“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.

Never look a gift universe in the mouth! A court jester might well state the seventh commandment in this manner since what is at stake is far more than merely not pinching the odd item that does not belong to us.

What is forbidden by this commandment? The biblical injunction against stealing forbids unjustly taking, keeping, acquiring, or damaging goods that do not rightly belong to us. Hence, what is forbidden is theft, vandalism, cheating so as to gain something, paying unjust wages, breaking or manipulating contracts so as to get an unfair advantage, and any stewardship of nature and mother earth that is not sufficiently respectful. That’s quite a list! Put more positively, the person who respects the seventh commandment, at this basic level, is a person who refuses, even in the smallest of matters, to ever dishonestly take or harm something that does not belong to him or her.

However, the phrase “thou shalt not” is a certain via negativa. The precept is negative, but the challenge is positive. The prohibitions constitute only the bare minimum that must be observed: Do not take or damage property that is not your own. But much more is implied in the commandment.

This commandment also has to do with ecology: To not steal means not only that we do not take what is not ours from other persons, it implies too that we may not steal what is not our due from nature. Mother earth, just as her inhabitants, also has inherent rights that must be respected. Scripture installs us as stewards over nature, but a steward does not own the property he or she adjudicates. The steward administrates the owner’s property. In this case, the owner is God. We do not own the earth any more than we own any public property. Hence any abuse, misuse, and excess use of nature is wrong. Simply put, it is stealing.

Contained in the seventh commandment, too, is the imperative to practice social justice. What is implied here is that we can steal from others not just by personally taking or damaging something that does not belong to us, but also by participating blindly in systems that do the stealing for us. Hence, to observe this commandment demands more than just being honest in our personal dealings with others. We can be scrupulously fair and honest in our own private lives and still be stealing from others, as we all do to some extent in the first world, by profiting from certain economic and social systems that reward us by unfairly taking goods from others who have less power and privilege. It matters little that this kind of stealing is legally sanctioned and that we do not see our victims or even know that we are victimizing anyone. Theft is theft; whether done consciously, face to face, or done blindly through some impersonal system.

Finally, there is a more subtle level still to this commandment: The seventh commandment, paradoxically, protects the right of private property even as it tells us that the world and everything in it is nobody’s private property. The world belongs to everyone, equally. Hence the prohibition against stealing implies that we may not, irrespective of how legitimately we have acquired it, own too much, that is, have excess while others do not have enough. The church has clearly spelled this out many times in its social encyclicals, even though this particular teaching is very unpopular and generally ignored. As the church puts it: Nobody may have excess property while others lack essentials.  Hence to acquire excess while others lack necessities is stealing, pure and simple.

This demand, inherent in the seventh commandment, runs smack into the face of some rather deeply engrained, admired, and morally sanctioned habits we have today. We tend to believe that the right to own private property is inalienable and that it is morally okay to own any amount of money and property, so long as we acquire them legally. But there is a caveat within the seventh commandment forbidding precisely this. Having excess while others have too little is a way of stealing. It may be culturally sanctioned and admired, but it is stealing nonetheless, and no glamorous figure in the entertainment world, be she ever so beautiful, or admired athlete, be he ever so talented, who earns millions of dollars along with our adoration, changes that.

A rather humble woman once asked that these words be inscribed on her gravestone: “Thanks for the space!” She was wise since she understood that nothing is owed to us, but that the world gives us a little space as gift. To not steal is to know one’s place and to accept one’s share, and only one’s share, of things.

An old axiom suggests that the sixth commandment gets all the ink, but the fifth commandment is the one that does us in. This is quite accurate. We are always killing.

Why do I say that? Murder, after all, is a rather infrequent occurrence.

There are different meanings to the precept thou shalt not kill. On the surface, it is clear. Murder is wrong. Jesus, however, in the Sermon on the Mount, points out that this commandment, understood more fully, does not just forbid the external act of killing, it also forbids killing others in our thoughts and attitudes: “You have heard it said,  ‘You shall not murder …’ but I say to you that if you are even angry with a brother or sister, you are liable to judgment.“

Henri Nouwen once said that nobody is shot with a bullet who is not first shot with a word – and nobody is shot with a word who is not first shot with a thought. Killing is not just a brute external act; it is, in its more common form, a subtle internal thing. All of us break the fifth commandment in countless ways.

