Welcome to Rolheiser

What if we all were more consistent? What if we all had wider loyalties? What if we were slower to dismiss others´ ideas? What if we took seriously the biblical idea that God´s revelation comes mostly in what is strange and foreign to us? What if we all took to heart the idea that a little learning is a dangerous thing, that a little ideology is more dangerous still, and that other peoples´ passion for truth might be just as real as our own? What if we all remembered that a heresy is a truth nine-tenth spoken? What if?
What if the pious were to become more liberal and the liberals were to become more pious? What if those who are involved in prayer groups were to become equally as involved within social action? What if those with a passion for social action were to become equally as obsessed with private prayer and private morality? What if the pious and the liberal were to become more understanding of each other?
What if liberals were to become as known for their humility, respect of others, and personal prudence as they are known for their social concern? What if conservatives were to define family values widely enough to include the welfare of the poor and of all races? What if Evangelicals were to get serious about justice and justice groups were to get serious about Jesus?
What if liberals were to draw more prudent boundaries even as they challenge others beyond rigidity? What if conservatives were suddenly to push for a greater risk and openness even as they defend the hard-won wisdom of tradition? What if both liberals and conservatives were able to do as Jesus did and bring out from their store the old as well as the new?
What if Pro-Life groups were also to become as known for their defense of the poor, ethnic minorities, the ecology, and the imprisoned? What if Pro-Choice groups were to champion, in the name of women, the most defenseless of all groups in the world, the unborn? What if both groups were to become renowned for the gentleness, their respect of others, and their willingness to sit down and calmly discuss anything? What if these two groups began to pray together?
What if both women and men were to adopt an attitude of sympathy towards each other, recognizing as Virginia Woolf says, that "life, for both of us, is arduous, difficult, and a perpetual struggle"? What if both men and women were more gentle, less cynical?
What if the church began to challenge people to enjoy sex even as it teaches non-negotiably the value of chastity? What if secular culture were to preach the value of chastity even as it challenges towards liberation from sexual repression? What if both, the church and the world, recognized the importance of what the other is saying regarding sexuality?
What if all the Christian churches would begin to focus on the things we share in common (a common God, a common Christ, a common scripture, a common creed, many fundamental dogmas, 2000 years of mostly-shared history) instead of upon the things that separate us? What if all churches would focus as much on who is living in charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, long-suffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity, as on who is dogmatically right?
What if all the people on spiritual quests who are agnostic about their churches were able to understand the importance of involvement in a concrete historical community? What if we all understood more clearly that only obedience and genuflection can save us from being slaves to the pride and wounds of our own egos? What if the churches were to become as known for their challenge to be free-thinking as they are for their challenge to obedience? What if both, the churches and the emerging non-ecclesial spiritualities, were to be more self-effacing, less righteous, less judgmental?
What if theologians were to become as renowned for their children's stories as they are for their attention to hermeneutics? What scriptural fundamentalists were to read the scriptural commentaries of Raymond Brown? What if liturgists were appreciated as much for their practical judgment as they are for their sense of the tradition and aesthetics? What if those who planned the liturgies in your parish understood basic human boredom and tiredness?
What if religious writers were genuinely as interested in bringing God's consolation and challenge to the world as they are in their own reputations? What if all columnists and editorial writers simply forgot about the labels of liberal and conservative for awhile and wrote up things as they appear on a given day?
What if we were all able to stretch our hearts in new ways to be open to a God and a truth that is forever beyond us? What if we all took more seriously the fact that God is ineffable and all of our language about God is, in se, inadequate?
Certainly we would all be more compassionate - and considerably easier to live with!”

We Cannot Not Disappoint
Each Other In Love

“Almost as a signature to her work, novelist Anita Brookner, makes this comment: The first task of a couple in marriage is to console each other for the fact that they cannot not disappoint each other.
The very way that we are made precludes ever having, in this life, a oneness of mind, heart and body that fulfills us in such a way that there is no disappointment. Our longing is simply too wide. We long for the infinite and are built for it, and so we wake to life and consciousness with longings as deep as a Grand Canyon without a bottom.
In this life, outside of rare and very transitory mystical experiences, there is no consummation with another person (sexual, emotional, psychological or even spiritual) that is so deep and all-embracing that it excludes all distance, shadow and emptiness.
In essence, there is no union which fulfills perfectly the Genesis prescription that "two become one flesh."
No matter how close a marriage or a friendship, two can never ultimately become one. Somewhere, we always sleep alone.
No love or friendship ever fully takes away our separateness. Sometimes sexual electricity or emotional or spiritual affinity can promise such a oneness, but in the end it cannot folly deliver. No matter how deep and powerful a union, ultimately we remain, and need to remain, captains of our own hearts, minds and bodies.
In this life we are always, to some degree, in exile from each other. Where we feel this most deeply is not in our sexual isolation, but in our moral separateness. What we crave even more deeply than sexual unity is moral affinity, to be truly one heart with another. More than we desire a lover, we desire a kindred spirit, a soul mate.

IT´S WHEN WE TRY TO BE CAPTAIN OF SOMEBODY ELSE´S SOUL (MORE SO EVEN THAN OF HIS OR HER BODY) THAT WE RAPE SOMEONE

If this is true, then the deepest violations of each other are also not sexual but moral. Its when we try to be captain of somebody else's soul (more so even than of his or her body) that we rape someone. And it is our failure to accept that we will always be somehow separate from each other that creates the pressure inside of us to unhealthily try to be captain of someone else's soul. We violate another's separateness precisely because we cannot accept the disappointment of love.
We cannot not be disappointed in love because, in the end, we are all, in some way, limited, inadequate, blemished, dull and boring. None of us is God. No matter how rich our personalities or attractive our bodies, none of us can indefinitely excite and generate novelty, sexual electricity and emotional pleasure within a relationship.
A relationship is like a long trip and, as Dan Berrigan puts it, "there's bound to be some long dull stretches. Don't travel with someone who expects you to be exciting all the time."
What's the lesson in this? Stoicism and cynicism about love and romance?
To the contrary, recognizing that we cannot not disappoint each other in love is what makes it possible for us to remain inside of marriage, friendship, celibacy and respect. Its when we demand not to be disappointed that we grow angry, make unrealistic demands and put pressure on each other's moral and sexual integrity.
Conversely, when we recognize the limits of love we can begin to console each other in our friendships and our marriages. In that consolation, since it touches so deeply the core of our souls, we can, in fact, begin to find the threads that can bind us into a oneness of heart beyond disappointment.”
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Tex. The Catholic Northwest Progress, September 6, 2007

Are we jealous because God is generous?

“John Shea gave me those words and I understood them a little better recently as I stood in line at an airport: I'd checked in for a flight, approached security, saw a huge lineup, and accepted the fact that it would take at least 40 minutes to get through it.
I was alright with the long wait and moved patiently in the line - until, just as my turn came, another security crew arrived, opened a second scanning machine, and a whole lineup of people, behind me, who hadn't waited the 40 minutes, got their turns almost immediately. I still got my turn as 1 would have before, but something inside of me felt slighted and angry: “This wasn't fair! I'd been waiting for 40 minutes and they got their turns at the same time as I did!” I'd been content waiting, until those who arrived later didn't have to wait at all. I hadn't been treated unfairly, but some others had been luckier than I'd been.
That experience taught me something, beyond the fact that my heart isn't always huge and generous. It helped me understand something about Jesus' parable concerning the workers who came at the 11th hour and received the same wages as those who'd worked all day and what is meant by the challenge that is given to those who grumbled about the unfairness of this: “Are you envious because I'm generous?”
Are we jealous because God is generous? Does it bother us when others are given unmerited gifts and forgiveness?
You bet! And ultimately that sense of injustice, of envy that someone else caught a break is a huge stumbling block to our happiness. Why7 Because something in us reacts negatively when it seems that life is not making others pay the same dues as we're paying.
In the Gospels we see an incident where Jesus goes to the synagogue on a Sabbath, stands up to read, and quotes a text from Isaiah - except he doesn't quote it fully but omits a part. The text (Isaiah 61:1-2) would have been well known to his listeners and it describes Isaiah's vision of what will be the sign that God has finally broken into the world and irrevocably changed things. And what will that be?
For Isaiah, the sign that God is now ruling the earth will be good news for the poor, consolation for the broken hearted, freedom for the enslaved, grace abundant for everyone, and vengeance on the wicked. Notice though, when Jesus quotes this, he leaves out the part about vengeance. Unlike Isaiah, he doesn't say that part of our joy will be seeing the wicked punished.

THE JOYS OF HEAVEN WILL NOT INCLUDE SEEING HITLER SUFFER

In heaven we will be given what we're owed and more (unmerited girt, forgiveness we don't deserve, joy beyond imagining) but, it seems, we will not be given that catharsis we so much want here on earth, the joy of seeing the wicked punished.
The joys of heaven will not include seeing Hitler suffer. Indeed the natural itch we have for strict justice (“An eye for an eye”) is exactly that, a natural itch, something the gospels invite us beyond. The desire for strict justice blocks our capacity for forgiveness and thereby prevents us from entering heaven where God, like the Father of the Prodigal Son, embraces and forgives without demanding a pound or flesh for a pound of sin.
We know we need God's mercy, but if grace is true for us, it has to be true for everyone; if forgiveness is given us, it must be given everybody; and if God does not avenge our misdeeds. God must not avenge the misdeeds of others either. Such is the logic of grace and such is the love of the God to whom we must attune ourselves.
Happiness is not about vengeance, but about forgiveness; not about vindication, but about unmerited embrace; and not about capital punishment, but about living beyond even murder.
It is not surprising that, in some of the great saints, we see a theology bordering on universalism, namely, the belief that in the end God will save everyone, even the Hitlers. They believed this not because they didn't believe in hell or the possibility of forever excluding ourselves from dod, but because they believed that God's love is so universal, so powerful, and so inviting that, ultimately, even those in hell will see the error of their ways, swallow their pride, and give themselves over to love. The final triumph of God, they felt, will be when the devil himself converts and hell is empty.
Maybe that will never happen. God leaves us free. But, when I, or anyone else, is upset at an airport, at a parole board hearing, or anywhere else where someone gets something we don't think he or she deserves, we have to accept that we're still a long ways from understanding and accepting the kingdom of God.”

Lying Is The Worst Form Of Darkness

A FRIEND OF MINE, an alcoholic in recovery, is fond of saying: “Alcoholism is only 10 per cent about a chemical, and 90 per cent about dishonesty. You can drink, as long as you do so honestly.”
He draws a wider moral axiom from this, adding: “In fact, you can do anything, as long as you don't have to lie about it! It's dishonesty, living a double life that kills the soul and kills families.” He's right. It's no accident that, in scripture, Satan is called "the prince of lies," not the prince of sex or the prince of greed. More than anything else, its lying that corrupts the soul, destroys relationships, and sets itself against light. Lying is darkness, the worst form of it.
This is dear in scripture. Jesus tells us that all sins can be forgiven, except one: If someone should blaspheme the Holy Spirit, he says, that would constitute an "unforgivable sin." How does one blaspheme against the Holy Spirit? Why is this unforgivable?
The unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit begins with lying, with rationalization, with the refusal to acknowledge the truth. But we don't commit this sin easily, overnight, the first time we tell a lie. We commit it down the line, through a sustained series of lies, long after we first told a lie to our loved ones and began to hide important parts of our lives from them. The soul warps slowly, like an old board soaked too often in the rain. It's not the first time it gets wet that makes the warp.
We commit the sin against the Holy Spirit when we lie for so long that we believe our own lies. If we lie long enough, eventually light begins to look like darkness and darkness begins to look like light. That's especially true of the lie of a double life, when we are no longer honest with our loved ones. If we do that long enough, eventually our betrayals begin to look like virtue, our lies like the truth, and what our families, faith, and churches stand for begins to look like falsehood, death, darkness.
Our sin then becomes unforgivable because we no longer want to be forgiven or deem any need to be forgiven. When a sin is unforgivable it's because we don't want to be forgiven, not because we've crossed some moral line in the sand beyond which God will no longer tolerate our behaviour.
The blockage is rather that what we once saw as truth (honesty, faith, family, fidelity, health through transparency) now looks like falsehood and the behaviour we once had to hide from others and lie about now seems as virtue.
We commit the unforgivable sin against the Holy Spirit when we live so long inside of a lie that our souls can no longer recognize truth or forgiveness. That's why Martin Luther warned: "Sin honestly!"
In John's Gospel, Jesus doesn't talk about the sin against the Holy Spirit, but gives its lesson instead in reverse. He tells us that the single condition to enter into the kingdom, to go to heaven, is to refuse to lie, even if we are weak and sinful. Thus, in Chapter 9, John tells the story of a man who comes to faith in Jesus even though he is not particularly interested in faith or religion. He comes to faith and commitment simply because he refuses to tell a lie. Because the man refused to lie, Jesus eventually found him.
About 15 years ago, a young man, still in his twenties, produced an award-winning movie. Sex, Lies, and Videotapes. The story is rather simplistic and crass at times, but overall teaches a lesson that could be from John's Gospel: The hero of the story, a young man with a bad history in the area of sexuality, resolves to make himself better by making a vow to never again tell a lie, even d very small one. Like the man who's born blind in John's Gospel, that vow brings him to health. He gets better, much better. He then sets up a video camera and invites people to come and tell their stories. Those who tell the truth also get better, healthier, and those who lie and hide their infidelities continue to deteriorate in both health and happiness. The truth does set us free.
In her book, Guidelines for Mystical Prayer, Ruth Burrows describes what it means to die a "happy death." To die in a good way, she states, is not a question of whether or not death catches us in a morally good moment or a morally bad one (dying drunk in a bar as opposed to dying in a church). Rather, to die a happy death is to die in honesty, wilhout pretence, without the need to lie about our lives.
Only a saint, she says, can afford a saint's death. The task for the rest of us is to die in honesty, as sinners asking God to forgive us for a life of weakness.
We need too to live that way.”

What would you feel if God suddenly walked into a room? Fear? Shame? Joy? Apprehension? Panic? A desire to hide? Relief when God finally left? Indeed, how would we even recognize God should God walk into a room?
Jane Tyson Clement, a poet and a member of the Bruderhof community, fantasizes about what might run through her mind and heart if Jesus suddenly walked up to her. In a poem entitled, Vigil, she writes:

“What would I do, O Master,
if you came slowly out of the woods.
Would I know your step?
Would I know by my beating heart?
Would I know by your eyes?
Would I feel on my shoulder too,
the burden you carry?
Would I rise and stand still till you drew near or
cover my eyes in shame?
Or would I simply forget everything except
that you had come and were here?”

Those last lines highlight the most important of all truths, namely, that God is love and only by letting that kind of love into our lives can we save ourselves from disappointment, shame, and sadness.
I don't often remember my dreams, nor do I set much stock by them, but, several years ago, I had a dream that I both remember and set some stock by. It went something like this:
For whatever reason, and dreams don't give you a reason, I was asked to go to an airport and pick up Jesus, who was arriving on a flight. I was understandably nervous and frightened. A bevy of apprehensions beset me: How would I recognize him? What would he look like? How would he react to me? What would I say to him? Would I like what I saw? More frightening yet, would he like what he saw when he looked at me?
With those feelings surging through me, I stood, as one stands in a dream, at the end of a long corridor nervously surveying the passengers who were walking towards me. How would I recognize Jesus and would his first glance at me reflect his disappointment.

WE EXPECT GOD TO BE DISAPPOINTED
WITH US AND TO GREET US WITH A FROWN

But this was a good dream and it taught me as much about God as I'd learned in all my years of studying theology. All of my fears were alleviated in a second. What happened was the opposite of all my expectations: Suddenly, walking down the corridor towards me was Jesus, smiling, beaming with delight, coming straight for me, rushing, eager to meet me. Everything about him was stunningly and wonderfully disarming. There was no awkward moment; everything about him erased that. His eyes, his face, and his body embraced me without reserve and without judgment. I knew he saw straight through me, knew all my faults and weaknesses, my lack of substance, and none of it mattered.
And, for that moment, none of it mattered to me either. Jesus was eager to meet me! In that moment, as Jane Tyson Clement suggests, one forgets everything, except that God is here. There's no place for fear or shame or wondering what God thinks of you.
And that's a lesson we must somehow learn, somehow experience.
We live with too much fear of God. Partly its bad theology, but mostly we fear because we've never experienced the kind of love that's manifest in God and we take for granted that anyone who sees us as we really are (in our unloveliness, weaknesses, pathology, sin, insubstantiality) will, in the end, be as disappointed with us as we are with ourselves.
At the end of the day we expect that God is disappointed with us and will greet us with a frown. The tragedy and sadness here is that, because we think that God is disappointed in us, especially at those times when we are disappointed with ourselves, we try to avoid meeting the one person, one love, and the one energy. God, that actually understands us, accepts us, delights in us, and is eager to smile at us. We are relieved that we never have to pick up Jesus at an airport. That's also true of church: We stay away from church exactly at those times when we would most need to be there.
A prairie poet and former Oblate confrere, Harry Hellman, gets the last word on this. He puts it well:

“Let's go back to the weather.
Most days you don't notice there is any
until you fall into love, and/or sin,
and then you see the clouds and
stare holes into heaven,
looking for Christ
when He's really at your shoulder
looking for you and in such great shape,
you'd never believe what he's been through.
Then before you know how it happened,
it's July again or August and you have time
to do what you should have been doing
all your life,
sitting or walking on the grass
in bare feet and loving...
Then you're all petals once more and tendrils
till the storm breaks your heart.
And the biggest piece goes to heaven,
and to hell with the weather.”

“BE IN THE WORLD. BUT NOT OF THE WORLD!”
Great advice, but not easy to follow.

