Recognizing Him In The Spilling Of The Wine

May 7, 1997

Somebody once suggested that the words of scripture are like musical scores, mute of themselves, but alive when someone actually plays them.

This is especially true of those texts in scripture which speak about the communion of saints, our contact with those who have died but are still in living communion with us. One such text tells us that we should not search for the living among the dead but, instead, look to find our loved ones, after they have died, by touching those qualities and virtues which most characterized them when they were alive.

Metaphorically, that concept and those words are the score for a good piece of music, a piano or violin concerto just waiting to be played. Often times, though, it is played badly. The notes are right, but the tone is too sentimental, heavy, or exotic.

Recently, however, I heard that particular piece played quite well. I liked the version because the woman who played it gave it just enough of an eccentric slant to bring out its lightness and its depth. In her version, not all the spirits are heavy and humourless and the communion of saints remains a very earthy thing.

So, after introducing a bit of the background, let me share her rendition of this with you.

Recently, I received a letter from a former student of mine, sharing with me how she met her deceased father:

My father died nearly two years ago. During the past year and a half, I have felt his continuing presence in my life in a concrete, if somewhat odd, way. One of my dad’s quirks was that he had a habit of spilling coffee on himself. He was not a sloppy person, but there was just something about him and coffee that meant that a few drops inevitably found their way down the front of his shirt.

I have noticed recently, in the months following his death, that I seem to be dribbling things (tea, soda, coffee, juice) on myself more than usual. Often when this happens, when I spill something on myself, I joke to myself: “Well, Dad lives!” For a long time, I never took the joke seriously, or connected it to the doctrine of the communion of saints, because what was happening was not a noble quality like hospitality or generosity, but a quirk, an eccentricity, that most people would not want to emulate.

Then one day, a few months ago, while attending Mass, I found myself feeling especially close to my dad during the prayers of remembrance for the dead. I always try to remember him at that moment in the Mass, but sometimes am too distracted to do it. I don’t know why I felt his person so strongly on this particular day, but the feeling of his presence was very strong and it continued with me as I went up to receive communion. I have been receiving communion from the cup for years without incident but, on this particular day, I spilled some communion wine on myself. Red stains on my white shirt! Where there had previously been coffee, or tea, or soda, there was now red wine – red communion wine!

I suddenly understood in a very tangible, yet profound, way some of what is contained in that article of our creed which says: I believe in the communion of saints. I felt my dad was right there with me, quite literally, in communion with me. I am not a person given much to mysticism and the otherworldly, but the feeling of my dad’s presence on that day, the incarnation of his presence into something as everyday and tangible as a red wine stain on a white shirt, made me want to laugh and cry at the same time and it made me know, in a way I had not known before, that I had not really lost my dad at all. He is alive and with me.

A few weeks after this incident, I was introduced to some new people and I was asked the question: “Is your father still living?” Without thinking, I said no, but, even while saying it, that answer didn’t feel right to me. Later that day it occurred to me that I should have said: “Not in this world” because I know now, from experience, that he is alive.

My father had many great qualities. He was a great lover of education, very generous, scrupulously fair, and he always gave us, his children, many second chances. I will certainly try to emulate those qualities and find him there, among these things, rather than in his odd quirk of spilling coffee. But resurrected life has its curious character and it was in the spilling of the wine that, like the disciples recognizing Jesus, I recognized my father.

Overcoming Anger – The Final Spiritual Struggle

April 30, 1997

As a young man, Nikos Kazantzakis once sought spiritual guidance from a renowned master, an old monk named Father Makarios. In his autobiography, he describes a conversation he had with the old monk:

“Do you still wrestle with the devil, Father Makarios?” I asked him. “Not any longer, my child. I have grown old now, and he has grown old with me. He doesn’t have the strength. … I wrestle with God.” “With God!” I exclaimed in astonishment. “And you hope to win?” “I hope to lose, my child. My bones remain with me still, and they continue to resist.” (Report to Greco, p.222)

As we grow older, what, in our bones, continues to resist God? How is it that we switch from wrestling with the devil to struggling with God?

I remember a confession I heard as a young priest. It was just before a Eucharist and everyone was hurrying through the line, hoping for a two-minute confession, when a woman, somewhere in her fifties, knelt before me. Hers was not a regular confession, a quick listing of sins, but words to this effect:

This is hard for me to talk about, and even just to admit, but lately I’m finding myself filling constantly with anger. It is hard to describe exactly because it is not so much that certain things trigger it, but that I find myself growing bitter. I’m resentful at my husband and family because they take me so much for granted and I am angry at the world, I guess, for the same reason. Also, and I don’t understand this at all, I have resentments towards God. I can’t word this exactly, but I’m angry at God – angry about some things in my life, angry because life is so unfair at times, and angry that everything is so hopelessly the way it is. I don’t understand this, I never was an angry person when I was younger and now I’m filling with anger. How is it that now, that I am older, I am getting more immature?”

I told her the Kazantzakis story about the old monk who ceased fighting with the devil to begin a more important struggle with God. I assured her that hers was not the struggle of the immature, as she so humbly thought, but rather the struggle of the mature, the struggle of those who have conquered enough of the weaknesses of youth to come face to face with a bigger hurdle, the barrier of resentment.

We wrestle with the devil when we struggle with the weaknesses of youth, but we wrestle with God when we struggle with the angers and resentments of aging. The latter is the struggle to move beyond the death of our dreams, beyond how we have been wounded and cheated and all the resentments that come with that, so as to feel instead inside of us the compassion of God. That is the final task of the spiritual life, the movement from resentment to gratitude, from cursing to blessing, from bitterness to graciousness. And it is a monumental task.

There is a lot of anger in us as we get older. This is not a case of growing angry as we grow older, but of angry people growing older. Psychology tells us that we get our wounds early on in life, but our angers emerge later. When we are young our energy and our dreams are still strong enough to shield us from the full brunt of our wounds, our hurts, and life’s unfairness. I remember, as a young man of twenty, living in a seminary with nearly 50 young men my own age. We were all pretty immature, but strangely we lived together pretty well. Today, if you would put those 50 persons together again in the same living situation we would, soon enough, I suspect, kill each other. We are more mature now… but also full of the angers, disappointments, and resentments of mid-life. Like the older brother of the prodigal son, we are now acutely aware that someone less deserving than ourselves gets to dance and eat the fatted calf.

But this must be understood for what it is, not a sign of regression, but a critical new moment in the spiritual life. As we age and become ever more aware of our wounds, our wasted potential, and the unfairness of life, we come face to face with the final spiritual hurdle, the challenge to become mellow and gracious in spirit. The spiritual task of midlife and old age is that of wrestling with God, namely, of standing inside all of the ways in which life has disappointed and betrayed us and, in spite of that, there, understand what God means with the words: “My child, everything I have is yours, but we must be happy!”

Jesus’ Way of Wisdom

April 23, 1997

Jesus states that he is the way that leads to life. What is this way of Jesus?

