There is a tradition within Christianity, strong in Scripture and in the early church but now sadly in danger of dying, of welcoming the stranger.

In the early church there was a custom of welcoming the strangers with the belief that they, being foreigners, were specially privileged in their capacity to bring new promise and fresh revelation from God. It was with this is in mind that the author of the letter to the Hebrews wrote: “In welcoming strangers some of you have entertained angels without knowing it.”

Thus, every family was encouraged to set aside a room in its house to serve as a guest room, a room within which strangers could be welcomed and hospitality shown to them.

In Scripture, God’s promise, revelation, and new truth are most often brought not through what’s familiar or through those whom we know and who are like us, but through a stranger or an angel (an angel being even more foreign than a stranger). Thu s, for instance, we see: Sarah and Abraham receive the promise of a son not from a family member, a neighbor or the local doctor, but from a stranger who has wandered in to their camp at night and to whom they have shown hospitality. Jacob meets God by wrestling with a stranger. Christ is visited in the crib not by the Jewish rulers but by the Magi, strange foreign kings. In the parable of the Good Samaritan, the wounded man is helped not by his own kinsfolk and those who were of his own religion, but by a Samaritan, a stranger. With the stranger lies surprise, new possibility, contact with that part of God and reality that we have never experienced before.

Why is that? Would it not be more logical, and indeed in line with the principles of the incarnation, that God should speak to us most deeply through that which is familiar to us?

The familiar is important. In the end, the real test of charity is our own family. Charity begins at home. However, precisely because it is home, it is not the place where we are often surprised. It is too familiar and because it is so familiar it is also not the place where we are likely to have our hearts stretched. God is not familiar. God is other. Accordingly, those who are other to us, strangers, are in a privileged position to reveal God to us.

As Parker Palmer puts it: “The role of the stranger in our lives is vital in the context of Christian faith, for the God of faith is one who continually speaks truth afresh, who continually makes all things new. God persistently challenges conventional truth and regularly upsets the world’s way of looking at things.

“It is no accident that this God is so often represented by the stranger, for the truth that God speaks in our lives is very strange indeed. Where the world sees impossibility, God sees potential. Where the world sees comfort, God sees idolatry. Where the world sees insecurity, God sees occasions for faith. Where the world sees death, God proclaims life.

“God uses the stranger to shake us from our conventional points of view, to remove the scales of worldly assumptions from our eyes. God is a stranger to us, and it is at the risk of missing God’s truth that we domesticate God, reduce God to the role of familiar friend.” (The Company of Strangers, p. 59).

There is a double challenge in that: The first has to do with racism, sexism, provincialism and sectarianism of all sorts. Invariably we are afraid of, and unwelcoming to, strangers—be they different vis-a-vis race, color, creed, gender or sexual orientation. We fear what is different from ourselves. We are comfortable only with our own.

However, within our circles much of the otherness of God cannot be revealed. Within familiar circles, good as these might be, there is too little in the way of promise, of newness. God can speak only a limited word here.

Nothing is impossible with God, but that is only true when we move outside of our own circles. Like Jacob, we must wrestle in the dust with the stranger. Who knows? The person who puts out your hip might well be God!

But we must welcome the stranger in another way too. In a world and in a church polarized by competing ideologies and torn by factionalism, we must welcome the stranger, show hospitality to, those who are different from ourselves: Conservatives must welcome liberals and liberals must welcome conservatives. We are strange to each other.

Feminists must welcome those who are afraid of them, and those who are afraid of feminism must welcome feminists. The same is true between pro-life and pro­choice. In welcoming the stranger, in showing real hospitality to those who seem foreign to us, whom we do not understand, we are given the opportunity to hear new promise, to hear a fuller revelation of God.

Several years ago, one of my sisters died of cancer. She was an Ursuline nun, possessed a deep faith and had, for many years, given herself over to the service of others with an unselfishness that was exceptional.

Yet, despite all this, she found it very hard to die, very hard to let go.

Why? I have seen others, with less faith, let go much more easily. In my sister’s case, this was the difficulty: She was not afraid of God, of the after-life, or of the unknown. This was not the issue.