“We struggle with this tension. On the one side, the temptation is to keep ourselves pure and unstained by the world, but at the cost of excessively separating ourselves from it, not loving it, not leaving ourselves vulnerable as Jesus did to feel its pains, and not modeling how someone can live inside the world and still have a vibrant faith and church life. The other temptation is the opposite: To enter the world and love and bless its energy, but to do so in a way that ultimately offers nothing in the way being salt and light for the world.
We will never be free of this tension. Such is the price of paradox. However in order to live within it more healthily, we need a certain theology and spirituality to guide us and we need a greater personal maturity to sustain us.
What kind of theology and spirituality can help us? What kind of personal and collective maturity is being asked of us?
In terms of a theology and spirituality, what we need is a vision that holds in proper tension our love for the world and our love for God. One may not be sacrificed for the other – they must be brought into proper relation.
We need to be able to love the world in such a way that we bless and honor its goodness, its energy, its color, its zest, and its moral strengths, even as we stand where the cross of Jesus is forever being erected and speak prophetic words of challenge in the face of the world's moral deficiencies, injustices, self-preoccupation, proclivity to greed, and less-than-full vision. But prophecy is predicated on love. Unless we first honor and bless what is good in the world we don't have the moral right to criticize it.
We need to be in solidarity with the world in everything but sin, blessing it with one hand, even as we hold the cross of Christ with the other.
But that's not easy. We don't just lack the vision, we also lack the moral and emotional strength needed to imitate Jesus. He could walk with sinners, eat with them, embrace them, forgive their sins, feel the pain and chaos of sin, yet not sin himself. He could challenge the world, even as he blessed and enjoyed its energies.
And the struggle to do that is not abstract, but earthy: Mostly we can't live as Jesus did simply because we lack the maturity to walk amidst the temptations, distractions, and comforts offered by the world without either losing ourselves in them, selling out our message, or unhealthily withdrawing into safe enclaves to huddle in fear, against the world, protected from it, but at the cost of denigrating its goodness, energy, colour, and zest.
It's no accident that our church communities sometimes look fearful, grey, sexless, and uninviting in comparison to the freedom, color, eros, and energy that's manifest in the world. We remain religious, but often at the cost of being unhealthily fearful, timid, frigid, and depressed.
But Jesus was never fearful, timid, frigid, or depressed. We often are because we need to protect ourselves, given that we haven't got Jesus' maturity and our timidity has its own wisdom, but...
In the 16th century, Ignatius of Loyola looked at the church and thought a new maturity – was needed. He founded the Jesuits in response.
We need that today. Someone needs to found a religious community with no rules because, for its members, none would be needed. Everyone would be mature enough to live out a poverty, chastity, and obedience that does not need to be externally prescribed and over-protected by symbols that set it apart. Attitudes and behaviour would be shaped from inside and would emanate from a commitment to a community, a vision, and a God that puts one under an obedience that is more demanding than any outside rule. The community would be mixed, men and women together, but strong enough to affectively love each other, remain chaste, and model friendship and family beyond sex and without denigrating sex. The community would be radically immersed in the world. Its members, sustained by prayer and community, would, be free, like Jesus, of curfews and laws, to dine with everyone, saint? and sinners alike, without sinning themselves. This community would give itself to the world even as it resisted being of the world.

'WHERE CAN I FIND THAT?
I'LL JOIN TOMORROW!'

Perhaps that's naive, but whenever I voice this fantasy to an audience the reaction is always very strong: Where can I find that? I'll join tomorrow!
The world needs mature Christians who, like Jesus, have the strength to walk inside the world, right inside the chaos of sin itself, without sinning themselves. Like the young men in the Book of Daniel, Christians must be able to walk around inside the flames without being consumed themselves, safe, singing sacred songs in the heart of the blaze.”

IN HER BOOK, Survivor, Christina Crawford writes: "Lost is a place, too."
That's more than a clever sound bite. It's a deep truth that's often lost in a world within which success, achievement, and good appearance define meaning and value.
What can that phrase teach us? That sometimes it's good to be without success, without health, without achievements to bolster us, without good appearance, and even without meaning. Being down and out, alone, lost, struggling for meaning, and looking bad, is also a valid place to be.
One of the greatest spiritual writers of all time, John of the Cross, would agree with that. If he was your spiritual director and you explained to him that you were going through a dark, painful patch in life and asked him: “What's wrong with me?” He would likely answer:
“There's nothing wrong with you; indeed, there's a lot right with you. You're where you should be right now: in the desert, letting the merciless sun do its work; in a dark night, undergoing an alchemy of soul; in exile, lamenting on a foreign shore so that you can better understand your homeland; in the garden, sweating the blood that needs to be sweated to live out your commitments; being pruned, undergoing spiritual chemotherapy, to shrink the tumors of emotional and spiritual deadwood that have built up from wrong turns taken; in the upper room, unsure of yourself, waiting for Pentecost before you can set out again with any confidence; undergoing positive disintegration, having your life ripped apart so that you can rearrange it in a more life- giving way; sitting in the ashes, like Cinderella, because only a certain kind of humiliation will ready your soul for celebration; and undergoing purgatory, right here on earth, so your heart, soul, and body can, through this painful purging, learn to embrace what you love without unhealthily wanting it for yourself.”
He'd also tell you that this can be a good place to be, a biblical and mystical place. That doesn't make it less painful or humiliating, it just gives you the consolation of knowing that you're in a valid place, a necessary one, and that everyone before you, Jesus included, spent some time there and everyone, including all those people who seem to be forever on top of the world, will spend some time there too. The desert spares nobody. Dark nights eventually find us all.
Knowing this, of course, doesn't make it easier to accept feeling lost and on the outside, especially in a world in which being successful is everything. That's why it's hard to ever admit, even to our closest friends, that we're struggling, tasting more ashes than glory. The need to name being lost, as a valid place is important for us, both communally and personally.
In many ways, at least in the Western world, that's exactly where the church is today, namely, in the desert, in a dark night, lost, being pruned, undergoing a purifying alchemy. We're experiencing public humiliation in the sexual abuse scandal, in our greying and emptying churches, and in the strong anti-clericalism inside our culture. We're aging, unsure of ourselves, lacking in vocations, and becoming ever more marginalized. But that's a place too, a good place to be. From the edges, humbled and insecure, we can again become church.
The same holds true in our personal lives. We have our good seasons, but we have seasons too where we lose relationships, lose health, lose friends, lose spouses, lose children, lose jobs, lose prestige, lose our grip, lose our dreams, lose our meaning, and end up humbled, alone, and lonely on a Friday night. But that's a place too, a valid and an important one. Inside that place, our souls are being shaped in ways we cannot understand but in ways that will stretch and widen them for a deeper love and happiness in the future.
Good wines are aged in cracked old barrels. That's what makes them rich and mellow. They can, of course, go sour during the process. That's the risk. The soul works in the same way and, thus, we might ask whether failure and loneliness, as they shape our souls, need to be re-imagined

THE DESERT SPARES NOBODY. DARK NIGHTS EVENTUALLY FIND US ALL.

aesthetically: Are maturity and transformation, growth in beauty, not about more than success, health, having it all, and looking like a million dollars?
Beauty is ultimately more about the size of our hearts, about how much they can empathize, and how about widely and unselfishly they can embrace. To that end, the desert heat of loneliness is helpful in softening the heart, enough at least to let it be painfully stretched. That happens more easily when we're lost, feeling like unanimity-minus-one, unsure of ourselves, empty of consolation, aching in frustration, and running a psychic temperature. Not pleasant, but that's a place too.”

The Mystery Of Saying Good-bye

“May 12, 2005 Issue, Catholic Northwest Progress.
When I was 23 years old, in the space of just three months, both my parents died.
They were young, I was young, our family was young - too young, we felt, to let them go. But they died despite that and their leaving left a gaping hole in our lives.
But after a time that void began to fill in and our sadness began to dissipate. It didn't happen quickly. It took a couple of years, but eventually things changed. What was once a cold absence now became a warm presence. Our mother and father came back to us in a new way. We began to feel their presence as a warm nurturing spirit, as a permanent sustaining love. They were now present to us in a deeper way, a way devoid of tension.
After our parents died and our grief over their leaving dissipated, their love for us and their presence began to flow into our lives in a way beyond those tensions. We now felt their love without a shadow. In their going away, in their deaths/ they were able to give us as fully when they were with us, namely, presence and love without a shadow.

“At times we have to go away in order for our spirits to bloom more fully.”

Intimacy is a curious thing, deep and paradoxical. Inside intimacy, presence and absence play on each other in such a way that, on a given day and in a given season of a relationship, it is hard to tell which provides the deeper connection. Sometimes when we are physically present to each other we cannot give each other what we need to and we must go away, at least for a time, in order for that to happen.
Sometimes only our absence can deepen and cleanse our presence. Sometimes it is better that we go away, for a day or for a season. That is part of the mystery, the theology, and the psychology of the Ascension.
At one level, this is a mystery, yet we have a sense of how it works.
As a parent, you experience this when your children grow up and move away. First there is the pain of letting them go, but eventually there is the joy of having those same children come back and stand before you in a new way, as adults now who can befriend you and be with you in a way that they couldn't as children. But, this doesn't happen unless your children first go away. Good parents know that by hanging on too tightly, by not giving your children the space within which to be absent, you not only stunt their growth, but you deprive yourselves of eventually having a wonderful adult come back to you with something deeper to give then the dependent love of a child. That's true in every relationship.
Jesus tries, painstakingly and repeatedly, to teach this to his disciples before his ascension. He tells them, again and again: “It is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away I cannot send you the spirit. You will grieve now, but later you will rejoice.”
It took me years to understand, even partially, what Jesus meant by those words and I'm still struggling, perhaps more in my heart than in my head, to accept that at times we have to go away in order for our spirits to bloom more fully and be capable of being received by those we love most, beyond the tensions and irritations that forever cloud relationships.
When children leave home for the first time to begin lives on their own, in one fashion or another, they arc saying to their parents what Jesus said to his disciples before his ascension: “It is better for you that I go away. If I do not go away I cannot come back to you in a deeper way!”
We speak those words too every time we walk out of a door, for a long time or even for just a day, and have to say the words: “Good-bye!””

Welcoming A New Pope

“There has been a mixed reaction to the election of Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger to the papacy.
For many conservatives there was joy and celebration. This was the best of all possible choices. The stunning outpouring of love and respect that the world showed at the death of John Paul II indicated that it wanted more of the same. In Benedict XVI, by all indications, it should get that. His election made it clear that there would be real continuity with what John Paul II had started. It also meant, for them, that the world and the church are to expect no major changes from the Vatican. The church is once again in safe, trusted hands.
For many liberals, though, the reaction was very different. They were, at least initially, deflated and depressed by the choice. Why?
Well, as the whole world knows, Pope Benedict XVI, formerly Cardinal Ratzinger, has been the head watch dog in the church for the past 24 years and, in that role, accumulated some baggage. He also acquired a persona within which he is perceived as hard, inflexible, ultra-conservative, overly clerical, negative towards women, regressive on ecumenism, overly centralizing in his ecclesiology, hostile rather than understanding towards the world, I and too prone to listen to selective pockets of malcontents rather than to the wider community.
Many of these perceptions are perhaps unfair; he was, after all, a symbolic lightening rod around which a lot of free floating frustration and anger could constellate. However it is fair to say that, more than his supporters would be willing to admit, this is how he has been perceived.
Beyond this, there is too the perception that, in choosing him, the cardinals may have been more motivated by the desire to batten down the hatches against secularity than by the kind of love, concern, risk, and self-dying for the world that Jesus embodied and expressed when he said, "My flesh is food for the life of the world!" In times of uncertainty, clarity too easily trumps everything else, especially risk. Liberals fear this has happened here.
Where do I weigh in on this?
Cardinal Ratzinger wasn't my first choice and may have been in fact my last choice, but, after some initial disappointment, I've made my peace with his selection. Why?
I've never met the man, but am close to many people who have and all of them, to the person, attest that his public persona is not accurate, and never has been. Our new pope, they assure us, is more soft than hard, more understanding than judgmental, more respectful than authoritarian, and, as even this critics admit, stunning in his intelligence.

Benedict XVI might be the best placed person, right now to actually achieve any reform.

Moreover, as his first homilies and actions already indicate, he promises to be quite different as a pope than he was as head disciplinarian in the church. As a friend of mine explains it: “I was once a vice principal in a school, in charge of discipline. Later on, I became the principal, in charge now of animating spirit and life. The different roles gave me an entirely different agenda - and a very different persona.”
Benedict XVI was a brilliant and even liberal theologian before being named to head the Congregation of Faith and Doctrine. My suspicion is that we will see some flashes of that again, now that he is freed of the watchdog responsibility. He might well surprise everyone, liberals and conservatives alike, as did John XXIII. We might have the surprise of our lives and might find ourselves inside Morris West's novel, Lazarus, where an aged pope, known for his strong conservatism, stuns everyone by not being what anyone expected.
Finally, there is this too: Given where John Paul II had taken the church and the curia, it might be wise to have a pope, for a while, who will try to move things ahead only slightly, without being a major reformer.
Any major reformer would, I suspect, find himself quickly crushed, and not just inside Vatican walls, by the structure and legacy that John Paul II left behind.
Thus, ironically, Pope Benedict XVI might be the best placed person right now to actually achieve any reform. Critics of reform will find it difficult to fight him, given his pedigree. To risk an analogy here: Ariel Sharon, because of his uncompromising pro-Israeli stance and his history in helping establish some of the Jewish settlements in Palestine, might be for that reason precisely the man best placed to dismantle the settlements and lead Israel into a new relationship with Palestine. Like Ariel Sharon, Benedict XVI's past can be his greatest asset in helping lead us into something new. We may yet see the deep wisdom in this selection.
Beyond all of this of course is the Holy Spirit. Faith asks us to believe in the Spirit's role in these things even when our personal expectations and agendas aren't met. The community is more important than personal need. Good will come of this choice, no doubt, even if, for now, not everyone is equally enthusiastic.”

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX (on sabbatical until August 2005). He can be contacted through his website www. ronrolheiser.com.

Multi-Citizenship Loyalties

Descent Into Hell

APRIL 14, 2005 “Several years ago, a young woman I knew attempted suicide. She was 23 years old and away from home.
Her frightened, concerned family rushed to her side.
They brought her home, got her the best medical and psychiatric attention available, and, most importantly, rallied around her, trying in every way to bring her out of suicidal depression.
They weren't successful. Two months later, she killed herself. She had descended into a place into which no human love, medicine, or psychiatry could penetrate, a private hell beyond human reach.
What hope do we have in situation like this?
Humanly there isn't any. Outside of faith, she is lost to us and we are helpless to reach her. But, inside of faith, there is hope, surprising hope.
We have a doctrine within our faith, which to my mind is singularly the most consoling belief in all religion, namely, the belief that Christ can descend into hell.
One version of our creed tells us that Jesus "descended into hell"?
What does this mean?
We are not always sure. There are various traditions as to its meaning: In one version, perhaps the most common, the idea is that the sin of Adam and Eve closed the gates of heaven and they remained sealed until the death of Jesus. Jesus' death opened them and Jesus, himself, in the time between his death and resurrection, descended into hell (Sheol, the Underworld) where all the souls who had died since the time of Adam somehow rested. He took them all to heaven. His "descending into hell," in this version of things, refers to his going into the underworld after his death to rescue those souls.

It is the single most consoling doctrine within all religion.

But there is another understanding. It suggests that Jesus' descent into hell refers especially to the manner of his death, to the depth of chaos and darkness he had to endure there, and to how the depth of love, trust, and forgiveness he revealed inside that darkness manifests a love that can penetrate into any hell that can be created. That's rather abstract to be sure, so allow me an illustration:
In St. Paul's Cathedral in London, England, there is a famous painting by Holman Hunt that has inspired numerous, less worthy, imitations. It is a painting which depicts Jesus outside a door with lantern, and the picture suggests that we, who are inside that door, must open the door to allow Jesus in, otherwise he will always remain outside. In some of the limitations of that painting, the artists have taken things further, namely, they have placed a knob on the inside of the door, but none on the outside, suggesting that Jesus cannot enter our lives unless we open the door to let him in.
I remember as a child, seeing this image on a holy card, and being haunted by it, fearing precisely that one day I might be too hurt, depressed, or otherwise paralyzed to open that door.
But, powerful as this image is, it is belied by the Gospels. How?
John, in his Gospel, gives us this picture: On the day Jesus rose from the dead, he finds his disciples huddled in fear inside a locked room. Jesus, unlike the imitation versions of Holman Hunt's great painting, does not stand outside the door and knock, waiting for the disciples to come and open the door. He goes right through the locked doors, stands inside their huddled circle of fear, and breathes out peace to them. He isn't helpless to enter when they are too frightened, depressed, and wounded to open the door for him. He can descend into their hell by going through the doors they have locked out of fear.
That is also true for the various private hells into which we sometimes descend. We can reach a point in our lives where others can no longer reach into our pain and where we are too wounded, frightened, and paralyzed to open the door to let anyone in. Human care can no longer reach us. But Jesus can enter those locked doors, can descend into our hell.
I am sure that when the young woman, whose suicide I mention, woke up on the other side, she found Jesus standing inside her fear and sickness, breathing out peace, love, and forgiveness, just as he did in the darkness and chaos that he descended into in his death. I am sure too that she, sensitive young woman that she was, found in his ordering, forgiving breath a peace that was, for all kinds of reasons, denied her in this life.
Our belief that Jesus did, and can, "descend into hell" is the single most consoling doctrine within all religion. It gives us hope when, humanly, there isn't any. Sometimes, because of illness and hurt, someone we love can descend into a place where we, no matter our love and effort, can no longer reach. But not all is lost: Jesus can descend into that hell and, even there, breathe out a peace that again orders the chaos.”