Among other things, it is the way of wisdom, the way of pondering. The way of Jesus is the way of standing amid all delight, joy, contradiction, ambiguity, division, and complexity with a heart and a faith big enough to somehow hold it all. Jesus’ way is the way of holding things.

Part of this can be understood by looking at its opposite. The opposite of the way of wisdom, the way of holding things, scripture tells us, is the way of amazement. Time and time again, the crowds following Jesus are described as being amazed at what he says and does. Always they are chided for it: “Don’t be amazed!” Jesus says. Amazement is not what Jesus wants and it is never something that does us good.

Why? Is it not good to be amazed? Yes, amazement can be good, if it is the amazement of a child where amazement is wonder, agnosis, a stunning of the intellect into silence and a sense of it own limits. That is good, but that is rarely true in adults. For us, normally amazement is not wonder, but cheerleading, and invariably we end up hating what formerly amazed us. The same persons who were amazed at Jesus and who tried to make him King would, not long afterwards, shout: “Crucify him!” What we are amazed at we will eventually try to crucify, as every celebrity soon learns. Amazement is the opposite of wisdom.

If amazement is bad, and the opposite of wisdom, what is good and what is wisdom?

Pondering and helplessness, these are wisdom. We see an example of this in Mary, Jesus’ mother. She is never amazed. When others are amazed she goes off and instead, silently, ponders things in her heart.

This is also true of the disciples of Jesus, though only on occasion. Normally, like the crowds, they are amazed and need some prodding. This Jesus tries to provide. One such example happens after Jesus’ exchange with the rich young man. Jesus asks him to give up everything and follow him, but the young man is unable to do so. He goes away sad. Jesus then turns to his disciples and says: “I tell you that it is harder for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven than for a camel to go through the eye of a needle.” How do the disciples react?

They are not amazed. There are no wows, no cheerleading, no congratulating Jesus on how wonderful he is. No. They are stunned: “If that is the case, then who can go to heaven?” Paraphrased that might read: “If that is the case, then we are all in deep trouble!” Jesus’ answer brings them face to face with their own helplessness, their poverty, their limits, and to the searing realization that they do not really have things figured out as they think they have. And that paralysis is good since it forces them to wonder, to again take on the helplessness of the child.

When we are amazed, we are not wise and we hold nothing together. In amazement, we fall prey to every kind of superficiality, novelty, trick, and one-sided ideology. Amazement is the unrecognized face of fundamentalism, the antithesis of wisdom. The way of amazement is the way of fundamentalism, the way of letting one piece, or person, be the whole.

And the way of amazement is everywhere: We look at our sports heroes, our rock stars, and all kinds of other pop celebrities and we say: “Wow. Be my King! Be my Queen!” Soon enough we also say: “Crucify him! Crucify her!” We take a first course in something (psychology, theology, liturgy, adult education, feminism, ecology, whatever) and emerge from that initial classroom starry-eyed, newly angry at the world, devoid of compassion; in brief, amazed. We begin then to crucify a whole lot of people and things. Small wonder, the poet, Alexander Pope, once suggested “a little learning is a dangerous thing.” It too easily leads to the way of amazement.

The way of wisdom is the way of pondering, the way of holding every kind of pain, suffering, delight, and contradiction long enough until it transforms you, gestates compassion within you, and brings you to your knees in thousand surrenders. You and I are wise, and we walk the way of Jesus, when we are so stunned by it all that, in wonder, we ask: “If that is the case, who then can be saved?”

A Mother Quivering With Delight

April 17, 1997

You don’t expect to see an icon of the trinity on an airplane, at least not on a really small commuter plane at 6:30 in the morning when it is still dark outside and the temperature is near minus 30 degrees celsius and you are waiting on the airport runway in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. But God is a God of the unexpected, and so these things happen.

I had boarded a very tiny airplane on a particularly frigid morning, during an especially awful winter to fly to Calgary so I could board a bigger plane which would take me to Los Angeles where I was scheduled to speak at a conference that, to my good fortune, had the convention center at Disneyland as its venue. God can be good, at times.

I took my seat across the aisle from a young mother and her preschool-aged daughter. They were silent, as we all were, waiting for everyone to board the plane so we could take off.

Then, just as the captain was announcing the particulars about our flight, the mother and the daughter turned to each other and I am not sure I can describe what exactly transpired between them, but it was a mystical moment: The child looked at her mother, smiled briefly, and moved her whole body in a way that said: “We are really doing this! It’s finally here! We’ve talked about this for a long time and now it’s finally happening!” Her body literally quivered with delight.

Later, since we were on the same planes all the way to Disneyland, I learned the cause of her joy. They were off to Disneyland, she and her whole family. For her, it was a day of firsts: The first time on an airplane, the first time on a long trip, and the first time on a journey big enough to match the fantasies of a fertile young mind. She was happy and her body might well have been a musical instrument.

But it wasn’t just her delight that I noticed and palpably felt. It was also the delight of her mother. If the daughter was overjoyed and basking in a special moment, even more so was the mother. Her body too quivered with delight – delight in her daughter’s joy, delight in a child’s anticipation, and delight in being able, as a mother, to provide this for her daughter. Her joy not only matched her child’s, it surpassed it. It was deeper, far deeper. Hers was the delight of being able to give delight, the joy of giving joy, the unique gladness of providing, of being source. To do these things is to do what God does and so to feel what God feels. That is what she must have felt.

And their exchange, that glance towards each other that made them both quiver with delight, is an icon of the trinity, as surely as is Andrew Rublev’s masterpiece. Like Rublev’s icon, it too captures a little of the river of life and love and gratitude that flows between the Father and the Son and creates a fire, an energy, called the Holy Spirit. To have that flow go through you is to know God.

Like all authentic icons, it reveals something about the inner life of God. What does it reveal?

When a mother and daughter exchange a look that makes each of them quiver with delight, what is revealed not, in the end, something about God’s gender, namely, that God is mother as well as father, female as well as male, that God also loves us with the instincts of a mother. That is true, of course, but it is not the central point.

What is centrally revealed is the heart of God, the flow of life and gratitude that makes the Father and Son quiver in each other’s presence. What is revealed too, quintessentially, is how God, as creator and parent, blesses us and takes delight in us. Just as God, after creating each element in creation, stood back, beamed, and said, “This is good”, and just as God looked down upon Jesus at his baptism and said: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight”, so is God still looking at us as we embark on our various fantasy journeys, so is God’s heart swelling still in sharing our anticipation, and so is God quivering with delight when we receive creation’s delight. God is enjoying the joy of a mother who can provide, just as God must surely suffer sometimes the pain of the mother who cannot.

On a very cold morning, in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, I was shown an icon of the trinity which has helped me to understand somewhat more those early pages of Scripture which tell us that God looked at the first creation, young and immature though it was, and saw that it was good, indeed it was very good.

