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.

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. 

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. 

“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.

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.

“It is not good to be alone”—not just in terms of emotional loneliness but also in terms of healthy human and moral growth.

“The human being needs a helpmate.” Those words, attributed to God just before the creation of Eve, are meant as an antidote to the pain of human loneliness and inconsummation. That is evident.

At the deepest level of everything, from atomic particles through men and women, there is an archetypal primal imperative that says something can be whole only if it has two mutually complementary principles, one female and the other male. No one male or group of males or one female or group of females can do away with loneliness the way that a man and a woman, united, can. The uniting of gender is constitutive of nature itself. Marriage lies at the root of everything.

But that is not the only reason that it is not good to be alone. There is another kind of aloneness that is perhaps less emotionally painful but probably more dangerous. It is also not good to be alone for reasons that have to do with human maturity and morality. Simply put, when I am alone it is often a lot easier to be selfish, immature, given over to addictions and blind to the needs of others.

Recently a colleague shared with me this story: He was working with a seminarian in spiritual direction and was trying to help him discern whether he should be in the seminary. He asked the young man: “Why do you want to be a priest?”

The answer he received both disappointed and astonished him. The young man gave this as his reason: “I grew up in a large family and I never had anything of my own. I had to share everything—room, food, television, stereo, visitors and even my parents’ affection. As a celibate, I will have the private space and the privacy that I’ve wanted all these years. My life will be my own!”

It is hard to think of a worse reason to want to become a priest.

I use this story not to suggest that all, or even many, seminarians think this way or that there is anything wrong with celibacy. This example is in fact quite atypical in terms of the reasons why, normally, people choose to make a vow of celibacy. Unfortunately, it is not as uncommon in terms of a practical attitude that pervades contemporary life and infects nearly all of us. As abhorrent as this young man’s motivation might seem on the surface, there is a good amount of him in each of us.

We may not state the issue as crassly as he did, but we too, all of us, have a similar itch for privacy, for control, for ownership, to have things exclusively for ourselves, and to decide things all on our own. We also want our own space and the power to control things around us—and to walk in and out on others on our own terms. Family and community life today are struggling for exactly those reasons.

It is dangerous to be alone, dangerous because, when we are alone, we do not have to adjust ourselves to another’s rhythm, another’s needs and another’s demands. It is then a lot easier to grow selfish. That is why for an adult person, being celibate or single or childless can be dangerous.

The danger is not so much that one will be more lonely than somebody who is married and has children, It is rather that, alone, free from the demands that a marriage partner and children, family, place on us we are dangerously free to have things too much our own way. When we are alone there are too few conscriptive forces pressuring us to maturity.

The opposite is true in a good marriage and a good family. What happens there is that the needs, demands and rhythms of others, our partner and our children, force us to constantly give of ourselves and to move beyond our own needs and demands. In community life, unless one lives it unhealthily, we come to maturity by conscription.

Thus, for example, the demands of children are a school of unselfishness for the parents. What that means is that after 30 or so years of not being able to turn around without somebody, your kids, demanding something of you, you become pretty practised in altruism. Most parents mature primarily because their children force them to do so.

It is also not good to be alone for moral reasons. It is no accident that we like to be alone when we act out in relation to our addictions. All alcoholics crave privacy, as do those who have drug, sex or gambling addictions. Bad morality doesn’t want an audience. Nobody watches pornography with his family!

It is not good to be alone. Everyone needs a helpmate . . . not just to not be lonely but also to be mature and moral.

A real artist could never paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Only somebody dangerously naive or ignorant in the area of aesthetics could do such a thing. But no artist could, his or her sensitivity is too fine. The connection to the area of aesthetics is too deep and too personal for an artist to ever deface a masterpiece. To do that would be tantamount to self-violation. For this reason, too, artists are very much personally saddened whenever a beautiful work of art is defaced. For an artist, simply because he or she is an artist, there are certain taboos.

It is important to understand this, not just so that we are more sensitive to the value of art, but also because this principle has important parallels in other areas. Just as there are artists in the realm of aesthetics, so too there are artists in the area of morality. They too are unable to paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. Likewise, they too are deeply and personally saddened whenever a certain beauty is violated and, like their artist cousins, they also live with certain taboos. 

One important reason that we need to understand this is because there are many hurtful misunderstandings about how we assess some people morally. What is at issue here is the seeming moral inhibitions and timidities that some people have and how this situation is often not honoured by others. Thus, for example, all of us know certain people (or perhaps you are one of those persons yourself) who, for all their lives, have, in certain moral areas, been timid, inhibited, afraid to make a serious mistake, unable to ever really let go or get drunk (in both the real and figurative sense of that term), or are unable to do all kinds of things that, seemingly, everyone else has no problem in doing.  

Too often we, their families and friends, judge and brand them as timid, uptight, frigid, and rigid. All too often too they are the object of both a certain ridicule (since in our society this kind of inhibition is seen as the opposite of freedom) and pity (“The poor thing, so uptight, unable to enjoy life!”)

Let me give you an example: A friend of mine fits this description: Married, the mother of two children, in her mid forties, she is seen by most everyone around her, including at times her husband and family, as morally uptight (“Our Mother Theresa!”). Looked at very superficially, she would seem to merit the title. Raised in a devout religious home, she has never, in any essential way, strayed from that path. Simply put, she has broken some minor rules here and there, but there has always been something inside of her that stopped her from ever breaking any of the major rules. And it hasn’t been through lack of opportunity. Opportunities for religious and sexual infidelity abounded. She has been tempted and yet never succumbed.

