Today, more and more, God and religion are seen as either a naiveté or a compost.

For a good number of persons, belief in God and religious practice are seen as a naiveté, a pre-scientific, pre-modern, and pre-critical attitude, tantamount to believing in Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, nice, but not something that holds up under the demands of reality. For others, many of whom are still connected to their churches, belief in God and religion is, in the end, a compost – a rich cultural, ethnic, and mythological ferment that one can delve into and from which one can draw out all kinds of valuable things.

Sincere as these views are, both are wrong. At the end of the day, God and religion are viewed as a naiveté and are seen as mediating something else, namely, a helpful mythology, a valuable connection to your roots, a link up to archetypal energy, or something else of this nature. They are not seen, however, for what they are, a vital connection to an existing and life-giving Person. But belief in God and the practice of religion are not a naiveté, nor are they simply a rich mythological, archetypal, and ethnic compost. They are the water of life, the deepest raw truth there is. They are our connection to the source of all reality.

But that is precisely what contemporary agnosticism, of both the benign and belligerent variety, denies. For it, irrespective of whether it sees religion as a dangerous naiveté or a valuable compost, belief in God is ultimately a childish thing, something that one eventually outgrows. How so?

Implicit in virtually every type of contemporary atheism and agnosticism is the concept that history can be compared to a child growing up and that child eventually outgrows the naive belief that there really is a God. In this view, we have today outgrown our need to believe in God and we can never return to the childish security of that belief, no more than we can turn back the clock and believe that the world is flat. Science is science. Facts are facts. Once the modern, critical mind has been established no one can return to that naive, safe haven of pre-modern beliefs -God and religion. To believe that there is an actual God who is somehow beyond and above and Lord of time and space is unimaginable. Anything of this nature, beyond an ideology for justice, is considered pre-modern, pre-critical, unsustainable in the light of hard evidence, naive.

To the modern mind, religion, at least in so far as it actually believes in the reality it espouses, is, besides being somewhat infantile, the source of false intellectual security in that it offers clear cut, simplistic answers which are unable to stand up to the scrutiny of science, technology, the existence of pain and evil, and actual life as we experience it today. Some of the intellectual giants of our century explicitly espoused this. You see such a theory in Marx, Freud, and Weber, among others. Your average person on the street does not word it all that sophisticatedly, but he or she has the hunch, conscious or unconscious, that religion is unable to stand up to the test of modern life, that it is a thing of the past.

What’s to be said about this? Is belief in God possible only in a pre-modern, pre-critical mind? Yes, if one does not postulate the possibility of a post-modern and post-critical mind.

There is, indeed, something in the modern mind and modern world that renders real belief in God almost impossible. But the reason is not because the modern mind asks questions which are too hard for religion to answer. It is not that we are so open-minded that agnosticism and atheism are the only option. It is rather that we have fixated at a certain level of agnosticism. We haven’t asked too many questions. We asked too few. We haven’t, for example, asked:

Could it be that we have trouble believing in God because of the limited scope and poverty of our own imaginations, given that God is not in our image and likeness? Might it be that we have trouble imagining the existence of God because we cannot imagine a God who does not make human happiness, right here and now, the be all and the end all of creation?  And might it be that this incapacity to be open to something beyond our imaginings and our own will is not a sign of maturity but rather of infantile grandiosity? And, yes, might it be that the most open-minded, critical posture of all is post-modern and post-critical and, like Isaiah, stares at the wonder of it all and is only able to say: “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God of Hosts!”?

On December 3rd, 1995, Pope John Paul II formally declared Eugene de Mazenod, the former bishop of Marseilles, France, a saint of the church. For myself, this was not just another canonization. Eugene de Mazenod is the founder of Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the religious order of priests and brothers to which I belong.

Thus, as an Oblate, this was a pretty significant event for me. However, when someone is declared a saint, he or she becomes then a saint for the whole church, the property, so to speak, of everyone, and not just of those who have a special or a vested interest in his or her life. That is the case with Eugene. He now belongs to everyone, not just to us, the Oblates. 

