Shame on you! You should know better! 

How often have we heard those awful words? Or, seen them, unspoken, real, in another’s eyes? No words, but the clear message: You should be ashamed of yourself! That’s raw hurt: A whip on bare flesh! Your nakedness ridiculed. An humiliating stain for everyone to see. A smell, like that of Cain. After shame you are a different person than before. 

Yet all of us live with it. Shame is part of life. Most of the time we connect it to a particular quality about ourselves. We are ashamed of something. Something about us is not quite right: our ignorance, our selfishness, our sexual darkness, our laziness, our loneliness, our past, our poverty, our lack of sophistication, our hidden phobia, our height, our fatness, our complexion, our hair, our birthmark, our smells, our addiction. We are all ashamed of something. 

And, after shame, we are a different person, colder, more lacking in trust. Someone once said that we often judge someone to be cold when he or she is only hurt. That is very true and I suspect that, more often than not, the hurt that looks like coldness is shame. Most of the time, when we appear as cold we are only ashamed.

The importance of this should never be understated, not just for psychology but also for spirituality. If we are ever to become whole and spiritual, namely, if we are to take seriously the first words that came out of the mouth of Jesus: “Change your life and believe in the good news”, then the coldness and distrust brought upon us by shame must be overcome. Otherwise we will go through life paranoid and ever somewhat cold.

And change will not be easy. Shame is powerful. Its bite is deep, the scars permanent. 

However, while the scars of shame are permanent, they are not necessarily fatal. We are powerfully resilient, capable of living warm and trusting lives, beyond shame. But the power to live beyond, does not lie in some easy fix or cure. As a wise axiom has it: Not everything can be cured or fixed, though it should be named properly. This is critical in the case of shame. It must be properly named.

There is a growing literature today, much of it in popular psychology circles, which tries precisely to do this, to name shame properly. Unfortunately, to my mind, it often does not name it very well. It talks about cultures of shame and religions of shame and, all too quickly, lays much of the blame for shame at the feet of those who insist on duty and on those who are less liberal sexually. We are shamed by too much insistence on duty and we are shamed by our own bodies and our sexual needs in a culture and religion which are too rigid and puritanical. Duty and sexual restraint, in this view, are the culprits. Too much insistence here and you produce a culture of shame. 

Whatever the truth of that, it misses the deeper point. Where we are most deeply shamed, and hurt, is not, first of all, because we are made to feel badly on account of some unfulfilled duty or because religion and culture have not given us permission to feel good about sex and our own bodies. No. Long before that, we are shamed at a deeper level. We are shamed in our enthusiasm. We are made to feel guilty, naive, and humiliated about our very pulse for life and about our very trust of each other. Long before we are ever told that sex is bad, or that our body isn’t quite right, or that we have failed in our duty somewhere, we are told that we are bad because we are so trusting and enthusiastic. Trust and enthusiasm are our nakedness, bare flesh. 

Remember as a child, the number of times you literally burst with life, how you ran up to somebody, someone you trusted, a parent, a teacher, a friend; completely trusting, full of life, you tried, with a nakedness you can never bring yourself to risk again, to share something you were excited about: a leaf you had found, a drawing you had made, your report card, a story you wanted to tell, a fall you had just taken, something that seemed so important to you, and you were met by a bored, irritated, chastising presence. Remember too how, sometime in your early years, however it happened, how you were made to feel ashamed for spontaneously feeling and believing certain things. Recall how the warmth and trust drained out of you. 

Then think, now, how, so many times, people perceive you as being cold when, as you know, you are only hurt.

There is a story told about St. Lawrence, perhaps only a legend, which merits retelling. 

Lawrence, so the story goes, was the deacon in small community during the third century, a time when Christians were being persecuted and martyred. One day, word came from the local civic authority that the government was going to confiscate church properties and that it was coming round to collect anything that Lawrence’s small community had which was of value. An edict was given to Lawrence stating that, on a certain day designated, he was to have all the “treasures of the church” readied so that the soldiers could come and pick them up. 

