What you dream alone remains a dream, what you dream with others can become a reality. Edward Schillebeeckx coined this phrase as a way of expressing the important truth that effective compassion is a collective endeavour. Private charity, be it ever so generous, is, in the end, not fully effective. Let me try to explain this by way of an example:

I belong to a religious order, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate. A couple of years ago, we had a General Chapter which brought together Oblates from around the world. The intent of any General Chapter is, of course, renewal. So we met and agonized: What could we do to renew ourselves so that, through our presence and ministries, Christ would be more present in the world?

At one stage, we were put into small groups and each group was asked the same question: Given the situation in the world and the church today, what, singularly, should we do so as to try to be more effective missionaries of God’s love and compassion? In the end, all of us came to one answer, and it was not the answer we had imagined prior to deep prayer and common reflection.

Our answer? We came to realize that if we would want to be more effective instruments of God’s love, we must be more together in community, linked more strongly to each other, living out more selflessly the truth that where enough people of goodwill are together in one mind and body an effective compassion can occur. We realized too why presently we, like so many others, are often ineffective. We have good private sentiments, good individual talents, and good individual energies, but unless we are linked and acting as one body we are no larger, no more powerful, and no more effective than each of our own small persons. Alone you can make a splash, but not a difference. Great individual charism, and even heroic acts, not fully given over to community, are like the fireworks at a festival, a stunning spectacle, a distraction from the ordinary, but everyone goes home to life as it was before. Nothing changes.

What has the power to change life is community, the type of community that the New Testament describes. Alone we can do effective private charity, but we can do little to change the overall situation; alone our individual talents and gifts are often more the instruments of self-aggrandizement and the objects of jealousy than they are gifts for the betterment and joy of the whole; and alone we generally watch the evening news with a lot of discouragement at our own helplessness.

When we watch the evening news and see all that is wrong in our world, the feeling that comes over most of us is one of helplessness. What can I do to change any of this? We go to bed discouraged and a bit guilt-ridden. I should be doing more, but, concretely, what can I do?

Why do we feel so helpless and discouraged? Because we are watching the news alone … and alone we cannot do much. That is the point; alone we are in fact quite helpless.

Now, speaking figuratively, imagine that a parish would watch the news together. They would still be pretty helpless, but they could more than one individual. Next, imagine that a whole diocese would watch the news together. They would still not have it in their power to change all that is wrong with the world, but they could do a lot more than any individual parish. Then, suppose all the churches of a country would watch the news together. They would still be unable to fully change the moral, social, and economic forces that perpetuate hate and chaos, but they could do much more than any one individual diocese. Finally, imagine, (and what an image of Christ’s Kingdom this is!) that all the churches in the whole world would watch the news together. This body could effect the change that is needed; it could bring about an effective compassion in the world.

The truth that needs to be added is that until this happens, until all the churches of the world do watch the news together, we will be unable, effectively, to bring about love and peace on this planet. Effective compassion is collective. What we dream alone remains a dream, but what we dream with others can become a reality. Why?

Because private sentiment is not enough. Watching the news alone leaves us helpless and guilt-ridden. Our helplessness lies in our individuality. Alone we are no larger or more powerful than our individual talents. No one person, working alone, can change this world. A community, living a common ideal, can. Community, and community alone, can make our dreams come true.

More and more, it is becoming clear that we need to move beyond the categories of liberal and conservative. Simply put, both have shown themselves to be dysfunctional in terms of trying to help lead us beyond the problems that beset us. Both are too narrow and too selective in terms of the morality they espouse, the loyalties they embrace, and the ways within which they dispense their sympathies to be the basis for anything other than what we already have. At the end of the day, neither has the width or depth to merit the label Catholic.

Nowhere is this more evident than in our moral discourse, especially in our attempts at dialogue about private morality, that is, about such areas as abortion, sex, marriage, homosexuality, and the like. The conservative and the liberal, each in his way, invites us to a certain narrowness and intolerance.

