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.

Years back, as a young professor of theology, I had a dream, to write a book on the question of faith. My hope was to shed some light on why God is hidden to us. Why don’t we see God physically? Why doesn’t God simply show himself to us in such a way that it would remove all doubt?

For a couple of years, in my spare time, I did some reseach. I prepared a bibliography on the question, looked up what many of the saints and classical theologians had to say on the issue, and I began to ask colleagues and friends what they thought. One day, sitting at table in our college cafeteria, I asked a colleague, an elderly man who had been one of my own mentors and who was now a professor emeritus, what he thought on the issue: “Why does God hide himself?” I asked, “Why doesn’t God just appear, physically, beyond doubt, and then we wouldn’t have to have faith, we would know God with certainty?”

His answer took me by surprise, especially because of its directness: He spoke very gently, as was his style, but, after his answer, I decided I would not write that book after all: “Your question is an interesting one,” he said, “If it is asked by a young person and asked with sufficient passion, it can seem like a profound question. But it is not, in the end, profound. What is betrays is a profound lack of understanding of the incarnation! But don’t be discouraged. It is a perennial question. It’s the one that Philip asked Jesus. The answer, therefore, that I will give you is the same one that Jesus gave him: `You can look at all you have seen and heard and still ask that question? To see certain things is to have seen the Father!‘

To ask a question like this is tantamount to looking at the most beautiful day in June, seeing all the trees and flowers in full blossom and asking a friend,  ‘Where is summer?’ To see certain things is to see summer. To see certain things is to see God.”

With those thoughts in mind, I would like here to offer a set of questions that Karl Rahner used to ask people when they asked him about the veil of faith:

-Have you ever kept silent, despite the urge to defend yourself, when you were unfairly treated?

-Have you ever forgiven another although you gained nothing by it and your forgiveness was accepted as quite natural?

-Have you ever made a sacrifice without receiving any thanks or acknowledgement, without even feeling any inward satisfaction?

-Have you ever decided to do a thing simply for the sake of conscience, knowing that you must bear sole responsibility for your decision without being able to explain it to anyone?

-Have you ever tried to act purely for love of God when no warmth sustained you, when your act seemed a leap in the dark, simply nonsensical?

-Have you ever been good to someone without expecting a trace of gratitude and without the comfortable feeling of having been “unselfish”?

If you have had such experiences, Rahner asserts, then you have had experienced God, perhaps without realizing it.

A priest I know tells the story of how he was preaching one Sunday on the parable of the wedding banquet. He was emphasizing the motif of urgency within the parable: “We must respond now!” he thundered, “tomorrow it will be too late!” A man got up and walked out of church. The priest suspected that his homily must have upset the man in some way. However, the next day this man phoned the priest. “The reason I walked out of church yesterday was not that I didn’t like your homily. I left because I understood exactly what you were saying. My brother and I had a fight 12 years ago and we hadn’t spoken to each other since that time. When you pointed out how Jesus warns about delaying coming to the banquet, I knew that if I didn’t act today, tomorrow I wouldn’t have the heart for it. I left church and phoned my brother from the first pay phone I found. We got together last night for a talk and we forgave each other!”

What does God look like? Take the fig tree as your parable, when its leaves grow green then you know that summer is near … look at someone who has forgiven somebody they hated for 12 years and you will know what God looks like.

A little girl, drawing a picture, was asked by her mother: “What are you drawing?” She replied: “A picture of God!” “But we don’t know what God looks like,” her mother objected. “Well,” replied the child, “when I am finished with this then you will know what God looks like!” If we do the things that Rahner suggests then too will draw a picture of God.

091994

American author, Sam Keen, recently published a book entitled, Hymns to an Unknown God. The book is outstanding—not because it is deep, but because it is typical.

What Keen, who is no novice to religion since he holds both a master’s degree in divinity and a doctorate in the philosophy of religion, does in this book is to draw hard the distinction between spirituality (the spiritual quest) and religion (church life), legitimating the former and somewhat denigrating the latter.

He calls himself a “trustful agnostic,” a “recovering Presbyterian” and wears a question mark rather than a cross around his neck. He sees himself as a searcher on a spiritual quest.

But the path of spirituality, in his view, is not the path of organized religion. “Every religion begins with the answers,” he asserts, the spiritual quest “begins exactly the opposite. It begins with the questions.” Within spirituality, unlike religion, “you don’t just surrender. You don’t just obey.”

Moreover, in the spiritual quest you never, in this life, really arrive. For him, once a person settles into the practice of a religion, he or she can no longer claim to be on a spiritual quest. Spirituality has been traded in for religion.

In saying this, Keen speaks for our age. Spirituality is in, religion is out. Typical today is the person who wants faith but not the church, the questions but not the answers, the religious but not the ecclesial, truth but not obedience.

The churches are dying right in the middle of a spiritual renaissance. More and more typical too is the person who understands himself or herself as a “recovering Christian,” as someone whose quest for God has taken them out of the church.

What’s to be said about all this? Is this good or bad? Are we growing up or are we setting human pride against God?

To my mind, it is all of these. What is happening is both good and bad. We are healthily moving beyond infantile submission even as we are, at the same time, arrogantly asserting human pride against faith’s perennial call to obedience.

To begin with, the churches must take this critique seriously. Why are so many people who are sincerely searching for God not turning to the churches? Why is there so much disillusionment with organized religion?

