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.

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!

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.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a column (August 30, 1996) about aloneness and family which argued that God meant the words: “It is not good to be alone” not just psychologically, but also morally and in terms of human maturity. In essence, I suggested that when we are alone, free from the demands and challenges that come from family and community, it is easier to become selfish and give ourselves over to our addictions. I stated, among other things, that living alone can be morally dangerous.

There was a very strong reaction, most of it negative, to that piece. I have received a good number of letters, many of which pained me – not because they were critical of what I had written but because, from them, I realized how much my words have caused pain in some peoples’ lives. I realize now, unfortunately after the fact, that what I wrote in that article was open to considerable misunderstanding. So, by way of apology, let me try to clarify what I tried to say there … even if that is not what the words said to everyone: 

First of all, the title itself (Selfishness and Solitude) already sent out the wrong signal, suggesting to some that solitude is perhaps a form of selfishness. The choice of title was not mine and it was never my intention to suggest that it is more selfish to be in solitude than in family, especially since, properly understood, solitude and family are not in opposition to each other, enemies, but two states which positively feed and enhance each other. To be in true solitude is to be in family. 

Carlo Carretto, the great spiritual writer, once spent a prolonged period of time living by himself in the desert. When he returned to Italy to visit his mother, he realized that she was more contemplative than he was, even though because of her duties as a mother she rarely had any quiet or prayer time. The conclusion he drew was not that there was anything wrong with what he was doing in solitude, but rather that there was something very right about what his mother was doing in giving herself over to her family in such a way that she had no time left for the type of solitude which he was living. In essence, in that fated column, I was trying to say the same thing: There is nothing wrong with solitude – but there is something eminently right about giving yourself over to the demands, duties, and challenges that flow from family and commitment. 

One woman wrote to me, pained and upset by what I had written, protesting that she had just spent her wedding anniversary alone – deserted by her husband and geographically separated from her children. Her protest: “How can it be wrong to be alone, especially when I didn’t even choose to be alone? How can you be so cruel as to suggest that it is?” 

Her pain caused me pain and, to her and to others like her, I sincerely apologize: I am sorry that my words were heard in this sense. That was not their intent. In fact, their aim was exactly the opposite. They were meant to challenge those who do positively choose to live alone, namely, those who refuse to make or keep commitments because they want the freedom, privacy, and aloneness to do their own thing. My words were meant as a challenge to people, like her ex-husband, who abandon commitments to spouses, families, and relatives precisely to be “alone” for purposes that their families would not exactly judge as good. 

There are different ways of being alone. The woman whose words I just quoted feels the emotional pain of being physically alone and she admits that it is not good. But it is not morally wrong to be alone in this way. In fact, lived out creatively, this kind of loneliness can give birth to compassion and an understanding that is not given to others. 

But that is not the kind of aloneness of which I was speaking. There is an aloneness which is dangerous and which inevitably spawns selfishness. To offer just a couple of examples: The person who abandons his or her spouse and family so as to be free from them and “alone” in order to pursue somebody or something else is living dangerously. His or her being alone is not a good thing, morally. The same is true for the addict, irrespective of the particular addiction. Invariably he or she is looking to be alone so as to have the freedom and the privacy to attend to the addiction. This, obviously, is not good. 

In these cases, however, the person is positively choosing to be alone, looking to be alone, and resentful of any spouse, family member, or commitment that stands in his or her way. It is this person who needs, again, to be challenged by God’s words: “It is not good to be alone!”

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 women, 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 as to 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 lonelier 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 thirty or so years of not being able to turn around without somebody, your kids, demanding something of you, you become pretty practiced 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 be to mature and moral.

Several years ago, a Catholic school board, frustrated because some of its teachers were no longer attending church regularly while others were flaunting the church’s teaching regarding living together before marriage, decided to tighten its hiring policies. They tried to implement a policy which demanded that any teachers hired in the future would be “practicing Catholics”. They ran into a hornet’s nest.

Immediately there was a wave of counterchallenge: What precisely constitutes a practicing Catholic Who defines this? Is the old criterion –  you must go to mass every Sunday and obey the Church’s teaching on sexuality and marriage – not simply reflective of a bias? What about somebody who does practice in the old sense but has no sense whatever of social justice or who lacks fundamental charity? Is he or she more of a practicing Catholic than somebody who is committed to justice but does not go to church every Sunday? Is somebody who obeys the letter of the law regarding the sixth commandment but abuses power more Catholic than the person who is gentle and nurturing but is living with someone he or she is not married to? What constitutes practice of a faith?

What does? This is not just a theoretical item. More and more, various Catholic institutions and organizations, from school boards to parish councils, must make very concrete decisions based upon how they view this question: Who should be allowed to teach in a Catholic school? Who should be permitted on a parish council? Who should be allowed to do ministry within the church? By what criteria do we decide these questions? 

