Virginia Woolf once said that life is what we see in each other’s eyes. Today, sadly, we rarely see each other’s eyes and we rarely see life either because we impersonalize and demonize each other through labels.

It is a terrible scourge, a moral failure, this labelling. A label renders another faceless, an amorphous category and usually, a hated one as well. Through labels we set up faceless demons through which we can give full vent to paranoia.

A generation ago, we did this with communism and its corollary labels: Godless Russia, leftist, Marxist, Soviet and so on. In the face of those labels we could discharge every kind of paranoia and suspicion and we could scapegoat to our hearts’ content.

Thus, for example, we could justify building nuclear bombs and could hate in the name of God. (“We need to be protected from this godless monster!”) Why? Because we were not hating actual persons, with faces, feelings, dreams, pains, families and children. We were hating a faceless monster, without eyes.

One wonders, as Jim Wallis is fond of asking, whether we would have had the same feelings back then had we been shown, regularly, pictures of Soviet families—mothers nursing children, grandparents playing with their grandchildren, husbands and wives agonizing over unpaid bills, lonely young children with innocent trusting eyes staring out at us.

Had we seen the Soviets in those terms, with faces, and not as godless insentient monsters, we might have had less appetite to build all those nuclear weapons. How do you plan for nuclear war when you are actually looking at human faces? But, having never seen their faces, we could rationalize every kind of paranoia.

All wars, ultimately, come about because we no longer look at persons, but rather at ideology and then create the appropriate labels by which to demonize people. Many soldiers, for instance, have commented that they find it almost impossible to kill someone if they are close enough to see that person’s face.

Killing is more easily done from a distance—with mortar shells, bombings and long-range weapons that strike a faceless “enemy” who is not actually seen. It is easier to live with ourselves when the people we have killed are faceless, “collateral damage.”

But this isn’t just true for war and that is my real point here, it is just as true within our church and civil circles: Here we disrespect, justify paranoia, and rationalize lack of elementary charity because we are, in the end, not dealing with real persons, but with faceless liberals, conservatives, feminists, male chauvinists, reactionaries, old fogies, New Agers, good-for-nothings on welfare, valueless yuppies, out-of-date patriarchal bullies, fanatical pro-lifers, family­value-destroying radicals and up-tight fundamentalists, not even to mention a whole other category—geeks, nerds, slobs, neurotics and people with an attitude.

We need not give these persons the love and understanding the Gospel asks for because, thanks to the labels we have already given them, they are not persons at all but demons to be exorcised.

We live in a time of paranoia and hysteria, both of the right and of the left, within society at large. Simply put, there is a lot of hatred, disrespect, slander of others and distortion of the truth around.

Moreover, on all sides, it is rationalized on the highest moral grounds. How is this done? Through labels we demonize each other, strip the faces off of each other and, figuratively and literally, kill each other.

When·is enough enough? When will we see the destructiveness and evil of this? When will we realize what this is really doing to us? When will we look at ourselves—and this congenital propensity to label, impersonalize and demonize—with some courage and honesty?

Despite loud protests to the contrary, despite our professed sensitivities, despite our politically correct indignations, and despite our growing belief that we are morally coming of age, especially in our championing of the poor and the misunderstood, we haven’t, I believe, moved a moral inch beyond previous generations that we look upon for labelling and demonizing certain ethnic and political groups.

The labels have changed and grown more sophisticated, but the charity and respect haven’t increased an iota.

It is time to say, enough!

A recent issue of Sojourners magazine (July 1994), featured articles by two prominent American Roman Catholics, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a leading feminist, and Richard Rohr, the articulate young Franciscan founder of the Centre for Action and Contemplation.

Both had been asked to respond to this question: Why do you stay in the church?

That, given the tensions within Catholicism today, is a good question. Many people, especially people who have been as critical of some of the things happening inside of the church as have Ruether an drohr, have left the church, saying that they can no longer believe in, nor stay in, an institution that has these flaws.

Those participating in this exodus cite a bevy of reasons: the church’s failure to practise justice within its own house, the church’s failure to afford women full equity in structure, recent sexual scandals among the clergy, a history that has always contained elements of injustice, racism and hypocrisy.