And The Atoms Moved

March 23, 1997

Teilhard de Chardin was once asked by a critic: “What are you trying to do? Why all this talk about atoms and molecules when you are speaking about Jesus Christ?” He answered something to this effect: “I am trying to formulate a Christology that is large enough to incorporate Christ because Christ is not just an anthropological event but a cosmic phenomenon as well.”

In essence, what he is saying is that Christ did not come just to reshape human history and save human beings, he came to reshape the earth and to save it as well.

That is a profound insight and it is nowhere more true than when we try to understand all that is implied in the resurrection of Christ. Jesus was raised from death to life. A dead body was resurrected and that has dimensions that are not just spiritual and psychological. There is something radically physical to this. When a dead body is brought to new life the very physical structure of the universe is being rearranged, atoms and molecules are being changed. The resurrection is about more than just new hope being born in human consciousness.

The resurrection is the basis for human hope, surely. Without it, we could not hope for any future that includes our full humanity, beyond the rather limited and asphyxiating limits of this life. In the resurrection of Jesus we are given a new future, in it we are saved. But the resurrection gives a new future to the earth, the physical planet, as well. Christ came to save the earth, not just human beings, and his resurrection is also about the future of the earth.

The earth, like ourselves, needs saving. From what? For what?

In a proper Christian understanding of things, the earth is not just a stage for human beings, that is, a thing with no value in itself, apart from us. Like humanity, it too is God’s work of art, God’s child. In fact, it is the matrix from which we all spring. We are, in the end, only that part of God’s creation that has become conscious of itself. Hence we do not stand apart from the earth and it does not exist simply for our benefit, like a stage for the actor, to be abandoned once the play is finished. Physical creation has value in itself, independent of humanity. We need to recognize that, and not just so that we practice better eco-ethics so that the earth can continue to provide air, water, and food for future generations of human beings. We need to recognize the intrinsic value of the earth because ultimately it is sister earth, destined to share eternity with us.

But, like us, it is also subject to decay. Like us, it too is time bound, mortal, and dying. Outside of an intervention from the outside it has no future. Science has already, long ago, pointed out to us the law of entropy. Put simply, energy in our universe is running down, the sun is burning out. The years our earth has before it are, like the days of any human being, numbered, counted, finite. It will take some millions of years, but finitude is finitude. There will be an end to the earth as we know it, just as there will be an end to each of us as we know ourselves to be. Outside of something offered us from the outside we, both the earth and the humans living on it, have no future.

It is to this concept that the Epistle to the Romans refers when it tells us that creation, the physical cosmos, is subject to futility and that it is groaning and longing to be set free to enjoy the glorious liberty of the children of God. Romans then assures us that the earth will enjoy the same future as human beings. In the resurrection it too is given a new possibility, transformation and an eternal future.

How will it be redeemed? Just as we are redeemed, through the resurrection of Jesus. The resurrection brings into our world, both into its spiritual and its physical elements, a new power, a new arrangement of things, a new hope, something so radical (and physical) that it can only be compared to what happened at the initial creation. In the beginning, the atoms and the molecules of this universe were made out of nothing, nature took its shape, and its reality and laws shaped everything from then on until the resurrection of Jesus. Something new happened then and that event, that physical event, touched every aspect of the universe, from the soul and psyche in every man and woman to the inner core of every atom and molecule.

In the resurrection of Jesus the very atoms of the universe were rearranged. Teilhard is right. The resurrection is not just about people, it is about the future of the planet as well.

Bury The Dead

March 19, 1997

Mircea Eliade, the renowned anthropologist, tells us that, within the wisdom of tribal cultures, there was often the belief that unless the dead were properly buried, with appropriate ritual and attentiveness from the community, disasters of all kinds might strike the people. Anything from infertility to drought might be caused by not properly attending to a death.

This is not so far fetched. A death, he writes, can be botched, just as a war can be lost or psychic equilibrium and joy can be destroyed. Life is tied to both of its ends, just as community life is integrally bound up with its births and deaths. To not be properly attentive to a birth or a death puts one at some peril. For this reason, among others, the last corporal work of mercy instructs to properly bury the dead.

However what does it mean, today, to bury the dead?

We must resist the temptation to put too much of a psychological spin to this, namely, to focus it on the question of putting proper psychological or emotional closure to the various kinds of death we experience in life. People and things are always dying around us, just as one day we too will die. Some of our relationships die, our youth and health eventually die, as do many of our cherished dreams and hopes. To get on with life we must, daily, bury our dead.

But the corporal works of mercy are not about emotional grieving and psychological closure. They are about burying real physical bodies.

Obviously what is commanded here had a much great importance, in the literal sense, in past cultures were sometimes people, especially the really poor, were left unburied, to be eaten by vultures and the worms. That is still true today in a number of war-torn countries. One has to only to watch the news any night to see how many people, still, do not receive the dignity of burial. The counsel, bury the dead, is first and foremost about this, no human being should be deprived of the dignity of having his or her body properly returned to the earth, be that through burial, cremation, or some other culturally sanctioned (sanctioned, as in sacred) practice.

In our Western world, however, for the main part, this happens, our dead are buried with reverence. In fact, this is one of our strengths, culturally and morally. We are horrified at the thought that in past ages, and in some present cultures, bodies are violated after death, stuck on posts to decay publicly, thrown into open graves, or simply left to vultures. We take moral offense at this. Rightly so.

So where should we be challenged?

Simply put, for us the challenge is to be more attentive to deaths within our communities, both by attending more funerals and by using those funerals (and wakes) to let the spirit of whoever we are burying bless us. For us, burying the dead means, in the words of Eliade, not botching our deaths.

The first thing we do to not botch our deaths is attend more funerals. We have, as I have already stated, a great strength as a culture in that we treat our dead with reverence. However, I can be reverent towards something even as I largely ignore it. We want our dead buried, with proper respect and dignity, but, mostly, we do not want to be there when that happens. More and more, we are going to less and less funerals.

I am old enough to remember another time. Growing up in a tightly-knit immigrant community, I went to a lot of funerals. Everyone did. It was not a question of whether the person who died was a relative, friend, or close neighbour. They were a member of the community and that was enough. Everyone was expected to be at the funeral and, generally, everyone was.

And what happened at those funerals was not just that a body was committed back to the earth with proper dignity and that each of us got to say a personal good-bye. What happened is that, in everyone being there, the whole community was able to better know and feel the words of scripture which tell us: “The life and death of each of us has its influence on others.” When we recognized that influence then we were affording the body we were committing back to the earth its proper dignity.

To bury our dead is to make sure every body is afforded its proper dignity. It also means not botching our deaths.

Ransom the Captive

March 13, 1997

The corporal works of mercy, as the phrase itself suggests, have to do with the physical, the material. Unlike the spiritual works of mercy, what is at stake is not feeding, clothing, or washing someone spiritually, with truth and spirit. The feeding, clothing, washing, visiting, ransoming, and burying that they direct us towards are precisely corporal, to do with the physical well-being of our neighbour.