So what should we know about him? Who was he? Why was he important? What might he model for us?

The chronology of his life can be easily given: He was born into an aristocratic French family, at Aix-en-Provence, in 1782. The French revolution forced his family into exile when Eugene was eight years old and he spent his youth shuttling among a variety of cities in Italy – bored, often melancholy, reading whatever books he could find, and struggling internally, torn between the pull of God and the lure of the world. At age 20 he was able to return to Aix. Although he had always been religious and had never, as he put it, given himself over to the pleasures of this world, at age 25, attending a Good Friday service, he had a profound religious conversion. His life was never the same.

He entered a seminary and became a diocesan priest. As a young priest, he was appalled by the condition of the church in Southern France at the time. The poor and those who lived in rural areas were, by and large, neglected. Feeling called to do something about this situation, he gathered around him a small group of idealistic young priests, set up community with them in a house he himself purchased, and formed a preaching team. This little missionary band then began to preach missions in the rural areas and among the poor.

Eventually, from this small band, the Oblates of Mary Immaculate were founded. Eugene himself, besides founding and directing until his death this band of missionaries, eventually became the Bishop of the Diocese of Marseilles and a towering figure in the French Church. Napoleon III appointed him a Senator, and when he died was the senior bishop of France.

Beyond that simple chronology, who really was he?  One of the caption descriptions about him, that runs like a leitmotif through many of his biographies, reads: He had a heart as big as the world. That he had and had in a time when provincialism, narrow loyalty to one’s own, sectarianism of the worst kind, and pettiness and self- interest characterized most of what was around him. He was a universalist, like Socrates, whose first identity was with humanity as a whole, not with his own tribe and kind.

But Eugene’s heart was big in another sense, it contained more than its share of flesh, blood, fiery passion, and pathological complexity. He was no China doll. As his biographies put it, he was a human saint, a man given over to anger and love, grandiosity and greatness, rage and forgiveness. His path to holiness was not a simple one. Eugene was too human. For this reason, his canonization process was never fast-tracked. The devil’s advocate always had lots of ammunition: Could someone so human be a saint?

But that complexity and humanity, in the end, was what made him a saint. Virtue did not come easily for him. Yet it came and, eventually, in extraordinary measure. His complexity tormented him, haunting any cheap peace or compromise he would try to make with comfort, wealth, or privilege. It left him no peace outside of God, depth, and real commitment. And his humanity, so often his downfall especially when he was given to fits of anger), was also his saviour. He was too human, too weak (so to speak), to ever look at another human being who was suffering and turn away. He was too human to be indifferent. His sensitive heart, which so often got him into trouble, in the end, because of its softness, was also the place where God and the poor could enter and stay.  

A human saint! That’s not an oxymoron. It’s a key, a secret, a wisdom. Humanity is the path, not the blockage, to holiness. Eugene de Mazenod, the founder of the Oblates of Mary Immaculate, helps show us that path. He can be a patron for those of us who struggle with the pathological complexity and pull of our own humanity.

There is an Aztec poem called, Ultimate Problem. It runs something like this: 

            In the Aztec design

            God is in the little pea

                        that is forever rolling out of the picture

            And all the rest extends bleaker

                        because God has gone away.

            In the white man’s design

            God is everywhere

                        but hard to see.

            The Aztecs frown on this:

            How do you know He’s everywhere?

                        And how did he get out of the pea?

            You could say that

                        if your are walking the roads of life these days

                        and if you are looking for God,

                                    or a piece of God

            You should be looking down

            For is God’s going to be found these days

                        it’s going to be in small things

                        it’s going to be close to the ground

                        it may even be below the ground.

            Looking for God, these days

                        requires the willingness to investigate the small

                                    to descend

                                    to look down

                                    to look down

                                    to look down. 