“Why stay?” they ask. “Surely this institution is not what Christ intended to mediate grace!”

But Ruether and Rohr are not two persons who think this way. Both make a strong and a clear option to stay with the church, despite its faults—and the reasons each gives for staying, to my mind, offer a valuable corrective for a generation of Catholics that can too easily lose its balance.

Ruether begins her response by giving a devastating critique of the church. By the time she is finished listing all that is wrong with Roman Catholicism as an institution, you are left wondering as to what’s still left standing. In the face of all of that, she asks, “Why stay?”

So why does she stay? Because she still sees grace present in all of this and she says that the proper response to all that’s wrong in the church is not to leave it, but to grow up.

“I suspect that part of our dismay at recognizing the fallibility of the church is our reluctance to grow up, and the way in which certain kinds of ecclesial ‘spirituality’ operate as spiritual infantilization, rather than maturity in faith.

“We are shocked at clerical and corporate ecclesiastical evils a little the way children are shocked and demoralized to discover that their parents are fallible. We can depart in sorrow looking for another impeccable father (or mother), perhaps in an all-wise guru or a preacher of an inerrant Bible. Or we can grow up and become responsible for the church of Christ . . .

“We can look steadily and without denial at the records of our corporate apostasy, not as the defeat of the Gospel, but as the revelation of god’s amazing power to deliver us from even the most monumental efforts to defeat God’s grace.”

Rohr takes a slightly different track, but is equally insightful. He too begins by admitting the church’s faults. He quotes Romano Guardini in his contention that “the church has always been the cross that Christ is crucified on.”

He states that it is easy enough to create a good rationale for leaving the church and adds: “In fact, with the information I have acquired, I might even hurry you out the door.”

But Rohr stays with the church and he urges others to do so. Why? Because for him it is, in the end, the only institution that ultimately offers hope—and it does this despite its flaws.

Those of us who are of sincere will are, he asserts, “trying to preach good news to many disparate groups in our world: youth who want both inspiration and structure, feminists who must know that they have an essential truth, patriarchs who need to be challenged but not dismissed, the simple who need reassurance, the broken who don’t need more words but a healing touch, the seekers who need both depth and patience, the alienated who both need and fear ‘home’, gays and lesbians who need acceptance before agenda, males who need soul work, parents who need skills, the oppressed who need justice and solidarity, believers who need to believe again.”

And, again Rohr’s words, “where else but in the great mystery of church, the living Body of Christ, can all of these find a common hope?”

The church has its faults but, outside of it, what have we got in a world that isn’t working? Private choices? Ideology? Pluralism without purpose? Individuation without community?

In the end, we are before the church like Peter was before Christ: “Where else can we go?”

But, valuable as these perspectives are, in the end, it is two words that provide for both Ruether and Rohr the sufficient reason for staying in the church—grace and forgiveness.

When I was a child, I had a friend, a very good one. We were friends the way only 12-year-olds can be. Ours was an amity sealed with all the emotion, enthusiasm, naivete and loyalty of youth.

We were drawn to the same things, dreamed the same dreams and together did the silly things that 12-year-old boys do. We swapped hockey cards, collected bubble-gum wrappers, hunted for crows’ eggs in neighborhood trees, and we played Chinese checkers and Parcheesi.

How we loved to play Parcheesi! That was our game! We played it for hours, hiding from our elders when we should have been doing our chores.

Childhood has its own deaths. One day we were given the news that my friend’s father was being transferred. My friend and I, 12-year-old boys that we were, were not much consoled by the fact that the transfer was for one year only. To a child, a year is a lifetime.

I was in mourning. For the whole year there would be no best friend, no raids on birds’ nests, no checkers, no Parcheesi. The last night before my friend left we played a last game of Parcheesi.

We were too young to understand ritual, but this was our last supper, our farewell discourse to each other, our seal. When the game was over, we packed up the board. It was given to me, in trust, for the year. It was to remain the symbol of our friendship.

