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”.

Common Ground

January 8, 1997

Concerned with an ever-intensifying polarization within the church, the late Cardinal Joseph Bernardin made a proposal for something he called Common Ground, an ecclesial space within which persons of very differing ideologies could meet.

Looking at this, it is important to note what he did not propose. He did not, as is often the assumption, recommend centrist ground, but common ground. There is a difference.

An old axiom reads: In medio stat virtus. Loosely rendered, this says that virtue lies in the middle, between any two extremes. That can be a wise statement. However, that is not exactly the common ground envisaged by Bernardin. Common ground is not some negotiated middle, some acceptable common denominator, between two radical extremes. As Jim Wallis, who is very sympathetic to Bernardin’s proposal, recently put it: “We certainly don’t want to sacrifice prophetic politics for a mushy middle.”

His is an important insight. The common ground that is so badly needed in the church, and in political life in general, is not what is achieved by a skillful negotiator who gets two sides to make the necessary compromises. That would leave us precisely with a mushy middle, mediocrity, the lowest common denominator, ground devoid of prophecy, oatmeal served-up with chamomile tea.

Common ground should not be fantasized as the meltdown of two extremes, the left and the right compromising enough with each other so as to produce a reality salt less enough so that everyone can live with it. The left and the right each bring an important prophecy and real common ground must include the salt of each of them.

Hence common ground is to be achieved not so much on the basis of compromise, but on the basis of each side, right and left, beginning to hear and accept the truth that the other is bringing.

Thus, to offer some examples:

Common ground will be found when left takes seriously what the right is saying about personal responsibility and accountability, even as the right takes seriously what the left is saying about communal rights, racism, and gender equality. When the left can meet the business community with enough nuance and admit that government isn’t the answer for everything and the right can see what our present government and business practices are, in fact, doing to the poor, we will be standing on some common ground.
Common ground will be found when, in the area of sexuality, the right takes seriously what the left is saying about the place of passion, even as the left takes seriously what the right is saying about central is the role of chastity and purity in the structure of any stable society or personality.
Common ground will be found when the left begins to hear what the right has been saying about how important the institutions of marriage and family are to the very foundation of our culture, even as the right begins to admit that heterosexual dysfunction, and not any concession made to a gay or lesbian rights, is at the root of divorce and family breakdown in Western culture.
Common ground will be found when the right begins to hear what feminism has been saying about how the present economic and social structure of Western society is, in fact, anti-family and anti-child, even as feminists begin to hear what the right has been saying for a long time, namely, that a woman’s right to choose is not the only moral issue involved in the question of abortion.
Common ground will be found when the deconstructionists of hierarchy on the left begin to hear what the right is saying, namely, that the eclipse of hierarchy is not only doing in patriarchy, but also matriarchy as well, and is leaving us at the mercy of a new set of commandments who answer to no God and whose demands that we be significant are infinitely more crippling and dehumanizing than ever were the hierarchical imperatives of the past. But this can only be heard when the right hears more clearly what the deconstructionists of hierarchy are saying, that is, that the world and the church are full of many bad, mostly male, leaders and institutions.
Common ground will be found when the right begins to take the place of chaos, creativity, and ambiguity more seriously, even as the left begins to understand how important are stability, order, and clarity. Common ground will make enough place for both creativity and stability.

As a current Sojourners’ slogan puts it: Not from the right, not from the left, but from the Spirit. Common ground is not a mushy middle. It is the ground created by what is carried in prophetically by both the right and the left. Long live Cardinal Bernardin’s vision and spirit!

The Court Jester’s New Year’s Advice

January 3, 1997

Make the new year a creative one: Write a poem every morning. How can you do that? Poet, William Stafford, has the answer: “Lower your standards!”
Know this: A society which scorns excellence in plumbing because it is a humble activity and tolerates shoddiness in philosophy because it is an exalted activity will have neither good plumbing nor good philosophy. Neither its pipes nor its theories will hold water. So writes John Gardner.
Are you planning to spend your summer vacation writing an academic article? Consider this: It is estimated that there are about 200,000 academic journals published in the English language and the average number of readers per article is five.
A post-modern, biblical, recasting of Murphy’s Law: In the house of irritation there are many rooms! Remember, it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than it is for an irritated person not to be a pain to be around.
Since 1993, close to 200 lawsuits have been filed by USA prison inmates, defending on grounds of religion practices that range from masturbation to reggae music. In one case, in a Texan prison, an inmate claimed that his religion required that once a week he be served chateaubriand. Why isn’t religion more popular?
If you watch a game, it’s fun. If you play it, it’s recreation. If you work at it, it’s golf. (Bob Hope
Past cultures believed in the other world, a reality beyond their own. We too believe in the other world, Hollywood.
Careerist’s credo for those in ecclesial or civil service:

Don’t think.