Why? Was it timidity or virtue that prevented her from acting out? Is she naive or full of wisdom? Is she to be pitied for being un-free or envied for living out her convictions?

In today’s moral and intellectual climate, most people understand her hesitancy negatively, namely, as a frigidity and lack of nerve. Few see her as truly adult in virtue. More commonly she is viewed as lacking nerve, as being uptight, as using religious and moral principle to rationalize a timidity and rigidity. Few persons, I suspect, have any appreciation whatever of her moral complexity, her struggle, and the cost of her fidelity. Fewer people still understand what lies at the deep root of her seeming inhibition.

What does? Timidity, lack of nerve, an incapacity to let go? Surely. But why? That’s the deeper question. I know her well enough to know that, in her case, the hesitation comes not from lack of nerve or opportunity. Virtue by conscription, by timidity, by naiveté? No, hers’ is the hesitation of the artist who will not, and existentially cannot paint a moustache on the Mona Lisa. She is a moral artist who cannot violate certain things in the moral order any more than an artist can take a crowbar to Michelangelo’s Pieta. She’s not morally timid. She’s morally sensitive. There is a difference.

Some years ago, Polish psychiatrist, Casmir Dabrowski, wrote a book which he entitled: Psychoneurosis Is Not An Illness. In rough, the thesis was that too often those of us who are not very sensitive are the reason why sensitive persons have to struggle so much in this world. Artists, whether in the aesthetic or the moral area, can vouch for this. And the rest of us? We might well want to check on just how often we have been painting a moustache on the Mona Lisa.

A few years ago, I had a friend who, like Nicodemus with Jesus, would come to me at night. This scene though wasn’t quite as pastoral as the biblical one. Mostly my friend came to drink and complain.

This was his issue: Publicly he was a very respected and successful man, in a position of authority with a number of persons working under him. To these, his employees, he was the penultimate nice guy. He doted on them and felt very good about himself because of this. This was, in fact, his pride. In his own eyes, because of the way he treated his employees and because of their subsequent affection for him, he was the most generous and kindly man on earth.  He told me: “There isn’t one of them, my employees, who wouldn’t give me the shirt off his or her back. I’ve been good to everyone of them.”

His problem wasn’t there. It was at home with his family. He had a drinking problem and all the inconsistencies that come with that. Simply put, he was never as nice at home as he was at the office and his wife and kids were not nearly as adoring and generous with their praise as were his employees. His family loved him, but saw his weaknesses and suffered greatly from them. Hence, by them, he was constantly challenged, either by their direct comments to him about his inconsistencies or by their angry avoidance of him. This embittered him greatly. Here is how he would generally put things to me:

Everyone likes me, except my family. I suspect that it’s because they can’t deal with my popularity. I go to the office and there isn’t one person there who isn’t indebted to me, whom I haven’t helped specially. We have a good atmosphere there. We laugh a lot and I’m appreciated. Then I go home … well, everything changes! Half the time everyone is avoiding me. If I’m upstairs, they’re all downstairs; if I’m downstairs, they’re all upstairs. They’re forever on my case about one thing or another. If I come home late a couple of times or miss a family thing I said I’d be there for it’s as if committed murder in public. I am fed up with it, being the leper at home, just because I miss the odd thing. They don’t love and appreciate me like the folks do at the office. I’m not asking for much at home, just a little understanding!”

A nice guy at office and an angry alcoholic at home! He didn’t see the glaring inconsistency. For him, the problem was simply that his wife and children were not as appreciative of him as they should be and as he deserved.

Jesus once told a very similar story: Once upon a time there was a judge in a certain town. He was well respected by everyone and, in public, people used to bring out gifts and give them to him because, obviously, he had been good to them. Everyone respected him, except one widow to whom he hadn’t given justice. She hounded him, demanding her just due. For a long time he avoided her and was irritated by her demands. Finally, he said to himself: “I fear neither God nor man, but if I don’t give her justice she will hound me to death!” He gave her her due.

That parable has a double meaning. On the one hand, it is a parable about prayer. With it, Jesus tries to teach us that we should persevere in prayer: God is the judge and we are the widow. Wear God out and eventually God will give us what we ask for. But the parable is intended in a second way too: We are the judge and God is the widow. God’s voice for us is particularly clear in the widows, in the hounders, in the poor, in those people who are not so impressed with our public persona. Simply put, one of God’s important voices for us is to be heard in the persons who irritate us the most; for example, in that one particular person we would most like to avoid in life. In Christ’s view of things God is both the one being asked and the one who is doing the asking. God is hounded and God hounds.

The moral of all this, then, is that we are asked to hear God’s voice in the persons who upset us, that is, in those people who, for whatever reason, are not very impressed with us. Usually that is the people we live with. Obviously, the principle breaks down when that voice is an abusive one. The gospel does not ask us to let ourselves be abused, but it does ask us to make an option for the poor and that option, like the house of God itself, has many surprising rooms, some of which are not very romantic or much to our liking.

Thus, beware of the voice that humbles you: It might just be one of God’s widows, puncturing your persona, and calling you to justice and honesty.