When the day arrived, the local authorities, complete with their military support, arrived at the door of Lawrence’s house. Lawrence, however, had read their decree in a way quite other than they had anticipated. He had assembled there, by his house, all the poor, the lame, the sick, the blind, the weak, the aged, the children, and the outcasts. The commandant announced: “We are here to pick up the treasures of the church! We command you: Hand them over!” 

Lawrence, on his part, calmly pointed to the group he had assembled and said: “Here they are! Take them! These are the treasures of the church!”

The commandant was neither amused nor understanding: “We are not here to play games. We have come to pick up the treasures of the church! Hand them over under the pain of death!” 

Lawrence again pointed to the group he had gathered and said: “You asked for the treasures of the church. These are our true treasures. Lying on the ground here is an old gunnysack filled with vessels and candlesticks. Some of these are made of silver, gold, and bronze. These you can gladly have. They are not of much value to us. But they are not what you asked for. The decree you sent to me said that you wanted to collect our treasures so I assembled them, these people, here for you.” 

We need, regularly, to recount this story, not just because our age is in danger decertifying, right out of existence, those who are not strong and healthy, but also because, under the influence of our culture, we are in danger of creating an ecclesiology that mirrors the blind bias of our age. 

For example: Many of us are getting ever more discouraged as, each year, the church is losing more and more of the young, the successful, the talented, and those others that our age and culture precisely considers as “golden”. Who’s left in the churches? The old, the weak, the psychologically unstable, and those with less choices and less place in the culture. As a rather cynical friend of mine puts it: “Here and there, among the very old, the very young, and those who don’t have much going in their lives, the church can still spin its magic! But it doesn’t have much attraction for those who actually have a life!” 

In Western culture, put as a simple statement of fact, he is, more than I would like to admit, correct. As a gross over-generalization, with many exceptions of course, that is what is happening. Sociologists of religion verify that. Statistics which tell us who is attending church and who is taking its doctrines and teachings seriously show, precisely, that where the church is weakest is in drawing people who are talented – artistically, athletically, scientifically, intellectually, and otherwise. We don’t draw so easily what is gold, silver, or bronze (in the eyes of the world). The church, as my cynical friend puts it, must spin its magic elsewhere. 

But we must be careful to interpret this properly. We can, and often times do, look at this and conclude that there is something terribly wrong with the church. Contemporary critics accuse us of peddling a “god of the gaps”, that is, of having a church that can draw people only when they feel certain inadequacies, gaps, in their lives. Religion, they claim, offers little to the healthy, talented, and the strong. Hence, as another cynic once put it, the church is left in the absurd position of trying to teach happy people to be unhappy so that it has some power over them!’

But there is another view, that of Lawrence: In the very old and the very young and in those who are marginalized through illness, poverty, or other kinds of unattractiveness, in those who are not seen as gold or silver in our culture, the church, more than ever, is full of treasure. 

Several years ago, at a workshop in Los Angeles, John Shea shared a story that speaks of the effect of a deep blessing:

It’s the story of a woman whom he met while teaching in Ireland. During a summer school there, he had asked each person in his class to recount an incident of blessing from his or her own life and one woman, very timidly, shared the following:

The incident took place when she was twelve years old, on a Sunday morning. She came from a large family and, each Sunday morning to ready them for church, her mother would line up all of her children and then, one by one, wash each child’s face and comb each one’s hair. Each would wait patiently in line for his or her turn and then go out to play while the mother finished with the rest. One Sunday she, the woman telling the story, was second in line and anxious to get her turn over with because it would mean nearly a half hour of play time while the others were being washed and combed. Then, just before her turn, her mother noticed that the youngest sister, at the end of the line, was missing a shoelace and asked her to go into the bedroom and get one. But, not wanting to lose her place in the line and given that her mother did not ask her a second time, she did not go. Her mother said nothing as she combed her hair. When she was finished she went out to play. However after playing for about ten minutes she felt guilty and went back into the house to get the shoelace for her baby sister. When she entered the house, the mother had just removed her own shoelace and was bent down, putting it into her baby sister’s shoe. Feeling doubly guilty, she went into her parents’ bedroom and got a shoelace and, as her mother was combing her baby sister’s hair, she bent down and put the shoelace into her mother’s shoe. While she was doing this, her mother said nothing but gently stroked her hair.