It is futile to argue that the world should perceive us, the churches, more kindly. You can’t argue with a perception! Better to admit our shortcomings. We are, right now, far from being the community we should be: We are intellectually slovenly, we don’t live adequately enough what we preach, we close off questions prematurely, and we radiate too little of the charity, forgiveness and joy of God.

We are not offering enough. Small wonder we are not attractive.

But the Sam Keens, bent on their spiritual quest, must also examine themselves. There are some hard questions that should be asked here too: Isn’t the spiritual quest, when it distinguishes itself from organized religion, a little too glamorous, too easy, too stoic, too saccharinely noble, too individualistic, too clean and too non-committal to ever lead to real self-sacrifice—which, in the end, is what the spiritual quest is all about?

Jesus, Muhammad, Buddha, the great saints, these were not glamorous, anti-heros, Hamlet-type figures, bent on an individualistic spiritual pursuit, understanding themselves as soaring above an intellectually dull and unwashed pack, hanging loose, unable to give their obedience to anything or anybody.

Neither were they afraid to link themselves to actual communities with all the sin, pettiness, dirt and compromise this brings. Jesus was content to die between two thieves, mistaken for someone who was naïve and who had compromised the truth.

In the end, to define spirituality as distinct from religion gets us off the hook in terms of conversion. Why? Because, at the end of the day, one does not have to make a commitment to a real community and one can always escape the crucifixion by continuing the quest.

Bluntly put, I don’t see a lot of people with question marks around their necks being crucified. There is too much glamor and too little commitment in it. Moreover there is also some intellectual dishonesty in it.

The pure quest that does not want a hard answer is ultimately trying to avoid something, actual commitment. As C.S. Lewis puts it: “Thirst is made for water; inquiry for truth.” Sometimes what we “call the free play of inquiry has neither more or less to do with the ends for which intelligence was given than masturbation has to do with marriage.”

The spiritual quest is about questions—and it is also about answers.

We all live with constricted hearts. There is a tightness, an unfreedom, a timidity, a tangle of constrictions, inside of each of us that blocks warmth and intimacy. We try things to get at it, to dissolve it, to free ourselves up.

Thus it is no accident that we are so obsessed with therapy, with sex, with achievement, with intellectual and artistic pursuit, and with quick solace in religion. We are trying to free up our hearts. Sadly, for the most part, we are not succeeding all that well. Why? Because the heart is not set free by the intellect, the groin, nor even the hands. It is set free through blessing. Blessing deconstricts the heart.

And blessing has various components: To bless someone is, first of all, to see them, to genuinely see them, to look at them so that they sense that they are truly being recognized and given adequate reality to. Then, and this need not always be put into words but can be present right in that seeing, to bless someone is to take delight in them, to give them the gaze of admiration, to look at them in a way that says: “You are my beloved child, in you I take delight!”

But that is not all. If I want to really bless someone, I must, in some way, give my life to that person so as to enable him or her to have more life, to really bless someone is to, in some way, die for him or her. Let me try to explain that by an example:

We see this aspect of blessing powerfully portrayed in Victor Hugo’s classic, Les Miserables (both in the book and in the recent musical production). At one point in that story, Jean Val Jean, who is by then an old man, goes in search of Marius, the young man who is in love with his adopted daughter. Initially his motivation for searching out Marius is mixed. He wants to see who this young man is, what he looks like, and form an opinion of him. He is also, at this stage, understandably threatened by this young man who is, after all, taking his daughter way from him. So he goes in search of him. 

He, Jean Val Jean, finds him at the barricades, with a group of idealistic young revolutionaries who, while trying to help the poor, have put themselves into a position where they are all about to be killed in a brutal attack from government forces.  Their position is hopeless. The almost certain possibility is that, tomorrow, when that attack comes, they will all die, including Marius. Jean Val Jean senses their idealism, but he also senses, beneath their bravado, a lot of fear. For all their idealism and courage, they are, underneath it all, still frightened boys.

It is in this situation that he finds young Marius, asleep. Jean Val Jean bends over him and says this prayer of blessing:

He begins by invoking God (“God on high, hear my prayer …”) and then, turning to young Marius, he continues speaking to God, repeating several times: “Look on this boy … he is young, he’s afraid … tomorrow he might die, but, Lord, let him live – let me die, let him live! Let him live!”

Those last lines are the prototype of deep blessing. They explain too why blessings work from the top down – from God to us, from old to young, from empowered to disempowered, from those who have full life to those who have not. They also show what is demanded in a deep blessing, namely, a giving away of life, a dying so that someone else might now have life. A blessing is not just simply an affirmation – “You are a fine young man! “You are a gifted young woman!” “I believe in you!” “I trust you!” These affirmations, good and life-giving as they are, are not enough. To bless someone deeply is to die for them in some real way, to really die, to give up some real life for them.

Good parents, good mothers and fathers, do that for their children. In all kinds of ways, they sacrifice their lives for their children. They die, but their children live. Good teachers do that for their students, good mentors do that for their protegees, good priests do that for their parishioners, good doctors and nurses do that for their patients, good politicians do that for their countries, and any good elder who truly blesses a young person does that for him or her.

Do you want to bless a young person? Give him or her your job! Give him or her some of your power. Step back and let him or her assume some of the leadership you’ve been exercising. Let his or her opinion overrule yours. Look at him or her and, like Jean Val Jean, pray to God: “Let me die! Let him, her, live!”