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.

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? 

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.

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!

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.

God does not cease to exist just because we do not think about him.

Ruth Burrows, in a recent book, points this out by presenting us with the following image:  “A baby in its mother’s womb is in a relationship with her but is unaware of it and does not respond to the mother’s intense love and desire to give herself to the child. The relationship with God on the human side can remain as minimal as that of the baby.”

This image, a baby in its mother’s womb though unaware of the mother, is a rich mine-field for prayer and reflection, especially in our time when our everyday consciousness tends to border on agnosticism. The image is rich.

The first thing it tells us is that an atheistic consciousness does not negate the existence of God, even if our age seems to think so. The reality of God does not depend upon our conscious awareness of it. God does not cease to exist simply because we cease to think about him. God’s reality is not threatened by our lack of awareness. Sadly, our culture often equates lack of awareness with lack of existence. We are tremendously impoverished by that notion.

More positively, this image can help us better understand something else, namely, the Christian doctrine of creation. Most of the time, almost all of us misunderstand this doctrine. We believe that God created us (past tense) and that we now somehow have life and existence independent of God, tantamount to a toy that has been created by some craftsman. But that notion, common though it is, is false. The dogma of creation asks us to believe that God is actively creating us right now and is sustaining us in being right now. There is no past tense as regards creation. If God, even for a second, ceased creating and sustaining us, we would cease to be. We have no reality independent of God, no more than a baby in the womb is independent of its mother. The baby may not be aware of the mother but the mother’s reality is what is massive, life giving, and life sustaining. That is also true in our relationship to God.

The great mystics and philosophers have always tried to teach that to us. I remember an encounter I once had with the great Belgian Dominican, Jan Walgrave. We had been talking about Etienne Gilson and his notion of existence when he, Walgrave, asked me this question: “Do you ever sit on a park bench, look at a tree, wonder about its existence, and ask yourself:  “Why is there something instead of nothing?'”

I answered honestly: “No. Sometimes I wonder about things and sometimes I ask that question for other reasons, but, in all honesty, I don’t think I have ever been so moved just looking at a tree that I asked myself why things existed as opposed to not existing.”

His reply to me was gentle, but clear: “Then you aren’t a true philosopher. You can study philosophy and it can help you, but you, yourself, are not a philosopher. A real philosopher will always ask that question. A real philosopher is unable to look at a tree and not ask why it is there. To see a tree, or anything else, is to see a dance … and there can be no dance without a dancer dancing it. Everything that you see posits the question: `Why is there something instead of nothing?’ Every day, when I sit on a park bench, I ask myself: ‘Why is there something instead of nothing?’ At a deep level, nothing explains itself and nothing sustains itself. Gilson understood this and this is too the Christian doctrine of creation. God is actively making the world and it doesn’t exist independent of that. Hence to see the world is to somehow see the reality beneath it, God”.

His concept is more philosophical than Burrows’ image but it is essentially the same. We are the baby and God is the mother gestating us. Our lack of conscious awareness of that fact in no way diminishes its reality or its importance. God does not cease to exist because we cease to think about him. An atheistic or agnostic consciousness does not kill God, as Nietzsche thought, it simply impoverishes our self-understanding.

The task of prayer is precisely to make us more consciously aware of that relationship of creation, providence, and love that exists between God and ourselves, prior to our consciously knowing it. God is gestating us, whether we know it or not. To pray is to learn that and to pray even more deeply is to learn,  as Burrows puts it, the intense love and desire of that Mother, God, to give herself to us.

Hugo of St. Victor once expressed an entire hermeneutics with a single line – love is the eye.

Part of us that knows exactly what he means by that and has no difficulty believing that he is right. We see straight and our eyesight is most clear when we are not selfish and sinful, but loving and moral. Lack of love is an impediment to proper sight, just as the prism of love affords the most accurate insight.

But part of us, too, has its doubts here. That part of us understands what Genesis means when it says that, after they had sinned, Adam and Eve’s eyes were opened. Their minds may have been darkened, as our catechisms taught us, but their eyes were opened and they knew some things after sin that they did not know before. The breaking of taboos, Scripture tells us, brings its own knowledge, a knowledge beyond chastity.

Experience, all experience, teaches and sometimes, it seems, that experience which stretches the limits of love and morality produces a certain knowledge that innocence and purity do not. Great artists have always known this and, for this reason, they are generally less renowned for their innocence and chastity than they are for how they have stretched the limits of experience. Generally too they are known more for their extraordinary creativity than for any exceptional love and generosity. We never doubt the intelligence of our artists, nor the range of their experience, but we are considerably less generous in our praise of their innocence © which often is exactly what was sacrificed in the pursuit of that high creativity. Doris Lessing, commenting on George Eliot, once suggested that Eliot would have been a far better writer had she been less moral. Part of us of knows exactly what that means.

Many people, I suspect, will protest at this and argue that what artists so often reject, and what Lessing challenges Eliot on, is not true morality but a certain restrictive concept of it. There is some truth in this too, but, de facto, the wisdom of art is often more a wisdom of aesthetics than it is a wisdom of love. Aesthetics of course has its own intrinsic value and, in a higher synthesis, merges with love. The problem is that rarely do we get that higher synthesis. Consequently, art and the gospel fight a lot and we are often left with some pretty schizophrenic sympathies.

What ultimately makes us wise? What in the end reveals life to us? Innocence or eating the apple? Chastity or breaking the taboos? Self-abnegation or self-development? Does what opens our eyes also darken our minds? Who is right, the artists or the ascetics? What are the false dichotomies here?