When she finished telling that story, somebody in the class asked her what it meant and she, rather embarrassedly, said: “I don’t know … but it has just stayed with me all these years!”

A day later, Shea, who during this two week course had the habit of sitting under a particular tree every day during the afternoon break and smoking a cigar, had settled himself under that tree, but had forgot to bring a cigar. Out of nowhere, the woman appeared: “Where is your cigar, today?” she asked shyly.  “I forgot to bring one!” He answered. Immediately she produced a cigar, gave it to him, and without a word disappeared. The next day after his conference, Shea found her sitting by herself at the back of the room. He went to her and confronted her with these words: “THE CIGAR IS THE SHOELACE, ISN’T IT?”  “Yes”, she answered, “Ever since that day that my mother stroked my hair, through all these years … and long after she has died … I have had this secret covenant with her, I go through life supplying what is missing!” 

Blessing begets blessing. When we are treated gently, gentleness grows in us. We all make an unconscious secret covenant with those who have blessed us, who have stroked our hair gently.

Listening to Shea’s story, I was reminded of the words of Li-Young Lee, the fine Chinese American poet, who recounts a similar incident with his own father. In a poem entitled, The Gift, he recounts how, when he was a boy of seven, his father recited a story to him to help calm the pain as he, the father, removed a metal splinter from his son’s hand. He cannot remember any longer the story his father told that day, but he can remember his father’s tenderness, his gentle voice, and how it soothed the fear and the pain of a seven-year-old who was frightened of dying from a splinter: “Had you entered that afternoon, you would have thought you saw a man planting something in a boy’s palm, a silver tear, a tiny flame.” 

Now, no longer a boy, he, the poet, is taking a splinter out of his wife’s hand and what his father put in his hand that afternoon, all those years ago, is now inside of him: “Look how I shave her thumbnail down so carefully she feels no pain. Watch as I lift the splinter out. I was seven when my father took my hand like this, and I did not hold that shard between my fingers and think, metal that will bury me, christen it Little Assassin, Ore Going Deep for my Heart. And I did not lift up my wound and cry, Death visited here! I did what a child does when he’s given something to keep. I kissed my father.”

When we bless others, stroking them gently with understanding and forgiveness, we make secret covenants, giving them something to keep.

Each age has it own way of defining the word prophet. Today the common notion, particularly within church circles, seems to be that a prophet is someone who challenges the institutional status quo, someone who shakes things up. As such, he or she is almost automatically conceived of as an agitator, as someone who makes others uncomfortable.

There is some truth to this notion, but it is, taken without qualification, simplistic. As a contemporary axiom puts it: Every prophet disturbs, but not everyone who disturbs is a prophet. Prophecy takes many forms, some of which far more subtle, and sometimes more needed, than is the common notion of the prophet as an agitator.

I want here to suggest a prophetic ministry that is desperately needed in both the world and the church today, namely, we need persons, prophets, who have wide enough loyalties, deep enough hearts, and extensive enough sympathies to help hold together a community that is dangerously fragmented. In both the world and in the church today the sincere are divided from the sincere, the good from the good, the committed from the committed. Everywhere we see anger, hatred, bitterness, people blaming others, people frustrated and stepping away from communities they used to take part in, and people with highly selective loyalties, sympathies, and indignations. Daily, the world and the church are further polarizing.

What we are losing in all of this is community. The radical edge of both the right and the left are fragmenting the middle in such a way that, simply put, the world and the church are falling apart. Because of this there is a growing hysteria in both the right and the left and this is helping to justify a lot of things in the name of prophecy which are antithetical to it. Elementary charity, respect for others, and simple good manners are frequently by-passed in the name of higher causes. Ever narrower agendas and ever more selective ideologies get paraded as the answer to everything and anyone, be he or she ever so narrow and intolerant, can get status as a prophet, as long as that person can display sufficient anger and indignation about something. At the end of the day, the net result of this is that more and more people get alienated from each other and our communities and families are falling apart.

