Reply to an Objection re: Jesus’ Imperfection

Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

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Doug, 

The “imperfection” of the Finding in the Temple (if any) was with Mary and Joseph – their imperfect understanding of Christ’s mission – certainly not with Christ. He was doing and revealing the will of the Father (not behaving like a child who takes a chocolate bar from a store without appreciating the wrongfulness of his action). If we take your “Christ-was-imperfect-just-like-us” to the next stage then even His public ministry, His crucifixion, His 7 last words, were imperfect. I think you misunderstand what is meant by “Christ was like us in all things but sin”. Yes He was fully man, but he was also God. He did not carry His divinity around like a wallet and pull it out from time to time as needed. He was a man without original sin – without any sin – hypostatically united to the divinity. Although “like man”, he was also unlike any man before or since. He was the perfection of man, if you will. So it is misleading to speak of Christ as imperfect.

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Dear _________:  It is certainly true that Mary and Joseph had an imperfect understanding of Christ’s mission. But Jesus too had an imperfect understanding of his mission at certain points in his early life–of course, I’m jumping from the frying pan into the fire here, so it’s better to stick with a simpler explanation. But Luke says it: he grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man. That’s it. If he was “perfect” from the get go, he did not grow in wisdom and stature, in favor with God and man. The exact text is:

Jesus “progressed (proekopten) to wisdom (sofia) and to prime stature (hlikia) and to grace/favor (cariti) beside (para) God (theo) and man (anthropois)”. 

What is perfect does not require progress. Perfect means “made through”, the end has been achieved. Jesus was the perfect man, but what does it mean to be a perfect man? One cannot be a material organism without imperfection, and one cannot be a human being without imperfection, so a perfect human being will include imperfections. That sounds counterintuitive, but it really isn’t a contradiction. 

What struck me is that when I read the WPI finished version of my article, I felt that it read much better, much smoother than my original. Now, I edited that article many times and sent in my best version of it. Still, the editor was able to see more that needed to be done, she was able to see what I was unable to see, and thus she continued to edit the piece. That’s human existence. To be a person is to have a radical need for others. The human person only discovers himself via an exit-of-self in the other, or in others. A person is an ekstasis. Let me quote John D. Zizioulas here: “…personhood implies the “openness of being,” and even more than that, the ek-stasis of being, that is, a movement towards communion which leads to a transcendence of the boundaries of the “self” and thus to freedom. (The Meaning of Being Human (pp. 14-15). (Function). Kindle Edition). 

God is an eternal community of Persons, and the human person exists in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons. Man is a per sona, a “through sound”, that is, a communicator, a being who becomes what he is by entering into community, who can only become what he is meant to become in and through community (to communicate is to enter into community). We are conceived within a human person and born into a family, a community, and we depend in every way on that first community, but most of all our own personality development depends upon those relations. Outside of a healthy community, our personality does not develop properly. Every human being undergoes personality development, and that development depends on the specifics of personal relationships, on how much the person is loved by others and how much he or she learns to love, to exit himself or herself towards the other. All this Jesus went through. The hypostatic union is the union of the two natures in one Person, the Person of the Son, who is a subsistent Relation. He is the Second Adam. He is more than a role model, but that he is nevertheless–not merely an external role model, like the saints, but an internal one; for we are to become him. But our role model cannot be one who it is impossible to model ourselves after. Imperfection is my lot and your lot, not the imperfection of sin or moral imperfection, because that imperfection is self-destructive, but the imperfection that belongs to human material existence. At the temple, Jesus was not behaving like a toddler taking a chocolate bar off of a store shelf, rather, he was behaving like a 12 year old adolescent–with a single minded focus, without proper consideration of how his lack of communication might impact others. It wasn’t a sin, but it was an imperfection that is typical of adolescence, and he went through adolescence. He did not skip that stage of human development. Again, perfect things don’t develop. Jesus needed the guidance of Mary and Joseph. If he did not need their guidance, if he did not in any way benefit from the wisdom of his parents, then you are right, he is not like us in all things. But he is like us in all things, in every aspect of human nature: intelligence, will, emotions, human ignorance and the need to learn from experience, and above all the need to learn from others. You mentioned in an earlier exchange that he did not have a human personality. He certainly did have a human personality. He’s not a human being if he does not have a human personality. The hypostatic union means the two natures (divine and human) were united in the One Person of the Son; so he is not two persons, a human person and a divine Person, but One Person, the divine Person of the Son. Everything Jesus said and did and underwent was said and done and undergone by the Person of the Son. But he certainly had a human personality that developed (person is not the same as personality). His personality was the human personality of God the Son–personality is a complex phenomenon that includes human intellect, will, emotions, their interactions, human self-consciousness, etc. 

I don’t see how all this implies that his death on the cross or his 7 last words were imperfect. His passion and death were the perfect act of love, the perfect act of religion. The perfection of Jesus does not cancel or override the imperfection that is part and parcel of human experience. His was a moral and religious perfection. He sanctified material existence. He sanctified the imperfection that belongs to living human organisms, the imperfection that is part and parcel of our day to day human existence. He actually said: “Who touched me?” in the scene involving the woman with a hemorrhage. He said “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” He experienced human desolation, darkness, despair, poverty and deprivation. He experienced frustration with his disciples: “How long must I put up with you?” That sounds like learning to me. In other words, his expectations were one thing, but the reality of the disciples’ sluggishness was another thing. 

I’m not sure what you mean by “He did not carry His divinity around like a wallet and pull it out from time to time as needed”.  Yes, all of Jesus was God the Son. Christ’s human nature was hypostatically united to God the Son, so everything he said, did, and underwent was said, done, and undergone by God the Son. From that hypostatic union, a number of paradoxes follow quite naturally: God died on a Cross; God suffered; Life Itself tasted death; God became a slave (Phil 2, 1ff); God progressed in wisdom and stature; God wept for John the Baptist; God was hungry and thirsty in the desert; and Mary is the Mother of God (Theotokos).  

Perfectionism vs Perfection

Reflection for the 2nd Sunday in Ordinary Time
https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_440perfectionismvsperfection.html

https://wherepeteris.com/perfectionism-vs-perfection/
Deacon Douglas McManaman

It is too small a thing that you should be my servant to raise up the tribes of Jacob and to restore the survivors of Israel; I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth.

This is an interesting line from the first reading: “It is too small a thing that you should be my servant…” Is it too small a thing that Israel should be “my servant”? Or is it too small a thing “to raise up the tribes of Jacob”? Perhaps both. I say this because our God intends to raise us up to be his equals, so to speak, and since friendship is based on a kind of equality, God intends to raise us up to the level of friendship. We read in the gospel of John: “I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know what his master is doing. I have called you friends, because I have told you everything I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15, 15).

What raises us up to that level of equality (friendship) is divine grace, which is a sharing in the divine life. It was St. Athanasius who said that “God became man in order that man might become God”. He became man so that divine grace may run through the veins of humanity, as it were, so that humanity may become the temple of the Holy Spirit, the dwelling place of the Lord. Grace is that which “makes holy”. But holiness, unfortunately, is often confused with sanctimony, and sanctimony tends to get mixed in with perfectionism, which in turn is usually a means of shaming others–children in particular. But holiness is not perfectionism. Holiness is love; holiness is charity. 

We read: “I will give you as a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the end of the earth” (Is 49, 6). But how can we become a light to the nations? God is Light, not us. We can be a light only by reflecting light, as a mirror does. But a mirror must be clean in order to receive the divine light and reflect it. However, in order to see the dirt and grime to be cleaned, one needs light, because one can’t see anything in the dark. But the dirt and grime prevent the mirror from receiving the light that is to be reflected, and so only the light can clean the mirror. In other words, we cannot clean ourselves in order to make ourselves receptacles of the divine light. If we take it upon ourselves to clean the mirror of our souls, we only end up becoming perfectionists, and perfectionism is not holiness. 

It sometimes happens that a person who has a late conversion in life will go to religious extremes. I believe that in such cases, since they will have spent a good part of their lives not at all concerned with the will and worship of God, they will have acquired certain vices along the way, such as a disposition to anger, or envy, the need to be “one up” on others, or the need to control others, or the need to be approved by authority figures, etc. The problem is that bad habits are hard to break and virtues take time to acquire, so what can happen is that these late converts can bring those habits into their new “religious life”, and this can cause a person to look for ways to continue in these behaviors, but under a religious guise. This is where sanctimony becomes confused with holiness, and there is a danger of becoming finger wagging perfectionists who will often find ways to stand out from others. 

I was part of a discussion recently in which a number of us were wondering whether or not everything Christ did was done perfectly. We all agreed that Jesus did not sin, but one person insisted that when Jesus the carpenter was sawing wood, for example, he would have made mistakes, perhaps cut the wood too short, or perhaps the table he made was not perfect in every way. Others took issue with this, insisting that Jesus was God, so he would have done everything perfectly. But we have to ask ourselves: Wasn’t he like us in all things but sin (Heb 4, 15)? If Jesus were to play baseball, would he have hit a home run every time or struck out every batter? Or, if he were in the Olympics, would he have won a gold medal in every event? Consider when Mary found Jesus in the temple: “Son, why have you done this to us? Your father and I have been looking for you with great anxiety.” Jesus was a 12-year-old boy, and like a typical adolescent male was almost exclusively focused on one thing. Our purview starts out very narrow but gradually widens as we grow in experience and we begin to consider things that we would not have considered in your youth. To deny Jesus that development is completely unwarranted. Life is a learning process, and to be part of that learning process is to experience normal human imperfection–not moral imperfection, not folly, but the need for growth. I believe we can make the case that he experienced the imperfection that belongs to material existence, and because he is the God-man, he sanctified human imperfection. Hence, there is indeed a kind of beauty in imperfection (Conrad Hall).

The only thing he cannot sanctify is sin. Imperfection, on the other hand, is nothing to be ashamed of. In fact, there would be far less misery in this world if more people would come to accept their own limitations and imperfections and give up the need to achieve perfection.

Jesus did say “Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. What he was referring to, according to St. Augustine, was perfect charity. We see this from the context: “Love your enemies, pray for those who persecute you, for God makes his sun shine on the wicked and the good” etc. Holiness is love, and God’s love was made visible in the Person of Christ, who descended, who emptied himself and took the form of a slave, and entered into our death in order to inject it with his divine life. And so, we become like him by descending, not by ascending. The way to ascend to God is to descend with him and love what he loved, and he had table fellowship with social rejects. Christ was not a temple priest. He was out in the world, mixing it up with the sick, the suffering, the lost and forsaken.

The spiritual life is a gradual letting go of all that blocks the divine light; it is about allowing the divine light to burn within us all disordered love of self, which is what keeps us from genuinely loving others. God is a consuming fire (Heb 12, 29), a refiner’s fire (Mal 3, 2). A blacksmith puts the iron in the fire to soften it, to make it more malleable, and then he hammers it into the shape he envisions for it. Outside of that fire, the iron remains hard, rigid, and unbending, but when placed in the fire, it begins to radiate with the color of the flame.

We do have a tendency to regard suffering, trials, difficulties as anomalies, as signs that something is terribly wrong, that we are in some way being punished by God. This is a serious misconception. In this gospel, John says: “Behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world”. This is Christ’s fundamental identity, the Lamb of God who has come into the world to be sacrificed. The most significant moment in the New Testament took place in the Garden of Gethsemane: “Lord, let this cup pass me by; but not my will, but your will be done”. He felt the size and weight of this obstacle, but these words were his victory, and we get to share in that victory all throughout our lives each time we are confronted with difficult and fearful choices. Our task is to allow ourselves to be molded by his hands, to allow him to make us like himself. 

But what is he like? We just have to look at a crucifix. That’s what he is like. It is rather easy to live a kind of religious life that amounts to a continuous evasion of the cross. We see this, for example, in those who, while they love liturgy, vestments, incense and candles, processions and liturgical drama, will demean others, look down upon them, make their authority felt and use religion to oppress others, especially women. The Church is a strange mixture of the divine and the human, holiness and sin, a mystery that can only really be understood from the inside. We see the results of this tragic mixture all throughout the history of the Church, alongside those who are genuinely saintly, like Don Bosco who devoted his life to poor youth on the streets during the time of the Industrial Revolution, or Vincent de Paul, Mother Teresa of Calcutta, Benedict Joseph Labre, Padre Pio, John Neumann who dedicated his life to the immigrants of Philadelphia, learning 8 languages in order to hear their confessions and who died on the street at 48 years of age while running some errands. And when I look back at my own life, I have encountered both those who have been a negative influence, who have done harm and have driven people away from the Church by their misogyny, legalism, and abuse of authority and who made their priesthood principally about them, alongside great men and women who had a tremendous influence on me, such as a very humble Salesian priest, an unpretentious and joyful diocesan priest from Washington D.C., who was violently murdered during a robbery, and countless women who were hidden vessels of divine patience, carriers of the divine light and love.

A Brief Note on Aquinas, Progress, and Asking Questions

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Aquinas was a genuinely progressive thinker. In fact, he was the “progressive” theologian of the 13th century. Thomas was open to everything that was good and useful for helping to explicate the faith. He exhibited great reverence not only for St. Augustine, but also for “the Philosopher” (Aristotle), as well as for Dionysius, Hilary, Ambrose, Peter Lombard, Maimonides, Avicenna and Averroes, Damascene, Gregory of Nyssa, and so many more. Although he was raised on Augustine, he clearly did not limit himself to Augustine. The irony, however, is that a number of Thomists during my early years in philosophy would limit their sources to St. Thomas Aquinas. In fact, in my 2nd year when we were taught modern philosophy for the first time, the professor would teach us some basic ideas of this or that thinker and then proceed to tell us what was wrong with them and why Aquinas had it right. This, of course, was a terrible way to teach–it was grounded in a flawed starting point. The result he was trying to achieve was for us to limit our thinking, our sources, to St. Thomas, which is a very “anti-Aquinas” way of operating. 

We have much more data at our disposal today than Aquinas had in the 13th century, very important data on human nature thanks to the development of the science of psychology and its various schools of thought, as well as psychiatry, neuroscience, anthropology and sociology, physics, history and various approaches to hermeneutics, etc., not to mention the different kinds of logic that developed in the 20th century, such as mathematical, modal, epistemic, temporal and many valued logics. There is no doubt that Aquinas would have taken a deep dive into all of this and more. 

There is a serious temptation in some people to want to keep things very simple and manageable, i.e., the bible alone, the koran alone, or the Catechism alone, or Aquinas alone. I believe that is why many young university students are drawn to ideological thinking, for it makes life much simpler. They can look at this utterly complex world through the lens of an ideology and everything begins to make sense. Karl Popper addressed this problem and showed how this kind of thinking is problematic–everywhere one looks one can find confirmation for an overarching idea.[1]  Ultimately, this is just lazy mindedness and an inordinate need for security. In short, closed mindedness. We see this pattern of thinking in fundamentalism of all stripes, that is, in Islam, Evangelical Protestantism, Catholicism, left and right wing political ideology, etc. It makes for a very simple existence, but an impoverished one. 

When we study Aquinas for years on end, we do see that out of great reverence he very often bends over backwards to defend the particular authority he leans on, such as the Philosopher (Aristotle) or whoever he cites in his Sed contra. He’s very respectful of these authorities, but not all of his arguments are of the same strength and weight–some just hang from a thread. He has been severely criticized for his arguments for the death penalty–dangerously akin to totalitarian thinking–, and Grisez took issue with what he wrote on desire after the Beatific vision, and in the end it is hard to disagree with Grisez on this. The point I make is that one can indeed argue with Aquinas, and great theologians have been doing so for the past 700 years, but especially in the 20th century. He was a genius of the highest order and a Doctor of the Church and deserves great reverence and consideration, but the notion that he cannot be contradicted and is immune from further development is not quite right. The wonderful thing about Catholic theology and Catholic teaching is that, despite what many traditionalists seem to believe, it continues to develop on the basis of questions that have never been asked. Questions are the driving force behind any science, and Aquinas asked a ridiculously large number of questions, which is why he made so much progress (progressive). But all possible questions have not been exhausted and never will be.

Notes

1. In his Science: Conjectures and Refutations , Popper writes: “These theories appeared to be able to explain practically everything that happened within the fields to which they referred. The study of any of them seemed to have the effect of an intellectual conversion or revelation, opening your eyes to a new truth hidden from those not yet initiated. Once your eyes were thus opened you saw confirming instances everywhere: the world was full of verifications of the theory. Whatever happened always confirmed it. Thus its truth appeared manifest; and unbelievers were clearly people who did not want to see the manifest truth; who refused to see it, either because it was against their class interest, or because of their repressions which were still “un – analysed” and crying aloud for treatment.

The most characteristic element in this situation seemed to me the incessant stream of confirmations, of observations which “verified” the theories in question; and this point was constantly emphasized by their adherents. A Marxist could not open a newspaper without finding on every page confirming evidence for his interpretation of history; not only in the news, but also in its presentation which revealed the class bias of the paper – – and especially of course in what the paper did not say. The Freudian analysts emphasized that their theories were constantly verified by their “clinical observations”. As for Adler, I was much impressed by a personal experience. Once, in 1919, I reported to him a case which to me did not seem particularly Adlerian, but which he found no difficulty in analyzing in terms of his theory of inferiority feelings, although he had not even seen the child.

Slightly shocked, I asked him how he could be so sure. “Because of my thousand-fold experience,” he replied; whereupon I could not help saying: “And with this new case, I suppose, your experience has become thousand-and-one-fold.” What I had in mind was that his previous observations may not have been much sounder than this new one; that each in its turn had been interpreted in the light of ‘previous experience’, and at the same time counted as additional confirmation. What, I asked myself, did it confirm? No more than that a case could be interpreted in the light of the theory.”

Some Thoughts on Sanity, Theology, and Change

Copyright © 2020-2026 by Douglas P. McManaman
All Rights Reserved (revised in 2026)

Deacon Douglas McManaman

We speak of psychosis as a loss of contact with reality, either permanent or temporary; psychotic episodes, for instance, are temporary breaks with reality. There is a sense, however, that being out of touch with “reality” is a matter of degree. I contend that the more we come to understand the inductive nature of knowledge acquisition and its implications, we should begin to see that we are always, to some degree at least, out of touch with reality. All knowledge begins in sensation, as Aristotle maintained (nothing is in the intellect that is not first in the senses); in other words, our knowledge has empirical origins; this means it begins with evidence and proceeds towards the most coherent and consistent explanation of the evidence. Most importantly, however, although our grasp of the real expands continually—or should—, the process of expansion is—or should be—accompanied by an awareness of an ever-decreasing circle in the midst of which we find ourselves, and at the edge of which is a vast and expanding penumbra of obscurity. Leaving aside early or first-episode psychosis (FEP), the genuinely insane are typically unaware that they have lost contact with the real, but the most sane among us have the greatest awareness that in the final analysis, the reality they are in touch with is so much larger than is their current grasp of it—increasingly so—, and they have the greatest awareness that their current worldview, which cannot exceed the limited information they possess about the real, is in large measure the product of what they believe the world to be through the lens of that limited set of information. It is all too easy to confuse our worldview with the world, which we always know only deficiently.

The benefit of coming to a deeper appreciation of statistical reasoning and Bayesian inference [1] is that one begins to realize both how risky our intuitive and formal statistical inferences are, and how precarious are those estimates that are the product of Bayesian inference. Statisticians and research scientists tend to have a deeper appreciation of the risky nature of their (and our) current convictions. Their subject matter is very often data that is too large for us to manage with great precision, such as a population mean, which we can only estimate—along with its standard deviation—, on the basis of a sample. The estimate, however, is typically an interval, and the wider the interval, the greater our confidence; the lesser our confidence level, the narrower and more precise that interval becomes. In other words, the more precise and thus more useful our estimates, the greater their vulnerability to error (i.e., we estimate the house for sale down the road to be between $850,000 – $900,000 vs. between $100 and 6 million. The latter is more certain, but less useful). Perhaps this is why good scientists tend not to speak with a rhetoric of high confidence, especially when our truth claims bear upon matters of precision. Only when matters become more general—and perhaps less useful—is greater confidence warranted. 

Moreover, Bayesian inference should bring us to a greater awareness of the role that experience plays in knowledge acquisition.[2] The probability of a hypothesis given the evidence [p(H|E)] leaves us with a space of uncertainty (i.e., 49% or 70%), and such inference depends upon a knowledge of base rates (for example, 48.2% of all Americans age 15+ are married, while 51.8% are not) and likelihoods (i.e., the probability that a couple has children given that they are married is 90%). However, when we estimate the probability of a belief given certain pieces of evidence, we tend to ignore base rates (prior ratios), and so our estimates that are the product of intuitive reasoning are often seriously mistaken—hence, we ought not to trust our intuitive probability estimates. The most important implication of Bayesian inference, however, is the effect that experience has on our posterior probabilities: new information changes them. And so, once again, we are reminded not to be too confident in what we claim to “know”—the very fact that new information that affects our base rates demands that we continually update our estimates, not to mention recognize them as estimates in the first place, and not “knowledge” per se.[3]

Our day to day reasoning, however, is not fundamentally mathematical, that is, we do not typically perform mathematical calculations on the basis of prior probabilities; rather, we reason on the basis of plausible data, not probabilities, and the reasoning is not calculative, but comparative. Sometimes what is improbable, i.e., that Jack was hit by a city bus, is moderately plausible given the plausibility indexes of our current data (witness statements, or a statement from the victim, or other sources, etc.), and often a number of competing estimates are equally plausible.[4]

In terms of plausible reasoning, all we ever have at any one time are limited sets of data formulated in propositions having a degree of plausibility, either minimal, moderate, high, etc., that is, a less than certain character. The entire set of data at our disposal is typically overabundant and inconsistent. Indeed, there are many propositions in our data set the truth of which we can be certain and from which we can deduce a great deal, rendering explicit what was previously implicit.[5] There are, however, a myriad of theses that are less than certain. The task of sound reasoning is to bring maximal consistency to this set of data.

What is particularly interesting to note is that bringing maximal consistency does not guarantee that in the end we possess the truth. What we have at best is the most plausible estimate given the information currently available. New information very often alters the consistency of our plausibilistically favored subsets of data bearing upon specific matters, with the result that a new estimate is in order. This is why there is a great deal of “mind-changing” in the sciences—we just don’t know whether or not we have enough information at any one time to resolve a particular question with complete certitude. It seems, in fact, that we are always information deficient.

And so, once again, the worldview that results from our current set of information is an ever changing one, that is, an evolving worldview. It has always been a deficient worldview, because the information on the basis of which it is established at any given time is deficient. Even the little that we have at our disposal is a product of interpretation, and our interpretation is once again made up of risky inferences. As Feynman says of science, it is an ever-expanding frontier of ignorance. Similarly, our day to day knowing is precisely an ever expanding frontier of ignorance: the more we come to know about the world we live in, the more we should realize just how much more we did not know than we previously thought there was to know. With every new discovery comes a manifold of new questions, and new questions open up new and unexplored avenues that, when explored, provide new information that very often upsets the consistency of what we thought was a well-established conceptual framework, causing us to adjust our estimates by discarding data inconsistent with more plausible data in order to establish a different and plausibilistically favored subset of data from which a better and more accurate worldview may arise. Moreover, new information may inadvertently strengthen a position we’ve held for a time; however, a new and maximally plausible estimate is no guarantee that we are any closer to the truth—a previous but now plausibilistically less favored estimate may in fact be true, and time may reveal that. In other words, the most current estimate is not necessarily closer to the truth. That is why learning is very often an oscillating process. If a position or estimate is true, it is not necessarily the case that newer information will corroborate it; we may be taken further away from the truth, only to return to it at a later date. Progress, in other words, is not necessarily unidirectional.

What this implies is that we are always, in a manner of speaking, out of touch with reality, for reality is so much larger, inconceivably larger, than our current grasp of it, and the frontier of our ignorance is ever expanding. And although we are always relatively out of touch with the real, at least we can know that we are always relatively out of touch with it. That, I contend, is what distinguishes the sane from the insane—the insane are out of touch and have no awareness of the fact. I dare say, however, that most people believe their grasp of reality to be far more comprehensive that it can possibly be, for many speak with a rhetoric of certainty that assumes a knowledge that is just not humanly possible on a large number of issues, given the little time invested in those matters. What I am suggesting is that most people have a greater resemblance to the insane than they do to the genuinely sane; the former tend to resist this never-ending learning process that requires adjusting our estimates in the light of new information. The intellectual, for example, who works exclusively in the realm of ideas, who has little interest in testing those ideas before they are imposed on a society, has a greater resemblance to the insane than the sane, which is likely why intellectuals who succeed in having their untested albeit interesting ideas implemented on a wider social scale usually end up costing the taxpayer a great deal. 

One irony in all of this is that a great deal of disordered confidence and resistance of the learning process is found within that discipline whose object is the mystery par excellence, namely the unutterable mystery of God. Many who are fond of theology fail to appreciate just how much the logic of the scientific method is involved in this more general science. Moral philosophy does not escape this logic, nor is this logic foreign to biblical exegesis and the study of Scripture, and thus by extension, moral theology or any other branch of sacred theology. Moral reasoning follows much the same law of complementarity that we encounter in statistics: the more universal or general the discourse, the greater the certainty, but as we move to greater precision, vulnerability to error increases. A fine example of this is Germain Grisez’s Difficult Moral Questions (Franciscan Press, 1997). That volume was the product of years of thinking about principles and their application to specific moral problems that have arisen as a result of new circumstances. On a number of occasions, I had the privilege of observing Joseph Boyle’s uncertainty as he pondered on the edge of the frontiers of a difficult moral problem. He refused to overstate his case, and he was all too aware that he may not have in his possession enough rational data necessary to satisfactorily work out the problem which preoccupied him at the time; moreover, these analytical moral philosophers (Grisez, Boyle, Finnis, etc.) have, over the years, changed their position on a number of important issues, thanks to more thought, dialogue, and discussion. Most especially, we see the same inductive/investigative process in the area of biblical studies/exegesis. With new historical data, what was once thought to be the case is now relegated to a lower level of plausibility while a more plausible hypothesis takes top spot. 

Canon lawyers working on marriage tribunals, for example, judging cases on a team of three, will testify that some cases are easy while others are very difficult; the latter are often resolved with a 2:1 ratio (the one outvoted has to humbly accept the majority decision, but after reviewing the reasons given will often see what was not noticed earlier). Those on the outside, unfamiliar with this process–and it is a process–, tend to have a difficult time appreciating the subtleties of these matters. Unlike judges who regularly work on such cases, most people have not encountered such intricate and murky situations, permeated as they are with uncertainty. A view from the “inside”–whether the subject matter is politics or law, etc.–is very different from a view from the “outside”, and many on the outside are too emotionally vested to acknowledge their own deficiency of information and will proceed to dogmatically spout off on all sorts of issues they know very little about.

Pastoral approaches to spiritual direction magnify this logic even further. A good pastor of souls must be able to pick up subtle clues in the words, gestures, and reactions of the directee, clues on the basis of which one may rapidly inference to information needed to uncover the best way to communicate important principles and insights that cannot be effectively imparted in the same way to everyone. A pastor of souls, like a good teacher, is one who is capable of detecting clues that give evidence of conditions within a person that render him/her temporarily incapable of understanding certain things (as well as conditions that make possible a certain understanding). Moreover, there is a distinction between a pastor of souls and a moral theologian. It is certainly possible for a person to be both, but a theologian without a good pastoral sensibility, that is, without a mind for contingent factors and other clues and who perhaps loves moral problems more than people, is not someone who should be providing spiritual direction. To be avoided are the two extremes of the easy going nonchalant who confuses a pastoral sense with moral permissiveness on the one hand, and the hard-nosed dogmatist who has no sense of the complexities of the human person on the other.

There’s no warrant for dogmatism here; what appears to be the “truth” at one time is often eventually discovered to be a rather deficient position or a position in need of further distinction. In the end, what this suggests is the need for a spirit of greater humility; it suggests the need for constant dialogue and a listening posture. But this is precisely the posture lacking in a large sector of our society, including our Church, that is, among the passionately conservative or traditional, among many of the clergy (both “liberal” and “conservative”), as well as the university environment, among professors of certain non-scientific disciplines, etc. What makes these epistemic matters more difficult is the fact that character, psychology, and mood play a significant role in knowledge acquisition. Character plays a fundamental role in our ability to make moral distinctions, among other things—people will not see what it is they are unwilling to see or are not emotionally ready to see. Character is a more permanent epistemic condition, while mood is temporary. Both, however, can beget blind spots.

End Notes

1. Bayesian inference seeks to estimate the probability of a belief or hypothesis given certain pieces of evidence. Hypothesis testing, on the other hand, seeks to determine the probability of evidence given a particular belief or hypothesis (a null or alternative hypothesis).

2. The formula for Bayes Theorem is: p(H|E) = p(H)p(E|H)/p(H)p(E|H) + p(~H)p(E|~H)

3. We typically confuse the p(E|H) with p(H|E). For example, over the years I have found that school administrators often assume that since the likelihood that a good teacher interviews well is over 90%, it follows that this or that person just interviewed is a good teacher (90% probability), since she interviewed very well. This conclusion, however, is invalid. There is a real distinction between 1) the probability that a person interviews well given that she is a good teacher [p(E|H)], and 2) the probability that this person is a good teacher given that she interviews well [p(H|E). For the sake of argument, let it be the case that 90% of good teachers interview well–that’s not an unreasonable assumption. Furthermore, with some experience in education, it soon becomes evident that the majority of a typical staff of teachers are not great teachers–great teachers are usually in the minority, and administrators desperately want to hang on to such people when they discover them (let us say 20% are hard-working, self-motivated, reliable, positive, love their subject matter and their students, and are not in it merely for the perks, etc.). And let us estimate that the likelihood that a “not so great” teacher will interview well is 40%. Given these numbers, the probability that this person is a good teacher given that he/she interviewed very well is only 36% (0.2 x 0.9/0.2 x 0.9 + 0.8 x 0.4 = 0.36). Hence, the reason administrators, much to their dismay, continue to hire the wrong people. Bayesian inference requires that we pay attention to how our prior probabilities change with the addition of new evidence. 

Consider as well how judgment of character might look from a Bayesian point of view. I see a person for a relatively short period of time. I am not aware of this at the time, but he’s going through chemotherapy treatments, which can make it much easier for a person to behave in a way that is relatively uncharacteristic. But during this relatively small period of time, he gives evidence of undesirable character. A person of good character might give evidence to the contrary about 5% of the time overall, but within a relatively limited period of time, he might give evidence to the contrary about 50% of that time period. After a while, it might average out to about 5% (much like scoring birdies for the first four holes in a game of golf, only to average out to 102 by the end of 18 holes). More time and experience allow us to change our prior ratios, that is, our base rates. A 1:1 ratio at the start of an investigation may become a 1:20 ratio by the end. Given a likelihood ratio 90:5 (a 90% likelihood that a person of bad character will give evidence consistent with it, and a 5% likelihood that a person of good character will give evidence to the contrary), a judgment that this person is of undesirable character can go from a 95% probability (highly probable) to 47% (i.e., the inference is probably wrong). The problem is that we typically focus our attention exclusively on the likelihoods [p(E|H)] and we neglect the incompleteness of our base rate information, that is, possible background knowledge that can change our posterior probabilities. 

4. It is not easy to explain the difference between Bayesian reasoning and plausibility reasoning. The former is quantitative and calculative, while plausibility is qualitative and comparative. Nicholas Rescher writes: “On the basis of logic and probability theory one cannot tell what may reasonably be accepted in the face of imperfect, indeed conflicting data. By contrast, the mechanisms of plausibility theory are designed to provide a basis on which it becomes possible to effect a transition of this nature–a move from the reliability of sources to the plausibility of their declarations. In providing a tool for handling cognitive dissonance, plausibility theory affords a reasonable basis for discriminating between the inferences which can and cannot be drawn from the inconsistent data-base yielded by the conflicting reports of imperfect sources. Accordingly, plausibility is intended to reflect an index of what reasonable people would–and should–agree on, given the relevant information.” Plausible Reasoning: An Introduction to the Theory and Practice of Plausibilistic Inference. The Netherlands: Van Gorcum, 1976, pp. 4-5.

5. This is particularly the case when it comes to probabilities and statistics. At the very least we can say that if our numbers are correct–and we cannot always be sure–, then we are certain that the interval is between # (lower limit) and # (upper limit). Moreover, I have argued elsewhere that on the most important matters, certainty is much easier to achieve. For example, the fundamental principles of the natural moral law (intelligible human goods) are naturally known, as well as the most general precepts of natural law. Indeed, they are imperfectly understood and inconsistently applied by most people, and of course much better understood by analytical moral thinkers who offer tentative estimates on the most difficult moral matters. And Leibniz has shown that the most important knowledge of all, namely the knowledge that God exists, is so simple that it is easily overlooked by most people: “If the necessary being is possible, then the necessary being exists” (because the necessary being cannot not exist, otherwise it is not the necessary being, but a contingent being). On matters somewhat less important, however, we are almost always information deficient. This epistemic state of affairs demands a posture of constant readiness to listen, to dialogue, to be corrected, one that is certainly not very widespread today, even in environments in which this openness to learning is reasonably expected to abound, namely the university environment. 

O Mavros Christos (The Black Christ)

Deacon Doug McManaman

I was inspired to write this Icon (O Mavros Christos/The Black Christ) while reading James Cone’s The Cross and the Lynching Tree. It was Rev. David McClearly who, soon after we met at Southlake hospital in Newmarket, ON, suggested I read this book. At the same time I recommended that he read G. Studdert Kennedy, Episcopalian chaplain to the British Army during WWI—specifically his book The Hardest Part. One of Studdert Kennedy’s great poems is entitled Indifference:

When Jesus came to Golgotha, they hanged Him on a tree,
They drove great nails through hands and feet, and made a Calvary;
They crowned Him with a crown of thorns, red were His wounds and deep,
For those were crude and cruel days, and human flesh was cheap.
When Jesus came to Birmingham, they simply passed Him by.
They would not hurt a hair of Him, they only let Him die;
For men had grown more tender, and they would not give Him pain,
They only just passed down the street, and left Him in the rain.
Still Jesus cried, “Forgive them, for they know not what they do,”
And still it rained the winter rain that drenched Him through and through;
The crowds went home and left the streets without a soul to see,
And Jesus crouched against a wall, and cried for Calvary.

This poem prepared me for the impact that James Cone’s book was going to have on me. It was one of the most deeply moving books in theology that I had read up to this point in my life. It left me speechless on a number of occasions. He writes:  

The lynching tree is a metaphor for white America’s crucifixion of black people. It is the window that best reveals the religious meaning of the cross in our land. In this sense, black people are Christ figures, not because they wanted to suffer but because they had no choice. Just as Jesus had no choice in his journey to Calvary, so black people had no choice about being lynched. The evil forces of the Roman state and of white supremacy in America willed it. Yet, God took the evil of the cross and the lynching tree and transformed them both into the triumphant beauty of the divine. If America has the courage to confront the great sin and ongoing legacy of white supremacy with repentance and reparation, there is hope “beyond tragedy”. 

I’ve studied iconography for many years now, and I knew that I wanted to “write” an icon of a black Christ–after all, Jesus was not white. But most importantly, the fundamental reason I have for this idea is that the moral and spiritual life of a believer is about becoming the unique Christ, which Christ can be in you individually, in me individually. When you are the person Christ intends you to be, when it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you (Gal 2, 20), then Christ appears in this world uniquely, through you. No one can be that unique Christ except you. And when you are that, you have a beauty that no one else can possess. There is a beauty that only you can bring the world. And so there is a “black Christ”, an Asian Christ, an Indigenous Christ, a Caucasian Christ, etc. I also knew I wanted a Christ with dreads. The symbolism of dreadlocks is rich and broad. It symbolizes connection to the divine, resistance against oppression; it is a symbol of African heritage and identity, and it became an emblem of resistance against colonial oppression. Of course, dreadlocks are an ancient symbol of wisdom and spiritual insight. Also, I wanted to make sure to include a “lynching tree” in the background. I cannot explain this better than Cone himself who writes:

As I see it, the lynching tree frees the cross from the false pieties of well-meaning Christians. When we see the crucifixion as a first-century lynching, we are confronted by the reenactment of Christ’s suffering in the blood-soaked history of African Americans. Thus, the lynching tree reveals the true religious meaning of the cross for American Christians today. The cross needs the lynching tree to remind Americans of the reality of suffering–to keep the cross from becoming a symbol of abstract, sentimental piety. …Yet the lynching tree also needs the cross, without which it becomes simply an abomination. It is the cross that points in the direction of hope, the confidence that there is a dimension to life beyond the reach of the oppressor. “Do not fear those who kill the body, and after that can do nothing more (Lk 12, 4). 