If you think, don’t speak.

If you think and speak, don’t write.

If you think and speak and write, don’t sign your name.

If you think and speak and write your name, don’t be surprised.

(National Catholic Reporter)

Yes, moral relativism is all the fashion: A lot of people say that there aren’t any “shoulds” in life, but here’s something you should know: There are only three words in the English language that end with gry … hungry, angry, and puggry!
Having trouble defining God? Try Alfred North Whitehead’s definition of the ineffable: God is the unconditioned actuality of conceptual feeling at the base of things; so that, by reason of this primordial actuality, there is an order in the relevance of eternal objects to the process of creation. His unity of conceptual operations is a free creative act, untrammelled by reference to any particular course of things. It is deflected neither by love, nor by hatred, for what in fact comes to pass. The particularities of the actual world presuppose it; while it merely presupposes the general metaphysical character of creative advance, of which it is the primordial exemplification. The primordial nature of God is the acquirement by creativity of a primordial character. His conceptual actuality at once exemplifies and establishes the categorical conditions. The conceptual feelings, which compose his primordial nature, exemplify in their subjective forms their mutual sensitivity and their subjective unity of subjective aim. These subjective forms are valuations determining the relative relevance of eternal objects for each occasion of actuality.
Strange anomalies. Therapy and prostitution: If you are lonely and nobody understands you and you feel like going crazy and you have some money left over that you don’t need for food, you can buy somebody to love you, at $100 per hour. But there are two different kinds of love you can buy; one is laudable, the other criminal, and the difference between them is laughable. Yet how exactly to explain that difference? Here’s a PH.D thesis in phenomenology waiting to be written.
Then there is the story of the Farmer who voted against Daylight Saving Time because he was afraid that the extra hour of sunlight each day might be too much for his crops to take!
It is easier to behave yourself into a new way of feeling than to feel yourself into a new way of behaving.

So have a good year!

Christmas – A Time To Rise Above Gloom

December 23, 1996

A lot of people would like to see Christmas cancelled, not exactly the feast itself, but the hoopla with which we surround it. What is being argued for is a strippeddown Christmas, a feast without trimmings, decorated shops, excessive dinners, expensive presents, bright lights, trees and carols.

The whole event, it is argued, has become too drawn-out, too over-done, too expensive, too commercialized, and has too little to do with the birth of Jesus or anything else religious: Stores and shops start putting up decorations, playing carols, and specially marketing items nearly two months before the actual day.

Advent, which is supposed to be a time of preparation for the feast, is an exhausting ordeal of parties that bring us to Christmas on celebration overload, already saturated with what we were supposed to be building up to.

And finally, there is the issue of the poor—we are celebrating in excess while they have too little.

Is not this the antithesis of what Jesus’ birth into our world is supposed to mean? Do our Christmas celebrations not serve more to obliterate our awareness of Christ’s birth than to highlight it?

There is much truth in this. Our Christmas celebrations, admittedly, do start too early (a fault in our chastity), are too commercially-driven, do focus too little on anything religious and do not take the poor sufficiently into account. Too often too they serve to obliterate religious awareness rather than highlight it. Graded purely on a religious and moral scale, our Christmas celebrations would not get a passing grade.

But, this being acknowledged, we must be careful not to throw out the baby with the bath water. Because something is being done badly does not mean it should be cancelled. What is called for is not the cancellation of the tinsel, lights, socials, food and drink that surround Christmas, but a better—more religious, moral, communitarian and inclusive—use of them. There are good reasons to cancel our celebrations, but there are even better reasons to keep them.

What reasons? Why continue all the hoopla—the lights, the trees, the cards, the partying?

First of all, because we need to celebrate. As human beings we have an irresistible, healthy, and God-given need to make festival, to have un-ordinary time, to have carnival. Christmas is sabbath, sabbatical, in the true biblical sense . . . and also the only sabbatical most of us will ever get! There are seasons in life, and these should be regular, meant solely for enjoyment, for color, for tinsel. There is even the occasional time for a bit of excess.