Then, with a sincerity only 12-year-olds can manage, we swore that a year’s separation would not change anything. We would remain best friends.

The year that followed was not easy, especially at first. I missed my friend and though I made new friends, I did not make a new best friend. So sometimes when I felt lonely, I would go to the closet and from its cherished place among my childish possessions I would pull out the Parcheesi board.

At those times, all the ache and joy would flood back in and I would take a calendar and count the months until my friend was to return.

I wrote letters to my friend during that year and even though he didn’t answer, I wasn’t uneasy. Unlike myself, he was not the letter-writing kind.

Never in my adult life have I ever anticipated anything as eagerly as I did, that year, looking forward to my friend’s return. Finally, the big day arrived. His family had come back and I headed for their house with our precious board tucked under my arm.

A surprise awaited me.

I met my friend alright, but it was not the same person with whom I had collected bubble-gum wrappers and raided crows’ nests. The young man I found stretched out on a sofa was four inches taller than the year before, he no longer wore his hair in a crewcut and he was smoking a cigarette.

Worse still, he was with another boy from our neighborhood, an older boy, a big, tough kid, someone whom he and I had formerly avoided.

Intuition is merciless. It took me less than a second to realize that things were not the same, would never be the same. My friend, I suspect, recognized something similar and was, I suspect too, as disappointed—for we stared at each other in silence.

I forget what exactly eventually we did say to each other, but, whatever it was, it did not do much for the distance that was now between us. After a few awkward moments, he turned from me to his new friend.

“Remember that Yoblonski kid?” he said. “Some loser he is! He probably hasn’t been more than 100 miles from here in his life! Probably still collecting bubble-gum cards!

He crushed out a half-smoked cigarette and got up from the sofa. His friend snickered and I suddenly became quite self-conscious about the Parcheesi board under my arm. Then he and his friend left the room punching each other all about.

I returned home, carrying the Parcheesi board. I put it on the dressing table, walked over to the mirror and, for a good long time, studied my crew-cut hair. Then I cried for the last time as a child.

That was more than 30 years ago. Those years have been kind to me. I’ve been blessed with many friends. I’ve grown four inches taller and have let my hair grow out.

But, through all these years, I’ve kept that Parcheesi board and I am saddened whenever I look at it, not because I feel back through all those years to a best friend and the times we had together—but because I think of the fierce loyalty of youth, how it can be lost and how people can grow apart.

A recent issue of Sojourners magazine (July, 1994), featured articles by two prominent American Roman Catholics, Rosemary Radford Ruether, a leading feminist, and Richard Rohr, the articulate young Franciscan founder of the Center for Action and Contemplation. Both had been asked to respond to this question: Why do you stay in the Church?

That, given the tensions within Catholicism today, is a good question. Many people, especially people who have been as critical of some of the things happening inside of the Church as have Ruether and Rohr, have left the church, saying that they can no longer believe in, nor stay in, in an institution that has these flaws. Those participating in this exodus cite a bevy of reasons: the church’s failure to practice justice within its own house, the church’s failure to afford women full equality in structure, recent sexual scandals among the clergy, a history that has always contained elements of injustice, racism, and hypocrisy. “Why stay?” they ask, “surely this institution is not what Christ intended to mediate grace!”

But Ruether and Rohr are not two persons who think this way.  Both make a strong and a clear option to stay with the church, despite its faults – and the reasons each gives for staying, to my mind, offer a valuable corrective for a generation of Catholics that can too easily lose its balance.

Ruether begins her response by giving a devastating critique of the church. By the time she is finished listing all that is wrong with Roman Catholicism as an institution, you are left wondering as to what’s still left standing. In the face of all of that, she asks: “Why stay?”

So why does she stay? Because she still sees grace present in all of this and she says that the proper response to all that’s wrong in the church is not to leave it, but to grow up. “I suspect that part of our dismay at recognizing the fallibility of the church is our reluctance to grow up, and the way in which certain kinds of ecclesial ‘spirituality’ operate as spiritual infantilization, rather than maturity in faith. We are shocked at clerical and corporate ecclesiastical evils a little the way children are shocked and demoralized to discover that their parents are fallible. We can depart in sorrow looking for another impeccable father (or mother), perhaps in an all-wise guru or a preacher of an inerrant Bible. Or we can grow up and become responsible for the Church of Christ. … We can look steadily and without denial at the records of our corporate apostasy, not as the defeat of the gospel, but as the revelation of God’s amazing power to deliver us from even the most monumental efforts to defeat God’s grace.”       