I would like to emphasize, however, that the tragedy of Good Friday was transformed into the beauty of the divine light, and thus the same is true of the lynching tree. Cone writes: 

Though the pain of Jesus’ cross was real, there was also joy and beauty in his cross. This is the great theological paradox that makes the cross impossible to embrace unless one is standing in solidarity with those who are powerless. God’s loving solidarity can transform ugliness–whether Jesus on the cross or a lynched black victim–into beauty, into God’s liberating presence. Through the powerful imagination of faith, we can discover the “terrible beauty” of the cross and the “tragic beauty” of the lynching tree. 

The following are pictures of the stages of development that this icon went through. The first stage of the writing of an icon is the preparation of the sketch and transferring it onto the gessoed surface of a poplar wood board. The gold leaf is then applied to the clay surface. 

The first layer in the painting process is roskrysh, which is followed by first lines, and then the first highlight. After the first highlight, one applies the first float, which dampens the brightness of the highlight. After the first float, we apply a second highlight, followed by a second float, a third highlight followed by a third float, and finally the second lines. The icon then sits for two weeks to dry before olipha (applying linseed oil). 

Notes for the icon Lynching treeDownload

A Reflection on Beauty in Time

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Ever since I retired, I’ve had more time to reflect upon my years as a teacher, and my years of friendship with some of my colleagues, and my good friends. Sometimes I have to drive to a nearby town for an eye appointment, and I’ll have to drive right past the school at which I taught for the past 20 years, and when I do so, I experience a certain euphoria, all as a result of an influx of various memories. 

So much has been forgotten, so many students that have passed through my classroom, the details of so many days, etc., and although I do remember many things, I do think I’ve forgotten more than I remember. But there is a joy there that I experience when I am brought back to that place, among other places.

My good friend is a retired priest, but I often think of my last 30 years with him, visiting him when he was stationed at this or that parish, and then after I was ordained in 2008 I could give him a break from preaching. A teaching colleague started to join me on these weekend visits; he’d cook, I’d preach, and our friend would smoke cigarettes and relax. Those were great memories. And they’re gone.  

I am acutely aware that there was something beautiful in those moments, something I miss, and something I long to recover, to experience again. And I believe this is the root of tradition, which is an attempt to make the past present once again. We believe that doing something the same way, repeating an action, making it ritual, like singing happy birthday and blowing out candles, or opening presents on Christmas morning and having turkey in the evening, allows us to experience once again what we experienced in the past, which now, in the present, we long for. We long to connect to that past, to the people who perhaps are no longer with us. 

But it begins with seeing something in the past that we didn’t quite see back then, or were not explicitly aware of at the time. It seems that time strips away some of the dross of our experiences and leaves us with a memory that is purified, and something now radiates. 

I became more and more aware of this the older I got. I began to realize that this beauty that I saw when looking back, was there at the time, when it was not past, but present, but something prevented me from seeing it at the time, or appreciating it. It was buried underneath a host of baggage–perhaps stress, anxiety, preoccupation with what needs to be done at the moment, marking tests or creating exams, etc. What this means is that today, in the present moment, that element, that nugget of beauty that I will appreciate and see clearly 10 or so years from now (looking back and recalling this present moment), is here now, at this moment. 

So, the question is: Is there a way for me to become aware of it now, so that I can delight in it now, rather than 20 years from now? And so a few years ago I began to really look for it in the present, to look for this element, this beauty, that I know I will see in retrospect.

So I know that one day I’m going to look back and remember teaching Confirmation to these kids, in the church basement either at St Lawrence the Martyr, or Blessed Trinity, or Sacred Heart in Uxbridge, taking their questions, questioning them, and I’m going to miss those moments, so, now, when I am teaching these classes, I am becoming more aware of that hidden element in the here and now. Same with preaching. One day I won’t be preaching anymore, but I’ll recall those times when I was preaching at this Church or that Church, and I’ll see something, something very memorable. I visit the hospitals often, at least once a week. Someday I might be a patient at Southlake hospital, and I’ll recall the years when I’d walk the halls and visit the patients, and I know I will long for those moments again, and I am aware of that now when I am in the hospital visiting patients, walking the halls and stairwells, making my way to their rooms. It’s hard to be attuned to this when we are young, because the young mind is just not focused on the present moment, but on the future. 

And yet, the moments keep on drifting into the past. I am aware that when I discern that element in the present moment, I will often try to grasp on to it and keep it, but I can’t do it. It still drifts into the past. And it is always sad to see it drift away like that. 

And yet, for God, nothing is past. God is the eternal present. So, does that mean when we die and enter into his rest, that all those moments will be recovered in some way? That we will experience the accumulated joy of each one of those moments, in the eternal present? 

I think so. I am quite convinced that this is part of the joy of heaven. We are not to experience the fullness of that joy here, it will always escape our attempts to capture it, but it will be returned to us one hundredfold later on, in eternity. 

Existence in time is a constant dying, drifting into the non-existent past. But Christ conquered death; he rose from the dead, so existence in time is a constant dying, each moment of which will rise again, in glory. Tradition seeks to recover the past, to make it present again, like the Mass, which actually does make present the sacrifice of Calvary. But in heaven, what tradition aims to achieve will be achieved. The joy of heaven will include the joys of each present moment of our existence, and so the deaths of each moment are not permanent; we can look at each moment and instead of saying “good-bye”, we can say: “see you again soon”. 

Now, the gospel reading for the 2nd Sunday of Lent, was the Transfiguration. You know it well, so I’m not going to read it, but I have always been struck by what Peter says there: 

Rabbi, it is good that we are here!
Let us make three tents:
one for you, one for Moses, and one for Elijah.

And every time I read that, I think of Father Frank Kelly, a homily that he gave way back in the early 90s, and I think it was when we came home from a retreat in New Jersey, we took a bunch of students, and we had Mass on our return. And the translation at that time was: “It is wonderful for us to be here”. That’s a better translation than what we have now.

The Greek word here is not “good” as in “It is good to be here”. The Greek word is kalon. It is kalon for us to be here. 

Aristotle used that word kalon in his Nicomachean Ethics. The word kalon is derived from kaleo, which means attractive, and it is a word used in the context of aesthetics, the study of art and the beautiful. The kalon in Aristotle is best translated as the morally beautiful. 

The gospel really should read: “It is beautiful for us to be here”, or “morally beautiful to be here”. The beauty is the moral atmosphere. This is an experience of beauty, the divine beauty. And it is an aesthetic experience that Peter, James, and John want to perpetuate. They want to keep it from drifting into the past.

Moses and Elijah, they are from the past, but they are present, in the present moment of the Transfiguration, contributing to its beauty; they represent salvation history before Christ. What is past is made present, in the here and now, through Christ. 

God the Son joined a human nature to himself. The eternal, who is Beauty Itself, has entered into time and joined himself to the matter of the universe. Now, Pope John Paul II said often, in joining a human nature, God the Son joined himself as it were to every human being. He is present to every human person. Those who have the theological virtue of faith, those who have allowed Christ the king to reign in their lives, are given the light of grace, the light of faith. They have become aware of that deep and hidden presence, the presence of God the Son within the interior of the soul. That’s the kalon that exists at every moment, within every moment, in the lives of the faithful. That element of beauty that we see when looking back at things that have past is the kalon of the divine presence, stripped of the dross that acted as a distraction at the time. Our life is transfigured in Christ, right now, but there is so much that eclipses the radiance that the present moment contains. Later on, our memories of these events unveil the kalon so that we have a minor transfiguration experience.

To find that experience in the present, underneath the current dross that clouds it, we need to learn to be present. To be present is to be in the present. And to be present is a skill. It is interesting how the two words are akin: present and presence. To be present to another is to be in the presence of another, to be aware of their presence–not just their position in space. To be in the here and now, focused on the person before us. It is easy to be focused on a great person, but being present to the lowest of the low, that’s a skill. It requires an ability to see something in that person that is well disguised. Mother Teresa always spoke of the poor as Jesus’ disguise. 

Now, the Greeks distinguish two kinds of time: chronos time and kairos time. Kairos is used over 80 times in the New Testament, and it refers to a season, such as harvest time. Chronos time is measured time, quantified into an hour, or a minute. Chronos time moves outside of us. The clock is ticking. The present moment, the now, is here instantaneously and then quickly drifts into the past, always escaping us. 

However, we can be “within time”, that is, in time. We can move in it. If we move in it, then it is always now. As an analogy: think of a spacecraft. If we are outside the spacecraft, it zooms by us. If we are inside the spacecraft, we move along with it. Kairos time is time that we are in, and so it is always present. 

But, chronos time is real, and it makes demands on us. We have an appointment and so we have to move on. Peter, James, and John got a taste of the kairos time that is in heaven, but chronos time made demands on them. The experience of the transfiguration came to an end and they had to come down from the mountain. 

Chronos time and kairos time are simultaneous. Chronos time says I have an appointment at 10 o’clock, so I have to take leave of my friends and make my way there. But when I get to the doctor’s office, I have to be present to the doctor, pay attention to him, be a presence to him and allow him to be a presence to me. But, even the trip to the doctors, the drive, or the bus ride, is not meant to be pure chronos. I must be present to the beauty of the present moment. The view outside the window, or to the people on the subway, the walk to the doctor’s office, or whatever. 

God is outside of time, not subject to the passing of time, but time exists, and God is intimately present within all that exists, as the First Cause of all that exists. God, who is Beauty Itself, is present in each moment of time.

And my students feel it. The first assignment that I give to my Niagara University students in January is to have them write out a short essay on how it is they got to where they are now, that is, how they got to teachers college. Reading their personal stories of how they got to this point is really an exhilarating experience. Their stories are so unique and so rich in content, and there is often some hero in their lives, either their parents, who came to Canada under adverse circumstances but struggled and overcame these obstacles through faith, trust in God, and hard work, or a great and unknown teacher in their lives who had a profound influence on the student as a result of the way that teacher related to her students, with great patience and perseverance, or some priest in their lives. etc. Many of them have very positive memories of their school years. Each story from each student is so different, but each one is usually so uplifting and exhilarating. And it is so easy to see the hand of divine providence in their lives, leading them to where they are now. 

Now, it is amazing how many of these prospective teachers drifted from the faith, but returned, and it was the result of memories that were gradually uncovered, a feeling like something was lost, a world, and they rediscovered it. 

The transfiguration was really a gift given to Peter, James, and John, to strengthen them for the impending trauma of Christ’s passion, and the memories we create for our students, for young people in the parish, are ordered to the same end, to strengthen them for the impending sufferings and difficulties and traumas that await them.  

It is a ministry ordered to the creation of memories. I was going over these ideas with a patient of mine at the hospital, a young lady who suffers from clinical depression. I’ve been visiting her for many years now. Certain months of the year are very difficult for her. But I was telling her about the themes of this retreat.

I did ask her if she has any memories that bring her a sense of peace, and she said she had very few if any. And of course, she suffers from depression. When I spoke of this, she was reminded of Erik Erickson, the final stage of psychosocial development, the stage of integrity vs despair. Now, it is not quite the same in her case, because the stage of despair results from the fact that one sees the choices that one has made, and the despair is the result of those bad choices. Clinical depression is not something that results from bad moral choices. It is a brain disease. But I did give her something to think about. This is what I said:

We believe that God the Son joined a human nature and entered into human suffering. In joining himself to every man, he is especially present in the depths of our suffering and darkness. We don’t suffer alone, although it may often feel that we do. But we don’t. And this lady has a special cross to bear, as do all those who suffer from clinical depression. 

And they must feel like they’ve been ripped off terribly. Others have their health, both mental and physical, they are privileged, brought up in a family that is well off, they travel and they’ve gone to university, they’re working. Life is tremendous. And here she is, this girl, in and out of mental health wards all her life. Life seems very unfair. But of course, our God is a God of justice. He balances the scales, and the divine justice has been revealed as the divine mercy. I told her that when you stand before God at the end of your life, and you see and grasp the meaning of your entire life from God’s point of view, that is, when you see your life in the light of Christ and the paschal mystery, and you reflect on the prospect of doing it all again, you will not want to change anything. She reacted to that and said she just cannot imagine that and doubts very much that she would not want anything changed. Nevertheless, that is the case, because she will see that Christ was present all along in the depths of that suffering, that her depression was a special sharing in the mental anguish of Christ that he endured throughout his life, especially on Holy Thursday night. She will see how her suffering has imprinted on her the image of the suffering Christ, and friendships are based on common qualities, and she’ll see how much her life has in common with Christ’s life, unlike the life of prosperity and privilege. She can’t see that now, but she will in eternity. But, she can begin to look now, to reflect upon her life in that light and perhaps begin to see it, begin to discover the suffering Christ in the midst of that darkness.

But the suffering involved in clinical depression is deep, but the Lord is there nonetheless. The specific cross given to such a person may involve being unable to detect the peace of his presence at any level, but he is there nevertheless, and one day this person will see it and delight in it, and see what it has done for her, how that suffering has configured her to the beautiful image of Christ crucified. And so the scales will be balanced in her favor.

A Season of Irony

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Years ago I was struck by something Gregory of Nyssa wrote in a Sermon on the Beatitudes: 

What more humble for the King of creation than to share in our poor nature? The Ruler of rulers, the Lord of lords puts on voluntarily the garb of servitude. The Judge of all things becomes a subject of governors; the Lord of creation dwells in a cave; He who holds the universe in His hands finds no place in the inn, but is cast aside into the manger of irrational beasts. The perfectly Pure accepts the filth of human nature, and after going through all our poverty passes on to the experience of death. …Life tastes death; the Judge is brought to judgement; the Lord of the life of all creatures is sentenced by the judge; the King of all heavenly powers does not push aside the hands of the executioners (Sermon 1, The Beatitudes).

Notice the irony in this. Christmas, the birth of Christ, is a season of irony. For this reason, it is a season of humour; for it is irony that makes us laugh. That’s what makes good comedians, namely, an ability to see and make explicit the irony in everyday situations. Consider the nick names kids give one another; they are often very funny because they are ironic: the tall kid is called ‘shorty’, the short one is called stretch, the weak and skinny kid is ‘hercules’, and they called me “slim”.   

If we stand back and think about the irony in the mystery of the Incarnation, it is rather funny. God, who is all powerful, immaterial, and indestructible, becomes flesh; God, who is eternal, is born in time; God, who is all powerful and independent, becomes a weak and vulnerable baby dependent upon a mother and father; God who is the judge of all is judged by a mere human being; God who is Life Itself dies on a cross. This is irony, and there is joyful humour in this. It is as if God is playing a joke on us, one serious to be sure, but a joke nonetheless–and it is serious because love is serious. 

The word ‘humor’ comes from the Latin humous, which means soil or dirt. The word ‘human’ is also derived from the same root, because we came from dust and to dust we shall return. And the word ‘humility’ has the same origin, for the humble know they are dust and ashes and they have their feet planted firmly on the ground–they do not walk high and mighty; they realize they are just flesh and blood and are everywhere prone to error. These three words (human, humility, humour) are clearly related. The more humble you are, the more human you are, and the more you are able to laugh, especially at yourself.  

This is a problem with our notion of holiness. In movies, saints are almost always depicted as overly serious, heavy, not disposed to laughter, as if laughter is offensive to God. But a truly holy person sees the irony in life in light of the divine irony, which is why truly holy people laugh a lot. Above all, they can laugh at themselves, because they take themselves lightly. I always emphasize to couples taking Marriage Prep that being able to laugh at yourself and taking yourself lightly is the key to conflict resolution–those who cannot laugh at themselves, who take themselves too seriously, will indeed have marital difficulties. 

God is joy itself, and you and I are called to enter into that joy, to enter into the divine humour. Grace gives us the eyes to see life’s irony so that we can begin to laugh with God. We cannot laugh, however, if we are afraid, and there is a great deal of fear in people’s lives. Inordinate fear can cause us to do things that only make a mess out of our lives and bring chaos to the lives of others. Human beings are limited by matter, by flesh and blood. Our abilities and our knowledge in particular are terribly limited. When we experience those limits, we typically begin to fear, because we realize there is very little that is in our control, and then we are tempted to make choices that are contrary to the limits that the moral law imposes upon us. In other words, we are tempted to sin, to take matters into our own hands. But this is where we have to trust; for the spiritual life is about learning to trust and to fear less and less. Christians have a unique advantage here, because we have the example of divine irony: God is so powerful that he can defeat the one enemy that man could not hope to defeat, namely sin and death, and he does so not through power, but weakness: the weakness of a child, the weakness of poverty, the weakness of a bad reputation (as a result of sharing table fellowship with tax collectors, sinners, and prostitutes), and the weakness of death on a cross. He rose from the dead. And he gives us his very self under the appearance of ordinary bread–more irony; God, who is extraordinary, allows himself to be consumed under the appearance of ordinary bread, in order to strengthen us, in order to dwell within us. God, who cannot be contained, allows us to contain him. So why are we afraid? “If God is for us, who can be against us (Rm 8, 31). 

Finally, the angel says to Joseph in a dream: “Do not be afraid to take Mary as your wife. The child conceived in her is from the Holy Spirit”. Why in a dream? The reason is that when we are sleeping, we are no longer in control. And if we are not in control, we cannot screw things up. We are most disposed to listen when we are not in control. And that’s why God often does speak to us in dreams. But the message in this is that we must learn to relinquish control, more and more, when we are not sleeping, but awake. The more we relinquish control and allow God to be God, the more we will see miracles. We see so few miracles because we insist on managing things ourselves, managing other people, and driving them away in the process. But the more we learn to trust him and listen in silence, the more we will hear him speak to us, and like Joseph, we will know what to do, where to go, and how to get there.

Thoughts on God as Pure Act of Being and Atheism

Deacon D. McManaman

God is pure act of existence. But what does this mean?  I can look at you and form a concept, an idea of what you are. In other words, I grasp something of your nature, i.e., you are a human kind of being, you have size and affective qualities, you have certain abilities and potentialities very similar and different from other kinds of beings. But I also apprehend that you exist, which is a different apprehension than the first (the apprehension of the kind of being you are). Your existence is intelligible, but I cannot form a concept of it–as I can form a concept of your nature, the kind of person you are. You are a certain kind of being that “has an act of existence”, but existence does not belong to your nature. Existence is an “act” that you have, while “human”, for example, is “what” you are (not what you have). The key point here is that your existence is not a concept; it is, nonetheless, intelligible. 

God is not a composite of essence and existence (as are you), rather, his essence is to exist. He does not “have” existence; rather, he is his own act of existing. And so God is intelligible, but we cannot form a concept or idea of God. And because God is pure act of existence, he is pure goodness and beauty, because goodness and beauty are properties of being. 

And so we need to be careful with confusing the worship of God with the worship of a conceptual framework. As pure act of being, God is intimately present to whatever has existence; God is more intimately present to you than you are to you. Being is the most interior aspect of a thing, and so God, who is the first existential and preservative cause of your being, is, of all that is within you, the most interior. How you relate to God, who is goodness itself and beauty itself, is not always clear to you, certainly not immediately clear. It becomes increasingly manifest in your dealings with other goods, such as human goods or human persons. 

The atheist typically rejects a conceptual framework, as opposed to God himself. Even the use of “himself” is dangerous because it brings God into a conceptual circle. This is not to say that it is false, but it can be misleading. God is in many ways “himself” and “herself” and infinitely more, while at the same time God is absolutely simple, for there is nothing simpler than “being itself”. 

And so when someone says he or she is an “atheist”, we have to ask what that means precisely. It very often does not mean that God is rejected–especially if the atheist has a degree of wisdom. It is usually a conceptual framework that is rejected, for a variety of reasons. The good news is that God is not a concept. God is intelligible, infinitely knowable, and incomprehensible. We believe he revealed himself in history, and this is where the construction of an elaborate conceptual framework begins, but this religious conceptual frame of mind, although not necessarily false, is always subject to reform and constant editing. God, however, is always infinitely larger than this religious conceptual framework. That is why openness to and dialogue with other religions and denominations is of the utmost importance. 

Fear and Primitive Reasoning

Deacon Douglas McManaman

Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God (Is 35, 4)

So much of what goes wrong in the world has its roots in fear. And there is so much about this world today that gives rise to fear; but this life is really about learning to depend upon God, that is, learning to fear less (fearless), and the way to do that is first to become increasingly aware that independence is relative and ultimately an illusion, and that we depend on God ultimately, and second to actually begin to rely on God. We certainly depend on one another, but ultimately everyone depends on God. And the more we surrender our lives to God, the more we learn through our own experience that God really is intimately involved in everything that happens to us and that nothing happens outside of his providential control. However, although human beings really do make a mess out of their lives when they take matters into their own hands instead of relying on God, they are still wrapped up and surrounded by God’s providence.  

My spiritual director would always say to me: “Fear is useless, what is needed is trust”. And fear is useless, at least fear without trust, because we all experience our radical limitations, but without trust we are tempted to cross those limits, that is, moral limits, and then we do things that we know to be wrong, like lying under oath, or stealing, or undermining the reputation of another, plotting to bring others down, etc. We make every effort to create an environment that is safe for ourselves, and this soon becomes a machination process in which we are willing to sideline those who get in our way. That injustice generates resentment in others, and such wounds can stay with a person all throughout his or her life. And soon everybody is carrying around a soul riddled with bullet holes, and the result is that we only think of ourselves, sort of like having a toothache–you can’t think of anything other than your own pain. 

But God does allow suffering into our lives. He does not impose it on us, but He does allow it; for suffering is the opportunity God gives us to depend on Him, to trust Him more fully, to place ourselves in His hands. When we do, we can be assured that he will act, but God does tend to “take his time”, not our time. And so, we have to be patient. That’s the problem with living in a fast-paced society–we are disposed to want things done quickly, and that just does not happen with God. The reason is that love is patient, and God is love, and he calls us to be patient: “Be patient, therefore, brothers, until the coming of the Lord. See how the farmer waits for the precious fruit of the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains” (Jm 5, 7).  Suffering and moments of darkness are symbolized here by the image of early and late rains–there is no “precious fruit of the earth” without that suffering. 

In my experience, most people, even religious people, believe that suffering, hardship, and struggles are anomalies. Religious people in particular often assume that if we have a relationship with God, all will be smooth and relatively easy, so that if suffering enters our life, that must mean that our relationship with God has somehow been broken by something we did, some sin that we committed. This is how Israel interpreted her own suffering and hardship on a national level; on an individual level, it was assumed that those who were poor, lame, deaf or blind, etc., were forsaken by God by virtue of some ancestral or personal sin. This is a primitive way of trying to make sense out of suffering. Jesus, however, challenged this in the gospel of John: “As he passed by he saw a man blind from birth. His disciples asked him, ‘Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’ Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him’” (Jn 9, 1-3).

Unfortunately, many people still tend to think this way, because they want to make sense out of suffering, and if I can convince myself that a person is suffering because of something sinful he has done, well then I don’t feel so bad–on some level I convince myself that he deserves it. If we carefully read the book of Job, we see that Job’s friends were reasoning precisely along these lines, which is why in the end God rebuked them for this (See Jb 42, 7-9).  

We have to be very careful with this kind of reasoning, which is still rather prevalent. Some people take many sections of the Old Testament literally and believe that God does in fact destroy otherwise innocent people (i.e., Amalekite children, David’s infant son, etc.) as a punishment for the sins committed by others. We have to keep in mind that Israel, in her infancy, thought as a child does, namely, egocentrically: if something bad is happening to a child, for example, if the child is being abused by a parent, or the child’s parents are going through a separation and divorce, that child believes this is all happening because “I am bad”. It takes years for a person to escape from this mythology–and he or she may need help (a trained therapist) to overcome such harmful and subconscious beliefs, otherwise they may carry that conviction into their adult lives, feeling and believing on some level that they are deeply flawed, and without knowing why. Such people typically carry around a great deal of anger. We see precisely this kind of thinking on a national level in the Hebrew Scriptures, but Israel is a nation in history, a nation that through time grew in her understanding of God as a result of that historical relationship. The way Israel thinks about herself and God later in her history is very different from the way she thought earlier.

However, God reveals his true face in the Incarnation of the Son, that is, in the Person of Christ. God’s response to human sin was pure grace. He does not impose suffering but enters into human suffering, for he joined a human nature to himself and entered into our darkness, so that when we suffer, we may find him in the midst of that suffering. He came to sanctify our suffering and death, to inject it with his life. That is why the Old Testament must always be read in the light of the New, that is, in the light of Christ’s life, death, and resurrection. 

Finally, John the Baptist, the greatest of those born of women, is suffering in the darkness of a prison cell, awaiting his execution. He does not suffer by virtue of some sin; rather, he is suffering because of his heroic virtue, that is, his decision to speak out against Herod, who after visiting his brother in Rome, seduced his wife and married her after dismissing his own wife. John rebuked Herod for this, and Herod responded by throwing him into the dungeons of the fortress of Machaerus, near the Dead Sea. In that darkness, John was tempted to doubt. Initially, he pointed out rather definitively that Jesus was the lamb of God, but in this dark and final period in prison, he sent his disciples to ask Jesus: “Are you the One who is to come, or, must we go on expecting another?” Jesus sent John’s disciples back with the evidence: the blind are given their sight, the lame are walking, lepers are being cleansed, the deaf are hearing, and the dead are being raised and the poor are receiving the good news. What Isaiah prophesied in the first reading is being fulfilled in the Person of Christ himself. And if the lame, the poor, the sick, the deaf, etc., were thought to be forsaken, abandoned, and rejected by God, then what is happening here can only be interpreted as a vindication of the poor, that the kingdom of God has come upon them in the Person of Christ. He overthrows the kingdom of darkness, and the true face of God is being revealed not a God who punishes retributively,[1] but a God who forgives and loves, who loves us so much that he will take on our sufferings, join us in our deepest darkness so that we may not suffer alone. He enters into the worst possible darkness that a person can experience: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me”. He tastes the furthest extremity of God forsakenness, the depths of hell, in order to fill it with his light and love. That is the good news of our salvation. 

1. When the New Testament speaks of divine punishment, the Greek word employed is kolasis, which is best translated as “chastisement”. Timoria is the Greek word for retribution or retributive punishment, but we do not find this word in the New Testament associated with divine punishment. Kolasis, on the contrary, is a horticultural term that refers to pruning, as in pruning a plant. One prunes a plant for the good of the plant. In other words, divine punishment is ordered to the good of the “chastised” and is consistent with the divine love.

    Perfect Victory

    Homily for the 2nd Sunday of Advent
    https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_437perfectvictory.html
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Anyone who uses social media and follows American politics is acutely aware of how divided we have become as a nation. This division is also evident in a number of Catholic journals, especially those that allow comments. YouTube videos often bear the legend “so and so gets humiliated”, or “____________ gets schooled by __________”, or crushed, demolished, destroyed, and so on. Such videos are not about listening to the finer points of an issue in order to inch our way closer to the truth; rather, the attitude is so often “demolish the enemy”, and the enemy, needless to say, are those who disagree with us. In the end, victory leaves us with one apparent winner and one loser; the winner gloats, and the loser is humiliated and goes off with his proverbial tail between his legs. Moreover, there is a tremendous lack of civility today on social media, especially when it comes to politics. 

    However, the first reading for the 2nd Sunday of Advent provides a very different vision of what a genuine victory is. I’m referring specifically to the last section of the first reading from Isaiah (11, 6-8):  

    The wolf shall live with the lamb,
    the leopard shall lie down with the baby goat,
    the calf and the lion and the fatling together,
    and a little child shall lead them.
    The cow and the bear shall graze,
    their young shall lie down together;
    and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
    The nursing child shall play over the hole of the cobra,
    and the weaned child shall put its hand on the den of the venomous snake.

    In short, no harm shall come from those who were at one time the enemy to be feared. This reading from Isaiah is a vision of the eschatological harmony that we can look forward to. And it is an entirely different vision of victory than what we typically understand by that word. There will not be one winner standing over the defeated enemy; rather, the enemies have been changed, that is, completely transformed. In short, there will be no more enemies; for they will have ceased to be such. That’s precisely what Christ’s victory is, which is the greatest possible victory. 

    I debated a lot when I was younger, and at times those debates got very heated. Back then, I was quite convinced that I won those debates, but my opponents were equally certain they did. In formal debates, it is the audience that decides the winner. If you came to the debate favoring a particular side, but the other side changed your mind, you indicate that at the end and the one who turned more people around to their side is the winner–and there is only one winner and one loser. 

    But is it possible to have two winners? Most people would say no, but it is possible. I know that in my case, on a number of occasions in my late 50s and especially in recent years, after reflecting upon certain issues for decades, I have said to myself more than once: “Gosh, so and so was right 35 years ago when I argued with him on this issue”, and “I think that person was right 20 years ago when we debated that issue”. This has happened many times in recent years, only because I still study. And it’s a marvelous experience to be sure, not unpleasant in any way, but there’s no way of getting in contact with these people to tell them: “Hey, remember the debate we had 35 years ago. You were right all along. It just took me 35 years to see it.” 

    In this case, we have two winners. And why did it take so long? Because human knowing is very limited; human intelligence is sluggish, and we depend so much on experience (empirical data), which takes time. Certain epistemic conditions were not in place at a specific point in our personal history, but after three decades, if and when those conditions are established, we see what we could not see earlier. That’s a true victory, when two opposing parties finally see eye to eye. And again, that’s why synodal listening is so important. Pope Francis understood something of the fundamentals of a sound theory of knowledge, and Pope Leo XIV continues to emphasize this essential aspect of the Church as “listening Church”. If Christ is victorious, it can only be a perfect victory, one that in the end leaves no enemies, a victory in which the enemy is entirely transformed: “Because of this, God greatly exalted him and bestowed on him the name that is above every name, that at the name of Jesus every knee should bend, of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth, and every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father” (Phil 2, 9-11).

    The book of Revelation also envisions the same thing. The kings of the earth are depicted as opponents of God, for they side with the beast and wage war against Christ at Armageddon (Rev 16, 16), but in chapter 21, verse 24, we read: “The city had no need of sun or moon to shine on it, for the glory of God gave it light, and its lamp was the Lamb. The nations will walk by its light, and to it the kings of the earth will bring their treasure.” Christ’s victory involves the transformation of the kings of the earth, from enemies to worshippers who adore the Lamb–a perfect victory.

    And we have a role to play in this eschatological state of affairs. Christ does not usher in the kingdom of God without us. We have to do our part and work for peace. We can move this world forward or we can hold things back. It all depends on the attitude we adopt. And it begins in the ordinary ways we relate to people who do not think like we do, whether they are on the right or the left, inside the Church or on the outside. How we talk and how we listen is important. People throw around the word “truth” rather loosely, but knowledge is very hard to achieve, and “truth” is for the most part truth as we currently see it, which implies that “truth” is, for the most part, tentative. The ones who  seem to appreciate this fact are scientists who must always test their hypotheses. Outside of that circle, people tend to speak with a rhetoric of certainty. 

    In my last 20 years of teaching, close to 40% of my students were Muslim. Around 2013, I started to show the film Dancing in Jaffa–it was a Muslim girl who urged me to purchase the film and show it. The film is about a world champion ballroom dancer, Pierre Dulaine, who returns to Jaffa, Israel, where he grew up 30 years earlier, and his goal was to teach ballroom dancing to Jewish and Palestinian kids, and then to have them dance together, boy with girl, but one must be Jewish and the other Palestinian. He thought this was going to be a cakewalk, but it proved to be much more challenging than he realized–he was ready to quit on a number of occasions; many kids simply refused to dance with a Jew, or dance with a Palestinian. They just would not have it; the prejudice was deep and ingrained. But some were willing to try it, and the film has a beautiful ending, with the 11 year old Jewish and Palestinian dance couples in a competition between schools. It’s a very moving and hopeful film. 

    But it does give us a glimpse of how difficult it is to overcome deep-seated prejudice, in particular prejudice that has been picked up from parents and religious communities. And that prejudice is not only there in the Middle East, it is here too in North America. The way some Catholics still talk about Protestants and the way some Protestants still talk about Catholics, or Hindus, Muslims, and Sikhs, and of course the way Liberals talk about Conservatives and Conservatives talk about Liberals strongly suggests that we really have a long way to go and that we are probably many centuries away from true and lasting peace. But that is our task, and we especially are responsible for taking the lead since we claim to worship the Prince of Peace, who was victorious over sin and death not through any kind of aggression, military or otherwise, but through the divine weakness, Christ’s birth in poverty and his death on the cross.    

    A Brief Note on Marriage and Celibacy

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    In some circles, celibacy continues to be described as “undivided love for Christ and His Church”[1]. And given peoples’ tendency to inference rather quickly, without a great deal of care, it is natural for most people to conclude that those who are not celibate can at best only hope to achieve a divided love for Christ and His Church. After all, St. Paul seems to imply as much in the seventh chapter of his first letter to the Corinthians: “Brothers and sisters: I should like you to be free of anxieties. An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord, how he may please the Lord. But a married man is anxious about the things of the world, how he may please his wife, and he is divided. An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord, so that she may be holy in both body and spirit. A married woman, on the other hand, is anxious about the things of the world, how she may please her husband. I am telling you this for your own benefit, not to impose a restraint upon you, but for the sake of propriety and adherence to the Lord without distraction” (32-35).

    Such an inference, however, is seriously problematic given the sixth beatitude: “Blessed are the pure in heart; they shall see God”. A pure heart (katharoi te kardia) is an unmixed heart, that is, a heart that loves undividedly, and of course this beatitude has a much larger and wider scope than would: “Blessed are the celibate”; for purity of heart is a fundamental characteristic of every genuine Christian, while celibacy is not. 

    Consider a genuinely dedicated priest or bishop, or even a sister of a congregation. The priest or bishop is often busy with administrative duties (paying bills, building churches, repairs, etc.)—not to mention various other pastoral duties–, and a Missionary of Charity, for example, is often busy with serving the needs of the poorest of the poor, i.e. making baby formula, feeding a dying man, etc. It would hardly be fitting to refer to the bishop’s love as divided between administrative work and the Lord, or a Missionary Sister’s love as divided between her love and service of the poorest of the poor and her love of the Lord. Rather, the very work they do is part and parcel of their love of God; it is the very expression of that love. The priest serves God by serving the parish in the many and varied ways this service takes shape, just as the Missionary Sister of Charity serves God when she cleans the dirty apartment of a poor woman living on her own in the Bronx (Mt 25, 31-46). And in precisely the same way, Christian married men and women are not, by virtue of their married state, leading divided lives with a divided heart; rather, their love for one another, their labor ordered to the good of the household, the sacrifices involved in raising their children and supporting one another are all part and parcel of their love of and devotion to God,  the very expression of that love. 

    Returning to Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, it should be emphasized that the section quoted above is only a small portion of the entire chapter, and taken out of its larger context one easily comes away with the impression that the celibate life is genuinely religious, while the married state is not. Such an interpretation, however, would be contrary to Paul’s overall teaching on marriage. In the larger context of this chapter, we see that Paul believes we are in the last period of salvation history. He refers to his own time as a time of distress, which in apocalyptic literature, is said to precede the time of the Second Coming of Christ. Paul writes: “So this is what I think best because of the present distress: that it is a good thing for a person to remain as he is. Are you bound to a wife? Do not seek a separation. Are you free of a wife? Then do not look for a wife…. I tell you, brothers, the time is running out” (26-27; 29). 

    This is hardly the kind of advice we would give to young people today. What Paul says about those who are married and those who are not must be read in this context, otherwise we come away with the impression that marriage has little if anything to do with serving the Lord. 

    But Christ’s love for his Church is a conjugal love, and the love of a baptized husband for his baptized wife is that very same love, and vice versa. Marriage is a sacrament, a sacred sign that contains what it signifies, and it signifies the paschal mystery; for just as God called Abraham to leave (to be ‘set apart from’) the land of Ur and go to the land that He will lead him to, and just as God called Israel to leave Egypt behind (to be ‘set apart from’) with its pantheon of false gods, and just as Jesus leaves this world behind in order to go to the Father–that is, he consecrates himself (sets himself apart. See Jn 17, 19)—, so too in matrimony, the two are called to leave behind a world closed in upon itself; they are consecrated, that is, set apart, for they are called to leave behind their comfortable world of independence and self-sufficiency, to be given over to another, to belong completely to one another, in order to become part of something larger than their own individual selves, namely, the one flesh institution that is their marriage. The couple relinquish their individual lives; they are no longer two individuals with their own independent existence; rather, they have become one body, a symbol of the Church who is one body with Christ the Bridegroom.