Prophecy is about genuine moral indignation and this takes many forms. Today we need to be morally indignant precisely about all of this angry, cancerous indignation which is so destructive of community. The task of prophecy today is to absorb division. To be a prophet today, in the church or in the world, is to let your person and your loyalties be wide enough so that they can be that place wherein all the different sides can meet, where the various indignations can spend themselves, like the storms they are, and where liberal and conservative, feminist and bishop, pro-life and pro-choice, victim and perpetrator, legalist and nihilist, puritan and liberated, socially concerned and privately obsessed can be at one table sat down. The task of the prophet today is keep incarnate the wide, all-embracing heart of God, a heart that has many rooms.

This will be a very lonely and painful vocation. In it, one will feel the earthly helplessness of the word of God, that powerlessness that comes from refusing to violate the widest and deepest contours of things. To be this kind of prophet is to sweat blood in the garden and to be powerless, defenceless, and silent before those who sit in the judgement seats of both the left and the right.

It will be a vocation within which one will, frequently, be hated by both sides, judged to be too liberal by some and too conservative by others. To be this kind of prophet is to be called wishy-washy, backward, puritanical, unbalanced, lacking in commitment to justice, sloppy in orthodoxy, judgemental, sold out, morally bankrupt.

And with that, will come an unspeakable loneliness, namely, the loneliness of true conscience, of moral isolation, of being divided from and judged by sincere persons. But that pain is the price of genuine prophecy, the price of absorbing division within a community.

Prophets, we are told, die somewhere between the altar and the sanctuary. Some of them die because they are agitators and speak out against the system. Others die because they get caught, as buffers, in the violence that follows upon that – and faith and community go on because of the blood of all of those martyrs.

Already 30 years ago, before the sexual revolution, Albert Camus had written: “Chastity alone is connected with personal progress. There is a time when moving beyond it is a victory—when it is released from its moral imperatives. But this quickly turns to defeat afterwards.” (Quoted by P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 233.)

Moving beyond chastity initially feels like a victory but eventually it becomes a defeat. Our post-sexual revolution generation might wan t to think about that. What is meant by those words?

Whatever they mean, they are not understood by our generation. It considers the move beyond chastity as anything but a defeat. For it, this is a progress, a sophistication, a liberation from a past ignorance, an eating of the forbidden fruit which is more of an entry into Eden than an expulsion from it.

Today, in Western culture, and in more than a few church communities as well, chastity is seen as naivete, timidity, frigidity, lack of nerve, being uptight, a certain innocence to be pitied.

One salient example of this can be seen in the debate surrounding AIDS, teenage pregnancies and venereal diseases. In this discussion the argument for chastity is generally seen as naive, impractical, narrow, religious (as if chastity was a religious concept), old-fashioned and even dangerous. Conversely, those who argue on the basis of condoms claim all the high ground—intellectual, moral and practical.

The same holds true today essentially in the entire discussion about sexuality and life. Chastity is given little place and even less respect. At best, it is seen as an unimportant and impractical ideal, at worst it is an object of ridicule. We are the poorer for this.

In some sense, and I submit this is not an overstatement, chastity is the key to everything. Joy, community, love and even full enjoyment in sex depend upon chastity. When a society is chaste, community will happen; when a family is chaste, it will find joy in its everyday life; when lovers are chaste, they will experience the full ecstasy of sex; when a church is chaste, it will experience the Holy Spirit.

The reverse is also true. Chaos, joylessness, erotic numbness and hardness of heart are generally a fault in chastity. To say this, however, implies a certain understanding of chastity. What is chastity?

Too often we identify chastity with a certain sexual purity or with simple celibacy. This, however, is too narrow. To be chaste does not mean that one does not have sex. Nor does it imply that one is in any way a prude. My parents were two of the most chaste persons I have ever met, yet they obviously enjoyed sex—as a large family and a warm, vivacious bond between them gave more than enough evidence of.