Jesus voiced that when his followers objected to a woman’s excess in anointing him. All cultures, whether poor or rich, have always had times of festival where, spoken or unspoken, they took seriously the words: “The poor you will always have with you” but today it is time to celebrate! Christmas is this time.

John Shea, in his marvellous little book on Christmas, tells the story of a family who decided one year to have an alternative Christmas. They did not put up a tree, string any lights, play any carols or exchange any gifts. They met for a simple, quiet meal on Christmas Day. Asked by friends, how it went, one member of the family replied that it “was pleasant.” Another member, speaking more honestly perhaps, stated that it was an “existential abyss.”

There is a God-given press within human nature that pushes us to celebrate and this is a healthy pressure because it keeps us aware that we are not meant for gloom but that we are destined for more, much more, than our poor lives can give us just now. The excess of carnival, of festival, of Christmas, teaches its own lessons in faith and hope.

To make a festival of Christmas, to surround the marking of Jesus’ birth with all the joy, light, music, gift-giving, energy and warmth we can muster is (and the Gospel makes for strange paradoxes) a prophetic act. It is, or at least it can be, a radical statement of faith and hope.

It is not the person who says: “It’s all rotten, let’s cancel it!” who radiates hope. At the end of the day, that’s despair masquerading as faith. No. It’s the woman or man, who, despite the world’s misuse and abuse of these, strings up the Christmas lights, trims the tree and turkey, pours gifts and drinks all around, turns up the stereo which is playing the carols and flashes a smile for the whole world, who radiates faith, who says that we are meant for more than gloom.

Happiness and Meaning

December 18, 1996

“Are you happy?” How would you honestly answer that? My suspicion is that, for most of us, this would be a painful question which, given our fantasy of what happiness should be, we would tend to answer in the negative: “No, I don’t think I’m happy. I would like to be, but there are too many limitations and frustrations in my life which block happiness.”

“Are you happy?” To stare that question square in the face can make you more unhappy. A torturous self-scrutiny can result from it. What this suggests is that perhaps it is not a good question to ask in the first place. To ask myself: “Am I happy?” is to confuse things and to begin to demand things from life and from God that are not realistic.

For a Christian, there is a better question. The essential question should not be, “Am I happy”? but rather, “Is my life meaningful?” That is a different question, one which can help purify our perspective on things.

What God has promised us in Christ is not, as is unfortunately so often preached and believed, a life free from pain, sickness, loneliness, oppression, and death. The preacher who tells you that you will have less pain in life if you take Jesus seriously is not in touch with the gospel. What the incarnation promises is not that Christ will do away with our pain, but that God will be with us in that pain. That is something quite different. In fact, one can go further and say the opposite: If you take the gospel seriously, you will probably have more pain in your life because you will be a more sensitive person.

To take the gospel seriously is not to be given immunity from the human condition. No. For the Christian, as for everyone else, there will be the same sicknesses, the same cold lonely seasons, the same painful frustrations, the same choices that are regretted, and the same bitter losses. Like everyone else, too, eventually we will have to face death. Faith in God does not, in this world, save one from pain, misunderstanding, loneliness, and death. Faith does not offer a life free of pain. What God does promise is to be with us in that pain. That is why our Saviour’s name is Emmanuel, a name which means God-is-with-us.

To have faith in God is to have God with you. This, as Avery Dulles once so aptly put it, does not give you a ladder to crawl out of the human condition, but a drill to burrow into the heart of it: “Jesus enables us to believe that human life, with all its contradictions, is the place where God is preeminently found. Unlike every other mythology, the myth of the Incarnation gives us strength to face up to the harsh realities of our fragmented world, to feel and to transmit the touch of God’s reconciling love. The Incarnation does not provide us with a ladder by which to escape from the ambiguities of this life and scale the heights of heaven. Rather it enables us to burrow deep into the heart of the planet earth and find it shimmering with divinity.”

For the Christian, then, the important question is not: “Am I happy?” but “Is my life meaningful?” By asking the latter question rather than the former one, I do not torture myself with some unattainable romantic ideal and, more importantly, I do not ask God to exempt me from the human condition. My life is meaningful precisely when I sense God’s presence in the midst of my suffering, sicknesses, loneliness, and pain. My faith should never pressure me to ask God to exempt me from these. Why should I be spared the human condition? Rather my faith should allow me to stand inside of every reality in my life, positive and negative, and see some meaning in it.