The liberal does this by being intolerant of the ideal, of moral principle. Crassly put, liberal ideology tells us that if the majority of people do not, or cannot, keep a commandment, well … then we should change the commandment. What possible sense does it make, it is asked, to have a moral precept that the majority of people do not accept? How can the church claim to be compassionate and in touch with the suffering and needs of people, if it makes them feel guilty for not keeping certain commandments in which they no longer believe? How can the church be so out of touch, so ivory tower, in its morality so as to ignore the sensus fidelium in these crucial moral areas? Ironically, the liberal is pretty reluctant to apply this same kind of reasoning to the social encyclicals.

Conservative intolerance generally puts on a crasser face. To illustrate this with a typical example, allow me to recount an incident: Several years ago, immediately after a talk that I gave, a man who challenged me. He approached me as I left the stage, angry, bitter. He attacked me with words to this effect: “Father, I can’t believe the wishy-washy bunk you’ve just given. That’s not the church’s teaching! Why don’t you put things as you’re supposed to put them: Tell people what the law is … and if they can’t take it, they should walk!” The reasoning here is pretty clear, and simple: The written rules of the church, the commandments and canon law, are the benchmarks. You either measure up or you do not. If you do not measure up, you leave the church or, at very least, assume some kind of penitential or second-class role within it. Ironically, too, like his liberal counterpart, the conservative is not eager to apply that same criterion when it comes to the social teachings of the church. 

Now perhaps these are caricatures, indicative only of the extreme and are not really typical. Few liberals and conservatives would identify with the positions. That may be true, but good caricatures distort in the same way in which art distorts, namely, by highlighting an essential form that ultimately gives shape to the picture but is not always so consciously clear. Hence, what these caricatures do is highlight what is narrow and dangerous in both liberal and conservative ideologies, at least as these pertain to moral discourse. Neither is really tolerant, compassionate, and wide enough to reflect the charity and catholicity of Jesus Christ.

Both the liberal and the conservative, in the end, are fundamentalists because each, albeit in her own way, on the basis of good intention, vastly oversimplifies things. The conservative does it by canonizing the commandments and the law in such a way that they, and they alone, become the criteria of genuine religiosity and sincerity. There is not sufficient allowance made, however, for those who, for whatever reason, find themselves unable to live these precepts. The liberal oversimplifies things in the other direction. For him, the existential ability, or lack of it, to keep certain moral precepts by the majority of the people becomes the criterion for whether or not those precepts should be retained or not. Each is narrow, one in the name of orthodoxy, the other in the name of compassion.

Neither, however, approaches things as Jesus did. Jesus was neither a liberal nor a conservative. His loyalties were less selective and his embrace was much wider. Thus, he refused to bring down an ideal just because the majority of people rejected it. At the same time, however, he refused to condemn those who could not live that ideal. For him, genuine compassion lies in doing both, retaining an ideal and in walking with those who cannot keep it. Thinking this way got him into a lot of trouble … but nobody could ever accuse him of loving too selectively.

Lord, God, I’m praying from my heart, not from my knees, with unspoken words, not with formulas. Hear this prayer that my parents can never know of. You read the heart, read what’s inside my restlessness and desire. 

I’m not sure who I am any more. I am glad that my parents don’t know what’s going on in my life. If they did, I’m afraid of what they might think …

Me … the girl who was once so proud of being the first altar server in our parish. Me, who taught the kids at the children’s liturgy, who helped out summers at the parish camp, who was the first high school student to help out in the RCIA, who used to help organize all the church activities for other young people, who once went to mass everyday … now so confused, unsure, unglued, morally in no man’s land, uncertain sometimes whether she even believes in God! If my parents knew! 

I’ve travelled a long ways from them, a long ways from the rosary we used to say together every night and from my mother’s warnings about the dangers in the world. Yes, I used to pray on my own. I used to really believe what I’d been taught. There was a time, not that long ago, when I felt very close to God. I can still see the plaque that hangs on the wall just over our family’s table:  The Family that Prays Together, Stays Together. Lately, we haven’t been praying together, nor exactly staying together … because I’m the one who’s staying away. 