However, physical does not necessarily mean literal. This is particularly so for the corporal work of mercy which directs us to ransom the captive. For most of us, taken literally, there would be little opportunity to practice this. Who today needs ransoming in the literal sense? Prisoners of war, hostages, and other victims of this sort. Not many of us are in situations where there is much rescuing we can do of this kind.

But the physical character of this injunction needs to be safeguarded even as we let go of its literalness. We still need to ransom the captive and today, as in every age, there are countless persons who, while not literally in a prison or held hostage, are physically captive, that is, caught up in conditions which physically imprison them in some way. In fact, sometimes this corporal work of mercy is rendered: minister to prisoners. That is simply a synonym for ransoming the captive.

So how might we today go about ransoming the captive today?

A few years ago, I was attending a lecture given by Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology. At one stage, after a long discussion on the complexity of social justice, someone asked him: “Given magnitude of poverty and injustice on this earth, given all the discussions about the complex systems that must be changed to make much difference in bringing about a more just world, and given my own limits as one human person, what really can I do?” Gutierrez answered something to this effect: “Do this at least, have one concrete poor person or family in your life. Never let your response to poverty and injustice be only a theoretical ideal. Always be concretely involved with someone who is physically poor, even if it is only one person.”

At one level, we ransom the captive by reaching out concretely to someone, even if it is to only one person, who is somehow being held hostage by poverty or injustice. Our efforts may not seem to make much difference in terms of changing the systems that cause poverty and injustice – but they can make a big difference to that one person, analogous to the story of a young child who was walking along the shore one day and was throwing beached jellyfish back into the water. Someone pointed out to her that, given the thousands of jellyfish that had been washed ashore, her efforts would not make a big difference. Picking up a jelly-fish and throwing it back into the ocean, she announced: “It will make a big difference for this one!”

To ransom the captive means to reach out, concretely and individually, but it means more:

It also demands that, beyond touching this or that concrete individual, we get involved in trying to change the social and economic conditions that are help cause poverty, analogous to another story: A small town was built downstream on a long river. One day a number of bodies were found floating on the river. The townsfolk pulled them out. They were dead, so they buried them. The next day, four more persons were found floating in the river. Two were dead and these they buried. One was badly injured and him they took to their hospital. Another was a child, frightened but healthy. They found a home for her and placed her in their school. From that day on, for many years after, this went on. Every day a number of bodies came floating down the river. The townsfolk fished them out and generously attended to their various needs – but, throughout all those years, nobody thought to go upstream and investigate why all those bodies were, daily, found in that stream.

Ransoming the captive, as social justice groups have always told us, is also about investigating why certain bodies are ending up helpless in the river of poverty and injustice. To visit prisoners does not just ask us to, in fact, spend some time with those society has locked away, it invites us too to visit the reasons why certain people invariably end up in prison.

Ransoming the captive has to do with more than just visiting and trying to set free prisoners of war and persons taken hostage. It has to do with persons who find themselves held captive by every kind of physical bondage. It enjoins us to visit them and to visit too the reasons for why they are imprisoned.

Visit the Sick

March 5, 1997

Among all the corporal works of mercy, it would seem, we do the best with this one. At a more obvious level at least, we tend to fulfil our duty here. If someone close to us, a family member, relative, or friend, is more seriously ill, we generally do not find it difficult to spend some time with him or her. Most people who are sick in hospitals receive visitors, sometimes more than their doctors and nurses would like.

When Jesus tells us to visit the sick, however, he means much more than simply visiting family members, relatives, and friends who are hospitalized. What else does he want of us?

Among other things, Jesus’ counsel to visit the sick means that we should examine our attitudes towards those who are sick in view of purging ourselves of a certain arrogance. Not so subtle in our society is the attitude that those who are sick are somehow responsible for their illness – with the other side of that being that we, who are healthy, should get the credit for our health. … “I take care of myself, my attitudes are positive, I live right, and that’s why I’m healthy! It’s no wonder she is sick, given how she thinks and lives!”

That is a very common attitude and there is an incredible arrogance in it. Moreover this arrogance is further reaching than we think. Initially, it makes a harsh judgement on persons who are sick because of depression or various psychosomatic illnesses. It blames them for being sick and, at the same time, congratulates itself for being well. Then it goes further:

It blames all sick persons for their illnesses, pure and simple. When we are healthy, we have the tendency to look at sick persons, indeed even very sick people who are dying from illnesses such as cancer, AIDS, heart disease, and the like, and see them as somehow responsible for that illness. Sometimes this is expressed openly and sometimes it is only there subtly within an attitude, but it is generally there and it is accentuated in a culture that is so strongly focused on being young, physically healthy, trim, and good-looking.

You see this among conservative persons in their attitude towards those who are sick with AIDS. There is the not-so-subtle accusation: “It’s your own fault! If you had a better moral life you wouldn’t be in this situation.” Liberals today are generally sympathetic towards AIDS victims but do not always have that same sympathy for those whose who are sick because they smoke, have bad eating habits, or (worst case scenario) those who are unhealthy because of scruples and moral rigidity. There is present the clear judgement: “This illness is your own fault!”

We if were really honest with ourselves, most of us would have to admit that we make some brutal judgements about various people who are sick. Maybe we blame those who are sick for that illness as a way of trying to immunize ourselves against sickness: “I don’t live that way so I will never get sick the way you are!” Perhaps then there is more fear in this than arrogance, but, in either case, when we feel like that we are not visiting the sick in the biblical sense.

Related to this too is the whole issue of our attitude towards those who are physically challenged or handicapped. Again, there is an incredible arrogance among those who are not as physically challenged as others.

Visiting the sick, as Jesus understood this, means that we must value and treat all lives as equal, irrespective of their overt physical qualities and appearance. We all struggle with this. Despite the fact that today most countries in the West have laws which attempt to enshrine equality, we do not live this out very well, both in attitude and in actual life. Those who are physically handicapped, despite the more politically-correct terms we have coined to describe them, are basically not treated as equals. From the way we treat the unborn to the way we patronize (and distance ourselves from) basically everyone else who is physically different from ourselves, we fail in visiting the poor.

Again, perhaps this takes its root more in fear than in arrogance, but the end result is the same. We self-congratulate and feel good about ourselves at the expense of somehow blaming others for their less than full health.

So Jesus asked: Do you suppose that those eighteen on whom the tower in Siloam fell and killed were worse culprits than all those who didn’t die? (Luke 13, 1-4)

Clothe the Naked

February 19, 1997

“It’s the welfare bums, people on the dole, single mothers and their kids, the homeless and the street people who are bleeding our tax dollars! It’s not fair, not right. Nobody is entitled to a free meal!”

We might well want to examine how we feel about the category of persons just named, as we ponder Jesus’ command to clothe the naked.