Gethsemane, Part I of Lenten Series 2005

Gethsemane, Part II of Lenten Series, 2005

Gethsemane, Part III of Lenten Series, 2005

Gethsemane, Part IV of Lenten Series, 2005

Gethsemane, Part V of Lenten Series, 2005

“Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you!” Leonard Cohen coined that phrase in a melancholic poem, "Hallelujah," and it reflects how certain things can seduce us so that we end up breaking our word, our commitments, and even our integrity. Lot of things, it seems, can overthrow us.
Beauty, sex, ambition, jealousy, fear, tension, wounds, anger, despair, impatience, frustration, hatred, tiredness, and even misguided religious fervor can overthrow us. The spirit is willing, says Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, but the flesh is weak.
And it is! The simple fact is that too often we cannot actualize ourselves as we would like. We're never as good as we'd like to be, never as stable as we'd like to be, never as much at peace as we'd like to be, never as bright as we'd like to be and never as beautiful as we'd like to be. We always fall short somehow.
One shortfall is moral: When we're honest we know the truth of St. Paul's words:"! I cannot understand my own behavior. I fail to carry out the things I want to do, and I find myself doing the things I hate." (Romans 7, 15-16)
How true! We're a mystery to ourselves and, often, a disappointment as well. There's a universal truth in the old Protestant dictum: “It's not a question of are you a sinner, it's only a question of 'What's your sin?'”
But it isn't always about sin. The flesh is also weak in terms of simple adequacy. A generation ago, Anna Blaman put it this way: We don't overcome our inadequacies by willpower alone; we change our lives through grace and community.
“I realized that it is simply impossible for a human being to be and remain 'good' or 'pure'. If, for instance, I wanted to be attentive in one direction, it could only be at the cost of neglecting another. If I gave my heart to one thing, I left another in the cold. ... No day and no hour goes by without my being guilty of some inadequacy. We never do enough, and what we do is never well enough done. ... except being inadequate, which we are good at, because it is the way we are made. This is true of me and of everyone else.”
Henri Nouwen, speaking more for our generation, has a gentler, though not-less clear, expression of this: “One of the most obvious characteristics of our daily lives is that we are busy. We experience our days as filled with things to do, people to meet, projects to finish, letters to write, calls to make, and appointments to keep. Our lives often seem like over packed suitcases bursting at the seams. In fact, we are almost always aware of being behind schedule. There is a nagging sense that there are unfinished tasks, unfulfilled promises, and unrealized proposals. There is always something else we should have remembered, done, or said. There are always people we did not speak to, write to, or visit. Thus, although we arc very busy, we also have a lingering feeling of never really fulfilling our obligations.”
We're weak and we fall short, not so much in intention as in execution. Generally it's not because of ill will that we end up experiencing what St. Paul, Anna Blaman, and Henri Nouwen so accurately describe. We don't want to be unfaithful, unreliable, neglectful, irresponsible, or inadequate. What's truest inside us wants to keep watch with Jesus in Gethsemane, wants to possess the moral greatness of a Mother Theresa, and wants to be known and respected for fidelity, reliability, and adequacy. The spirit, mostly, is willing, but, as Jesus warns in the Garden of Gethsemane, "the flesh is weak."
What's to be learned from this?
What does the Garden of Gethsemane have to teach us as we struggle with weakness and inadequacy?
That we don't overcome our inadequacies by willpower alone; by simply willing that we might be better. We change our lives through grace and community. In the Garden an angel came and strengthened Jesus. That same angel has to come and strengthen us.
In Gethsemane, Jesus didn't just warn us about the never-ending struggle between good-intention and good execution, between desiring to be good and actually being so. He underwent the struggle himself. His spirit was willing, but his flesh, like ours, was full of resistance. Ultimately he triumphed. However that triumph did not come about simply because he willed to remain faithful (though he did and that was a necessary part of the triumph) but because “an angel came and strengthened him”, that is, divine power eventually did for him what he could not do for himself.
A lot of things can, and do, overthrow us, despite the fact that we want to be good. One of the lessons of Gethsemane is that we cannot overcome this simply by renewed willpower and good intention. We need, in the struggle, to surrender to grace and community in such a way that God's angels can come and give us what we can't give ourselves, namely, goodness, wholeness, and adequacy.
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TK (on sabbatical until August 2005). He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Gethsemane, Part VI of VI Of Lenten Series, 2005

Gethsemane: The place to give up resentment
Last in a six-part Lenten series
“When you carry someone's cross, don't send him or her the bill!”
This is one of the lessons of Gethsemane. The challenge of being an adult, one who helps carry life for others, is to give ourselves over in love, duty, and service without resentment. Those last words are key: Real love is not simply a matter of giving ourselves over in service and duty (mostly we have to do this anyway, whether we want to or not) it's a question of giving ourselves over without being resentful.
This was one of the struggles of Jesus in Gethsemane. He was asked to give up his life and freedom for something higher and, like all of us, felt a fierce resistance. Nobody, easily and naturally, gives himself or herself over to the deeper demands of love, duty, and service. Transformation through prayer is needed to bring us there.
We see this in Jesus: Only after having prayed is he finally able to say: “Yet not my will, but yours, be done.” When he says this, his gift is pure. He is able to give himself over without resentment to the demands of a love which will take his whole life. After his prayer in Gethsemane, he is able to do what he needs to do without the feeling that he is a victim.
When Pontius Pilate tries to intimidate him by telling him: "I can save your life or I can take it," Jesus responds: “Nobody takes my life from me, I give it up freely!” That translates: “You can't take from me by force what I have already freely given over out of love!”

Only when we stop seeing duty as an unfair burden can we love and serve others without resentment.

And that's the lesson: We become life-giving adults and our love becomes free of manipulation only when we can say this and mean it: “Nobody takes my love and service from me, I give it over freely!” Only when we stop seeing duty as an unfair burden that we haven't chosen can we love and serve others without resentment and without making others feel guilty because of what it's costing us.
But, it's not easy to say those words and mean them. Like Jesus in the face of the deeper demands of love and duty, we initially say: "Let this cup pass! There's got to be a way out of this, a way for me to become free of this." That's natural. It's natural to want our freedom, to want to be free of burdens, of duty, of unfair circumstance. Nobody wants a martyrdom that he or she didn't sign up for! But eventually this form of martyrdom finds us all. If we are sensitive and good-hearted, love will frequently become duty, demanding circumstance, and an invitation to sacrifice ourselves for someone or something else. Always there will be someone or something making demands on our freedom and opportunity: children who need us, an aging parent who has only us, family obligations, a spouse with an illness, a crisis at our workplace, a tsunami in Asia, a war we don't want, a church that needs volunteers, and obligations of ever)' kind that come from being sensitive to the demands of God, family, church, country, morality, and the poor.
The world is not divided up between those who are burdened by duty and those who are free of it.
Anyone who is sensitive and good is burdened by duty. The world is divided up rather between those who are burdened with duty and are resentful about it and those who are burdened with duty and are not resentful about it.
That is very much the lesson of Gethsemane; What Jesus gave over to his Father in the Garden is not perhaps so much his life, since his enemies were closing in on him and he might have had to die in any case, irrespective of any willingness or unwillingness on his part. Thousands of people die violently every day, against their will. There's nothing special in that. What's special in Jesus is how he prepared himself to meet that death, namely, by being willing to die without resentment, without putting a price tag on it, without making anyone feel guilty about it, and with a heart that was warm rather than cold, forgiving rather than bitter, and large and understanding enough that it didn't have to demand its due. In the face of bitter duty, he took his life and his love and made them a free gift.
That's the greatest struggle we have in love. We're good people mostly, but, like the older brother of the prodigal son. All too often we nurse resentment, even as we do all the right things. That leaves us outside the house of love, hearing the music, but unable to dance, bitter about life's unfairness. We need, at some point, to say: "Not my will, but yours, be done."
If we say that and mean them, we will taste for the first time ever, real freedom.”

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, the new president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Tex., and an award-winning author, is writing a book on spirituality in the second half of life. Father Rolheiser discussed this topic, and the importance of hope in the second half of life, in a recent interview with Kay Lagreid, a Progress contributing editor and the Director of Communications for Catholic Community Services of Western Washington.

“Why are you writing a book on spirituality in the second half of life?

My previous book. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality, attempted to name the fundamentals and essentials of Christian discipleship. It addresses such questions as: "What do we need to believe? What are the essentials of faith? What is negotiable and non-negotiable?" In many ways, that is spirituality for the first half of life. Hopefully, the mature person at age 45 or 50 is there. They have attained an essential maturity, an essential religious practice, and an essential integration. They don't need any more reasons why they should go to church.
In the second half of life, the questions change. They become questions such as: “What is the new invitation? What is God calling me to?”
In the past in spirituality, we have not distinguished the two halves of life, and it has hurt both sides. Now we realize we can't call a 21-year-old to be a Mother Teresa. Likewise, we don't challenge 60-year-olds to be who they should be. We don't challenge ourselves with the Gospel message. The Gospel speaks to everybody. It gives slightly different invitations during the first half of life and the second half of life.
My new book looks at what happens after a person attains essential integration and maturity.

Why are you interested in spirituality in the second half of life?

It's an area of spirituality that we haven't developed enough, because we didn't have to. People died young. They didn't live to be 85, or retire at age 50. Also, it's what people are searching for. We're an aging population. As I travel and give lectures, I meet more and more good Christian people who ask: "What's the next chapter in my life?"
Most of us leave our first home in our teen or young adult years. Then, it takes 30 or 40 years to get back home - to find space for rest, maturity and peace. This is the place we haven't addressed.

How would you describe spirituality in the second half of life?

In many ways, we deal with the same forces in the second half of life that we do in the first half - ego, the sexual drive, the drive to achieve, the drive for immortality, the drive to connect - but they have a different meaning in the second half of life. They take us to a different level.
Until we attain what earlier spiritualities called "proficiency" - essential maturity - the spiritual and psychological tasks of life go together. They're very much tied to establishing identity, integrating one's sexuality, and achievement - whether that's professional achievement, having children, building a house, or building something else.
During the first half of life, the parable of the talents is very important. God gives us talents to achieve, and achieving something can be very good. In fact, during the first half of life, by nature and theology, we are supposed to do something.
When we get to be 50, 60, or 70, we might still do a lot of that, but we start to do it for a different reason. There also comes a point when it's time to let go - to start shedding.
One key image for the second half of life is Job's statement: "Naked I came from my mother's womb, and naked I go back." Another is Jesus' invitation to the rich young man, who asks, "What must I do?" There is a new invitation, something more radical. Importantly, the second half of life is very much the struggle of the older brother. It is very much about anger, letting go, and forgiveness. The spiritual tasks of the second half of life can be expressed in three words: Forgive. Forgive. Forgive. We're all wounded, and in many ways, we're the older brother. We're not leaving home anymore. We're home doing the father's work, but oftentimes with a lot of anger and resentment.
A poetic image for the second half of life is that of leaving home a second time.

When does the change from the first half of life to the second half take place?

We can't help but ask this question chronologically, although chronology is only one aspect of the second half of life. The other is spiritual.
Psychologically, according to Freud, and biologically, midlife is age 35. There is a long holding pattern, but after 35, the body is in decline.
I view the second half of life the way the mystics, such as John of the Cross, do. They say it occurs when one has attained “proficiency” - an essential unselfishness or maturity. Your life is no longer just about you. You have broken the pleasure principle as your basic motivation. For many people, this happens chronologically in their late 30s, 40s, or 50s.

How do people experience changes in their spirituality in the second half of life?

Sometimes, the change is triggered by what is described as a "mid-life crisis."
More commonly, however, the change occurs in two ways. Oftentimes, you don't realize it's happening. There may be a sort of nagging. You're going though life and doing pretty well, but you have a sense that you aren't sure that you want to do this for the rest of your life -- although what you're doing is good. You have a sense that what you're doing is temporary, and that there should be another chapter in your life, whatever that is. Sometimes, the change is more radical. For example, a person who is integrated, giving, and not bitter suddenly experiences a lot of resentment; the/re angry, and may not know why.

You've written that the second half of life demands a journey and that the spiritual task on that journey is letting go. What does letting go involve?

There are two phases to the second half of life. There is a "proficiency" phase in which a person between age 45 and age 65 - already in second half of life - is trying to deepen their spirituality. They're trying to be ever more mature, they're doing their inner work, and they're trying to be forgiving, but they're still not shedding a lot of stuff, even though they may have stopped accumulating.
The next phase is a more radical phase. Mystics call it the dark night of the spirit - preparing ourselves for death. In this phase, we are letting go, letting go, and letting go- to achieve a biblical nakedness.
For most of us, this doesn't happen voluntarily; it's conscriptive. For example, a doctor tells us we have six months to live. At that moment, we put our affairs in order. At that moment, we enter the night of the spirit. We're letting go. If we could do this voluntarily, we might say at age 65, "I'm dying"- even though we might live another 20 years. This is the time to start saying our goodbyes, to start reconciling, to start putting all in order.
Forgiveness is another, very important task of the second half of life. Part of forgiveness is letting go of grudges and anger. Blessing is another important task -- dethroning ourselves and no longer needing to be the center of anything. An example is the good grandmother or grandfather at the barbecue. They don't ask, "Does anyone want to hear my story?" They want to hear the kids' story.
Also, a new kind of trust occurs. You no longer have to make meaning for yourself. God will do it for you. As a young person, you have to establish who you are. At this point, you want to let God give you significance and meaning.

How would you describe hope in the second half of life?

During the first half of life there's a lot of natural hope. We're young and naturally optimistic. We believe life will get better and turn out well, that we will meet the right people and have the right experiences. During the first half of life we have a healthy, strong eros and life principle and a natural optimism. Doors are still opening. There's light at the end of the tunnel most of the time.
I really believe that during the first half of life, we aren't put to the test of hope. During the second half of life there's darkness at the end of the tunnel most of the time, and that calls for a different way of viewing hope.
We see doors close, and yet we still have the old fire inside. At this point we have to get our meaning from something deeper. We have to have biblical hope. It's not about what I achieve or whether I win a lottery. Rather, it's about whether I believe in the power of God, and whether I believe in a world beyond this one. Do I believe in God's power to take my work, my life, my diminishment, and my death, and make it mean something? Can I believe enough and hope that my death is as much of a gift to the world as my work was? We also have to believe that hope can achieve something, that if we hope and pray and work long enough we can help bring peace to the world. We also have to believe that hope can achieve something, that if we hope and pray and work long enough we can help bring peace to the world.

You've written that "hope is not wishful thinking, natural optimism, or an educated theory based on CNN." What is hope?

Hope is a belief in God's power, ultimately, to bring life from death. Hope is found in the resurrection of Jesus, and it's found in the promise - the promise of God and God's power. Hope is that God promised that all will be well, and all will be well, and every manner of being will be well. God delivered on that promise in the resurrection. That's hope.

How might people in the second half of life nurture hope?

There are no quick or easy answers, but I'll give you the traditional answers. One of them is that we have to do it through prayer and through meditation. Another important way is to be in contact with hope-filled people - people who radiate hope, not just optimism.

Is there anything else that should be said about hope in the second half of life?

In the second half of life, we're in the season of the Resurrection. In the second half of life, the Resurrection and the hope that it gives us has to become the grounding event in a way that it doesn't have to in the first half of life. As we get older, we realize we need God.”

Suicide: The most misunderstood of all deaths

“Death is always painful, but its pains are compounded considerably if its cause is suicide.
When a suicide occurs, we aren't just left with the loss of a person, we're also left with a legacy of anger, second-guessing, and fearful anxiety.
So each year I write a column on suicide, hoping that it might help produce more understanding around the issue and, in a small way perhaps, offer some consolation to those who have lost a loved one to this dreadful disease. Essentially, I say the same things each year because they need to be said. As Margaret Atwood once put it, some things need to be said and said and said again, until they don't need to be said any more. That's true of suicide.
What needs to be said, and said again, about it?
First of all that it's a disease and perhaps the most misunderstood of all diseases. We tend to think that if a death is self-inflicted it is voluntary in a way that death through physical illness or accident is not. For most suicides, this isn't true. A person who falls victim to suicide dies, as the does the victim of a terminal illness or fatal accident, not by his or her own choice. When people die from heart attacks, strokes, cancer, AIDS, and accidents, they die against their will. The same is true of suicide, except that in the case of suicide the breakdown is emotional rather than physical - an emotional stroke, an emotional cancer, a breakdown of the emotional immune system, an emotional fatality.
This is not an analogy. The two kinds of heart attacks, strokes, cancers, break-downs of the immune system, and fatal accidents, are identical in that, in neither case, is the person leaving this world on the basis of a voluntary decision of his or her own will. In both cases, he or she is taken out of life against his or her own will. That's why we speak of someone as a "victim" of suicide.
Given this fact, we should not worry unduly about the eternal salvation of a suicide victim, believing (as we used to) that suicide is always an act of ultimate despair. God is infinitely more understanding that we are and God's hands are infinitely safer and more gentle than our own. Imagine a loving mother having just given birth, welcoming her child onto her breast for the first time. That, I believe, is the best image we have available to understand how a suicide victim (most often an overly sensitive soul) is received into the next life.
Again, this isn't an analogy. God is infinitely more understanding, loving, and motherly than any mother on earth. We need not worry about the fate of anyone, no matter the cause of death, who exits this world honest, over-sensitive, gentle, over-wrought, and emotionally crushed. God's understanding and compassion exceed our own.
Knowing all of this however, doesn't necessarily take away our pain (and anger) at losing someone to suicide. Faith and understanding aren't meant to take our pain away but to give us hope, vision, and support as we walk within it.
Finally, we should not unduly second-guess when we lose a loved one to suicide: "What might I have done? Where did I let this person down? If only I had been there? What if ...?" It can be too easy to be haunted with the thought: "If only I'd been there at the right time." Rarely would this have made a difference. Indeed, most of the time, we weren't there for the exact reason that the person who fell victim to this disease did not want us to be there. He or she picked the moment, the spot, and the means precisely so that we wouldn't be there. Perhaps it's more accurate to say that suicide is a disease that picks its victim precisely in such a way so as to exclude others and their attentiveness. This should not be an excuse for insensitivity; especially towards those suffering from dangerous depression, but it should be a healthy check against false guilt and fruitless second-guessing.
We're human beings, not God. People die of illness and accidents all the time and all the love and attentive-ness in the world often cannot prevent a loved one from dying. Suicide is a sickness. There are some sicknesses that all the care and love in the world cannot cure.
A proper human and faith response to suicide should not be horror, fear for the victim's eternal salvation, or guilty second-guessing about how we failed this person. Suicide is indeed a horrible way to die, but we must understand it (at least in most cases) as a sickness, a disease, an illness, a tragic breakdown within the emotional immune-system. And then we must trust, in God's goodness, God's understanding. God's power to descend into hell, and God's power to redeem all things, even death, even death by suicide.”

The Inclusive Embrace of Catholicism

Canadian theologian Michael Higgins recently made this observation. At the upcoming Academy Awards, two movies will take center stage. Mel Gibson´s, The Passion Of The Christ, and Michael Moore´s, Fahrenheit 9/11.
What´s interesting about this, Higgins notes, is that, different as they are from each other, both Gibson and Moore are Roman Catholics, each in his own way very committed to what Catholicism means to him. The secular press of course has quickly marginalized this, calling Gibson an extreme, right wing Catholic, on the theological edges of mainstream Catholicism, and simplistically labelling Moore a secular liberal.
This, as Higgins rightly points out, is not exactly the case: Mel Gibson, whether you like him or not, is not so easily categorized, marginalized, and seen as in some kind of maverick on the fringe, in antipathy to mainstream Catholic theological tradition. Likewise for Moore: Like him or hate him, he is not a secular liberal, but a Catholic coming out of the tradition of social justice of Dorothy Day, Daniel Berrigan, and Thomas Merton. He may well push the political envelope further than they did, but what drives him is not secular liberalism (whose agenda no longer in fact often agrees with Moore's) but his Catholic roots and the social justice tradition he inhaled there.
I highlight this because, whether or not you were inspired or turned off by either of their movies, there is something significant (and wonderful) in the fact that both Gibson and Moore, seemingly at such extreme ends of the ideological and ecclesial universe, claim the same faith allegiance, derive their inspiration from the same source, and, in the end, worship in the same church. That's a stretch, but, that's the point, Catholicism is meant to be a stretch, a huge one, taking us where we would rather not go, beyond our comfort zone, beyond our own kind, beyond the like-minded.
Jesus said: "In my father's house there are many rooms!" That's also meant to be a description, at least ideally, of Christianity, Catholicism, the church, and our theological and ideological embrace. A healthy faith community, a healthy church, and a healthy theological community should find enough room inside it for both Mel Gibson and Michael Moore.
Allow me another example: Most every year, unless other commitments make it impossible, I attend a Religious Education Congress sponsored by the Archdiocese of Los Angeles in Anaheim, Calif. It's always an uplifting, faith-filled event within which more than 30,000 Christians come together to reflect on and celebrate their faith. One of the little sub-themes there that I've always enjoyed is the particular placing of some of the book displays in the pavilion where the various publishers sell their wares. Invariably you will find, side by side, the booths for The Catholic Worker and Ignatius Press. They're miles apart ideologically (Michael Moore would shop at the former, Mel Gibson at the latter) yet here they are, side by side, on very friendly terms, participating in the same faith event, both representing something important within the same tradition, neither bent on excluding the other.
There's something important, I believe, to be learned from this, and not just for Roman Catholics. We cannot build either a society or a church with just liberals or just conservatives. To build community we need to work with more than just those who are like-minded. Any community or church built with just the like-minded is not worth belonging to because it reflects neither what's best inside the human spirit nor, for those of us who are Christians, the inclusive embrace of Christ. A healthy society and a healthy church includes both the Mel Gibson's and the Michael Moores and everyone in between.