We do it in the negative and suspicious judgments we make about each other: “He thinks he’s so clever!”  “She always thinks she’s better than others!” “He’s a sham, everything he does is for show!” “She’s so proud of herself, but she should be staying home and taking care of her own children!” “I know his angle, he’s a selfish person who’s using other people for his own glory!” Daily, hourly, almost every minute of our lives, we are making judgments like this and, in them, we are killing those around us, shooting them through the heart just as surely as if we were doing it with a gun. What breaks the fifth commandment is not just the brute act of murder, or even the physical acts of bullying or abuse. Paranoia, false suspicion, harsh judgment, cynicism, and negativity, be it in word or attitude, also kill.

Thus, for example, in our envy of others we kill their spontaneity; in our criticism of others we kill their enthusiasm; in our neglect of our own children and in our refusal to bless them with our affirmation, we help kill their capacity to love others; with our suspicions we kill trust; with our cynicism we kill the capacity of the community to build; in our broken commitments we kill relationships; in our infidelities we kill the bond that makes for family; in our laziness we kill creativity; in our abuse of food, alcohol, and drugs we kill our own bodies; in our excesses we kill enjoyment; and in our constant habit of first depreciating before appreciating, we kill the very goodness with which God surrounded creation, we kill the original blessing of God. In the harsh thoughts we have we kill each others’ capacity to be free and joyous. Small wonder that death, sadness, harshness, coldness, fear, suspicion, and joylessness are most everywhere.

An image can be helpful here: Most of us shrink in horror from the word necrophilia, the perverse practice of making love to dead bodies. It is incomprehensible to us. How could someone actually do this? Yet, in very subtle forms, this is what we do when, in our paranoia, suspicion, envy, and woundedness we kill enthusiasm, kill freedom, and kill life in the ways just described. When I am so cynical that my main wish is to see things destroyed rather than built up, I am preferring death to life; when the first mode of my entry into community is to criticize rather than to look for the good, I am preferring death to life; and when my habitual thoughts of others are suspicious and judgmental, I am likewise preferring death to life. In all these ways, I break the fifth commandment.

Thou shalt not kill! The older we get the more that commandment, among all others, takes on prominence. Alice Miller, the renowned Swiss psychologist suggests that, from mid-life onwards, the great struggle for all humans is the struggle to not give way to bitterness, resentment, self-pity, and all the negativity and harsh judgments that flow from that. That is another way of saying that the real struggle for adults is with the fifth commandment. Jesus, in dialogue with the Scribes and Pharisees, says essentially the same thing. His issue with them, as with the Older Brother of the Prodigal Son, is with fifth commandment. In their attitudes, they were forever killing others.

Thou shalt not kill! Thou shalt not negate the goodness of creation by preferring death to life! Do not silence a heartbeat – not just with a gun, but also not with harsh words, paranoid thoughts, suspicious judgments, empty cynicism, broken commitments, and blessings that are never given.

Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. What is forbidden by this edict? In dealing with the third commandment perhaps it is better to ask what is bidden by it. What is the positive challenge in God telling us to rest one day a week?

For many years, for most of us, the third commandment simply meant that we could not do our normal work on Sundays and on that day we were obliged, as well, to go to church to fulfill our “Sunday obligation”. Western culture, for the most part, played along and most non-vital businesses and commerce shut down on Sundays. If we transgressed, we confessed: “I missed going to church on Sunday” or “I worked on Sunday”. 

Today there is considerable confusion about what it means to keep the Sabbath day holy and, for the most part, this commandment is being benignly ignored. More and more in Western society there is business as usual on Sundays and many of us are obliged to work on that day, whether we want to or not. Church attendance is also declining steadily. In this context we must again ask: What does it mean to keep holy the Sabbath day?

The book of Genesis states that God created the world in six days and on the seventh day, the sabbath, God rested. We too are to rest on that day because God did. But that is a curious logic. First of all, how does God rest? What is meant here has not so much to do with God being busy or at leisure as it has to do with the purpose of creation. Biblically, the sabbath is the end, the feast, for which all creation was made. Hence, Jesus tells us that we were not made for the sabbath, the sabbath was made for us. Simply put, the sabbath prefigures the end times, the world that is to come, heaven. What the precept to keep the sabbath holy asks is that we, individually and collectively, regularly, have a sabbatical (notice the root of that word) by stopping our normal work and activities so as to try to taste a little of what the final state will be like. 