“Is my life meaningful?” When I ask the question this way the perspective is very different. Now my happiness will no longer depend upon my never getting sick, or upon my not getting lonely, or upon my never being misunderstood, or upon my never making wrong choices, or on somehow being exempt from death’s shadow. Life can be frustrating and still be very meaningful. We can be lonely, sick, sorrowful about wrong choices, over-worked and unappreciated, staring old age and death in the face and still experience deep meaning. Happiness will be a by-product of that.

Are my symbols working? Is my faith deep enough so that every corner of my experience, no matter how painful, makes some sense in a higher plan? Is God with me as I walk through both health and sickness, joy and sorrow, friendship and loneliness, success and failure, youth and aging? Does my life have a meaning? The question about happiness comes after that question.

The Power of a Candle

December 16, 1996

In South Africa, prior to the abolition of apartheid, people used to light candles and place them in their windows as a sign of hope, a sign that one day this injustice would be overcome. At a point, the authorities began to crack down on this. It became illegal to have a lit candle in your window, as illegal as carrying a firearm.

The children did not miss the irony of this. They soon had a joke among themselves: “The government is afraid of candles!”

Eventually, as we know, apartheid was overcome. Reflecting upon the forces that helped overthrow it, it is fairly evident that candles, lit religious candles, were more powerful, ultimately, than were firearms. In retrospect, the children’s taunting notwithstanding, the government’s paranoia about candles was well founded. A lit candle is more dangerous than any firearm. Hope is more powerful than any army.

But what is hope?

Hope should be clearly distinguished from a number of things with which it is commonly confused. Many of us, mistake wishing for hope. They are not at all the same. Wishing is fantasy, pure and simple. Thus, for example, I can wish that I might win a million dollars, marry the most beautiful person in the world, or be a one in a million athlete, pop star, or writer, but that is not connected to any reality. It is simple daydreaming: “It would be nice to have that.” You do not light a candle for a daydream.

Likewise hope is not to be identified, as it so often is, with a naturally optimistic, upbeat temperament. The person who is naturally bubbly and always sees the bright side of things may indeed be a welcome addition to any family, organization, and community, but he or she is not necessarily the most hope filled person there. Hope is not a question of light or heavy temperament, of cheeriness or somberness.

Finally, hope is also not a question of being able to look at the facts and see in them the possibility for better world. Thus, it is not hope when I watch the world news at night, sense a certain improvement in the world situation, and conclude that, because of this, the world is after all a good place. Conversely, it is not a lack of hope when, alternately, I watch the news, see that things do not seem to be getting better, and conclude that the world is not a good place.

Hope is not based upon wishing, an optimistic temperament, or upon what the world looks like on the newscasts on a given evening. Hope is based upon a promise, the promise of God, a promise which says that, human sin and power notwithstanding, and human powerlessness against sin and evil notwithstanding, justice, peace, love, harmony, gentleness, and graciousness will, eventually, become reality.

If I am living my life by hope, I believe these things will triumph not because it would be nice if they did, or because I am a person who naturally sees the bright side of things, or because I watch the news and the facts indicate that things are in fact improving. The kingdom of God – justice, peace, love, harmony, gentleness, and graciousness – will triumph because God has promised they will and, in the resurrection of Jesus, God has shown that there is a power beyond human power to bring these about. Hope, in the end, is based upon the promise and power of God.

To light a candle, then, is to say a number of things: First, it is to say that we are under a higher authority than our government. Small wonder governments don’t like religious candles! Second, to light a religious candle, is to say that we believe in the power of the resurrection, namely, we believe that God has the power to bring justice, peace, and love to this planet, irrespective of all the injustice, war, and hatred we see each night on the newscasts. Finally, to light a candle is to say, and say correctly, that gentleness and graciousness are ultimately more powerful than are threats, torture, and guns. To light a candle is to tell governments, human authorities, and powers of all kinds that there is a more important agenda than theirs, that there is a greater power and authority than theirs, and that our real allegiance is given to something and Somebody beyond them.

To light a candle is to make a statement which is both religious and political. We should not be surprised when governments react.

Advent Longing

December 4, 1996

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. Arms crossed, knees drawn up, holding, holding on, this motion, unlike a ship’s, smooths and contains the rocker. It’s an inside kind – wrapped tight like skin. Then there is a loneliness that roams. No rocking can hold it down. It is alive, on its own. A dry and spreading thing that makes the sound of one’s own feet going seem to come from a far-off place.

So writes Toni Morrison at the end of her Pulitzer Prize winning novel, Beloved. So too, in some way, has written every poet of the heart. There is a loneliness that roams, that can make us strange to ourselves, that haunts the soul.