For Catholics in the recent past, things were more clear: A practicing Catholic, when the concept was boiled down to its lowest common denominator, was somebody who attended mass every Sunday (save when excused for grave reasons) and was not publicly at odds with the church’s teaching regarding dogma and morals. Anyone who did not meet those criteria would, ordinarily, not be allowed to teach in a Catholic school, serve on a church board, or do any public ministry in the church. Today, as the questions just raised highlight, things are not so clear. All kinds of questions are being raised that suggest that the old way of viewing this biases things too much in one direction. 

So what does constitute a practicing Catholic?

The question is not a simple one. First off, it must be admitted that no one, save God, is fully a practicing Catholic. All of us fail in some aspects to live the faith; everyone has gaps in his or her faith practice. Thus, strictly speaking, none of us can ever claim fully to be practicing our faith. However, beyond that necessary and important confession of ambiguity, not all is vague. There are some essential components to Roman Catholicism that can be named and thus, at some point, one can define what constitutes the practice of that faith.

The essential components of Roman Catholicism are:

• Full initiation into the community.
• Regular participation in the Eucharist within the local community, including within that a sensitivity to the liturgical rhythm of the church’s life. This component is so emphasized because, as Roman Catholics, we are a Eucharistic community, that is, our primary gathering is around the Eucharist.
• A life of prayer and private morality.
• A commitment to social teachings of the church.
• A sense of responsibility for ministry and leadership within the church, including the financial.
• A concern for the universal church – its unity, its spread, and its maintenance.
• A concern and respect for public forum within the community; that is, negatively, not being a source of scandal.

Given those essentials, what constitutes a practicing Catholic?

Classically, as we saw, it has meant that one attended mass regularly (every Sunday) and was not at odds with the public forum of the church regarding morals or dogma, namely, one was not causing scandal. This definition, while not ideal, does contain within itself the important essentials and should be retained as the minimum high jump bar.

The definition of a practicing Catholic must go further:  A practicing Catholic is a fully initiated member of the community who participates regularly within the Sunday Eucharist and participates as well in the prayer life (both public and private), the social action, the ministry and leadership, and the missionary concerns of the church. As well, he or she should not be at variance in the public forum vis-à-vis major doctrinal or moral teachings of the church.

Now, even allowing for the fact that only God practices the faith perfectly, to do public ministry within the church, be it teaching or serving on a church board, one should, minimally at least, meet this criterion.

In a recent novel, Love, Again, Doris Lessing, with her usual genius, paints a picture of the soul of a late middle-aged woman, Sarah Durham, as she, Sarah, spends a summer painfully infatuated with a man young enough to be her grandson.

The love is hopeless, of course, and it brings Sarah nothing but heartache and restlessness. And it is surprising too for she is the epitome of maturity and common sense and has, for more than twenty years since the death of her husband, felt herself beyond the tears that come with these kinds of falling in love.

The story builds this way: Sarah, a widow and grandmother, is a successful theatre writer and producer. Her productions appear, among other places, in London’s prestigious West End. Working in theatre, she naturally spends a lot of time with young and very attractive actors, of both sexes. The atmosphere exudes sex, but, for a good number of years after her husband’s death, Sarah appears immune. She seems quietly content with a celibacy which is, in fact, partly an extended fidelity to her late husband. This celibacy, while leaving her sexless by some definitions of that word, spares her the heartache that is so often the flipside of the ecstasy of falling in love.

All this changes one summer when, already in late middle age and quite confident that she is beyond teenage type crushes, she helps produce a play about a tragic young French woman named, Julie Vairon. Julie, like her namesake, Juliet, of  “Romeo and Juliet”, lives life in the pain of unrequited love and dies for love. The combination of Julie, the atmosphere of love she rouses, and a young American actor of startling good looks, overcomes Sarah. She falls in love with a man young enough to be her grandson. It is all very hopeless and all very painful and it sets loose in Sarah pains she has not experienced since she was a very young girl … and it sets loose in Lessing a series of reflections about the phenomenology of love and sex that the great analysts of the world can only envy.

At one point, Lessing paints for us a picture of what it feels like to be too old for a love one desperately wants. Her reflection produces a rich vein for meditation:

From this central thought or area led several paths, and one of them was to the fact that the fate of us all, to get old, or even to grow older, is one so cruel that while we spend every energy in trying to avert or postpone it, we in fact seldom allow the realization to strike home sharp and cold: from being this – and she looked around at the young people – one becomes this, a husk without colour, above all without the luster, the shine. And I, Sarah Durham, sitting here tonight surrounded mostly by the young (or people who seem young to me), am in exactly the same situation as the innumerable people of the world who are ugly, deformed, or crippled, or who have horrible skin disorders. Or who lack that mysterious thing sex appeal. Millions spend their lives behind ugly masks, longing for the simplicities of love known to attractive people. There is now no difference between me and those people barred from love, but this is the first time it has been brought home to me that all my youth I was in a privileged class sexually but never thought about it or what it must mean not to be. Yet no matter how unfeeling or callous one is when young, everyone, but everyone, will learn what it is to be in a desert of deprivation, and it is just as well, travelling so fast towards old age, that we don’t know it.  (Love, Again, pp. 140-141.)