There are many ways of being naked, different forms of being without clothing, even physically. To be naked is to be vulnerable, exposed, powerless, and usually in a shameful position. It is no accident that the first thing which Adam and Eve did after sin broke their initial paradise was to put on clothing. Nakedness save for being in paradise or in the pure innocence of child or within a uniquely committed sexual intimacy is a situation from which we need to protect ourselves. And this is not a question of prudishness, but of health. In this life, we need the protection of clothing, clothing of all sorts.

And we need, as Jesus enjoins us, to not only clothe ourselves but to make sure that everyone else too has clothing. This mandate, to clothe the naked, like the other corporal works of mercy, should never be spiritualized. It needs to be taken in a physical, even if not literal, sense.

What is implied here, physical but not literal?

Straight physical nakedness is not a major problem in the world today, even in those parts which are economically the most dis-privileged. Few people, literally, do not have clothing to wear. However, while literal nakedness is not a big issue, physical nakedness is. Many people are naked in that they stand physically vulnerable, exposed, helpless, and in some shame before the rest of us. Who are these people?

The prophets of the ancient Israel named them already some 800 years before Jesus was born. All the great prophets of scripture taught a single truth: The quality of faith depends upon the character of justice in the land and the character justice in the land depends directly upon how we treat the most physically vulnerable in the land. Simply put, this means we stand before God exactly as we stand before those who are most economically disadvantaged. For the prophets, this category was made up of three groups: widows, orphans and foreigners. And their criterion for self-assessment was clear: We should judge the quality of our faith in direct relationship to how these groups fare in society. If they fare well, we have a strong faith. If they fare badly, we have a weak faith.

And they picked these groups because, in their day, they were the most vulnerable and helpless, in essence, the most naked. It is interesting how little has changed in 2800 years. In Western society, these groups, now joined by a few others, still remain the most vulnerable and helpless. In today’s world, they are the naked. Hence to clothe the naked today implies a number of things: At its core, it means that as a society we must ensure that there is always a sufficient safety net so that those who fall into the category of the naked – single mothers and their children, welfare recipients, displaced persons, runaway youth, street people, and all those others who, for whatever reason, cannot avail themselves of normal economic opportunity are provided not only with the basics of food and shelter, but, as well, with access to the essentials for health and education.

Beyond trying to ensure that our governments, at all levels, do this, there are too some major things we are called upon to do as individuals. First off, we should begin by judging ourselves by that prophetic standard, namely, the quality of our faith and the nobility of our character is to be measured against the concrete situation within which single mothers and their children, welfare recipients, displaced persons, runaway youth, street people, and other such persons find themselves. How, in fact, are they faring? Our faith and virtue depend upon that answer.

But economics is only one part of this. Attitude is the other. As long as we are judgmental of these people, seeing them as getting a free ride from our work and our tax dollars, we have neither understood nor indeed begun to live out what is implied in clothing the naked. We owe to those who find themselves naked and this is not a question of charity, but of faith and justice.

Give Drink to the Thirsty

February 13, 1997

When we think of the essentials of the Christian faith we generally associate these with belief in a certain creed, acceptance of various dogmas, adherence to a certain moral code, especially as it pertains to private morality, involvement with a church community, and with having some personal relationship to Christ in our lives.

Now, while these things are essential and may never be denigrated, Jesus would add something else. For him, a criterion, in fact the criterion, for the practice of the Christian faith is the exercise of the corporal works of mercy. Have we fed the hungry? Given drink to the thirsty? Clothed the naked?

Jesus’ command to practice the corporal works of mercy is direct, uncompromising, and everywhere present in the entire New Testament. Taken as whole, every tenth line in the New Testament is a direct challenge to the Christian to reach out to the physically poor. In Luke’s gospel, it is every sixth line. In the Epistle of James, it is every fifth line. Involvement with the poor is not a negotiable item. This is mandated with the same weight as is any creed, dogma, and moral or spiritual teaching.

And this may never be spiritualized. The command to be involved with the physically poor means just that, the physically poor. It is rationalizing when we turn the corporal works of mercy into something less concrete, namely, when we define the physically poor in such a wide sense so as to include everyone – “To feed the hungry can also mean feeding those who are spiritually hungry.” “To give drink to the thirsty can also mean giving spiritual nourishment to those who, while affluent materially, are hungry for deeper things.” There is a sense in which this is true, but that is not what Jesus intended in Matthew 25 and not what the church has perennially intended in its social teachings. There is a spiritual sense to hunger, thirst, and poverty, but that is addressed elsewhere, both in the New Testament and in church teachings. Reaching out to the deeper, non-material, hungers and thirsts of humanity is what is mandated in the spiritual works of mercy. The words of Jesus in the gospels challenging us to reach out to the physically poor are not intended spiritually. The corporal works of mercy are about reaching out to the physically poor, pure and simple.

So how do we give drink to the thirsty?

Obviously, especially given what has just been said, there is an aspect to this that is brutally concrete. Water is even more important than food. Without water we die, are unable to wash ourselves and our clothing, and are unable to enjoy any quality of life whatever. To lack clean, drinkable water is to lack the first necessity of life. Hence, Jesus’ command to give drink to the thirsty is, first of all, about looking around ourselves and our world and trying to provide for every person on this earth clean, drinkable water.

This, given the present situation of the planet, is not easy to do. A long, and mostly morally sanctioned, history of privilege and inequality – wherein some of us have surplus while others lack for basic necessities – has made for a situation in which there is now a rationalized acceptance of the fact that millions of people lack the basic physical necessities for life, including clean, drinkable water. Thus, to get water to the thirsty today requires more than just the positive efforts being made by those individuals and agencies which are directly trying to bring clean water into poor areas. What is required, as well, is a change of heart and ultimately a change of lifestyle, by each of us who does have clean water.

As the great social encyclicals of the church, from Leo XIII through John Paul II, re-iterate over and over, clean water will come to everyone on the planet when those of us who have surplus, of any kind, live fully moral lives, namely when we accept that is it not right to have surplus while other lack necessities:

-God intended the earth and everything in it for the sake of all human beings. … Thus created goods should flow fairly to all. All other rights, whatever they may be, are subordinated to this principle. (Popularum Progressio 22 & Gaudium et Spes 69)

-No person or country may have surplus if others do not have the basic necessities.” (Rerum Novarum 19; Quadragesima Anno 50-51; Mater et Magistra 119-121; Popularum Progressio 230)

Giving drink to the thirsty involves looking at those principles with more moral courage than we have up to now.

Jesus Before Pilate

February 12, 1997

Few things sit as deep within us as does the desire for freedom. We are not always sure exactly what freedom means, but we are ever resistant to whatever restrains, limits, or coerces us. We do not like being forced to do things, being told what to do, or having outside forces limit our choices. We value, more deeply than most anything else, our freedom.