I don’t know how that all happens. I don’t even know whether I am mixed-up or whether, for the first time, my eyes are really open. I know this: I’m no longer sure what’s right or what’s wrong. When I first came here to university, things were clear. I went to mass almost every day, I prayed every day, I was idealistic about love and sex. I really believed (and God how my mum had drilled it into me!) that sex was something sacred and that our bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit and that we were meant to wait until marriage before having sex. Well all of that seems pretty naive just right now. Everything has changed.

And it’s changed all over! In the theology classes I was taking they questioned everything. Most of what I held as true and precious was subject to ridicule. In our Christian Morality class virtually everyone agreed that the church was backwards regarding sex and that premarital sex was good as long as there was love and commitment there. As well, everyone seemed to think that the Pope was backward and fundamentalistic and when I shared that I still prayed the rosary some actually laughed at me. That was the last time I said the rosary!

Then to top it all, one night at the residence, my roommate brought her boyfriend into our room and they made love all night, as if I wasn’t even there! My small-town eyes were opened. That was a year ago. Now, I’m not much different with my own boyfriend.

I went home for Christmas and went to church with my family … and I wanted to cry. I don’t know whether they’re naive and I’m mixed up or whether the church has made them uptight and I’m the one who’s seeing the light. I really don’t know. The tug of my parents’ faith, the faith I had when I was little, still pulls me. So I sat in church, restless, bored, angry, confused, and not sure of anything. 

When I came back, I went to see one of the Chaplains here at university and he told me that maybe God wants my confusion, that maybe God is leading me to a more adult faith … but, this doesn’t feel like faith. It feels like something else and I am not sure what that something else is. I’m not sure any more what’s virtue and what’s being uptight. I’m not sure whether I was virtuous before and am screwed up now or whether I was screwed up before and am virtuous now. I really don’t know. You, Jesus, need to read what’s in my heart.

Jesus, you are the God of my parents, the God I prayed to when I was little, and you’re the God of my confusion and infidelities too. I’m so restless all the time, so much is churning inside of me. Lately, there have been times when I just wanted to chuck it all and go back home if it would make me feel like a felt when I was little, except I know that I wouldn’t stay there very long. I’d be restless all over again. 

Jesus, take my confusion, my restlessness, my pain, my doubts, even my infidelities. Hang onto me because I feel myself slipping away from you.

Many of the classical spiritual treatises have a curious layout. They begin with a challenge, telling us how to live our lives in a better way. Then, usually already in the very next chapter, they chronicle all the faults we will then have, precisely because we have converted and begun to live as they have prescribed. Strange as it sounds, conversion brings with it a whole series of new faults. 

Ruth Burrows, for example, begins her fine treatise, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, by setting out a paradigm for conversion and then, immediately after, telling us all the new faults we will acquire if we do actually convert. John of the Cross develops his books in a similar way, immediately after each major challenge, he details what faults we will have when we begin to take that challenge seriously. 

It seems nothing comes pure, even virtue. This side of eternity, everything has its shadow side. A more sophisticated intolerance inevitably accompanies virtue. Our friends, of course, already know all of this! They don’t need John of the Cross or Ruth Burrows to tell them that our deepening conversions so often make us intolerable. Many is the frustrated spouse, family member, colleague, or friend who painfully puts up with the righteousness of our rightness.

It is because of this, our proclivity to inflate with intolerance even as we fill with virtue, that the great spiritual authors also tell us that the capacity for genuine self-criticism is the litmus test of maturity. To be healthy means, precisely, to be healthily self-critical. Failure in this area is an infallible sign of immaturity.

If this is true, and I believe it is, then we would be wise today to write a spirituality of criticism, for both liberals and conservatives, along the lines of the classical treatises. The first chapter of such a book would lay out the positive challenge. The next chapter, though, would be entitled: Faults of those who have taken this seriously! It would have to be a long chapter, with one section for liberals and another for conservatives. Allow me, here, in a bit of a playful manner. to suggest what might go into this second chapter: 

What are my faults, if I am a sincere liberal who has indeed taken seriously the gospel challenge to be prophetic? 