Any community or church built with just the like-minded is not worth belonging to.

But that doesn't come naturally is the proclivity to huddle together in fear and like-mindedness, like the disciples before Pentecost, barricaded behind locked door with our own kind, paranoid, suspicious of all who arc not of our own mind. Not that all of this is bad. Sometimes we need, for a time^ nurturing and healing, a convalescence of sorts, inside a more intentional community so that hearts and nerves that have been frayed by division and opposition within family, community, and church have a chance to be more gently massaged and nurtured. Intentional community' of this sort, in essence, is the "upper room" the early church retired to, in pain and fear, as it waited for Pentecost.
But it didn't stay there forever. Indeed, no real community was formed in that room. They huddled together for a while for a purpose, in fear, in loneliness, consoling each other within a certain fragility; but when they finally felt the real power of God's spirit, they burst out of those narrow confines. Their narrowness and fear gave way to an inclusivity and a courage which enabled them to speak different languages, languages of both the left and the right, languages of both the liberal and the conservative, languages that both Mel Gibson and Michael Moore could hear and take to heart.”

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, TX (on sabbatical until August 2005). This appeared in the Catholic Northwest Progress for January 13, 2005. He can be contacted through his website
www.ronrolheiser.com.

Faith Means That God Is With Us

“If Christ was born into the world to redeem it, why doesn't our world look more redeemed? Why is our world still full of loneliness, anxiety, betrayals, sickness, poverty, violence, war, and death? What did Christ's birth into our world really change?
These aren't irreverent questions; the/re the right questions. Only in struggling to answer them do we begin to understand more deeply the mystery of Christ. What is that mystery?
In the Gospels, one of the angels who announces Jesus'birth, tells us: “They shall name him Emmanuel” (which means 'God is with us.') What do those words mean?
Sometimes it's helpful to proceed by the via negativa, namely, by explaining what something doesn't mean. In this case, the fact that Christ is born into our world does not mean that those who believe in him will be spared the pain, loneliness, seasons of sickness, heartaches, betrayals, anxieties, fears, and humiliations that afflict everyone else. Faith offers no one an escape from pain. Moreover, believers, just like unbelievers, will suffer too the darkness of doubt, the painful fear that the heavens are empty. Faith in Christ doesn't remove any of the pains inherent within the human condition, including the pain of doubting God's existence. Faith promises no magic pass-cards.
What it does promise is that God will be with us so that we do not have to walk through loneliness, sickness, violence, anxiety, fear, and death alone. We have a hand to grasp, a love to embrace, a truth to cling to, and a power to sustain us (even through death itself). We walk in the same world as everyone else, but, like a young child holding on to her mother's hand as she walks into school for the first time, we are not alone, a trusted, sustaining, guiding love walks with us. God doesn't remove us from what can hurt us, but walks with us amidst it all.
But that explanation too can feel pretty empty on any given day. If God is walking beside us, hand in ours, why don't we feel that more really? Why does God often seem non-existent, not with us at all?
Because believers, like everyone else, are not exempt from the trial of faith, from the darkness of doubt, from those emotional and spiritual dark nights that can crush us, bring us to our knees, and can make us cry out in fear that God has abandoned us, as happened to Jesus on the cross. Part of being human (and faith isn't some magic bullet immunizing us against the human condition) is the experience of God's seeming absence.

We see God more clearly in our past than in our present

So how can we say "God is with us" when mostly it feels like God isn't there for us? That's a complex question and a full answer would necessitate a discussion on why, in the nature of faith, God's reality is often felt more like an absence than a presence. But, without entering into a full blown discussion on this, allow me to give just one perspective:
In the Jewish scriptures there's a famous incident where Moses asks God to see his face. God answers that this is impossible because nobody can see God's face and live. When Moses persists in his demand. God offers a compromise: He tells Moses that he will place him in a cleft in the rocks, put his hand over Moses' face, and then pass by, so that Moses will get to see God's, back, though never his face.
What does this mean? Among other things, that we are wise not to be overly naive about the powerful, sacred, archetypal energies that flow through us. Even when something is beautiful and good, like sex for instance, it doesn't mean we don't have to treat with sacred caution.
We're wise to accord things their proper respect, to keep our shoes off before the burning bush. But there's a wonderful sub text here too which can help explain why we so often think that God is absent in our lives. Generally we struggle to feel God in the present moment, to see God s race in the here and now. In the present, God often seems absent. Yet, when we turn around and look back in our lives, when we look back on our story', we more easily see how God has been there all along and how we have walked in a divine presence, protection, guidance, and love that were imperceptible at the time but are clear in retrospect. We see God more clearly in our past than in our present. We see God's back more than we see God's face.
This can be helpful in understanding how Christ is present to us, even when it doesn't always feel like it.
Faith doesn't promise us a ladder to crawl out of the pains of life, it promises a friend to walk with through those pains. Mostly though it's only when we look back in our lives that we see that this friend has always been there.”

Struggling with possessiveness

Catholic Northwest Progress, September 9, 2004

“The award winning play, "Children of a Lesser God," tells an interesting story of how love can go wrong, even when it seems like it is going right.
The story focuses on a spirited young woman who is deaf. Intelligent, sensitive and wounded, she resists in his attempts to help her, until one day a gifted teacher, a man her own age, enters her life. For a while she resists both his love and his efforts to help her, but eventually trust grows in her and she opens up to him. They fall in love and, for a while, things are wonderful and he helps open her to the world.
But then the story takes a curious turn. At a point, a huge tension begins to grow up between them. She feels guilty about it, sensing she should be grateful, even as resentment and anger continue to grow in her. For his part, he can't help feeling angry because he feels himself being pushed away after all he has done for her. The tension eventually produces a storm, a big one, lots of anger, lots of shouting, lots of recrimination, and calm afterward.
In that calm, she, still feeling guilty, apologizes and tells him she feels bad because he has been such a great teacher and she owes so much to him. But the storm has taught him its lesson. He now knows the reason for her resentment. In essence, he puts it this way: “I've been a good teacher and have loved you, up to a point, but now I realize what 1 was really doing. In effect, I was saying this to you: 'Grow, but not so much that you don't need me anymore. Understand yourself, but not better than I understand you. Be free, but not of my expectations for you.' I offered you my love and help ... as long as I could dictate how you use them.”
Perhaps the deepest struggle we have (psychologically, morally, and spiritually) is with possessiveness and what that triggers in us: restlessness, jealousy, greed, and manipulation. Something inside our very DNA makes us want to possess whatever is beautiful and to have exclusively for ourselves whatever we love. It's no accident that there are two commandments against jealousy. From a toddler's tantrum over his mother's inattention to the sexual jealousy so universal in adulthood, we see that it's hard to look at what attracts us and respond only with gratitude and admiration.

‘The answer lies in a healthy maturity that can admire without seeking to own, and without seeking to manipulate.’

For this reason, when we should be feeling wonderful, we often feel unsettled, restless, obsessed, and jealous in the' face of beauty and love. Etty Hillesum gives us an honest expression of this in her insightful memoir, An Interrupted Life.
“And here I have hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful scenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual, I might almost write too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it! Hence the painful longing that could never he satisfied the pining for something I thought unattainable, which I called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works.”
“It all suddenly changed, God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my short walk round the Skating Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with the light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past. Then all the beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart and I would not have known what to do with the pain. Then I would have felt the need to write, to compose verses, but the words would still have refused to come. 1 would have felt utterly miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have sapped all my energy...but its beauty now filled me with joy...I no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated.”
What do we do with our possessiveness? Good spirituality and good psychology agree that the answer I lies a healthy maturity that can admire without 'seeking to own and love without seeking to manipulate. But that's easier said than done. We don't change our deepest instincts (John of the Cross calls them "our metaphysics") simply by willing away possessiveness.
What's the answer? A lifelong walk toward a very difficult maturity. Overcoming our incurable instinct to possess one of the final hurdles in life. When we're no longer prone to jealousy, we're saints.
In the meantime, it can be helpful to name this. A symptom suffers less when it knows where it belongs.”

Helping create a symphony of prayer

“Spirituality, Catholic NW Progress, July 29, 2004

Theologians make an important distinction between what they call "devotional" and "liturgical" prayer.
"Devotional" prayer, they tell us, is private in nature and is meant to help sustain us personally on the spiritual journey. "Liturgical" prayer, by contrast, is public by nature, the church's prayer (not our own), is universal in scope, and is intended for the needs of the world.
We don't always grasp this, to the detriment of both kinds of prayer. Perhaps we might understand this better if we put different names to these. What helps clarify things for me are the terms "affective" and "priestly" prayer. "Affective" prayer refers to private prayer, prayer that's about us, focused precisely on bringing us and our feelings to God. "Priestly" prayer, on the other hand, is not about us, is about the world, is public in nature, and it doesn't have to be meaningful personally to be of value. But how can this be? How can prayer be of value if it isn't personally meaningful?
An analogy might be helpful. Imagine you're part of a symphony orchestra, playing an instrument that contributes to an overall musical score. Night in and night out, you're playing the same piece in the same theater, helping to create a beautiful symphony for the audience,
The public prayer of the church, priestly prayer, works exactly like that. It's a symphony intended for the benefit of everyone and open to everyone.
This has a number of ramifications. First of all, it clarifies some age-old questions about who benefits from our prayer and who doesn't. Are people who have others to pray for them luckier than those who don't? Imagine two people, both in pain and in need of prayer. The first is a very well-loved individual, part of a big and loving community, perhaps even a public figure, and he has many people praying for him. The second person isn't as lucky. She's alone, without family and friends, unknown to the world, with nobody to pray for her. Are we to believe that the first person has drawn a lucky straw and will benefit from all the prayers offered for him, while the second will languish alone, without the benefit of prayer, since she has nobody to pray for her?
No. That's not the way prayer works, at least not the "priestly" prayer of the church. It creates a symphony that's intended for everyone, includes everyone, and benefits every-one - the loved, the unloved, the lucky, and the unlucky all equally. When a symphony is being played, it's not selective or discriminatory; the music is for everybody.
Granted, in its explicit expression, our "priestly" prayer might sometimes be directed toward the needs of one particular person (“Let us pray for Martha who's ill and in the hospital”), but everyone, Martha included, is given the benefit of the symphony. Indeed, such an understanding of "priestly" prayer should challenge us precisely to continually stretch ourselves in terms of the universal intent of our public prayer when we gather as church. Our public prayers on a Sunday are not so much intended for some individual Martha who's ill and in pain, as for the whole world in all its ills and pains, Martha and her pains included.
This analogy of public prayer as a symphony sheds light on another issue as well, namely, on why our public, priestly prayer does not have to be meaningful to us personally to be valuable.
Imagine again that you're part of an orchestra that, night in and night out, plays the same musical score. You've played the same piece many times over and, most evenings, are bored with it. You'd love, for your own stimulation, to play something else which would give you more energy. But the symphony isn't yours, isn't intended for you, and depends on many things beyond your tastes and preferences. Your participation is in function of something else. You're playing this for somebody else. So you play the same piece, night in and night out, not for your own benefit, but for the audience. You contribute your efforts to the symphony for the benefit of others, even as you yourself would prefer to be playing something else.
That's how "priestly" prayer works; it makes a symphony of prayer for the benefit of everyone. That's the intent of all Sunday services and all liturgical prayers of the church.
What constitutes "priestly" prayer? It's the public prayer of our churches, the Eucharist, the sacraments, Services of the Word, Sunday worship. It's also the Office of the Church (the Liturgy of the Hours, the Breviary). All of these, by essence and definition, are public prayers, intended first of all not for the private nourishment of those praying them, but as a symphony of prayer for the benefit of the whole world.
The next time you're at a church service and telling yourself that this isn't nurturing you, remember that the function of an orchestra is, first of all, not to entertain itself but to make music for others.”

The Naked Truth About Incarnation>

“Regular Context readers have to know that one of my favorite religious magazines is Perspectives. To give you a sample of its perspectives, I am going to raid it for three successive items this fortnight.
The first is a letter to the editor from Michael Lindvall of Ann Arbor, Michigan, who is referring to a review of a book whose title might sound sensational but which is a serious scholarly work, illustrated with Renaissance paintings that showed "gendered" interest in Jesus' physical body (as opposed to a mystical "Body of Christ"). Lindvall: “I read with great appreciation David Timmer's extensive review in the February issue of Leo Steinberg's new edition of his book, The Sexuality of Christ in Renaissance Art and Modem Oblivion [University of Chicago Press, 1996]. That review quickly and happily grew into a fine essay on Steinberg's work and the attendant scholarly controversy. One of the pleasures of reading thought as fresh as this is the sense that something long in front of you is suddenly visible. The thematic centrality of Christ's fully human and forthrightly gendered identity in familiar Renaissance art has always been 'visible' (save where later moralists with paint brushes overpainted it). But I for one looked around it. This Midwestern Scandinavian Calvinist noticed it, but attributed it to nothing more than full-blooded Italian Roman Catholics painting in climates too warm for their moral health.”
“Timmer's unfolding of Steinberg's thesis and the debate that has followed sheds light not only on the history of Renaissance painting, but also on the history of Christology and present discussions about the humanity and divinity of Christ. The Apostle Paul is clear about the scandal attendant to a full understanding of Christ's Incarnation. The radical particularity, gross materiality, and base earthiness of incarnation are as potentially embarrassing to us as we imagine they were to our putative Puritanical spiritual ancestors.”
“[W]e may blush at the concrete physicality implied by gender and sexuality, especially when graphically portrayed. But anything less–be it a Christ who is emotionally or physically less than human–is neither scandalous nor wondrous enough to be incarnation. The center of the gospel is the unabashed portrayal of the divine in human form. Renaissance art placarded the raw edge of incarnation. It was a bold sermon indeed, and perhaps as needful today as it was a half a millennium ago.” Agreed.””

Sexual Abuse: The Flesh Remains Weak

“ The flesh remains weak
Stephen T. Davis, professor of philosophy at Claremont McKenna College, on ministers who fall, through some immoral activity. It is one of the more painful topics relating to organized religious life. Let's hear him, at leisure, because, clergy or not, we all relate to themes like this in respect to varieties of professions. But none more than in the case of ministry. Davis: “Once several years ago the senior pastor of a large Presbyterian church in the Los Angeles area, a man in his 40s who was married and had children, was caught having an affair with a woman parishioner. One day the Pasadena Star News ran an article about the situation, and the next morning the Los Angeles Times picked up the story.”
That same morning one of my colleagues at Claremont McKenna College, an economics professor who loves to scoff at religion, stopped me in the hall with this rather strange outburst: ‘Well, Steve, I guess I'm going to have to keep my wife away from you from now on.’
Completely baffled, perhaps a little slow on the uptake that day, I said, ‘What on earth are you talking about?’ 'Well,' he said, ‘judging by what I read in the newspapers, you Presbyterian ministers are not to be trusted around other men's wives.’
“That exchange hurt. It hurt because there was absolutely nothing I could say to defend either myself or Presbyterian ministers. The pastor who got himself into trouble had doubtless never envisioned such an effect as this. His actions provided ammunition, miles away, for a sarcastic critic of Christianity whom he had never met. In the words of Psalm 69, it brought shame and dishonor on some of those who hope in God. What he did discredited all Presbyterian ministers, to a lesser extent all clergy, and maybe even all Christians.” Indeed. There was nothing particularly Presbyterian about it.
Davis, again: “We live in a day and age when it is widely held that sexual gratification is a right, maybe even a sacred right. People believe that merely because 'I want something,' it follows that 'I deserve it.' In addition, the ethos of our era is that everybody is a victim. (I actually heard a minister who got in trouble over sexual issues publicly give a psychiatric explanation of his behavior, the gist of which was that it was his way of dealing with the stress of being a pastor.) But of course if everybody is a victim, then nobody is guilty of anything. And maybe the belief that they too were victims is one of the reasons so many of the clergy who fall are so quick to start talking about the need for mercy and forgiveness.”
“Many of them seem to think that once they've said their mea culpas, sincerely apologized to their victims, tried as much as possible to repair the hurt they've caused, and genuinely confessed their sins to God, they should be forgiven. And perhaps they should. But the problem comes at the next step when they say: ‘And therefore I ought to be restored to my church.’ (We might call this argument the 'Jimmy Swaggart fallacy.') The problem is that their brothers and sisters in Christ need to see evidence that there will be no more such behavior, and this may take time. Moreover, although in God's eyes sexual sins are doubtless no more serious than the sins of pride, envy, lying, and gossiping that all Christians and clergy are guilty of, that is not how the world views things. The truth is that sexual sins by members of the clergy can do terrible damage to the body of Christ. Accordingly, it is rarely wise to move even a sincerely repentant and rehabilitated sexual sinner back into his former job.”
“I may have gone on a bit long with this item, but it merits attention, and Davis speaks eloquently, as when he concludes: There is no doubt that ministers who fall are guilty of sin and do damage to the cause of Christ. The psalmist says, ‘Do not let those who hope in you be put to shame because of me, 0 Lord of hosts. Do not let those who seek you be dishonored because of me, 0 God of Israel.’ “Maybe all of us who are clergy should carry this verse around in our wallets, or better, in our minds”
“At the very least, we need to live by it. If we did, there would be fewer clergy who fall from grace.”