The incarnation, the central mystery of our Christian faith, invites us to look down, to investigate the small, to descend. Why? Because that is what God did in the incarnation. He emptied Himself, taking on the form of slave. He became small, a helpless baby.

Unfortunately, even though we all know this theoretically, we find it hard to do practically. Usually when we look for God we look the other way, towards the sky. We investigate the powerful. We try to ascend.

A friend of mine who is a counsellor tells me that, more and more, when people come to him they complain of their powerlessness and ask him to help them find ways of being more empowered. His response generally surprises them. Frequently, when they complain of powerlessness and ask to be more empowered, he asks them this question: “Why do you want to be more empowered? Most people who do have power are pretty unhappy and often they are pretty self-centred as well. Do you really want to be like that? Maybe your experience of powerlessness is a privileged avenue in your quest to know God and your own soul and its depth. Maybe you need to investigate more your experience of powerlessness to see what riches can be found in it.”

The movement of God in Jesus Christ is a downward one. Thus, among other things, it invites us to enter into the experience of powerlessness, it invites us to look down, to investigate the small. It invites us to look for God in the baby rather than in corporate magnate, the president, the prime minister, the rock star, the star athlete, the brilliant writer, the Nobel prize winning scientist, or the Hollywood god or goddess. It is not that God is cannot be present in these. It is just that, given the movement of the incarnation, if we are looking for God these days, we should be looking close to the ground, we should be investigating the small, we should be looking at the baby. 

Beyond telling us where we should be looking, the incarnation also tells us which way we should be travelling, namely, downwards. To be Christian, to be persons who keeping giving flesh to God in this world, we must, ultimately, be free of the tyranny of ambition and achievement, of measuring our meaning and success from what gives us upward mobility. A useful criterion to discern whether we are following Christ or following our own desires (under the guise of following Christ) is precisely whether are we moving upward or downward? Are we deeming equality with God as something to be grasped at? Are we growing in power, prestige, and admiration? Or, are we emptying ourselves and assuming the powerlessness of the poor?

There should be no delusion. The Christ-movement is downward.

One distinguishing characteristic of our church today in the Western world is that we are a grieving church. We live in a certain sadness, somewhere between a death and a new Pentecost, more than a little confused by resurrected life that we’ve not seen before, longing for what used to be, grieving.

What are we grieving? What have we lost?

Essentially we are grieving four things: i) A certain lost innocence, a golden age, a lost virginity; ii) a lost unity, a painful division within the church, an emotional apartheid; iii) a lost child, our child that has become adolescent, post-religious culture, and iv) a lost wholeness among the people, the grief of our people.

We are grieving a lost innocence. More superficially, we feel this as we experience the recent scandals within the church, sexual misconduct by some priests and bishops, financial impropriety and abuse of power by some church leaders, and other such things which have all but shattered the image of the church as the unsullied bride of Christ that does no wrong and has done no wrong.

Recent studies in church history have helped intensify this as they show that the church’s long history of grace is colored through all those years by a long history of sin.

But, painful as this is, it is not what is cutting deepest here. Less visible, less expressed, but more wounding, is the sense of having lost a deep security, the sense that we had the high moral ground, that we were the cognitive majority (so many millions of us can’t be wrong!), that we were having an affair with real existent virtues, and that our ecclesial structures, moral codes, and cherished ways of doing things, our cherished rights and wrongs, truly mediated grace.

We had faith in the tradition. Today what is in doubt is the goodness of that tradition. An innocence, a virginity, has been lost. This does not come without grief. We are grieving a painful division within the church and society. I doubt that there has been any time since the Reformation that the Roman Catholic Church has been so painfully divided emotionally.

In some places we, in fact, have two emotional communities, so divided are we by different theologies, ideologies, and spiritualities. We live in emotional apartheid. Different ideological communities are living apart. Such is our church today.

Division within the church is not new. Christ held true on his promise that he would bring fire to the earth. The difference today is that the division is not between the sincere and the insincere, the good and the bad, the committed and the non-committed. Today, too often, the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the committed from the committed.