All of us experience it. We ache at our center. There, where we would wish a stillness, we find a longing, a loneliness, a relentless ache for consummation that does not go away even when we do not sleep alone. This kind of loneliness can not be soothed by a rocking chair. No. It drives us outward, to far-off places.

And we wander to those places, the sound of our own feet strange to ourselves, forever wanting some affection, some attention, some love, some achievement that eludes. Yes, the very beat of the heart brings a pain: to be one with that someone special, to leave a mark, to celebrate and to not have darkness, to dance and to not have shame, to play and to have delight, to display so as to be seen for all we are. We have an ache in the heart, to fly, beyond our skin.

What’s to be done? What’s to be gleaned from our wandering? Has loneliness a design? Is there a secret to be learned?

What we learn from the longing is that we are more, more than any moment in our lives, more than any situation, more than any humiliation, more than any achievement, more than how we find ourselves right now. Longing takes us beyond. What we know through possession is small when compared to what we know through longing. Possession is limited; longing is infinite. Possession puts fences around us; longing takes them down. Only in the torment of the insufficiency of everything attainable do we know that we are more, more than the limits of our bodies, marriages, jobs, and particular places where we live and die. Longing is the great teacher.

It teaches us – better yet, it lets us touch through desire – God’s deep design for each of us. In our longing, as the mystics have always told us, we intuit the Kingdom of God. In our yearning we see the deeper blueprint for things.

The Kingdom of God is not, as we know, a question of earthily pleasure (“eating and drinking”) but, as Romans puts it, a matter of justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit.

And justice, peace, and joy in the Holy Spirit are precisely what we ache for in our longing. In the end, our longings are about consummation, oneness, completeness, peace, harmony, and justice. Granted, some particular fantasies, which concretize our longing, may not, on the surface, seem much centred on God’s Kingdom. Fantasies of sex, revenge, fame, and power hardly suggest that the Kingdom of God is being intuited. And yet, even in them, be they ever so crass, there is present always something deeper, a hunger for justice, for peace, for joy, and for oneness in Christ’s body, as well as the knowledge that we are more than what we are limited to at present. In our longing, constantly, we are driven to know that we are more than what we are at this given moment. In our longing we intuit the Kingdom of God.

Advent is about longing: It is about getting in touch with it, about letting it teach us that we are more than the limits of our present, about intuiting God’s Kingdom through it, about coming to a new hope through it, and about getting pregnant through its seed. That is what Mary did and the end result was Christmas.

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin once suggested that peace and unity will come to our world when there is a high enough psychic temperature to create such a fusion. Behind that metaphor lies an understanding of the lesson of advent, namely, that longing is not something to be denied, repressed, or denigrated, but something rather to be entered into, deepened, and evangelized. In longing are the deep seeds of hope. When we long, the Holy Spirit prays through us.

There is a loneliness that can be rocked. There is also another kind that roams and this kind drives us into advent.

Helping To Give Birth To God’s Body

November 27, 1996

There is a marvelous story told about a four year old child who woke up one night frightened, convinced that there were all kinds of spooks and monsters in her room. In terror she fled to her parents’ bedroom. Her mother took her back to her room and, after soothing her fears, assured her that things were safe there: “You don’t have to be afraid. After I leave, you won’t be alone in the room. God will be here with you.” “I know that God will be here,” the child protested, “but I need someone in this room who has some skin.”

This little story can teach us a whole lot about the incarnation. God knows that we all need a God who has some skin for we are creatures of the senses. We see, hear, touch, taste, and smell. Everything that goes into to us enters through those senses, just as everything that comes out of us exits through them. Through our senses we are open to the world and to each other. Through them, we communicate.

In the incarnation, God comes to us through the senses. In Jesus, the ineffable, spiritual, invisible reality of God, which is beyond all physical sense, becomes precisely something which can be seen, heard, and touched through the senses.

This mystery, the incarnation, is the centre of our entire faith. It is also often misunderstood. What we tend to not understand is its ongoing nature. Generally, we understand the incarnation too much as a thirty-three year experiment: In Jesus, God takes on flesh, lives on earth for thirty-three years, and then, after his death and resurrection, ascends back to God and sends us the Holy Spirit (who has no flesh and is not physical). In this view, God took on flesh, for a while, but has returned to heaven and is now working invisibly again.