    The lives of a married couple are a witness of Christ’s love for his Church and the Church’s ever expanding response to that love; they witness to that love in their sacrificial love for one another and for the children who are the fruit of that marriage–and raising children well demands a tremendously sacrificial love, especially today–in fact, given the circumstance in which couples find themselves in the 21st century, one could well argue that in some cases marriage and family life demand a far greater sacrificial disposition than does celibate life, given the increased cost of living, the housing crisis, food prices, inflation, job insecurity, time constraints, etc. In giving themselves irrevocably and exclusively to one another, without knowing what lies ahead, a young couple die to their own individual plans, they die to a life directed by their own individual wills, and in doing so, they find life; for they have become a larger reality. The heart of Christ is pure and undivided, yet the love that Christ has for us (the Church) is not in competition with his love for God the Father; rather, the two are one and the same. Matrimony as a sign of the very love that Christ has for his Bride is the ultimate meaning of marriage. In short, married love is undivided love for Christ and his Church. 

    Certain habits of thinking, however, are clearly rooted in a centuries old anthropological dualism that extends all the way back to the patristic era in which there was indeed an “embarrassment, suspicion, antipathy and abhorrence of sexuality”, an attitude that permeated hellenic culture, and of course that antipathy affected their evaluation of marriage itself.[2] I refer, of course, to the dualism that holds that the true self is the immaterial or noetic aspect of the human person, which is said to be in continual conflict with the material aspect (the body and the emotions). When such a dualism becomes a conceptual framework, other dualisms are spawned, such as a two-tiered understanding of nature and grace,[3] or the dualism of heaven versus earth (i.e., our primary purpose is to get to heaven, and not to work for justice and the emancipation of the oppressed),[4] or the dualism we’ve been discussing, that between married life versus religious (holy) life. 

    In the patristic era, marriage was allowed, but it was not encouraged. It was Jerome who said that the saving grace of marriage (or sexual intercourse) was that it produced virgins: “I praise wedlock, I praise marriage, but it is because they give me virgins. I gather the rose from the thorns, the gold from the earth, the pearl from the shell” (Letter 22, 20). Moreover, the parable of the sower was typically interpreted allegorically in a way that says a great deal about how married life was regarded at the time; the seed which fell on good soil bore fruit: some one hundredfold, some sixtyfold, and some thirtyfold. The seed that produced one hundredfold was said to represent martyrdom, the seed that produced sixtyfold represents virginity, and finally the seed that produced thirtyfold was said to represent marriage–martyrdom was obviously the best, followed by virginity, and at the bottom of the hierarchy was married life; for martyrdom involves the sacrifice of the entire body, virginity involves the perpetual sacrifice of the sexual act, while marriage apparently involves neither, but a capitulation to the flesh.[5] 

    Although marriage is not quite regarded in such a negative light today, we still have not entirely freed ourselves from every residue of this ancient worldview, and in light of the Hebrew understanding of knowledge as experience, perhaps we will not do so until we return to the ancient custom that the 23 Eastern Catholic Churches never relinquished, namely that married men can be ordained as priests. Whatever the case may be, the belief that things will eventually work out well as long as we continue to speak as we’ve always spoken and do what we’ve always done, without any significant change in the pre-conciliar way that many have been taught to regard the world and its relationship to the kingdom of God, might very well be denial, and denial has never accomplished much beyond impeding healing and growth. 

    Notes

    1. Letter from the Holy Father Leo XIV to the Archdiocesan Major Seminary of “San Carlos y San Marcelo” in Trujillo, on the occasion of the 400th anniversary of its founding, 05.11.2025).

    2. Donald F. Winslow. “Sex and Anti-sex in the Early Church Fathers” in Male and Female: Christian Approaches to Sexuality. Edited by Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Urban T. Holmes, III. p. 30.

    3. Peter Fransen S. J. writes: ““In the spirituality commonly met with in convents and religious writings, a distinction is drawn between the purely natural human values in our life and the “supernatural” ones. The natural values are treated as having little or no consequence unless they are sanctified by a special “good intention,” which has to be superimposed on them. The joy of watching a glorious sunset has no supernatural value unless I offer it up to God. A mother loves her children–but that is normal. A man goes to his office–but that is as it should be. If these activities and states are to have any value before God, more especially, if there is to be any “merit” in them in the sight of God, something must be added, namely, a “good intention.” A little more and these people would declare that nothing but the exceptional, the uncommon, counts for anything in God’s eyes. Hence they embrace a constrained spirituality that is not met with in the life of Christ or in the lives of most saints. 

    Of course, this is a wrong notion of the supernatural, the spiritual. The Germans have a name for it: the doctrine of the two stories. On the ground floor are the service quarters, on the top the drawing rooms. God does not deign to appear on the ground floor; He dwells only in the drawing rooms! The truth is that our divinization is also our humanization. We have been made children of God in a renovated humanity. God is pleased with our courtesy to others as much as with our prayers, with our enjoyment of nature as much as with our rejoicing in His glory, with our human friendships as much as with our faith, with our justice and loyalty as much as with our charity–so long as we act with the heart of a child of God. No special intention is required for the purpose.” The New Life of Grace. Translated from the Flemish by Georges Dupont, S. J. London: Geoffrey Chapman, 1971, p. 135. Further along, he writes: “The so-called “pure nature,” that is, a human existence in which divine grace has no part to act, has never existed. The call to grace,…owes its origin to the divine presence in our actual history.” Ibid.,  p 156.

    4. Fransen writes: “Love for God is greatly threatened when the neighbor is not loved. Some “pious souls” drink avidly the cup of maudlin devotions while indulging their own sweet will, and shutting their hearts upon the neighbor. A companion of St. Ignatius, and for many years his secretary, vented one day his long experience in the government of the religious in the sarcastic remark: “Why must ‘pious’ religious be those who are the most intractable, the most wayward and self-willed men? “Piety” meets with scant sympathy on the part of many outsiders, not because these people foster an aversion to fellowmen who consecrate themselves to God, but because such a consecration seems to serve for a cloak for hardheartedness, indifference and inhumanity. In their eyes, “love for God” appears either a pretext for grim severity, or a form of escapism from real life, a flight from the simple solid human virtues, such as courtesy, tact, sincerity and honor.” Ibid., p 304

     5. Op.cit., Winslow, p. 33-34. 

    The Unique Charism of the Chaplain

    (Talk given to High School Chaplains, St. Bonaventure Church, Toronto, November 13, 2025)
    Deacon Doug McManaman

    It’s a real honor to be given this opportunity to speak to all of you this afternoon. And it’s been delightful to have spent these past few weeks thinking back over my 32 and a half years as a high school religion teacher and reflecting on the high school chaplains that have been a real support in my life. There is no doubt in my mind that the special charism of the high school chaplain is the ability to listen to people. And there is so much more to this charism than we tend to think. Most people think of listening as sitting back and not doing anything per se, something purely passive, but listening is really activity of the highest order, but most importantly, it is an activity that requires a host of conditions that only certain kinds of experience can put in place. Since we are given the charisms we need to live out the vocation that is ours, it is obvious to me that the Lord did not call me to chaplaincy in my years as a teacher, especially my early years; I didn’t have the gifts and the specific charism that are so essential for a chaplain. That charism developed slowly and came later as I was called to the diaconate, and this process of acquiring the necessary conditions in order to hear is still ongoing in my life, and will be until the very end.  

    My first teaching assignment was in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto, Regina Pacis Secondary School, which was founded by Father Gerald Fitzgerald CSSp. He envisioned a school in Jane and Finch that would serve those students who could not get accepted at the nearest Catholic high school, and I came on board in 1987. Father Fitz retired shortly thereafter, which was when they hired a Salesian priest as our school chaplain, Father Dave Sajdak SDB, and so it was at this time that I was introduced to the spirituality of St. John Bosco. When students would ask Father Dave what he actually does at the school, his answer was always: “I just hang out. That’s it. I walk around, and I talk to students, teachers, and administrators”. And of course he was a very significant presence in the school, and he was a very good listener, much better than I was at the time. When he left, Patty Ann Dennis, was hired to take his place, and she too was a great presence in the school, a very humble woman who easily recognized the students’ gifts and tapped into them, bringing out the best in them. 

    But there was one year early on after she left for another school board when I was asked to take on one period of chaplaincy. And so I did. During that year, with a period of chaplaincy, I recall spending a lot of time with a Vice Principal whose father had just died, and who was also having a very difficult time with a small group of staff who became rather bitter and cynical–because it was a very difficult school to teach in. In the heart of Jane and Finch, one needed a great deal more patience than one would need in almost any other school, and after a while, some teachers just got burned out and wanted to change that school into a school for the advanced level–but that’s not what the original mission of the school was, and so they became very cynical, cantankerous, and bitter. This Vice Principal, however, was a very good man, but with the death of his father and having to deal with a small group of cynics, he was becoming increasingly disillusioned, frustrated, and perhaps cynical himself, which is why I did spend a great deal of time in his office that year, just listening to him. But one day I said to him: “I’ve been coming down here all week, and I’ve seen this student sitting there for a couple of days now, and that student the other day. These are good kids. What’s going on?” I cannot recall the details, but let’s just say he made it clear to me that a good number of students were being sent down for the silliest reasons. And so I decided to challenge this Vice Principal, who I really liked. I said to him: “Why do you put up with this nonsense? Why don’t you challenge us at staff meetings? Why don’t you say something? You guys say nothing, you go on as if everything is okay, and you keep all this crap to yourselves”, or words to that effect. As a young and inexperienced teacher, I always wanted to challenge my administrators, and here I had the chance, because he was a friend of mine, and I could talk to him in a way that I wouldn’t talk to any other administrator–I knew there would be no repercussions. And, he could talk to me in a way that he would not speak to any other teacher, that is, he didn’t have to fear a grievance letter, of which he had plenty. 

    He told me in no uncertain terms that my neat and tidy solutions were the product of inexperience, they were not solutions at all, but imprudence rooted in a lack of data that would only result in a heap of difficulties. He helped me to see that there are many more levels for an administrator to consider, far more than a teacher has to consider: i.e., senior administration at the board level, the union, parents, police, the law, teachers, etc. When one becomes an administrator, one acquires a purview that is very different, far more complex and much larger than that of a teacher. I realized that the four walls of my classroom shielded me from appreciating the complexity of this work. I became a more grateful teacher, but it was an eye opener for me, and I became a better listener to those in administration than I had been previously and was able to offer much greater support to all my administrators in the following years. 

    I had an interesting dream that year as well. Over the years, I had dreams that were in many ways visions, as it were. Sometimes we are too busy to hear what the Lord is saying to us, but when we sleep, we just can’t interfere, so we are more disposed to listen to what God is trying to tell us. And I know when a dream is more than a dream, because I remember the details, I usually wake up in a spirit of joy, and it feels as if I just had a holiday and I have renewed strength to continue. But this was a very simple dream. I was in a huge barn, and I went to the barn door, the upper part of which was open, and I looked out onto this huge pasture, covered in manure, everywhere. I look to my left and see this beautiful stallion, and there’s a woman grabbing the hoof of this beautiful horse, like a farrier would, and cleaning the shit off of it, and she looks over at me and yells out my name and tells me to get out there and help her. So I did. 

    Now, I knew immediately upon waking that the stallion symbolizes my Vice Principal friend, and the woman, I knew, was Mary, the blessed mother. It’s a great image of Mary. She spoke to me with such familiarity, like an older sister, and she was shoveling shit with her hands. Very important. That’s how I knew my time with this Vice Principal was important. Just listen, help clean off the crap that is thrown at him every day, help him not to get discouraged.

    The following year I was back in the classroom, which is where I wanted to be, but the experience of teacher cynicism, which was a very difficult ordeal for me, took me a bit further in terms of my ability to listen to a certain sector of the school, namely administration. And that’s why I never became an administrator. Many of my friends became administrators and so I knew what they had to go through, because they would tell me. I also knew I didn’t have those gifts, and administration is a charism that St. Paul lists among the various charisms he speaks about in 1 Corinthians and Romans. 

    Another painful but significant experience I had that helped me in terms of my ability to listen to and genuinely hear a certain group of people took place in 2011. I was ordained a deacon three years by then, and as a deacon my ministry was to those who suffer from mental illness. Every week I would visit CAMH, the old Queen Street Mental Health Center downtown. I was still a teacher, however, and we had been preparing to introduce the IB program in our school and I was set to teach the Theory of Knowledge course. Well, one day while visiting the philosophy classes at St. Theresa of Lisieux Secondary School in Richmond Hill, Friday, Dec 23rd, the last day before the Christmas holidays, I began to sweat, and I was getting the shivers. I stuck it out and left immediately at the end of the day, and just got into bed. The next day it was worse. I had terrible pain in my head and neck and shoulders, and the chills were bad, so I told my wife and daughter to go on ahead to Kitchener, Ontario, and I would drive up on Christmas day. Well, that wasn’t going to happen. The pain got worse, it moved from my head to my legs and arms, and I was taking Motrin, but you can only do that for so long before it burns a hole in your stomach. On Christmas day, all I had was a can of tuna. On Boxing Day, I went to the Emergency, and the doctor thought I might have Polymyalgia Rheumatica, for which there is no known cure. I was put on prednisone and given some oxycodone for the pain. The oxycodone was too powerful for me; it felt great, but it was playing tricks with my mind so I stopped it. But I was in a deep state of despair. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night. I didn’t think I’d be able to return to the classroom ever again. I thought it was over. I could not imagine returning; for I was experiencing a general, all around flu like condition x 10 with lots of pain in my arms and legs, like nothing I’ve ever experienced before. But the worst part was the despair.  

    However, at one point in our conversation I said to him: “I think I understand now what my patients have to go through every day, the ones who battle depression.” I was genuinely frightened, because I didn’t know how I’d be able to manage this for the rest of my life–there is no known cure. I realized I had to stop thinking long term and think “one moment at a time”, not one week at a time nor even one day at a time. But I clearly remember saying to Father Kelly: “I think I have a glimpse, a much better appreciation, of what my patients have to go through every day”. And then Father Kelly said to me: “Just keep saying the following prayer: ‘Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit. Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit’.

    Now, I knew that prayer, because it is part of the Night Prayer in the Breviary that we promised to pray on our day of ordination. The problem is when you say a prayer for years on end, it can become just words after a while. So I decided I would pray this prayer and mean it: “Into your hands, Lord I commend my spirit. If you do not want me to go back to teaching, your will be done”. 

    That night I had the best sleep. It felt as if a cool breeze had passed through my body. In the morning, the pain was still there, but the darkness was not. And eventually after a few days, the pain was beginning to subside, and I began to see a light at the end of the tunnel, and soon I was slowly weaned off the prednisone. But I had a much deeper appreciation for my patients who suffer from clinical depression. What I was experiencing was not clinical depression, they have it much worse, to be sure, but it was enough to give me a glimpse into what they have to battle every day for years on end. I was a much better chaplain to the mentally ill after that experience. “Blessed are the Poor in Spirit, the kingdom of heaven is theirs”, and it is mental sufferers who in my experience are the truly poor in spirit, who recognize their utter need for God. 

    But the Lord was not through with me yet. I’m reminded of Father Don MacLean saying to me in the sacristy one day when I was studying to be a Deacon; he said: “You never arrive. Remember that. You never arrive. Don’t ever think you’ve arrived”. As a Deacon for 17 years, I’ve seen things that I would probably not have seen without ordination, and not all of it was pretty; some of it was very ugly. I’ve known and worked with a number of very good priests over the years. When I first came back to the Church in my late teens, the priests who were the greatest influence were of course great priests, the most significant of which was Monsignor Tom Wells of the Archdiocese of Washington DC, who stopped the car and picked me up when I was hitchhiking to Nashville, TN, back in 1979. However, I have had my share of misogynistic priests, overly controlling micromanagers, insecure, arrogant, condescending, and envious priests; gossipy, petty, vindictive, male chauvinists who think women are good for little more than emptying the dishwasher, setting up tables and making coffee, setting down cookies and snacks, and other menial tasks, but not for giving talks for a parish mission or giving spiritual direction, much less preaching. Consistent with this clerical elitism–in some cases, a deep seated narcissism–, such priests, who are almost entirely indifferent to social outreach, will have a great love of liturgy and sanctuary decor, vestments, etc. These are the genuine poster boys for the clericalism that Pope Francis spoke out against so often during his papacy. I’ve had to taste that, experience that, and still do, it hasn’t disappeared, and that has been very difficult.

    But I will say this: it has also been a great blessing in many ways; a painful blessing, but a blessing nonetheless. I say this because I didn’t always understand those who had been hurt by the Church. My mother was hurt by the Church; many of the patients I visit in hospital who haven’t seen the inside of a Church in decades have been hurt by the Church. I wasn’t able to identify with them completely; I didn’t really know what they were talking about. But now I do. I know exactly where they are coming from. And I am able to hear them in a way that was not possible earlier on. And so I am in some ways thankful for these condescending exemplars of clerical elitism who really believe the Church is about them and that the focal point of the life of the parish and the liturgy is them. 

    If we read the Document for the Continental Stage of the Synod on Synodality that Pope Francis initiated, we will see that this kind of clericalism is not a local problem, but a worldwide problem. Francis is one Pope that understood the importance of listening, but it is remarkable how few clergy see its importance and still regard the parish as their own little fiefdom, to change and mold as they please. At one time in our history, not too long ago, a large percentage of priests were like that. Hence, the number of people who will simply not set foot inside a Catholic Church, except for the occasional wedding or baptism. 

    In the gospel of Luke, Simeon is described as righteous and devout, awaiting the Messiah. It was revealed to him that he would not see death before laying eyes on the Messiah. He recognized, through the Holy Spirit, that the child Mary was holding was that Messiah and that he would be a sign of contradiction. He turns to Mary and tells her that a sword will pierce your soul also. Mary and Joseph both marvelled at what was being said by Simeon. Furthermore, Simeon blesses both Mary and Joseph. And so Mary, the greatest saint, full of grace, and Joseph, the greatest saint next to her, are amazed, impressed, they marvel at what was said about the child, and both are willing to receive Simeon’s blessing. Also, Anna, a prophetess, married and widowed, a woman of prayer and fasting, came forward too and spoke about the child. And one other irony: Mary and Joseph, the richest creatures ever created by God, are poor; for they offer the offering of the poor, two turtle doves instead of a lamb, and yet they hold in their arms the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And Luke, throughout his gospel, depicts Mary as one who “ponders these things in her heart”. She listens. In other words, it’s not as if she knows everything. She learns, and marvels at what she learns through others like Simeon and Anna, the prophetess, and ponders what she hears. Mary and Joseph seem to have no idea of their status before God. Both of them allow themselves to be taught, and to be amazed; although the old law is fulfilled in her womb, Mary does not see herself as superior to the old law, nor as superior to Simeon or Anna, even though she is higher than the angels.

    This says a great deal about what true holiness is. Holiness is listening, and listening is an activity, not a passivity, and it is rooted in charity. The truly holy allow themselves to learn from everyone, and they are able to be impressed with others. The proud and envious, on the contrary, are rarely impressed with anyone or anything, unless it is related to them and glorifies them in some way. 

    Pope Francis, early in his papacy, derided the notion of a self-referential Church, focused on itself. Many in the Church were distressed by the suggestion, but his successor, Pope Leo XIV, continues to call the Church to turn outward, towards the world, to become a more listening Church. In fact, two or three weeks ago, he said: 

    We must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone. Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world.

    Listening is utterly central to the nature of the Church, which is a living organism that, in order to grow, must appropriate so much that is good from the environment that is outside the organism and integrate it. That is why synodal listening is so important, listening not just to clergy, but to the lay faithful, recognizing their gifts, talents, and expertise. However, not every diocese has been on board with this. There has been a great deal of indifference, in large part because very few clergy have been taught to listen and see themselves instead as the “anointed” with all the answers to life’s difficulties and peoples’ questions. But the world is vast and inconceivably complex, with a myriad of pockets of knowledge, each one a universe unto itself. The conceptual framework of one individual person and even a small bureaucracy made up of relatively like minded clerics unconvinced of the power of openness and listening to the lay faithful–not to mention those who have been hurt by the Church in many and varied ways–is far too limited to exercise any kind of effective and credible leadership today. 

    Francis thus envisions a more Marian Church, a Church that, like Mary, listens and marvels at the extraordinary gifts, talents, insights and abilities of unknown men and women who are unique and genuinely under the influence of the Holy Spirit, like Simeon and Anna in Luke. 

    Recently I asked Sue LaRosa, who was the longest serving director of the YCDSB, to do a video for my students at Niagara University. We are looking at magisterial pronouncements on the right to association, so I asked her to speak about her vision of the relationship between senior administration and the union. She says [emphasis mine]: 

    When I became Director of Education , I inherited a teacher’s strike followed by a provincial strike. Trust between the board and the union was shattered. I indicated to the Board of Trustees that “this is no way to live”. I committed to rebuilding trust and changing the culture. They didn’t discourage me, but they didn’t believe it could be done. I wasn’t totally convinced I could develop the trust level that would allow for a path  to stop the “blame game”. So, I reflected on my beliefs. I believe we are all born with unique talents and a desire to contribute to the common good. No one thrives in conflict mode. The first step was one of reassurance and deep listening –not defensiveness if this broken relationship was going to be mended. The turning point was the introduction of interest-based bargaining. Many of you may never be involved in  bargaining , but the concept of interest-based bargaining was the catalyst that restored trust. The name alone gives hope: interest based. The method is built on collaboration and mutual understanding . The board team and the teacher team trained  together. The key word here is “together”. We moved cautiously , learning together . It wasn’t a rapid shift. In this approach, everyone had equal status—whether you were the Director or a teacher. That leveled the playing field.  We were disciplined in following  the proven strategies. It wasn’t always easy . Actually, there were moments I questioned the path.  The result was  evident; we successfully negotiated five collective agreements without ever hearing the word strike again. We went from forty annual  grievances to three.

    That was, of course, a small portion of her talk, but what struck me about this is that she understood the fundamental principles of synodality and ecumenical dialogue more than 13 years before the Papacy of Pope Francis. 

    There have been three priests in my life who I can characterize as having been widely beloved. A few years ago I began to reflect specifically upon why they are so loved by so many people. As I pondered this, I came to the conclusion that the reason they are so loved is that they are genuinely interested in ordinary people. They pay attention to people. They approach you and want to know your name, what you do, where you are from, what you love, the names of your children, etc. I was talking to one of these three priests the other day. He was out of town at a funeral reception a couple of weeks ago and he went around to everyone and shook their hands, asked about them, their names, the names of their children, what they do, and so on. But when he got up to leave, a number of them asked where he was stationed, that is, where he says Mass. He’s retired, so he is not stationed anywhere. But he was struck by their desire to maintain contact with him.

    Now, I wasn’t surprised. That’s why he’s so widely loved. He’s genuinely interested in people, which is why he’s still very busy as a retired priest. My wife was reading Chesterton the other day and came across some lines that reminded her of my retired priest friend. He writes: 

    How much larger your life would be if yourself could become smaller in it; if you could really look at other men with common curiosity and pleasure; if you could see them walking as they are in their sunny selfishness and their virile indifference, you would begin to be interested in them, because they were not interested in you. You would break out of this tiny and tawdry theatre in which your own little plot is always being played and you would find yourself under a free sky in a street full of splendid strangers.

    That’s why these three priest friends of mine are so interested in other people, because they are so small in their own eyes, and so they always walk under a free sky in streets full of splendid strangers. 

    I believe this is a small scale example of how ecumenical unity works. It’s not about having a great debate. These people were moved by the fact that this priest was interested in them as persons. They encountered Christ in him. ‘Someone loves me enough to pay attention to me’. In their minds, that has to be Christ. ‘Where do you live so we can make the effort to see you again’. That’s the key to ecumenical unity.

    The more I was interested in my students’ religions, whether Islam or Sikhism, Hinduism, etc., the more they became interested in what I profess to believe. If they have Christ at some level, and if I love Christ, then I will have the eyes to discern Christ within their tradition, their literature, their great teachers. These students know from within that their religion is good, that God is among them (Emmanuel), and if they see that I am able to discern that, they know that I too must have something good that enables me to see this, and they want to know what that is, and they want to share in that. Ecumenical unity is not going to be the result of a series of Q & A sessions or a campaign of apologetics. It’s going to be a matter of mutual enrichment. ‘I see that you have something to offer me, that you can help me see the world in a way that I currently do not, that you can even help me to discover things about Christ that I would otherwise have overlooked, and vice versa.’  It’s not going to work if we insist that we have the “fullness of truth” while you others have only splinters and fragments here and there–so we don’t really need you, but you need us. No, at the heart of ecumenical dialogue is Christ. As St. Paul says: it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me, and if he lives in me, then I have his eyes, and I will recognize him outside of my tribe. Hence, the importance of listening, hearing, seeing. Unfortunately, tribal Catholicism is on the rise, even among young Catholics who typically confuse evangelization with apologetics. Evangelization is the proclamation of the good news, and the good news is that Christ is risen, he has conquered death, that death no longer has the final word over my life and your life, and that in joining a human nature to himself, God the Son joined himself to every man, as it were. 

    Chaplains are called to be the good news. That’s how we proclaim it: “It is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me”. In our schools, there is great diversity. Almost 40% of my students in Markham were Muslim. We had Hindus, Sikhs, Buddhists and more. We are not called to proselytize, but to witness to the risen life of Christ, to the joy of Easter. If it is no longer you who live, but Christ who lives in you, then it follows that those Muslim, Hindu, and Sikh students who love you and love what they see in you in fact love Christ without them necessarily knowing it. The good news of the risen Christ is proclaimed to them in you. That’s what is most important at this point, not that they leave their religion and join the local Catholic parish. 

    Although none of you here are clergy, you are all priests, members of the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. Each one of us, when baptized, were anointed, with sacred chrism, priest, prophet and king, Christ’s threefold identity, and as a high school chaplain, you are rightfully exercising that priesthood. Catholics of the Latin rite are not used to hearing this, again, due in large part to the clericalism of the past centuries that sees the Church as primarily clerics: deacons, priests, bishops, cardinals and pope, with the laity at the base of the pyramid. And many have forgotten the efforts made at the Second Vatican Council to define the Church primarily as the laos, from which is derived the word laity: the people, which includes clergy. The Church is the fellowship of believers, the people of God. The hierarchy is only a small part of that larger Church, but the whole Church is a priestly people. The ministerial priesthood exists to serve the common priesthood of the faithful. It was Pius X’s mother who commented on his papal ring that people were kissing and she said to him: “You wouldn’t be wearing that ring if it wasn’t for this ring here”, pointing to her wedding ring. Marriage is a genuine priesthood. A priest is one who offers sacrifice, and the life of a married couple is a genuine self-offering. It is difficult, it is sacrificial, and life in our schools today, whether you are a chaplain, teacher or administrator, is holy work. It is difficult work, but it is holy, sacred. When we walk into a classroom, we are walking on holy ground. And chaplains are called to minister to the entire school, not just the students, but administrators and support staff.

    Finally, let me end with this. I was talking to a consecrated virgin in our parish recently; she is a wonderful woman and gives talks to seminarians at St. Peter’s in London–but not here, for a prophet is not welcome in her own town, especially if she’s a woman–, and she is on fire about synodality, and rather frustrated with the lack of it at the parish level. But I asked her what she thinks I should say to you. She said a host of things to me at that moment, but I asked her to write it down. She writes: 

    We don’t need to wait for some program about synodality to come into our parishes–like the Alpha program or a Bible study–for synodality to become a reality for us. We can start now in becoming synodal people, that is, people who intentionally encounter other parishioners, listen to them prayerfully in light of the Holy Spirit, come to appreciate their gifts, go out to the margins to encounter those who feel uncomfortable or excluded by church structures, etc. There is so much we can do now, as individuals or as informal groups of parishioners, to begin to live synodally, to be living signs of what synodality looks like. As Pope Francis said repeatedly, synodality is not just another program; it is a way of being church.

    Yes, it will be great when initiatives taken by the Archdiocese begin to filter down to our parishes in structural reforms that will facilitate shared decision-making and accountability in our parish life. But we do not need to wait for those structural changes to come down from on high. We can begin now with grassroots, relational, attitudinal changes. What we can do now is about preparing the ground, so that when the structural changes do come, we will be ready to embrace them. Let us trust that the Holy Spirit will lead us in this, because it is so much a movement of the Spirit for our time – necessary and prophetic.

    Of course, what she implies is that we should just start to do that in the school and not wait for the diocese, because you’ll probably be retired and in a long term care facility before we see anything like that. I was driving through Markham recently and saw, in big bold letters on the side of a barn, Be The Change. I laughed, because the line is such a cliche and very 70s, and yet it is true. Be that synodal Church. And that’s the unique gift brought by the chaplains that I’ve been blessed to have had in my life, the gift of synodal listening. 

    Miscellaneous Thoughts on Receiving Communion

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    In the last little while, visiting a number of parishes, I have noticed that some parishioners–not many to be sure–will deliberately cross over onto another communion line in order to receive communion from the priest, as opposed to the extraordinary minister, a layman or laywoman. I inquired about this from one such person, and the reasoning, I found, had almost no coherence whatsoever. It seems to me that the very idea that one ought to receive communion from a priest and not a lay person is nothing more than liturgical snobbery. The entire Church received “holy communion” from a lay woman, namely Mary, Jesus’ own mother. That should settle the matter. But of course it doesn’t. 

    Consider the optics if we were to employ Kant’s principle of universalizability to this issue. A parish priest requests help to distribute holy communion from some of the faithful, who then become extraordinary ministers of communion. The rest of the congregation, however, adopts the attitude that communion should only be received from a priest, not a laywoman or layman. The extraordinary ministers would be standing there the whole time, waiting and watching everyone line up and receive from the priest. It is safe to say that this would certainly frustrate the pastor who would like to finish the Mass at a reasonable time. 

    But more to the point, is communion somehow different when it is received from the hands of a laywoman or layman? Is it less than Christ? Or, does a person receive something more, for example, a greater dignity perhaps, when he or she receives communion from a priest? If so, how does that work precisely? 

    Perhaps it is about reverence, as the person I questioned insisted it is. And so, is it the case that if I wish to show greater reverence to Christ, I should receive communion from the hand of a priest as opposed to the hand of a laywoman or layman? Again, if so, how does that work? To show reverence to Christ pleases him; to show greater reverence to Christ pleases him more. And so I approach the communion minister, I bow or make some reverential gesture, receive the host and then move on, but if I were to receive from the hand of an ordained priest, somehow Christ is more pleased with me, because I’ve shown him greater reverence? I have not yet been able to figure this out, even with the help of one who insists on receiving communion only from a priest.

    Moreover, “communion” means just that: “union”, not only with Christ, but with the entire worshipping community. Of course, there is diversity within that community and that should not be suppressed (diverse talents, experiences, angles on life, spiritualities, etc.), but liturgically some people insist on doing their own thing, and the result is that some are kneeling, most are standing, some receive on the tongue, and some–thankfully most–receive on the hand, some only from the priest, and some–thankfully most–from either a priest or layman/woman, whoever is available at the moment. Is it the case that some people have a need to separate themselves from the “commoners”? Whatever way we slice it, I can’t help but suspect that this is another instance of Phariseeism (from Aramaic perishayya, “separated ones”).

    Christ ate with sinners and tax collectors, shared meals with them, thereby entering into a profound communion with them–given the Jewish understanding of what it means to share a meal–, thereby becoming ritually unclean in the eyes of the religious leaders, which is why they despised him. Jesus was not concerned about ritual purity, as we see from the parable of the Good Samaritan, and he despised the elitist and condescending arrogance of the Pharisees, referring to them as whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead and every kind of filth. His attitude appears to me to be the complete opposite of the semi-elitist attitude that insists on receiving communion from an ordained priest only, as though it were “below me” to receive from an ordinary layperson, as it was below the religious leaders to share a meal with those ignorant of the Torah. 

    But I’ve been assured that this is not the sentiment. But then I am asked: Are not the priests’ hands anointed at his  Ordination? They are, but so are the hands of those who receive the anointing of the sick, and so too the heads of babies who are baptized. Confirmandi are anointed on the forehead at Confirmation. Anointing represents Christ (Gk: Christos, anointed one), and oil symbolizes strength, wealth and royalty. All of us have been anointed (in Baptism and Confirmation), and all of us share in the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. The congregation is a congregation of priests, because Israel and the New Israel (the Church) is a “priestly people” (Exodus 19, 6). The laos (people) have been “set apart”. As our first Pope said:  “But you are a chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people set apart for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (2 Peter 2, 9). That a baby’s head has been anointed with sacred chrism, endowing that child with a new identity, namely that of priest, prophet and king, does not in any way necessitate different behaviour on the part of others towards the baby. Some will zero in on that aspect of the ordination ceremony in which a priest’s hands are anointed and deduce that this somehow suggests that we should behave differently towards him–i.e., choose his communion line–and that doing so is “more reverent towards our Lord”. Somehow his hands add something to the significance of my receiving communion, but what exactly that is, I have no idea at this point.

    I cannot help but think that this is another symptom of the disease of clericalism that Francis so often spoke out against. He explicitly warned the laity not to put priests on pedestals, and yet how this decision to receive only from the hand of a priest is not an instance of just such a practice is beyond me.  

    Perhaps this practice of receiving communion only from an ordained priest is a subtle but real repudiation of the layperson’s sharing in the royal priesthood of the faithful. After all, the procession begins when the faithful leave their homes to go to the Church to celebrate Mass. The formal procession at the start of the Mass is merely a continuation of the procession that the people began when leaving their houses. The offertory is precisely the offering of this priestly people, an offering of their sufferings, their labor, their treasure, etc., and it takes the form of bread and wine (the parish purchases the bread and wine out of the treasury that comes from the people). The ministerial priest offers the bread and wine on behalf of this priestly people, the congregation. Christ receives that offering and changes it into himself, returning it to us, saying: “take and eat”. The priest is merely an instrument, an unworthy instrument as Pope Benedict XVI would often remind us. It is Christ who consecrates, it is Christ who is the single priest and victim. The ministerial priest is acting in persona Christi, which means that it is really Christ who is the agent who changes the offering (bread and wine) into himself–just as it is Christ, not the priest or deacon, who gives life in baptism and infuses the theological virtues of faith, hope, and charity into the soul of the baptized, among other things. 

    The function of a ministerial priest is different from the function of those who belong to the common priesthood of the faithful, but it is a function that is entirely at the service of the priestly people that is the congregation. One can certainly say that the priest is “set apart” for a specific work, and that is true, but he is set apart to serve the entire people who have been set apart from the world, who have become a holy nation, a kingdom of priests. The significance of his vocation cannot be understood apart from this community. In other words, his priestly function cannot be understood except within the larger context of the priestly nature of the community. I’m reminded of Pius X, when people were kissing his papal ring, his mother said to him: “Keep in mind that you wouldn’t be wearing that ring if it were not for this ring here” (pointing to her wedding ring). The ministerial priest is “set apart” to act on behalf of the priestly congregation, which is “a people set apart”. 

    Peter himself gives us a clue to the resolution of this issue: “As Peter was about to enter, Cornelius met him and fell at his feet to worship him. But Peter helped him up. “Stand up,” he said, “I am only a man myself” (Acts 10, 26).

    Some people look upon the clergy not as lowly common servants (feet washers), but as members of the British Royal Family, as it were, and within such a mindset, one will only hear the gospel within the framework of an old monarchical ecclesiology, which keeps a person from understanding the gospel’s radical nature.  

    I’ve tried to understand this issue from various angles, but the reasoning continues to make as much sense to me as a person who believes, deep within his heart, that eating potato chips is an offence to koala bears, so instead he chooses to eat corn chips. 

    The Evolution of the Temple

    Homily for the Feast of the Dedication of the Lateran Basilica in Rome
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    In the first reading, Ezekiel has a vision of the temple of Jerusalem, where water was flowing from below the threshold toward the east, from the right side. The water gives life to whatever it touches. But we know from the gospel reading that the temple of Jerusalem foreshadows the true temple, which is the temple of Jesus’ body, from whose right side water flowed as a result of the open wound caused by the centurion’s lance. And that water from his side symbolizes baptism, which brings to life all who are immersed therein.  