Setting our ecclesial gauges

“Karl Rahner once cautioned that we should never assume that everyone alive at the same time belongs to the same generation.
Nowhere is this more true than in church circles today, where we have multiple ecclesiologies operating inside the same churches.
In Roman Catholicism, for instance, since Vatican II, we have two-and-a-half distinct generations, all trying to share the same pews. Not an easy task. It makes for tension and this is the case inside all the churches.
That tension, while painful, isn't necessarily unhealthy. When Jesus says, "In my Father's house there are many rooms," he isn't describing celestial geography, but a heart, God's, whose compassion and scope is the antithesis of any small sectarian group or any group of like-minded people huddling around some fiery ideology. The challenge for the churches is to mirror this embrace, namely, to build a house with a large entrance and with rooms enough to accommodate persons of every persuasion.
But that's not easy. Invariably, for every kind of reason, we start narrowing the door and closing off the number of rooms. What's required to avoid this, I believe, is a more deliberate effort to set our ecclesial gauges properly. What's meant by this?
Sometimes I picture the church like a huge airplane, complete with a large instrument panel, gauges of every kind, which indicate the state of things and which someone has to carefully set and monitor so as to have a smooth and safe flight. What does the instrument panel in the church look like? What are our ecclesial gauges?
To have a healthy ecclesiology, we need to monitor the tension between a series of polarities which perennially compete with each other and which need, precisely, a certain deliberate and delicate regulating. What are these polarities that are in tension with each other?
Among others, it mentions these:

• The tension between the liberal and the conservative.
• The tension between the theological and the devotional.
• The tension between the liturgical and the pastoral.
• The tension between Word and Eucharist.
• The tension between social justice and private morality.
• The tension between prophecy and diocesan structures.
• The tension between program and compassion.
• The tension between missionary and maintenance.
• The tension between enthusiasm and stability.
• The tension between ecumenism and denominational commitment.
• The tension between Christianity and other religions.
• The tension between community and individual charism.
• The tension between aesthetics and simplicity of life.

Each of these might be conceived of as a separate gauge, icon, on the ecclesial instrument panel and, inside each gauge, each of the two poles represents something to be guarded. Our task is to try to deliberately set those gauges by pinpointing where, ideally, as an ecclesial community, we want to be on the continuum between the various ecclesial poles (using critical principles rather than ideology, private temperament, or private desire as our guiding needle).
Hence, for example: In the tension between liberal and conservative, how much, like the wise scribe idealized by Jesus, are we willing to give place to the old as well as the new? In the tension between the theological and the devotional, where do we want to place the guiding needle so as to have a healthy balance between head and heart? In the tension between the liturgical and the pastoral, how much do we want to push ideal liturgical principle as a corrective to sloppy worship and how much do we want the real needs of our congregations to mitigate a potentially sterile ideal? What, for instance, is the place of a eulogy at a funeral, given the balance we want between the liturgical ideal and the needs of a grieving family?
What's the proper balance between concern for the issues of justice in the world and concern for private integrity of soul? How much is the church about justice and how much is it about soul-building? How programmatic or compassionate do we want to be? Where is the proper balance between being overly rigid and overly loose? Which is the greater risk, to be irresponsible with sacraments and grace or to unhealthily cut off access to God? Do we want to sacrifice aesthetics for simplicity of life by building cheap, ugly churches, or do we sacrifice simplicity of life for good taste? Where's the proper balance between being loving and loyal to your own denomination and recognizing valid baptism and God's grace as present in other Christians? The list goes on.
Jung once said that whatever energies we don't consciously access and direct will unconsciously direct themselves. That's true here, too, in terms of these ecclesial energies. To the extent that we do not - prayerfully, communally, and according to sound principle -- deliberately set where we want to be on the continuum between these various energies, other things (ideology, self-interest, personal temperament, ego, charismatic personality, whim, the need to be right, the flavor of the moment) will set them for us, though not always in ways that will build a church that reflects God's compassion, embrace, and beauty.”

2004 Lenten Meditation Series by Father Ron Rolheiser

The Agony in the Garden: The place of special loneliness
First part in a seven-part Lenten Series

“We tend to misunderstand "the passion of Jesus." Spontaneously we think of it as the pain of the physical sufferings he endured on the road to his death. Partly that misses the point. Jesus' passion should be understood precisely as "passio," passivity a certain submissive helplessness he had to undergo in counter–distinction to his power and activity. The passion of Jesus refers to the helplessness he had to endure during the last hours of his life, a helplessness extremely fruitful for him and for us.
And the first component in that helplessness begins in the Garden of Gethsemane, immediately after he has celebrated the Last Supper. The Scriptures tell us that he went out into the garden with his disciples to pray for the strength he needed to face the ordeal that was now imminent. It's significant that this agony should take place in a garden. In archetypal literature (and Scripture, among other things, is this kind of literature), a garden is not a place to pick cucumbers and onions. Archetypally, a garden is the place of delight, the place of love, the place to drink wine, the place where lovers meet in the moonlight, the place of intimacy. The garden is paradise. That's why Adam and Eve in their paradisiacal state are described as being in a garden.
So it's no accident that Jesus ends up having to sweat blood in a garden. And it's precisely as a lover that he's in agony there. The Jesus who sweats blood in the Garden of Gethsemane is not the great King, full of pain because the sheep will not heed the shepherd; nor is it the great Magus, full of sorrow because nobody wants to pick up on the truth he's revealed; nor is it the great warrior, frustrated in his efforts to defeat the powers of sin, death, and darkness. These pains and frustrations mostly take place elsewhere, among the crowds, in the temple, in the desert. The garden is for lovers, not for kings, magi, and warriors.
It's Jesus, the lover, the one who calls us to intimacy and delight with him, who sweats blood in the garden. That's why, in describing his suffering during his passion, the evangelists focus little on his physical sufferings (which must have been horrific). Indeed, Mark puts it all in a single line: "They led him away and crucified him." What the Gospel writers focus on is not the scourging, the whips, the ropes, the nails, the physical pain - none of that. They emphasize rather that, in all of this, Jesus is alone, misunderstood, lonely, isolated, without support, unanimity-minus-one. What's emphasized is his suffering as a lover – the agony of a heart that's ultra-sensitive, gentle, loving, understanding, warm, inviting, hungry to embrace everyone but which instead finds itself misunderstood, alone, isolated, hated, brutalized, facing murder.
That's the point that has been too often missed in both spirituality and popular devotion. I remember as a young boy, being instructed by a wonderful nun who told us that Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane because, in his divine-nature, he was saddened because he already foresaw that many people would not accept the sacrifice of his death. That's a wonderfully pious thought, but it misses the point of what happened in Gethsemane.”

In Gethsemane, we see Jesus suffering as a lover. His agony is not that of the Son of God, frustrated because many people will not accept his sacrifice, nor even is his agony the all too understandable fear of the physical pain that awaits him. No, his real pain is that of the lover who's been misunderstood and rejected in a way that is mortal and humiliating.
What Jesus is undergoing in Gethsemane might aptly be paralleled to what a good, faithful, loving, very sensitive, and deeply respectful man or woman would feel if he or she were falsely accused of pedophilia, publicly judged as guilty, and now made to stand powerless, isolated, misunderstood, and falsely judged before the world, family, friends and loved ones. Such a person, too, would surely pray: “If it is possible, let this cup pass from me!”
The agony in the garden is many things, but, first of all, it's Jesus' entry into the darkest black hole of human existence, the black hole of bitter misunderstanding, rejection, aloneness, loneliness, humiliation, and the helplessness to do anything about it. The agony in the garden is the black hole of sensitivity brutalized by callousness, love brutalized by hatred, goodness brutalized by misunderstanding, innocence brutalized by wrong judgment, forgiveness brutalized by murder, and heaven brutalized by hell. This is the deepest black hole of loneliness and it brings the lover inside us to the ground in agony, begging for release.
But, whenever our mouths are pushed into the dust of misunderstanding and loneliness inside that black hole, it's helpful to know that Jesus was there before us, tasting just our kind of loneliness.”

Week Two: The Agony in the Garden: The Place to Sweat Blood
Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser is a theologian, teacher and award-winning author. He currently serves' in Toronto and Rome as the general councilor for Canada for his religious order, the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate. Father Rolheiser is also an adjunct faculty member of the School of Theology and Ministry at Seattle University. He can be contacted at info@ronrolheiser.com.

The Agony in the Garden: The place to sweat blood
Second in a seven-part Lenten Series

In describing Jesus in the Garden of Gethsemane, Luke says this: “In his anguish he prayed even more earnestly, and his sweat fell to the ground like great drops of blood.”
Biblical scholars agree that the accounts of Jesus' death do not highlight so much his physical suffering as his emotional anguish and how his decision for love, to respond to a higher moral call, left him lonely, humiliated, misunderstood, prostrate in pain. It's Jesus, the lover, who sweats blood in Gethsemane.
What, more precisely, was his anguish? What is the lover's anguish?
Some years ago, there was an TV series entitled, "Thirty Something." One episode went this way: A group of men, all married, had gathered for a men-only evening at a downtown hotel. One of the men, several years married, found himself attracted to one of the hotel managers, an attractive woman, with whom he had to deal all evening in terms of arranging food, music, and drink. She was attracted to him, too, and though nothing other than practical talk passed between them during the evening, the romantic chemistry intensified. Gender magic was doing its old tricks.
As the evening was ending, both did what comes naturally; they lingered near each other, not knowing what to say, but sensing a special connection they were reluctant to break off. They covered this by making practical talk about cleaning up the room and settling the bills. Finally, the moment came to part. The man stalled, thanking her yet again for her help and graciousness, and she, not wanting to lose the moment, said to him: “I very much enjoyed meeting you. Would you like to get together again sometime?” The man, guiltily fingering his wedding ring and apologizing for not being more forthright earlier, did what few of us have the moral courage to do. Not without sweating a little blood, he said: “I'm sorry. I'm married. I should have made that clearer. I need to go home to my wife.”
My dad, perhaps the most moral man I've ever known, used to say: “Unless you can sweat blood, you'll never keep a commitment, in marriage, in priesthood, or anywhere. That's what it takes!” He was right. One of the great lessons of Gethsemane is precisely that. To keep any commitment, we have to sweat blood because, like Jesus in the garden, there comes a time when we have to enter into a great loneliness, the loneliness of moral integrity, the loneliness of fidelity, and the loneliness of responding to a higher will and a higher eros. And that, as Jesus showed, requires a painful emotional asceticism, a certain romantic fasting, which can almost crush the spirit.
To make commitments and to remain faithful to each other requires being willing to experience what Jesus experienced in the garden, namely, emotional crucifixion. Scripture says he gave his will over to his Father, but it was a very particular part of his will that was undergoing struggle and resistance in Gethsemane, namely, that part which stewards freedom, opportunity, romance, pleasure, and embrace. The lover in him had to let go of some things. The same is true for each of us:

• Whenever you stop flirting with an attractive romantic possibility because you are already committed to someone or something else, when you go home because that's where fidelity calls you, you sweat blood in the garden and feel what Jesus felt in Gethsemane.
• Whenever you willingly, without resentment, give up some of your freedom, renounce dreams for a career, accept that you will never now be able to achieve some of the things you might have accomplished because children, family, church, and other needs have their conscriptive rope around you, whenever you accept the burden of duty, you sweat blood in the garden and feel what Jesus felt in Gethsemane.
• Whenever you willingly, without resentment, accept that some wonderful, legitimate opportunity for pleasure and enjoyment cannot be yours because something else' is calling you to a deeper place, when you accept to settle for less because of the demand of higher things, you sweat blood in the garden and feel what Jesus felt in Gethsemane.
• Whenever you decide to do something purely for the sake of conscience, to do what is right even when everything inside of you screams against its unfairness, you sweat blood in the garden and feel what Jesus felt in Gethsemane.
• Whenever you experience an emotional crucifixion for the sake of truth and fidelity, you sweat blood in the garden - and you also create a place where God can enter into the world and transform it because this kind of blood is what takes tension out of the community.

Goethe, in his poem, "The Holy Longing," suggests that there comes a time in life when “a desire for higher love-making” sweeps you upward to a place where you become "insane for the light." That describes both Jesus in Gethsemane and the invitation he left us.”

Article: The Romantic Imagination With Religion

Source: A Rolheiser Bibliography Available

• Rolheiser. Against An Infinite Horizon, Crossroads;
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• Rolheiser. The Restless Heart, Hodder & Stoughton;
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• Rolheiser. The Holy Longing, Doubleday;
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• Lewis, C.S. The Great Divorce, Collins;
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• Hill, Edmund. Being Human, Geoffrey Chapman;
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• Hillman, James. The Soul's Code, Random House;
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• Schneiders, Sandra. Beyond Patching, Paulist Press;

Father, Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do

“As Jesus is being crucified, he asks his Father to forgive his killers. These are his words: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they are doing!”
Karl Rahner once made an interesting comment on this. He pointed out that, in fact, they did know. The people crucifying Jesus knew exactly what they were doing.
They knew he was innocent, they knew their own jealousy, and they knew, too, that they were doing something wrong; just as we know, at least most of the time, when we are doing wrong. Our sense of right and wrong is not that easily derailed, even when we are caught up in a mob action where there is a certain moral blindness and safety in numbers.
So what does Jesus mean by this? What were his executioners ignorant of? How could they be innocent when they knew better? For Rahner, the statement, "they know not what they are doing," refers to something beyond conscious awareness. What those crucifying Jesus didn't know is how much they were loved. They weren't ignorant of their own motivation. They knew their own deceit. But they had too little knowledge and awareness of God's love for them. It's that ignorance that made them - and makes us - mostly innocent of real sin.
Scholastic thought used to distinguish between "culpable" and "inculpable" ignorance. It termed the latter "invincible ignorance" and defined it as a darkness, a lack of understanding, for which we are not responsible. In this framework of thought, you are not considered to be committing a sin when you do something wrong if you do it out of an ignorance that isn't your fault. For the Scholastics, in I order to sin, you first have to have a certain awareness. Of what? Of love.
Allow me an illustration:
Some years ago, I received a letter from a woman in her late 40s. She began the letter by telling me that she could, in all truth, say that for the first 40 years of her life she had not committed a sin.
Her words: “I grew up in a terrible home and was abused and unloved as child. I became bitter, suicidal, and acted out in every way. I bit in order not to be bitten and broke every commandment except murder (which in fact I contemplated), but 1 really don't believe I ever sinned, even though I knew I was doing wrong at the time. Why don't I think I sinned? Because sin is a betrayal of love and nobody, as far as I knew, had ever loved me. God was loving me,1 know that now, but I had no way of knowing or believing that then. I did what I needed to do to survive.
Sometime after my 40th birthday a miracle happened. I fell in love and that person fell in love with me. I experienced love for the first time. I know now what it means to sin because I'm loved. Now when I do something wrong it's a sin because I am betraying love. But you first need to be loved in order to betray that. When I didn't know love and had no way of sensing God's love for me, I had nothing to betray, at least as far as I knew. That's why I believe that, even though I did many wrong things, I didn't sin.”
Sin is a betrayal of love. However, you first have to be loved and, however dimly, sense that before you can betray it. In Rahner's view, this is what lies behind Jesus' plea to his Father to forgive his killers because they don't know any better. At one level, of course, they do, but at another, a far more important one, they don't. Like the woman whose letter I just quoted, they don't know how much they are loved. They are biting in order not to be bitten.
There's more jealousy, hatred, anger, murder, adultery, slander, lying and blasphemy at God in our world than there is sin. We're not so much bad as ignorant, inculpably so. Oftentimes when we do wrong, we aren't betraying love because we don't know love to begin with. That doesn't mean our behavior isn't destructive, that it doesn't ruin lives, wreak havoc with happiness, and that it doesn't continue (as Scripture so graphically puts it) to murder God out of ignorance. Our actions have real and often permanent effects. Those effects may never be trivialized. When we do wrong we hurt others and hurt ourselves, even if we aren't sinning. Darkness is always the enemy of light. It's just that, more often than not I suspect, our actions may be wrong, very wrong, but they're not sinful because we don't know what we're doing. Our dark ness is invincible, inculpable, something for which we aren't really responsible.
Mercifully, God's compassion and understanding are deeper than our own and God's love can descend into hell itself and, even there, forgive and redeem us.”
Fr. Rolheiser's Column in April 15, 2003 Issue of the Northwest Progress.The tenth and last summary of the ten chapters of his book, The Holy Longing

Consequences of the Incarnation for Spirituality

Many of us know the pain of having loved ones no longer walk the road of faith and church with us.
Oftentimes it's our own children. In almost all families today there are members who no longer attend church, no longer accept the Christian teachings on sex and marriage, and who are, or at least seem, indifferent or even hostile to religion.
Let's take a classic example. You are a parent trying to live out what you believe in, You value church, the church's teachings on marriage, and the importance of a relationship to God in prayer, but some of your own children no longer accept these things. When they were young, they naturally followed you in your faith practice and valued what you value. Then, gradually or dramatically, they stopped going to church, adapted their own view's on sex and marriage, and apologetically or defiantly began to live in a way that opposes what you cherish and believe.
At first, you challenged and fought, but eventually accepted that it was to no avail. Now you stand, seemingly with no moves left, save your own quiet witness.
What's to be done in the face of this? What, beyond continuing to live out your own convictions and praying for your loved ones, can you do?
Oftentimes parents say to me: “All I can do now is to continue to love them and to pray for them!” They say it as if that wasn't very much at all, but that, taken within the Incarnation, is no small thing. It's enough. It can work the needed miracle. How? Let me explain.
G.K. Chesterton once told this story: A man who was entirely careless of spiritual affairs died and went to hell. And he was much missed on earth by his old friends. A friend went down to the gates of hell to see if there was any chance of bringing him back. But, though he pleaded for the gates to be opened, the iron bars never yielded. His priest went as well and argued: “He wasn't really a bad fellow, let him out!” But the gates remained stubbornly shut against all their voices.
Finally his mother came. She didn't beg for his release. Quietly, and with a strange catch in her voice, she said to Satan, "Let me in." Immediately the great doors of hell swung open. For love goes down through the gates of hell and there redeems the damned.
The Incarnation gives us that kind of power. As Christians, we believe that God becomes flesh in Christ and that God's flesh, the body of Christ, is equally manifest in Jesus, the Eucharist, and the body of believers. We, like Jesus, are part of Christ's body. Thus, when we forgive, our children are forgiven; when we (through our love) connect someone to the body of Christ, he or she is connected to grace; and when we say, "My heaven includes my son or daughter," heaven honors those words.
When Jesus said, “Whose sins you shall forgive, they are forgiven” (John 20:23); “Whatever you bind on earth shall be considered bound in heaven and whatever you loose on earth shall be considered loosed in heaven” (Matthew 16:19); and “In truth I tell you, whoever believes in me will perform the same works that I do myself, and will perform even greater works” (John 14:12), he wasn't just talking about the power of ordained ministers inside of the church. He was talking about the power of the whole community, all of us. Jesus gave us the power, literally, to save each other from hell.
Sometimes when I teach this I am accused of preaching wild, new doctrine. Partly that's right. It's wild doctrine all right, but it's not new; it's old, ancient, biblical, stemming right from the first Christmas in Bethlehem when God took on human flesh, a flesh that God has never shed. What it states is so wondrous that it inspires the that we find in Christmas hymns. Christ's birth did bring something wondrously new into the world.
Some years ago I wrote two articles on the Incarnation, within which I stated that, as Christians, we can be sacraments to each other and we can, literally, save each other from hell. I was deluged with letters, almost all of which found this too incredulous to believe. One woman wrote, saying: “Father, I've seven children. None go to church anymore and only two are married inside of the church; the others live common law.”
“They're good kids, though, and I love them and pray for them, but 1 fear for them. How can they go to heaven without faith and the church? I'd like to believe you, but I can't. If what you say is true, it would be too good to be true!” I sent her a note with these words: “What a wonderful description of the Incarnation! It's too good to be true!”
Chapter 5 of The Holy Longing develops this motif: As Christians we aren't merely theists. We don't just believe in a God in heaven, but in a God who is in heaven, but also on earth, incarnate, in flesh, in our own flesh – and that gives us the power, literally, to open the gates of hell.”