The reason she found it so hard to die was, quite simply, that she loved her life so deeply.

She thoroughly loved and enjoyed her life. Friends, work, family, good food, good weather, good chocolate (her weakness), these she basked in.

She wasn’t a particularly reflective person, but she wasn’t a moody one either. Her impatience was with those who gave life too much of a tragic or stoic twist. This she considered pompous, false, a waste.

Life, for her, was good, something to be drunk in with delight. Her view: To enjoy life is to end up with a double chin. This is what separates the true Christian from the stoic. The formula worked for her. She had a happy life, did eventually develop a double chin and died a deeply loved woman. What this story highlights is something that is too often lost within spirituality, namely, that the highest compliment someone can give to a gift giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift. The highest compliment we can give to God, our creator, is to thoroughly enjoy the gift of lie. One should never look a gift universe in the mouth! The best way to pay for a beautiful moment is to enjoy it.

More often than not, this is not the message that has come through in Christian spirituality, or in virtually every other spirituality and secular philosophy for that matter. Mostly what has been presented as mature, as the ideal to be imitated, is stoicism, the Hamlet-figure, the Socrates-figure, the person who is somehow above and detached from the enjoyments, pleasures and delights of the ordinary person.

A saint who craves chocolate! There aren’t many icons, outside of Buddhism, that show someone with a double chin. We are the poorer for that. What is not mature is our spiritual understanding. We have mistaken Hamlet for Jesus, stoicism for Christianity, despair for healthy detachment.

This needs correction. The Christian, as John Shea is so fond of pointing out, is not the noble anti-hero, luxuriating in despair, but the child of the kingdom, the grace-merry person who, while sharing fully in the tears of this world, is ultimately distinguished through his or her laughter.

To consider life as tragic is to not believe in the resurrection. It is also to not imitate Christ who shocked as many people with his capacity to enjoy the earth as he did with his challenge to live in the face of the fact that this world is not our true home.

I was taught this lesson by Gustavo Gutierrez, the father of liberation theology. I was once fortunate enough to meet him. He is a man with a passion for justice but he is also a man with a passion for life. I remember an incident some years back when he came to deliver some lectures at the college where I was teaching. My job was to pick him up from the airport, take him to breakfast and get him settled in. I guided him into my car with considerable trepidation for, in my mind, I was transporting an icon.

That feeling, unfair as it was, disappeared when I took him to breakfast in our college cafeteria. He wasn’t a pious icon, he was man, and he was a man who thoroughly enjoys his breakfast!

After loading his plate with a generous sample of everything that our cooks had laid out, he sat down to the table, said a grace, and then made the pronouncement: “I like eating! When I was a child there often wasn’t enough food. Now, when there is, I thoroughly enjoy it!”

He enjoyed good food without apology. He also had the beginnings of a double chin. Hardly what you expect from the father of liberation theology! But then people didn’t expect that of Jesus either.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but it is invariably those who see and live out most clearly the fact that this world is not our true home who also have the ability to enjoy life most fully. Occasionally too they have double chins. My sister would have liked Gutierrez. They would have enjoyed chocolate together.

The best way to thank a gift giver is to thoroughly enjoy the gift.

Nobody gets through grade school without having to write an essay on My Day at the Zoo. One never outgrows the need to write such a piece. The zoos just change.

Recently I was in the gambling capital of North America, Las Vegas, to give a talk on prayer and contemplation at a local church. I had a couple of extra hours before my talk so I headed for the nearest casino, a place called The Gold Coast. Since I’d played a little blackjack at some clerical parties I thought I’d give that a try. So, trying to look as confident and professional as possible, I seated myself at the two-dollar card table.

The dealer, a young woman with a name tag reading: “My name is Henja and I am from Sweden”, did not speak. Her business was not to socialize and so she dealt, poker-faced and silent. The others at the table were not so silent:

“You play much?” asks a young man wearing an LA Dodger baseball cap.