Hence, according to Scripture, our lives should have a certain rhythm: work should be followed by play, pressured time by unpressured time, duty by worship, earth by heaven. Every seventh day we should taste a bit of play, unpressured time, worship, and heaven. Very practically, the idea of the sabbath suggests that we should have this rhythm in our lives: we work for 6 days, then have one day of sabbatical; we work for 6 years and have one year of sabbatical (only a few privileged academics get to actually live out this part); and we work for a lifetime and then have an eternity of sabbatical, that is, an eternity of rest in God. One day a week, Sundays for Christians and Saturdays for Jews, we are supposed to remind ourselves that we are made not for work, but for play, that we do not live by work and worry alone and, in the end, we will not live by work and worry at all. 

But there is further element involved in observing the sabbath, reconciliation. We stop work once a week not just to rest and worship God, but also, and especially, to forgive debts, to bring ourselves more into a general sympathy with all things. To observe the sabbath means to cancel debts, to forgive others, to let go of our hurts. Our failure to do this is the reason why, so often, our vacations and recreation times do not really renew us. We come back from a holiday, physically rested and suntanned, only to find that almost immediately all of our problems return and we are tired again. We have not really been renewed, we have only suspended our worries for a while and they return because we have not forgiven anyone. 

Hence in examining ourselves against the third commandment, we should not just confess that we did not go to church on Sunday or that we did business as usual on Sunday, we should also confess that we did not forgive others on Sunday. 

Observing the sabbath is a critical observance, both religiously and psychologically. Unless we pull back from our normal lives regularly, one day a week, and rest, worship, and forgive, we lose perspective on what is really important and become compulsive, driven persons who are caught up in the rat race. Likewise we become ambitious, greedy, and resentful, unable to pray, to forgive, and simply enjoy life. It is no accident that today, as Sunday observance is slipping, we find ourselves ever more trapped and pressured, always behind, never really able to rest, and unable to delight in the deep joys of life. What this means is that we are not observing the sabbath.

The sabbath is our day. Once a week we have a chance to taste a wee bit of heaven – to rest, worship God, forgive each other, and to feel a bit more in sympathy with all things.

Among all the commandments, the first is the most difficult to keep. We are forever worshipping strange gods. Idolatry, more so even than atheism, is what is natural to us. But how do we, believers, Christians, sincere churchgoers  – break the first commandment? How do we have strange gods before us? 

The answer is not easy. The idolatry that afflicts us has little to do with worshipping icons, misguided devotions, and other such things. It is subtler. It has to do with the false images of God to which we give obeisance. Allow me to name 10 such false gods whom we habitually substitute for the real God, Yahweh, the Father of Jesus Christ.

1) The arbitrary god of fear.

2) The insecure, defensive, threatened god.

3) The dumb, non-understanding god.

4) The exotic god of special places.

5) The ascetic god whose Christ does not proclaim feast.

6) The emasculated god of unbalanced piety.

7) The orthodox god of strict theological formulation.

8) The unholy god our own image and likeness.

9) The overly intense, wired, god of our own neuroses.

10) The anti-erotic god, anti-enjoyment, god of our guilt.

Space does not allow for a commentary on each of these, but allow me a few, more general, reflections. I apologize as well about the directness of some of the comments. They are not meant to be irreverent, but … iconoclasm, smashing false gods, is never a gentle business.

In the Greek myth of Prometheus, humanity is punished for stealing fire from the gods. In ancient mythology, the gods have life and want to keep it for themselves. We, humans, are an unwanted pregnancy, unwanted children. Hence everything we do, especially anything creative, is threat to the divine realm.

We have never overcome this. By and large we still believe that God is petty, defensive, and threatened by us. We feel that God likes us better when we are uncreative and docile, when we don’t steal his fire. It is no accident that many creative persons leave the church and that the church has so often been defensive about progress, evolution, and human creativity. The God we believe in is too threatened and defensive.

We also, habitually, worship a god whom, unconsciously, we consider to be rather dumb and non-understanding of our human complexity. Just one typical example: I once officiated at a funeral for a young man from a very religious family who, while away from the church and living rather dissolutely, was killed accidentally while drunk. The people at his funeral, good churchgoers all of us, were not only grieving his loss, we were also fearing for his eternal salvation. One woman remarked to me: “He was good soul, underneath it all. I knew him. If I were opening the gates of heaven, I would certainly let him in, despite his irresponsibility.” She was an understanding woman, but she was not giving God credit for the same thing. All of us tend to mirror that attitude. We do not give God credit for being as bright as we are. 