Rohr takes a slightly different track, but is equally insightful. He, too, begins by admitting the church’s faults. He quotes Romano Guardini in his contention that “the church has always been the cross that Christ is crucified on.” He states that it is easy enough to create a good rationale for leaving the church and adds: “In fact, with the information I have acquired, I might even hurry you out the door.”

But Rohr stays with the church, and he urges others to do so. Why? Because for him it is, in the end, the only institution that ultimately offers hope – and it does this despite its flaws: Those of us who are of sincere will are, he asserts, “trying to preach good news to many disparate groups in our world: youth who want both inspiration and structure, feminists who must know that they have an essential truth, patriarchs who need to be challenged but not dismissed, the simple who need reassurance, the broken who don’t need more words but a healing touch, the seekers who need both depth and patience, the alienated who both need and fear ‘home’, gays and lesbians who need acceptance before agenda, males who need soul work, parents who need skills, the oppressed who need justice and solidarity, believers who need to believe again.”

And, again Rohr’s words, “where else but in the great mystery of church, the living Body of Christ, can all of these find a common hope?” The church has its faults but, outside of it, what have we got in a world that isn’t working? Private choices? Ideology? Pluralism without purpose? Individuation without community? In the end, we are before the church like Peter was before Christ: “Where else can we go?”

But, valuable as these perspectives are, in the end, it is two words that provide for both Ruether and Rohr the sufficient reason for staying in the church – grace and forgiveness.

James Hillman, who is perhaps America’s most fertile thinker, suggests that it is our inferiorities that build up our souls. His view is that it is not our strengths that give us depth and character, but our weaknesses.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but more of us are rendered superficial by our successes than by our failures, more of us are torn apart by our strengths than by our weaknesses. Why is it like that?

Reflecting on this, I recall a time some years back when I was a young student studying psychology and having, one evening, the privileged experience of being at a seminar with the renowned Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski.

He had just given us a lecture on a concept which he called “positive disintegration.” His theory was that we grow by, first, falling apart. At one point, I raised this objection: “Can’t we also grow by being built up by our successes, by taking in positive affirmation and letting it purify us of our selfishness?”

His answer supports Hillman: “Theoretically, yes; we can grow through our successes, just as easily as we can through our failures.

“But I can say this, through more than 40 years of psychiatric practice I have rarely seen it. Almost always deep growth takes place through the opposite—our death, our losses, our dark nights of the soul.”

He, like Hillman, believed that it is, in the end, our inferiorities that build up our souls. Hence, an important exercise in the spiritual life is that of learning to listen to our inferiorities.

Thus, for example, it is generally the least gifted member of the family, the one the family is most publicly ashamed of, more so than the most gifted member of the family, who most enriches a family. Ask any family that has a handicapped member.

Moreover, ask any family who has a handicapped member what they think has given them depth, compassion and understanding? They will, as does Christopher de Vinck in his little masterpiece, The Power of the Powerless, A Brother’s Legacy of Love, tell you that soul comes from inferiority. It is weakness, limit, shame and powerlessness that bring depth.

What has made us deep persons? What has taught us compassion? Our successes? The things we have been praised for? Those qualities of body or mind which make us superior to others? That perfect body that everyone envies us for? That athletic achievement that is one-in-a-million? That summa cum laude that is the envy of our classmates? That perfect home that is the envy of our neighbors? Have these given us soul? Are these what make us interesting?