Or, at least so it would seem. On the surface, this is true. At a deeper level, however, our desire for freedom is obfuscated by many things, especially by the fact that, too often, we have freedom confused with emancipation. Our struggle for freedom is focused rather narrowly on those forces outside of us which unfairly bind or limit us. But victory over these forces, emancipation, is only a small step towards genuine freedom.

Today, in the Western world, we are, for the most part, emancipated, but we are far from free. We have been able to throw off most of the shackles of external tyranny, but we remain very much the prisoner of our own fears, our own wounds, our own angers, our own attachments, and our own obsessions. We are emancipated, but not free.

Let us look at a picture of a rare freedom: Jesus, at his trial, standing, bound and stripped, before Pontius Pilate.

In all of literature, nowhere do you see an image of a freer human being. Not even in Socrates before his accusers, or in the illustrious, stoic heros and heroines of great literature, nor indeed even in the deaths of martyrs, do we see anyone more free. Jesus stands before Pilate as a truly free human being.

And there is a great paradox in this. Jesus stands before Pilate in chains, captive, bound, whipped, despised, ridiculed, humanly impotent, unable to do a single thing to free himself. Yet he is free in a way that even his critics envy.

One of those critics is Pilate himself and he too, ironically, ends up admiring the man he condemns. Pilate has an interesting exchange with Jesus. When he first begins to question him, Jesus refuses to answer. Pilate then tries to intimidate him: “Don’t you know that I have power over you, that I can put you to death or set you free?”

Jesus, bound, externally powerless, answers in words that might aptly be paraphrased this way: “You have no power over me whatsoever. You do not adjudicate death and freedom. That power lies beyond you. You have no power to kill me or to set me free because, first of all, in my case, I am already dead … and free from you because of that! In the garden of Gethsemane, I gave my life away, gave it away of my own accord. Nobody takes my life from me. I lay it down and I take it up. God, alone, is Lord of life and freedom and once a person submits to that then no human person, no tyrant, no despot, no Hitler, can take his or her life and freedom away. You can kill me … but I am already dead!”

Pilate, to his credit, understood and the Scriptures tell us that, afterwards, he was anxious to free Jesus.

Jesus, before Pilate, was free, but not emancipated. We, today, are emancipated, but not free. As we struggle for freedom, we might well contemplate that image of rare freedom, Jesus before Pilate, externally bound but internally free, telling the world that no human power can ultimately coerce the heart.

However as we contemplate that image, we need to follow through on why Jesus was free in this deep way. Pilate had no power to take his life from him only because he had already given his life to his Father. Through obedience he became free, through submission to the God of heaven he escaped the power of the gods of earth.

Too often today our notions of freedom are too adolescent to understand this. We are emotionally resistant to all notions of obedience, submission, another’s will, and sometimes even to the very idea of Someone being above in such a way that puts us below. But until we give ourselves over in obedience to what is ultimate, higher, we will constantly find ourselves at the mercy of lesser gods whose altars perennially demand human sacrifice.

C.S.Lewis once said: The harshness of God is kinder than the softness of human beings and God’s compulsion is our liberation. We see exactly how true that is when Jesus appears before Pilate.

Feed the Hungry

February 8, 1997

A cynic once quipped: “What would you get if you crossed a radical liberal social justice advocate with a strongly conservative pious daily communicant?” The answer? Dorothy Day!

That’s a piece of wit which it can serve to throw some light on how one might begin, today, to live out the first corporal work of mercy, the command to feed the hungry.

How do we feed the hungry? Even if we are convinced, and perhaps even obsessed, by Jesus command to do this, how, in fact, can it be done today? The world is a big place and millions upon millions of people live in hunger. Moreover we live a situation of compounded complexity of every sort, political, social, and economic. There is no simple way to get resources from the rich to the poor, from your table to the table of someone who is hungry. How can you live out Christ’s command to feed the hungry, given the complexities of today’s world?

Generally speaking, rightly and wrongly, we look to our governments, the United Nations, relief organizations, social services, welfare, and other such agencies to do this for us. Given the scope and complexity of poverty and hunger in the world, the tendency is to look over our shoulders, to something massive, to some big government or agency, to feed the hungry. We tend to feel too small and individually over-powered in the face of hunger’s enormity.

But this can be, and invariably is, a rationalization, an abdication, a way of escaping Jesus’ command. Ultimately we cannot use the excuse that things are too complicated, that we are too small and powerless, and that only huge organizations can do anything for the hungry. The gospel call to feed the hungry is uncompromising and eminently personal. Each of us is called upon personally to do something real and this must be something beyond the normal corporate things we are involved in, paying taxes and giving charity monies to governments and big agencies to enable them to do this for us. We must do something ourselves.

But what more can we do concretely? How can you and how can I feed the hungry?

There are a couple of possible approaches: Mother Theresa takes one approach. For her, Jesus’ command is simple and clear. Each of us should personally, beyond government and other agencies, reach out concretely and touch some poor person or persons. There should be times when we are, literally, taking food to hungry people, working in soup kitchens, giving aid to individual street people, and having a poor person eat at our table. This approach is individual, personal, and concrete. Each poor person has a face and one does not, at least not all the time, ask questions regarding where this person will eat tomorrow or what social problems are causing this hunger. In this view, the demand that we feed the hungry challenges us precisely to reach out beyond ideologies and social theories and irrespective of social structures, like the Good Samaritan, person-to-person, take food to the hungry.

But there is another approach, more abstract though not less critical. In this view, it is less important to feed this or that individual person on a given day than it is to change the social, political, and economic structures that are responsible for that particular person being hungry. This approach is less personal and slower, but can, at the end of the day, be more far-reaching. In it, one attempts to feed the hungry by involving oneself in social justice groups that are trying to change the conditions that produce poverty.

Both of these approaches, in their best expressions, are predicated on some other things: Feeding the hungry, as Jesus asks us to do it, involves a reduction in our own standard of living. To feed the hungry means to consume less ourselves, to do some fasting, and to live in a simplicity that puts us in more solidarity with the poor. Feeding the hungry also means prayer. We have some bad habits that only God can cure and thus only the outside power of God can ultimately transform our world.

So which is the best approach? As Christians, our task is not to pick between being a Mother Theresa or a social justice advocate. The gospel asks us to be both. We need to work at transforming the conditions that create poverty even as we, like Mother Theresa, reach out personally, beyond the economics and social issues involved, to feed very individual poor people.

Jesus’ command to feed the hungry asks to become a Dorothy Day.

Listening to Christ’s Heartbeat

The last supper account in John’s gospel contains a curious picture. The evangelist describes the beloved disciple as reclining on the breast of Jesus. What is contained in this image? A picture of how each of us should be focused as we look out at the world.

When you put your head upon the breast of another, your ear is just above that person’s heart and you are able to hear his or her heartbeat. Thus, in John’s image, we see the beloved disciple with his ear on Jesus’ heart and his eyes peering out at the world.