The god we worship is also, most often, an ascetic, an anti-erotic, celibate who does not want his children to enjoy sex and who is less happy when his children are smiling than when they are suffering. This god sends us, as messiah, not a Jesus who declares that the kingdom is a wedding feast, but an ascetic who never says: “Weddings must increase and I must decrease!” Rarely do we worship a smiling, relaxed God, who makes forgiveness as easy to access as the nearest water tap. 

We commit idolatry too when we make God more monastic than domestic, when we limit God’s presence to churches and holy places and do not notice God in our kitchens. When I cannot see the wounds of Christ in the pained face of the person across the table from myself, then my crucifix is more gold calf than icon. 

Finally, we break the first commandment when we make worship of God more a question of proper orthodoxy and correct doctrine than a question of letting the life of the Trinity, Love, flow through us. God, I suspect, prefers a loving, gracious heretic to person who is theologically correct, but bitter and unloving.

Whenever we conceive of God as somehow being defensive, exotic, anti-enjoyment, less compassionate and intelligent than ourselves, and preferring orthodoxy to compassion, we are breaking the first commandment. Such is idolatry.

I have been a priest for more than twenty years and one of the great privileges of that has been the opportunity to say mass daily. At that daily mass (Eucharist, if you prefer the more contemporary term) I have met an interesting variety of persons. I say ‘variety’ because there is not just one type of person who comes to daily mass.

Who does come to daily mass? In my experience no single category does justice here. On the surface at least, it appears that there is little common among those who attend daily mass. It is a most strange mixture of people: some nuns, some unemployed people, a lot of retired women, some retired men, a few young persons, some housewives, and a motley collection of nurses, businessmen, secretaries, and other such professionals on their lunch break.

There is no similarity in character among them, but there is something among them (and I am speaking here only of those who truly have the habit of attending daily mass) that is held in common, namely, in the end, they are all there for the same reason. What is that reason? It is something that is deeper and less obvious than is immediately evident. Simply put, people who go to mass daily are there in order to stay alive. They go to mass because they know that, without mass, they would fall apart, inflate, become depressed, and be unable to handle their own lives.

That’s quite a mouthful! People go to daily mass in order to stay alive! I doubt that most people who attend mass daily would tell you that. More likely they would tell you something to the effect that they go to mass to pray to God, or to be nurtured and sustained by God, or to touch God and to receive God’s blessing upon their day, or because they feel it is only right that they should offer some of their day back to God. On the surface, those are their reasons. But for anyone who sustains the habit of daily mass for a long period of time there is a deeper reason, always. Daily mass is a ritual, a deep powerful one that sustains a person in the same way that the habit of attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting sustains a man or a woman seeking sobriety.

I understood that parallel when an alcoholic friend explained to me why he goes regularly to AA meetings. He told me: “I know, and know for sure, that if I don’t go to meetings regularly, I’ll begin to drink again. It’s funny, the meetings are always the same, the same things get said over and over again. I know everything that will be said. Everyone coming there knows that. And I don’t go to those meetings to be a nice person. I go there to stay alive. I go there because, if I don’t, I will eventually destroy myself!”

What is true about Alcoholics Anonymous meetings is also true for daily Eucharist. Granted, it is a prayer, it is a our primary coming together as Christians, it is Christ’s prayer, the perfect prayer that Jesus left us, and it is the place on this earth where God touches us physically. Eucharist is these things. But it is more: it is also a ritual, a container, a sustainer, a coming together which keeps us from falling apart.

And we are always falling apart, failing in most everything: we fight, divorce, have relationships go sour, fill with resentment, lie, slander others, fall from grace, betray our friends and convictions, and only have pleasures which are never whole because they are never fully shared. We go to daily mass not to escape these things so as to fly off into some kind of immortality and freedom. No. The ritual of daily mass reminds us precisely of the fact that we are unfree, that we are sinners, and that we must die – just as an AA meeting reminds those there of the same thing. One approaches the Eucharist table daily precisely to keep oneself aware of the fact that “My name is Ron .. and I’m a sinner!”

Interesting too is the fact that there is a something else held in common among those who attend daily mass, they don’t want a service that is too long or too creative. They want a clear ritual, a predictable one, and a short one. Because of this they are often at the mercy of critics who look at this and, simplistically, see nothing other than empty ritual, rote prayer, people going through the mechanics of worship without heart. Nothing could be further from the truth and this type of accusation betrays the misunderstanding of an outsider.

Daily mass is not meant to be an experience of high energy and creativity. It’s a ritual act, simple, clear, profound. It’s a touching of Someone so as not to fall apart and die.