What is wrong with this view? One main thing: The ascension of Jesus does not end, nor fundamentally change, the incarnation. God continues still to have real flesh on earth. Jesus returned to God but, in a manner of speaking, Christ did not. The word “Christ”, as we know, is not Jesus’ surname name; for example, as we might say in: Jack Smith, Susan Parker, Jesus Christ. Jesus did not have a surname. The word “Christ” is a title which connotes God’s anointed presence on earth.

Hence, Scripture uses the expression the Body of Christ, to mean three things equally: Jesus, the historical person who walked the earth for thirty-three years; the Eucharist, which is also the physical presence of God on earth; and the body of believers, which is also a real presence of God. Hence, to use the phrase, the Body of Christ is to refer, at one and the same time, to Jesus, the Eucharist, and the community of faith.

This is not an exaggeration, nor a metaphor. To say that the body of believers is the body of Christ is not to say something that Scripture does not. The reverse is true. Scripture, in particular St. Paul, never tells us that the body of believers replaces Christ’s body, nor that it represents Christ’s body, nor even that it is Christ’s mystical body. It says simply: “We are Christ’s body.” This is must be understood physically.

To say that the body of believers is the body of Christ is not any more of a metaphor than to say that the Eucharist is the body of Christ. The Eucharist and the body of believers are not like the body of Christ. Each is the body of Christ, just as Jesus is the body of Christ.

We have always been a bit wary of emphasizing that the community of believers truly is the body of Christ and have always been more comfortable with it as a metaphor or as some vague mystical reality. But that caution is wrongly placed. The danger lies in not emphasizing the raw physical truth of that reality. That we are the body of Christ, physically, has immense implications. Simply put, in the incarnation, God gives us divine powers, the exact powers that were in Jesus himself.

Jesus makes this clear. In John’s gospel (14, 12), he tells us that, as his disciples, we can do all the things that he does, and even greater things. This is not a pious platitude. If we ever understood its real truth we would no longer doubt that the gospel is “good news” and we would sing out joy filled Christmas songs until our lungs burst. The power that came into our world with Jesus, at that first Christmas, is still with us. It is in us. Like Jesus, we too can freely dispense God’s forgiveness, heal each other with God’s touch, and reach through death itself to save our loved ones. Christmas begins the mystery of God’s body on earth. Our own bodies are part of that mystery. Advent is all about realizing this.

Self-Obsession Robs Us Of Joy

November 18, 1996

Perspective is everything. When it’s lost, headaches and heartaches set in, take root and begin to dominate our lives.

When we lose perspective everything is reduced—the wide horizon, the depth of our minds, the compassion of our hearts, the enjoyment of our lives, and the consolation of our God. When perspective is lost, the world turns upside down; contentment gives way to restlessness, humility to ambition, and patience to a hopeless pursuit of a consummation, renown and immortality that this life can never give.

I know. It’s happened to me, countless times; in fact it happens to me most all of the time. In my life, forever it seems, I keep losing perspective and becoming obsessed with a love l cannot have, with hurts that I cannot let go of, and with an ambition that leaves me too preoccupied, too self-absorbed and too hurried to fully notice what’s around me.

Like most everyone else, I spend too many hours waiting for a special phone call that doesn’t come, for a special letter that doesn’t arrive, for a special glance of affection that isn’t given and for a special daydream to turn into reality. Like most everyone else who’s lost perspective, I spend too many hours stewing about hurts, replaying again and again the real and imagined rejections, insults and misunderstandings that have come my way, and dwelling on where I’ve been cheated, where life is unfair, and where others have been given what I don’t have.

Like most everyone else, I am driven, restless, ambitious and I live a pressured life, a life too hurried and demanding to be fully enjoyed. Like most everyone else, I dwell too much upon my own emotional, sexual, and moral loneliness and this preoccupation robs me of most of the simple, and deepest, joys of life.

And, like most everyone I know, for me, it won’t be easy to die, to let go, to return, with grace and gratitude, to the dust of earth, content enough with the astounding fact that I have lived, felt life, walked the earth, been loved, and have been and remain part of the Body of Christ.

But to have perspective, I must be praying, mystically feeling the other world, and content enough in my anonymity to take my place, but no more that, among others, as one small but integral member of the billions of men and women who have walked, and will walk the earth and will, one day, be presented by Christ to his Father. It is not easy to keep perspective and to claim no more, and no less, than my true place in history.

When my own prayer and mysticism is too weak for me to properly do this, one of the things I can still do is to stay in touch with those who have kept things in perspective. One of the persons who has helped me in this is Pierre Teilhard de Chardin—the French scientist-priest-mystic-philosopher who died on Easter Sunday in1955.