    And so we’ve gone from the temple made of stone to the living temple of Christ’s body. But the second reading from Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians takes this even further. He says: “Do you not know that you are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in you?” (3, 16). You and I are temples of the Holy Spirit because we have put on Christ, as Paul says in Galatians: “For as many of you as have been baptized into Christ, have put on Christ” (3, 27).  

    And so we’ve gone from the temple of Jerusalem, made of stone, which will eventually be destroyed, to the temple of Christ’s body, which was destroyed but restored in his resurrection, to the faithful, each one of whom is the temple of the Holy Spirit. But, it does not stop there. Jesus not only houses himself in the baptized, he houses himself in all those who suffer, as we read in the Parable of the Last Judgment: I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and in prison and you visited me. When did we see you this way? As long as you did this to the least of my brethren, you did it to me (Mt 25, 31-46).

    As Mother Teresa never tired of saying, Jesus disguises himself in the poor and suffering. They house Christ without their knowing it necessarily, and they are all around us. And not everyone who belongs to Christ is explicitly aware of the fact, and not everyone who explicitly belongs to the visible Church actually does so, for Christ said it himself: “Did we not prophecy in your name, cast out demons in your name? …go away from me, I never knew you; I do not know where you come from” (See Mt 7, 21-23; Lk 13, 27).

    Desecration of the temple incensed Jesus because desecration was rooted in a failure to discern the sacred, and that spiritual blindness was caused by the greed of the money changers. And what angers Jesus today is the same failure to see and discern the sacred (himself) in the suffering, the struggling, ordinary human persons who have lost their social standing. We don’t have to take “poor”, “thirsty”, and “in prison” literally. These terms include the sick who are poor in health, and all those oppressed at work by an emotionally abusive boss or a toxic workplace environment, or those oppressed by a mental illness, or a lonely elderly person virtually abandoned by his or her family, or a teenager who feels alienated and estranged from parents going through a divorce, or alienated by an alcoholic father or mother, and so on. Christ is housed by the suffering of this world because he identifies with them, and that’s what love does. And if this is true, it follows that a hospital room, for example, is holy ground. I know of one priest who was so convinced of this that he would take off his shoes when visiting the sick in hospital. A classroom of young students is holy ground as well; a prison cell is holy ground, and so too a street shelter. Wherever we encounter suffering human beings, we have found Christ. A Carmelite biblical scholar recently mentioned to me that when he was in the city, he gave some money to a person living on the street, who responded by calling out to him: “God bless you”. This priest is emphatic that this man’s blessing has greater significance than if it were a blessing from the Pope himself. 

    Speaking of which, Pope Leo XIV, in a recent homily, said that “we must dream of and build a more humble Church; a Church that does not stand upright like the Pharisee, triumphant and inflated with pride, but bends down to wash the feet of humanity; a Church that does not judge as the Pharisee does the tax collector, but becomes a welcoming place for all; a Church that does not close in on itself, but remains attentive to God so that it can similarly listen to everyone. Let us commit ourselves to building a Church that is entirely synodal, ministerial and attracted to Christ and therefore committed to serving the world” (30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, 26 October, 2025). Amen.

    The Widow’s Joy

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    In this gospel (Lk 7, 11-17), Jesus does what he does best and what he enjoys doing most, which is to raise the dead to life. Some people like playing golf; some people like going fishing, some like camping, but Jesus, he likes raising the dead to life. He raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), he raised Lazarus from the dead, and in this gospel today he raised the only son of the widow of Nain. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5). 

    Consider too that if a person is dead, he or she cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process; for he’s dead. So, if we are raised (justified), we who were dead in our sins, it was not as a result of anything we might have done. It was all his doing. That’s the God we worship, and that’s the good news. Everything is sheer gift. We don’t have to earn anything. We can’t earn anything. We just have to receive it, which can be difficult. It is difficult to open ourselves up to God’s generosity; we don’t feel we deserve it, and of course we don’t, but that’s besides the point. It’s not about us, but about his love for us. In the letter to the Colossians, we read: “And even when you were dead in transgressions and the uncircumcision of your flesh, he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims,…he removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross” (2, 13-15).

    This is important because we have a tendency to slip back into the legalism that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But we are not saved by our works; we are saved by Christ’s generosity, his initiative, his incarnation and death on the cross. All our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked–we are free to go. No charges are hovering over and against us. If we could only believe that good news, our lives would change radically; we’d be living in the joy of Easter. Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive the forgiveness that was previously not there; rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us; we have a very hard time believing that we’ve been forgiven, and the reason is our awareness that if we were in God’s place, we’d likely forgive very few people, until they earned it in some way. Our limited love keeps us from receiving God’s forgiveness of ourselves. Incidentally, that is why some people would like me or whoever is preaching to preach hard, for they would like the preacher to be a conduit of their anger at the world. That is the kind of Pope some Catholics today would like to see as well.  

    But this is a clue to the difference between the saint and the non-saint. It’s not that the one is so holy and the other is not. No, the saints have a profound awareness of their own sinfulness, like the tax collector we heard about last week (Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner), and they admit it–the saint would not think for a second that he or she is a cut above anyone. The difference is that the saint believes the good news and receives it, allows himself or herself to be touched by it. 

    There won’t be any sense that we deserve heaven nor any sense that we will be given our rightful due. That wouldn’t be heaven; it is much better than that. Heaven is unimaginable gratitude and joy, and a pale image of that joy might be the joy that the widow received in getting back her only son from the dead. Just consider the pain of losing your only child, and then your child is restored to you. That’s a small taste of the joy of heaven. Think of the sadness we felt after losing someone we were close to: a sibling, a parent, grandparent, a son, daughter, or close friend. We are all going to experience such a loss if we haven’t already, but the good news is that all that we lost will be restored to us. Their happiness, the happiness of those who have died but whom we will see again, will be our own happiness. And our love for God will be made perfect, and so God’s happiness will be our own as well, and if our love for God is perfected, our love for all who belong to him (everyone) will be perfected, and then their happiness will also become our own. It is just not possible to get our heads around the joy that awaits us. This life is precisely about preparing for the joy of heaven, but we prepare for this joy by expanding our capacity to be loved and our capacity to love.

    The first reading from Wisdom (3, 1-9) mentions the furnace and the dross. That’s kind of what suffering does to us in our lives, similar to the furnace burning off the dross so that in the end, we are left with pure gold. Human beings seem to be at their worst in times of prosperity, but we are at our best in times of suffering, which is why God allows suffering to enter our lives, that is, in order to shape us, like a blacksmith shapes the iron, by heating and pounding it into a beautiful sword, or whatever is he is making. So when we find ourselves engulfed in darkness and despair, like the widow of Nain would have experienced at the death of her only son, we need to keep in mind that sunrise always follows the darkness and a joy we cannot conceive will soon be ours. 

    Have Mercy On Me, A Sinner

    Homily for the 30th Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    My ministry as a deacon is to the sick, especially those who suffer from mental illness. I remember visiting a patient many years ago in the mental health unit of a hospital, and I recall very clearly that he was telling me that he “feels” horrible about himself. He also has thoughts running through his head that he cannot control or get rid of, and these thoughts cause him to feel horrible about himself, that he is twisted, unclean and tainted. At that moment, something occurred to me. I said: “I was talking to my students about Aristotle today, something he said in his Nicomachean Ethics: You are not what you feel, and you are not what you think. In other words, the opinions you hold do not define your character. Rather, you are what you will. Your character is determined by what you will to be. So you may feel that you are a horrible person, and you may have all sorts of thoughts running through your head that you cannot control, thoughts that suggest you are a terrible human being, but you are what you will. So, what do you want to be? The answer to that question will tell you who you really are. 

    Well, I did not expect those words to have had an impact on him, but his eyes opened wide. He was delighted to hear that. God sees right into the heart, that is, he knows what constitutes your deepest desire, and so he knows who you really are, even if the rest of us do not. And since this patient desperately wants to be something completely other than what he feels himself to be and what he thinks himself to be, then he is profoundly good.

    I never saw him again after that, but a couple of months later I received a card, a thank you note. It was from this patient; that was the first and last time I ever received a thank you note from a hospital patient. That simple ancient insight made all the difference in the world to him.

    The tax collector in today’s gospel reminded me of this patient of mine. He felt horrible about himself, but his deepest desire was revealed in his prayer: “Lord, have mercy on me, a sinner”.

    When the sun comes out and its rays penetrate through a window, we see how dirty the window really is, the spots, the grime and dirt, etc., but at night time, we don’t see those spots, for they are not visible. At night, the window looks clean. But of course it isn’t; it’s dirty, which we can only see during the day when the rays of light penetrate through the window. So too, God is light from light, as we say in the creed, and when God draws us close to himself, we see our spots, the grime and dirt. If we are not close to God, then we are in the dark, and the result is we cannot see our own dirt, grime and spots. Instead, we believe that we are clean, and we feel good about ourselves, and then it is much easier to look with contempt upon another. 

    The Pharisee saw himself as okay; he was very pleased with himself. He had no shame in the presence of God, no sense of having fallen short in any way, because for the Pharisee, holiness is about religious works: “I fast twice a week and give a tenth of my income”, he said. But we are not saved by the works of the law, as Paul says. He writes: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” (Eph 2, 8) The tax collector, on the other hand, saw nothing but his own sins: “God, be merciful to me, a sinner”. And that’s why the tax collector went down to his home justified. It was the light of divine grace that allowed him to recognize his own sinfulness. He had no contempt for others, only contempt for himself. 

    Holiness is charity. Holiness is love. What we see in the Pharisees is sanctimony, which is a false holiness. In the Parable of the Last Judgment, the Son of Man does not say to us: “You did not genuflect properly; you didn’t dress properly for Mass; you weren’t reverent enough”, etc.,. No, he’s going to say “I was hungry and you gave me something to eat, thirsty and you gave me something to drink, lonely and you visited me”, and so on. That’s reverence. Jesus berated the Pharisees for desiring seats of honor and delighting in titles and having people fawn all over them. We are going to be judged on how we serve those who are forgotten, those who have no importance, no social standing. That’s holiness; that’s genuine religion. The reason is that this is precisely where Jesus hides himself, as Mother Teresa would always say. Jesus disguises himself in the poor and the neglected. But century after century, Christians like to forget this and instead busy themselves with all sorts of piety. But piety, if it is genuine, will allow us to see and recognize Jesus in his various disguises. And if we truly love him, we will develop the ability to notice him in those who are forgotten and neglected, and we will love him in those who do not love themselves, who do not delight in themselves, but who doubt themselves and would never think to compare themselves to others. 

    The Good News that Our God is an Unjust Judge

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    The gospel reading for the 29th Sunday in Ordinary time is the Parable of the Widow and the Unrighteous Judge (Lk 18, 1-8). The figure for God the Father in this parable is, interestingly enough, an unjust judge, that is, one who has no fear of God and no respect for any human being. And he refuses to listen to a widow who is pleading for a just judgment, a woman who has lost her protection (her husband) and who has lost her social standing. He simply refuses to consider the merits of her case. So why is this kind of a judge a figure for God in this parable?

    I contend that this is a very subtle proclamation of the good news of the gospel; for the unjust judge ends up granting her justice (ekdikeso), but not on the merits of her case, but merely for self-centered reasons: “so that she may not wear me out by continually coming”. In other words, “to get her off my back”.  

    The same root root word is employed by Paul in his letter to the Romans: “There is none righteous (dikaios)” (3, 10), and “For all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God and are justified (dikaioumenoi) freely by His grace through the redemption that is in Christ Jesus” (3, 23). The verb is dikaioun, to justify, to render favorable. The same word is used in 2 Corinthians when Paul says: “For our sake he made him to be sin who did not know sin, so that we might become the righteousness of God in him” (dikaiosune theou). In other words, we are the ones who were given a favorable judgement, made righteous, justified, not on the merits of our lives, but purely on the basis of God’s good pleasure. We could even say “for self-centered reasons”, like the unjust judge. In other words, the reason for our justification is nothing more than that “he wanted to”, “he felt like it”, for he is not beholden to anything above himself–there is nothing above God–nor is he beholden to any human tribunal. 

    To be the righteousness of God is to be justified, because to justify is to “make right” (jus). It means to stand in right relationship with God. We can’t do that; we have no power to justify ourselves, to redeem ourselves, to buy ourselves back from the slavery of sin. We cannot make up for sin. Only God can do that, and he does so in Christ, in his death, as a sheer gift, not as a result of anything we might have done, nor by virtue of any disposition or prior goodness on our part. All of us stand before God in need of redemption, in need of salvation, completely dependent upon one who can and does redeem us.

    So why does Jesus hold up the unjust judge as a figure for God? The reason is that from our point of view, God is often seen as unjust. Think of the parable of the laborers in the vineyard. The landowner hires laborers at different times of the day, but at the end of the day he pays the one who worked one hour the same wage as the one who worked a full day. They grumbled and saw that as a violation of justice. Consider the parable of the lost son (apollumai:  ‘being destroyed’), the son who “destroys himself” by his own choices, and the older son’s anger towards his father for his unjust royal treatment upon his return. In other words, God is like an unjust judge who pays no attention to the requirements of justice, but does what he pleases, and what pleases him above all else is raising the dead to life. If one is dead, one cannot do anything to earn that resurrection or help in the process, for one is dead. Jesus raised a 12 year old girl (the daughter of Jairus), and he raised the son of the widow of Nain, and he raised Lazarus from the dead. And he raises us from the dead as well: “But God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our sins, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with him,…” (Eph 2, 4-5). 

    God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy, said a long time priest friend of mine. That’s the God we worship. It would be terrible news if our justification depended upon the merits of our life, that is, terrible news if our God was a “Just Judge” who rendered judgements on the basis of how much our lives measure up to the standards of justice. 

    When a defendant awaiting a verdict stands before a court judge, he or she is typically nervous, filled with fear, a servile fear. But God calls us to grow out of servile fear and into filial fear, which is not the fear of punishment, but a profound reverence for God that is so deep that sin loses all attraction. What human judge can cause us to lose all attraction to sin and self-seeking? If we stand before God with servile fear, we haven’t learned what we should have learned in this life; we have not embraced the good news of the gospel, and that may be in part because the good news was not proclaimed to us; for what is often proclaimed is a false gospel, a gospel reduced to a transaction: “If you do this, you will get that; if you don’t do this, you will not get that”. It’s the false gospel of salvation through works, the semi-Pelagian heresy that we have to do something to earn that initial grace. But we’ve earned nothing. It’s all grace, including the grace of our cooperation.

    Jesus ends by asking: “Will not God grant justice to his chosen ones who cry to him day and night?” If we project our own limits onto God, if we see God as a God who judges us on the merits of our case, on the basis of what we actually deserve, then we won’t pray much, at least not with a great deal of hope. But if we truly believe the good news of the divine mercy–which is not easy to believe–, then we will pray with great confidence, and when we pray with confidence, we begin to see miracles, especially when interceding for others. 

    St. Paul says that it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, for we do not know how to pray as we ought, so the Spirit intercedes for us with groanings that cannot be expressed in words (Rom 8, 26). When we pray for others, it is the Holy Spirit who prays through us, and God loves our children and all those for whom we pray infinitely more than we do, so whatever love we have for our children, it is merely a limited sharing in that love of his for them, and so we can pray for them without anxiety and uncertainty. Our God is an unjust judge. In other words, his mercy goes far beyond the demands of justice. He hears our prayers because he inspires them. And that is indeed hard to believe, which is why this reading ends with Christ saying: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”, specifically, the faith that we have nothing to fear in the servile sense, faith that we will get not what we deserve, but what he wants for us, which is a never ending sharing in his own happiness, which not only lasts forever, but which expands without end, an eternal life of unimaginable surprises. And God always gets what he wants in the end. 

    Is Everyone in Heaven a Taoist?

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    A short video clip of Father Dan Reehil was shared with me on Facebook recently. In this short segment he said that a woman in his last parish asked him about her mother who had died, but was a Baptist, not a Catholic–she was inquiring about her mother’s soul. Father Reehil said although she did her best in life, raised her kids well, ultimately we really don’t know where she is, she might be in purgatory, which is why we pray for the deceased. But then he said to her: “Well you know, everybody who is in heaven is Catholic”. The woman became angry at this and said: “Well, my mother was not Catholic”. He replied to her: “Well she is now if she’s there. It’s not a question of that section is for the baptists and that section is for the Lutherans, and the Calvinists are at the back, and the Catholics get the front row seats. No. When you go to heaven, you embrace everything that’s true. And the fullness of it is in this Church that Jesus founded”. 

    Half truths are dangerous, and I believe this might be an instance of a half truth. I can’t help but feel terribly disappointed at having to witness what appears to be an “ecumenically challenged” priest continue to perpetuate a sectarian “us and them” cast of mind, despite his failed attempt to transcend religious tribalism (by insisting there are no denominational sections in heaven). There is one point he made, however, that is indisputable, and that is when we get to heaven, we embrace everything that is true. It would have been nice had he ended there. For if it is the case that in heaven we embrace everything that is true, that would suggest that in heaven everyone is also a Taoist, and everyone a Sikh; everyone is a Hindu, and everyone a Jew, Muslim and Catholic, and above all, everyone is a Zen Master. We could also say that everyone is Lutheran, for we will embrace everything that Luther got right. But we would also embrace everything that Roman Catholicism got right. If one insists that Roman Catholicism got everything right and has no need of further development, then I think it is safe to say that one has not studied enough Church history.

    Nevertheless, Father Reehil proceeds to assert that the fullness of “it” (truth) is in this Church that Jesus founded, pointing to his own. The difficulty is knowing precisely what that means. For some people it means that “whatever you have—all you who are outside the Roman Catholic Church—, we have too, but you on the outside don’t have what we have”. The idea is that “when you get to heaven, you will keep what you have that is true and good, which we already have, but you will get what you did not have before, and so you will realize that we were right all along”, or words to that effect. To be fair, it is not clear whether Father Reehil would take that step, but too many Catholics do. 

    Instead of this line of thought, I would like to submit the following: those who are not Christian, but who are in heaven, indeed embraced or possessed Christ in the first place–or better yet, were and are possessed by Christ–, for Christ is the Logos, the eternal Word uttered by the First Person of the Trinity, and divine grace is the indwelling of the Trinity, and there is no entering into the kingdom of God except through grace. Hence, they died in a state of grace. And to possess Christ (or be held by him), even without one’s explicit awareness, is to possess the fullness of truth, because Christ is that fullness (Jn 14, 6), and one need not be explicitly a Christian to love and seek the truth. But to seek him is to have been found by him who is always searching for us–which is the reason anyone seeks him in the first place. In the 2nd century, St. Justin Martyr wrote: 

    Christ is the Logos [Divine Word] of whom the whole race of men partake. Those who lived according to Logos are Christians, even if they were considered atheists, such as, among the Greeks, Socrates and Heraclitus.

    Also writing in the 2nd century was St. Irenaeus who wrote: 

    There is one and the same God the Father and His Logos, always assisting the human race, with varied arrangements, to be sure, and doing many things, and saving from the beginning those who are saved, for they are those who love and, according to their generation (genean) follow His Logos. 

    One problem with the tribal “we’re right, the rest of you are wrong” model is that if I (the Catholic) were to possess all the knowledge that you possess, but more, then dialogue is unnecessary. All that is needed is a lecture from me, so that you can learn from me–but I could learn nothing theologically significant from you, for dialogue presupposes that there are two of us who are in need of rising to a higher space in which we both are enlarged and enhanced. Hence, dialogue can be nothing more than a sham. 

    But ecumenical dialogue is not a sham. We learn from everyone, and we believe that the Church, which is much larger than the Roman tradition and embraces the Eastern traditions and includes the entire fellowship of believers (i.e., non-Catholics), is Christ’s Mystical Body. This means that the Church is intimately joined to Christ. But it is Christ “in whom are hidden all the treasures of wisdom and knowledge” (Col 2, 3), not me, a Catholic. Every member of the pilgrim Church is “on the way”, growing and learning, yet at every moment each one of us is limited by time and geography. It is also the case that at every moment Christ, the fullness of truth, gives himself to the Church, in his Eucharistic self-offering, and so there is a sense in which I possess that fullness, since Christ has given himself to me. At the same time, however, I am unable to appropriate all that Christ is, in all his fullness, by virtue of my own limitations—I get so many things wrong throughout my life. And this is the case with every member of Christ’s Mystical Body. 

    So, has Christ not given all of himself to the Baptist, the Lutheran, the Episcopalian, and Presbyterian, etc., as well, all of whom have entered into the tomb of Christ and risen with him, through their baptism? Of course he has, for every time I pick up something written by George MacDonald, for example, I am made so much better. And the same is the case when I get to learn from Robert Farrar Capon, G. Studdert Kennedy, Jurgen Moltmann, Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse and Ann Belford Ulanov, Christoph F. Blumhardt, Thomas Allin, Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Lossky, James Cone, Gerhard O. Forde, Samuel Terrien, Phyllis Trible, and so many more who are not Roman Catholic. We’d all be so much less without them.

    Discerning Personhood: A Reflection on the Leper Who Returns 

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Only one out of the ten who were cured of leprosy returned to thank Jesus. This is not to suggest that the other nine were without any gratitude–it is hard to imagine that anyone who knew the isolation and poverty of a life with leprosy in the first century could be lacking in gratitude for getting his life back. Who knows what their response was later on in their lives? But the one who did return to offer thanks clearly saw the Person behind his restoration, a Person to be thanked, namely the Person of Jesus, and that awareness was the root of his return. 

    The very word ‘religion’ (Latin: re-ligare) implies a return and reunion, but such a return will only happen with those who are able to discern the Person behind the good things that happen to us every day. I’m reminded of a Hasidic tale in which a group of Jewish scholars were very upset that the renowned Jewish philosopher Maimonides would dare suggest that Aristotle knew more about the spheres in the heavens than Ezekiel. The rabbi of Rizhyn said to them: 

    “It is just as our master Maimonides says. Two people entered the palace of a king. One took a long time over each room, examined the gorgeous stuffs and treasures with the eyes of an expert and could not see enough. The other walked through the halls and knew nothing but this: ‘This is the king’s house, this is the king’s robe. A few steps more and I shall behold my Lord, the King.” (From Tales of the Hasidim, by Martin Buber, Book II, p. 58.)

    Ezekiel saw the cosmos as a person’s house (the king), that is, the Lord God himself, which moved him to search further in order to find him. The Indigenous too have thoroughly “personalized” the natural word; trees, the sun, the moon, the eagle, a mountain, etc., are all regarded as kin; we are all part of a larger interconnected family, and so all things in the universe are at some level our relatives. This “personalized” way of looking at the world tends to foster a greater reverence for creation, as opposed to the depersonalized mode of thinking characteristic of the Western world, which of course has led to a number of manmade environmental disasters over the years. 

    Now one may dismiss this way of looking at the world as “pagan” until one realizes that St. Francis of Assisi saw things in much the same way. In The Canticle of the Sun, he refers to “Brother Sun, Brother Wind and Air, Brother Fire” and “Sister Moon and Stars” and “Sister Earth our Mother”, etc. This is not a matter of projecting human qualities onto non-living things, but is rooted in the ability to discern a Person, the divine Person, behind the goodness and beauty of the cosmos, which continually announces that goodness and sings God’s praises (See Dan 3, 24-90). This was the predominant intuition of the Samaritan leper whom Jesus healed, and it is this “sense of the divine” that is at the root of all genuine religion. 

    But this sense of the divine Person is also the source of our ability to see the personhood of every human being, whether that person is developmentally disabled, or is almost completely incapacitated by Alzheimer’s, battling the infirmities of old age or suffering from a debilitating and terminal illness. We begin to realize that what is before our eyes is not simply a hunk of matter, a mere individual, but a human person, and this person was willed into existence by God for his/her own sake, not for my sake or even for the sake of society at large. When we discern the divine Person behind the cosmos and behind the life that is ours, then we are moved to love him as well as the human persons that he brought into existence for their sake, regardless of their condition, because we see them, as we see ourselves, as persons of intrinsic value and inviolable dignity, images of the divine Person. It is very possible to look at a human being and not see that ‘personhood’; at that point, we become capable of tremendous indifference, even violence. But when we become explicitly aware of that ‘personhood’ in others, we can begin to love them with the heart of God, and as St. Augustine says in his Confessions, God loves each one of us as if there is only one of us to love. 

    If we don’t see the divine Person behind all that is, we may end up interpreting human existence much like some atheistic existentialists do, who see human existence as absurd, as an arena of perpetual conflict and struggle for survival, who think that love is reducible to the will to power, that the only kind of love we are capable of is the love of another primarily for the sake of what that person can do for me. As that attitude proliferates, life becomes increasingly empty and lonely, which spawns a variety of destructive behaviors, such as substance abuse, mass shootings, suicide and the request to be euthanized, etc.

    The Samaritan leper turns around and goes in search of Jesus to thank him for giving him his life back. And that’s what conversion is, a 180 degree turn, and it begins with a recognition that we are known and loved by a Person much larger than ourselves and much larger than the world, and it is the awareness that we are loved which changes us and allows us to love in return, especially those who depend upon us because they simply cannot take care of themselves. And we begin to see that Medical Assistance in Dying (or MAID) is never an option. The only option is to love and care for the infirm to the very end, so that their death becomes a final prayer, a final offering to God in thanksgiving for all that He has given. 

    The Jerusalem Talmud teaches that to destroy one soul is to destroy an entire world. It also teaches the converse, that anyone who sustains one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. It is quite something to behold a hospital parking lot and to consider the hundreds of vehicles parked there every day, belonging to the nurses, doctors, surgeons, support staff, etc., all working towards a single end, which is the care of the sick and suffering. It is holy work, and it has a value in the eyes of God that is beyond the grasp of a single person, because to sustain one soul is credited with sustaining an entire world. There is a kingdom that works against this in very subtle ways, a kingdom that Christ came to defeat. We choose which kingdom we wish to belong to: the one in which human life is disposable, or the one in which individual human life is regarded as sacred and of immeasurable value. 

    Our Priestly, Prophetic, and Royal Identity

    Reflection on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross

    https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_432feastholycrosshomily.html

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    After 400 years of slavery, the Hebrew people were finally delivered, and what a miraculous delivery it was, which Jews to this day remember at Passover. And yet, many of them became impatient on their way to the land of Canaan. They “spoke against God and against Moses”, and they detested the miserable food they were given to eat (Num 21, 4-9). 

    Now I’ve never spent any time in the desert, and I have never felt hunger pangs or desert induced thirst, so I’m not going to pronounce judgment on these people, but it is rather clear that they have lost a sense of the importance of their own history, for they began to long for a return to life under Egyptian slavery, because they had better food: melons and other fruits, fish and meat, and as much bread as they could eat. It was this that they valued more than their very own identity as the covenant people of the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob. They were willing to surrender that identity and remain in slavery, if it meant better quality food.

    The God of the Old Testament took the initiative and revealed himself to Abraham and made a covenant with him, promising to make him the father of a great nation. Count the stars; that’s how numerous your descendents will be (Gn 15, 5). And this did not happen on account of anything Abraham did. It was an act of pure generosity. Furthermore, this gift was not merely for Abraham and his descendants, but was ordered to the whole of humanity: “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you; …All the families of the earth will find blessing in you” (Gn 12, 3). And God revealed to Abraham in a dream that his descendents will be slaves in a foreign land: “Know for certain that your descendants will reside as aliens in a land not their own, where they shall be enslaved and oppressed for four hundred years. But I will bring judgment on the nation they must serve, and after this they will go out with great wealth” (Gn 15, 13).

    These people under Moses are the very fulfillment of that promise; for they were on their way to the land promised to Abraham and his descendants, and it is from this land that blessing will go forth to all of humanity, ultimately through Jesus, whose covenant will extend to the whole of humanity. The dignity of that Jewish identity has immeasurable value, but many of them, in the circumstances of the desert, forgot about it or became indifferent to it when they began to compare the quality of food they enjoyed in Egypt with the food they have now. 

    We too have an identity, and it is linked to the identity of the Hebrew people who have been set free. We are the people who share in the blessing that was promised to Abraham, that all nations will be blessed through him. The saviour of humanity was born of a Jewish woman, and Christ came into this world in view of Good Friday, in order to enter into our death so as to destroy it, to inject it with his divine life so that death would no longer have the final word over your life and my life. Just as the blood of the Passover lamb delivered the Hebrews from Egyptian slavery, so too the blood of the lamb of God delivers us from the slavery of sin and death. We are sons and daughters of Abraham in the Person of Christ, and when we were baptized, we were anointed with sacred chrism and given a share in the three-fold identity of Christ, namely that of “priest, prophet, and king”; for Christ is the eschatological priest who offered himself on the altar of the cross for the deliverance of humanity; he is the prophet that Moses spoke of in Deuteronomy, 18: “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kindred, and will put my words into the mouth of the prophet and he shall tell them all that I command” (v. 18); and of course, Christ is the king of kings, a king who does not compel, but who defeats the one enemy that man could not defeat, namely death, by allowing himself to be swallowed up by death. 

    So although you are not clergy, you are indeed priests. You exercise a genuine priesthood as a result of that baptismal anointing. Everything you do in life, such as ordinary parenting, or driving a truck, teaching children, nursing the sick, mopping floors, prosecuting the guilty or defending your clients, medical research, etc., is now made holy, for our life and labor is an offering lived out in the Person of Christ, for the bringing forth of God’s kingdom and the christification of the cosmos. The ministerial priesthood is ordered to serve this larger royal priesthood of the faithful, to help the faithful to become aware of that priestly identity, to maintain it, and not obscure it, as was done in the past. 

    And you are prophets, for your new life is a genuine sharing in Christ’s prophetic office. That is precisely why Pope Francis taught that the Church is fundamentally Synodal, that is, a listening Church; for the Church is fundamentally a communio fidelium (a communion of the faithful), and the faithful have a genuine sensus fidelium (a sense of the faith) that arises from this communion, and according to Francis, the communio hierarchica (the hierarchical communion) must carefully listen to the unique and intuitive insights of the faithful, because as sharers in Christ’s prophetic office, the Lord speaks to the Church today through them. Francis writes: “Let us trust in our People, in their memory and in their ‘sense of smell,’ let us trust that the Holy Spirit acts in and with our People and that this Spirit is not merely the ‘property’ of the ecclesial hierarchy.”[1] Two years earlier he wrote: “To find what the Lord asks of his Church today, we must lend an ear to the debates of our time and perceive the “fragrance” of the men of this age, so as to be permeated with their joys and hopes, with their griefs and anxieties. At that moment we will know how to propose the good news on the family with credibility.”[2]

    And your new life is a share in Christ’s kingship. Whatever authority you have been given in this life, that is, in the family, or at school, at work, in government, etc., it is not to be exercised with a sense of self-importance, as a “lording over” others. All authority must become a genuine service and thus involve a kenotic lowering of self (Mt 20, 25-26; Phil 2, 1-8); for only in this way will the exercise of authority not spawn resistance and rebellion.

    Priest, prophet, and king is our identity, and it is easy to forget that identity by becoming so caught up in the pleasures of this world that we begin to believe that this life is fundamentally about enjoyment and the pleasures of the present moment. The kingdom of God, says St. Paul, is not a matter of eating and drinking; rather, it is a matter of justice, harmony within humanity, and the joy of the Holy Spirit (Romans 14, 17), and our new life in Christ is to be directed to that universal brotherhood, which can only be established through the relentless pursuit of justice. 

    The bronze serpent in the desert is a foreshadowing of Christ, the crucified and risen one. It is when we look upon him, our priest, prophet, and king that our lives are made whole. Of course, to “look upon” does not mean “a glance”. Rather, it means that this cross is the focal point of our existence, for the cross alone brings healing and power to our lives. And this is the paradox of Good Friday: our king is so powerful that he defeats his enemy by allowing himself to be defeated, and our source of strength and healing is precisely the weakness of God and the death of God. 

    Notes

    1. “Letter of His Holiness Pope Francis to cardinal Marc Ouellet President of the Pontifical Commission for Latin America”, 19 March 2016, http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/letters/2016/documents/papa-francesco_20160319_pont-comm-america-latina.html. See also Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies. 2017, Vol. 78(2) 299­ –325. 

    2. Pope Francis, “Address of His Holiness Pope Francis during the Meeting on the Family” (Vatican City, October 4, 2014), http://w2.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches/2014/october/documents/papa-francesco_20141004_incontro-per-la-famiglia.html. The call to listen has been very difficult for a good number of clerics who were raised within a certain theological paradigm in which clergy see themselves as an elite class with “all the answers”, while the laity are little more than passive receptacles of clerical wisdom from on high. In 1906, Pope Pius X wrote: “The Church is essentially an unequal society, that is, a society comprising two categories of persons, the Pastors and the flock, those who occupy a rank in the different degrees of the hierarchy and the multitude of the faithful. So distinct are these categories that with the pastoral body only rests the necessary right and authority for promoting the end of the society and directing all its members towards that end; the one duty of the multitude is to allow themselves to be led, and, like a docile flock, to follow the Pastors.” Pope Pius X, Vehementer Nos (February 11, 1906), 8, http://w2.vatican.va/content/pius-x/en/encyclicals/documents/hf_p-x_enc_11021906_vehementer-nos.html.

    Hypocrisy and the Dangers of Disillusionment

    Hypocrisy and the Dangers of Disillusionment @Where Peter Is

    Deacon Douglas P. McManaman

    Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, hypocrites! For you are like whitewashed tombs, which on the outside look beautiful, but inside they are full of the bones of the dead and of all kinds of filth. (Mt 23, 27-28).

    The word hypocrite is from the Greek word hypokrites: stage actor. A hypocrite is essentially a pretender, that is, a liar. What is presented on the outside is a facade that has very little correspondence with what is within, as the words of a liar do not correspond to what is in the mind. Jesus referred to the scribes and Pharisees as “whitewashed tombs full of the bones of the dead”, a first century Palestinian way of saying “they’re full of s___”. 

    And of course things have not changed in two thousand years. I’ve been a Deacon for 17 years and I’ve seen my share of clerical elitism, opportunism, clerical envy, insecurity, pettiness, micromanaging, and immaturity, in short, clericalism, a disease that Francis spoke out against so often during his papacy. And there seems to be an increasing number of young men who are more interested in liturgical etiquette and decor, vestments, altar cloths, cassocks and ferraiolos, Latin, and clerical privilege than they are in Christ hidden in the struggles of ordinary families, in the poor, the sick and hospitalized, the lonely, in short, the suffering. If you have reverent liturgy—which means elaborate vestments, altar candles, perfectly folded hands, chant and incense, etc—, everything will take care of itself in the world and life in the Church will be as it was in the 40s, or so I’ve been told.

    Of course, what appears on the outside does not always correspond to what is actually there, as a whitewashed tomb hides the filth buried within. Perhaps it is a good thing that a number of the faithful do not see through the charade–when in fact it is a charade–, because disillusionment can be dangerous. Some people will in time see through the facade as a result of circumstances that helped to reveal the true character of the cleric behind it, and those who do will either leave the Church altogether or they will realize that our faith is not about the clergy, but about Christ, and so they choose to “run with patience” (Heb 12, 1). I marvel at the faith of the latter, but they are certainly in the minority. I’m reminded of Sister Joan Chittister’s first trip to Rome. She writes: 

    The first time I went to Rome, experienced the intrigues of the Curia, saw the politics of the system, watched the maneuverings of national clerical alliances, and realized how helpless women were in the face of all of it, I felt years of ecclesiastical conditioning go to dust under my feet. What was there left to believe in? Where was the Shangri-La of my religious dreams? How could I possibly continue to profess any commitment to any of this? It was all so human. It was all so venal. It was all so depressing. “Don’t worry,” the old monk said to me. “You’ll be all right. Everybody who comes to Rome loses their faith here the first two weeks.” Then, he smiled a small smile and added, “Then in the last two weeks, they put it back where it should have been to begin with: in Jesus.” (The face of God is imprinted on everyone, June 24, 2024)

    We do have a tendency to idealize the Church. Despite the warnings of our late Holy Father, so many continue to place clergy on pedestals, in some cases carrying on like fawning sycophants, but grace does not obliterate nature, and the members of the hierarchy suffer from the same cognitive limitations that constrain everyone else in the world, and when those caught up in the illusion of clerical superiority are eventually disillusioned, they find themselves in a “no man’s land” that can lead to 1) a higher level of spiritual growth, that is, a resurrection that follows upon a death, or 2) anger, which if not resolved can fester into bitter rebellion. Sister Joan continues:

    I grew immensely in those four weeks—out of spiritual infancy into spiritual adulthood. Out of adoration of the church, into worship of the God whom this tradition had made accessible to me. To understand the value of the church, ironically, I had to understand its limitations. To worship God I had to stop worshiping the things of God. “Open yourself to the Tao,” the Tao Te Ching teaches, “then trust your natural responses and everything will fall into place.” Now I knew what that meant (Ibid.).