“Sure, all the time.” I answer, “I’m a professional. I make my living gambling. I play all over, even in Monte Cassino.”

“Well, that certainly explains your unorthodox style! Nobody here takes a card when they have 14 and the dealer is showing a a low card.”

A middle-aged woman at my immediate left glares at me every time she loses: “How can I win when you keep taking my cards?”

“Maam,” I say, meeting her stare, “I thought the dealer dealt me that card.”

“You know what I mean! You shouldn’t have drawn a card. It was a high card, it busted you and I needed it.”

“Sorry.”

Two minutes later, it’s her again:

“I can’t believe it. You took my card again! I needed that low card and you took it. How can I win when you keep taking my cards?”

“And you knew it would be a low card?” I ask.

She’s too angry to answer. She keeps losing – we all do.

The kid with the baseball finally says: “I’m outta here. This dealer’s an undertaker. I’m off to another table.”

He’s gone. My bad luck isn’t. Neither is the lady’s to my left. Her mood matches her luck: “You’ve taken my card again! I needed that high card. I can’t win when you keep taking my cards!”

My two hours are coming to an end, as are my patience and my pocket money. I’m dealt a good hand. Finally! I double my bet, my last 4 dollars. I draw a low card, I needed a high one. The lady to my left draws a high card, she needed a low one: “Thanks,” she snarls, “you took my low card!” The dealer draws a good card. I am out of money and out of the game.

“Hope your luck improves,” I say to my lady friend as I leave.

Outside the fresh air is a welcome relief from the smoke-filled casino. The kid with the baseball cap is sitting on the railing. He looks pretting dejected.

“Any luck at another table?” I ask.

“Nope. My luck’s been bad. They’re on a roll in there. I lost big time … Hey, your aren’t really a professional, are you?”

“I am, but not at cards. I’m a priest. I’m here giving some talks at a church.”

“No kidding! Well, that certainly explains your unorthodox style. What are your talks about?”

“Prayer.”

“No kidding! Where are they at? With the way my luck has been running, maybe I could use something like that!”

“I’m at Christ the King, up on Torrey Pines, 7:30 tonight.”

“No kidding! Gee thanks. I might be there.”

Just then my lady friend emerges and from her face I can see that, after I left, someone else must have been taking her cards.

I can’t resist: “Any luck after I left?”

“No, some horrible man kept taking my cards!”

“Did you lose a lot?” I ask, with genuine sympathy.

“Over 400 dollars just this afternoon.”

“No kidding! Well that certainly explains your unorthodox manners!”

“I’m coming back here tonight,” she snarls angrily. “You’d better not be at my table. That’s a warning!”

“No kidding! Gee thanks. I won’t be there!”

Some years ago, I visited the Holy Land. It’s a strangely different place. Nobody doubts that. Virtually every inch of its soil has been soaked in blood, including the blood of Christ himself, and history leaps out at you from every rock.

Ancient things from beyond our time seem to come to surface there and mix with the things of today. When you stand in its sacred spots, you begin to understand why Moses was told to take his shoes off and why, through the centuries, so many wars have been fought over this small strip of desert.

It is aptly named the Holy Land. I walked its ground, barefoot in soul, for several weeks.

Of all the things I saw there, however, including the tomb of Christ itself, none touched me as deeply as did the Church of the Visitation. It stands in sharp contrast to many of the other churches there which mark the key events in Christ’s life.

Unlike these other churches, the Church of the Visitation is a very modest building and is basically unadorned. You don’t see any gold or marble there. Its wooden walls and oak ceiling are plain and mostly bare. However, on the front wall, behind the altar, there is a painting that depicts the scene of the Visitation. It was this painting of Elizabeth and Mary that struck me so deeply.

It’s a picture of two peasant women, both pregnant, greeting each other. Everything about it suggests smallness, littleness, obscurity, dust, small-town, insignificance. What you see is two rather plain-looking women, standing in the dust of an unknown village.