Like the rest of us, his life too had its share of hurts, ambitions, cold lonely seasons and obsessions. He spent most of his life unsure that anyone really understood him. But, and this is where he is rare, he invariably was able to put things into perspective, to regain the wide horizon and to see things, no matter how bad they appeared on the surface, as making sense in Christ.

Because of this, this perspective, he was a gifted man, gifted not just with extraordinary insight, but also with exceptional joy. He could see God in a stone. A chip of rock in the desert or an opera in Paris or New York, both held equal potential for delight. The simple pleasures of life, the elementary act of looking at the world and feeling its elements—the weather, the soil, the sun, the very dust—could give him a joy bordering on ecstasy.

It didn’t matter whether he was with his loved ones, at home in France, or away from his loved ones (and loved land), in exile in China, every kind of everyday experience could leave him feeling deeply grateful just for the fact of living, for the privilege of being part of what God is doing on this earth.

He could love deeply and he could also let go—and this letting go was what saved him from the always-present fear, ambition and loneliness that so often asphyxiates me. He was able to keep things in perspective and so he didn’t need to dwell on past hurts, on present loneliness and on future fears. Thus, for example:

At age 35, in 1916, he found himself in the front lines, as a stretcher-bearer, in the First World War. Before the battle to recapture Douaumont, fearing that he might be killed, he wrote the following: “I tell you this: I shall go into this engagement in a religious spirit, with all my soul, borne on by a single great impetus in which I am unable to distinguish where human emotions end and adoration begins. And if I am destined not to return from those heights I would like my body to remain there, molded into the clay of the fortifications, like a living cement thrown by God into the stonework of the New City” (Hymns of the Universe, London, Fontana, 1970, p.51).

Humbling words, noble words, from a rare person with a rare faith. We all need to read and write words like this—and then, perhaps, we won’t live in restlessness and ambition, waiting for that special something that never comes.

Fear Not You Are Inadequate!

November 13, 1996

Some twenty years ago, while on a retreat, an elderly nun was assigned to me as director. She proved to be a woman of rare maturity, providing the guidance that I needed at the time. Being young and intense, I too easily made a cosmic drama and tragedy out of every ordinary desolation or setback and she challenged me with a wisdom, an earthiness, and a sense of humour that continually helped deflate my pompousness.

At one stage of the retreat, sensing my Hamlet type propensities, she gave me a little proverb: Fear not you are inadequate!

Through the years, that little adage has come back to me, off and on, mostly at times when I have been a bit overwhelmed by my own inadequacy or have been, usually without a lot of success, trying to console somebody else. There is a deceptive depth in that little saying.

On the one hand, there is a certain consolation in it. Whether you are a parent, a teacher, a minister, a priest, an advocate for justice, or simply a friend to someone in need, there are countless times when you come face to face with your own inadequacy, when you are helpless in the face of all that you should be doing. At times like that, it is important to remember that God alone is adequate, that you are not God, and that God is more parent, teacher, minister, priest, advocate for justice, and friend than you are. Obvious as this is, it is not always evident to us, as our history of needless worry, being angry, feeling overly self-important, living with ulcers, and being chronically overextended give ample testimony to.

Great spiritual writers have always said this. For example, John of the Cross, in a treatise on spiritual direction, reminds directors that God is the real spiritual director and that they are only secondary instruments. That is also true for every parent, teacher, minister, priest, justice advocate, and friend. God is the real parent, the real teacher, the real minister, the real advocate for justice, and the real friend and alone is adequate for that task. We are instruments, mere instruments, albeit important ones, and, unlike God, we are not adequate to the task.

Knowing this should give us some consolation at those times when it seems that, somehow, we should be doing better than we are. However, that consolation, expressed so well in the proverb, should never give us an excuse to slacken our efforts, be lazy, or to shirk responsibility. God may be the real parent or the real teacher or the real friend, but God, in the incarnation, has tied divine power to human hands and human effort. Hence the fact that nobody, save Jesus, is adequate to give expression to God must not however deter us from trying.

Be that as it may, this adage, the common sense faith of a very good nun, is itself a prayer. How so?