This is an image, a mystical one. Among other things, it is a picture of gentleness. What is shows, however, is not a saccharine piety, a sweetness hard to swallow, but a softness that comes from being at peace, from being so rooted and centred in a love that one can look out at the world without bitterness, anger, jealousy, the sense of being cheated, and the need to blame or compete with others.

In John’s gospel, it is also a eucharistic image. What we see there, the image of a person with his ear on Jesus’ heart, is how John wants us to imagine ourselves when we are at eucharist. In its reality, that is what the eucharist is, a physical reclining on the breast of Jesus. But the picture that John shows here is more than a eucharistic picture. It is also an image of how we should touch God and be sustained by him in solitude.

Henri Nouwen once said: “By touching the center of our solitude, we sense that we have been touched by loving hands.” (Show Me the Way) Deep inside each of us, like a brand, there is a place where God has touched, caressed, and kissed us. Long before memory, long before we ever remember touching or loving or kissing anyone or anything, or being touched by anything or anybody in this world, there is a different kind of memory, the memory of being gently touched by loving hands. When our ear is pressed to God’s heart – to the breast of all that is good, true, and beautiful – we hear a certain heartbeat and we remember, remember in some inchoate place, at a level beyond thought, that we have been gently kissed by God.

This is what is deepest, archetypally, within us. There is an ancient legend which holds that when an infant is created God kisses its soul and sings to it. As its guardian angel carries it to earth to join its body, she also sings to it. The legend says that God’s kiss and his song, as well as the song of the angel, remain in that soul forever – to be called up, cherished, shared, and to become the basis of all of our songs.

But to feel that kiss, to hear that song, requires solitude. I do not feel gentleness when inside of me and all around me there is noise, abrasiveness, anger, bitterness, jealousy, competitiveness, and paranoia. The sound of God’s heartbeat is audible only in solitude and in the gentleness it brings. John of the Cross once defined solitude as “bringing the mild into harmony with the mild”. That was his way of saying that we will begin to remember the primordial touch of God when, through solitude, we empty our hearts of all that is not mild, namely, noise, anger, bitterness, and jealousy. When we become mild we will remember that we have been touched by loving hands and, like the beloved disciple, we will then have our ear to the heartbeat of Christ.

Thus, inside each of us there is a church, an oratory, a place of worship, a sanctuary not made by human hands. And it is a gentle place, a virgin place, a holy place, a place where there is no anger, no sense of being cheated, and no need to be competitive. It is a soft place; but it can be violated, through rape, through a giving of oneself that does not respect oneself, and, especially, through lying and rationalizing and the cauterization, warping, and hardening of heart that follows upon that. Conversely, though, it is also a place that can remain inviolate, sacred, and untouched, even through external rape.

It is in that place, entered into through solitude and gentleness of spirit, that we have a privileged access to God because that is the place where God has already touched us and where we, however dimly, remember that.

We have been touched by loving hands. The memory of that touch is a brand – warm, dark, gentle. To enter that memory is to lean on the breast of Christ, just as the beloved apostle did at the last supper. From that place, with our ear on Christ’s heart, we have the truest perspective on our world.

The Corporal Works of Mercy

February 2, 1997

Long before it was fashionable to publish books of lists, my generation was asked to memorize them. As children, many of us were asked to memorize, among other things, a mini-catalogue that was, back then, called a list of the corporal works of mercy. It contained seven biblical imperatives:

Feed the hungry

Give drink to the thirsty

Clothe the naked

Shelter the homeless

Visit the sick

Ransom the captive

Bury the dead

My suspicion is that few of us have thought much about this list for a long time and that a new generation of Christians is not even aware that it exists. This is not to say, of course, that present catechesis and spirituality has not, in other ways, picked up and incorporated what is commanded by this list. The strong emphasis on social justice within recent years attempts to bring the same challenge. However, the goodness of this recent development notwithstanding, there can be, I feel, considerable benefit in revisiting that old list. Hence, this column begins a series of reflections, partially geared for the lenten season, on the corporal works of mercy.

Before examining each of these individually it can be helpful to look at the concept of mercy itself. What does it mean to be merciful in the religious sense?

Medieval theology taught that mercy flows spontaneously out of charity, like smoke from fire. Nonetheless, it suggested that it should still be considered a separate virtue and an important one. Moreover, it linked mercy to justice, seeing it as one dimension of justice. This insight is valuable because mercy does flow out of charity and ultimately does take its root in justice. It does too, however, have its own specificity and this can be seen when we examine it biblically.

In the Old Testament, mercy (HESED, often translated as loving-kindness) is a quality ascribed first of all to God – “Give thanks to the Lord for his loving-kindness is without end.” Later, the prophets begin to challenge the people with it, telling them that what God wants is not sacrifice but mercy, as practised by God. What is implied in this?

Commentators sometimes try to explain mercy by contrasting it to justice (mercy is optional, justice is not) but this can be misleading. The biblical concept of mercy is ultimately rooted in justice, it presupposes justice. Mercy however goes beyond justice the way advanced calculus goes beyond simple arithmetic, it adds something even while it presupposes what it dwarfs. Properly understood, mercy is super-justice.

Biblically, mercy it is a word used to describe the feelings and actions that a very loving parent has towards his or her children. There is justice here, surely, but there is much more. In scripture, the concept of mercy connotes feelings and actions which are deeply personal, one-to-one, unique, special, tender, and warm. The tender love of a parent for a child dwarfs the demand of strict justice even while never violating it.

Classically, in trying to teach this to us, the church complied various lists which tried to summarize what is implied in imitating God’s mercy. The corporal works of mercy are one such list, though there are others. In essence, these lists try to challenge us to be more holy, God-like, through practising a justice which is more personal, one to one, warm, and gracious beyond strict need. The works of mercy ask us to make everyone, especially the poor and needy, our family.

In looking at the list of the corporal works of mercy, we see that each imperative, save the last one, is explicitly commanded in Scripture. The prophets of the Old Testament made this list the acid test for faith. If you did these things you had faith – and vice versa. Jesus goes even further. For him, as is evident in Matthew 25, the corporal works of mercy are the criteria for salvation and the measure of how we are treating him – “Whatsoever you do unto the hungry, thirsty, naked, homeless, sick, and captive, you do unto me.”

Sometimes it is good to revisit old fox-holes. Old lairs can be full of surprises. The list of the corporal works of mercy, long buried in the thicket, awaits such exploration.

The Evangelization of Desire

January 19, 1997

For some years now, an Oblate colleague of mine has been developing an idea he calls: The Evangelization of Desire. Among other things, he gives a retreat to help persons get in touch with their deep desires so as to see in them how the Holy Spirit prays through their longing.

In essence, he tries to help people appropriate in a personal way what St. Paul says when he tells us that when we do not know how to pray as we should, the Spirit, “with groaning too deep for words”, prays through us.

How does the Spirit pray through human longing? There is a complex, though very rich, theological explanation for this. At root lies the fact that the same Holy Spirit which drove Jesus into the desert and guided him through his ministry also drives all of physical creation, including the movements of the heart. What animated Jesus also animates everything else, except that nothing else is as perfectly responsive to it as Jesus was.