To the contrary, our souls, precisely in so far as they have depth, strength, compassion and hold interest for others, have been shaped by something quite different: the fear that I will gain weight and end up looking like my mother, that shame that I feel because my teeth aren’t straight, the birthmark that I can’t hide, the blemishes that set me apart, the fat around my waist and hips that humbles me, the fear that I am not smart enough, not interesting enough, that my background isn’t good enough, my phobias, my timidities, my plain and simple inadequacies, these, coupled with the diapers I’ve had to change, the humiliations I endure in my work, in my marriage·and in my family that I am powerless to do anything about, the insults and taunts I received on the playground as a child, my drunken stepfather, these are what give me depth of soul.

It is not that these are, in and of themselves, good; it is just that when we listen to them we grow deep. They build up our souls.

These inferiorities, these humiliations, are not things to be cured from, things to be solved, things to be ignored, things to be buried as private and past shames. They are to be listened to. They are entries into the depth of our souls.

Daniel Berrigan was once asked to give a talk on God. How do we listen to God? He surprised his audience. He gave no theological treatise, he simply described how he goes regularly and sits at a bed­side of a young boy who is deaf, mute, paralysed and unable to react in any way to anything that is around him. He just lies in bed, helpless, powerless, unable to say or do anything.

Berrigan goes and sits by his bedside. Nothing is said and nothing seemingly is exchanged. But, says Berrigan, “I sit by his helplessness and I know that in this powerlessness God is speaking—and speaking in the only way that God can speak in this world!”

Inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation—forgers of depth, of soul, the voice of God!

Several years ago, I attended the funeral of a young man who had been killed in a traffic accident. From nearly every point of view he died in less tha ideal circumstances. He was still very young, not yet 30 years old, had come from a very traditional Catholic family, but had, for the past several years, not been to church, been sexually promiscuous, and died intoxicated. Hardly the paradigm for a Christian death! 

I was the presiding priest at the funeral and as I looked around the congregation, at his family, his relatives, and his friends, I saw not just a deep sadness about his loss, but also a real fear for his salvation. These were good people present, good Christians, who were worried that this young man – whom we all knew and whom we all knew to have, underneath his adolescent irresponsibility, a good, sincere heart – might now be in hell because he had, by all surface appearance, died outside of grace, in serious sin.  A woman, an aunt of his, had commented to me the previous evening, at the wake: “I wish I were God, running the gates of heaven. I would let him in, despite of the way he died … he had such a good heart!” 

Her comment became the basis for my homily within which I assured everyone present that this young man, with his good heart, was, right now, being solidly, lovingly, and joyfully embraced by God – not unlike the prodigal son. If we, with our weak understanding and imperfect compassion were able to see through this young man’s struggles to the goodness of his heart, how much more so God? Sometimes we do not give God much credit for intelligence, compassion, and forgiveness!

We teach that God is unconditional love and seldom, in fact never, take that seriously enough. Our generation likes to believe that we have freed ourselves from some older fears – within which God was sometimes seen too much as Someone with a big stick, ready to punish us for every weakness and infidelity, or as Someone with a big book, recording every one of our sins in view of some great future reckoning. We have moved a bit beyond this conception, though not nearly as much as we give ourselves credit for. By and large, our God is still a vindictive God, a petty God, a stupid, non-compassionate God. In conservative circles, God is hung-up on orthodoxy, of dogma and morals. In liberal circles, God is hung-up on social justice. In neither circle is He very joyous, understanding, and compassionate.

We are still a long ways from appropriating the God that Jesus incarnated. Do we ever really take the unconditional love of God seriously? Do we ever really take the joy of God seriously? Do we ever really believe that God loves us long before any sin we commit and long after every sin we will ever commit? Do we ever really believe that God still, unconditionally, loves Satan, and everyone in hell, and that God is, even now, willing to open the gates of heaven to them? Do we ever really take seriously how wide is the embrace of God? Do we ever believe Julian of Norwich when she tells us that God sits in the centre of heaven, smiling, his face completely relaxed, looking like a marvellous symphony? No. 

Except for rare, graced, moments we still believe in a God who is hyper-serious, wired, intense, pained, disappointed in us, disappointed in the world, and far from unconditionally forgiving. 

Yet the deep struggle of all religion is to enter into the joy of God.