    It will take at least a century to see the reforms of Vatican II established and fully in place, which is another 40 years. At the Council, we saw a return to an earlier Apostolic model of the Church as laos (Gk: people).[1] The Church is first and foremost the people of God (Cf. Lumen gentium, 9-17), that is, the laos from which is derived the English word ‘laity’. Included in that people (laos) are the presbyters (elders, but which has come to be translated as priests) and the episcopos (Gk: overseer, i.e., bishop). In the Apostolic era, presbyters did not enjoy “clerical status”; rather, the entire Church was kleros. In 1 Peter, chapter 5, 2-4, we read:  

    Feed the flock of God which is among you, taking the oversight [thereof], not by constraint, but willingly; not for filthy lucre, but of a ready mind; Neither as being lords over [God’s] heritage (kleros: lot, inheritance), but being examples (types, models) to the flock.

    The kleros, the Lord’s inheritance, is the entire people of God, the people he has chosen as his own: “Blessed is the nation whose God is the Lord, the people chosen as his inheritance” (Ps 33, 12). This of course includes those in Holy Orders. Clericalization, the process by which servant-leaders were separated from the laos and given a privileged status, was a gradual phenomenon, and it was particularly in the 4th century when Christianity became the official religion of the Empire that the “clerical state” of the pagan priesthood of the Roman Empire was transferred to the servant-leaders (presbyters and episcopi) of the Christian Church, elevating them above the laity, so to speak, portraying them as the ‘chosen ones’ (kleros).[2]

    Those ordained to be servant-leaders (deacons, priests, bishops, etc.) come from the people (laos) to whom they are called to serve, not the other way around, and servants are not elevated above, but remain at the feet of those they serve (Jn 13, 1-17).[3] As Jesus said in Matthew: 

    You know how those who exercise authority among the Gentiles lord it over them; their great ones make their importance felt. It cannot be that way with you. Anyone among you who aspires to greatness must serve the rest, and whoever wants to rank first among you, must serve the needs of all (20, 25-26).

    It is rather remarkable that this text of scripture has for centuries gone in one ecclesiastical ear and out the other, but having to endure emotionally abusive clergy can turn out to be a blessing in many ways. For example, encountering “clergy” whose priesthood was little more than the sanctuary and who have been almost completely indifferent to social outreach, who have as much pastoral prudence as a young teenager–not to mention misogyny, chauvinism, and an institutionally entrenched sexism–, has allowed me to come to a deeper appreciation for my older colleagues who grew up in a time when a much greater percentage of the clergy were just like that. I did not understand my colleagues who wrote for the Catholic New Times and who were very politically minded and social justice oriented, until relatively recently. I would never have come to appreciate them as I have had I not been exposed to clerical minded elitists who lack basic hospitality, thoughtfulness, generosity, and humility.

    We know from history that love of liturgy can co-exist with profound sexual immaturity, not to mention a serious lack of concern for the faithful. What is loved in such cases is the liturgical ambiance of the sanctuary, which has become for them a stage on which one performs and takes delight in the fact that the eyes of all in the congregation are focused “on me”. But this delight does not sustain, but leaves a person empty, because at its roots it is essentially a degree of narcissism. Joy that sustains a vocation is the joy of loving (Mother Theresa), the joy that is a fruit of the Holy Spirit. This is the joy of allowing yourself to be used as an instrument through which the Holy Spirit reaches into the most impoverished regions of the world’s darkness; it is the joy of being dead so that the life of Christ can be made manifest through us (2 Co 4, 10), to those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death. 

    NOTES

    1. At the Council, Belgian Bishop Emile-Joseph De Smedt intervened with the following: “In the first chapters of the Draft the traditional picture of the Church predominates. You know the pyramid: the pope, the bishops, the priests, who preside and, when they receive the powers, who teach, sanctify, and govern; then, at the bottom, the Christian people who instead receive and somehow seem to occupy second place in the Church.

    We should note that hierarchical power is only something transitory. It belongs to our status on the way. In the next life, in the final state, it will no longer have a purpose, because the elect will have reached perfection, perfect unity in Christ. What remains is the People of God; what passes is the ministry of the hierarchy.

    In the People of God we are all joined to others and have the same basic rights and duties. We all share in the royal priesthood of the People of God. The pope is one of the faithful; bishops, priests, lay people, religious: we are all the faithful. We go to the same sacraments; we all need the forgiveness of sins, the eucharistic bread, and the Word of God; we are all heading towards the same homeland, by God’s mercy and by the power of the Holy Spirit.

    But as long as the People of God is on the way, Christ brings it to perfection by means of the sacred ministry of the hierarchy. All power in the Church is for ministering, for serving: a ministry of the Word, a ministry of grace, a ministry of governance. We did not come to be served but to serve.

    We must be careful lest in speaking about the Church we fall into a kind of hierarchism, clericalism, episcopolatry, or papolatry. What is most important is the People of God; to this People of God, to this Bride of the Word, to this living Temple of the Holy Spirit, the hierarchy must supply its humble services so that it may grow and reach perfect manhood, the fullness of Christ. Of this growing life the hierarchical Church is the good mother: Mother Church.” Acta Synodalia Sacrosancti Concilii Oecumenici Vaticani II, 32 vols. (Vatican City: Typis Polyglottis Vaticanis, 1970-99) I/4, 142–44. See Ormond Rush. “Inverting the Pyramid: The Sensus Fidelium in a Synodal Church”. Theological Studies, 2017, Vol 78(2). P. 301.

    2. See Piet F. Fransen. Hermeneutics of the Councils and Other Studies: “Some Aspects of the Dogmatization of Office”, p. 382-389. Collected by J.E. Mertens and F. De Graeve, Leuven University Press, 1985. See also Joe Holland, Roman Catholic Clericalism: Pacem in Terris Press, 2024, p. 61-62. Yves Congar. Power and Poverty in the Church: The Renewal and Understanding of Service. New York: Paulist Press. 2016. See also Joseph Mattam, S. J. “Clergy-Laity Divide in the Church”. New Leader, (Chennai, India,) July 2012. https://www.churchauthority.org/clergy-laity-divide-in-the-church-mattam/.

    3. The “pyramid model” is really an anachronism that perpetuates a number of dualisms that have proved dangerous to the Church and civilization, such as the two-tiered notion of “nature and grace”, or the depiction of the ordinary work of the laity as profane and directed outward to the world vs. the life of “clerics” as holy, interior, ordered to the sanctuary; or the laity not called to a life of holiness vs. “clerics” and religious who are; or the depiction of the earth and the world as the profane realm vs. the interior as the realm of the sacred; or science as profane vs. theology as sacred; or body, matter, marriage and sex as shameful vs. the soul and celibacy as higher, etc. 

    Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

    https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

    But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength. 

    One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day. 

    I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

    Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

    That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me. 

    Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

    Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes: 

    All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.1

    On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames. 

    There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.2 What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

    The Vocation of Mental Illness

    On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes: 

    Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

    It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.3

    In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”. No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.4 Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

    A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

                “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

                “Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

                Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

                I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

                It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.5

    A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”6 Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”7

    If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

    My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.8  

    Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.9 We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes: 

    This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption. 

    This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.10

    Some Final Thoughts

    Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness11—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us. 

    To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.12

    Notes

    1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

    2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff. 

    3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

    4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

    5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

    6. Ibid., p. 178.

    7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89. 

    8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

    9. “Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well.” Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

    10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

    11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959. 

    12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96. 

    Cloud of Witnesses

    Homily for the 20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Deacon Doug McManaman

    There is a line in the 2nd reading from Hebrews that struck me, and it is the following: “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us also lay aside every weight and the sin that clings so closely…” (Heb 12, 1-4). This notion that we are surrounded by a great cloud of witnesses is so important. The expression refers to the faithful individuals from the past, including of course those saints who have been canonized.

    When I was a full-time teacher, I used to visit my best friend Father Don Sanvido of the Hamilton Diocese a couple of times every semester, to give him a break from preaching, etc. I am an early riser, and this one morning I got up just before 5 am, went to the living room of the rectory, and said my breviary. When I finished, I looked up and noticed, on a large bookshelf, Butler’s four volume Lives of the Saints. I went up to the books, closed my eyes, randomly selected a volume, opened the book and placed my finger on a randomly selected page. Wherever my finger landed, I would read the life of that saint. I landed on some 3rd century saint I’ve never heard of before. After reading about her life, less than a page of that volume, I felt tremendous inspiration. I felt awakened. So I did it once more, this time choosing a different volume, landing on a 6th century male saint. His life and character was totally different from the first woman I’d read about, but I felt inspired once again, like I had just drank a large glass of orange juice. The feeling was actually in my body.  

    And this is the lie we’ve been fed for years in the world of entertainment: goodness is boring; evil is interesting. But it’s really the other way around; goodness is profoundly interesting and inspiring, while evil is nothing but an empty promise. Goodness inspires and fills, but people tend to believe the opposite. My first 10 years of teaching were in a very poor and broken neighbourhood of Toronto, but every year our students would raise over 60 thousand food items for the Food Bank at Christmas, more than any other institution in the city. At first, we’d notify the media, the local newspapers, but no one was interested. However, let there be a non-fatal stabbing in the school Cafeteria and it’s on every local news channel by 6 o’clock in the evening. 

    The lives and stories of the faithful are far more interesting. Think of a typical coffee shop, a Tim Horton’s for example. Practically everyone there is a non entity to you, and you are a non entity to them. But if any one of us were to sit down at a table where some old man is having his coffee and were to ask him to spend the next hour or so telling us about himself, his life history, etc., a whole world would open up before us and his life would acquire color and significance, and we’d never see him the same way again. Consider the number of tombstones in a typical cemetery. Each one represents a massive biography that would easily exceed two thousand pages. I am convinced that in our first few thousand years in heaven, we’re going to be reading biographies–without the actual books, that is, we will be coming to know the deepest meaning of every human person in the kingdom of God. The life of each person is a unique instance and expression of the workings of divine providence. We are surrounded by a cloud of witnesses, and we hope one day to be part of that communion of saints. 

    But that is a frightening thought, in many ways. I think of the third volume of the Lord of the Rings, the scene in which Gandalf comes before Theoden, King of Rohan, who is under a spell that was cast by the diabolical character, Wormtongue. Gandalf is trying to get through to the King that he needs to call his people to take up arms and join in the resistance against Saruman’s forces. The king, however, is just not awake to the danger that is approaching, but Gandalf finally breaks the spell and Theoden suddenly realizes what he has to do and gathers his men for battle. Eowen, the king’s daughter, arms herself for battle because she too is determined to fight the evil that threatens. Theoden is finally struck down in the battle of Pelennor, and as she kneels down beside her dying father, he says the following: “My body is broken. I go to my fathers. And even in their mighty company I shall not now be ashamed”. 

    That is a tremendous line: “I shall not now be ashamed”. In other words, I would have been ashamed having died refusing to enter into battle and suffer for the sake of my people, but not now. We are destined to join our fathers and mothers, and the question I have often asked myself over the years is whether or not I will feel ashamed in their mighty company. Think of the courageous lives of our great saints, like St. Patrick, who in the 4th century was captured by Irish marauders and was a slave for 6 years in a region of Northern Ireland. He finally escaped and walked more than 200 miles to board a ship back to Britain. Years later, as a result of a dream he had in which the Irish were calling him to return, he actually returns as a missionary, surrounded by danger and living in hardship. Or consider the life of St. John de Brebeuf among the Hurons, in 17th century Canada, in the brutal Canadian winters, without heated vehicles, traveling in the freezing temperatures, long trips by canoe and portages over land, carrying canoes and supplies around rapids and waterfalls, living on corn mush for weeks on end. Or St. Isaac Jogues who was tortured, his hands mutilated, and yet after going back to France actually returned to the missions and ended his life as a martyr. Or St. Maximilian Kolbe, whose feast we just celebrated, who took the place of a polish sergeant chosen to die by starvation in a Nazi concentration camp in retaliation for an escaped prisoner. It took Maximillian two weeks to die of starvation. Or St. Thomas More who refused to take the oath of Parliament and was confined to the Tower of London for more than a year before being found guilty of treason. All he had to do was take a simple oath, and he would have been restored to his former position with all the perks of high office, an estate in Chelsea, a life of ease and prestige. Instead, he chose not to violate his conscience, and he had his head cut off for it–he was originally scheduled to be hung, drawn and quartered, but at the last minute the king had mercy and commuted the sentence to beheading. And then you have great saints in our day like Mother Theresa who left the comforts of the Loretto Convent to live on the streets of Calcutta. 

    These are the kinds of people we are going to be in the presence of in the kingdom of God. That could turn out to be a rather uncomfortable experience, at least initially. Their lives were on fire with the fire that Jesus spoke of in Luke: “I came to bring fire to the earth, and how I wish it were already kindled!” (Luke 12, 49). God is a consuming fire and their lives were burning with it. 

    And that’s what the spiritual life is about, becoming more and more disposed to be lit by the fire of the divine love for the human beings that Christ came to die for. In the end, that is the only real joy in life, the joy of loving others, as Mother Teresa worded it.  As St. John of the Cross wrote: “In the evening of this life, we will be judged on love alone”. Nothing else; not our accomplishments or awards, not our social status, not even the office we might have held in the Church. Only on love, that is, on how large the fire is that burns within us. 

    Faith

    Reflection for the 19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
    Published also at Where Peter Is

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    What is particularly interesting about faith is that most of what we do every day is based on faith, not so much supernatural faith, which is a theological virtue, but natural faith in the sense of accepting as true something somebody tells you because you have evidence that the speaker is well informed about the subject and is honest. We simply could not live without natural faith. For example, we take a prescription to the pharmacist, he or she fills the prescription and we take those pills. Now, unless you understand the intricacies of the science of pharmacology, you don’t really know what you are taking; but we trust first the doctor who prescribed them and we trust that the pharmacist did not make a serious dispensing error. Or, I take my car in for a brake replacement; I am told that it is done, that the car will stop when I press the brake pedal. I trust him; I don’t really know until I get to a red light. The world of science too relies heavily on natural faith. It is not possible for a scientist to repeat every experiment that has been done in the past. They trust the results of the experiment, that is, they trust that the scientist has not lied to the scientific community by falsifying data, which happens at times. Years ago I was at a Toyota dealership waiting for my car to be fixed when I picked up the Toronto Star and read an article about the British doctor who published a paper in the late 90s that linked the childhood vaccine for measles-mumps-rubella to autism. The study has now been thoroughly discredited, but the final line in the article was the following: “Most scientists are to be trusted. But our systems are not ideal. We just are implicitly trustful of those we work with.” 

    As a teacher, I realized early on that my students put an awful lot of faith in me, faith that I am not lying to them, that what I am teaching them about history, for example, is actually true. They don’t know, but they believe their teachers. Most of all, relationships are based on faith. When someone tells you “I love you”, you don’t really know that, but you choose to believe them if you are able–some people have been let down so much that they can no longer trust. And so love is risky. Life is full of risk, and it is risk that makes life interesting. If we are completely averse to risk, we will fear relationships, which means we will be too afraid to receive love.

    And all this is true as well when it comes to our relationship with God and his relationship to us. It is a relationship of love, and so it is grounded in faith. Supernatural faith in the Person of Christ is accepting as true what he has told us about himself, because we have evidence that he is trustworthy and honest. But of course, it is more personal than that. The Lord invades your life and my life. We do not cross over to him; rather, he comes to us. He reveals himself to you in your deepest interior. That is where he dwells, and he calls you and me to meet him there in that space (Rev 3, 20). To agree to meet him there really is a matter of faith, trust, and risk. And once I discover him there, I can recognize him outside of me, in the Person of Christ who set up his tent among us (Jn 1, 14). He gives me the capacity to risk, to enter into relationship with him, and that capacity is the grace of supernatural faith, and the interior light to which faith gives rise enables me to recognize him in his historical relationship to Israel and in the historical Person of Christ, and we begin to feel at some level that the good of which the natural moral law is an articulation is ultimately a Person, thus to act against that moral law is to act against this Person. At that point, scripture comes alive for us; we know through a supernatural intuition that these pages are not like any other piece of literature. We experience scripture as the word of God. Without that interior meeting, scripture is nothing more to us than literature.

    Now, although we cannot cross over to him, that is, although we cannot cultivate supernatural faith on our own natural power, we can, once it is given to us, lose it on our own, by simply choosing not to believe in what God has revealed about himself within us and outside of us in the scriptures, for whatever reason. But to choose to believe in him is an act of love. And that is how we keep the seed of faith from dying out; we have to exercise our faith, practice our faith, and the more we do so, the more we are given understanding. 

    Understanding is one of the personal gifts of the Holy Spirit. Having that gift does not necessarily mean that we can write an essay on the mysteries of our faith, but we are given a supernatural light by which we understand in a way we may not be able to articulate. St. Augustine often said: “Believe in order to understand”, and not the other way around–some people will not make an act of faith until they arrive at some rational understanding that minimizes the risk. We will only acquire understanding after we make an act of faith and persist in that faith, sort of like a relationship. It is only by trusting in the love that a person says he or she has for us that we eventually realize, through experience, that our trust was well placed. Of course, sometimes that is not the case and we discover that we were lied to and used. The good news is that God cannot lie and is thus completely trustworthy.

    I remember a great friend of mine, a priest of the Archdiocese of Washington DC, who came up to visit me in Canada when I was 18 years old. We went to visit the Martyrs’ Shrine in Midland, Ontario, and during a conversation on priesthood and ministry, he said to me: “I’m thinking of leaving the priesthood. I want to get married”. I was shocked and wasn’t sure whether or not he was kidding around, as he often did. Finally, he smiled and said: “Listen, priesthood is the second greatest gift that God has given me. I am not leaving the priesthood”. I was relieved to hear that. But then I wondered: second greatest gift? What’s the first greatest gift?  He said: faith. And faith is indeed the greatest gift we have been given. We can be tremendously successful in this world with lots of money in the bank, a large and luxurious cottage, a history of admiration and awards for this, that, and the other thing, but if we die without faith, we have nothing in the end. And the converse is true: we can die in poverty, without property, without a bank account, completely irrelevant and unrecognized, perhaps on medication for a mental illness of one kind or another, but if we die with faith, we die a great success. And that has so often been the case in my ministry to those who suffer from mental illness: many of them have so little in life, but they very often have great faith and a tremendous sense of the divine in their lives. 

    I know a lady who just turned ninety-nine and lives in the long-term care facility that I visit regularly. She insists the best thing that happened to her in her life was the stroke that had left her paralyzed. She and her husband had lots of money and regularly threw parties for friends, but one day she went to the basement to get some drinks from the fridge and she collapsed. They found her and called 911. She couldn’t move; she was paralyzed. She thought to herself: “My life is over”. She had completely neglected her faith throughout her adult life, but lying in the hospital bed, in darkness and despair, she remembered the words of the Our Father and said them. Suddenly she felt a tremendous peace come over her, and that was the beginning of a new life for her. She is in a wheelchair now, reads constantly, and she brings joy, comfort and hope to so many of the residents in the long-term care home. With faith, our life becomes rich with hope, the hope of eternal life, and it becomes permeated with joy. With faith, the joy of heaven begins now. 

    Saving the world without realizing it

    Homily for the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time
    https://wherepeteris.com/saving-the-world-without-realizing-it/
    Deacon Doug McManaman

    “If there are ten righteous people, I will not destroy it” 

    Abraham intercedes for the cities of Sodom and Gomorrah; he is told that yes, if there are ten righteous people to be found there, the two cities would not be destroyed. So, let’s extend this by asking: “What is it that is preserving this world from destruction?” The answer is the same. The “righteous”, the just, or the justified. “Righteous” is an unfortunate word, because it has come to be associated with a smug and morally superior posture. The theological fact of the matter is that we are made “right” (jus) or justified by grace, not by anything we might have done. Whatever genuine righteousness there is in our lives, it is due not to our own initiative, but is a justification that comes through grace: “For by grace you have been saved through faith, and this is not from you; it is the gift of God; it is not from works, so no one may boast.” (Eph 2, 8-9).

    Very often, however, we feel that we are not doing much for this vast world; we have virtually no power to change things on a grand scale. What difference does my existence make to this world as a whole? I and everything I do are virtually unknown, and if I were to die tomorrow, life would certainly go on without me. 

    This first reading challenges such thinking. Think of ten people in a state of grace; ten people who are almost completely unknown but who belong to the Lord, who try to serve God to the best of their ability, who pray, who participate in the Mass, receive Christ in communion, go to Confession when they need to, etc. Basically, you who are reading this—included of course are our non-Catholic and non-Christian brothers and sisters who also belong to the Lord. You may live in a densely populated city, which is part of a larger province or state, which is part of a larger nation, and you are surrounded by a myriad of people who may very well be so preoccupied with their lives that they give no thought to God and are completely indifferent to his will. Who knows? We don’t really know. But what you do know is that you belong to the Lord, you are doing your best to live in accordance with his will, you pray, you come up for communion because, I’m guessing, you want to receive him into yourself. Well, the Lord protects his own, and if the city or province or nation in which you live manages to destroy itself, you will be affected in a bad way, so the Lord protects you, his own, by protecting all those around you, who are being protected and preserved from the complete self-destruction that sin, indifference, and self-seeking inevitably bring about—how this works in precise detail is beyond our ken. So without you knowing, without your explicit awareness, you are indirectly saving and preserving this world, or this nation, or province or city from the effects of its sins, which is self-destruction. Psalm 116, 15 indicates that precious in the sight of the Lord is the death of his faithful servants; how much more precious are the lives of his faithful servants?

    So, although some of you may feel as if you are doing nothing for this world, you may be surprised to discover the contrary when you stand before God in judgment—that judgment may not be as negative as you might expect, but a revelation that you loved God much more than you thought and that your simple faith has done much more good for this world than you thought possible. Perhaps this is very much like parents with a newborn who work to put in place all sorts of safety measures in their own lives, in the house, in the yard, in the vehicle, etc., all for the sake of the child who has no understanding at this point that this is happening or how.  

    Now, in the gospel, we read: “…ask and you will receive; seek and you will find; knock and the door will be opened to you….If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him?”

    I’m quite convinced that we tend not to ask because we don’t really believe our prayer will be answered. We have a tendency to project our own limits onto God, in particular, the limited scope of our own love. But consider the love you have for your child or children. Can you imagine a love of greater intensity? God’s love is fittingly compared to the love a mother has for her child, and yet God’s love is boundlessly greater than that:

    Can a mother forget her baby, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you (Is 49, 15).

    We have been given the grace to believe this, but it is very difficult to believe from the depths of the heart that I am the object of such a love. Part of the problem is, again, projection; just consider how many people we encounter each day who are simply non-entities to us. Someone is on death row; we read about his heinous crimes and perhaps we have no problem with his impending execution. However, there is someone in that person’s life who sees things differently, namely his mother. She knows him in a way that we do not; he belongs to her, and his death is her death. And yet, scripture reveals that God’s love for him is even greater than his mother’s love for him. The gospel really is good news. And this brings us to the second reading:

    And even when you were dead in transgressions … he brought you to life along with him, having forgiven us all our transgressions; obliterating the bond against us, with its legal claims, which was opposed to us, he also removed it from our midst, nailing it to the cross (Col 2, 13-14).

    We have a horrible tendency to slip back into the legalism and transactionalism of the Old Testament, that forgiveness is conditional upon what we do. But this reading reveals that all our transgressions have been obliterated. The prison doors have been unlocked and opened–we are free to go. No charges hover over us. If we could only believe that extraordinarily good news, our lives would change radically; we’d be living in the joy of Easter. Confession is not the sacrament in which we suddenly receive a forgiveness that was not there before; rather, we are given the grace to open ourselves up to the forgiveness that has always been there. It is not God who has a hard time forgiving us; rather, we have a very difficult time believing in that forgiveness. But many of us would rather do something in order to feel we have earned it in some way; but if we could earn it, that forgiveness would no longer be a “sheer gift”. When we finally begin to realize this, we will have begun to live. 

    The Nobility of Matter

    Homily for the Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord
    https://wherepeteris.com/the-nobility-of-matter/ (@Where Peter Is)

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Recently I drove up to the cemetery to say a rosary and visit my mother’s grave site, as well as a number of other parishioners who are buried there. I thought I had the whole cemetery to myself until I saw an old man in a lawn chair smoking a cigarette, sitting next to a grave. I assumed it was his wife’s grave. Whoever he was visiting, again probably his deceased wife, he loved her and wanted to be near her, so he sat next to her grave and had a smoke. For me, it was a very touching scene.

    And that’s love. We are drawn to those we love, we wish to be in close proximity to them, and when they are deceased, the next best thing, I suppose, is their grave site. I don’t mean to suggest that they are there, six feet under, but we are flesh and blood creatures, and matter gives rise to place, and we need to be in the same place as the one we love. We are not angels, or pure spirits; rather, we are composites of spirit and matter, and matter situates us in place, and if we love someone, we need to situate them in place and occupy a place next to their place. That’s why cemeteries are so important. My mother used to say she just wanted to be cremated and her ashes scattered to the wind, but one day she expressed her desire to be buried in the nearby cemetery. My sister eventually told me why she changed her mind; apparently, I told her one day that it would be nice if she were buried somewhere so I could visit regularly. I didn’t think my saying that would make a difference to her, but it did.

    Now God became matter, joined matter to himself, and began to occupy place. In doing so, God elevated flesh; he elevated matter and material existence. When God became flesh, he gave matter a new dignity. Life in the body is now holy. Early Gnosticism could not understand this; for the Gnostics, matter is evil, the body is evil, which is why they denied the Incarnation of the Son of God. In their minds, it is unthinkable that God would join matter to himself. But everything God created is good, but in joining himself to matter, God actually made matter holy, that is, extraordinarily good. The flesh is holy. Your body is holy. He joined himself to the matter of humanity because he loves each one of us, and love seeks to unite with the beloved, and if the beloved is in the flesh, love seeks to unite with the beloved in the flesh. In joining a human nature to himself, God the Son joined himself to every man and woman, as it were. 

    But God did more than that. In his flesh, Christ ascended to the right hand of the Father. That expression “right hand” is not to be taken literally, as if God the Father has a literal right hand. It is a symbolic expression that we still use today when we refer to someone as my right hand, like my right-hand man: my closest most intimate friend. God the Son sits at the right hand of the Father, because he is the Son, and the Father loves the Son as His eternal divine Son. But the flesh to which God the Son joined himself was not some temporary covering or shell that is disposed of after death. Rather, the flesh he assumed was forever. In his ascension, matter has been glorified, deified, for all eternity. Humanity has been lifted up to the right hand of the Father, and we are part of humanity. And every level of the hierarchy of being exists in us, that is, the mineral level, the vegetative level, the animal level, all within each human being, and so in being raised in the flesh to the right hand of the Father, all of material creation has been raised to the right hand of the Father in the Person of Christ. Pope Francis, in his Encyclical Laudato Si, wrote:

    The ultimate destiny of the universe is in the fullness of God…The final purpose of other creatures is not to be found in us. Rather, all creatures are moving forward, with us and through us, towards a common point of arrival, which is God (83).

    So, we have begun to sit at the right hand of the Father, in Christ who has ascended. All of humanity and all creation has begun to sit at the right hand of the Father. When the Father looks upon his Son, he sees humanity, each one of us, and when he looks upon humanity, he sees his Son, and he loves humanity with the same love by which he loves the Son, and he sees and loves all creation in loving humanity: As Christ said: “not one sparrow falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge” (Mt 10, 29).

    My daughter is a high extrovert, while my wife and I are high introverts–she was in many ways God’s practical joke on us. My wife and I would be content staying at home all the time, but since as far back as we can remember, my daughter has always been one who wanted to get out and party and see people and travel, especially where her favorite celebrities live and eat at restaurants where these celebrities eat, and so we had to go to Los Angeles, New York, Paris and London, and Rome and Capris, etc. We were forced out of our shell; if it wasn’t for her, we never would have visited these places. But what I discovered is that when I see these places that I’ve visited with her on television or in movies, like the Observatory in Hollywood, or a street in Santa Monica or New York or London, or if I am actually in one of these places without her, I actually love these places and want to visit the same places we visited when I was there with her. I thought to myself: What do I love about the Griffith Observatory in Hollywood, or Central Park in New York, or the fashion district in Rome of all places? It’s that she loves them, and she was there and I was with her, and I realized that it is her that I love in these places. She loved them, so I found that I began to love them as well. In the same way, the Son loved humanity and the matter of this creation to the point of joining to himself a human nature, becoming a part of humanity, raising up human flesh in the process. And so, the Father loves us because the Son loves us; the Father loves us because his Son was here and is still united to the flesh of humanity. 

    That’s why you and I will be raised up on the last day, because we are in him, and when God looks upon us, he sees his Son in our flesh, and He cannot turn his back on his Son, so he does not turn his back on us.

    A Mountain of Riches

    A Message to Confirmation Candidates, 2025

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    It is always frustrating teaching a Confirmation course like this every year, because there is just so much more to do, so much more to cover, and there just isn’t the time. We barely scratched the surface, and all we were able to do for you is open a few doors and hope that you’ll walk through those doors into this inexhaustible treasure house that is ours. When I speak about the rich heritage that is ours in the Church, I often think of the movie The Hobbit, which was written by JRR Tolkien, who also wrote The Lord of the Rings. There is a scene in The Hobbit where Bilbo Baggins finds himself in this massive cave of treasure, walking on a mountain of jewels, gold and silver coins, diamonds and precious stones, etc. The camera moves to a panoramic angle, and now we see how tiny he is in relation to this massive cave. Of course, there is a huge dragon underneath all that treasure that Bilbo slowly awakens by his footsteps. The scene is spectacular. The Catholic heritage that you were born into is like that, but so much more, and our hope is that you explore that limitless cave for the rest of your lives. 

    During the Winter and Spring seasons I teach prospective Catholic teachers at Niagara University, and a good number of the students speak of the regret they feel that they had left the faith years earlier, that they allowed themselves to drift away, and they almost always point out that they had no idea how deep, meaningful and beautiful is the Catholic faith. They seem to have come to a realization that it is so much larger than they thought, and they do genuinely feel a degree of sorrow for dismissing it. 

    I know an elderly woman in her 90s who said to me that the greatest blessing she’s received in her life was the stroke she had that paralyzed her. Her biggest regret in life is that she’s spent most of it without thinking about God, without thanking God, living as if God does not exist. She told me that they had money, that her husband had a very good job and she had a very good job. They would throw dinner parties for their many friends. During one of these parties, her husband asked her to go to the cellar to get some more soft drinks to bring up for the guests. When she opened the fridge, she felt funny and then fell to the floor. Her husband wondered what was taking her so long, so he asked a guest to go down and check on her. When the guest saw her on the floor, he called 911 immediately. She had had a stroke. Her life would never be the same again, and lying there in a hospital bed, paralyzed and in despair, she thought to herself: “My life is over”. But she remembered the Our Father from her youth, and so she started to pray that prayer for the first time in decades. She told me she suddenly felt a profound sense of peace come over her. She continued to pray that same prayer every day. 

    All she could do at this point was develop her spiritual life, which she had neglected. And developing a spiritual life is very much like physiotherapy, which can take a long time to restore the strength to the injured part of the body. The spiritual life is like that, and she kept at it, and now she is a woman of great faith and great charity. Her husband died and now she is in a nursing home, not a very luxurious one I’ll tell you, but she’s happy. Joyful. And I see how much she brings to the lonely and suffering residents every day. She is a remarkable woman. But what struck me is that although she told me she’s profoundly happy, at the same time feels regret that most of her life was wasted on the pursuit of wealth and luxury. The stroke was her greatest blessing, because it was as a result of that stroke that she returned to God. 

    Each year it seems I meet so many people who have discovered this boundless cave of treasure that they didn’t know was under their very noses, the spiritual, intellectual, philosophical, theological, literary, and artistic heritage of the 2000-year-old Church that Christ established. 

    One of these great treasures of the Church is Julian of Norwich, who was a great mystic who lived in the 14th century and died in the early 15th. She says this about heaven: 

    Every man’s age will be known in heaven, and he will be rewarded for his voluntary service and for the time that he has served, and especially the age of those who voluntarily and freely offer their youth to God is fittingly rewarded and wonderfully thanked. 

    That’s such an important line: “…those who voluntarily and freely offer their youth to God are fittingly rewarded and wonderfully thanked.” For as you know, most people do not offer their youth to God. Most people usually keep their youth for themselves. Only much later on in life do they come to the realization that the things they’ve been pursuing in life are just empty bubbles with very little substance, so only a small minority offer their youth to God. We really hope that you will offer your youth to God, that you will hang on to the faith in which you have been baptized, that you survive your teenage years with your faith and morals intact.  

    After 38 years of teaching, I can say this: the happiest students that I have every year are those who practice their religion, whether they are Catholic, Muslim, Hindu or Sikh. The happiest are those who live and breathe their faith, who study it, and who develop a strong spiritual life, and who avoid bad friends and bad influences and who are committed to justice and fighting oppression in all its various forms. These are the ones who exhibit the greatest mental and emotional health and who radiate a genuine spirit of joy and who have the strength to endure the sufferings and difficulties that life brings to each one of us in our youth. 

    So, I beg you to continue to pray, to grow in a love for the Eucharist, to take advantage of the sacrament of Reconciliation (Confession) by going regularly, at least once a month, but more than that if you can, to develop a devotion to our Blessed Mother, to pray the rosary. Stay close to God, and give God permission to do with you what He wants to do with you. If you give God permission to take over your life, to use you, to do with you as He pleases, you are going to live a life that will be profoundly rich in meaning. 

    My Sheep Hear My Voice

    Homily for the 4th Sunday of Easter

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.

    Years ago I was reading parts of Nelson Mandela’s autobiography in which he makes the interesting observation that a shepherd (or shepherdess) leads his (her) sheep from the back. This image was his model of leadership. The Vice President of a Canadian company that specializes in offering leadership training for corporations travelled to Israel to watch how a shepherd relates to his sheep in order to gain insight into the fundamental principles of leadership. And of course, the shepherd made it very clear that a shepherd typically leads from behind, not from the front. That is the first principle of leadership. But before he can lead from behind, he must invest time and ‘relational equity’ in the sheep. He must come to know each sheep individually. Owners of dogs usually recognize the distinct and unique sound of their pet’s bark. Similarly, a shepherd knows intimately the sound and behavior of each of his sheep. 

    How does this translate to leadership? About 30 years ago I met a well-loved high school principal from the Dufferin-Peel Catholic District School Board, Lorne Howcroft, who said to me that being a principal is primarily about recognizing the gifts and talents of your staff and putting them up front in leadership positions, while you step back. A good principal–not to mention a good bishop–is like an umpire in a baseball game; he does not have the skills to pitch or catch high flies–that’s for the skilled athletes. In the same way, a good leader is not necessarily skilled in this or that, but will recognize the talents and gifts in the people around him and place them up front so that they may lead in that capacity for the benefit of the community. 

    The second principle of good leadership is that one should only lead from the front in times of danger, or when the shepherd needs to trace out a different route. Such a frontline position, however, is only temporary; the normal course is to step back and get out of the way. Poor leaders, on the contrary, lead from the front for the most part, and run to take cover in times of danger; thus, the sheep are thereby left to the wolves, or thrown under the bus, as they say.

    The third principle is “do not lead alone”. This particular shepherd in Israel led with the help of a female ewe. She was the power broker in the flock. And I will say that without a doubt, the best leaders in my life in over 35 years in education were women: the smartest and most prudent high school principal in all those years as a teacher was a woman, and the most competent Director of Education, also a woman. Misogyny, which spawns patriarchy, is really a foolish posture that has done so much to retard the development of our institutions, including the Church of course.

    The next point I’d like to make has to do with the sheep who know the voice of their shepherd. There’s a wonderful YouTube Video on Cornerstone Kids that is about two minutes in length that shows a bunch of sheep grazing in a field, and three different people, one by one, approach the fence and call out to the sheep. But the sheep, as though they were deaf, don’t move–not even look up. Finally, the shepherd comes to the fence and utters the same call, and they all look up and within seconds make their way to the shepherd.

