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 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.

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.

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.

Christian Perspective

October 29, 1996

Perspective is everything. When its 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 I 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 than 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 in 1955. 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 thirty-five, 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.

On Jesus and Socrates

October 23, 1996

Iris Murdoch, with a single phrase, states a great irony: A common soldier dies without fear – Jesus died afraid.

There is a fruitful meditation in that and it has already been done for us by Michael Buckley, the American Jesuit, who some years ago published a homily he had delivered at an ordination. In it, he asks the man who was being ordained: “Are you weak enough to be a priest?”

That’s an interesting twist. His question was not about strength for the job, but about weakness: “Are you weak enough to do this well?” I want here to give a bit of background to this question, as Buckley asked it, because it is one which can be widened and asked of everyone of us: “Are you weak enough to be a real Christian?” “Are you weak enough to be a fully sensitive human being?”

Shouldn’t one try not to be weak? Isn’t it best to be strong? That is true if one is speaking morally, but it isn’t true if one asks a different kind of question: “Are you deficient and weak enough so that you cannot ward off significant suffering in you life?” “Are you weak enough that the sufferings of others affect you deeply?”

For Buckley, Jesus was weak in precisely this sense. It was this deficiency in him, his incapacity to protect himself against pain that made his life and his death so particularly redemptive.

To try to explain this, Buckley makes a comparison between Jesus and Socrates, a comparison in human excellence (as this is often judged humanly). The result is that Socrates, judged by certain categories, is superior to Jesus on virtually every score. Thus, for example, one can compare their deaths. Both were good men, unjustly condemned by jealous opponents, but they met their deaths very differently:

Socrates went to his death with a certain calmness and poise. He heard the judgment of the court, accepted it, calmly spoke concerning what death might mean and about the possibilities of immortality, appeared unafraid, drank the poison and died. One pictures his death scene like Hollywood has so often portrays its heroes and heroines dying: Paul Scofield dying in Man for All Seasons or Ali McGraw in Love Story. Death without a hair or emotion out of place! Death faced in a way that the rest of us ordinary, less-put-together, mortals can never approximate!

How different Jesus’ death! He sweated blood. From the time it became inevitable that he was going to die, Jesus became afraid, very afraid, and began to pray “with loud cries and tears to him who was able to have him from death.” He sought, repeatedly, for comfort from his friends and prayed for escape from death. He found neither. Finally, in the end, he established some control over himself and moved towards his death in silence and lonely isolation, crying out in agony to a God who seemed to have let him down. Not exactly the way one would imagine a God to die!

Let me quote Buckley, as he assesses this: “I once thought that this was because Socrates and Jesus suffered different deaths, the one so much more terrible than the other, the pain and agony of the cross so overshadowing the release of the hemlock. But now I think that this explanation, though correct in as far as it runs, is superficial and secondary. Now I believe that Jesus was a more profoundly weak man than Socrates, more liable to pain and weariness, more sensitive to human rejection and contempt, and more affected by love and hate. Socrates never wept over Athens. Socrates never expressed sorrow and pain over the betrayal of friends. He was possessed and integral, never overextended, convinced that the just person could never suffer genuine hurt. And for this reason, Socrates © one of the greatest and most heroic people who has ever existed, a paradigm of what humanity can achieve within the individual was a philosopher. And for the same reason, Jesus of Nazareth was a priest: ambiguous, suffering, mysterious, and salvific.”

Obviously the word “priest”, as Buckley uses it here, refers not only to those of us who have been ordained presbyters in the church but to a way of being in the world so as to help carry its pain. To be a “priest”, in the Christian sense, is to live and die in such a way that our lives and deaths optimally help others, especially those suffering. When I am strong enough to, calmly, block out most of that suffering, I am much more of a philosopher than a priest, more of a Socrates than a Jesus.

Some Gathering Hymns for Social Justice

October 16, 1996

The wages of work is cash.

The wages of cash is want more cash.

The wages of want more cash is vicious competition.

The wages of vicious competition is the world we live in.

(D.H. Lawrence)

The Seven Social Sins according to Mohandas Gandhi …

Politics without principle

Wealth without work

Commerce without morality

Pleasure without conscience

Education without character

Science without humanity

Worship without sacrifice

“We have some bad habits that only God can cure!”