Some years ago, while I was doing a 30-day Ignatian retreat, my director, a wise, though not very old, Jesuit, asked me to meditate the scourging of Jesus by the Roman soldiers. He gave me the text from scripture where Peter out of fear betrays Jesus, denying that he knows him and follows at a safe distance, pretending he is not one of his followers. Then, just after Jesus has been scourged and humiliated, he turns and looks Peter square in the face. 

“In your meditation, pretend you are Peter,” my director instructed me. “Let Jesus look at you, really look you in the face, then come back and tell me what you saw in that face.” I did the meditation a number of times, but every time I contemplated Jesus’ face I saw the face of someone very good who loved me – my father, an intimate friend, my mentor – but the face I saw showed, besides love, something else, pained disappointment in me. My director made me do the meditation over and over until, finally, in a graced moment, I saw what Peter must have seen, and what made him go out into the night and weep bitterly, namely, a softness, acceptance, and non-dissappointment beyond what any human being has ever shown me.

There is a virus sweeping the Western world and infecting most of us with a new disease. It comes complete with a high fever. The sickness? The debility and self-focus that come from the feeling that I am a victim, that I am being hard-done by, that the structures of life are particularly unjust to me.

Today we see this everywhere. It seems no group or individual is immune. Everyone feels the victim.

At an obvious level, we see this played out in the tensions surrounding gender: Both women and men feel duly victimized. Women feel that they have been victimized by men, by patriarchal structures, by biology, by a male God, and by history in general. Because of this, many women carry a deep archetypal anger. Men, and this comes as a surprise to most women, feel that they are victims, that the industrial revolution took them away from their homes and their children and took their fathers away from them. They are the ones who history and circumstance forced to do the killing (of other men in war, of animals for food). Many men today feel a deep archetypal sadness. Both genders feel hard done by and both are far from healthy.

And we see this dynamic everywhere. People who have left their churches often feel hurt by those churches and luxuriate in the scars. Church leaders, on the other hand, themselves feel victimized because they have become the symbolic lightening rods around which virtually every type of anger, shortcoming, and hatred can constellate. Persons on welfare feel victimized by a society which cannot provide them with work, just as those who are working and paying the taxes from which welfare takes its money themselves feel victimized by those whom they perceive as getting a free ride. Almost every ethnic group in the Western world portrays itself as the victim, just as the white majority themselves now feel victimized. Everywhere there is a certain sense of anger, of outrage even, at the unfairness of it all.

Moreover what we see within groups is paralleled in individuals. Most of us have a paranoid conviction of personal injustice. Life has not been fair to us. We have been abused, taken-for-granted, used, not given equal access, or not given a fair shake. We feel victims of racism, sexism, family violence, incest, sexual abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, cultural abuse, of something unfair – and we are now reacting to life appropriately, with anger and rage.

Hence we are obsessed with rights, with claiming them, and with suing whoever who might even accidentally or indirectly infringe upon them. North American society, in particular, is obsessed with rights. We have Human Rights Commissions working overtime to deal with the multiple indignations that arise when everyone in a culture feels victimized, analyzes life through a victim-perpetrator typology, is mad at the world, and is in an ideological sulk.

Where does that leave us at the end of the day? Communally, it leaves us fragmented, raw, living a certain emotional apartheid, and unable to build real political and ecclesial communities because, while we have rights, we don’t have equal responsibilities. In the Western world we have Charters of Rights and Human Rights Commissions but we don’t have their necessary counterpart, Charters and Commissions on Human Responsibilities. In a climate where everyone feels victimized the focus will always be on rights. While this may be good and necessary in many non-Western societies at present, in the Western world it is a focus that betrays an unhealthy self-obsession. We are too narcissistic to have the heart and resiliency for community.