    Of course, we are Christ’s sheep. All of us. We have all been anointed priest, prophet, and king at our baptism. We’ve been given the seven personal gifts of the Holy Spirit, as well as unique charisms in view of our specific vocation. All the baptized share in the Royal Priesthood of the Faithful. Our deepest identity in the Person of Christ is that we are priest, prophet, and we share in Christ’s kingship, but unfortunately the faithful for the most part do not see themselves as such. And yet there is a great deal of wisdom in the ordinary faithful of which they are not even aware. John speaks of this in the second chapter of his first letter:  

    As for you, the anointing that you received from him remains in you, so that you do not need anyone to teach you. But his anointing teaches you about everything and is true and not false; just as it taught you, remain in him (2, 27).

    I have to laugh sometimes when I join a table at our parish bible study, because a number of parishioners will say what they think in answer to a particular question, but they always end by saying something like: “I don’t know. What do I know?” I laugh because what she just said was so rich, detailed, and full of insight. They do know; they just don’t know they know. Occasionally I will have lunch with a parishioner who has never studied theology in his life, has no advanced degrees and drives a truck for a living. When he speaks, however, he exhibits tremendous spiritual and theological insight, and he too has no clue how much wisdom he has acquired over the years. All this is the result of the anointing that John speaks of in his first letter. 

    The faithful recognize the voice of the shepherd; some more than others, perhaps. But each one also sees the world and interprets what she hears in the readings from her own unique vantage point. Among us are parents with years of experience who know about the difficulties and challenges in raising children today, and we have teachers who understand the needs of young students, a very different world from the world of our childhood; nurses with knowledge that results from extensive experience with the sick and the suffering, psychiatrists who understand mental illness and the latest developments in treating such illness and who understand a great deal about how spirituality fits in to good mental health, etc. Each one recognizes something about the shepherd from their own unique vantage point. They know Christ in a way that I don’t, and they manifest Christ in a way that I don’t. And that’s why it is so important to listen to one another, if we are to be a community that is made up of a discipleship of equals.

    Womanhood and Priesthood

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    At a recent bible study, I was asked how it is that Adam prefigures Christ. I don’t believe there is a simple and single answer to this question, but diving into it opens up an interesting horizon in light of which we may be able to shed light on other important questions having to do with the role of women and perhaps the ordination of women.

    Those who posed the question were puzzled that Adam could prefigure Christ; for Adam is fallen, but Christ is perfect; Adam was disobedient, while Christ was obedient; Adam was married but Christ was not, and Adam was created while Christ is the eternal Person of the Son made flesh, etc.  

    Jesus is the second Adam, or last Adam (Rom 5, 12-21; 1 Cor 15: 22, 44-49; Eph 1:10). All things were created “through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). The first Adam is indeed a figure of Christ. We say this because God created Adam (humanity) in his image, in the image of God he created them, male and female he created them. What this means is that there are two ways to be “Adam”, a male way and a female way. It is not Adam the male who was created in the image and likeness of God while the female was in some ways secondary. Rather, Adam is both zakar (male) and neqebah (female). These two Hebrew words imply relation to one another. Hence, the human person is fundamentally relational; in other words, the one cannot be understood without the other. Zakar and neqebah imply an “existing towards one another”, for zakar (male) means “the one who has a tip” and neqebah (female) means “the one who is punctured”. The relationship of the sexes is clearly implied; for each one individually is reproductively incomplete, but together, in the act of sexual union, they become reproductively one organism.

    According to the Genesis text, it is not the male (zakar) by himself who is the image (zelem/eikon) of God, nor is it the female (neqebah) by herself who is the image of God; both of them together constitute the divine icon that is Adam. And so God in His active generosity, in His effusive act of communicating the goodness of existence to creatures, is represented in the icon of male and female, joined in the one flesh union of marriage. It is important not to overstate the passive element belonging to the female in the act of sexual union. Her ovum actively “goes out” to meet the male seed, and so her role is not entirely passive. The first parents (Adam) are one body, one flesh, who prefigure Christ, who is one body with his Church.

    In the second creation story, the man is put into a deep sleep and from his side, the woman is formed. This allegorical imagery foreshadows the cross on which Christ enters the sleep of death, and from his side the Church, his bride, is born–blood and water proceed from his side, symbolizing the Eucharist and baptism; for it is through baptism that one becomes joined to Christ’s Mystical Body, and of course the Eucharist is Christ’s flesh and blood. As De Lubac famously said: “The Church makes the Eucharist and the Eucharist makes the Church.”

    Christ’s existence is a relational existence. He is the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, which is a subsistent relation. And since in the flesh, he is one Person, Christ continues to exist “in relation to…” He came to redeem his bride, the Church, the New Israel. The existence of the first Adam, as we said above, is relational, for Adam includes zakar and neqebah who exist in relation to one another (who face one another). Their relationship is nuptial, and of course the relationship between God and Israel is nuptial, and the relationship between Christ and the Church is nuptial, and heaven will be an eternal wedding banquet (Mt 22, 1-14). 

    “Adam’s” existence is ordered to Christ, who is the fulfillment of humanity (Adam). We read in section 22 of Gaudium et Spes that “…only in the mystery of the Incarnate Word does the mystery of man take on light”. And so “Adam” indeed prefigures Christ, who in turn is the perfection of Adam (humanity). But “Adam” is not a man in the sense of an individual ‘male’, but ‘them’, male and female in relation to one another. The two in relation are the ‘icon’ or image of God. This is a relationship that gets disrupted or distorted as a result of the fall: “You shall have desire for your husband, but he will dominate you” (or rule over you) (Gn 3, 16). In other words, the domination and subordination of women is not part of God’s plan for creation, but is the result of sin. Male and female were created equal, “of the same stuff” (from his side). In fact, the image of woman coming from the side of the man suggests that her role is to reach down and call forth the man to what is higher, for he came from the mud of the earth, the soil, while she came from a higher place. But the history of humanity is a history of oppression, including the oppression of women. 

    Now, the entire Church is woman, the New Israel, the Bride of Christ, and she has been given authority, but the exercise of this authority is to be entirely unlike that of the gentiles: “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and the great ones make their authority over them felt. But it shall not be so among you. Rather, whoever wishes to be great among you shall be your servant; whoever wishes to be first among you shall be your slave. Just so, the Son of Man did not come to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for many” (Mt 20, 25-28).

    Furthermore, the entire Church is “priest”. In the evening prayer for Thursday within the octave of Easter, the Church prays: “Almighty God, ever-living mystery of unity and Trinity, you gave life to the new Israel by birth from water and the Spirit, and made it a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a people set apart as your eternal possession. May all those you have called to walk in the splendor of the new light render you fitting service and adoration.” Each of the baptized is anointed priest, prophet, and king, and so with regard to the royal priesthood of the faithful, gender is irrelevant–certainly not an impediment. The entire Church is a “chosen people, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people for God’s own possession, to proclaim the virtues of Him who called you out of darkness into His marvelous light” (1 Pt 2, 9). And so the Church as a whole is a priestly people and at the same time bride and mother (female); for it is the entire congregation that offers gifts to be consecrated. The congregation are not simply passive observers, but active agents, priests offering their gifts, their labors, their sufferings and toil, their bread and wine, placed at the foot of the altar; the ministerial priest offers it on behalf of the entire congregation, of which he too is a part. Christ receives those gifts and changes them into himself, and returns them to us as our food. In consuming the Bread of Life, we become Christ, that is, all our matter becomes Christ–the cosmos becomes Christ in us. 

    So it seems there is no incongruity between priesthood and womanhood, for the entire Church is both woman and priest. Indeed, the priest is the icon of Christ, but Adam prefigures Christ, and Adam (zakar and neqebah) exists as the image or eikon of God who became flesh in Christ, “…a priest forever according to the order of Melchizedek” (Heb 7, 17). The original icon that Adam is includes both male and female. The Church cannot be understood except in relation to Christ, for she is his body, and thus woman cannot be understood except in relation to Christ. The woman that is the Church is the sacrament of Christ, and she participates in his priesthood.

    One year during a Confirmation class in which we were talking about the sacraments, one clever young lady put up her hand and asked: “Why is it that men are able to receive all seven sacraments, but women have access to only six?” That was a brilliant way of formulating the question. I did not have time to go into a detailed explanation of the reason the Roman Church does not ordain women, for it would not do justice to the precise formulation of her question anyway. Moreover, it is increasingly difficult for me to see any genuinely compelling reason for the exclusion of women from the sacrament of Holy Orders. Perhaps the theology of sexual complementarity, focused exclusively on the sexual act itself according to the strict categories of activity and passivity, a model currently employed to maintain an all male priesthood, is really a theologically sophisticated rationalization of an outdated sexist divide. 

    Cosmic Restoration

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Peter, do you love me? Then feed my lambs.

    Today it is very common to confuse love with sentimentality. Genuine love involves willing the good of another, and that willing may be accompanied by positive sentiments or it may not be. Good feelings towards another are really not part of the essence of genuine love. A true sign of love is the willingness to sacrifice for the other. A genuine love of Christ reaches out to others; it does not stay inside, but seeks out the lost, the wounded, the poor and the oppressed, which is precisely what we see in the life of Christ. 

    Another popular tendency is to confuse holiness with sanctimony. I’ve noticed that I hesitate to use the word “holiness” when teaching, because the word conjures up images of sanctimonious individuals with folded hands and a serious demeanour, but who are indifferent to social outreach. 

    Holiness is love, it is charity, and love seeks the lowest place, it descends to whatever level is required in order to reach the person to be loved. A priest friend asked me recently: Where can God be found? He pointed out that if we read the New Testament carefully, we see that God is found in the sewers; always in the lowest places. God the Son descended and dwelt among us, and on Holy Saturday he descended further to the utmost regions of hell’s darkness. That is what holiness is like; that is what the divine love is like. Sanctimony, however, is something different. It does not seek the lowest place, but the highest place. And piety as well is not quite the same as holiness. A person may be devotional, reciting prayers, chaplets, novenas, observing religious laws, in love with religious things, churches, basilicas, etc., but if this is genuine piety, which is a gift of the Holy Spirit, then it will bear fruit in genuine social outreach. If it is false, it will remain closed in on itself.  

    Genuine holiness is inclined to descend to the lowest places, to those places where most people are not willing to go; for if we love God, we love all who belong to God, and everything that God has created belongs to God. If we love God and not merely things associated with God, our fundamental desire that drives every one of our choices will be the desire to see God loved, adored, and glorified. That is what justice is according to the New Testament. Justice (justification) is the restoration of all things to their proper order, which is joyful and grateful subjection to God. The love of justice is the desire to see all things restored in Christ, who in turn has no other food than the praise, love, adoration, and glorification of God the Father. 

    Christ loved those who were murdering him. His passion and death were the consummation of the world’s injustice. But the most perfect rectification of that injustice is to see all of Christ’s enemies turn towards him and love him in gratitude, to finally recognize him and to praise, adore, and glorify him forever. Without that, there is no justice, but perpetual injustice and disorder; with that, however, there is the perfection of justice, the perfect victory over sin, very much like the story of St. Maria Goretti. Her murderer spent 27 years in prison, asked for forgiveness and afterward became a Capuchin brother. That’s a small scale example of Christ’s victory over evil. 

    And that is the universal and cosmic justice mentioned in the second reading: 

    Then I heard every creature in heaven and on earth and under the earth and in the sea, and all that is in them, singing, “To the one seated on the throne and to the Lamb be blessing and honour and glory and might forever and ever! (Rev 5, 11ff). 

    What is interesting about this verse is that it says every creature, every created thing (pan ktisma), in heaven, on earth, and under the earth, and in the sea, which includes not only every man and angel, but every sea creature, fish, dolphin and shark, etc., every plant, every tree, every created thing will in the end bless, honour, and glorify God forever and ever. And so the love of God includes a love and reverence for the earth and an awareness of the way each creature manifests and praises God (Dan 3, 56-82).

    A genuine love of God is accompanied by the awareness that all things came to be through the Word (Logos), and so all things carry within themselves some reflection of the Word, just as every work of art has a trace of the artist in it–all creatures are inexhaustible words of the Word, and as St Paul says, every creature longs to share in the freedom of the children of God (Rom 8, 21). The entire cosmos longs for justice (redemption), which means it longs for Christ. And Christ’s resurrection is that victory over death, the perfect victory over injustice, and that victory is a process, a movement, that has begun and will in the end be achieved (Mt 13, 31-32). 

    Descending to the Lowest Place

    A Reflection on Holy Thursday
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Also published here

    What is so important about Holy Thursday night is the explicit connection between the institution of the Eucharist and a life of service, that is, the link between the sacrament and works of mercy, works of charity, which includes the commitment to social justice in all its forms. An ardent love of the Eucharist alongside relative indifference to those who suffer is a love that is essentially a farce. 

    Christ washes the feet of the Apostles, the dirtiest part of the body, a task reserved for slaves. The life of Christ was a descent. God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, descended and “set up his tent” among us and took the form of a slave, so it is fitting that at this time he would engage in the work of a slave, namely washing feet. All of us without exception are to descend to the level of slaves (Gk: doulou); for the only way to ascend to God is through a descent to the lowest place. God, like water, always seeks the lowest place. 

    I am reminded of a dream I once had early on in my career as a teacher. I was teaching in the Jane and Finch area of Toronto (a very broken neighborhood) and that year I was assigned a period of chaplaincy. The Vice Principal, a very good man, had just lost his father, and he was struggling with this loss as well as with a group of rather cantankerous staff members who were making his life miserable. One night–it must have been close to 30 years ago–I dreamt I was in a barn. I went to the barn door, the top part of which was open, and looked out. The entire pasture was covered in dung, feces, or cow manure. Over to my left was a beautiful stallion, standing deep in the manure. There was a woman next to the stallion, slightly older than I, but not by much (I was in my 30s), and she grabbed the hoof of the stallion, like a farrier, and with her hand would scoop up the dung and throw it on the ground. She kept doing that. She then looks over at me and, with a bit of consternation in her voice that I was just watching her, calls me by name and tells me to get out there and help her. And so I did. 

    That was the dream. When I woke up, I knew exactly what it meant. The woman, I was convinced, was Mary, Our Lady. In that dream, however, she was more like an older sister, and she spoke to me with genuine familiarity. The stallion, I knew immediately, was a symbol of that Vice Principal who was going through a very difficult period in his life, with the loss of his father and the frustrations of having to deal with a very cynical group of teachers on staff. My job was to help her tend to him, wash his feet, serve him, keep him company in his difficulties, encourage him, keep the “crap” that was being spread around from discouraging him. I am reminded of that dream every time I drive to a certain small town in Ontario, for there is a barn on the way that looks just like the one in my dream. 

    We receive Christ’s body in order to become what we eat–Christ. But Christ lost his status, and in first century Palestine, status was everything. He lost it because he had table fellowship with those whom the religious leaders would have nothing to do with– prostitutes, tax collectors, sinners who fail to observe the requirements of the law because they don’t know the law, etc. To share a meal is to enter into intimate communion with all those at table, in this case with those considered to be forsaken by God. Genuine love of the Eucharist will therefore translate into love of others; if not, it is not love of the Eucharist, but love of something else in some way related to the Eucharist, i.e., ambiance, candles, quiet, etc. 

    English poet and WWI British army chaplain G. Studdert Kennedy warned of those clergy who yearned to keep religion indoors. In 1920, Studdert Kennedy wrote:  

    The cry that is often raised, that we are going to secularize religion and take the clergy away from their purely “spiritual work”, is the cry of the man who dare not face the Cross. He wants to keep his Christ forever standing amid the lilies of the altar, with the sweet incense of worship rising around him, a weekly refuge from the distraught and vulgar world. He wants to lock Christ up in the Tabernacle, to keep Him in the silence of the secret place, where men must go down on their knees before they touch Him. But Christ wants to come out into the market-place, and down to the streets; He wants to eat and drink with prostitutes, to be mocked and spit upon by soldiers. He wants to call the dishonest trader from his office desk; to stand at his lathe beside the workman; and to bend with the mother over the washtub in the city of mean streets. He wants to go out into the world, that beauty and goodness and truth – beautiful things, good people, and true thought – may grow up around Him wherever He goes. You cannot keep Christ in your churches; He will break them into pieces if you try. He will make for the streets in spite of you, and go on with His own work; defying dead authorities, breaking down tyrannies, destroying shams, declaring open war against a Godless world. And wherever He goes the true Church will go with Him – the Church of those who are forgiven because they are bearing the sins of the world, and have learned how to forgive.

    We are called to discover Christ in the Eucharist precisely in order that we might more readily perceive him everywhere. The Blessed Sacrament leads us, “not to a localization” (Studdert Kennedy), but to a deeper sense of the presence of God everywhere in the world, in and among the sick, the poor, the forgotten, and in and among all creation, every part of which sings the praises of God (Dan 3, 56-82). 

    Our Wounds Heal

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Holy week begins, and it is the holiest week of the year. This week brings us into the heart of the mystery of suffering. A mystery, in theology, is something that is knowable or intelligible, but it is inexhaustible. It is infinitely knowable, which means it can be understood more and more, but without end. And the reason that suffering is a mystery is that God, who is the unutterable mystery, joined a human nature to himself and in doing so entered into human suffering. He joined us in our suffering, out of love for us; for if we truly love someone, we do not allow them to suffer alone. Their suffering causes us great sorrow, and so we long to join them in their suffering. And our suffering causes God a sorrow that is greater than we can possibly conceive–for God is Love–, and this sorrow is visible in the life of Christ who is the Word of the Father, who is everything that the Father can say about himself. This divine sorrow is visible in his passion and death. Christ came to enter into human suffering so that we may always find him in the midst of our own darkness. And we do find him, if we look for him there. Even if we don’t find him there at the time of our deepest suffering, we will see him in retrospect, if we look hard enough.

    I have been through some difficult times in my own life, as have you all. Many of you have endured worse than I have, but I’ve had my share of situations that were unjust and frustrating, and they gave rise to a justified anger. I had no explanation for it at the time, however, the anger was there and it was real. But one Sunday after Mass, I was approached by an older man who wanted to talk, and this was a man who suffered far more than I did, and had been carrying so much more anger than I had been carrying. I soon realized that if I had not been suffering as I was at the time and had not the wounds from which that anger arose in me, I would not have been able to listen to him, to hear him, to understand him. I would not have been able to connect with him, and he would have been left in his sorrow, to endure it by himself, because he would know at the deepest level that I was not there with him in his own suffering. But I was there with him to some extent, because I had experienced something similar. And because he was heard, because he was understood, he experienced a degree of healing. You could say my wounds helped bring him healing, even though his suffering and wounds were greater than mine. 

    And that’s what St. Peter meant when he wrote: “By his wounds we have been healed”. Christ’s wounds heal us. If our wounds help to heal others, it is only because they are a sharing in his wounds. He knows our suffering because he’s endured worse, and he is God, and God is not supposed to suffer. But he does. And he chose to suffer with us and in us, imparting to our suffering life-giving power. We never suffer alone, and we will discover, if we have not already, that we have never suffered alone. Suffering and even death will not have the final word over your life or my life, because Christ entered into it and he rose from the dead. At the end of our sufferings will be the fullness of eternal life, and an eternal friendship with him who loved us so much that he drew close to us. 

    Juridical Thinking and Divine Mercy

    Reflection for the 4th Sunday of Lent
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Published at Where Peter Is

    We are all familiar with the parable of the prodigal son, so I would like to focus on just a few key points from this text to bring out its radical nature. The younger son, as we all know, begins to treat his father as if he were dead by demanding his share of the property that he will inherit upon his father’s death–he wants it now. When he finally comes to his senses after reducing himself to poverty, he makes plans to return to his father and formulates a proposal that he will deliver upon his return; he is going to confess his sin and declare that he is no longer worthy to be called “his son” and will ask to be treated as a hired hand.

    The father sees him from a distance and immediately goes out to meet him, but the father cuts him off in mid sentence, allowing him to confess his sins, but he does not allow his son to articulate his proposal. Instead, he is restored to his original position and given the signet ring that permits him to sign cheques–a gesture of tremendous trust. Finally, they celebrate with a fatted calf: “For this son of mine was dead and is alive again, he was lost and is found.” Now, the dead do not bring themselves back to life. So, who brought him back to life? Who found him? This is an important implication I will return to.

    The elder son who resents all this treatment represents the attitude of the religious leaders, the Pharisees and scribes, as well as the attitude of a vast number of the faithful who still operate out of a juridical or legalistic mindset, that is, within a transactional model which says: If you will give me X, then I will give you Y in return; but if you don’t give me X, I won’t give you Y. That’s the model we understand most easily, because it is a natural business model. Unfortunately, it is a model that has been brought into the religious sphere, and that’s why the elder son just cannot understand his father’s behaviour towards the younger son who squandered his inheritance, and that’s why the scholars of the law, the religious leaders, did not understand Jesus—they were legalists. And that’s why most people tend not to understand not only this parable but other parables of the kingdom of God, like the workers in the vineyard, in which Jesus compares the kingdom of God to a landowner who goes out early and hires labourers to work all day in the vineyard for a single denarius; he returns at 9 o’clock to hire more workers, and again at noon and then at 3, and then at 5 o’clock, each time hiring more laborers. At the end of the day, he pays each worker a single denarius, the same amount whether they’ve been working all day or just since the evening, which caused great resentment among those who worked all day. 

    Most people struggle with these parables because they think within a juridical paradigm, a legalistic model in which a transaction is measured by fairness; hence, legal justice becomes the principal value. But the fundamental value of the gospel proclaimed by Christ’s entire life is mercy. Christ, who is God the Son, reveals the divine mercy, which transcends justice and is utterly incomprehensible. If one insists on reading the New Testament within a juridical model, one will distort the gospel, at which point it is no longer extraordinarily good news, and this will do a great deal of damage to the religious lives of the faithful, which for centuries has happened and is still happening in many places. 

    The good news of the gospel is the revelation of the absolute and incomprehensible mercy of God: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost (apololos)” (Lk 19, 10). The Greek verb appolumi means ‘to destroy’, and the noun form appoleia is ‘destruction’, and so the meaning is that the Son of Man has come to seek out and save those who have destroyed their lives. 

    Where can God be found? We naturally believe he is found in the highest places, basilicas with ornate and breathtaking interiors-and these have their place; but the Son of Man descended to the sewers. It was this descent to the level of the swine that brought the prodigal son back to life. Our God is found in the lowest places; for Jesus had table fellowship with outcasts, the poor, the sick, sinners, tax collectors, etc. He came to liberate them from the bad news, the lie, that they were forsaken by God. Table fellowship brings about a profound intimacy between all those at the table. The very idea of the Pharisees and scribes sharing a meal with those with whom Jesus kept company was simply unthinkable; status was everything in first century Palestine, and Jesus lost that status by associating with the poor, the lame, tax collectors, sinners, etc.  

    Now, in this 15th chapter of Luke where we find the prodigal son, there are two other parables of the divine mercy, and they are there for a reason: we can misinterpret the prodigal son and mistakenly believe that the father showed mercy because the son first made a decision to return on his own. But that would be to miss the entire point of the parable; for the son was dead, and what is dead does not move. Hence, right before this parable are two others that are intended to make such a misreading less likely. I’m referring to the parable of the lost sheep, who wanders from the fold and is lost and cannot find his way back, unlike the prodigal son who does find his way back home. All the sheep can do is bleat, and hopefully the Shepherd will hear the bleating and find it, put it on his shoulders and take it back to the fold, which is what happened because the Shepherd actually goes out looking for the lost sheep. 

    However, this gets better; for if the sheep cries out, it means it is alive. But what if the one who is lost (destroyed) cannot cry out in the dark for help, or cannot get up and make his or her way back home? What if this person has turned his or her back on God completely, lives in utter darkness, and is spiritually dead? We have the parable of the lost coin: “What woman having ten coins and losing one would not light a lamp and sweep the house, searching carefully until she finds it?” 

    A coin is a piece of metal. It is inert, it is dead. It does not cry out nor make its way home. The mercy of God is compared this time to a woman who will search the house carefully and will not stop until she finds that lost and inert piece of matter. That’s what our God is like, compared this time to a woman because women don’t give up. More importantly, though, God does not wait for us to take the initiative and return; rather, she loves us first and goes out looking for the lost, the dead, the forsaken, those who live in darkness, and will not stop searching until she finds them.

    You and I are where we are in our faith life not by virtue of anything we have done, but purely on the basis of God’s unutterable mercy. I was fortunate to have had a priest friend in my youth who would emphasize that repeatedly, but that isn’t typical. Today, there are many Catholic writers, podcasters and preachers who are moralizers, legalists, who seem to reduce the faith to a set of moral proscriptions, usually centering on issues of sexual ethics, and who think within a transactional paradigm. But as St. Paul says in his letter to the Ephesians, we are not saved by our works: “For it is by grace you have been saved, through faith—and this is not from yourselves, it is the gift of God—not by works, so that no one can boast” (Eph 2, 8-9). In my experience, a large percentage of the faithful have unwittingly adopted semi-Pelagianism, believing that grace has entered our lives as a result of some initial good act of the will and as a reward for that action. But our cooperation with grace is itself a grace. 

    Faith is the grace that allows us to trust and to hope in the divine mercy. That’s what saves. Nothing frustrated Jesus more than people’s lack of trusting faith, which leads to fear, anxiety, and the abuse of authority, which in turn generates resentment and division, all rooted in a refusal to trust divine providence. But there was nothing that pleased Jesus more than finding that trusting faith in others, such as the Syrophoenician woman or the Roman Centurion, the woman with a hemorrhage, or the blind man naked on the road. That faith is what allowed Christ to work miracles in their lives and in the lives of those for whom they were interceding. Many of us are worried about our sons or daughters who have turned their backs on God and are now apparently lost and perhaps spiritually dead. If we believe in the God that Christ revealed, we know that fear is useless; in fact, it is harmful. It can cause us to do things that only alienate us from our children. If we learn to trust in the all-powerful and all-knowing God who pursues the lost and does not stop until he finds what he’s looking for, then there is nothing for us to worry about, for he will find them and bring them to himself in ways that we cannot think of on our own. 

    The Transfiguration and the Veiling of the Divine Glory

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    The readings for the Second Sunday of Lent are about hope. In the first reading, the Lord gives Abram (Abraham) hope that his descendents will be as numerous as the stars of the sky, and that he will be the father of a great nation. In the Second Reading, Paul reminds us of the hope that the Lord will transform our bodies to be conformed to the body of his glory, by his power. And the gospel reading is an unveiling of Christ’s glory. Peter, James and John see Christ in all his splendor, his human nature permeated by the glory of the divine nature. It’s very hard to imagine what that experience was like for them, but they describe it as ‘kalon’, beautiful: “It is beautiful for us to be here”. 

    This event is important because it is easy to lose hope, and if we lose hope, we have lost faith, and by faith we mean trust in Christ, in his promise of salvation, his promise of sharing in his everlasting glory. Peter, James, and John were given this experience to strengthen them for what is to come, namely the suffering and death of Christ. But if the glory of God the Son was unveiled at the transfiguration, it means that he was veiled beforehand. And this is what Paul says in Philippians: 

    Though he was in the form of God, Jesus did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men.

    The key word here is “empty” (ekenosen). He emptied himself of the glory that he had as the only Son of God the Father. He took the form of a slave; the Greek word is doulou: servant, slave, from which the French word for sorrow or pain is derived: douleur. He became a man of suffering servitude. Paul continues:

    He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross!

    So his glory was hidden. He was unknown, unrecognized, as we read in the gospel of John: 

    He was in the world, and the world came to be through him, but the world did not know him. He came to what was his own, but his own people did not accept him.

    The glory of his divinity was hidden under the veil of his humanity. Hence, he was rejected. And this is what it means to live our life in Christ. He invites us to become like him, to share in his hidden life, to be hidden as well. 

    The glory that is in you is the glory of his love (the Holy Spirit). The more that charity burns in you, the less you will be understood in this life. The reason is that we only really understand what has a likeness to ourselves, and most people are not like this God, who is Love and chooses servitude. So if you are a person of great charity, the very heart of your personhood will be veiled and you will suffer the pain of not being understood by most people, and there can be a certain loneliness in that. And because your love is great, your suffering will be that much greater as you behold the suffering around you, which increases your sorrow (douleur). Injustice bothers you more than it does others. Your lot (kleros) is to share in that hiddenness of Christ and the pain that goes with it. There is tremendous glory in that, but it is hidden, like his. 

    But Christ says in Luke that there is nothing concealed that will not be disclosed, or hidden that will not be made known (12, 2). Given that the glory of his love is in you and growing, slowly transforming you into his image, that glory will one day be revealed. You will be transfigured. But today, very few people will truly know and understand you. This hiddenness is something that we have to learn to love. St. Silouan the Athonite writes: “When the soul sees the Lord, how meek and humble He is, then she [the soul] is thoroughly humbled, and desires nothing so much as the humility of Christ. And however long the soul may live on earth, she will always desire and seek this humility which passes all understanding.” 

    Now the converse is also true. There are people in this world who seek their own glory, people whose predominant desire is to be known, admired, or barring that, feared. They love power and the glory of authority and having others fawn all over them; such people have an aversion to servitude. And so wherever there are positions of authority, such people will aspire after them, or aspire to be associated with those who have them. This is not to suggest that everyone in a position of power grasped after that authority; some are gifted leaders who would rather not have authority. One of the greatest popes in the history of the Church was Gregory the Great, a brilliant administrator and at the same time a great contemplative and pastoral genius–a rare and unusual combination. He was a monk, the first pope to have come from a monastic background. In the late 6th century, he wrote The Book of Pastoral Rule, a work that should be read by all who hold Church office. It is remarkable how well he understood human psychology, in particular the psychology of those who aspire after positions of authority and who abuse power, either by excess or neglect. As an example, consider the following:  

    It is common that a ruler, from the very fact of his being set over others, is puffed up with elation, and while all things serve his need, while his commands are quickly executed according to his desire, while all his subjects extol with praises what he has done well, but have no authority to speak against what he has done poorly, and while they commonly praise what they should have reproved, his mind, seduced by what is offered in abundance from his subordinates, is lifted above itself; and, while outwardly surrounded by unbounded favour, he loses his inward sense of truth, and, forgetful of himself, he scatters himself on the voices of others, and believes himself to be as they say he is, rather than such as he ought inwardly to have judged himself to be. He looks down on those who are under him, nor does he acknowledge them as his equals; … he esteems himself wiser than all whom he excels in power. He establishes himself, in his own mind, on a lofty eminence, and, though bound together in the same condition of nature with others, he disdains to regard others from the same level.

    What is interesting here is that the emptiness and small heartedness of such authority figures is veiled by the trappings of power and pomp, the complete inverse of the genuine follower of Christ, whose interior is rich with the glory of the divine love, but hidden behind the veil of the ordinary. And that’s why we are so often wrong in our judgments of others; we judge on the basis of appearances and forget that not everything is as it appears. As Pope Francis once said, we put clerics on pedestals, but they are only human beings, and if they relish the pedestal and in time fall off, we become terribly disillusioned, which can lead us to turn our backs on the Church indefinitely. But Peter, the first pope, did not lose sight of his own humanness and radical equality with others, for when he entered the house of Cornelius, he fell at Peter’s feet and paid him homage. Peter, however, raised him up, saying, “Get up. I myself am also a human being.” Unfortunately, history is filled with examples of human beings doing quite the opposite of what we see in the kenosis of God the Son. Instead of emptying themselves of the desire for glory and settling for a difficult life of hidden servitude, they relish elevation and cover themselves with trappings of glory and expect to be addressed by lofty titles. Our task, however, is to decrease so that Christ may increase, that is, increase within us, that his image may expand within us, that the love of God and neighbour may increasingly take possession of us, all under the appearance of the ordinary, like the Eucharist, which is the risen Christ under the appearance of an ordinary and unexciting piece of bread. 

    Some Thoughts on Scripture and Ineffective Kerygma

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    The Church of course has the task of proclaiming the gospel, the good news of deliverance, that is, the good news of Christ’s resurrection, the Christ who conquered death. The kingdom of God has been established in the Person of Christ, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life (Jn 14, 6). The Truth that we are called to proclaim, however, is not so much a set of theses bearing upon a limited number of issues of personal morality, mostly of a sexual nature, but a Person, a risen Person whose mind we are called to make our own (Phil 2, 5).

    Recently I read and commented on an article written by a US prelate, an article that to me came across as an attempt to provide a bird’s eye view of the relationship between the modern world–described as lost, confused and depraved–and the Church–or perhaps a conservative and faithful remnant within the Church that possesses and guards the “Truth” in its purity and fullness. The first few paragraphs of this article were devoted to sin, and the first specific example of what the bishop had in mind when talking about sin was the sexual revolution. This was soon followed by a reminder that the society in which we live denies moral absolutes and natural law, which in turn was followed by more examples that included abortion, the meaning and purpose of sexuality, the definition of marriage, and gender issues. These apparently constitute a sufficient moral characterization of the secular world we are living in. The focus of the article was clearly a moral one, but perhaps, I thought to myself, a wider and more complete description of contemporary society was forthcoming, but the examples were limited to “acceptance of contraception, homosexual activity, transgenderism, puberty blockers and surgery for minors and euthanasia”, which the author claimed are now being advocated for by some theologians, priests and bishops within the Church. 

    I could not help but detect a radical change in temperature when I compared this article, rooted as it is in a very specific, limited, and legalistic/moralistic paradigm, and the actual gospels themselves. When we take a cursory glance at the gospels, for example, Luke and Matthew, we notice a very different hue, that is, an entirely different emphasis. Christ eats with tax collectors and sinners (thereby challenging the culture and social structure of prestige), he picks corn on the sabbath (violating religious law, which is made for man, not vice versa); he cures the man with a withered hand, delivers a dire warning to those who have plenty to eat now (“woe to you”), who laugh now, and blesses the poor, the hungry, those who are weeping now. Jesus speaks of the importance of compassion, he speaks of the true disciple, proclaims the coming of God’s kingdom and demonstrates that coming by raising the dead to life and working miracles, for example his power over nature. He speaks of following him along the way of the cross, and he gives power to heal, provides the criterion for greatness, which is humility and childlikeness; he commands us to forgive those who have trespassed against us, exhorts us to give alms and to sell our possessions, to trust in providence, and he derides the hypocrisy of the religious leaders.

    He tells the parable of the good Samaritan which shines the light on the problem of putting ritual or liturgical purity over attending to the needs of our neighbour, and he teaches about the Lord’s incomprehensible mercy in three different parables. We encounter a single verse only on divorce (Lk 16, 18), followed immediately by eleven verses of a parable: the rich man and Lazarus, and more verses on the need for persistence in prayer, the power of faith, a note on humble service. We read about the presumption of the Pharisee and the humility of the tax collector, more on the dangers of riches, the healing of the blind man, the expulsion of the dealers from the Temple, the widow’s mite, and much more.

    In Matthew’s Beatitudes we have poverty of spirit as a necessary condition for belonging to his kingdom, meekness, hungering and thirsting for what is right, mercy, the importance of peacemaking, undivided love of God, endurance in persecution, another single verse on divorce, followed by a multitude of verses on nursing anger, looking upon another with contempt and damaging a person’s reputation. We encounter more exhortation to remember the poor, to trust in providence, not to judge the hearts of others, to pray with faith, we see more cures, the scandal of eating with sinners and tax collectors, more parables of the kingdom of God, Christ’s compassion for the hungry and the subsequent miracle of the loaves and fishes, a single mention of fornication and adultery (15, 20), soon followed by another miracle of the loaves, more deriding of the religious leaders, a parable of the lost sheep which details not so much that they are lost as a result of their rejection of moral absolutes and natural law, but the fact that the Shepherd is concerned about and goes looking for the lost, and will not stop until he finds them. And of course there is the parable of the last judgment, which mentions nothing about sex, gender, divorce, homosexuality, or liturgy, but teaches us the meaning of attending to the hungry, thirsty, lonely, the sick, the imprisoned, with whom the Lord identifies so much that to serve or ignore them is to serve or ignore him.  