(A Los Angeles gang leader, quoted by Jim Wallis)

We need to be on fire again,

for our hope is no longer an easy one.

We live in a culture of despair

pentecost can no longer be taken for granted.

We must refuse to make the Holy Spirit a piece of private property,

but a spirit that matters. (Mary Jo Leddy)

The religious right thinks that to be religious you have to be extremist and fundamentalist … and the radical left agrees. It is time for the religious left to be more religious than left. And it is time for both the left and the right to admit that they have run out of imagination, that the categories of liberal and conservative are dysfunctional, and that what is needed to bring about justice is a radicalism that leads beyond both the right and the left. That radicalism can only be found in the gospel which is neither liberal nor conservative but compassionate. (Jim Wallis)

Edward Galeano … The Nobodies

We are not, but could be.

We don’t speak languages, but dialects.

We don’t have religions, but superstitions.

We don’t create art, but handicrafts.

We don’t have a culture, but folklore.

We are not human beings, but human resources.

We do not have face, but arms.

We do not have names, but numbers.

We do not appear in the history of the world,

but in the police blotter of the local paper.

The nobodies, who are not worth

the bullets that kill them.

“Lost is a place, too.” (Christina Crawford)

“We don’t want your money: we can steal that from you when we need it. We need you to lead us back to God … and to give us some jobs.” (Gang leader to a group of church and business leaders, Spokane, Washington.)

“Preach the gospel wherever you go, even use words if necessary.” (Francis of Assisi)

The moral majority has forged God’s signature on a contract with America! (A Southern Baptist minister)

“In the world’s schema of things, survival of the fittest is the rule. In God’s schema, survival of the weakest is the rule. (Alphonse Keuter, OMI)

“Seeing injustice is not what makes you just. Crossing over to the other side, as did the Good Samaritan and as did God in the incarnation, is what gives birth to justice.” (Erik Riechers)

Strength without compassion is violence

Compassion without justice is sentiment

Justice without love is Marxism

And … love without justice is baloney!

(Cardinal Sin)

It is not possible to create a world in which no innocent people suffer, but it is possible to create a world in which fewer innocent people suffer. (quoted by Bryan Hehir)

Truly, we have some bad habits that only God can cure!

Recovering Catholics

October 14, 1996

“I’m a recovering Catholic!” More and more, especially within intellectual circles, this is a trendy thing to say. I have heard it off of the lips of authors, rock singers, university professors, talk-show hosts, ex-clergy and ex-religious, numerous public speakers, and a variety of my Catholic friends.

Usually it is not meant lightly. Most times it carries with it all the emotion and obsession of a fundamentalism: “I’m a recovering Catholic and this is central to my identity. To understand me, my struggle, my complexes, and my present anger and resentments, you have to understand this.”

Understand what? What are we saying when we say that we are “recovering Catholics?”

What I hear in the phrase is this: “I grew up in a certain narrowness and naivete. The religion of my youth, Catholicism, kept me infantile and unfree. It also put deep guilt complexes in to me, especially about freedom, creativity and sex. “As a child, I breathed in a certain Catholic neurosis. I’ve begun to move beyond that now, albeit the process isn’t easy. I am finding it hard to rid myself fully of the narrowness, guilt and adolescence of my Catholic upbringing. But I am growing up! I am slowly moving beyond the creative and moral suffocation of classical Catholicism.”

Undergirding this is a double affirmation: At one level, the recovering Catholic is stating that he or she is finally growing up; at a second level, he or she is suggesting, with some bitterness, that the Catholicism that was breathed in as a child is to blame for many of the neuroses, timidities, guilt and struggles that he or she is undergoing right now.

To my mind, both affirmations, while admittedly containing an element of truth, are major inflations:

“I am finally growing up!” Really. This is adulthood? Is there not a certain contradiction in laying claim to maturity just as one is laying blame for one’s unhappiness at the foot of somebody else?

What is heard in the echo of the claim (“I am a recovering Catholic and the Catholicism of my youth is to blame for many of my present unhappy struggles!”) is the voice of the wounded (and whining) child, the puer, the puella, still shifting responsibility away from self: “It is somebody else’s fault that I’m unhappy.”