When good people can no longer be in community together, not even to mention respectful dialogue with each other, there are only two options: anger or sadness—and anger is just another form of sadness. We are a grieving church.

We are grieving a lost child. What is at issue here can best be expressed in an image: Western culture is to us, the church, much like an adolescent child is to its parents. We gave it birth, helped raise it, and now, with a fierceness and an anger that do not seem justifiable, it is asserting its independence from us, accusing us of being bad parents, and claiming it can find life only by moving away from us—and all this without acknowledging its debt to us.

Like parents too we fear for its life even as we envy its youth, power and daring, and resent its independence. Like parents, we feel a sadness. The child has left home, rejecting many cherished values in that exit. It is slipping away from us, daily becoming more post-Christian. To not admit a certain sadness about this is to be in denial.

Finally, we are grieving the grief of our people. Western society is, in large measure, despondent and suffering from every kind of brokenness. There is anger and frustration among women; depression and alienation among men. Brokenness, not wholeness, is the rule.

More and more it is the exception for someone to not come from a broken home, a broken marriage, a series of broken relationships and a background of sexual abuse. We are a society of the wounded and we bring this to our churches and this colors all of church life. We are a grieving church.

But that’s the death part. There’s another side, a resurrected Christ is already moving about and making appearances. We need to cry our tears, otherwise our hearts will harden, but we also need to gather in upper rooms and pray together until new tongues of fire put grief far behind.

Celibacy, as it is lived out today within clerical and religious life, has few defenders. More and more persons are suggesting the church should change the rules and no longer make it mandatory for priesthood. Moreover, and this is a different and deeper criticism, many critics are suggesting that celibacy, as a vowed state, is positively dysfunctional and should no longer be retained as an ideal of any kind. 

Their argument has both a theoretical and a practical prong: Theoretically, celibacy is seen as, in se, unhealthy. God made the universe to work in pairs, plain and simple. To be celibate, especially to choose positively to be so, goes against nature and is contrary to the way God intended life to be. To quote Merton, to choose celibacy is to choose to live in a loneliness that God, himself, has condemned. What’s wrong, these critics argue, is that, at the end of the day, vowed celibacy produces inside of a person (even in the person who lives it out faithfully) an inhuman asceticism, a Hamlet-type resignation, which ultimately devalues life. At its best, it creates a certain anti-hero, stoic, asexual, seemingly above ordinary human need, praying while others are making love. At its worst, it is perverse, either frigid or a lie. In either case, it is a fault in humility, belittling, among other things, sex, marriage, ordinary human life and enjoyment. 

Then there is the practical argument: A lot of celibates, to phrase it euphemistically, do not do celibacy very well. As recent surveys show, a lot of celibate (male, at least) have affairs, both homosexual and heterosexual. That, while obviously distressing, is not, to my mind, the primary indicator that many people are not living out their celibacy very fruitfully. More common, and more important, are some other indicators, namely, the number of celibates who not too subtly compensate for their celibacy through anger, self-pity, misuse of power, an overly affluent lifestyle, alcohol, eating disorders, bad bodily aesthetics, and bad work habits. Not all of these things, admittedly, are unique to celibates nor are they always compensatory for being celibate. But there is, undeniably, often a connection.  Hence it should not come as a surprise that more people are suggesting that the whole question of celibacy be radically re-evaluated. 

What’s to be said about this? Would we have a healthier priesthood if we ordained only married persons? Is vowed celibacy positively dysfunctional? Is it, in fact, unliveable? 

Good questions. Questions to be taken seriously. There are real problems with celibacy, especially at the level of fidelity. However, neither judge, critic nor proponent, should be quick in answering these questions. Celibacy needs re-examination, but in terms of both its negatives and its potentials. 