There is wisdom in Hugo of St. Victor, in his advice: love is the eye. Love sorts things out; it makes for the higher synthesis. It was this insight that also prompted St. Augustine to write: Love and do as you like.  But the last word on this should go to Jesus. He also taught a class on hermeneutics, the Beatitudes. Among other things, he said this:  Happy are the pure of heart; they shall see God. For him, purity of heart and poverty of spirit are what clear the eyesight and enable us to see straight. Conversely, all sin, selfishness, and greed weaken our eyesight because, through that prism, we see a world that is as self-centered, cynical, untrustworthy, and hardened as we are. Through chastity and innocence, on the other hand, we see a world that is fresh, childlike, and capable of firing more enthusiasm than cynicism. 

For Jesus, purity of heart is the real basis for revelation. And he taught this in more than words. He knew the deep truths he taught not, first of all, because he was divine, but because he was moral. He was able to reveal perfectly because he did not sin. Purity of heart, childlike innocence, self-abnegation, and the fruits of the Holy Spirit; not intellectual brilliance, chance, luck, correct cult, or gnostic insight © are the conduits to the deep secrets of God and the world. In Jesus’ view, one does not need a spiritual guru to break open the seal the binds the deep secrets, one needs a good moral life and a childlike innocence.

It is interesting to view, against this background, our late 20th century philosophical discussions about objectivity. As we know, after the insights of Albert Einstein, Werner Heisenberg, and Max Planck, science is telling us that, while objective reality exists, reality can never be known completely in any objective manner. All knowledge, even the most empirical data of mathematics and physics, is to some degree subjective. All research is, ultimately, partly me-search. Freud, Jung, and Durkheim would agree. There is no such a thing as not having a bias. The task is to have the correct one.

Jesus challenges us to have the correct bias, the bias of love, and he goes further to tell us that this bias is predicated on charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, faith, modesty, fidelity, and chastity. These are the ultimate corrective lens we need in order to see straight.

A couple of years ago, I witnessed an exchange between two of my colleagues, both priests. They had been having a rather spirited discussion, over drinks, and personalities and values were clashing. At one point, the younger one asked the older one this question: “Do you find your work meaningful?”

The older priest, a man already in his sixties, gave an answer which, in effect, amounted to this: “That’s a typical question from somebody of your generation who have the luxury of asking a question that most of my generation never got to ask. We didn’t think like that, in terms of meaning or meaningless work. However since you ask the question I will give you my answer: Most of my work is not meaningful. Ninety-five percent of what I do is straight rote, duty, hard work. I do it because it’s my job, because I should have to make a living just like everyone else. Why should I get a free ride? Only about five percent of what I do is creative and gives me energy.

But that is not so bad.  That ninety-five percent, all those hours when I have to work and it gives me no energy, but only a pay cheque, is my solidarity with the poor. The poor don’t have meaningful work. They work to make a living, to eat, to pay their mortgages. They work because they have to. Why should I be different! To be a human being is to work for your living, whether it’s meaningful or not. The poor know this.

My father went to work every day for forty years carrying a lunch pail, doing manual labour for somebody else. He did it to make a living, not because he drew meaning from it. He drew his meaning from other things: his family, sports, community life, politics, the church. My work is mostly tedious duty, but it puts me in solidarity with the poor, with my dad and mother who were poor, and the millions of others who have to work for a living without having the luxury of having their work give them much meaning.”

There is a wisdom in his answer which, if properly understood, could save us from much frustration and restlessness and, as this priest suggests, put us into a more genuine solidarity with the poor.

Solidarity with the poor is not just about writing them into our curriculum vitae, an easy enough thing to do and in vogue today. We are virtually tripping over each other in our attempts to establish ourselves as “more-in-solidarity-with-the-poor-than-thou”. We write articles on the poor, go to every kind of meeting and seminar on poverty and justice, protest publicly how offended we are, and try to one-up each other vis-à-vis the admired symbolic things that bespeak our empathy and solidarity trips to the third world, the boycotting of various things, and the academic whipping of certain institutions and symbols.

Now, don’t get me wrong. It is not that this bad. We need to write those articles, go to those meetings, make those protests, boycott those items, and make the necessary critique of certain institutions and symbols. But we are also missing something, and something pretty fundamental in terms of solidarity with the poor, when our desire for meaning and personal fulfillment, legitimate as it may be, precisely turns us into the kind of persons who want to be elite, privileged, and exempt from what is required of the poor, namely, work and duty, despite lost dreams.

Poverty is not just about economics. It is about power, about not having any. It is about being forced – in order to eat, live, and raise a family; to get up early in the morning, pack a lunch, and go, usually with somebody else as boss, to do some work which you do not find very meaningful and you are doing because that is your only option. In fact, that is one of the key definitions of poverty: to not have meaningful work. To the extent that I have meaningful work, I am not poor and I should not pretend to be. I would be both more peaceful and more honest if I understood that.

Further to this, I add another story: Some years ago, a young nun came to me for spiritual direction. She complained that there was a lot of tension in the convent within which she lived. A couple of her sisters did not like her and it was not always the most pleasant of experiences to go home at night. She was giving a lot of conferences on poverty at the time but did not make the connection between her situation and that of millions of persons who live in domestic and marital tension and who also do not always find it pleasant to go home at night. Eventually she saw the connection. It brought her some peace and some genuine empathy. It could do the same for us.