Moreover, in our private lives this sense of being the victim has rendered us unhappy and made it hard for us to genuinely reach out in love. Why? Because when I feel victimized, it is impossible to feel gratitude and delight, to count my blessings.  As such, it becomes equally arduous to be unselfish since gratitude, in the end, undergirds all love and virtue. When my primary identity is that of being a victim – “I have been abused! I am a woman! I am a man! I am a minority! I come from a dysfunctional family! My rights have been violated!” – I, like a patient in a hospital, am someone to be ministered to, someone who must first undergo a convalescence before being capable of ministering much to others. When I feel the victim I do not have the resiliency to absorb the necessary give and take of community, nor do I have the heart to live the dialectic of love that Christ proposed, namely, that if I want love and forgiveness I should, first, go out and give them to others. When I feel as victim, I am not likely to be living the Prayer of St. Francis. 

James Hillman, who is perhaps America’s most fertile thinker, suggests that it is our inferiorities that build up our souls. His view is that it is not our strengths that give us depth and character but our weaknesses.

Passing strange, yet strangely true, but more of us are rendered superficial by our successes than by our failures, more of us are torn apart by our strengths than by our weaknesses. Why is it like that?

Reflecting on this, I recall a time some years back when I was a young student studying psychology and having, one evening, the privileged experience of being at a seminar with the renowned Polish psychologist, Casmir Dabrowski. He had just given us a lecture on a concept which he called “positive disintegration”. His theory was that we grow by, first, falling apart. At one point, I raised this objection: “Can’t we also grow by being built up by our successes, by taking in positive affirmation and letting it purify us of our selfishness?”

His answer supports Hillman: “Theoretically, yes, we can grow through our successes, just as easily as we can through our failures. But I can say this, through more than 40 years of psychiatric practice I have rarely seen it. Almost always deep growth takes place through the opposite – our deaths, our losses, our dark nights of the soul.”  He, like Hillman, believed that it is, in the end, our inferiorities that build up our souls. Hence, an important exercise in the spiritual life is that of learning to listen to our inferiorities.

Thus, for example, it is generally the least gifted member of the family, the one the family is most publicly ashamed of, more so than the most gifted member of the family, who most enriches a family. Ask any family that has a handicapped member. Moreover, ask any family who has a handicapped member what they think has given them depth, compassion, and understanding? They will, as does Christopher de Vinck in his little masterpiece, The Power of the Powerless, A Brother’s Legacy of Love, tell you that soul comes from inferiority. It is weakness, limit, shame, and powerlessness that bring depth.

What has made us deep persons? What has taught us compassion? Our successes? The things we have been praised for? Those qualities of body or mind which make us superior to others? That perfect body that everyone envies us for? That athletic achievement that is one-in-a-million? That Summa Cum Laude that is the envy of our classmates? That perfect home that is the envy of our neighbours? Have these given us soul? Are these what make us interesting? 

To the contrary, our souls, precisely in so far as they have depth, strength, compassion, and hold interest for others, have been shaped by something quite different: the fear that I will gain weight and end up looking like my mother, the shame that I feel because my teeth aren’t straight, the birthmark that I can’t hide, the blemishes that set me apart, the fat around my waists and hips that humbles me, the fear that I am not smart enough, not interesting enough, that my background isn’t good enough, my phobias, my timidities, my plain and simple inadequacies, these, coupled with the diapers I’ve had to change, the humiliations I endure in my work, in my marriage, and in my family that I am powerless to do anything about, the insults and taunts I received on the playground as a child, my drunken stepfather, these are what give me depth of soul.

It is not that these are, in and of themselves, good; it is just that when we listen to them we grow deep. They build up our souls. These inferiorities, these humiliations, are not things to be cured from, things to be solved, things to be ignored, things to be buried as private and past shames. They are to be listened to. They are entries into the depth of our souls.

Daniel Berrigan was once asked to give a talk on God. How do we listen to God? He surprised his audience. He gave no theological treatise, he simply described how he goes regularly and sits at the bedside of a young boy who is deaf, mute, paralysed, and unable to react in any way to anything that is around him. He just lies in bed, helpless, powerless, unable to say or do anything. Berrigan goes and sits by his bedside. Nothing is said and nothing, seemingly, is exchanged. But, says Berrigan, “I sit by his helplessness and I know that in this powerlessness God is speaking – and speaking in the only way that God can speak in this world!” Inferiority, powerlessness, humiliation – forgers of depth, of soul, the voice of God!