Chastity is, first and foremost, not even primarily a sexual concept—though, given the power and urgency of sex, faults in chastity often are within the area of sexuality. Chastity has to do with all experiencing. It is about the appropriateness of any experience. Chastity is reverence. Sin, in the end, is irreverence.

To be chaste is to experience people, things, places, sexuality, entertainment, phases of life, and all the opportunities that life offers in a way that does not violate, them nor ourselves. Chastity means to experience things reverently, in such a way that the experience of them leaves both them and ourselves more, not less, integrated.

I am chaste when I relate to others in a way that does not transgress their moral, psychological, emotional, sexual and aesthetic contours. I am chaste when I do not let irreverence or impatience ruin what is gift, when I let life, others, sex, be fully what they are. Conversely, I lack chastity when I cross boundaries prematurely or irreverently, when I violate anything so as to somehow reduce the gift that it is.

Chastity is respect and reverence. Its fruits are integration, gratitude and joy. Lack of chastity is irreverence and violence. Its fruits are disintegration, bitterness and cynicism (infallible signs of the lack of chastity).

Our generation, since it suffers so much from violence, disrespect, emotional chaos, lack of community, sexual irresponsibility, despondency, cynicism and lack of delight, might want to be slower in denigrating chastity. It might too, should it ever summon the courage, sort out what, in the area of chastity, is victory and what is defeat.

We live with a lot of anger, polarization, and bitterness, both within the world and within the church. The very fabric of community is being torn apart by this. In all that anger, the sincere are alienated from the sincere, good people are finding themselves at odds with other good people, and everywhere there is an atmosphere of despondency.

What is sad, among many other things, in all of this is that almost all of us, on all sides of virtually every issue, are using truth and the gospel to make hard, non-compassionate judgements. In both civic and church circles there is little to be seen in the way of gentleness, softness, and forgiveness. The zeal for orthodoxy and the passion for justice, especially among the more enlightened and supposedly sensitive, are producing a lot more anger than compassion.  

This is a cruel thing to say, but all this angry zeal and passion, no matter how high the cause which fuels it, is not a sign that truth and the gospel are breaking through. When truth and the gospel break through, the first mark is compassion, not anger.

The word of God first meets the world in compassion, not judgement. Irrespective of whether we attempt to speak our truth and prophecy from a liberal or a conservative pulpit, we want to remember that. We mediate the word of God correctly, speak for truth and justice, when, and only when, we are recognized for our gentleness, compassion, and forgiveness – towards everyone, and not just towards those in the same ideological camp as ourselves. Unfortunately, this is not easy to do.

Too often we take in the word of God, we let ourselves be consecrated by truth, and then very quickly turn towards others in anger and judgement. Allow me to illustrate this with some typical examples:

I take a good course in liturgy and learn how, ideally, a liturgy should happen. Then, what follows, like smoke follows from fire, is that very soon I am disgruntled and angry about the liturgy in my own parish. I sit in the pews and mutter to myself: “This is a liturgy? I can’t worship in this way!” Pretty soon, I am looking for a different parish or even a different church. Or, I become sensitive to the issues of social justice. All too soon, I am looking at the world and the church through very angry eyes: “All this injustice and everyone is asleep to it!” Or, if I am more conservative of temperament, I read the spiritual classics, with all their emphasis on private morality, and I begin to fill with a holy anger and judgement as I look at a world that is given mostly to ignoring these demands: “Our world is losing its soul! There is no morality left!”

It is so easy, all in the name of truth, morality, orthodoxy, justice, and genuine concern for others to become an angry, judgemental person. Likewise it is so tempting, in the name of all of the same things, to look at those we share community with and see them as backward, unenlightened, selfish, ignorant, and petty. That is the temptation. But when we succumb to it, our anger negates compassion.