As well, any claim to a new-found maturity that contains within it a certain bitterness about a former naivete is precisely a sign of lingering adolescence. It is the adolescent who is bitter about the taboos of childhood: “We were raised on poverty, chastity and obedience—and this left us infantile, guilt-ridden and unfree! I am bright enough now to see all that and am moving beyond it.”

Fine and good. That is a critical move beyond childhood. But it is not yet the move beyond adolescence. The adolescent longs to be sophisticated and critical, beyond the naivete and taboos of childhood. But the adult longs for something beyond even this. He or she longs to be post-sophisticate. As an adult, one again longs for a poverty, chastity and obedience that is post-critical. I don’t see this longing, nor this tone or energy, in many recovering Catholics.

“The Catholicism of my youth is to blame for many of my inner struggles and problems, especially my guilt neuroses.”

While there is obviously some truth in the statement, at the end of the day, it is a rationalization. It stretches logic to suggest that a series of religious ideals and moral taboos (which one is no longer observing) are, right now, the major cause of one’s unhappiness.

Moreover, there is a growing body of research (e.g., Anton Vergote’s work on guilt) that suggests that guilt-neuroses do not primarily take their base in religion (given that they exist just as noxiously in post-Christian cultures) and that most anger that is directed at institutionalized religion is anger more properly (and honestly) directed at one’s own father. We have about the same degree of comfort or anger in the face of the Catholicism of our youth as we do in the face of our own father—but it’s safer to be angry at Catholicism.

All of us struggle. Freedom, maturity, adulthood perennially evade our grasp. But I am not so sure that it is either healthy or honest to put so much blame for this at the feet of classical Catholicism and cloak it with high ideology. We are involved in a far humbler process. It’s called growing up.

Henri Nouwen: In Memoriam

October 9, 1996

The great anthropologist, Mircea Eliade, used to say that no community should botch its deaths. To not properly attune oneself to the significance of a person’s death is to miss an important blessing.

In the Catholic world, and in the spiritual world in general, a very important person has died. On September 21st, Henri Nouwen, perhaps the foremost spiritual writer of the past quarter century, died in Holland. We should not botch that death and miss a blessing for, as Nouwen himself used to put it, a good person blesses not just with his or her life but also with his or her death. Henri Nouwen has blessed many of us, through his books and through the example of his life. We need now still to be blessed too through his death.

What made him so special? What among so many gifted and sincere spiritual writers makes him stand out?

The first thing, and not an important one, is his life itself. His own life was a laboratory for his books. He lived what he preached, both the virtue and the weakness, and it was that particular combination which helped make him so intriguing.

St. Paul tells us that the only thing we should ever boast about is our own weakness so that the surpassing power of God can shine through us. This describes Nouwen well. He shared with us his weaknesses and the power of God shone through. In an obituary in the Globe and Mail, Carolyn Whitney -Brown, who lived in community with him at L’Arche Daybreak, commented that what made him so special was that he willing shared details of his life in his books that most of us would cringe to admit, much less publish. He had both a rare honesty and a rare depth and this made for a unique combination.

He was a complex man, a soul for whom peace did not come easy. He was too full of both weakness and hope to often have much in the way of simple, quiet rest. He shared both with us, the weakness and the hope, and he wrote in a simple style that went straight to the heart, irrespective of whether one had little formal education or taught theology in a graduate school. And he was honest, disarmingly honest.

In his writings, his weaknesses shone through, but so too did his God. He once shared with us, his readers, that Soren Kierkegaard had touched him so deeply because he had risked sharing his loneliness with the world. That is precisely the way many of us now feel about Henri Nouwen. He risked sharing his loneliness with us.

In one of his works he shares how, when he was a little boy, his mother used to call him aside and say to him: “Henri, I don’t care what you do, as long as you stay close to Christ.” That voice touched him deeply and stayed with him the rest of his life. But, at the same time too, other persons, in various ways, called him aside and told him: “Henri, you are very bright and talented. You can make a brilliant career for yourself.” That voice also touched him deeply and stayed with him and the struggle between those two voices explains a lot in his life. Eventually his mother’s voice, which was always the one that had somewhat the upper hand, scored a more decisive victory. At the peak of his academic career (he was an honoured teacher at Harvard with invitations to speak around the world) he sat in his car and drove away from the academic world and a brilliant career to live the rest of his life among the mentally handicapped.