ARTICLES ARE A NEW SYNTHESIS

For this year's religious education series (in the Catholic Northwest Progress, January 30th to April 15, 2003), "Longing for Faith," Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser will write a synthesis of each of the 10 chapters of his award-winning and best-selling book. The Holy Longing: The Search for a Christian Spirituality (Doubleday, 1999). The book has also been released on audiocassette by St. Anthony Messenger Press.

Next month: "A Spirituality of Ecclesiology".

God's Gender

God's gender thing that always needs to be said before weighing any-thing we affirm about God. The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), in fact, defined as dogma the fact that all language about God conceals more than it reveals and is more inaccurate than accurate. All language about God largely misses the mark.
Nowhere is this more evident, or problematic, than in our efforts to conceive of and speak of God's gender. We speak of Cod as "He" as "Father," as masculine, but Scripture assures us that God is not just masculine, nor just feminine, nor some neutered entity. God, as revealed in the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, is eminently personal, gendered and sexed; but, as the first chapter of Genesis makes clear. God is equally male and female, since both masculinity and femininity image God equally.
But how can this be conceived of or captured in language? Essentially, it can't. All concepts and language are inadequate here. This is one of the reasons why, for so many centuries, we commonly conceived of and spoke of God as exclusively masculine. It solved a lot of problems.
God, as masculine, is the dominant (though not exclusive) image of God in Scripture. Given that we have no reasons why, for so many centuries, we commonly conceived of and spoke of God as exclusively masculine. It solved a lot of problems. God, as masculine, is the dominant though not exclusive) image of God in Scripture. Given that we have no nouns and pronouns that capture both genders, for better and for worse, we opted to speak of God as "He" and "Father," rather than as having no personality. Conceiving and speaking of God as exclusively masculine was one-sided, but it helped save us from something even more debilitating, namely, a God without gender, sex, or personality ("The force be with you!"). So where do we go from here?
Mircea Eliade, in his mythical schema of things, suggests that, archetypically, at the center of things there sit two thrones. On one site a King, on the other a Queen. But the two work as one, always in perfect harmony, in perfect mutuality, empowering each other. They rule as one and the kingdom and everything in it is safe be-cause those two thrones sit at the center and the two together can create the energy and power needed to order, feed, and bless the people.
‘God, as revealed In the Judeo-Christian Scriptures, is eminently personal, gendered and sexed.’
The center of things is, of course, where God sits. What Eliade is pro-posing, in fact, is a concept of God as perfect masculinity and perfect femininity, in perfect harmony, in perfect mutuality, in full adulthood, empowering each other so that the gracious-ness that is thus generated flows out and feeds, blesses, and protects all the people. What a wonderful image of God! How full of personality and gender! And yet, how beyond language!
Beautiful as this is, some of our mystical images go even further. How to conceive of God? Imagine perfect masculinity and perfect femininity making perfect love. That's what's happening inside of God and all the creativity and fertility within the universe is the result of that. Billions of mystical images go even further. How to conceive of God? Imagine perfect masculinity and perfect femininity making perfect love. That's what's happening inside of God and all the creativity and fertility within the universe is the result of that. Billions of galaxies, billions of people, and gracious energy beyond imagination is constantly being generated because, inside of God, loving embrace is happening.
Such an image is perhaps more poetic than theological, but, in the end, isn't all theology just that - poetry meant to inspire? More crassly, isn't all orthodox theology simply a set of words that God has given us permission to use without threat or being killed for blasphemy.
This image of God, as perfect masculinity and femininity making love, can, I submit, be a rich mine field for prayer and reflection. Of itself, it won't solve the problem of the equality of the sexes, or the struggle to find a more inclusive language about God, though it might serve as a valuable backdrop for these issues. Such a concept of God, though, can help us to see and contemplate more clearly what St. Augustine called the "vestiges of the Trinity," namely, images of God within nature and human life.
If God can be conceived as perfect, fully adult masculinity and perfect femininity making love, then vestiges of God can be seen everywhere. The ecstatic embrace of the great King and the great Queen leaves traces everywhere - in the dew on the grass, in the flowers growing in a garden, in the interplay of light and smell that enchant a forest, in the peace that settles in as an elderly couple silently shares a meal, in the passionate e brace of lovers, in the respect a holy fear one sometimes sees between the sexes and, of course and especially, whenever you see, in this war femininity and masculinity empowering each other for the good of the kingdom and the kids.
All good fairy tails end with a marriage, a prince and princess marry each other, become the King a Queen, and then “live happily ever after.” That's an image that tells what's happening “inside of God and what, because of this wonderful marriage, God has in store for us.””

Where Faith Resides

Daniel Berrigan was once asked; “Where does your faith reside? Where's its real seat?” His answer is wonderful, both in color and insight: “Your faith is rarely where your head is at and rarely where your heart is at. Your faith is where your ass is at! Inside what commitments are you sitting? Within what reality do you anchor yourself?”
Faith, in his view, is not anchored in the head or the heart. But how is that possible? If it isn't in the head or the heart, where is it?
From Aristotle, through Thomas Aquinas, through contemporary philosophy and psychology, analysts have generally agreed that, as human beings, we have three major spiritual faculties - head, heart and gut - each with a special function. In our heads, we think. In our hearts, we feel. What happens in the gut? In the gut, we know - just simply know - in a way beyond thoughts and feelings. The gut has to do with intuition; it lets us know what we "have to do." It's there that we experience the categorical imperatives within our lives.
With that as a background, we can begin to understand the wisdom of Berrigan's answer. To use just one example, there are times when each of us, in the most important commitments within our lives (faith, family, church, morality), find ourselves in a situation where our heads aren't in it, our hearts aren't in it, but we are in it!
Against the more spontaneous wisdom of our heads and against the more natural feelings of our hearts/ we are anchored by another kind of thought and feeling which perhaps we can't explain to anyone - even to ourselves - but which keeps us sit-ting, standing, and walking solidly inside of a certain commitment. We are doing what "we have to do" because at some deep level we simply "know" that this is what we need to do, that this is what is right. That's faith.
Faith is manifest in our decisions, our commitments, and our life choices, more than in any intellectual beliefs or passionate feelings. It shows itself in decisions, in choosing certain commitments, and in remaining within them. It's helpful to know this.
How do I know whether my faith is weak or strong? By checking where my ass is at! Why am I inside certain commitments? Why am I remaining there? That, ultimately, is the criterion.
‘Faith is manifest in our decisions, our commitments, and our life choices, more than in any intellectual beliefs or passionate feelings.’
The same holds true for assessment of others' faith. What's to be said of those among our own children, siblings, neighbors and friends who no longer go to church and seem, on the surface at least, to be rather cavalier about the faith?
How we assess their faith may not be based upon where their heads and hearts are at, but rather upon where they are at. Do they radiate charity, graciousness, respect, hospitality, honesty, generosity, moral integrity, concern for justice? To what are they giving their lives? What commitments are they sitting and walking within and why? Faith is judged by these things, not only by how someone thinks, feels, or expresses herself explicitly in the area of faith.
God, as Jesus makes clear, is a self-emptying God, and we live in the wonder and grace of that kenosis. God, it seems, is self-secure enough so as to not need to be always the center of conscious attention, the acknowledged life of the party.
We see, then, that there is a real difference between the idea of faith and its reality. Too often we confuse these. Faith is also an idea and that idea can sometimes be very stimulating intellectually. As well, the idea of faith can stir and inflame the heart. The reverse is also true. As a notion, faith can sometimes seem intellectually stifling and can feel emotionally crippling. Feelings and thoughts run a wide gamut and so we must be careful to not mistake how we think and feel about God on any given day for the reality of faith.
Thoughts and feelings about God are not necessarily faith, as we all too quickly learn when our faith is challenged, either by the distractions of everyday life, the scandals in the church or, more deeply, by personal tragedy - when we are cut down at our roots by terminal illness, the loss of health through aging, and other irreversible losses. It's then that we find out, only too quickly, that the idea of faith, as distinct from the reality of faith, lacks the substance to truly let us believe in a deeper life than what the world can give us now.
C.S. Lewis, in recounting his own journey to faith, tells us that it was not, in the end, his thoughts or feelings that led him to faith. Rather, it was God's grip on him, an inchoate brand in his soul that wouldn't go away, a nagging bum in his gut. As he puts it: “The harshness of God is softer than the kindness of men and God's compulsion is our liberation.”

Loneliness And The Second Half Of Life

“Twenty years ago I wrote a book on loneliness. I was young then, lonely myself, restless like all young people, and still searching for many things. So despite leaning heavily on Augustine, Aquinas/ John of the Cross, and Karl Rahner for my insights, the book was probably as much autobiography as spirituality or theology. I'm still proud of it, though. It's a book on the loneliness of youth and none of us, regardless of age or achievement, ever really outgrows that.
Loneliness haunts you in a very particular way when you're young. It comes turbocharged with a restlessness that can beat you up like the playground bully, especially on a Friday or a Saturday night when it seems like the whole world is doing something exciting and you have been left out. When you're young it always feels like you're missing out on something. You ache to drink in the whole world and make love to it, but are stuck in a very confining situation where your life always seems too small. You want a larger connection to the world, more sex, deeper intimacy, and a soul mate that you have not yet found.
At that time of life, you're also overly-romantic, driven by fantasies of finding perfect love, perfect sex, and a one-in-four-billion soul mate who will finally fill in every lonely spot inside you. When you're young it's easy to be besotted by Romeo and Juliet: Find perfect love, make perfect love, and then die together. Surely the noblest exit off the planet!
Youth and restlessness go together. It is never easy to find simple rest when you're young. You resonate naturally with Augustine's dictum: “You have made us for yourself. Lord, and our hearts are restless until they rest in you,” and you can feel what Scripture means when it says: “God has made everything beautiful in its own time, but has put timelessness into our hearts so that we are out of sync with everything from beginning to end.”
Yes, when you're young you know exactly what "timelessness" feels like inside you. None of this really changes as you get older, but a new kind of loneliness begins to break through inside. This kind doesn't hit you broadside, like the turbulent restlessness of youth. It comes on more like a painful, bitter realization that, at first, you try to block out and deny.
What is this loneliness? It's the realization that, at some level, there will always be a distance between yourself and others, even from those nearest and dearest to you. This hits as part of the realization of your own mortality. To realize that you are mortal doesn't just mean that you more realistically accept the fact that someday, perhaps even soon, you will die. The brute fact of mortality also brings with it the realization that there will always be some areas of life where you will be all alone, alienated from others, separated by differences that seem/as the classical divorce formula puts it, irreconcilable.
The ache in this kind of loneliness dwarfs the pain of youthful restlessness and often leads to bitterness of soul. It is helpful to understand this, precisely so as not to become bitter.
Where do you feel this kind of loneliness? You feel it in those silent areas that exist between you and your spouse, your family, your friends, and your community. There are always things that can't be spoken, can't be understood, can't be harmonized, even in your most intimate relation ships and especially inside of family and community life.
This is the loneliness you feel when you drive away from the family gathering, finish that long talk with your spouse, stand trying to explain some thing to your own child, or are left muttering to yourself after that church or civic meeting. At those moments you can feel like a minority of one, unanimity minus one, alone morally with most of what's deepest in you. And it's a messy feeling too' — far, far from that bittersweet romantic taste that comes with longing when we are young or that satisfied spiritual feeling you get when you're suffering, but know that this is doing you good. This kind of loneliness makes you feel like there's something wrong with you, morally and otherwise: “I'm out of sync here. Perhaps I'm just too stubborn or too stupid or too proud or too sinful or too selfish!” Worse still, as William Stafford says, this kind of feeling opens up the floodgates inside you where all of your old wounds begin to seep through.
But, like the loneliness of youth, it too, has much to teach us. As the Persian poet, Hafiz, puts it:
Don't surrender your loneliness So quickly. Let it cut more deep.
Let it ferment and season you as few human Or even divine ingredients can.
Something missing in my heart tonight has made my eyes so soft, My voice so tender.
My need of God Absolutely Clear.”

The Cross As Revealing God's Unconditional Love

“A number of years ago, a young man came to me because he was in crisis. He had been having an affair with his girlfriend and she had become pregnant. For a variety of reasons, marriage was impossible. The pregnancy would have an irrevocable impact on a number of lives: his girlfriend's, his own, their families' - not to mention the child that would be born.
He was a sensitive person and knew that he had been irresponsible. He made no attempt to rationalize or to deflect blame from himself. He recognized that he had done wrong and that through his irresponsibility a certain innocence had been lost trust had been betrayed - various lives had been permanently disrupted, and he would now live in a certain brokenness. This troubled him deeply.
He ended his story on a note of despair: "1 was irresponsible and this has, forever, hurt some people because even God can't unscramble an egg!" For him, it now seemed, there would always be a certain, skeleton in the closet, a past ghost to haunt his happiness.
Even God can't unscramble an egg! What a statement! And how true, except for one thing: The cross of Jesus reveals that we can live and live happily and healthily, beyond any egg we have ever scrambled. That is the central message of the cross. How does the cross tell us this?
Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, used to say that we understand the makeup of things best when we see them lying in pieces -- shattered. In the brokenness we see the underlying structure.
That is also true of love and faith. We see how they are made up when we see them fractured. Jesus' death shows us this. At the second he died, Scripture says, the “curtain veil in the temple was torn from top to bottom.” The curtain veil, as we know, separated the people in me temple from seeing what went on in the holy of holies; it represented the veil between God and ourselves. The cross of Jesus tears apart that veil and lets us see inside the holy of holies, the heart of God. And what do we see there? Unfathomable love, unfathomable forgiveness, a compassion and tenderness beyond understanding. In the cross God tells us: “You can do this to me - and I will still love you!”
I remember another young man who shared with me how he once so badly betrayed all that he believed in that he decided to commit suicide. Setting out to kill himself, he decided, first, to stop in a church and say some final prayers. He entered a church and sat down. The only thing lit up in that darkened church was a crucifix on the front wall. He looked at the cross and, in a second of sheer grace, understood what it meant.
Here are his words: “I looked at the cross and 1 understood. I was in hell and God hadn't stopped loving me for one second. I saw that God loves me, no matter what. I'm not proud of what 1 did and it will always be part of me, but I can live beyond it, and be happy, knowing God's love and strength are always with me, even when I betray them.” Unaware that he was doing it he was tenderly fingering a cross he was wearing around his neck as he shared this.
An elderly nun, whom 1 much love and respect, is fond of saying: "I'm a loved sinner'" The secret to spiritual health is to acknowledge, in the roots of our souls, both parts of that equation: We are sinners without any need to rationalize or excuse ourselves, even as we have the sure knowledge that God loves us, deeply and irrevocably, in our weakness. The cross gives us that assurance by tailing us, precisely, that God. doesn't stop loving us, even for one second, irrespective of weakness.
The cross of Christ is rich reality. Among other things, it tells us how God loves and redeems us even when we are unfaithful and our lives are broken.
It is not surprising mat hundreds of millions of people, young and old, wear a cross in some form. These crosses, like the meaning of the cross itself, have an infinite variety of shapes and sparkles. From delicately cut, golden earrings, chosen lo match an expensive evening dress, to rough, crude wooden crosses slung casually over a denim shirt, the cross of Jesus is everywhere evident. We see it on hillsides, on church spires, in cemeteries, and most everywhere that anything special, love or tragedy, has happened. Rightly so. The cross is the ultimate symbol of love. it shows what love is, what love costs, and what love does for us.
Most important of all, it shows us that God never stops loving us even for a second, no matter what we do, and that we can live, and live happily, beyond any egg we have ever scrambled. - Lent 02(21)2002”

The Gaze of Sheer Admiration

“The older I get the more convinced I am that spiritual maturity lies in the simple capacity to admire - to admire beauty, admire talent, and admire youth, without trying to possess them. It takes years and lots of restless sadness, to come to understand that. Happiness doesn't come from achieving great things, being the center of attention, or being recognized for being exceptional in some way. Paradoxically, the near reverse is true; real joy lies in being able to admire another, in focusing attention away from self, and in being able to admire another, in focusing attention away from self, and in being able to enjoy the beauty and giftedness of others without trying to possess them.
That's easily said and very hard to do. Our congenital metaphysics militates against it. Soul and the body resist it. We want to possess what's beautiful, press it against ourselves, make it our own. The heart wants to capture, possess, and control what attracts it. That's the way we're built.
And it's the reason, too, why we often find it so painful to experience beauty. Strange, rather than filling us with joy, the experience of beauty often makes us sad and restless. Beauty attracts us, even stuns us sometimes, but, too often, leaves us with the bittersweet feeling: “This is beautiful, but I can't have it, and so it accentuates everything I am not!” The experience of beauty, more often than not, leaves us restless and sad, incapable of joyful admiration.
Etty Hillesum, in her poignant memoir. An interrupted Life, articulates this well:
“And here 1 hit upon something essential. Whenever I saw a beautiful flower, what I longed to do with it was press it to my heart, or eat it all up. It was more difficult with a piece of beautiful scenery, but the feeling was the same. I was too sensual; I might also write that I was too greedy. I yearned physically for all I thought was beautiful, wanted to own it. Hence the painful longing that could never be satisfied, the pining for something I thought unattainable, which 1 called my creative urge. I believe it was this powerful emotion that made me think that I was born to produce great works.”
“It all suddenly changed. God alone knows by what inner process, but it is different now. I realized it only this morning, when I recalled my slow walk around the Skating Club a few nights ago. It was dusk, soft hues in the sky, mysterious silhouettes of houses, trees alive with light through the tracery of their branches, in short, enchanting. And then I knew precisely how I had felt in the past. Then all the beauty would have gone like a stab to my heart and I would not have known what to do with the pain.
Then I would have felt the need to write, to compose verses, but the words still would have refused to come. I would have felt utterly miserable, wallowed in the pain and exhausted myself as a result. The experience would have sapped all my energy. Now I know it for what it was: mental masturbation.”
“But that night, only just gone, I reacted quite differently. I felt that God's world was beautiful despite everything, but its beauty now thrilled me with joy. I was just as deeply moved by that mysterious, still landscape in the dusk as I might have been before, but somehow 1 no longer wanted to own it. I went home invigorated and got to work. And the scenery stayed with me, in the background as a cloak about my soul, to put it poetically for once, but it no longer held me back: I no longer masturbated with it.”
“To admire someone attractive or something beautiful without trying to possess, that's the real task, not just of aesthetics but, especially, of spirituality.” When the rich young man comes up to Jesus and asks, “What must I do to possess eternal life?”, Jesus gently corrects his verb. He tells him: “If you would receive eternal life, then open your hands and, in that posture of non-grasping, eternal life is free for you.” But, as we know, the story has an unhappy ending. The young man goes away sad, unable to do what Jesus asked of him.
That's our problem too, generally, with sadness. We are unable to stand before beauty without trying, like the rich young man, to possess it, to close our hands over it. If only we could be content just to receive it, to admire it, to bless it our restlessness and sadness could turn to joy.
The older we get, the more we know the truth of this, though we aren't always up to the task. But it's helpful, very helpful, to know in what direction peace and maturity lie. Hopefully one day, like Etty Hillesum, joy will catch us blindside, as we look at a beauty that swells the heart and are able to say: "This is beautiful, and I don't need to press it to my heart!" April 11, 2002.”