With my liberal consciousness will come, as naturally as smoke follows fire, an arrogance. Consciously or unconsciously, I will consider myself enlightened – and those who disagree with me as more ignorant and less sensitive than I. Hence, I will use the phrase “a raised consciousness” and apply it to myself and my own without for a second realizing how absolutely arrogant that is.

As a liberal, too, I will posture open-mindedness, but then dispense that empathy on everyone, except one group. Against my conservative foes, I am allowed, in the name of open-mindedness, to be a bigot. My empathy, espoused as universal, is allowed one blind spot. From this stance, too, I am allowed to be positively gleeful at the demise of some of the major (conservative) institutions that once formed the glue of community – heterosexual monogamy, marriage, family.

Prophecy is a virtue. Liberals bring that virtue into the world. But gift of that virtue is often written off because of “the faults of those who have taken prophecy seriously”.

What are my faults if I am a sincere conservative who is truly concerned with being faithful to the tradition?

Like my liberal counterpart, I am also arrogant. Mine, however, is not an intellectual arrogance. I know my liberal sister or brother is better educated than I, but she or he is not as good, as faithful, as prayerful, and as moral (in the real deep sense) as I am. And that knowledge, that I, alone, am truly faithful, that I, alone, carry Christ’s moral loneliness, gives me permission to be angry, to abuse power (of course, only to be helpful!), and to by-pass some elementary laws of charity. Thus, I am a loving, Christ-faithful, prayerful person … who can, in the name of the gospel, be mean, unjust, and bitter. 

Conservativism too is a virtue – and a much needed one. Conservatives keep society and the church from ultimately disintegrating, but that virtue too can most often be ignored precisely because of “the faults of those who have taken fidelity to the tradition seriously”.

Wasn’t it necessary that the Christ should so suffer …?” That doesn’t fit the myth. 

There is a popular myth that warms the heart. It speaks of justice and vindication and is the stuff of great legends. In it, we separate the great heroes and heroines from lesser mortals. 

It runs something like this: Evil stalks the earth, intimidating the good. There is invariably a bad man, a bully, who remains unchallenged because it seems nobody is strong enough to stand up to him. He has his way for a long time. Who can oppose him? But there lives someone, the true hero (a male in the classical legend), who, while actually being stronger than the bad man, for reasons that are not yet clear, puts up with the bully and accepts from him every kind of insult and humiliation. Nobody understands why and the hero’s reticence to act is seen as a sign of weakness. The bully is strong and the hero is weak. But, at the end of the day, the hero has his vindication. The time comes when the evil man pushes him too far and then, long after lesser mortals would have acted, he stands up, assumes his full strength, and completely humiliates and annihilates the evil man. Moreover his final vindication is not just the humiliation of his enemy but the recognition by the people that he, the seemingly weak one, was the strong one all along.

You see this, for example, in countless films. The ultimate cowboy movie, Shane, works precisely this theme: Alan Ladd is the strong, silent type. His quiet strength is seen as weakness, until the bad guys push him too far. When he finally is goaded into fighting, he proves the strongest of them all. More recently, Kenny Rogers sold millions of copies with a hit recording, The Coward of the County, a song about a man who was considered a coward by everyone, until one day the bad men pushed him too far and he proved that he was, underneath his shy, weak exterior, the strongest of all.

There is something inside us that would like to see Christ in this sentimental way: the reluctant hero, The Coward of the County, Shane, the strongest man of all who is reticent about using his muscle … until he is pushed too far!

What is interesting however is that Christ never used his muscle in this way, even when he was pushed too far! No amount of goading, humiliation, accusations of cowardice and weakness (“If you are the Son of God, come off of that cross!”) turned him into that hero of myth who warms our hearts with a last minute vindication, proving that he was all the while superior. Jesus does not suddenly, after one final insult, turn upon his enemies and say: “That’s enough! I’ve had enough! Now you will find out who’s strong and who is a coward!”