It can, admittedly, give rise to a duplicitous lifestyle and to all kinds of compensatory and dysfunctional activity. But it can also be very life-giving. It can be a privileged access to grace, just as married and sexual love can be. 

But, and this is the point here, celibacy can only be life-giving if it comes out of a certain mysticism, that is, if it takes its roots in a deep personal communion with God. Outside of this, it will always lead to some kind of masturbation, some unhealthy turning inward. There is no other option. A vowed celibate who does not have a vital personal relationship with God (which, at a point, engages his or her feelings) is a dangerous person – just as is a married person who does not have a vital relationship to his or her partner. Such a person is an affair and a compensation looking for a place to happen. 

Conversely, though, celibacy, vowed or otherwise, if linked to mysticism, can, as can all forms of inconsummation, be a privileged medium for bringing God into the world. God, as revelation assures us, has various ways of appearing in our lives. A special birth occurs when there is advent – yearning, longing, tears, and dry inconsummation. Fire comes after things reach kindling temperature.

When this happens, celibacy is also very life-giving for the person living it out. As Goethe puts it: “Now you are no longer caught in the obsession with darkness, and a desire for higher love-making sweeps you upward. Distance does not make you falter, now, arriving in magic, flying, and finally, insane for the light, you are a butterfly and you are gone. And as long as you haven’t experienced this: to die and so to grow, you are only a troubled guest on the dark earth. (The Holy Longing)

Scripture frequently uses these words to challenge us and we too rarely reflect upon them: Has anyone ever believed in a God as great as ours? Great, not just in terms of power, but, especially, in terms of goodness.

Julian of Norwich, whose theology of God has few equals, used to see God this way: “l see God, sitting at a table, smiling, completely relaxed, his face like a marvellous symphony.”

That vision, foreign and even perhaps scandalous to common conception and Christian preaching, is the one that, in the end, best fits the vision of God given us in Scripture.

The first image we get of God in the Old Testament, immediately after creation, is that of a God looking down on this earth and saying: “It is good; indeed, it is very good!” This is paralleled at the beginning of the New Testament, at the baptism of Jesus, when God is seen again as looking down from heaven, on his child, and saying: “This is my beloved child in whom I take delight!”

The essential attitude of Jesus can only be understood in this light. He knew God intimately and thus, in the deepest part of himself, could hear God say the deepest thing that God does say: “You are blessed. I am pleased with you. The earth is blessed. I am pleased with it.”

Because he heard this inside of himself, Jesus could look at the world, and everyone in it, and see it and them as blessed: “Blessed are you.”

Many implications flow from this, both in regards to how we view God and in how we see life.

First of all, regarding how we view God: Do we ever view God as relaxed, content, pleased with us and pleased, in fact, with the world? Do we ever believe that God takes delight in us and in the world?

Most of us, I suspect, are no longer much haunted by images of a punishing, legalistic, vindictive and arbitrary God, a God who records every sin and who exacts an ounce of suffering for an ounce of sin. Few of us still suffer from this particular fear.

Most of us, however, still suffer form an equally unhealthy and debilitating fear of God. Today this just takes a different form. For us, God is no longer the great watchdog in the sky, but is, nonetheless, far, far from pleased, relaxed and smiling. Our God, instead, is a workaholic, overly-intense, wired, displeased and semi-neurotic.

He no longer threatens us with hellfire, but he isn’t smiling, relaxed and pleased either. This is equally true in liberal and conservative circles—both of which mirror, precisely, the neurotic intensity and constant displeasure that come from believing in a hyper, workaholic and unhappy God.

We are still a long ways from really believing that God is smiling, relaxed and seeing us and the world as blessed. Consequently, consciously or unconsciously, we believe that God’s first mode of interpretation, when seeing us and the world, is that of depreciation rather than appreciation. Not unlike so many generations in the past, of whom we are so critical, we still see God as looking down on this world in judgment, in sadness and with disappointment, rather than with appreciative consciousness.