Nothing suggests that either of them, or anything they are doing or carrying, is out of the ordinary or of much significance. Yet, and this is the genius of the painting, all that littleness, obscurity, seeming barrenness, and small-town insignificance makes you automatically ask the question: “Who would have thought it? Who could ever have imagined that these two women, in this obscure town, in this obscure place, in this obscure time, were carrying inside of themselves something that would radically and forever change the world?

Who would have thought it? Yet, it’s true. What these obscure peasant women were gestating and carrying inside of themselves would one day change history more than any army, any philosopher, any artist, any King or Queen, or any entertainment star ever would.

Inside of themselves, they were gestating the Christ and the Prophet. These births changed the world radically. Today we even measure time by the event of those births. We live in the year 1994 AD, that is, after that event.

There is a lesson in that: Never underrate, in terms of world importance, someone living in obscurity who is pregnant with promise. Never underestimate the impact in history of silent, hidden gestation.

We might well meditate this image: Insofar as we have real significance all of us live in obscurity, pregnant with promise, silently, in away hidden to the world, gestating that which will change time and history.

If we understood this, there would be more peace in our lives, one of the raging fires inside of us would torment us much less.

There is a deep restlessness in all of us that can only be stilled by understanding this for all of us live that martyrdom of obscurity, the martyrdom of a life within which we do not have adequate self-expression.

There is a relentless pressure inside of each of us that pushes us to be known, to make a difference, to make our lives count in terms of the big picture. Thus, we yearn to do great things, big things, things that affect beyond the boundaries of the small towns we all live in.

Invariably then we sit inside of our own lives and we feel unknown, small-time, undistinguished and frustrated because almost all of our riches are still unknown to others. We have so much to give to the world, but the world doesn’t know about us.

What we need to bring us some peace is what is expressed in that painting in the Church of the Visitation, namely, that what changes the world is what we give birth to when, in the obscurity and dust of our small towns and within the frustration of lives that will always seem too small for us, we become pregnant with hope and, after a long, humble gestation process, a process which is not advertised or known to the world, we bring that hope to full term.

A songwriter once said: “Many’s the bottle of wine that’s never been drunk—and many’s the thought that’s never been thunk!” I look at what hope did when it was gestated in obscurity and ask: “Who would have thunk it?”

Christmas is like a diamond you hold up in the sun. Every time you move it even a little it gives off yet a different sparkle. It is inexhaustible in the meanings it generates. As we prepare ourselves to celebrate Christmas, let me speak of one of its sparkles that we too rarely examine:

Several years ago, I attended an international symposium on Church in Belgium. It had been organized by Christiane Brusselmanns and one of the speakers at that conference was Michael Rodrigo, an Oblate Priest from Asia who several years later was to be martyred as he said mass in Sri Lanka.

In his address, Michael challenged the churches, especially the First World churches, to examine themselves as to whether they were unheathily turned in upon themselves as opposed to being truly missionary and other-centred. At one point, he highlighted the following statement of Christ: My flesh is food for the life of the world. He went on to ask this question: “What are we trying to do within the life of our churches? Do our churches exist for the life of the world or for their own sake? When we establish any program in our parishes, what really is our aim? Are we trying to better the life of the world or are we trying to simply better the life of our own parish? Is our aim as a church community really to let ourselves be eaten, killed, consumed, so that the world, not we, ourselves, might live?” 

Christ, he re-iterated, gave his body as food for the life of the world and not just as food for the life of believers.

What has all this to do with Christmas and our preparations for it?

Jesus was born in a manger, a place where brute animals, oxen and ass, come to eat. That symbolism is not accidental.   Jesus was born in a trough, a feeding place. This already shows us what Jesus will later on explicitly tell us, namely, that his life and his body are  food for the life of the world.  Christ exists to be eaten … and to be eaten, first of all, by the world, not by the churches. If that is true, and it is, then all of church life and ministry exist for that same reason, they are food to be eaten by the world. Christ lay in a manger, a trough, as a sign that he is food for the ox, sheep, and ass, the world. There is both a challenge and a consolation in that.