His death didn’t warm any hearts and his vindication, the resurrection, initially didn’t either. Even his closest apostles didn’t understand. They, like us, wanted him to be that great hero, the Shane of Israel, who shows his power at the last moment and muscles his enemies into submission. Thus, even after the resurrection, when his disciples met him on the road to Emmaus, they were still lamenting about a story that didn’t end like Shane or like The Coward of the County. 

Their hero had died without flexing his muscles, without showing at the end that he was the stronger. Now he was trying to explain it to them: “Wasn’t it necessary to suffer like that, to not use the world’s muscle power, to not confuse the ways of God with the ways of humanity?” 

They hadn’t understood him earlier when he had said the same thing about the misunderstanding of older brother of the prodigal son: “Wasn’t it necessary that we should celebrate because your younger brother was dead and now he is alive.”

Yes, isn’t it necessary that God should love so lavishly? Isn’t it necessary that a God who is love beyond all measure and understanding should give himself over that freely? Isn’t it necessary that if you give yourself over freely, and mean it, you will sweat blood in a garden?  Isn’t it necessary that fathers and mothers who truly love their children should have to put up with so much? Isn’t it necessary that God should not be as defensive as human beings, even when pushed by evil? Isn’t it necessary that God should approach us in vulnerability rather than muscle us into submission?  And yes, isn’t it necessary that the power of God be tied to a wisdom, a love, and a patience that runs considerably deeper than our adolescent and sentimental understanding of it?

“Whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven. “Those words of Jesus, as you know, apply not just to those who are ordained to ministry but to everyone within the body of Christ. All of us have the power to bind and to loose.

What is this power? How do we bind and loose each other on earth in a way that enjoins heaven?

Part of this is a little easier to explain: As a member of the Body of Christ, if you forgive someone, Christ forgives that person and he or she is loosed from sin. Likewise, if you, as part of the Body of Christ, love someone and remain connected to him or her, that person is connected to the Body of Christ and through you touches the hem of Christ’s garment, even if he or she is not explicitly confessing that.

But what about the reverse? Suppose I refuse to forgive someone who has wounded me in some way, suppose I hold grudges and refuse to let go of the wrongs that another has done me, am I binding that person in sin? Does God also refuse to forgive and let go because I refuse to forgive and let go? How does those the Body of Christ work regarding the “binding” part of the power that Jesus gave us?

This is a difficult question, though a couple of preliminary distinctions can already shed some light on the issue:

To begin with, the logic of grace – and grace, like love, has a logic  – only works one way. In grace, just as in love, you can be gifted beyond what you deserve, but the reverse is not true. The algebra of undeserved grace works only one way. There can be gratuitousness to love but not to punishment. Hence God gives us the power to set each other free, but not the same kind of power to keep each other in bondage.

Second, in this life, as C.S. Lewis used to say, hell can blackmail heaven, but this is not true in the other realm. Thus, while we can hold each other captive, psychologically and emotionally, on this side, God does not ratify those actions.

When we bind each other here in this world by refusing to forgive each other, that refusal does not bind God to do likewise. Put more simply, when I hold a grudge against someone who has wronged me, making him constantly aware that he has done wrong, I am helping keep that person tied to their sin – but I hardly expect that God is endorsing this. Heaven will not go along with my emotional blackmail.

These distinctions though provide only an ambience for an understanding of this. What does it mean to bind a person?

The Christian power to bind and loose is the power to bind and loose in conscience, in truth, in goodness, and in love. When I refuse to forgive another, when I hold a grudge, I am acting not as the Body of Christ, not as an agent of grace, but precisely as part of the very chain of sin and helplessness that Christ was trying to break. When I act this way, it is I who need to be loosed from sin since I am acting contrary to grace. My non-forgiveness may well bind another person emotionally, keeping her bound in that way to her sin, but it is the very antithesis of the power that Christ gave us.