What should be happening? The word of God, and all that it demands in the name of truth, justice, and love, must enter us. But it must not leave us as anger and judgement. It must leave us as compassion, wide understanding, gentle forgiveness. For it to do this, however, requires that we first hold it long enough inside of ourselves for it to gestate into compassion. We must nurture the word of God until it can finally flow out of us as did the incarnate word from Mary, as a gentle child. When it flows out in anger and judgement, we have given premature birth. A premature baby needs some further incubation before it can be a peace at the mother’s breast, or anywhere else. Small wonder many of us are so angry and judgemental within our communities.

Before the word of God flows out of us, we should first hear it saying inside of us: “You are my beloved child in whom I am well-pleased. You are blessed in my eyes.” Once we have heard those words, God’s central words to us, then we have a chance of looking out at our world and seeing it somewhat in the same way as God sees us, as blessed, as a source of delight.

I was once at a seminar given by Michael Meade. At its conclusion he said something to this effect: “If this has been meaningful to you, don’t be full of advice for everyone when you get home. Instead give someone a gift.” God asks the same regarding his word.

Already thirty years ago, before the sexual revolution, Albert Camus had written: “Chastity alone is connected with personal progress. There is a time when moving beyond it is a victory – when it is released from its moral imperatives. But this quickly turns to defeat afterwards.” (Quoted by P. Rieff, The Triumph of the Therapeutic, p. 233.)

Moving beyond chastity initially feels like a victory but eventually it becomes a defeat. Our, post-sexual revolution, generation might want to think about that. What is meant by those words?

Whatever they mean, they are not understood by our generation. It considers the move beyond chastity as anything but a defeat.  For it, this is a progress, a sophistication, a liberation from a past ignorance, an eating of the forbidden fruit which is more of an entry into Eden than an expulsion from it. Today, in Western culture, and in more than a few church communities as well, chastity is seen as naivete, timidity, frigidity, lack of nerve, being uptight, a certain innocence to be pitied.

One salient example of this can be seen in the debate surrounding AIDS, teenage pregnancies, and venereal diseases. In this discussion the argument for chastity is generally seen as naive, impractical, narrow, religious (as if chastity was a religious concept), old-fashioned, and even dangerous. Conversely, those who argue on basis of condoms claim all the high ground – intellectual, moral, and practical. The same holds true today essentially in the entire discussion about sexuality and life. Chastity is given little place and even less respect. At best, it is seen as an unimportant and impractical ideal, at worst it is an object of ridicule. We are the poorer for this.

In some sense, and I submit this is not an overstatement, chastity is the key to everything. Joy, community, love, and even full enjoyment in sex depend upon chastity. When a society is chaste, community will happen; when a family is chaste, it will find joy in its everyday life; when lovers are chaste, they will experience the full ecstasy of sex; when a church is chaste, it will experience the Holy Spirit. The reverse is also true. Chaos, joylessness, erotic numbness, and hardness of heart are generally a fault in chastity. To say this, however, implies a certain understanding of chastity.  What is chastity?

Too often we identify chastity with a certain sexual purity or with simple celibacy. This, however, is too narrow. To be chaste does not mean that one does not have sex. Nor does it imply that one is in any way a prude.  My parents were two of the most chaste persons I have ever met, yet they obviously enjoyed sex – as a large family and a warm vivacious bond between them gave more than enough evidence of.

Chastity is, first and foremost, not even primarily a sexual concept – though, given the power and urgency of sex, faults in chastity often are within the area of sexuality. Chastity has to do with all experiencing. It is about the appropriateness of any experience. Chastity is reverence. Sin, in the end, is irreverence.

To be chaste is to experience people, things, places, sexuality, entertainment, phases of life, and all the opportunities that life offers in a way that does not violate them nor ourselves. Chastity means to experience things reverently, in such a way that the experience of them leaves both them and ourselves more, not less, integrated. I am chaste when I relate to others in a way that does not transgress their moral, psychological, emotional, sexual, and aesthetic contours. I am chaste when I do not let irreverence or impatience ruin what is gift, when I let life, others, sex, be fully what they are.  Conversely, I lack chastity when I cross boundaries prematurely or irreverently, when I violate anything so as to somehow reduce the gift that it is.