The challenge, obviously, is that, as church communities and as individuals, we should never succumb to the temptation of narcissism, that is, we should never become so excessively absorbed with ourselves so as to forget that we exist, precisely, to be eaten by the world. The primary agenda for the church must always be the survival, well-being, and consolation of the world. The church doesn’t exist so that it can thrive and the world can, so to speak, go to the eschatological place of the wicked. The church exists for the sake of the world, not the other way around. Jesus showed us this by lying in a bed of straw.

The consolation is less obvious though, for that reason, not less important. If we meditate the image of Jesus lying in a manger we will, perhaps, feel less sorry for ourselves at those times when we feel like we are being eaten up, literally, by the demands of ministry, family, justice, and the like. When we feel the most sorry for ourselves, when we are over-tired and feel that others are simply eating us alive and that we are not being given the chance to have the kind of life and freedom we would like, we might profitably reflect upon the fact that Jesus was born in a manger, a trough, a place where animals come to feed. The Christ child is meant to be eaten by the world. That too is central to the meaning of Christmas and what it implies vis-a-vis our vocation should also be central in our preparation for Christmas.

Scripture says: Mary gave birth to her first-born and wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger. There is a entire ecclesiology and pastoral theology in that line. Christmas is a time to eat and celebrate, but it is also a time when we should realize more deeply that our vocation, like that of Jesus, is to let ourselves be eaten, as Christ’s flesh which is food for the life of the world.

When I was child, each advent my mother used to set out a little manger for us and ask us, as kids, to place a little piece of straw in it every time we made some small sacrifice: “To make a bed for the baby Jesus.” That’s not bad piety, it’s good theology!

Perhaps the deepest imperative within the entire moral life is that of being non-violent. It undergirds everything else: Thou shalt not violate others! So reads the most basic of all commandments.

But, for all its importance, it is a certain moral minimum. Beyond being non­violent, we are asked to be, positively, peacemakers. However, all efforts at peacemaking must be predicated on non­violence. Violent efforts that try for peace are themselves part of the problem.

With this in mind, let me paraphrase Jim Wallis—who draws these principles from such great peacemakers as Gandhi, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, Thomas Merton and William Stringfellow. Wallis suggests that if our efforts at peacemaking are to be fruitful, both within the intimate circles of our primary communities as well as in the wider circles of social justice, we must truly remain non-violent. That implies the following:

All our actions for peace must be rooted in the power of love and the power of truth and must be done for the purpose of making that power known and not for making ourselves known. Our motivation must always be to open people to the truth and not to show ourselves as right and them as wrong.

Our best actions are those which admit our complicity and are marked by a spirit of genuine repentance and humility. Our worst actions are those that seek to demonstrate our own righteousness, our purity, and our moral distance from the violence we are protesting.

Whenever our pride overtakes our protest we are simply repeating in a political form the self-righteousness judgment of the fundamentalist: “I’m saved and you are not!”

Action done in public always carries with it the great danger of presumption. Hence it should always be done in the spirit of humility and invitation.

Judgment, arrogance and exclusiveness, which so often mark our protest, are signs of spiritual immaturity and protest characterized by such things will have the effect of hardening hearts and cementing people in their present opinions. Protest just as easily perpetuates as dispels public blindness.

Moreover, never has the need for genuine non-violence been greater than now. However, its chief weapon is the application of spiritual force and not the use of coercion. A very serious problem in the peace movement is sometimes the hidden aggression, the manipulation, the assertive ego, the desire for provocation that can work beneath the surface of moral platitudes about the commitment to non-violence.

The rhetorical cloak of non-violence can be used to hide the will to power which is the very foundation of violence. The desire to win over others, to defeat one’s enemies, to humiliate the opposition, are all characteristics of violence and are still too painfully evident in almost all of our peace efforts.

Our anger, our infighting, and our lack of respect for others, is hardly evidence that the will to power has been overcome. We should know by now that violence is of a piece. If that is true, then the violence of dissent is directly linked to the violence of the established order. In fact, it is a mere reflection of it.