We bind each other in the biblical sense when, in love, we refuse to compromise truth, when we refuse to give each other permission to take false liberties and make bad choices. Thus, for example, parents bind their children when they, lovingly but clearly, refuse to give them permission to ignore Christ’s teaching on marriage and sexuality. We bind a friend when we refuse to give him our approval to cheat in his business so as to make more money. A friend binds me when she refuses to bless my moral compromises.

In Robert Bolt’s play, A Man For All Seasons, we see Henry VIII literally beg Thomas More to bless his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Henry appeals to their friendship, appeals to their shared humanity, and tries to morally bully Thomas by telling him that his refusal to approve is a timidity and arrogance on his, Thomas’, part. Yet Thomas refuses to approve. He binds Henry in conscience and Henry knows he is bound. In the end, he kills Thomas for his refusal to compromise and give permission.

Ever since God took on concrete human flesh, grace has a visible human dimension. Heaven is watching earth – and is letting itself be helped by the best of what we do down here.

Forgiveness is the only thing that is new and it is the message of the resurrection.

The world contains only one thing that is truly novel, forgiveness. Everything else is an old tape repeating itself endlessly over and over again. There is normally only one song that gets sung: betrayal-hurt-resentment-non-forgiveness. That pattern never changes. There is an unbroken chain of unforgiven resentment and anger stretching back to Adam and Eve.

We are all part of that chain. Everyone is wounded and everyone wounds. Everyone sins and everyone is sinned against. Everyone needs to forgive and everyone needs to be forgiven.

Betrayal is an archetypal structure within the human soul, just as sin is innate within the human condition. We, all of us, betray and sin. We betray ourselves, betray our loved ones, betray our communities, and sin against our God. Everyone stands in need of forgiveness.

But we are also, each one of us, betrayed and sinned against. We are betrayed by our loved ones, by churches, by our communities, and, in a manner of speaking, even by our God. It is not for nothing that, on the cross, Jesus, incarnating there all that is human, cries out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” We all feel betrayed at that deep level sometimes. Hence, as badly as we need to be forgiven, we also need to forgive.

We have hurt others and we have been hurt. We have sinned and we have been sinned against and when we wake up to that we have a choice: Like Judas we can cleanse ourselves of this, figuratively speaking, by taking what we have gained by our sin, the thirty pieces of silver, and throwing it back into the temple and walking away, purified, but unforgiven, walking straight towards suicide. Conversely, though, we can do like Peter, after his great betrayal, weep bitterly and then return, humbled, compromised and scarred, but forgiven, walking solidly into life. In forgiveness lies the difference between the choice for suicide and the choice for life.

But forgiveness is not easy. An old adage says: To err is human, to forgive is divine. More accurately, one might put it this way: To forgive is the grace that is given by the resurrection.

The resurrection of Jesus has many dimensions. At one level, it was a physical event. The dead body of Jesus was raised, the cosmic universe at its deepest level suddenly had a new set of laws, and the very atoms of this universe, as nature first arranged them, were re-arranged. Something radically new, physically new, as radical and new as the original creation, appeared within history. This aspect should never be, as it recently has been, understated.

However the resurrection was also a spiritual event and that too is important. In the resurrection of Jesus we are given not just the potential for a resurrected body and a resurrected cosmos, we are given as well the possibility of forgiveness, of being forgiven and of forgiving each other. That new possibility and its radical novelty should also never be understated. From the beginning of time until Jesus’ resurrection, dead bodies stayed dead. And from Adam and Eve until that same resurrection, wounded and dead hearts stayed wounded and dead. All that has now changed. There are new possibilities.

What is new in the resurrection is not just the unbelievable new possibility of physical resurrection. The resurrection gives us to the equally unbelievable possibility of the newness of life that forgiving and being forgiven brings. In our day to day lives that is how we are asked to appropriate the resurrection of Jesus, by forgiving and by letting ourselves be forgiven.