It is no accident then that, for the most part, that is also the way we look at ourselves and the world, namely, our first mode of interpretation is depreciation rather than appreciation: Before we see what is good, we see what is wrong; before we appreciate, we judge; before we are pleased, we are disappointed; before we bless; we curse; and before there is joy, there is anger. Before there is appreciative consciousness there is always criticism.

Moreover, and this is the point here, too often we do this in the name of God. We see ourselves as defending truth, values, orthodoxy or some cause and, under that divine mandate, unconsciously and consciously, we make our first task that of displeasure, criticism and judgment.

These have a place, but theirs is the second place, not the first. First, before depreciation, there must be appreciation, before my criticism there must first be appreciative consciousness. Why?

Because God works that way. Long before there is any judgment on this planet or on any of us, God is saying: “It is good. You are my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased!” God is smiling, relaxed and not neurotic. When we, liberal and conservative alike, are in a similar mode we will see the world in a similar fashion.

There is a story told about Saint Vincent de Paul which, while perhaps embellished by myth, needs nonetheless to be told and told and told again for its challenge is perennial. It runs something like this:

Vincent, whose life-effort, as we know, was directed to serving the poor, once gave his community the following instruction: “When the demands of service seem unfair to us, when we are exhausted and have to pull ourselves out of bed yet another time to do some act of service, we should do it gladly, without counting the cost and without self-pity, for if we persevere in serving the poor, persevere to the point of completely spending ourselves, perhaps someday the poor will find it in their hearts to forgive us. For it is more blessed to give than to receive … and it is also a lot easier!”

On the surface at least this is a curious comment. Why must the poor forgive us? What needs to be forgiven, especially if we are giving ourselves to them in service? 

Our minds may not see the entire logic of his statement, but, I suspect, many of us, at the level of feeling, have a pretty good sense of what is at issue here. At a simple level, all of us know that there is a certain humiliation in needing to receive, just as there is a certain pride in being able to  give. What is worse than being too busy? Having nothing at all to do. What is more painful than having to give away most everything we own? Having nothing of our own to give away. What is harder than being dragged out of bed to minister to someone in need? Being the person whose needs to drag someone else out of bed to minister to his or her needs. What is harder than being brought to our knees by the demands of those around us for our time and energy? Being on our knees begging someone else for his or her time and energy. At one level it is easy to see why it is easier to give than to receive. But there is more. 

There is divine power, literally, in being able to give. The one who gives gets to be God – or, at very least, to mediate God. That is not an overstatement. God is the source of all that is, the source of all gift. When we are in a position to give, we mediate that and feel that power, even if only unconsciously. There is a blessedness in that which, while ideally a great grace, can unfortunately easily be used to make the recipient feel inferior. It is important to understand this, otherwise there is the perennial danger that we will use our gifts of service in a way that further demeans the poor. It is not easy to learn to give gift in a way that does not shame the recipient.

But Vincent’s challenge goes further: He meant this too to be an antidote to self-pity. For anyone who is in a giving role – a parent, a priest, a minister, a teacher, a nurse, an advocate for Justice, or even a politician – there is the constant temptation to fall into self-pity: “Look what I am doing! Nobody is doing anything for me! I am so tired! Is there no end to this? Am I the only one who cares? This is asking more of me than is fair! I have my own problems!” It is easy, especially if one is tired and frustrated by lack of support, to lose heart, be begin to feel sorry for oneself, and to, eventually, feel oneself as victimized by those one is serving.

That is very common today. More and more, care-givers themselves are beginning to feel victimized by those to whom they are giving of themselves. Thus, psychologists have coined the term, “compassion burnout”. Moreover, many good people are beginning to resent the demands of the poor – the welfare system, the push by various groups for their rights, the pressure of immigrants, the drain that the sick put on the energy and money of a society, the cost of repairing the damage done by youthful vandals, and so on. Sadly, many of us are giving up and giving in, giving up on going the extra mile and giving in to the temptation to resign and take care of ourselves. 