But it wasn’t without a struggle and that is what he shared with us: “Indeed, how divided my heart has been and still is! I want to love God, but also to make a career. I want to be a good Christian, but also to have my successes as a teacher, preacher, or speaker. I want to be a saint, but also enjoy the sensations of the sinner. I want to be close to Christ but also popular and liked by people. No wonder that living becomes a tiring enterprise. The characteristic of a saint is, to borrow Kierkegaard’s words, ‘To will one thing.’ Well, I will more than one thing, am double hearted, double minded, and have a very divided loyalty.”

All of us can identify with those words but Henri Nouwen had the honesty and courage to write them. In the years before his death, he was slowly getting better at, more and more, throwing himself into God’s arms and letting God help him “will the one thing”. In this, he is an example of how somebody from our generation, with our problems, facing our issues, can, with God’s help, slowly become a saint.

The Gentle Powerless Power Of God

September 29, 1996

Daniel Berrigan was once asked to give a conference at a university gathering. The topic given him was something to the effect of “God’s Presence in Today’s World”. His talk, I suspect, surprised a number of people in his audience, both in brevity and content.

He simply told the audience how he, working in a hospice for the terminally ill, goes each week to spend some time sitting by the bed of a young boy who is totally incapacitated, physically and mentally.

The young boy can only lie there. He cannot speak or communicate with his body nor in any other way, it would seem, express himself to those who come into his room. He lies mute, helpless, by all outward appearance cut off from any possible communication.

Berrigan then described how he goes regularly to sit by this young boy’s bed to try to hear what he is saying in his silence and helplessness.

After sharing this, Berrigan added a further point: The way this young man lies in our world, silent and helpless, is the way God lies in our world. To hear what God is saying we must learn to hear what this young boy is saying.

This is an extremely useful image in helping us understand how the power of God manifests itself in our world. God’s power is in the world like that young boy. It does not overpower with muscle, or attractiveness, or brilliance, or grace, as does the speed and muscle of an Olympic athlete, the physical beauty of a young film star, or the gifted speech or rhetoric of the brilliant orator or author.

These latter things—muscle, swiftness, beauty, brilliance, grace—do reflect God’s glory, but they are not the primary way God shows power in this world. No. God’s power in the world has a very different look and a very different feel to it.

What does God’s power look like? How does it feel to feel as God must often feel in this world?

If you have ever been overpowered physically and been helpless in that, if you have ever been hit or slapped by someone and been powerless to defend yourself or fight back, then you have felt how God is in this world.

If you have ever dreamed a dream and found that every effort you made was hopeless and that your dream could never be realized, if you have cried tears and felt shame at your own inadequacy, then you have felt how God is in this world.

If you have ever been sick and there was no doctor or medicine that could cure you, if you have ever felt the mortality of your own body and been hopeless at its weakness, then you have felt how God is in the world.

If you have ever been shamed in your enthusiasm and not given a chance to explain yourself, if you have ever been cursed for your goodness by people who misunderstood you and were powerless to make them see things in your way, then you have felt how God is in this world.

If you have ever tried to make yourself attractive to someone and were incapable of it, if you have ever loved someone and wanted desperately to somehow make him or her notice you and found yourself hopelessly unable to do so, then you have felt how God is in this world.

If you have ever felt yourself aging and losing both the health and tautness of a young bod y and the opportunities that come with that and been powerless to turn back the clock, if you have ever felt the world slipping away from you as you grow older and ever more marginalized, then you have felt how God is in this world.

And if you have ever felt like a minority of one before the group hysteria of a crowd gone mad, if you have ever felt, first-hand, the sick evil of a gang rape, then you have felt how God is in this world . . . and how Jesus felt on Good Friday.

God never overpowers. God’s power is never the power of a muscle, a speed, a physical attractiveness, a brilliance or a grace which (as the contemporary expression has it) blows you away and makes you say: “Yes, there is a God!” The world’s power tries to work that way.

God’s power though is more muted, more helpless, more shamed and more marginalized. But it lies at a deeper level, at the ultimate base of things, and will, in the end, gently have the final say.