In Mark’s account of the death and resurrection, our human condition is symbolized by a young man who was following Jesus’ journey to the cross from a safe distance. At a certain point this young man, who is wearing only a white linen cloth, is seized. He escapes his captors and flees naked, leaving the cloth behind. That betrayal is yours and mine. But we next meet him on Easter Sunday, sitting on the tomb of the resurrected Jesus, wearing again his linen cloth and announcing to the whole world that Jesus has been raised, that an unbelievable newness has burst into our world, and that there is something even beyond our wounds, sins, and betrayals. The chain of anger has been broken.

Some years ago, when Jimmy Carter was president of the United States, he confessed publicly that he sometimes had lustful thoughts about women that were not confined to his wife. That brought an interesting reaction. Every comedian in North America had ammunition for a couple of years of stand-up gigs. This, however, is not worrisome. Comedians may be our modern equivalent of the medieval court jester, but their commentary is not a crucial indicator of moral fiber within a culture. More serious was the fact that, in all but the most conservative church circles, Carter’s comment provoked either ridicule or that particular kind of pity reserved for those whom we consider well intentioned but naive. Church groups and moralists alike gave him little respect.

More recently, John Paul II suffered a similar fate for, in effect, quoting Jesus, who clearly said that if someone thinks lustful thoughts that person has already committed adultery in his or her heart. Far from being taken seriously, the Pope’s comments, like Carter’s, became fuel for a lot of humor and ridicule.

In both cases, the humor that ensued was perhaps harmless, the ridicule was not. That ridicule, which is a crucial indicator of moral fiber within a society, helped create scandal in the biblical sense. Scandal, as you know, does not normally happen when something really shocks us. It happens when, for whatever reason, we trivialize something important to the point where it precisely no longer shocks us, but is instead taken for granted, as normal. We are scandalized when we are no longer shocked by something that should shock us. This is what has happened in the Western world vis-a-vis lust. It no longer shocks. It has been trivialized, made to seem normal, harmless, innocent.  

What is very interesting here, however, is that few persons see irony in the fact that it is precisely the same people who ridicule both Jimmy Carter and John Paul II for their old-fashioned ideas of lust, who are alerting us, and validly so, to the subtle and pernicious character of sexual harassment. Speak of inconsistencies and moral blind spots! Just as the ninth commandment is becoming the object of humor and derision we are becoming sensitive to the issue of sexual harassment. Small wonder we are making little progress with the latter.

What commandment is broken in sexual harassment, especially of the very subtle variety? What commandment is broken when mindless (at least for that moment) men whistle at pretty young women as they walk by work sites? What is at stake when women, of all ages, feel that men do not treat them with a respect that suggests that they, the men, are seeing an entire human being? Justice is being violated, surely. But on what basis? On the basis precisely of the greed (another word for lust) that is forbidden by the ninth commandment: Thou shalt not covet thy neighbor’s wife!

This is a commandment we no longer understand today.

In a culture that is obsessed with sex and which tends to view any positive restriction on sex as repressive, it becomes almost impossible to have anyone take seriously a commandment that enjoins us to practice an asceticism within our very thinking about sex. When our moral thinking regarding sexuality slips to the point where we can no longer distinguish between sexual and contraceptive responsibility, when the latter is made to carry the same responsibilities as the former, then we are a long ways away from even talking about the ninth commandment. How do you speak of purity of thought in a debate focused on condoms?

Ironically, as stated earlier, the road forward might lie precisely with those who, for now, disdain this commandment. Being liberal in one’s sexual morality brings some gains as well as losses. One of the gains it brings is precisely, as just mentioned, an ever increasing sensitivity to how subtle, pernicious, and omnipresent sexual harassment is and how, long before it acts out in the public arena, sexual harassment roots in certain attitudes which themselves take root in certain very private, lustful, thoughts. Long before anyone whistles at a pretty girl at a work site or some employer subtly or crassly sexually pressures an employee, someone has been breaking the ninth commandment.

Blessed are the pure of heart for they shall see God… and not violate the dignity of those around them! That is a positive wording of the ninth commandment which challenges us to see the person in front of us, not through the prism of our own greed, but through eyes that accord proper respect.