Nor may we justify excesses in the peace movement and in ourselves by appealing to a greater violence in the system. The urgency of the present situation calls for more, not less, care in the actions we undertake. At its heart, non­violence does not try to overcome the adversary by defeating him, but by convincing him. It tries to turn an adversary into a friend, not by winning over her, but by winning her over.

As well, patience is central to non­violence. Non-violence is based upon the kind of patience that the Bible speaks of as “enduring all things.” Thomas Merton taught that the root of war is fear. If that is true, then we must become much more understanding of the fears that people have. The most effective peacemakers are those who can understand the fears of others.

Finally, genuine peace-making springs from genuine hope. Bill Stringfellow once scolded a peace group by telling them something to this effect: “I notice in your conversations a drastic omission, the resurrection. The victory of God over death is already assured and our modest task in peacemaking is simply to live in a way that reveals that fact.

“We do not have to triumph over death by our own inspiration, efforts and strategy. We do not have to defeat death all over again. Psalm 58 tells us: ‘Surely there is God who rules over the earth!’ We must never forget that.

”That hope, and not anger, must direct protest. Moreover, that hope, belief in the resurrection, is not a feeling or a mood, it is a necessary choice for survival.”

I believe in the communion of saints!

This is a dogma of our creed upon which we too seldom reflect. What does it mean to believe in a communion of saints?

Simply stated, it means that, as Christians, we believe that we are still in communion with those who have died. Among other things, this says that we can relate to them, speak to them and be spoken to by them.

The bond of love and of family still exists between those who have died and ourselves. We can still be present to each other and influence each others’ lives.

That sounds like fantasy and wishful thinking. Wouldn’t it be nice if that were true! Well, it is true. It’s an article of faith. Sadly, today, we rarely live our lives in the face of that and we are the poorer for it.

There is a rich mysticism, not to mention an immense fountain of grace and consolation, lying untapped here. Allow me to illustrate this with just one kind of an example:

Last winter, I attended a large religious education conference in Los Angeles. Its theme was the resurrection, its logo was the rainbow and its closing liturgy brought together about 6,000 people.

At that Eucharist, after Communion, when all the hymns had been sung and everything was quiet, a young couple walked up to the altar and picked up the microphone. They looked up at the more than 6,000 who were gathered there and shared this story:

About a year ago, their 12-year-old son had died of cancer. He had died after a long struggle. They were, naturally, devastated.

Nothing prepares parents for the death of a child and nothing, on this side of eternity, can soften its blow. Nature itself is set up in reverse: Children are equipped to bury their parents, tough as that is, but not the other way around. Children are meant to outlive their parents.

The morning after their son’s death they were sitting with friends in the living room of their home, drinking coffee and attempting to console each other, when their phone rang. It was a neighbor.

“Quickly, go look out of your front door!” he exhorted. “You’ll see something unique.”

They rushed to look and there, before them, was a rainbow the like of which they had never seen before, in terms of its spectacular color as well as its scope (it extended perfectly without flaw from the edge of one horizon to the edge of the other).

They were, of course, taken by its beauty and by its symbolism (rainbows are a symbol of hope, God’s promise and the resurrection), but they were even more taken by the clear, unmistakeable, intuition that it was their son who was doing these particular fireworks for their benefit.

As they watched in awe, and in faith, the mother heard her son say to her gently: “Mum, this is for you! And because it is hard for you to believe it, I will do it again, the same way, for you tomorrow at this same time!”

All doubts that they had this was some trick of their imaginations or mere wishful thinking induced by fatigue, sorrow and longing, were erased the next day when, at exactly the same time, the identical rainbow re-appeared . Their son was speaking to them and they, I am sure, will now forever know what it means to believe in the communion of saints.

I believe their story, not just because they appeared to be very balanced persons, nor because they had enough nerve to share this in front of thousands of people, but because what they shared is not something weird, exotic, new age or even all that extraordinary.

The story they shared is what the dogma of the communion of saints means when it is taken out of the creedal formulae, out of the theology texts and out of the realm of the abstract, and put into our actual lives.

There is a rich mysticism here, a rich grace, a deep consolation. We must take this item of our creed far more seriously.

