column, however, I want to share personally about a major change taking place in my life.

Six years ago, I was enjoying a sabbatical, my first, when, one morning, I got a phone call from France, where the General Council of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious order to which I belong, were meeting. They were asking me to serve as Provincial Superior for one of our provinces of Oblates in Central Canada. My life changed in an instant, and quite drastically too. I drove my car from Oakland, California to Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, abandoning not only an unfinished sabbatical and an unfinished book but a myriad of unfinished plans and dreams as well. I must confess that, as I made that drive, I felt considerably less enthusiasm than depression.

But God was good. And Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, was also good. I loved the city, it air, its water, its beauty, its parks, its pubs, its university, and especially its people, with their own particular warmth, humour, intellectuality, character, and faith. This is a good city. Perhaps most of the world cannot find it on a map, but that only proves that it is one of the better-kept secrets in the world and difficult to spell!

The job? Being Provincial Superior to an order of priests and brothers had its ups and downs. Whatever else it was, and it was many things, it was always interesting, always challenging, and it always stretched me and took me to places I would rather not have gone, in terms of geography and in terms of the heart.

It had a downside: one cannot be in a major religious superior for any length of time and not be forced into making decisions that will hurt some people, no matter which way those decisions are made and no matter if they are made at all. I had no previous experience with any of this and everything in my temperament is stacked against it, but I had no escape and I now have baggage I was free of six years ago. One loses one’s innocence when one is in authority. Would it were otherwise!

But there was also a major compensation, the dedication and faith that I witnessed, both among the men I served and the people to whom they ministered. In all organizations, about 10-12% of the persons you are dealing with are, as it is put today, dysfunctional. That can be discouraging. However, and this is what needs to be kept in perspective, this means that about 90% are not. 90% are honest, loving, faith-filled, generous, dedicated, and healthy. That is also true of the men to whom I served as provincial. In nine out of ten of them, I witnessed a faith, generosity, and dedication that left me humbled. Service is always more privilege than burden. We always receive more than we give and gratitude eventually dwarfs the scars. At least that was true of my six years as a provincial superior.

But it ended late this spring. In our congregation, we serve six-year terms as provincials. Mine is now finished. So what is next?

More immediately, sabbatical. From summer, 1997, to summer, 1998, I will be living with our Oblate community in Toronto, resting, praying, reading, attempting to write a book, taking in some baseball and football, and walking in the sun whenever possible. The book which I hope to write while on this sabbatical does not, as yet, have a name. It does have an aim. It may seem grandiose, and indeed it is, but I hope to write a book, a spirituality book, which, in essence, is an apologia for belief in God and (especially) in the church in today’s world. Teilhard de Chardin once commented that he always found it amazing that so many sincere, good, searching people could not believe in God. His conclusion? They, unlike himself, must not have heard about God in a palatable way. His writings set out to address this. I do not put myself in the same class as Teilhard de Chardin, not by a long shot, but my attempt, modest by his standards, will try to address essentially the same issue.

What happens after summer of 1998? I leave that in the hands of God and the hands of my community, the Oblates. I have a simple enough faith. It believes that wherever I am sent will be the right place. No place, as Rilke says, is poor in its capacity to fire gratitude. There will be good people to meet, I am sure, wherever I go.