Sexuality And Creativity

“A friend of mine recently left the priesthood. He loved being a priest and was a good one. His problem? He was a man who worked with his hands and fashioned beautiful things out of wood. At a point, rightly or wrongly, he felt that he couldn't be really creative if he remained celibate: "I can't be creative without sex!" is how he put it. That was more than hormones speaking. He was an artist, with an artist's temperament. Most artists, I suspect, will understand exactly what he is saying, even if they don't necessarily agree that this necessitates his particular decision.
There's a creativity that is released by sex, just as there's sterility ("dried-upness") that can come about by its suppression. Artists know this too well, in fact. It's one of the reasons they're so prone to artistic license in this area. Countless artists have expressed this; creativity and sexuality are linked at the very source of things.
Anne Michaels, for example, in her recent book, Fugitive Pieces, makes a virtual spirituality of creativity out of sex. Her two main characters, both male, have their personalities and creativity opened up only through sex. The intimation, of course, is that this is true for everyone.
This is not a simplistic thesis. Artistic license in the area of sex is fired by more than hormones, ego, or irresponsibility, though one would have to be blind not to see that these often play a role, as well. What drives artists here is the connection between sex and creativity. There is a powerful link. And why shouldn't there be? All life is, after all, created through sex. In some fashion or other of that word.
Given this background, we see that Mary's question to die Angel Gabriel, at the time of the Annunciation, is more than a simple query in biology: “How can this be, since I am a virgin?” Six? had just been told that she was to be the most creative of all artisans, me artist of artists, the mother of the fountain of creativity itself. So her question is a good one, a deep one: “From what source can this life spring, given the limited way that I am living out my sexuality?”
This is, indeed, the real meditation for celibates like me; “How can I be creative without sex?” It is also just as crucial a meditation for everyone else, even for those who do enjoy healthy sexual lives. Given our congenital propensity for polymorphous embrace, we still all have to live out a certain sexual asceticism. Ultimately everyone has Mary's question; “How can I truly bring forth new life, given that I can't sleep with the whole world?”
There's no easy answer to that question - for artists, for married people, for celibates, or for anyone else. Sometimes, in terms of Christian spirituality, we have been too simplistic in our answer. We're paying the price for that. Too prevalent is the artist who finds our theology of sexuality stifling and anti-life and has walked away from the church (and sometimes the faith) for just that reason.
What is the answer? How can any of us be creative, given that we may not give ourselves irresponsible license in the area of sex?
I'm not sure that there is a theoretical answer - some clear spiritual formula that can be articulated, canonized, and then applied in each case. We have, of course, a few non-negotiable principles, like the Ten Commandments, but these only define the outside parameters. Inside, innate within the very concepts of love, sex, respect, and responsibility them-selves, lies a deeper set of moral principles that are much less easy to name and codify. We learn these more by living morally than by. studying anything, So how should we live so that our sexuality properly fuels our creativity?
The answer to that, 1 suspect, will involve three things: a certain grieving, a certain mysticism, and a certain trust.
'How should we live so that our sexuality properly fuels our creativity?'
Grieving: We can't be God, either in our talents to create or in our capacity to sleep with the universe. At a certain point, we have to accept limit. We're creatures, not God. And what we can't have must be grieved or it will make us bitter.
Mysticism: Sex is earthy, real, and produces life. But there are other, real forms of love-making. These, too, produce life. The Body of Christ is, at one and the same time, radically physical and radically mystical. Even as sex plays such a life-producing role in this world, there are deep, invisible embraces inside the Body of Christ where seed and womb also meet and produce life In ways beyond what we can phenomenologically trace.
Trust: Maybe, as we see in Mary's response, the real answer is trust - faith that if we live out our lives ac-cording to what we deeply believe, no matter how far from human fertility that may seem at times. God will make us creative in ways that we cannot now imagine. The Holy Spirit, too, makes us pregnant. - January 31, 2002.”

On Hearing The Voice That Soothes

“Inside each of us there is deep, congenital restlessness. We are not restful beings who sometimes get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience rest. Karl Rahner, I believe, had it right when he said that we do not have souls that get redress, but that our souls themselves are lonely caverns thirsting for the infinite, deep wells of restlessness that make us ache to sleep with the whole world and all that is beyond.
Because of this. we can find it difficult to concentrate during the day and to sleep at night. We go through life feeling like we are missing out on something, that life is more exciting and fulfilling for others than it is for us. Our achievements rarely satisfy us because we are always aware of what we haven't achieved, of missed chances and failed possibilities. Always, too, it seems that we are inadequate to the task, that we cannot not disappoint those we love.
We are always a bit dissatisfied. As Henri Nouwen puts it, in this life, it seems that there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy, but that even our happiest moments come with a shadow, a fear, a jealousy, a restlessness. Inside us, no matter what our age, we are always somewhat lost and full of a sadness that we don't quite know what to do with. Thoreau was right; we do live lives of quiet desperation. What are we meant to do with that?
An analogy might help us here. We can learn something valuable I believe, by comparing these feelings to what a baby feels, at a certain moment, in the presence of a baby sitter in the absence of its mother.
As many a frustrated baby sitter has learned, there can come a moment, usually later in the evening, when the baby grows tired of being titillated by flashy toys, extra sweets, and the continued cooing of the baby sitter. The baby becomes irritated, cranky, weepy, and finally disconsolate. At that point nothing will soothe its aches, except me voice and the touch of the mother herself. The baby needs to hear the mother's voice and only the mother's voice; no attempt by me baby sitter to replace the mother or even to imitate the mother is of much avail. The baby will not be fooled; there comes a moment when only the mother can soothe and comfort. The baby's disquiet will disappear only when she again hears the mother lovingly call her name.
As adults its really no different for us in trying to come to grips with our congenital restlessness. We can distract ourselves for awhile, be titillated by flashy toys, be soothed and lulled by sympathetic voices, and momentarily even be content in the absence of our real mother. But there will come a time, usually a little later on in the proceedings, when we are a bit more tired and cranky, when these o things will soothe no more. We will begin to miss, in the very depths of our souls, the one voice and one presence that can ultimately bring us rest.
Of course that one voice that can soothe, that one voice that we search for among all the others, is the voice of God, the primordial Mother. Ultimately we reach a point in life when there is an ache and a sadness inside us that no one can still and comfort, other than the one who ultimately brought us to birth. Like the baby frustrated with its baby sitter, we, too, need to hear our mother lovingly pronounce our names.
The Gospel of John opens very differently than the other Gospels. There are no infancy narratives. Right at the beginning we already meet the adult Christ, and the first words he speaks are a question: "What are you searching for?" John's whole Gospel tries to answer that, but the full answer is given only at the very end, by Jesus himself.
What are we ultimately searching for? On the morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdala meets the newly-risen Jesus, but she doesn't recognize him. He approaches her and asks (in words that repeat his question at the opening of the Gospel): “What are you searching for?” She explains that she is searching for the body, the dead body, of Jesus. He says just one word to her in response: "Mary," He calls her by name and, in that, she not only recognizes him, but she hears precisely what a disconsolate baby cannot hear in the voice of her baby sitter - the voice of the mother, lovingly pronouncing her name.
In Jesus' response to Mary Magdala, we learn the answer to life's most fundamental question: What do we ache for? Ultimately all our aching is for one thing - to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this - hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God.”

The cross as revealing the inner life of God

“There's a particularly poignant line in the account of Jesus' death which says that, when he died, “the veil in the sanctuary was torn from top to bottom.” I remember, as a boy, hearing that read in Church picturing it literally, and thinking: "Now they'll know what a terrible thing they've done!" But that line doesn't refer to some ominous, dark sign at the moment of the crucifixion, meant to stun the world and prove it made a gross mistake. It refers to something else, not dark and fateful at all.
The sanctuary veil was me curtain that hung between the ordinary people and the holy of holies, the most sacred of all places, and prevented them from seeing what was behind. What the Gospel writers are saying is that, at the moment of Jesus' death, the veil that sits between us and the inner life of God was ripped open so that we can now see what God looks like inside.
The cross, then, is the ultimate icon, the real depiction of the Holy. It shows us God's heart, the inner life of the Holy Trinity. How is this so?
On the cross, there is not just one person, Jesus. Ultimately all three persons in the Trinity - Father, Son, and Holy Spirit-all on the cross.
On the surface, of course, we see Jesus, the Son. What's he doing? He's suffering and dying, but in a particular way. He hangs on the cross in anguish, dying, alone, humiliated, misunderstood, but he also hangs there in trust and fidelity, giving his life away without resentment, recrimination, and bitter questioning because he knows and trusts someone deeply enough to, literally, believe in the sun even when it isn't shining, in love even when he isn't experiencing it, and in God even when God is silent.
We see Jesus on the cross, but we see him there clinging to someone else with a trust that turns hatred into love, curses into blessing, bitterness into graciousness, recrimination into understanding, and God's silence into faith. On the cross we see one person, but as being held and empowered by somebody else.
Less visible, but clearly there as the recipient of this trust, present as the one whom this drama is ultimately about, is the Father. He is also on the cross, suffering with the Son, holding the Son in this darkness, showing himself wormy of trust, and trusting the Son not to short-circuit the tension so that God's response, the resurrection, can be what it should be - not an act of vengeance, nor a bullying definition of who's in charge, but an act of unfathomable redemption, understanding, forgiveness, and love, in act that, more than anything else, defines God. The Father is there, too, on the cross, suffering, waiting in patience, empowering another to trust.
Finally, the Holy Spirit is also on the cross, uniquely generated and released by what unfolds there. As the drama of the crucifixion, this deep interplay of giving and receiving in Eve and trust is taking place, a forgiving warmth, a healing fire, and an unfathomable patience and understanding are being produced, revealed, and released. That energy, the ultimate oxygen, which the Gospels depict as spilling out of Jesus pierced side as blood and water, is the Holy Spirit, and that Spirit reveals precisely what is going on inside of God. What is happening there?
Inside of God, as we can see from the cross, there is no bitterness, vengeance, loss of patience, or lack of graciousness (not a single trace). When the veil inside the temple is torn, when the side of Jesus is pierced, what we see, what flows out, is only forgiveness, patience, gentleness, understanding, and warm invitation.
We have an analogy for this, how-ever inadequate, inside human relationships. Whenever two people love each other so deeply that the power of that love enables them to trust enough so as not to grow embittered, recriminating, and questioning of God in times of pain and darkness, then that love becomes an energy, a warm spirit, an oxygen that empowers everyone who comes into contact with it.
You see this in a good marriage, where the love and trust that a man and a woman have for each other become something akin to a warm fireplace that warms everyone around them. From their side, too, flows blood and water, a spirit and a baptism. But that happens only when their love for each other is of the kind that enables them both to sweat blood in the garden rather than give in to bitterness, recrimination, and the temptation to make God prove himself. A good love empowers both parties to carry the burdens of others as well as the burden of doubt, without resentment.
The cross is an icon of this kind of love, it defines God as love and gives us a picture of what that kind of love looks like. March 28, 2002”

Finding God in Community>

On Envying The Amoral

“It's hard not to envy the amoral, especially if you're dutifully trying to be faithful to God, commitments, family, church, and the commandments. Nikos Kazantazakis used to say that virtue sits on its high perch, surveys what's around it, and then weeps for all it is missing out on. When we're honest we know this is true, at least for our bad days. Duty brings its own kinds of crucifixion and, more often than not, irresponsibility can look very attractive. It's not for nothing that our society uses the word "cool" to describe the non-committed. Hanging loose out-side the circle of commitment can easily pass itself off as the way, the truth, and the life, just as virtue can look and feel like frigidity, up-tightness, lack of nerve, nothing but feckless duty.
It's one thing to be responsible and dutiful; it's quite another be grateful for living that way. The danger is that, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we end up doing the right thing and then becoming bitter about having to do it. What happens, then, is that we stand outside the circle of the dance, angry, secretly jealous of the amoral, protesting that life isn't fair, that God isn't fair; “I've stayed home, done my duty, never seriously strayed, and now the fuss is all about others who have had a fling and haven't been as faithful as I!”
Piet Fransen used to offer a little litmus exam to test our attitude on this. His test? Check out your reaction to this, namely, a classical deathbed conversion:
You hear tell of a man who lives his life entirely oblivious to spiritual and moral affairs. He is interested, rather, in other kinds of affairs. A dilettante, irresponsible, selfish, he deems life only for the pleasure it can bring. He pursues the good life – pleasures of every kind, comfort, luxurious vacations, sexual irresponsibility - without a thought to God, the poor, or duty of any kind. And so he lives from his youth until old age. Then just before dying, he repents, makes a sincere confession, and dies prayerfully, throwing himself into the arms of God at the last minute in genuine sincerity. What's your spontaneous reaction to that? Ah, the wonder of grace! Or ... the lucky beggar' He got to have a fling and now he gets heaven besides!
Fransen comments that if we feel - even a tinge of envy - and most of us probably do - then, like the older brother of the prodigal son, we have not yet understood God's grace. If we understood the grace we live in, then, like the father of the prodigal son, we would be deeply grateful because someone who has missed out on so much of life has finally, again, come back to life (which is exactly what the person who makes a sincere deathbed conversion realizes and admits). What a sincere deathbed conversion reveals is that going the way of the prodigal son does not constitute life, but is a stepping away from it, an abandoning of happiness, an act of despair.
But that is precisely what his older brother and we, so many of us, dutiful Christians, tend to misunderstand. We get upset that someone has had a fling while we remained faithful. Virtue on its high perch weeping! Duty and fidelity, outside of a real understanding of grace, too easily make us bitter and envious.
But God, as the parable of the prodigal son makes clear, is equally as gentle with the bitter as with the prodigal. The father's words to the older brother are just as loving and forgiving (and revealing) as are his words to the prodigal son: “My child, you have always been with me and everything I have is yours.”
Inside God's house/ everything that belongs to God, including the burden of forgiveness and the burden of God's anxiety for the world, also belongs to all the others. Only those who stay home with the father can become empathic with him because they, alone, are around enough to be aware of the family's real situation. Only those at home hear the phlem in their father's throat when he coughs in the morning.
That's a vital part of living in grace. Grace makes us empathic with God and that more than anything else, can trigger a depth of meaning that dwarfs the pleasure of any prodigal fling. When one owns everything or she does not become bitter and jealous over someone else's pleasure.
Albert Camus, who won a Nobel Prize for literature but lived most his life in poverty, wrote: “Poverty taught me that not all was well under the sun, but the sun taught me that poverty isn't everything!”
Grace, like the sun, is free, and warmth and light dwarf all else. How often we don't understand this and we find ourselves standing outside the dance, bitter, angry that those who haven't followed us in duty now seem happier than we. May 2, 2002.”

A Rich Tradition Of The Heart

“There has probably never been a time in the church, certainly not in recent centuries, when we have had as healthy a theology as we have today. The past 40 years have been a time of great scholarship m Scripture and theology. There are now more theologians studying and writing than ever before, and they are more conscientious of scholarship than ever before. And their efforts haven't been wasted, Protestant and Roman Catholic scholars alike have produced libraries of excellent books. We're swimming in good theology. In Christology alone, there have probably been more than 600 serious, scholarly books written in the last 40 years.
Wonderful as this is, it hasn't easily translated into an invigorated church or faith life. While capturing the intellectual imagination of people, scholarly theology hasn't always been able to inflame the romantic imagination. That's not its fault. Theology does what it does, and lately it's been doing that well.
God, however, is strewn in many pieces, across many places. To ingest the reality of God so as to have an invigorating faith requires not just that part of us that does the critical thinking be involved, but also that the parts of us that are artist, mystic, saint, and magician be equally involved. Reality is many-layered and there are traces of the divine everywhere. Critical thinking uncovers some of this, but other parts of us must unearth the rest.
One of the great complements to theology (and, in the best of times. friends to it) has been the Roman Catholic devotional tradition. This tradition doesn't trade on critical thinking, but on the romantic imagination. It aspires to inflame the heart. Admittedly, this is risky. Feelings can lead us in many directions, but faith-without-feeling is perhaps the greater danger. The heart also needs its due.
More recently, I fear, we haven't al-ways given the heart its proper due, inside either Protestantism or Roman Catholicism. For better and for worse, we've bet all our chips on the biblical and theological - solid homilies, solid theology, solid liturgy. What else could be needed? Well-intentioned as this is, it's been reductionistic. Afraid of food poisoning, we've put ourselves on a diet of antiseptics. Now we will never die of impurities, but we might well die of malnutrition.
Where might we go in all of this?
Wendy Wright, a theologian at Creighton University in Nebraska, has just released a new book entitled Sacred Heart. - Gateway to God (Orbis Books, 2001). The book is partly autobiographical, solidly theological, and everywhere insightful. Her thesis? We need to become more attentive to the rich minefield that constitutes our devotional tradition to see how it might help fan the fires around a faith that often is dry and too much simply an act of the will.
Among other things, the book chronicles how she herself was led to faith and how she now sustains herself there. At one point she tells this story:
“In her library one day with her husband, she picked up a book on the saints to look up the saint of her husband's middle name, Hubert. First she was fascinated by descriptions of him., as a scholar, a bishop, and a diplomat of sorts. But ... "I was chugging along just fine until I came to a description of Hubert's ability to bi-locate. The historical narrative melded seamlessly into a matter-of-fact statement."
The Roman Catholic devotional tradition doesn't trade on critical thinking, but on the romantic imagination, it aspires to inflame the heart.
Hubert´s simultaneous appearances in North Africa and continental Europe was followed by a nonchalant prose passage detailing the saint´s many miraculous exploits.
"Profoundly disoriented, I closed the book. I felt queasy. It was as though two subterranean tectonic plates had collided inside the structured universe in which I lived. In retrospect, I know this was one moment of many at the time that brought about my inexorable turning toward God and the Catholic faith. This was my introduction to a layered universe, to a conceptual world in which time and space ceased to have the boundaries that my empirically trained mind assumed. Here was a world suffused with a power that did not conform to necessity. Here was a world drenched with grace."
"A layered reality is part of the Catholic imagination. To possess this imagination is to dwell in a universe inhabited by unseen presences - the presence of God, the presence of saints, the presence of one another, There are no isolated individuals, but rather unique beings whose deepest life is discovered in and through one another. This life transcends the confines of space and time."
"We - and Jesus and the saints - exist in some essential way outside of the chronology of historical time. We have being beyond the strictures of geographical space. And we can sense this now, in the concreteness of our lives." (Gateway to God. pp. 47-48) The Catholic devotional tradition has long been helpful in making us aware of our many–layered universe. We need to continue to employ its imagination if we are to help our fleshy hearts feel more really what lies inside the eternal heart of God. CNWP,April 25, 2002.”