What Lessing describes here is one of the worst types of poverty known, the poverty of being sexually unattractive, of being unable to enjoy all the aspects of love that are known to other people. And this poverty brings with it a special kind of shame. Many are the women or men who takes a certain pride in an honest type of economic poverty. Nobody takes pride in being unattractive, particularly in a society that deifies the physical and identifies being sexual with having sex. Today sexual unattractiveness is perhaps the most painful and shameful of all poverties. Those in the sexual underclass are the new, and unprotected, outcasts: “Geeks”, “Nerds”, “Slobs” these are the slurs against the poor that nobody censures.

Today, just as the generations before us, we tend to interpret pretty selectively Christ’s challenge to make a preferential option for the poor. Invariably as we open our eyes to the formerly unseen pain of one group we close our eyes to the poverty of another. But … the poor will inherit the kingdom and, today in our culture, the poorest of the poor are those who have been ostracized sexually. It is time we said as much.

He was a disappointment to his dad, that’s for sure. After all, his dad had spent three hundred dollars, just for his uniform. Then there were other expenses: Fees to enroll him in the soccer program, costs for driving him to various places for games, and all kinds of nickel and diming that had to be done. The money alone was enough, but there were other things too.

Pride, for one. His dad was one of the coaches. His son had let the team down. And why? For no decent reason: for lack of concentration, for being a scatterbrain, for making what grownups called a “mental error”. Christopher wasn’t so sure what a mental error was since he was only six, but, driving home in the car, he was sure of one thing, his father was pretty mad at him.

He was only six and so the particulars of what exactly had happened were already fading. He hadn’t been paying attention anyway, but now because everyone seemed so angry, he had to think about it. So in the icy silence of the car he tried to patch it back together. 

The evening had started out okay. He’d come home from school and his mum had made him a snack. He’d stayed around in the kitchen for a while, getting under her feet, because after being gone all day he wanted to be in the room with her, even if she was forever telling him to go outside. Finally his dad came home. He loved his dad too, except when his dad was angry.

His dad had ruffled his hair, reminded him of the game, and called him “tiger”. His dad always called him that before a game and he liked it. After supper he’d put on his uniform. He knew it was expensive because it looked so nice and because he had overheard his mum and dad arguing about it, with his mum saying that it was overdone to pay three hundred dollars for a kid’s uniform and his dad saying back that sports were important. He didn’t like the argument, but he did like the uniform. 

His dad teased him all the way to the school ground, even though his mum was along in the car: “You’re gonna pop some goals tonight, tiger! Play with your head up. Remember what I told you about staying in position and not just stupidly chasing the ball. Let the other kids be stupid. You play like your dad! Make me proud!”  Christopher liked it when his dad teased him like that. Mum didn’t say much, but he knew she would be watching him too and she’d told him how great he looked in his uniform. 

He couldn’t remember so clearly the first part of the game. He hadn’t scored. He remembered all the parents jumping and screaming every time there was a goal scored and they hadn’t jumped and screamed for him, though his dad had screamed at him once because he had started to chase the ball like kids who play stupidly do. His dad had talked to him about that at the break but, by then, he was pretty tired and, really, would have liked to go home. But the game was only half over and he still had to take his turn playing goalkeeper. 

It was then, when he was in goal, that it went wrong. It was here that he wasn’t paying attention. The ball had been at the other end and he was tired. It was like he was all-alone on the field when he saw the young gopher poke his head up, not three feet away. The gopher didn’t move so he began slowly to crawl towards it. He had never been that close to a wild animal and his heart beat wildly. The gopher didn’t move. He could almost touch it! His eyes and the gopher’s locked and held. It was magic. He forgot about everything.

Then he heard the shouting: “Christopher! Christopher! Look up! Get with it! Pay attention! There’s a breakaway! Get up!” All that shouting scared the gopher. Their eyes let go and the gopher disappeared and it was too late. The ball was in the net and everyone was yelling at him. But he was still glancing at the gopher hole, hoping to meet a pair of eyes. 

His dad was pretty mad. There wasn’t any teasing in car going home. His mum looked like she wanted to say something, something soft, to break the silence, but she was quiet too: “You are a disgrace to your uniform!” was what his dad had said. But Christopher wasn’t thinking about his uniform or about how much it cost. He was thinking that it would be nice if mum said something, and he was thinking too about the gopher and its eyes and how he would imagine that when he went to sleep. 

Jesus said: “I thank you, Father, Lord of Heaven and earth, because you have hidden these things from the wise and the clever and have revealed them to mere children.”