The Holy Spirit is the deep fire driving all of creation and the dynamics of this spirit can be studied through physics, biology, chemistry, or psychology, just as they can be studied through Christology and spirituality. As the Psalmist puts it in Psalm 104, addressing God, “if you take away your spirit, all creation returns to dust.” Astonishing? Yes. The Holy Spirit holds physical creation together. What animates the union of hydrogen and oxygen and what animated Jesus is the same thing, a spirit that unites elements and then presses outward towards greater life, a fire that can be seen in Jesus’ life and ministry, just as it can be seen in the relentless growth of a bamboo plant. At the heart of everything there is a divine fire. In the end, all yearning, longing, and aching, every desire we have, is driven by that fire. So too are the laws of gravity.

And what does this fire want? An interesting question. Jesus poses it to us at the beginning of John’s gospel and then answers at the end that gospel.

In the first chapter of John, Jesus sees two persons eyeing him with curiosity and he asks them: “What are you looking for?” At the end of the gospel, he answers the question. When Mary Magdala comes looking for his dead body and meets instead his resurrected person, he pronounces her name: “Mary”. In that, she recognizes him and she recognizes too what she, and everyone else and all of creation, is wanting, namely, to have God, personally and gently, pronounce her name. What are we looking for? All of the fire in all of creation, all conscious and unconscious desire, in the end, longs to be so embraced by God, to have God intimately pronounce its name.

But, and this needs to be immediately added, this has already happened, God has already pronounced our names. In the depths of the soul, in that part of us where all that is most precious is kept and nurtured, where we suffer moral loneliness, where we have our purest longings, we know that we have already been touched, caressed, and embraced by God. There is a part of us that no hurt can harden, no abuse can stain, and no sin (save the sin against the Holy Spirit) can warp. It is here that we have a dark, warm memory of having once been gently embraced, held, and caressed.

An ancient legend says that, before putting a soul into a person, God kisses that soul. Bernard Lonergan suggests that faith is “the brand of God” inside of us, an indelible memory of some deep touch. These are other ways of speaking of this.

There is a place in the soul where we still remember feeling God’s embrace and it is there that we gently hear God call our name whenever in this life we meet truth, love, gentleness, forgiveness, justice, and innocence. In the presence of these the soul feels right, something touches its hypothalamus, and we, like Mary of Magdala, suddenly recognize the voice of Christ calling our name.

So how do we evangelize desire? How can we take the aching dis-ease within us and turn it into prayer? How do we baptize what groans in us and what groans in creation?

By nurturing more and more that part in us which still remembers God’s embrace, by getting in touch with our moral loneliness, by recognizing that all that is so restless in us wants, at its root, to hear God call its name, and by connecting truth, love, gentleness, forgiveness, justice, and innocence with the voice of the resurrected Christ.

From Gifted Child To Giving Adult

January 15, 1997

Nearly fifteen years ago, Swiss analyst, Alice Miller produced a little essay that made a big impact, The Drama of the Gifted Child.

For her, the gifted child is not the kid with the extraordinary intelligence quotient, Einstein’s kid. In Miller’s view rather, the gifted child is the child who is, from the womb onwards, extraordinarily sensitive, the child who, among other things, picks up, internalizes, and lives out the expectations of others. Such a child, early on, becomes a pleaser and often goes through life renouncing his or her own needs so as to try always not to disappoint anyone.

Too often, however, such a child grows into an adult who, already in early mid-life, in her thirties or early forties, ends up complaining: “I’ve lived my whole life for others. I’ve never really made my own choices. First, it was my parents, everything I did as a child was to please them, to not disappoint. Then it was my teachers, my coaches, my church, my peers. Always it was a question of letting go of what I wanted so as to meet others’ expectations. The same thing in my marriage, my needs always got sacrificed so as not to disappoint my spouse. I’ve never been able to do things just for me. I’ve spent my life victimized by others’ expectations. And, through this all, I have become a timid person, good and virtuous, though not by choice but by conscription and weakness. I’m in mid-life and I’m like a child, not virtuous really, just lacking in nerve to ever do what I really would want.”

Whether these words are spoken on a therapeutic couch or at a friend’s coffee table, they get uttered a lot. This is a common lament, the complaint of a good person who, after years of giving, starts to feel victimized and begins to let bitterness seep into her or his life.

But am I a victim when I feel like that? Is the gifted child a victim or is she virtuous?

There are two ways of looking at this: On the one hand, if I make such a lament, I am confessing lack of nerve, lack of strength, a weakness – “I’m too weak in the face of the expectations of others to live out my own internal integrity.” On the other hand, I am confessing too to a certain selflessness: “I have been living unselfishly all these years.” Not a bad thing, viewed this way.

But is it selflessness or weakness? Can it be both? Where does the gifted child end and the sacrificing Christ begin? What is the distinction between victim and virtue?

That distinction is not so easily drawn. When is one a victim and when is one giving one’s life for others? At the level of outward appearance, simple phenomenology, this can be indistinguishable. Outward action is not the criterion, inward freedom is. I am victim when somebody takes my life and I am practicing selfless virtue when I freely give it.

Jesus illustrates this. As he sacrifices freely his life, renouncing consistently his own needs in the face of the needs of others, he keeps repeating, as if a mantra: “Nobody takes my life from me. I give it freely.”

Jesus was not a victim, he made that plain in the Garden of Gethsemane and again before Pilate. He chose to lay down his life. It was a free decision, made in love. Nobody can take by force what one gives for free.

It is from this, Jesus’ example of a love that freely sacrifices unto to death, that we must learn. The key to move beyond being and feeling the victim lies in this since all of us, like the gifted child, constantly find ourselves unfree in the face of others’ demands. Nobody escapes the unfairness of life and nobody, other than a complete monster, goes through life without ever putting other people’s needs ahead of his or her own. There are many places where life must be freely laid down or it will be forcibly taken. It I never freely give away my life, I will forever be victimized because, daily, someone will be taking it.

Hence my choice, at least in terms of choosing adulthood and morality, is not between being the gifted child who lives for others or living life for myself. My choice is rather between being the gifted child or the giving adult. The gifted child gives, not freely, but because he or she is too weak to resist the request. The action is unselfish, but the result is bitterness. The giving adult gives freely, not out of weakness, but out of strength. That action too is unselfish and the result is participation in the joy of Christ.

The challenge of the gospel is in the end the challenge of simple human growth, namely, to move from bitter victim to joyful giver, from gifted child to giving adult.

Hopefully at our burial, none of us will request that they play Frank Sinatra singing: I DID IT MAY WAY. Anyone who actually lives out that philosophy and forever insists on his or her own way will probably not have a very large contingent of family, friends, and community standing at his or her grave full of gratitude. Our family and friends will receive our lives in gratitude precisely when we do not always “do it my way”.