Healthy prayer functions paradoxically: On the one hand, it connects us to God and links us to divine energy. Conversely, at the same time, it dissociates us from God by making it clear to us that we are not God. Hence, a good prayer life is paradoxical too in its effect, namely, it connects us to God and thus saves us from depression even as it dissociates us from God and thereby saves us from inflation and self-righteousness. Simply put, if someone does not pray, in some way, he or she is forever falling either into depression or into infantile grandiosity, either there is a lack of connection to God or there is an over identification with God. Both have negative effects.

Thus, for example, when looks at someone like David Koresh – the Cult Davidian leader who burned to death in Waco, Texas – one sees precisely an over identification with God. There was plenty of energy, plenty of fire, but too little in the way of dissociation. He might well have meditated that little proverb on inadequacy and come to understand that he was not God. Conversely, when we are chronically depressed (as opposed to being clinically depressed) we are too out of touch with divine energy and stand in need of more connection. Accepting our inadequacy can help bring us to prayer.

Fear not you are inadequate! To accept the truth of that is to be make a little prayer. It is both healthily humbling and uplifting to accept the fact that we are not God and that we are not asked to try to be. When we are overly discouraged it is because we have forgotten that truth. When are overly inflated, it is for the same reason.

Living with an Unnatural Wound

November 5, 1996

Few things in life are as difficult as the death of a young person. Many is the parent, the mother or the father, with a broken heart. They have lost a daughter or a son and, despite time and perhaps even the consolation of faith, there is a wound that will not heal. There is a reason why this wound is so unrelenting and it lies not so much in a lack of faith in us, as persons, as in a certain lack within nature itself. Nature equips us for most situations, but it does not equip us to bury our own young.

Death is always hard. It severs with a finality and an irrevocability that cauterizes the heart. This is true even if the person who has died is elderly and has lived a full life. Ultimately nothing prepares us, really, to accept the deaths of those whom we love.

But nature has better equipped us to handle the deaths of our elders. We are meant to bury our parents. That is the way nature is set up, the natural order of things. Parents are meant to die before their children and, generally speaking, that is the way it happens. This brings its own excruciating pain. It is not easy to lose one’s parents, just as it is not easy to lose one’s spouse, one’s siblings, or one’s friends. Death always exacts its toll. However, without denying how much this can hurt, nature has equipped us to handle these deaths.

Metaphorically stated, when our elders die, there are circuits in our hardwiring that we can access, open up, and draw new energy through. Ultimately, the death of a fellow adult washes clean and normality returns – for it is natural, nature’s way, for adults to die. That is the proper order of things. One of life’s tasks is to bury one’s parents.

But it is not natural for young people to die. It is not natural for parents to bury their children. That is not the way nature intended things and thus nature has not really equipped us for the task. Again, to utilize the metaphor, when one of our children dies – be it through natural disease, accident, or suicide – nature has not, in our hardwiring, provided us with the circuits we need. It is not, as with the death of our parents, a matter of proper grieving, patience, and time. When one of our children dies, we can grieve, be patient, give it time and still find that the wound does not get better, that time does not heal, and that there is no way to really accept what has happened.

A hundred years ago, Alfred Edward Housman, wrote his famous poem, To An Athlete Dying Young. At one point he tells the young man who has died:

Smart lad, to slip betimes away

From fields where glory does not stay.

Housman is correct. Sometimes a young death freezes forever a glory and an honour that, given time, would eventually slip away. To die young is to die in bloom, in the full beauty of life. But that addresses the issue of the young person who is dying, not the grief of those who are left behind. I am not so sure that they, the ones left behind, would say: “Smart lad, to slip betimes away.” Their grief is not so quick to slip away. Nature has not provided them with the internal circuits, the required wiring, to process what they need to process.

Knowing this, of course, does not make things any easier. Death is still death. Understanding how much against nature it is to have to bury one of your own children does not bring that child back. It does not help bring things back to normal since, and this is the point, it is precisely abnormal for a parent to bury a child. What understanding can bring, however, is an insight into why the pain is so deep and so unrelenting, why it is natural to feel so badly, and why no cheap consolation or challenge is very helpful. At the end of the day, the death of one’s own child has no answer.

It is also helpful to know that faith in God, albeit powerful and important, does not take away that wound. It is not meant to. When one of our children dies something has been unnaturally cut off, like the amputation of a limb. Faith in God can be most beneficial in helping us live with the pain and the unnaturalness of being less than whole, but it does not bring back the limb or make things whole again. What faith can do is teach us how to live with the amputation, how to open that irreparable violation of nature to something and Someone beyond us so that this larger perspective, God’s heart, can give us the courage to live with so unnatural a wound.