Given all this, Vincent de Paul’s little adage must be told and retold: If we do not pull ourselves out of our exhaustion and resignation and continue to serve the poor, they will not find it in their hearts to forgive us. So too we need to remember always that it is more blessed to give than to resign and and take care of ourselves … and it also a lot easier!

Portraits of Vincent de Paul show him with a strong face, a warm face, a face that, everywhere, suggests a comfortable friendliness. He looks like a man you would want over for dinner. But if you had him over for dinner, you might want to make sure that your gift to him was indeed a real gift.

My dad has been dead for nearly 25 years and yet hardly a day goes by when I do not feel in some way, however inchoate, his influence. As I age and am, myself, forced, with each passing day, to look at life from the other side of youth, I am becoming ever more appreciative of what he shared with me.

Wisdom is not easily come by. His came to him conscriptively, through fire, through poverty, through years of having to make do with less than he would have liked. Sometimes, though not often, he would share with us incidents from his own growing up that would give us, his children, a glimpse into what shaped his soul. Let me share one of these with you: 

When my father first married, he and my mother were not able to afford a place of their own and lived, for several years, with his parents. During these years, my father worked on his dad’s farm, along with some of his other brothers. One of the winters he spent there was a particularly long and harsh one; harsh, not only in terms of cold and snow, but also in terms of the necessities of living. They were a large family, not-well-to-do, and the long winter took its toll. The family was reliant on a small herd of cattle for the milk, meat, and butter they needed for their daily subsistence. Moreover the future of the farm depended upon that herd of cattle making the winter.

With a considerable stretch of winter still before them, they ran out of feed for that herd. Feed was to be had, but it was not close by. So each day, for a number of weeks until winter finally broke, a journey of some 15 – 20 miles had to be made, in the cold, by horse and sleigh, to get the feed for the next day. The lot fell to my father and one of his brothers, along with a neighbour (who was is in the same situation) to do that journey. And so, each morning, my father, his brother, and their neighbour, would set off while it was still dark and travel nearly 10 miles by horse and sled. Once there, they would hurriedly eat a cold lunch that they had packed, load the sled with straw, and begin the long cold journey home, arriving back when it was already getting dark. 

It was a marathon and it took its toll. The neighbour, a young man, caught pneumonia and, eventually, died from it. My father and his brother were luckier. They survived that ordeal – as did the cattle and, thanks to them, the family and the farm.

Telling us all this, years later, there was nothing in my father that suggested self-pity, heroism, or even that this was all that extraordinary. “We did what we had to!” was his simple statement. “That’s what it took, back then!”

Things like that shaped his soul, formed his mettle, and, conscriptively, taught him what you need to do when you are cornered by duty, done in by circumstance, and stand helplessly before certain dictates of life: You do what it takes! 

Robert Moore, the brilliant Jungian analyst, suggests that the defining mark of adulthood is precisely that characteristic: the adult, man or woman, does what it takes.

I bring this up not just because all of us will some times in our lives find ourselves caught in situations where everything inside of us, and everything and everyone around us, will be saying: “This is ridiculous! Nobody should have to do this!” and, yet, find that there is no way out, we need to do what it takes, but especially because we are not equipping our young adequately to handle frustration. 

Richard Rohr, speaking recently on the theme of reconstruction, stated: “Today, we are giving our children less than scraps.” There are, I suggest, different levels to his statement. On the surface, obviously, he is referring to certain moral values and traits of faith. At another level, though, he is also referring to a certain quality of character, including, among other things, the capacity to handle frustration. 

It is on this point that we, as a whole society, are failing our children. We are not equipping them to handle frustration, even as, with all good intention, we continue to raise their expectations of what life should give them. 

We have given our children the highest of expectations. That is good. We owe them a dream. Where we have failed them is in not giving them the tools to handle the frustration that comes when those dreams get crushed, when circumstance and duty corner them, and there is not other choice other than to do what it takes.