    After reading this and other similar articles, I am inclined to offer some advice to the culture warrior who insists on a moralizing kerygma–as opposed to one well rooted in the gospel–, an approach that seems to have left things unchanged these past 50 years at the very least. When you are at war and you see that you’ve been losing the war for decades now and yet you continue to employ the same strategy, it is fair to suggest that you are a lousy general. You need to be replaced by one with fresh ideas and a more effective military strategy, one that actually works. Moralistic assertions of truths long rejected are not going to cut it. Furthermore, dividing the world neatly into “us” (the faithful ones who possess the “Truth”) and “them” (those on the outside, the confused, lost, and immoral) is not quite true to the facts. You have to be able to understand those who have left the Church–or have never been in the Church in the first place–and see that they indeed embrace many absolute moral principles and are in many ways good willed, but often carry emotional wounds that spawn inconsistencies in their thinking, like many in the Church who are on the “left” and the “right”. You have to be the kind of person who is able to enter into their lives, as Christ entered into the lives of those rejected, the outcasts, the downtrodden, the poor, those who were considered to be “forsaken” by God, and you have to be able to move them to love the Lord, but you can only do that the same way a mother awakens a smile in her baby, that is, by smiling at her baby. You have to be able to see the goodness in others and help them to see themselves from God’s point of view. Moralizing per se is ineffective. We should not confuse Christianity with Churchianity (Metropolitan Anthony Bloom)—such an approach has failed and continues to fail. We need a strategy that is more focused on relationships with real concrete people who are struggling to survive in this world, and less on relatively abstract moral arguments written for politically slanted Catholic journals that few people have time to read let alone know how to find. We need a strategy more focused on the Person of Christ and his message, which is a message of mercy, of the love and providence of God, that we are loved by God beyond our ability to conceive, that he loves us so much that he seeks us out and won’t stop till he finds us. In short, “relationship” is more fundamental than moral problem solving. 

    Issues of personal morality are important and have their place, especially the direct killing of the mentally and terminally ill, but putting the cart before the horse keeps the horse from moving forward. I know of a man who overcame his addiction to pornography only after he fell in love with a woman. It was his experience of real love of a person that allowed him to see through the false love to which he was enslaved, the love of self. All the pontificating in the world would not have moved him off his addiction. Similarly, it is faith, which is a genuine confidence in a Person, namely Christ who loved us while we were sinners (Rom 5, 8), that is going to make all the difference in our lives. Martin Luther, one of the most misunderstood personages in the history of the Church, drew the following analogy that underscores the primacy of faith as trust: “When a man and a woman love each other and truly believe in their love, who teaches them how to behave, what to do, what to avoid, what to say or not say, and what to think? Their confidence alone teaches them all this and more. They don’t differentiate between actions: they do big, long, and many tasks as gladly as small, short, and few ones, and vice versa; all with joyful, peaceful, and confident hearts, each being a free companion to the other. But where there is doubt, people search for what is best; then they imagine different actions to win favor, yet they do it with a heavy heart and great reluctance. It’s as if they are trapped, more than half in despair, and often end up making a fool of themselves” (Luther, Martin. Treatise on Good Works: Modern, Updated Translation (p. 11). (Function). Kindle Edition. See also The Joint Declaration on the Doctrine of Justification, 1997, by the Lutheran World Federation and the Catholic Church. Dicastery for Promoting Christian Unity). 

    Faith in the Person of Christ is prior to everything else. Repentance is not so much what an individual does in order to merit forgiveness; rather, it is what a person does precisely because he has been forgiven. Zacchaeus is an example of this pattern; for his repentance and good works came only after Jesus’ decision to approach him, almost impose himself, or invite himself to his house: “…come down quickly, for today I must stay at your house”. We tend to think of repentance and good works as a precondition for salvation: “If you repent, then Christ will enter your life”. No, Christ draws close to us, he enters our lives, and his “intrusion” is an unmerited gift, and only then are we able to respond accordingly: “Behold, half of my possessions I shall give to the poor, and if I have extorted anything from anyone, I shall repay it four times” (Lk 19, 8). Jesus did not go looking for Zacchaeus as though he knew Zacchaeus as a very generous soul concerned about the poor, a person of unimpeachable integrity; that’s not who Zacchaeus was–he was a hated tax collector who was indifferent to the poor and most certainly extorted others. Rather, Zacchaeus turns towards the poor and becomes a person of integrity precisely because Jesus found him first. 

    We are all like Zacchaeus, especially St. Paul who viciously persecuted the Church prior to Christ’s approach that changed him forever. That is why the words of St. Isaac the Syrian are fitting: “Do not call God just anymore, for his justice is not manifest in the things concerning you” (The Ascetical Homilies of Saint Isaac the Syrian. 1.51.250.). What is manifest in the things concerning us is God’s absolute mercy. And, St. Silouan the Athonite prays: “How could I do other than seek You, for You first sought me and found me and gave me the ability to delight in Your Holy Spirit, and my soul fell to loving You” (A Year in the Holy Spirit with Saint Silouan the Athonite: A Calendar of Daily Quotes. Compiled by Elizabeth P. Fitzgerald. Kindle Edition, 2020. s.v., Feb. 14th. p. 17).

    Creative and Destructive Conflict

    Deacon Douglas McManaman
    Also published at https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_422creativedestructiveconflict.html

    The kiln tests the potter’s vessels; so the test of the just person is in tribulation.

    A kiln is a furnace that dries out the potter’s clay and actually transforms it into a beautiful ceramic piece. We can’t use a clay bowl or cup that has not been in the kiln; it would fall apart, for it would be too soft. And of course, we are the clay, as we read in Isaiah, “Yet, Lord, you are our father; we are the clay and you our potter: we are all the work of your hand” (Is 64, 8). And so it follows that trials, sufferings, difficulties, are part and parcel of the spiritual life.

    I have found over the years that the vast majority of people mistakenly believe that religious life, life in the Church, life in Christ, the devout life, is supposed to be a life of peace and tranquility, like the quiet of a cemetery, where everything works out smoothly and without a glitch. And so when things go awry, we tend to see this as an anomaly, that something is wrong, that if we are right with God, life should proceed without a struggle. But this is a serious misconception. Life is essentially conflict, because it is movement, and all motion is at some level a struggle. Anyone who has studied evolutionary biology knows this. There is no such thing as life without conflict and struggle.

    There are, however, two kinds of conflict: destructive conflict and creative conflict. Sports (play) is essentially conflict and struggle, but it is an enjoyable one because it is essentially creative. Art is a matter of creative conflict, a battle between the sculptor and the resistance of the marble that he is about to carve into a beautiful figure. A life without creative conflict becomes intolerably dull and meaningless. In fact, heaven will be an eternity of creative conflict. Hadewijch of Antwerp writes:

    God will grace you to love God with that limitless Love God loves himself with, the Love through which God satisfies himself eternally and forever. With this Love, the heavenly spirits strive to satisfy God: this is their task that can never be accomplished and the lack of this fruition is their supreme fruition” (Love is Everything: A Year with Hadewijch of Antwerp, trans. Andrew Harvey, May 1st). 

    “Peace” and “rest” are not opposites of conflict, that is, heaven is not a life without obstacles and things to achieve. 

    It is destructive conflict that is the problem. However, God joined a human nature, he joined himself to our humanity, and in doing so he entered into the destructive conflict that human sin has brought about in the world. The victory of that destructive conflict is death, which without Christ has the final word over our lives. But Christ came to die, to enter into our death, to inject it with his divine life, to destroy the power of death, to rise from the dead. He was victorious over death, and so he overcame the struggle of human existence, the battle against destructive conflict. 

    Christ transformed the destructive conflict of death and sin in all its various instances into a matter of creative conflict, a matter of play, as it were: “When he set for the sea its limit, so that the waters should not transgress his command; When he fixed the foundations of earth, then was I beside him as artisan; I was his delight day by day, playing before him all the while, playing over the whole of his earth, having my delight with human beings” (Prov 8, 29-31). We can now share in his victory over both sin and death. He offers us his own humanity so that we might overcome our own life struggles with his strength: “I can do all things in him who strengthens me” (Phil 4, 13). The kiln that dries out all our moisture (disordered love of self) and in time transforms us into something beautiful is the particular difficulties and struggles that we have to contend with in our lives. And some people have greater struggles than others; the heat of the kiln is much hotter in their lives, and perhaps they have been in it for much longer than the rest of us. But the result is a more beautiful product from the hand of the potter. It is not the case that God wills that certain people suffer illness or tragedy; rather, God the Son joined himself to a human nature in order to draw very close to us in our suffering and trials, to give us his divine life that we might overcome the world and its conflicts with him and through him, that we might share in the joy of his victory. The greater the struggle, the greater the victory, and the greater will be the joy in that victory.

    This, I believe, is the key to unlocking today’s gospel: “Can a blind person guide a blind person?…Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?…first take the log out of your own eye, and then you will see clearly to take the speck out of your neighbour’s eye”. The spiritual life is a long and difficult road, a slow process of gradual enlightenment. I don’t know about you, but I do not like looking back at my life and being reminded of what I was back then, because I see my blindness. And of course, the blind cannot lead the blind. But the blind are leading the blind all the time. Even great saints had their blind spots. Study the history of the Church without triumphalist blinders: stupidity, arrogance, sin, oppression, envy, violence, lust for power, control, avarice, etc, is everywhere in our history. We have had great popes who did great things as well as some outrageous things; made great decisions as well as terrible decisions that were very destructive and whose repercussions are still with us today in many ways. It is a real mixture. But that’s life in the Church, as well as the life of the individual person in a state of grace. The spiritual life is conflict, a struggle, a struggle against our own blindness and propensity to sin and self seeking as well as the blindness of others and its repercussions. 

    But before we can take it upon ourselves to correct others, we have to spend years in the kiln, in the furnace, allowing the fire of the divine love to change us so that we may remove the plank from our eye. Recently I asked my Confirmation class about the graces they are going to receive from God upon their Confirmation, specifically the grace of mission. 

    “You are going to be sent on a mission; but to do what?” I asked them. 

    One good candidate put up his hand and said: 

    “To proclaim the gospel”. And of course, that’s a great answer. 

    “But how are you going to do that?” 

    “Preach”, he said. 

    Well, the problem is you’ll lose friends quickly. If you want to be friendless, start preaching to them. If parents want to drive their kids from the church, start preaching. The way to proclaim the gospel is by the very life you lead. The gospel is the good news of Christ’s victory over death, his resurrection. We don’t need to use words. We just need to be a person who lives in the joy of Easter, a person who has the hope of eternal life, a person who is not overcome by life’s tragedies, because we believe that Christ has overcome the world and conquered death. Others will see that in us, by how we react to life’s difficulties and struggles, even life’s tragedies–that we have risen above them in the joy of the risen Christ. 

    Catholic Tribalism

    Deacon Doug McManaman

    Today’s gospel reading (Wednesday of the 7th Week in Ordinary Time) is taken from Mark, chapter 9, verses 38-40. John says to Jesus that they saw someone casting out demons in Jesus’ name and that they tried to stop him, “because he was not following us”–as if it is about “following them”, and not Christ, or acting in the name of the Person of Christ. Jesus tells them straight out: “Do not stop him; for no one who does a deed of power in my name will be able soon afterward to speak evil of me. Whoever is not against us is for us”. 

    It continues to puzzle me that this reading continues to fly over the heads of so many Christians today, including Catholic prelates, clergy, and very traditional Catholics who are thoroughly sectarian or tribal in their thinking. If there is one section of the gospel that rails against Catholic tribalism, it seems to me that this is the one. Had the hierarchy taken the path laid out by Pope Gregory the Great, a pastoral and administrative genius, rather than the authoritarian approach of Pope Leo the Great–not to mention Innocent III—, the history of Christianity would have looked very different than what it is now.  

    When I study such great theologians as Jurgen Moltmann, or G. Studdert Kennedy, Sergius Bulgakov, or Vladimir Solovyov, Christoph Blumhardt or Gerhard O. Forde, Robin A. Parry or F. D. Maurice, etc., I lose all awareness that these people belong to another “tribe”, a different denomination, that is, that they are “Protestant”. All I sense is that we are of the same family; we are “of the same mind”, which is the mind of Christ Jesus (Phil 2, 5). 

    The first reading from Sirach (4, 11-19) is also very revealing: “Wisdom teaches her children and gives help to those who seek her. Whoever loves her loves life, …Whoever holds her fast inherits glory, and the Lord blesses the place she enters. Those who serve her minister to the Holy One; the Lord loves those who love her.” My last 20 years of teaching were at a school in which close to 50% of my students were non-Catholic; many were Muslims, Hindus, Sikhs, and Buddhists, and many of these were genuine seekers of wisdom, lovers of wisdom, and they recognized wisdom whenever they encountered her. The Lord loves those who love her, and one cannot love her without divine grace, which is a sharing in the divine life. So much for Catholic triumphalism, Muslim tribalism, or any tribalism for that matter. 

    I would not say that these people were “anonymous Christians”, a term made popular by Karl Rahner in the early post-Vatican II period. The best criticism of this apparently inclusive way of regarding those who are not explicitly Christian comes from Hans Kung, who writes: 

    Karl Rahner’s theory of the “anonymous Christian” is in the final analysis still dependent on a (Christian) standpoint of superiority that sets up one’s own religion as the a priori true one. For, according to Rahner’s theory, which attempts to solve the dilemma of the “Outside the Church” dogma, all the Jews, Hindus, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists are saved not because they are Jews, Muslims, Hindus, and Buddhists, but because in the final analysis they are Christians, “anonymous Christians,” to be precise. The embrace here is no less subtle than in Hinduism. The will of those who are after all not Christians and do not want to be Christians, is not respected but interpreted in accordance with the Christian theologian’s interests. But around the world one will never find a serious Jew or Muslim, Hindu or Buddhist, who does not feel the arrogance of the claim that he or she is “anonymous” and, what is more, an “anonymous Christian.” Quite apart from the utterly perverse use of the word “anonymous”—as if all these people did not know what they themselves were—this sort of speculative pocketing of one’s conversation partner brings dialogue to an end before it has even gotten under way. We must not forget that followers of other religions are to be respected as such, and not to be subsumed in a Christian theology (Theology for the Third Millennium: An Ecumenical View. trans. Peter Heinegg. New York: Doubleday, 1988. P. 313). 

    My students may not be “anonymous Christians”, but if they seek wisdom, love wisdom, and in serving her serve the Holy One who loves those who love her, then they are moved by grace, which is the indwelling of the Trinity. To be in such a state does not depend upon adopting a certain terminology or conceptual frame of mind, but on the love of her (Sophia). All things came to be through the Logos (Jn 1, 1ff), and all were created for him. Just as I can learn so much more about the Person of Christ, the Logos, by contemplating the cosmos that came to be through him and for him, so too I can learn so much more about the Person of Christ by contemplating the ancient wisdom of those who seek, love and live for the wisdom spoken about in the book of Sirach, the Sophia through whom and for whom all things came to be. 

    The Feast of the Presentation

    D. McManaman

    The gospel reading on the Presentation is really about humility. The word humility comes from the Latin ‘humous’, which means dirt or soil. The humble are down to earth; they don’t walk high and mighty. But another English word that is derived from ‘humous’ is humour. Now what’s interesting about humour is that it hinges upon irony. You’ll notice this in the nicknames that kids give to one another. They are full of irony, which is why they are funny. The short kid is nicknamed stretch, the tall kid is given the nickname shorty, the skinny kid is nicknamed Hercules, and when I was a kid, they called me slim. 

    What’s interesting about the gospel is that it is full of irony, and so it is full of humour–divine humour. St. Gregory of Nyssa calls attention to this divine irony in his sermon on the Beatitudes when he says that the judge of all creatures is subject to the judgment of mere humans, the author and sustainer of life tastes death, the all powerful is hungry for bread and dies on a cross, and so on. 

    This gospel reading is also packed with irony. Jesus is presented in the temple, because the Torah says that “every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord”. Now to consecrate means to ‘make holy’. But Jesus is the fount of all holiness; he is Lord, God the Son. This is irony. So too, Mary undergoes forty days of purification, but she is purity itself, for she is the Immaculate Conception, she is ‘full of grace’, as the angel addressed her at the Annunciation. Not only that, but Mary is, according to the author of the gospel of Luke, the New Ark of the Covenant. The Ark of the Covenant in the Old Testament was the holiest object in Israel, and it contained the tablets of the commandments, manna from the desert, and the staff of Aaron the Levite priest. Mary, the New Ark of the Covenant, contains in her womb Christ the New Law, who is the Bread of Life, and who is the eschatological priest who came to offer himself for the salvation of the world. She is the holiest of God’s creatures, and Joseph is the greatest saint next to her. Nonetheless, both of them submit to the requirements of the old law. That is perfect humility.

    But there is more. Simeon is described as righteous and devout, awaiting the Messiah. It was revealed to him that he would not see death before laying eyes on Messiah. He recognized, through the Holy Spirit, that this child was the Messiah, and that he would be a sign of contradiction, and he turns to Mary and tells her that a sword will pierce your soul also. And Mary and Joseph both marvelled at what was being said by Simeon. Furthermore, Simeon blesses both Mary and Joseph. And so Mary, the greatest saint, full of grace, and Joseph, the greatest saint next to her, are amazed, impressed, they marvel at what was said about the child, and both are willing to receive Simeon’s blessing. Moreover, Anna, a prophetess, married and widowed, a woman of prayer and fasting, came forward too and spoke about the child. And one other irony: Mary and Joseph, the richest creatures ever created by God, are poor; for they offer the offering of the poor, two turtle doves instead of a lamb, and yet they hold in their arms the lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. And Luke, throughout his gospel, depicts Mary as one who “ponders these things in her heart”. In other words, it’s not as if she knows everything. She learns, and marvels at what she learns through others like Simeon and Anna, the prophetess, and ponders what she hears.  

    It is obvious that Mary and Joseph have no idea of their status before God, no idea of their holiness. Both of them allow themselves to be taught, and to be amazed; although the old law is fulfilled in her womb, Mary does not see herself as superior to the old law, nor as superior to Simeon or Anna, even though she is even higher than the angels.

    This says a great deal about what true holiness is. Those who are genuinely holy do not know they are extraordinary; for they don’t compare themselves to others. The truly holy allow themselves to learn from everyone, and they are able to be impressed with others. The proud and envious, on the contrary, are rarely impressed with anyone or anything, unless it is related to them and glorifies them in some way. 

    And rarely do they speak well of others. Although the true saint is hidden and unknown, because they don’t stand out, pseudo-saints find many subtle ways to make themselves stand out from others around them. Great saints don’t know they are saints, they don’t pontificate, they are not quick to correct others or give advice; pseudo-saints pontificate, are quick to offer correction, are quick to advise. True saints affirm others who go away from them always feeling better about themselves; but pseudo-saints do not allow others to leave them feeling better about themselves, but confused and doubtful about their worth. Genuine saints are very generous, pseudo-saints are stingy, not only with money, but with everything–they rarely praise or compliment others, unless the object of their praise somehow reflects back on them. And as genuine saints are not the least bit aware of their holiness, pseudo-saints are not the least bit aware of their pretension and hypocrisy, but see themselves as superior. 

    Let me finish by saying that Pope Francis, early in his papacy, derided the notion of a self-referential Church, focused on itself. Many in the Church were distressed by the suggestion, but he continues to call the Church to turn outward, towards the world, to become a more listening Church. This is why he has put so much effort into Synodality; listening to the lay faithful, recognizing their gifts, talents, and expertise. In other words, he envisions a more Marian Church, a Church that, like Mary, listens and marvels at the extraordinary gifts, talents, insights and abilities of unknown men and women who are genuinely influenced by the Holy Spirit, like Simeon and Anna in this gospel. 

    Suicide, Depression, and Salvation

    https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_420suicide.depression.salvation.html

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Soon after ordination in 2008 I began to minister to those who suffer from mental illness (mental sufferers), and over the years I have known a few who have taken their own lives, including a former student and parent of that student, as well as patients that I came to know in ministry. On a couple of occasions I found myself situated between a rock and a hard place when asked by a patient suffering from depression whether she would automatically go straight to hell if she were to take her own life. The problem, I tell them, is that if I were to say ‘yes’, I’d be telling you something that I simply do not for an instant believe and feel that I’d be lying; if I were to say ‘no’, that it is not necessarily the case that you are going to hell for taking your own life, you might receive that as permission, and I cannot grant you that permission. Interestingly enough, the few that have asked me this understood, and as far as I know, none of those took their own lives.

    But I have dealt with a number of patients before in the face of whose sufferings I have honestly said to myself, with tremendous fear and trepidation: “If I had to suffer the depression they are experiencing at this moment, I sincerely don’t think I could endure it. I’m afraid I’d “do myself in”.” I perceived very clearly my own inability to go on, on my own strength. 

    One of the most significant moments in my life as a deacon was Christmas, 2011. Two days before Christmas, on the last day of school before the holidays in front of a classroom of senior high school students, I began to sweat and shake. I had to leave school quickly and went straight home to bed. Soon my head and shoulders were wracked with pain and my body was shaking with chills. The pain soon made its way down to my arms and wrists, and then my back and legs. Christmas dinner for me that year was a can of tuna; on Boxing Day I had to go to the Emergency. The emergency physician thought I could have polymyalgia rheumatica, a condition that typically strikes those who are 50+ and there is no known cure. I was given prednisone and oxycodone and sent home–the oxycodone was so powerful that I was too frightened to take any more after the first day. 

    I honestly believed that I would not be returning to the classroom again, that my teaching career had come to an end, for I could not imagine teaching while in such pain. More importantly, I was battling deep despair—for no medical expert had an answer, none could tell me whether a light would eventually appear at the end of this tunnel. I was on the phone with my spiritual director every night, and I remember saying to him at one point: “I think I’m beginning to appreciate what my patients, who suffer from clinical depression, have to go through every day.” The thought that I had to endure this darkness for another week, let alone for years to come, was terrifying, and so I began to train myself to think not one week at a time, or one day at a time, but one moment at a time.

    Things began to change when my spiritual director casually advised me to say the following prayer: “Into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit; into your hands, Lord, I commend my spirit”. Of course, I knew that prayer, for it is part of the Night Prayer of the Breviary that we are required to pray daily. But when one has been saying a certain prayer for years on end, after a time it can become just words, without a great deal of thought behind them. So I decided that I would say this prayer, think of the words, and mean it. If I was no longer able to continue to teach and had to spend the rest of my life in a wheelchair, then your will be done, Lord; into your hands I commend my spirit.

    That night I had the best sleep I’d had in years. I woke up feeling as though a cool breeze had passed through my body. I was still in a lot of pain, but the despair and darkness were gone, and eventually I was slowly weaned off of the prednisone. It turned out that my illness was not polymyalgia rheumatica, but the medical experts to this day have no idea what it was. Nevertheless, the experience was very important for me. 

    Not that I ever had the inclination to do so, but I would not pronounce judgment on anyone in the throes of clinical depression who decided to take his/her own life, and I continue to be unpleasantly surprised that a good number of the faithful are under the false impression that anyone who does so is automatically consigned to a state of eternal damnation–and worse, that there are still a number of “pastorally challenged” clergy—few in number—who believe and teach this, and refuse to conduct a funeral mass for such a person.

    Traditionally, there are three conditions required for one to be in a state of sin: knowledge, free deliberation, and serious matter. Clearly, taking one’s life constitutes “serious matter”, but free deliberation is the condition in which there is a serious mitigating factor, namely clinical depression. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., writes: 

    All too many people today still hold the belief that suicide somehow represents a rash but rational act committed by otherwise healthy persons. When someone takes his or her own life, the usual reactions are of shock and bewilderment. How could she do such a thing? She never gave any sign that anything was wrong. Or, Why didn’t he call me? I knew he lost his job … he and Janet split … but why this? But suicide is not an act committed by an otherwise healthy and rational person. On the contrary, more often than not, the person who commits suicide is in the throes of a severe depression when taking his or her life. And in most cases the act is preceded by severe depression with increasing signs and symptoms of hopelessness and despair. About two-thirds of the people who take their own lives suffer from major depression or bipolar disorder. Almost everyone else who commits suicide has depression, alcohol or substance abuse, or a delusional illness like schizophrenia.1

    On 9/11, a number of people jumped off of the World Trade Center to their deaths. Did they freely choose to take their own lives? They certainly did not; and those who take their own lives to escape the utter darkness, the feeling of utter hopelessness, the depression they’ve had to endure for decades, are very much like those who jump from a burning building to avoid the flames. 

    There is a distinction between small ‘d’ depression and major depressive disorder, which typically features a dramatic change in mood (sadness, anxiety, apathy, numbness, either separate or in combination), a loss of vitality, energy, concentration, as well as muddled thinking, a loss of self-esteem, a sense of uselessness, profound pessimism, and suicidal impulses. In some cases, anxiety and panic disorder occur as manifestations of the depression.2 What I experienced in 2011 was not major depressive disorder (clinical depression), but something much less severe; however, it provided me with some appreciation for what those who do suffer from this debilitating illness have to endure.

    The Vocation of Mental Illness

    On Holy Thursday night in Gethsemane, Jesus experienced the worst mental anguish, and he called Peter, James, and John to accompany him for one hour. But they could not do so; they slept. Mental sufferers, on the other hand, do not sleep; rather, they keep Christ company in his mental distress–and he keeps them company in theirs. Friendships are typically founded upon common qualities and interests. The special gift that mental sufferers are given by Christ is precisely this common experience, which makes them special friends of Christ. Thus, it is easy for me to believe that, instead of eternal despair, they will encounter the Lord’s gratitude for keeping him company in his mental anguish throughout all those years they had to endure it. Caryll Houselander writes: 

    Mental patients often live out their lives in Gethsemane, and without alleviation for the fear and conflict that they suffer–and here it is that we discover the very core of the vocation of those who serve them. …Their great need is that which Christ pleaded for in Gethsemane–compassion. He did not ask them to try to do away with his anguish or to alleviate his passion, but simply to be with him, to enter into his suffering through compassion. But this even Peter, who would so gladly have swept the passion away, could not do! ‘Then he went back to his disciples to find them asleep; and he said to Peter, had you no strength then to watch with me even for an hour?’

    It is the same today. In the mental sufferer Christ asks first of all and most of all for compassion, for those who will simply be with him, who will see through the sweat of his agony to the secret of his love.3

    In terms of the proclamation of hope and the good news of divine mercy, I think I can safely argue that the traditional kerygma has been rather deficient over the centuries, and so many of the faithful today have had to carry the wounds of that deficiency for decades. We speak of the unfathomable mercy of God and his unconditional love on the one hand, and on the other hand we undermine and belie the claim as we project our own limits onto God, preaching what he is able to forgive and not able to forgive, turning the justice of God, revealed in Christ as absolute mercy, into an absurdity so much beneath the worst examples of human “justice”. No doctrine can be true which makes Jesus less than God, or which makes God less than Jesus.4 Priest and poet G. Studdert Kennedy writes:

    A thousand mysteries begin to clear away, if we cling persistently to that great Name of God which is given by St. John: “God is Love” –the Love that was revealed in Jesus. That is not one of His attributes; that is His very Self. Cling to that Name, and use it, in all these great passages:

                “All we like sheep have gone astray; we have turned every one to his own way; and Love hath laid on Him the iniquity of us all.”

                “Love, for our sakes, in His own Body bare our sins upon the tree.” “Him that never knew sin, Love made to be sin for us.”

                Doesn’t a light begin to break through?

                I remember being called upon to visit a man who was in prison for forgery and embezzlement. He was the queerest, crookedest, hardest-hearted specimen of humanity that it has ever been my luck to strike, and I could not move him an inch nearer repentance. The only sign of softening that he showed at all, was when he asked me to go and see his mother. I went. She came down, looking worn and sleepless, and that I expected. But there was something about her which I, being young, could not understand. She was bitterly ashamed, and in my pity for her I wondered, What has she to be ashamed of? And then there came the light, and I murmured to myself: Surely she hath borne his griefs and carried his sorrows; the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed, if there be any power that can heal him. He has gone astray and turned to his own way, and Love hath laid on her the iniquity of her son. The mother-heart which knew but little sin, Love hath made to feel exceeding sinful for his sake. I understood and, in a measure, the eternal mystery cleared. That love which a woman can pour out upon her son, and which makes her so entirely one with him, that his sin is her sin, his disgrace is her disgrace, his shame is her shame, is the nearest that we can get upon earth to the love of God; to what God is.

                It was that love, extended to infinity, which beat within the human heart of Christ, God Incarnate, and made Him feel to every man, every woman, and every child in all the world, as that mother felt for her son; so that our sins became His sins; our disgrace His disgrace; our shame His shame; and in His own Body He bare our sins upon the tree.5

    A close priest friend of mine once preached that God can control his anger, but he cannot control his mercy. This is the God who has been revealed in the Person of Christ, the Good Shepherd who seeks the lost. He does not wait for us to seek Him out, rather, He goes in search of us and will not stop until He finds what He is looking for. This is what is so important about the parable of the lost coin. We miss the radical nature of the divine mercy when we focus solely on the parables of the Prodigal Son and the Lost Sheep, and overlook this very short parable in the fifteenth chapter of the gospel of Luke. At least the prodigal son freely chose to return home to beg for mercy; the lost sheep is alive enough to bleat in the wilderness, enabling the Shepherd to follow the sound in order to find it and bring it home. Both are alive. But a coin is a lump of inert matter; it is dead. It cannot rise up and make its way home nor cry out for mercy. It is entirely lost, hidden in the dust of a first century Palestinian floor. But God’s love is comparable to the love of a woman who lights a lamp and sweeps the house, searching carefully until she finds it. This is what God is like. St. Paul says, “While we were sinners, Christ died for us”. In other words, before we turned to him and repented, He loved us. “In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins” (1 Jn 4, 10). This is the heart of the mystery of grace that so few have been able to grasp, more than likely as a result of the tendency to look at sin through a juridical lens. As Studdert Kennedy points out: “Sin did estrange man from God; but it never has, and it never could, estrange God from man. God never waits for us to come to Him, God is for ever coming to us–He is the coming God.”6 Further, he writes: “We get much nearer to the significance of the forgiveness of sins, when we think of it in terms of life, than when we think of it in terms of law. Forgiveness is always regeneration, new birth; sin is always a process of decay, rather than an act of disobedience.”7

    If I am saved, I am saved personally, but not individually. It is the person, not the individual, who has been created in the image and likeness of God, who is a Trinity of Persons, Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, a plurality in unity. I am saved as a plurality, a member of Christ’s Mystical Body, a member of a Brotherhood, a community in which salvation is made possible. And if I am not saved individually, it is because I am not redeemed individually, and by extension I am not condemned or lost individually. Many others share in responsibility for my state of being lost. This, I believe, is the point made by the Elder Zosima in Dostoevsky’s The Brothers Karamazov:

    My friends, ask God for gaiety. Be gay as children, as the birds of the sky. And let not human sin confound you in your deeds, do not be afraid that it will frustrate your task and not allow it to be accomplished, do not say: ‘Strong is sin, strong is impiety, strong is the vicious world in which men live, and we are alone and helpless, that vicious world will frustrate us and not allow us to accomplish our good deeds.’ Avoid, O children, this melancholy! There is but one salvation from it: take yourself and make yourself a respondent for all human sin. Friend, this is indeed truly so, for no sooner do you sincerely make yourself the respondent of all creatures and all things than you will immediately see that it is in reality thus and that it is you who are guilty for all creatures and all things.8  

    Sin is not a private affair between me and God, or you and God, but is a public affair. My sins have repercussions that extend beyond the circle of my own private relationship with God; they adversely affect others in ways that I am currently unaware of. If one person is in hell, we are all in hell, for the “one” who is in hell is my brother, my sister to whom I am attached—to whom I am a respondent. There is nothing I can do to detach myself from him so that he suffers by himself and I am left unaffected: “… if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift” (Mt 5, 24). I will never be saved completely as long as my brother, my sister, is in hell and has something against me (See 1 Co 15, 20-28). The love of Christ was universal in the fullest sense of the word, and we are called to love in the same way: “As I have loved you, so you also should love one another” (Jn 13, 34). The mother has made herself responsible (a respondent) for the sins of her son, for she looked worn and sleepless, an image of God, whose worn out and sleepless face is Christ crowned with thorns. She bore his griefs and carried his sorrows, and the chastisement of his peace is upon her, and with her stripes he shall be healed. If I choose to love as I have been loved by Christ crowned with thorns, then I will carry the sorrows of the condemned, the chastised (kolasis), and the heavenly liturgy will wait for us, in the Person of Christ, to destroy hell’s brass gates, who destroyed those gates on Holy Saturday.9 We cannot endure the suffering of our damned son or daughter, for if we belong to Christ, we are joined to their suffering (1 Co 12, 26). Mental sufferers too do not allow us to suffer alone because they do not allow Christ to suffer alone; for Christ purchased their suffering, making them co-redeemers, that is, sin-bearers. Caryll Houselander writes: 

    This is a vocation in which everyone, not only the specialist, has some part because it depends on an attitude of mind and heart, which for the majority of people must mean a change of mind and heart toward the mental sufferer, who is of all suffering people the least understood. This change of heart, and with it power to help the mental sufferer, means learning to recognise Christ in the patient and to recognize the patient’s own vocation, his part in Christ’s passion and his gift to the world. For he, by his unique suffering, is taking part in the world’s redemption. 

    This must never be forgotten. The mental sufferer must never be regarded as one whose life is without purpose or meaning, as a burden to his family, or as one who gives nothing to those who care for him, because he is in fact giving the redeeming suffering of Christ, on which the salvation of the world and each one of us depends.10

    Some Final Thoughts

    Of course, the clinically depressed are also sinners, like everyone else, but their depression is not an indication or the result of a moral failure—at least not a genuine mental illness consistent with holiness11—, and much less is it a punishment for sin— another offshoot of a juridical paradigm, which formed the background of centuries of bad preaching. Their suffering is a vocation, as is ours, which always involves sin-bearing to one degree or another, whatever that vocation is. God the Son entered into human suffering in order to redeem it and make us sharers in his redemption. Those who suffer from mental illness share in this to a somewhat greater extent than the rest of us. 

    To be called to minister to them either professionally (I.e., the psychiatrist and psychiatric nurse) or non professionally is to be called to a highly noble task. It is a ministry of compassion in the true sense of that word: “to suffer with…” It is a mission of accompaniment, a call to taste their darkness, and this we do to the degree that we love them. Our task is to join the light of our hope and the joy of the risen Christ to their darkness. To the degree that we taste their darkness, they taste our joy and the hope of new life. Although we may not have the privilege of being Christ’s special friends, those called to minister to them may have the next best thing, namely the vocation to serve them who in turn accompany Christ in his mental anguish. The evolution of that branch of medical science that seeks to understand and treat clinical depression and other mental disorders is a sacred history because it is ordered to the good of man, whose existence is ordered to Christ: “For all were created through him and for him” (Col 1, 16). Those current achievements are the fruit of creative conflict, a battle rooted in the love of humanity, ordered to the overcoming of an illness that cripples so many human persons.12

    Notes

    1. Dr. J. Raymond DePaulo Jr., Understanding Depression: What We Know and What You Can Do About It. New Jersey: Wiley & Sons, Inc. 2002, pp. 133-134.

    2. Ibid., p. 23. See also p. 51ff. 

    3. Caryll Houselander. “The Care of the Mentally Ill” in The Mother of Christ. London: Sheed and Ward, 1978, p. 104.

    4. G. A. Studdert Kennedy. The Wicket Gate or Plain Bread. London: Hodder and Stoughton. 1935, p. 197.

    5. Ibid., pp. 197-199.

    6. Ibid., p. 178.

    7. Ibid., p. 178-179. About twenty years later, Nicholas Berdyaev writes: “There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone.” The Divine and the Human, trans. R. M. French. London: Geoffrey Bles, 1949. p. 89. 

    8. Bk 6, ch. 3 (g). translated by David McDuff. New York: Penguin Books, 2003, p. 414.

    9. “Death, unwilling to be defeated, is defeated; corruption is transformed; unconquerable passion is destroyed. While hell, diseased with excessive insatiability and never satisfied with the dead, is taught, even if against its will, that which it could not learn previously. For it not only ceases to claim those who are still to fall [in the future], but also sets free those already captured, being subjected to splendid devastation by the power of our Saviour.… Having preached to the spirits in hell, once disobedient, he came out as conqueror by resurrecting his temple like a beginning of our hope, and by showing to [our] nature the manner of the raising from the dead, and giving us along with it other blessings as well.” Cyril of Alexandria, Fifth Festive Letter, 29–40 (SC 372, 284). Quoted in Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev, Christ the Conqueror of Hell, New York: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press. p. 78. Commenting on this text, Metropolitan Hilarion writes: “Clearly, Cyril perceives the victory of Christ over hell and death as complete and definitive. For him, hell loses authority both over those who are in its power and those who are to become its prey in the future. Thus the descent into Hades, a single and unique action, is perceived as a timeless event. The raised body of Christ becomes the guarantee of universal salvation, the beginning of the way leading human nature to ultimate deification.” Ibid. Consider, as well, Fulton Sheen’s vision of the man on a cross. Upon attempting to take the nails out of his feet, the man said: “Let them be; for I cannot be taken down until every man, woman, and child come together to take me down”.