Anxiety As The Opposite Of Faith

“The opposite of faith in Scripture is not doubt, but anxiety. To lack faith is not so much to have theoretical doubts about God's existence as it is to be anxious and fearful at a deep level.
How is this possible? We cannot help but be full of anxiety and worry about many things – our loved ones, our health, our work, our future: “Will I pass this examination?” “Will my son come home this evening?” “Will my medical check-up be Ok?” “Will this person reject me?” “Will I lose my job?” “Will I get this promotion?” “Can I pay my mortgage?” “Are my daughter's new friends good for her?” “Is my spouse being truthful?” “Do people like me?” “Are my clothes right?” “Will I be stuck in traffic and miss my appointment?”
There is rarely a moment in our lives that is not clouded by a worry of some kind or other. We are always somewhat anxious. Is worrying about so many things bad for our faith?
Not necessarily. What opposes faith is not so much worry about this or that particular thing as worry that God has forgotten us, worry that our names are not written in heaven that we aren't in good hands, that our lives aren't safe, and that there is every reason to fear and be anxious because, at the core of things, there isn't a benevolent, all-powerful goodness who is concerned about us.
Our anxiety opposes faith when, however vaguely we might have this feeling, we have the sense that God is not fully trustworthy or powerful enough to assure that, as Julian of Norwich so wonderfully puts it, in the end all will be well and every manner of being will be well.
Perhaps this can be best explained by looking at its opposite. In the Garden of Gethsemane, Jesus is surrounded by darkness and betrayal. He has, it seems, every reason to be deeply anxious. Yet, he begins his prayer with the words: “Father, all things are possible for you!” On the surface, all is terror, but underneath there is a rock?solid trust. He senses God´s graciousness and power, despite the darkness.
Our problem is often the opposite. We are surrounded with light (love, trust, health, good cheer, and no immediate danger or threat), yet underneath we are racked with fear, guilt, and distrust. Jesus stood inside of darkness and was secure in the light; we stand in the light and are anxious about a darkness underneath. Jesus was being put to death by sick forces and he rooted himself in the sense that things are still good; we stand inside of health and feel guilty about life's goodness. Jesus was dying and he assured himself that God had not forgotten him; we wake up to sunshine on any given morning and worry that we have been forgotten.
Have you ever had the experience of going to your closet and noticing an item of clothing that you had forgotten you still possessed? You see a shirt or a blouse that you haven´t, worn for a long time and you say to yourself: “I still have this had completely forgotten about it!” It had simply slipped off your radar screen.
Anxiety of this sort is what haunts faith – the fear that we have slipped off God´s radar screen, that we have been forgotten, that God will look down on earth sometime and realize with a start that we are still here: “My God, she´s still there. I had completely forgotten about her!”
It is this kind of anxiety, the deep fear that we have been forgotten, that so much pushes us to make an assertion of our lives. Nobody wants to live and die unnoticed, insignificant, forgotten. We are always somewhat anxious about that. This anxiety is the opposite of faith – not so much the fear that God doesn't exist as the fear that God does not notice our existence.
What is faith? Faith doesn´t have you believe that you will have no worries, or that you will not make mistakes or betray, or that you and your loved ones won´t sometimes, too, fall victim to accident, sickness, and suicide. What faith gives you is the assurance that God is good, that God can be trusted, that God won't forget you, and that, despite any indication to the contrary, God is still solidly in charge of this universe.
Faith says that God is real and God is lord and, because of this, there is ultimately nothing to fear. We are in safe hands. Reality is gracious, forgiving, loving, redeeming, and absolutely trustworthy. Our task is to surrender to that. Faith assures us that there is really nothing to fear. We see this in Scripture: Virtually every time that God appears in revelation, when heaven speaks to earth, the opening words are: “Do not be afraid! Be at peace!” Those words capture what faith ultimately invites us to. Pope Says Trust In God´s Protection.”

On Not Commiting the Original Sin

“Theologian James Mackey once shared this story in a classroom: A man he knew was part of a hunting expedition in Africa. His group was camped in a jungle. One morning he left camp early, hiked a few miles into the bush by himself, and shot two wild turkeys. Buckling these to his belt, he was walking back toward camp, when he heard noises and realized he was being followed. Frightened, his hands tight on his rifle, he scanned the woods for movement.
His fear was quickly dispelled. What he saw stalking him was a young boy, about 12 years old, naked and hungry. He realized instantly that what the boy wanted was not him, but food. He stopped, opened his belt, let the turkeys fall to the ground, and backed away. The young boy ran up to the turkeys, but didn't pick them up. Instead he looked toward the man and, in his own language, began asking him for something.
Not understanding what the boy was asking, but sensing that he wanted permission to take the birds, the man began gesturing to him that it was OK. But the boy still was not at ease. He kept asking and gesturing for something. Finally, in desperation, the boy took several steps back from the turkeys and stood silently with his hands out, open in front of him ? waiting until the man came and placed the turkeys into his hands. Then he ran off into the jungle. He had, despite his hunger and need, refused to take the birds. He had waited until they were given to him.
‘Something is only love and it can only give life when it is freely given and gratefully received.’
This story, in essence, captures what makes for the opposite of original sin. This young boy did what Adam and Eve didn't do. He accepted that life had to be given him and that he could not take it all on his own, no matter how desperate he was.
How is this so? To answer that, we need to look at what constituted the original sin. What did Adam and Eve do 'that so badly violated God's plan? How is their action the opposite of this young boy's?
The story of the fall of Adam and Eve is colored throughout, especially at the end (nakedness and shame), with sexual imagery, so much so that we can easily conclude that their transgression was of a sexual nature. It wasn´t. The sexual motif in the story is a metaphor, an image of rape. Adam and Eve took, as by force, something which can only be received in love.
The condition that God gave Adam and Eve might be summarized this way: “I am giving you life. I will bathe you in life. But you must receive it and never take it. As long as you receive it, it will always be life giving, but on the day you begin to take, rather than receive, your actions will begin to deal death, distrust, alienation, nakedness, and shame.” That single commandment encapsulates all morality.
Sometimes we ask why God gave a commandment to Adam and Eve in the first place. Why a condition? Why not paradise without conditions? The question is a valid one, but, in answering it, we must be careful to not see the commandment as a test, as some arbitrary thing that God might have asked or not asked. The condition here isn't arbitrary; it's something inherent within love itself.
How so? God made a love-contoured universe. In such an order of things, everything is gift. Nothing may be snatched, grabbed by force, or claimed by right. Life can only be received as gift, respectfully, in its own time. It's the same with love. Something is only love and it can only give life when it is freely given and gratefully received.
This condition is part of love's DNA. Love is not unconditional and never can be. There is a condition innate to love itself. To be love, something must be received as gift. Conversely, if love is snatched by force rather than respectfully received as gift, we have another word for that. We call it rape.
The original sin of Adam and Eve wasn't sexual, but it was an act of rape. They wrongfully took what was intended as gift. Our culture, which rewards aggressiveness and tells us that we are foolish not to take for ourselves the good things we want, too often invites us to do the same thing.
The story of Adam and Eve was written centuries after the Ten Commandments were given and is an attempt to summarize all of them in a single condition: “You may receive, but you may never take” That's also the lesson in Jesus´ gentle correction of the rich young man. The man had asked: “What must I do to possess eternal life?” Jesus's answer: “If you would receive eternal life, You must, like the young African boy, stand before life with empty hands and wait until it is given you.”

Commandments for Making Friends

“More than 2,500 years ago, Moses gave us the Ten Commandments. The centuries since - the Enlightenment notwithstanding – haven't given us a single reason to doubt the validity and importance of any of those precepts.
However, as we struggle to live them out, it might be helpful if Moses again descended from that same mountain with two new tablets of stone, spelling out some rules for better befriending each other, God, life, and ourselves.
Perhaps this second set of commandments might read like this:
(1) Befriend humanity.
To be human is to be fallible, wounded, scarred, sinful, and living in a far from perfect history, body, family, church. Don´t look for anyone to blame, to sue, to be angry at. This is called the human condition. Make friends with it. Grieve – don't rage. Think of chaos, not blame. Our parents called this “original sin.”
We talk of “dysfunctional families.” It has ever been thus. Don´t live in a sulk.
(2) Befriend what's best in you.
As long as we look out at the world through our wounds we will always fill with self-pity, bitterness, and jealousy. If, however, we look out through the prism of what´s best in us, our jealousy can turn to appreciation and we can again be astonished at others´ goodness. We have two souls: a grand soul, where we carry the image of God, and the memory of our blessings, and a petty soul, where we carry the bitterness and jealousies that come from our wounds. We need to attach our eyes, our ears, our speech, and our attitudes to our grand soul. We need to be better friends with what´s best in us.
(3) Befriend those who love you.
There are only two potential tragedies in life: To go through. life and never love, and to go through life and not express love and affection to those who love us. We need to make better friends with our friends, to express more readily our affection, our gratitude, our appreciation, and our contrition. Thank those who love you for loving you. Never take their love for granted, or as owed. Give out a lot more compliments. Say thank you constantly.
(4) Befriend chastity.
So much of our pain and restlessness comes from our lack of chastity, and much of our subsequent rationalization and bitterness comes from not admitting this.
We have sophisticated ourselves into unhappiness. For all of our knowing, we aren't happy. Make friends with chastity. Children and virgins, Scripture assures us, enter the kingdom easily.
Be post-sophisticated. Learn to believe in Santa and the Easter Bunny again. Enjoy second naiveté. Ride a merry-go-round. Make a searing, honest confession soon.
(5) Befriend your own body.
Don't be afraid of your own body, of its goodness, its sexuality, its pleasures, its tiredness, its limits. It's the only one you've got, in any case. Befriend it. Don't punish it, don't spoil it, don't denigrate it. It's a church, a temple. Give it enough rest, enough exercise, enough discipline, and enough respect.
(6) Befriend the other gender.
The mothers and the fathers, the wives and the husbands, are fighting. Small wonder the children are suffering. Never trivialize the issues of gender. We are being called to a new level of mutual respect and mutual sympathy. Make friends with what seems most threatening to you in the other gender.
(7) Befriend your father.
Father-hunger is one of the deepest hungers in the Western world today. Reconcile with your own father, with other fathers, and with God the Father. Your father's blessing will de-constrict your heart. Forgive him his inadequacy. Acknowledge your hunger.
(8) Befriend your mortality.
Death comes to us all. Make friends with aging, with wrinkles, with gray hair, with a body that is no longer young. Accept, let go, grieve, move on. Bless the young. Share your wisdom with them. Give away what's left of your life. Let the zest, beauty, and color of young people enliven you?
(9) Befriend humor.
In our laughter we taste transcendence. Humor takes us above the tragic. Laughter gives us wings to fly. Thomas More cracked a. joke to the man who was about to behead him. That's a quality of sanctity that we too often neglect.
(10) Befriend your God.
The Gospel is not so much good advice as it is good news; it tells us how much God loves us, what God has already done for us. God is as proud of us as is any mother of her children.
Peace comes to us when we can enjoy that favor. Befriend the God of love and, the God of the resurrection, the God who is completely relaxed, whose face beams like a marvelous symphony, whose power to raise dead bodies from the grave assures us that in the end all will be well and all will be well and every manner of being will be well. Befriend the God who tells us 365 times in Scripture not to be afraid. Walk in that confidence.”

–Northwest Progress, December 2001

The Mystery of the Ascension

“When I was in my early 20s, both my parents died; dad first, of cancer, mum three months later, of pancreatitis and a broken heart. Like my brothers and sisters, I felt a great loss.
Nothing had prepared us for this. Moreover, mixed with the pain, the sorrow, was also the sense that this was somehow unfair. They died too young. This isn't fair.
For a while, I felt their deaths as a coldness, an absence, an unfairness. Slowly, imperceptibly, those feelings changed until, after about two years, their absence began to feel like its opposite - a different kind of presence. The pain of separation disappeared and, like my brothers and sisters, I began to feel their warm presence again, in a new, more enduring way. More-over, whatever faults and deficiencies they might have had in life now seemed purified, washed clean by their deaths.
In that experience, I got a taste of the great mystery of the Ascension, the mystery of how in having to let go of one kind of presence, however painful that may be, we receive a new, more enduring presence - that of spirit.
The ascension is perhaps the least understood of all the major mysteries within Christianity - perhaps more "under-understood" than misunderstood. We tend to picture the ascension more than theologize about it. Mention of the ascension tends to set loose a picture (given us by St. Luke) of the resurrected body of Jesus ascending like a slow?motion satellite at Cape Canaveral, with Jesus waving goodbye and blessing us as he drifts slowly upward through the clouds. A beautiful icon. But what is this mystery, really?
The ascension, in essence, is the mystery that explains the transition between the earthly and the enduring presence of Jesus. What does this mean?
Perhaps John's Gospel is easiest to understand here. John expresses the idea of the ascension in the concept of "not clinging," of letting go of Jesus as we once had him in order to be able to receive his new, resurrected presence, now given in his spirit, the Holy Spirit.
“The ascension, in essence is the mystery that explains the transition between the earthly and the enduring presence of Jesus.”
The other Gospels employ a different image, but with the same idea. The Jesus who walked this earth with us, whom we touched physically, who ate fish in front of us even after the resurrection ? but who was then circumscribed and limited in his presence by that physical tangibility ?must be let go of so that he can now be with us in a richer, fuller way Moreover, this concept does not just describe an event in Jesus´ life; it throws light on the entire mystery of human love and intimacy, revealing there a great paradox, a puzzling interplay between presence and absence, between physical touch and enduring spirit, between having to let go of one kind of presence in order to receive another. And always it involves a pain that stretches us.
In John´s Gospel, when Jesus is preparing his followers for the ascension, he keeps saying these words over and over again: “It is better for you that I go away because only if I go, can I send you the spirit. You will be sad now, but your sadness will turn to joy.” John adds the cryptic phrase, “For, as yet, there was no Holy Spirit since Jesus had not yet been glorified.” How is this possible? Doesn´t the Spirit pre-exist inside God from all eternity?
John is not commenting here on the Holy Spirit´s pre-existence. What he is saying is intended to help us under stand a certain something within the mystery of Jesus´ death and within the mystery of life in general. What? Among other things, this: Every time a child grows up and leaves home, he or she could say the same words Jesus did: “It is better that I go. Only then can you receive my new spirit. Right now that spirit doesn´t exist because I haven´t yet gone away.”
This is even more true when a mother or father is dying. Had a dying parent full faith, full courage, and full words, he or she could say to the family: “It is better for you that I go away. Only then can you receive my spirit. You will be sad now; my death will feel like a coldness, an absence. But one day that will turn to warmth, to a new enduring presence, my spirit.”
Indeed, this even true, in a miniature way, whenever we visit a friend. It is good that we come for a visit; it is also good that we leave. Our absence helps purify our presence, not just in the sense of “how can you miss me if I don´t go away,” but in that much deeper sense, where only our leaving can release a fuller, more enduring presence, our spirit.
Such is the dynamic of the Ascension. Spirit follows touch, healthy absence can help purify presence, and only a certain kind of going away can keep us together forever. (May 31, 2001)”

Theology for
a God-centered Life

The Pearl of Great Price: The Kingdom of God – The search for the will of our God who loves us. This leads us to look always for the greatest possible good which is the will of God who loves us... a life-long pursuit. The Kingdom of God is not the church which needs to lead us to the will of God... to assist us in remembering God's presence in Christ and His Body and Blood in the Eucharist.

Prayer For Peace
To Mary, The Light of Hope
Pope John Paul II

“Immaculate Heart of Mary, help us to conquer the menace of evil, which so easily takes root in the hearts of the people of today, and whose immeasurable effects already weigh down upon our modern world and seem to block the paths toward the future.
From famine and war, deliver us.
From nuclear war, from incalculable self-destruction, from every kind of war, deliver us.
From sins against human life from its very beginning, deliver us.
From hatred and from the demeaning of the dignity of the children of God, deliver us.
From every kind of injustice in the life of society, both national and international, deliver us.
From readiness to trample on the commandments of God, deliver us.
From attempts to stifle in human hearts the very truth of God, deliver us.
From the loss of awareness of good and evil, deliver us.
From sins against the Holy Spirit, deliver us.
Accept, 0 Mother of Christ,
this cry laden with the sufferings of all individual human beings, laden with the sufferings of whole societies.
Help us with the power of the Holy Spirit conquer all sin: individual sin and the "sin of the world," sin in all its manifestations.
Let there be revealed once more in the history of the world the infinite saving power of the redemption:
the power of merciful love.
May it put a stop to evil.
May it transform consciences.
May your Immaculate Heart reveal for all the light of hope. Amen.”

Muslim, Jewish, Christian Prayer for Peace

O God, you are the. Source of life and peace.
Praised be your name forever.
We know it is you who turn our minds to thoughts of peace.
Hear our grayer in this time of war.
Your power changes hearts.
Muslims, Christians, and Jews remember, and profoundly affirm,
that they are followers of the one God,
children of Abraham, brothers and sisters;
enemies begin to speak to one another;
those who were estranged join hands in friendship;
nations seek the way of peace together.
Strengthen our resolve to give witness to these truths
by the way we live. Give to us:
Understanding that puts an end to strife;
Mercy that quenches hatred, and
Forgiveness that overcomes vengeance.
Empower all people to live in your law of Love. Amen.”

Prayer of John XXIII, Vatican II

From the Document, Laity In The Church, Fromthe Second Vatican Council:

No matter what your condition of life,
no matter who you are
or what you do,
Christ is calling you to be holy.
In fact, the Spirit is even now
moving you interiorly
to love God more deeply
and serve God more fully.
We have been made sons and daughters of God
through baptism
and now we share in the divine life.
This means that we are truly made holy,
we are truly called to live accordingly.
We are among the saints,
God's chosen ones,
beloved of God,
called to be meek,
to be kind,
and to be loving.
God's mercy is upon us. Amen. (Article 40)

Prayer to Christ the Healer

“In the comfort of your love,
I pour out to you, my Savior, The memories that haunt me,
The anxieties that perplex me, The fears that stifle me,
The sickness that prevails upon me,
And the frustration of all the pain that weaves about within me.
Lord, help me to see your peace in my turmoil,
your compassion in my sorrow,
your forgiveness in my weakness,
And, your love in my need.
Touch me, 0 Lord, with your healing power and strength.”

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