Chastity is respect and reverence. Its fruits are integration, gratitude, and joy. Lack of chastity is irreverence and violence. Its fruits are disintegration, bitterness, and cynicism (infallible signs of the lack of chastity).

Our generation, since it suffers so much from violence, disrespect, emotional chaos, lack of community, sexual irresponsibility, despondency, cynicism, and lack of delight might want to be slower in denigrating chastity. It might too, should it ever summon the courage, sort out what, in the area of chastity, is victory and what is defeat.

When someone close to us dies, especially if his or her life has been a rather troubled or painful one, we take consolation in the thought that he or she is finally “safe in God’s arms”. But what is contained in that thought? What does it mean to be safe in God’s arms?

How do God’s love and mercy work? How does God’s justice take into account our imperfections, sin, and selfishness when we die? To be in heaven is to be at one with God and with all others of good will. Given this, what happens to us when we die and are still too full of false will, false freedom, and simple selfishness to be truly at one with God and community? How can we be safe in God’s arms when there is still inside of us much that is resistant to the selflessness that is required to live, as Scripture puts it, in the land of the living?

Jesus tells us in the Gospels that his will is entirely one with the Father. Few human persons, perhaps none, die in a condition which is that ideal. So what happens to us when we die? The afterlife is something beyond present imagination and so it is risky to use images from this life to try to understand it, but, given the infinite love and power of God, perhaps the following image might be helpful.

Picture this, a common enough image: A very young child is in the throes of a tantrum. Angry, sobbing, kicking, stubbornly wilful, resistant to every effort to be helped, the child is closed in on itself. Then, somewhere past the time where any reasoning or persuasion can do any good, the mother picks up the child. But the child is not exactly compliant. He or she continues to kick and scream and fight the mother, trying to push away from her and continue the tantrum.

However the mother’s is not put off by this. She understands it for what it is and calmly, though firmly, continues to hold the child and to press it to her breast. Slowly, or perhaps even instantly, the fighting stops. The child continues to cry, but now the tears are different. They are no longer the tears of anger and resistance that infantile grandiosity, false will, and immaturity bring. No, they are the tears that the prodigal son cried when he was embraced by his father, tears that, precisely, move one beyond grandiosity and selfishness to peace and rest. They are the tears of helplessness and trust, tears that result from letting go of false will and false self-importance. At a point, the child comes to quiet and peace. It is safe in its mother’s arms.

Few images, to my mind, are as helpful to understand what happens to us when we die as is this one. Except for cases where there is truly a hardened and hopelessly distorted heart (a situation which, while theoretically important to affirm, is, I believe, most rare in fact) our false will, immaturities, prejudices, angers, sick secrets, sin, and straight out selfishness are our tantrum, our infantile kicking resistance to love. God, like any good mother, understands these for what they are and, like any good mother, knows too what to do.

He, She in this case, picks us up and, despite our kicking and resistance, holds us safely in her arms. Then, since our alienation is not that of someone who is strong enough to commit the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit (a sin of strength) but is rather the weakness of someone who is suffering from the immaturity and selfishness of a child, our resistance will be short-lived. Soon, very soon, we will cease kicking against love and we will let ourselves be held – in will and in true freedom as well as in body, mind, and soul. We will be safely in God’s arms, finally in the land of the living.

This image is also helpful in understanding what, classically in Roman Catholic theology, has been taught as the state of purgatory. Catholics and Protestants have long argued about the existence or non-existence of purgatory. For Catholics purgatory was thought as necessary since some purification is necessary for us in order to live in heaven (otherwise heaven would soon turn into earth!) Protestants, basing themselves on scripture which teaches at there are only two eternal states, heaven and hell, have basically always rejected the idea of purgatory. Purgatory, however, should not be understood as a place that is separate from heaven. It is the pain of entering heaven. Thus, it is not a place, it is an anguish. Purgatory is the purifying pain that is felt by the selfish, resistant child, kicking against the mother. But it is a momentary pain, one that gives way to quiet peace and contentment just as soon as the struggle against love ceases.