Christian tradition puts it into a dogma and that tradition, as G.K. Chesterton once suggested, “may be defined as an extension of the franchise. Tradition means giving, votes to the most obscure of all classes, the dead. It is the democracy of the dead. It refuses to submit to the small and arrogant oligarchy of those who merely happen to be walking around.

“All democrats object to persons being disqualified by the accident of birth; (Christian) tradition objects to their being disqualified by the accident of death” (Orthodoxy, p. 83).

In Brian Moore’s recent novel, No Other Life, his central character, Michael, is a Roman Catholic priest teaching in one of the schools run by his order in Haiti. Fr. Michael, by every appearance, is a very good priest and a very fine person. He strictly keeps his priestly vows and dedicates himself completely to his vocation. Beyond this selflessness, he is also a model of common sense and fidelity.

At he end of the book, however, when he faces his death, Fr. Michael comes to realization that he does not really believe in God. Interestingly, that realization is, for him, not all that painful and empty. It’s more of an insipid thing: “I don’t really believe in God and, in the end, it doesn’t make all that much difference.”  He is not haunted by any painful metaphysical questions surrounding this. He doesn’t ask: “Why did I do all that service, prayer, and sacrifice, if there isn’t any God?” “Why did I think I believed during my whole life, if, now, I realize there isn’t any God?”  “Is this a test, a dark night of the soul?” He asks no such questions and his bland acceptance of his atheism suggests that he has, at some level, known all along that there isn’t any God. He dies an atheist priest, not all that upset about that inconsistency.

That theme, a life of supposed faith washed away by the realization at death that one does not believe in God, is not that uncommon in fiction today. It’s a popular theme, worked over especially by post-Catholic writers. Most of these writers, too, unlike an earlier generation of existential authors (Bergman, Camus, Beckett), do not ask too many painful questions about it, this reversal of a death-bed conversion. They take it as natural, almost intimating that everyone, deep down, knows that there isn’t any God and that those with real honesty admit it, at least to themselves, in the end.

That’s in fiction. Perhaps it’s also true for some in real life. Let me here, however, share some non-fiction, some real life:

My father was a man of faith. Like Brian Moore’s character, Father Michael, he too lived his life in a pretty selfless manner and he too had pretty good common sense. He lived for his God, his church, his family, and his community. He went to church as often as he could and he prayed. He also made it plain to us, his children, that belief in, and worship of, God was the most important single thing anyone could do in this life. He had his faults, admittedly;  but, human weakness notwithstanding, he lived his whole life in the face of his faith.

That faith was to be tested. He was still a relatively young man, 62 years of age, when he was diagnosed with terminal cancer. He fought the cancer, long and hard, just as those clinical books on death and dying prescribe: denial, anger, bargaining.  He most desperately wanted to live, but he lost that battle and that struggle tried his faith. Finally, exhausted, he moved to the final stage in the process of dying, acceptance.

Shortly before he died he turned to some of us, his family, and he said: “You know, during my whole life, I have believed in God, but maybe that’s easier to do when you aren’t facing dying. Now, when I have to face death this squarely, I have to examine that: Do I really believe it?”  There was only the slightest of hesitations before he added: “Yes, I believe it. God exists. What the church says is true. There’s a whole world beyond this one. I haven’t been mistaken. It’s all worth it. There is nothing I would change now!” 

Hearing those words from your own father, as he lies dying, leaves its mark. Sometimes when I struggle with doubts and questions of faith, I come back to that scene and take consolation, and more than that, from the fact that my own father, a very good man with a lot of common sense, stared the deep darkness, death, in the face with faith in his heart and his faith won the day.

We are given faith by those who have it and those persons are never abstract. They’re real. They have names. I was given my faith by my parents, both of whom left this world young, and both of whom left it assuring us, who stayed behind, that the God they had taught us to believe in when we were little, the God who had taught them to accept life both as a celebration and as a mourning and weeping in this valley of tears, is not a figment of some hopeful imagination or some mythical construct that has been socialized into us, but is a real Person who is worth serving both in life and in death.