    10. Op.cit., p. 96-97.

    11. In this article, I have limited myself to discussing mental illness consistent with sanctity; there is, however, mental illness that is inconsistent with sanctity. See Thomas Verner Moore. Heroic Sanctity and Insanity: An Introduction to the Spiritual Life and Mental Hygiene. New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959. 

    12. “It was not only of his historical passion that he spoke when he said, ‘Lay up in your hearts these words; for it shall come to pass, that the son of man shall be delivered into the hands of men’. For as long as this world lasts, and men live and love and suffer and die in it, the passion of Christ will go on, and he will suffer it in the lives of men. Because this is so, all vocations, however varied outwardly, have fundamentally the same object, the comforting of Christ, and there is none of which this more true than that of caring for the mentally ill.” Caryll Houselander, Op.cit., p. 96. 

    Joining Humanity and Divinity

    https://www.lifeissues.net/writers/mcm/mcm_419homily12.29.2024epiphany.html

    Homily for the Epiphany of the Lord
    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    It is fitting that we exchange gifts at Christmas, because our life in Christ is a gift exchange. He came among us precisely to exchange gifts. Jesus is God the Son, the Second Person of the Trinity, who joined his divinity to a human nature. In joining a human nature, he joined divinity to humanity. Vatican II pointed out that in joining a human nature, God the Son is intimately present to every man (joined himself to every man, as it were). But he does not force himself upon anyone. His Incarnation is an offer of exchange, and the exchange is: If you give me your humanity, I will give you my divinity.  

    Jesus is both human and divine, and he offers us the opportunity to become both human and divine; for it was St. Athanasius who said: “God became man so that man might become god”.

    Parents who have their children baptized carry out this exchange; parents offer their children on their behalf. They give to Christ the humanity of their child, and in return, Christ gives that child his divinity. The result is that the child leaves the Church a different creature than when he or she arrived. That child has been deified, divinized, filled with divine grace (theosis). That child is human, but at the same time more than human. That child shares in the divine nature, and so he or she is more than human without ceasing to be human, and as a result that child has capacities that he or she would not have without divine grace, such as the power to believe what Christ has revealed about himself (faith), the capacity to hope for eternal life, and the power to love God intimately, as an intimate friend between whom secrets are shared. None of this is possible without divine grace. And of course, the child receives the 7 personal gifts of the Holy Spirit, as seeds that will unfold as the child continues to grow in faith. And there’s no doubt in my mind that parents for the most part have no idea the good they are doing for their children and for the world in offering their children for baptism. They have a sense that this is a good thing, because they arrange for baptism, even when they are not fully practicing the faith themselves. But they don’t fully realize how much good they are doing for their children and for the world in doing so.

    That is the exchange that Christ offers us. I will give you my divinity if you give me your humanity, and it is a giving that we have to renew for the rest of our lives, because we tend to drift away from him over the course of the years. We tend to get caught up in things that ultimately don’t matter; we get distracted by fear and the lures of pleasure, power, and money, and sin blinds the mind to a certain degree, which allows us to veer away even further. And if we are reflective enough, we become aware of an increasing emptiness–these things don’t fulfill us, and the reason is that we became a “son of God”, deified, divinized, sharers in the divine nature. That’s our deepest identity. In 1920, army chaplain and poet G. Studdert Kennedy wrote: 

    If I am the son of God, nothing but God will satisfy my soul; no amount of comfort, no amount of ease, no amount of pleasure, will give me peace or rest. If I had the full cup of all the world’s joys held up to me, and could drain it to the dregs, I should still remain thirsty if I had not God. If the feast of all the good things of life, pleasures and powers that have been and that are, could be laid out before me and I could eat it all at one meal, I should still be hungry if I had not God. Nor would it satisfy my soul, if I could be assured of an infinite extension of this present life at its best, apart from God. If the feast of this life’s goods could last forever, yet would I start up from the table satiated but still unsatisfied, because I had not God. There is not enough in ten material worlds to satisfy a fully-developed human soul–I must have communion with God. Whatever tends to break that communion is an enemy of mine, however much it may pretend to be a friend. However stubbornly I may stick to the delusion that I can live without Him, however closely I may cling to the idol that I put up in His place, sooner or later, in this world or in the next, the idols and delusions will have to go.

    There is another side to this exchange. In joining his divinity to our humanity, Christ joined the divine joy to the suffering of our humanity, and this is something we can experience as well. If I am a son of God, if Christ’s divinity is joined to my own humanity as a result of my own willing acceptance of that divinity, and if I have made some progress in the spiritual life, then I can sense the joy of that divinity in the midst of suffering, especially physical suffering. Although the suffering is horrible, whether it is a kidney stone, a painful illness, or the pain of dying of old age, at the very core of one’s being, there is joy. Not exhilaration, not exuberance, but a tiny and subtle flame of joy suffering cannot touch or extinguish, only illuminate. In my experience with dying patients, it is always those with real faith who, although they are experiencing some agony, have not lost charity, but are still full of gratitude, still thoughtful, still good natured. This is rarely the case with people who are dying. There is a clear difference between dying patients who have lived a life of faith, hope, and charity throughout their lives, and those who seemed to have refused the divine exchange.

    And so there is really nothing to fear when it comes to pain and suffering, if we have given our humanity to him. At the deepest center of our nature, we will detect the divine light, which illuminates and brings a degree of warmth in the midst of that suffering, so that the suffering does not overwhelm us with fear and despair. 

    Complicity

    Complicity

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Recently I encountered a woman who said to me that many people have left the Church as a direct result of the news of the unmarked graves on the property of the old Kamloops Residential School in British Columbia–her husband being one of them. Of course, there is no denying that the Residential school system, at its origin, constituted a fundamental violation of the basic human rights of the Indigenous peoples of Canada. In 1883, John A. MacDonald wrote: 

    When the school is on the reserve the child lives with its parents, who are savages; he is surrounded by savages, and though he may learn to read and write his habits, and training and mode of thought are Indian. He is simply a savage who can read and write. It has been strongly pressed on myself, as the head of the Department, that the Indian children should be withdrawn as much as possible from the parental influence, and the only way to do that would be to put them in central training industrial schools where they will acquire the habits and modes of thought of white men.

    Despite the fact that a number of First people had positive and memorable experiences in their Residential schools, the entire system originated in and existed under the umbrella of this utterly racist conceptual frame of mind and culturally genocidal purpose. It goes without saying that the Church should never have cooperated with the Canadian government in this. But they, along with the rest of the country, did cooperate with it.

    In this light, why would I want to belong to such an organization as the Roman Catholic Church? I guess it is the same reason that I choose to belong to this country, Canada, which obviously has a very sordid history–it is not on account of this country’s sins that I wish to belong to it, but on account of the tremendous goods that this country has managed to achieve throughout its long history. In belonging to the Church, I certainly belong to an institution that has a very sordid past, but is there a nation or institution in this world that does not? Is it even possible for an individual person, a saint even, not to have a relatively sordid history? Don’t we all look back at our lives and shake our heads? 

    The process of coming to belong to the Church is not in any way the same as the process of coming to belong to any other institution, such as a corporation like Pepsi or Bell Canada, or a hospital or educational institution, etc. The reason is that the object of faith is not the Church as such, but Christ. For a person to believe in Christ and to enter into his death through baptism is to become, by virtue of that baptismal immersion, a part of his Mystical Body, and that person’s eyes are still on Christ, not on his Church; for he has become that Church, a member thereof, and he is taught to say every day: “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who have trespassed against us”. The reason for this is that he remains a sinner, but one who has been “deified”, filled with divine grace, not by virtue of anything he has done, but simply by virtue of the unutterable mercy of God. His life is now a battle to overcome the effects of his wounded nature, namely, death, concupiscence, and the dulling of the mind. His life will therefore be one of continual reform, which is why the Church as a whole is in continual reform, for the Church is made up of sinful and flawed human beings whose minds are to a degree blinded by sin. There is no getting around this. And that is why the study of the history of the Church is a rather painful experience for the Catholic who has an idealized image of the Church, as a child has an idealized image of his own mother and father–the child chooses not to see what he simply does not want to see.

    Those who choose to leave the Church because highly scandalous behaviour on the part of clergy or religious has been reported in the news, such as the operation of Residential schools and the abusive behaviour that took place in those institutions, or the clerical sex abuse scandals, etc., seem to believe that they have no complicity in the sins of the nation and the sins of the Church. But we were all complicit at the time–practically everyone operated within the arrogance of a Eurocentric worldview that looked down upon Indigenous culture, a worldview that kept us from appreciating its beauty and value, and we are all complicit today in the perpetuation of the injustices that First people continue to endure, such as lack of clean drinking water on the reserves among other things. And we are complicit in the injustices that Canadian young people and young families are forced to endure (i.e., housing prices and the cost of living) as a result of political and economic decisions made by an unjust and incompetent government that we put into power and kept in power. This notion of universal complicity is not a new concept, by any means. In 1923, G. Studdert Kennedy wrote:

    Not long ago, a man was sentenced to ten years penal servitude for holding up a post office and shooting at a policeman. He was one of the army of unemployed in London. He had a wife and two children; he paid 8s. 3d [8 shillings, 3 pence] a week for two rooms in Whitechapel, which were so dark that the gas had to be kept burning all the time; he had fought in the army and been wounded, and he had done 10 weeks work in 18 months. He was not a good character, being weak and easily led; but in any decent community rightly ordered, he would in all probability have led quite a decent life. But in “justice“ he is to serve ten years. I am not disposed to rail at the courts – I think the sentence was inevitable for the protection of society, but purely for that reason, and not because it is just. He is suffering as much for the sin of the world, for your sin and mine, as for his own (The Wicket Gate, p. 73).

    A person who leaves the Church or refuses to have anything to do with the Church because of her past sins has, at the very least, committed the fallacy of judging the past by the standards of today; to do so is to misunderstand the nature of human progress. I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past, and what I know today was the result of a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and as it unfolded. In other words, it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. All of us are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person be changed for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today? This means that if we are changing for the better, as we have a responsibility to do, then we can reasonably expect to experience disappointments when looking back on our lives. Individually, we cannot help but judge our own past by the standards we currently live by, but it seems we have no choice but to forgive ourselves, because the standards we hold up for ourselves today are the result of that experience and our own decision to reflect upon it, in light of moral principles we have discovered along the way–not to mention the resolution to improve. But for some reason we judge others’ histories with much less patience than we do our own; we overlook that the growing process is the same for everyone, every nation, and every institution. And of course, that does not necessarily cancel our responsibility for certain past decisions–one may still have to make reparation for a decision made long ago, perhaps a criminal decision or simply an immoral decision that left another or others profoundly hurt. But why would I walk away from the Church that Christ established— the Church that abandoned him on Holy Thursday night—, for being exactly the kind of developing organism that I have always been and cannot otherwise be?

    Our Deeds Go Before Us

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Last month I was out with a few fellas from our parish men’s prayer group, and the reading our leader gave out for us to reflect upon (“The Great Project of Our Life”, Msgr. Fred Dolan ) contained a Jewish tale that, after reading it, I knew I would use at some point. A rabbi in Toronto told this story at a funeral; he said that in a kingdom long, long ago, there was a woman who had three friends. One of them she adored; they were in touch every day. As for the second friend, the two of them would get together once a month for a coffee. As for the third friend, they were rarely ever in touch. One day, however, this woman was summoned to the castle by the King. When she received that summons, she was terrified. And so she called her first friend, the one whom she adored and asked: “Can you please go with me to the castle? I’m really frightened.” The friend said, “No. Forget it, I will not go with you.” Terribly disillusioned, she turned to the second friend, filled with hope. The second friend, however, said: “I will go with you as far as the doors of the castle, but I will not take one step beyond that point.” On the verge of despair, she turned to her third friend, without expecting a great deal. To her great surprise, the third friend said: “I would be delighted to go with you. Not only will I accompany you, I will go ahead of you to prepare the way to make sure that everything is ready for you to see the King.” 

    What does this mean? The first friend, the one who was adored, represents all our money. When we die, our money does us no good whatsoever; it will not even go with us to the castle. We’ve all heard the old adage that we’ll never see a hearse pulling a U-Haul trailer–we can’t take anything with us. But what about the second friend, the one who would go all the way to the gates of the castle but no further? This friend represents our family, who will be there at our side when we are on our deathbed, but they cannot go any further than that. Who, then, is this mysterious third friend, the one who will accompany us and even go ahead of us to prepare the way? That third friend is our mitzvot, which is the plural of mitzvah, which is Hebrew for our good deeds. Our deeds accompany us and even go ahead of us to prepare the way for us to meet the King of kings. 

    This is a wonderful tale that illustrates what ultimately matters in this life, which is “the day to day leaving behind us a trail of mitzvot”, that is, good deeds. 

    There is a real unity between love of God and love of others. The more a person loves God, the more that person loves all who belong to God, and human beings belong to God. That’s what holiness is–love of God and neighbor. Holiness is not the same as piety or devotional practices. These are certainly good, but a person can easily be pious and fervently religious without being holy, that is, without the love of God and neighbor, as Jesus implies in Matthew: Although you prophesied in my name, cast out demons in my name, worked miracles in my name, I never knew you (Mt 7, 21-23). And so, appearances can be deceiving.

    Mother Teresa said very often: “Not all of us can do great things, but we can do small things with great love”. Doing small things with great love moves this world forward in ways that are beyond our purview. We cannot see the effects of those small acts of great love, but God is not subject to the passing of time, so all our deeds in time are present to God all at once, eternally. Our good deeds are the sacrifices that rise to him like the sweet smoke of incense–the incense at a liturgy is just a symbolic representation of these small acts of great love, which include our prayers. Your day to day labors, if they are carried out with great love for God and neighbor, are that pleasing incense; they are genuine acts of worship, no matter what that work is. I met a former student of mine recently while taking out the garbage–he was the garbage man who grabbed and dumped my trash can. He kept trying to justify his job, as if he was embarrassed by it. But there is nothing to be embarrassed about. That work has great dignity, and it is utterly important work, and if it is done with great love for the common good, it is holy and has eternal value. Our good deeds are like the materials that we lay at the feet of Christ, who takes those materials and builds a mansion with them, one that will be our eternal dwelling place, as Christ says in the gospel of John: “In my Father’s house, there are many mansions” (Jn 14, 2). 

    English poet William Wordsworth said: The best portion of a good man’s life is his little, nameless, unremembered acts of kindness and love (From ‘Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798.’). And that’s the point of sacrificial offerings to God, especially the Old Testament sacrifices, to offer Him the best portion of what we have, the first fruits of the harvest or the first born of the flock. The best portion of our life is our little, nameless, and unremembered acts of kindness and love.

    Thoughts on Free-Choice, Damnation, and Grace

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Human beings certainly have free-choice, for without it, we would have no sense of responsibility. But that sense of responsibility–for we do hold others responsible for their decisions–is a clear indication that we are free. However, contrary to Jean Paul Sartre, I don’t believe we are absolutely free. I’m quite convinced that our freedom is limited by a multitude of factors: ignorance, passion, unhealed memories and emotional wounds that distort our perception and understanding of things and people and that keep us from an accurate assessment of things, etc. These factors in the lives of others are for the most part invisible to us–even to ourselves. Only God, who is omniscient, knows the human heart, and so we are rightly commanded not to judge the hearts or guilt of others (Mt 7, 1-5). 

    Years ago, when I held an almost absolutist notion of freedom, I had a tendency to judge, because in my mind at least, I was able to. That absolutist notion of freedom allowed me to leave out any consideration of the myriad of factors that limit human freedom and responsibility–if no such factors exist, then the sinner is completely and entirely responsible for his choices, and I am free to pronounce judgement. But those factors do exist. All we have to do is look back at our own lives to when we were younger and made very bad decisions, even sinful decisions. The point I wish to make is the following: free-choice involves options, and each option contains finite goods, some of which are not contained in the other options, which is the reason we deliberate. The object of the will is the “good”, and so the will is drawn to the finite goods contained in each of these options. If any option contained all the goods that are found in the others, there would be no choice to make–I would not deliberate but would necessarily choose that option. But I continue to deliberate because no option contains all the finite goods that are found in the others. Decision is the “cutting off” (Latin: decidere: to cut off) of the deliberation process.

    Now, let’s say I know that option #3 is contrary to God’s will–it may be an act of adultery, or theft, or lying under oath, etc. What draws me to this option is not the evil as such, but the good or goods that the option contains, such as, in the case of adultery, the alleviation of loneliness, the comfort of companionship, the feeling of being loved or the feeling of being important, etc.,–let’s say this woman is saying all the right things at the right time. I know, on the other hand, that this is seriously wrong, but I just don’t believe I have the strength of will to deny my passions–probably because I haven’t had a whole lot of practice, for let’s assume I was not raised by religious parents who stressed the importance of self-denial, who never observed Lent, much less encouraged me to fast and pray, and of course I was raised in a postmodern society that encourages young people to follow our dreams and passions, etc. I would argue that in this imaginary scenario, my choice to be unfaithful was really not a choice to be unfaithful as such, it was fundamentally a choice for the finite goods contained in that option. It was a deficient option to be sure, thus an evil option, and I was aware of that, which is why the experience of guilt results from the decision. I am all too aware that it was a selfish decision, and I am responsible for it, but it was the limited goods in that option that were the motivating principles of that choice. I accepted the evil (as opposed to ‘intend’), that is, the deficiency of that option–which I was obligated not to–, but what I intended primarily in choosing that option (an option I willed) were the goods contained therein. I am indeed responsible for choosing that option, the deficiency of which I understood and in principle could have rejected–otherwise I am completely without responsibility. But how much responsibility do I have? God knows the degree of my freedom, limited as it is by a myriad of factors partially hidden from me, because God is omniscient. Although my choice was a sinful choice, was it essentially a rejection of the Supreme Good Itself (God)? I don’t think so; rather, it was a choice “for” certain goods that are congruent with my nature. That is not all, of course. I knew it was wrong in the larger scheme of things and that there were better options, but accompanied by fear, loneliness, anxiety, weakness of will, etc., I freely chose the sinful option. Did that choice amount to a decision for eternal alienation from God? Did I really look God in the face and spit? I would say not at all, even were I to feel no remorse and to have no use for religion. God knows all the many factors that contributed to my decision to leave religion behind. But it is not as if one option was simply God in all his unlimited goodness and love which I rejected–that’s impossible anyways, for the Supreme Good contains all the good contained in the entire ensemble of all possible alternatives. But it was a deficient option (evil option) that contained finite goods that I was drawn to, and the ultimate motivating principle for my being drawn to these goods is my being drawn to God, who is the Good as such, without limits. 

    To continue with this phenomenology of sin, I know that I should discipline myself so that I can avoid those choices and choose in accordance with God’s will, but in this case I did not. Before I get to Confession, I am shot as a result of a robbery. Did I freely and totally reject God and choose hell? As was said above, I did freely reject the option I knew would please God, so I made a choice inconsistent with His friendship, and thus wounded my friendship with him, but did I totally and intentionally reject God in all his goodness and beauty? I don’t think so. Do I deserve the pain of purgatory? Yes I do. I need to experience the hurt that I’ve caused others (i.e., my wife, children, relatives, etc.). But do I deserve a never ending torment? I cannot for the life of me see it. Is it possible for me to refuse to repent of that sin? I would have to say yes. But did my choice amount to choosing darkness for all eternity? I don’t think so. I don’t want darkness, for there is nothing to love about darkness; for it is empty. Indeed, I am my own worst enemy when I sin, because I don’t want darkness and emptiness, but I choose a course of action that leads to darkness and emptiness. I was deluded in believing that the pleasure of adultery, or the pleasure of stolen goods, etc., was going to last forever and bring me perpetual joy, which I ultimately seek–because I pre-consciously seek God in every one of my choices. It did not last forever; rather, it left me empty. Again, there’s my ignorance. So what would motivate a person after death to persist in rebellion against God? After all, it is not as if the state after death leaves a person frozen and completely immobile; just consider the parable of the Rich Man and Lazarus: “…he cried out, ‘Father Abraham, have pity on me. Send Lazarus to dip the tip of his finger in water and cool my tongue, for I am suffering torment in these flames.’” At the very least, the rich man is no longer completely indifferent to Lazarus. When that didn’t work, he said: “‘Then I beg you, father, send him to my father’s house, for I have five brothers, so that he may warn them, lest they too come to this place of torment’” (Lk 16, 24; 27-28). After I am dead, what competing finite good exists that I choose instead of life and light? I have no idea. The illusion of pride perhaps? The fact that I have become my own god? Could anyone choose that perpetually, over the Supreme Good? No one has been able to explain that to me. Some do insist ‘there is no competing good’, one simply has to live eternally within the state of mind one is in, which is a state of darkness and emptiness, for ever and ever and ever and ever, ad infinitum. But what could a person do to deserve a retributive punishment that is unending? A fling with another woman during a difficult period of his/her life? Perhaps it was not a difficult period of a person’s life, perhaps this person is just self-centered and irreligious. Indeed, God does not owe anyone eternal life or mercy. Such a person dies his/her own worst enemy, and there is nothing anyone can do to escape the hell they put themselves in as a result of a life of sin. But what can we on the outside expect from God, according to what He has revealed about himself? We can expect mercy, because his justice was revealed as unfathomable mercy. 

    There is real irony in those who, on the one hand, insist that the divine mercy is unfathomable, but on the other hand reveal themselves to be the most brutal of infernalists; for the doctrine of never ending hell makes God’s mercy quite fathomable, limited, and understandable according to our own limits. Some descriptions of hell do much worse than render the divine mercy fathomable; they render the divine justice patently absurd, i.e., Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and others like it found in the writings of some saints. We are the ones who say “I’ll never forgive that person as long as I live”, not God. He instructs us to forgive 70 x 7 (490 is the numerical value of the biblical Hebrew word “tamim” which means to “complete,” “perfect,” or “finished”; God’s forgiveness is perfect). Would God command us to forgive 70 x 7, a symbolic number that corresponds to his divine nature, which is without limit, while He Himself refuses to forgive once the blanket of death covers our eyes? I can only doubt it. A man’s sin is in his unjustified acceptance of the deficiency of his choice, and so that choice deserves kolasis (chastisement), even aionios kolasis (Mt 25, 46), a chastisement that lasts “ages of ages”. But unending? 

    A number of people have raised the following objection or something similar: “There is a danger in trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience; we apply limited human logic to mysteries that transcend our comprehension. God is always more.”

    This is an interesting objection. Of course, it depends on what we mean by “trying to understand God’s mercy and justice through human experience”. If one means that we impose limits on God, i.e., anthropomorphism, then there is a sense in which this is true. But God became flesh, joined a human nature, precisely in order to reveal Himself, that we might understand him through our natural mode of knowing, that is, through our own human experience. Christ reveals God through his human words, through his own human experience, which he shares in common with us. He speaks a human language and reacts emotionally as well. That is precisely how we understand him, in the same way we understand anything else–you step on a thumb tack and yell out in pain; I understand you are in pain through my own past experience of pain. 

    When Jesus says: “Father, forgive them, they know not what they do”, I understand his words through my own experience of ignorance, which lessens responsibility, which I too have experienced—I’ve done things that I didn’t realize were worse than what I thought, but I just didn’t realize it at the time, for I lacked experience. But that is how we understand Christ, through our own experience. God revealed Himself through a human nature, that of Christ, and when it comes to the mercy and justice of God, he too speaks in a way that we can understand, because it corresponds to our own experience. We know through experience that sacrifice is the language of love. Christ sacrifices his life for us. We understand what that means through our own experience of making sacrifices. When we realize, through faith, that Jesus is God, and that God the Father gave up His only begotten Son for us, we understand this analogically, through our own experience of our love for our children. We also know, through the experience of the limits of our own love, that His love exceeds what we are capable of. Moreover, when we read about the divine justice, again, we understand this through our own experience of justice. However, when we are expected to believe that God’s justice is completely incongruent with our own in the sense that we would not impose an infinite sentence of unending suffering on another, but God would, we experience a cognitive dissonance, one that flies in the face of all we understand about justice. Such a teaching cannot be understood analogically. To insist that “God is a mystery that is beyond us” does not resolve the dissonance, but merely buries it. Justice implies that the punishment fits the crime, and a good judge must, to the best of his ability, take into consideration the intention of the person as well as what he knew and did not know or understand. A 66 year old man from Norwalk, Connecticut received a 675 year prison sentence for sexually abusing an 11 year old relative. Obviously, he cannot serve that. But let’s do a thought experiment. He can now live for 1000 years. After 675 years, he has paid his debt and ought to be released, otherwise it is an inadequate prison sentence. We seem to intuitively understand that justice demands a limit to the punishment, for there is a limit to the crime, for the criminal is limited in every way. Now, if one maintains that God imposes a punishment not of 675 years, but infinity, for a person who was let’s say not a Christian, not baptised, or who lived a very selfish and irreligious life, there is simply nothing in our experience by which we can grasp or make sense out of that, unlike every other aspect of divine revelation; for it is the only thing in divine revelation that is entirely incongruent with our own mode of knowing. Unimaginable suffering that does not end is unintelligible as a mode of justice. From our point of view, it is absurd. But the infernalist claims that from God’s point of view, it is love. Faith is assent to what is beyond reason but consistent with reason, not what is below reason and absurd. Nicholas Berdyaev writes: 

    There is something servile in the interpretation of sin as crime which infringes the will of God and calls for legal proceedings on the part of God. To overcome the servile conception means movement within, movement in depth. Sin is dividedness, a state of deficiency, incompleteness, dissociation, enslavement, hatred, but it is not disobedience and not formal violation of the will of God. It is impossible and inadmissible to construct an ontology of evil. The idea of an eternal hell is, therefore, absurd and evil. Evil is but a pathway, a testing, a disruption; to fall into sin is above all else a testing of freedom. Man moves towards the light through the darkness. Dostoyevsky revealed this more profoundly than anyone (The Divine and the Human, p. 89). 

    There is a real sense in which I am what I am today because of the imperfections and mistakes of my past. What I know today was the result of a decision, to be sure, a decision to continually reflect upon my life as it was unfolding and unfolded, and so it was a result of a continued reflection upon my experiences, which are now past. I and everyone else are expected to grow from experience, but how can a person change for the better unless he was in some ways worse than he is today? That is why judging the past using the standards of today is irrational, because the standards of today were the result of reflection upon what is now past; for we are here today, precisely where we are morally, as a result of that past and our decision, as a society, to reflect upon our past decisions and their repercussions. That’s how a culture changes and truly progresses. That does not necessarily cancel our responsibility for certain past decisions–one may still have to make reparation for a decision made long ago, perhaps a criminal decision or simply an immoral decision that left another or others profoundly hurt.

    Finally, consider the following objection: “If we can freely choose love and goodness, then it’s also possible to freely reject them. And if someone were to persistently reject God, even in the face of His mercy, then the separation they choose may well be eternal”.

    Perhaps this is correct. If someone were to persistently reject God, then God must allow that person to do so, if God is Love, for love does not compel. But this becomes very mysterious when we consider the fact that God did not allow you and me to reject Him, for while we were sinners, Christ died for us (Rom 5, 8). Consider the gospel of John: “You did not choose me, but I chose you” (15, 16). My freedom was restored by grace. Moreover, it is my experience that most Catholics hold a semi-Pelagian position in that they naturally believe that grace came to us precisely because prior to the infusion of grace, we made a free choice to open ourselves to God, and so God responded. But no, this is a heretical position. “While we were sinners” means while we were slaves, and slaves are not entirely free. We were unable to merit any grace; for we were unable to do anything pleasing to God that would merit a sharing in the divine nature. Otherwise, we are not saved by grace, but by our own initial choice to say ‘yes’ to God. Grace is utterly gratuitous. You and I were saved by grace, and so our cooperation with grace was itself a grace. 

    Freedom is a task to be achieved. It is not a homogeneous state that endures unchanging throughout the many changes in our lives. I was not as “free” in the past as I am today–and here I do not refer to political freedom, but moral freedom, which implies love, knowledge, and responsibility. Moreover, we often look upon the relationship between free-will and one’s ability to reject a course of action (such as the decision to form a friendship, or to marry and remain faithful to another, etc) as enjoying a positive correlation. But this may not be the case. Consider a faithfully married couple, married for 40 years. At the start of their relationship, they were more free to choose another option, for example, to pursue other relationships. And yet, they did not love one another then as they love one another now, after 40 years–their love now has been tested; it is stronger and purer. Are they more able to say to one another: “Well, there are other options for us, so let’s pursue those and open our marriage or just call it quits”? No, they are not; rather, that is far less likely to happen. And yet, their freedom is much greater than it was at the beginning. The greater the love, the greater the freedom, which in this case also means the less likely they are to freely choose to dissolve it; the less love there is, the greater the likelihood that they will dissolve it. Similarly, it is far less likely for a saintly person to reject God than it is for a not so saintly person, but the saintly person has a much greater freedom, a much deeper knowledge and certainly a greater responsibility than the not so saintly person. The paradox is that grace increases our freedom, but it also makes us less likely to reject it. Hence, St. Edith Stein writes:

    All merciful love can descend upon anyone. We believe that it does. And now, should there
    be souls who exclude themselves from it permanently? In principle, the possibility is not
    excluded. In fact, it can become infinitely unlikely, precisely through what prevenient Grace is able
    to accomplish in the soul. This Grace can only knock, and there are souls that open themselves
    at even this quiet call. Others let it go unheeded. But then this Grace can worm its way into these
    souls, and more and more expand itself in them. The greater the space that it occupies in such an
    illegitimate way, the more unlikely it will be that the soul closes itself off. It already sees the
    world now in the light of Grace…The more ground that Grace wins from that which occupied it
    before, the more ground it deprives from the free acts directed against it. And, in principle, there
    are no limits to this displacement. When all the impulses against the spirit of light are displaced
    from the soul, then a free decision against it [the spirit of light] becomes infinitely unlikely. For
    this reason, the belief in the boundlessness of God’s love and Grace, as well as the hope for universal salvation, are justified… 

    This is an interesting and mysterious paradox: that grace slowly and gradually deprives a soul of the ground for the free acts directed against it, and yet such displacement in fact marks an increase in freedom, for “The Lord is the Spirit, and where the Spirit of the Lord is, there is freedom” (2 Co 3, 17). Those in darkness are slaves to sin, and they really do not understand the full implications of the choices they make. Indeed, Christ himself said: “Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do” (Lk 23, 34), and for the most part, we don’t know what we are doing–at least not entirely–, especially when our choices plunge us more and more deeply into darkness.

    The Normality of Struggle

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    Struggle is a normal and necessary part of human existence, with or without the Fall of Man. After the Fall of Man (Gn 3), the struggles involved in everyday human life did not suddenly arise; rather, they simply became difficult, frustrating, and unenjoyable. The reason is that after the Fall, man, wounded by concupiscence, seeks rest without struggle. Prior to the Fall, daily struggles that are part and parcel of human existence would have been as enjoyable and exhilarating as a well played game or sport. In this light, rest and struggle are not opposites.

    Creation itself, the bringing into being of all things, involves a kind of tension or a battle of sorts: 

    In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep; and the Spirit of God was moving over the face of the waters.

    Water is a symbol for chaos, for it is powerful, destructive and without form, and thus creation is depicted as a bringing order out of chaos, or form and content out of what is formless and empty, or light from darkness, as a sculptor stands before a heavy slab of marble that will resist his efforts to bring form and order out of its formless posture. Like an artist who contemplates his finished work, God contemplates all He has made and “behold, it was very good”. Rest comes after the struggle, and there is no rest without it. Beauty is its fruit.

    Work is holy, but work is fundamentally a struggle, a kind of emulation of God who creates: “And the Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.” It was only as a result of the Fall that work–or what is humanly good to do–became burdensome to man: “…in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life,…In the sweat of your face you shall eat bread”. 

    The spiritual life is a battle, specifically a battle of love. It is only a battle against the self because it is a “battle of love”, and inordinate self-love destroys love and is the resistance that makes the spiritual life a genuine struggle. Without a spiritual life, human life is empty, for it is the spirit that brings direction (meaning) to the matter of the universe, and so human life as a whole is a battle, specifically a struggle to achieve love, which is unitive and creative, and thus it is a battle for universal fraternity (the kingdom of God). Inserting struggle into our lives is God’s way of dealing with us: “We should be grateful to the Lord our God, for putting us to the test, as he did our forefathers. Recall how he dealt with Abraham, and how he tried Isaac, and all that happened to Jacob in Syrian Mesopotamia while he was tending the flocks of Laban, his mother’s brother. Not for vengeance did the Lord put them in the crucible to try their hearts, nor has he done so with us. It is by way of admonition that he chastises those who are close to him” (Jud 8, 25-27). To chastise is to prune, which a gardener does for the good of the plant being pruned, that it may bear more fruit. And so a life without the struggle and dialectic of opposites, that is, a life of rest without arduous struggle bears very little fruit and leaves a person without a great deal of depth and light.

    G. Studdert Kennedy writes: 

    “Love endures all things.” The word of “endure” is translated patience, and so is long-suffering, but “endures” is the patience that works and plods at things. Love is a fighter, a reformer, not content with things as they are. “Endures” means “conquers through patience,” it is that which overcomes the world. Patience that fights and wears things down until they become expressive of order and love. It stands on the rock and is patience born of faith and hope in presence of love’s very self. It has the sense of going on along a road or climbing a hill and never giving up but going steadily at it. There is the description of what love does, it ends as this life, which consists in walking on steadily, will do. There’s this much joy in it, that the road gets easier the more faithfully we keep on. The first hills of childhood seem terribly hard and so the troubles of the young are harder than those of the old because the young do not realise that the flat part will come later, it won’t be all hills. But patience is its own reward and there is never a moment when we don’t need it. The troubles of a child seem quite heart-breaking, e.g. when it tells its first lie and is ostracized by its parents who hear it crying in the next room and cannot go to it. At last we must get our feet firmly set and know that if sorrow comes we will go through it. If we keep close to Love we shall win in the end. …The world is made for love and demands it. We are toiling and working out the problem of the perfection of love and we must learn to live in unity in the human race, bearing each other’s burdens and fighting the battle of love.” The Best of Studdert Kennedy, p. 190-193.

    Thoughts on Trinity and Personhood

    Deacon Douglas McManaman

    In the first book of Maccabees, we read: “In those days Mattathias, son of John, son of Simeon, a priest of the family of Joarib, left Jerusalem and settled in Modein” (2, 1). This kind of description is typical in the bible. The reason is that a person is fundamentally a plurality. That’s why the doctrine of the Trinity is so important, more important than a pure and rational monotheism. God is three Persons in One divine nature, not one in three. “Three” must always precede the One, and the One must be seen in relation to the three, and not within the conceptual framework of a metaphysical oneness. God is a plurality of three equal Persons: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit. The Oneness of God is the Oneness of the three equal Persons: “I pray not only for them, but also for those who will believe in me through their word, so that they may all be one, as you, Father, are in me and I in you, that they also may be in us, that the world may believe that you sent me. And I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me” (Jn 17, 20-23).

    The human person is created in the image and likeness of God; but God is a Trinity of Persons. It follows that although you and I are individual persons, one being, we are first and foremost a kind of plurality. For example, my own human existence has a place within history, and it is a historically relational existence. I am related to the past; I cannot be understood apart from the past. The human person is born from a mother, and that child has just spent his/her first nine months of life deep within her womb, nurtured and sustained by that mother, placed in her arms immediately after delivery. That child is completely and utterly dependent upon the care of the parents for many years to come, who in turn are dependent upon innumerable others. And so my existence is related to the past in that others before me have made my life possible–I inherited their matter, their proclivities, talents, I’ve been positively influenced by people in my own family and by certain people outside of my family, such as my teachers, many of whom I have forgotten, not because they were insignificant, but by virtue of the limits of memory, which in turn allows me to further depend on others; and my existence influences others who will live after I am gone, who will have been influenced by my life and my sacrifices in some way. And so “my life” is not purely mine. It is not an isolated existence, but a thoroughly relational one. It is the product of the love and labor of countless others.

    Our fundamental purpose is to struggle to bring about a universal fraternity, a plurality in unity, a brotherhood that sin destroys. Vatican II points out: “Christians should cooperate, willingly and wholeheartedly, in building an international order based on genuine respect for legitimate freedom and on a brotherhood of universal friendship” (GS 88). Christ came to gather, but sin always divides.