Heaven and Home

Posted on July 19, 2014 by admin

When I was in the Franciscan seminary,  my novice director encouraged me to view things “under the aspect of eternity”. However, the setup of Western society is such that if we’re young and from a materially prosperous enough background, we can maintain the illusion that lasting happiness can be found on Earth. We may not have lost anyone close to us. Media stars are mainly the young and the beautiful. We segregate the aged into retirement communities. We convince ourselves that youth lasts forever.

We’re at a point when our environment and our health can be so managed that we’re rarely physically uncomfortable. The elimination of the “genetically unfit”, or of the simply inconvenient – through abortion and euthanasia – shields us from another type of suffering. The increasing gulf between rich and poor spares the more privileged much unpleasantness. Finally, technology has provided us with endless opportunities for amusement and distraction. A person can make it into his/her twenties or even thirties never having experienced deep suffering. “Life is good” – and will always remain so; “don’t worry, be happy” seems to be a manageable long-term proposition.

As one gets older, the illusion that ultimate happiness can be found on Earth inevitably fails. If we live long enough, we will suffer the loss of parents, siblings, friends, and perhaps even children. If we live long enough, we will experience the pains and limitations of aging. We will experience broken relationships that our best efforts can’t reconcile; injustices, betrayals, and misunderstandings. If we are reasonably compassionate, we will suffer through the suffering of those we love. If we’re reasonably reflective, the cycle of amusements won’t completely satisfy. At whatever age suffering hits us, the necessity of Heaven becomes clearer. If we’re honest enough with ourselves, we come to see that we have desires that are foundational to who we are, that Earth can’t satisfy.

What heaven offers is perfect fulfillment of the desires of every human heart: 1) a place of belonging and welcome; 2) a place of unutterable, aching beauty; 3) a place where every hope and dream and longing is satisfied; 4) a place of fellowship, where every conflict is resolved; 5) a place where every tear is dried; 6) and all of the above forever and ever and ever. It is striking how prevalent some of those themes are great literature (defined, at least partly, as “literature I really enjoy”).

For example, regarding “Heaven as a place where every longing is satisfied.” I was delighted that the editor of one edition of The Wind in the Willows singled out “The Piper at the Gates of Dawn” as a chapter that all readers find particularly moving. It’s a powerful, haunting scene: the Mole and the Water Rat, searching on the river through the night for Otter’s lost child, find him, at dawn, on a little island, in the care of the nature god Pan. In simply beholding Pan, their deepest longings are fulfilled. They are overwhelmed, not with “just” love: with worship. I don’t know if the author, Kenneth Grahame, was a Christian, but how beautifully he captures the almost painful sweetness of the Beatific Vision! The vision of Pan’s glory flees as soon as it appears, leaving an ache and a memory. But the human heart longs for such a vision to last forever and ever.

The longing for a beauty and sweetness that last forever is captured also in Keats’ “Ode to a Grecian Urn” (unfortunately, reminding me of the joke, “What’s a Grecian earn?””Oh, about 5 or 6 drachmas a day” – but I digress). The lovers’ kiss depicted on the urn is frozen in time, eternal. We do experience some moments we want to last forever – but they pass. I still vividly remember when my oldest brother’s best friend, Terry O’Kelly, took my sister and me for a blast of a day to Warren Dunes State Park on the shore of Lake Michigan. We ran up and down dunes, dove in the lake, and best of all, swung out the side of a large dune on a rope tied to a tree, dropping down into the soft sand. We bought a bushel of fresh-picked peaches on the way home and ate them as the juice ran down our chins. It was a day out of Eden with the fun-loving, easygoing father I never had. Our hearts are made for days like that, fruit like that, forever and ever.

In the second book of C. S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy”, Perelandra, the main character, Ransom, experiences an unfallen paradise on the planet Venus. It is a world where everything is provided for to one’s heart’s delight, and everything permitted except sin. In the third book of the trilogy, That Hideous Strength, the angel of the planet Venus descends to Earth, and the overwhelming scent of that paradise fills the nostrils of Ransom and his friends.

Only Ransom recognizes the scent, but all are overwhelmed with tears of aching longing – a longing so sweet that it’s almost a fulfillment. For Ransom, it is the home to which he longs to return; for them, it’s the home they’ve never been to but always knew, somehow, existed. St. Augustine prays, “Our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee”; we might also say, “Our hearts are homeless till they rest in Heaven”. As Lewis writes in the last Chronicle of Narnia, The Last Battle, we love Earth so much because for brief moments, it looks just a bit like our true home, Heaven.

In The Lord of the Rings, the Elves are pilgrims and wayfarers in Middle Earth. They participate in Middle Earth’s events, but their hearts are elsewhere. Frodo, the trilogy’s hero, loves them, but he is also saddened by their detachment from him and from all things of Middle Earth. The interior gaze of the Elves is always on the unseen – as Tolkien notes, they live in the seen and the unseen worlds at once. Their hearts long for the Undying Lands, their homeland and their ultimate destination, which closely resemble the Christian concept of Heaven.

After the Ring is destroyed, Frodo, too, can find no comfort in anything but the eternal life and joy found in the Undying Lands. At the trilogy’s end, his longing is fulfilled: he sails with the Elves, and one night he smells “a sweet fragrance…the grey rain-curtain turned all to silver glass and was rolled back, and he beheld white shores and beyond them a far green country under a swift sunrise.” He is home at last.

Literature is filled with examples: Alice’s encounter with the fawn in the forest where nothing has names; the brief moment of connection between Gene and Phineas in A Separate Peace; the poignancy of Holden Caulfield’s heartfelt wish – to be a “catcher in the rye”- in the book of the same name; the sweet melancholy of Ariel’s parting song in “The Tempest”; the glimpse of Christ’s majesty under the form of a hovering falcon in Gerard Manley Hopkins’ magnificent poem, “The Windhover”. The window on the eternal, on what we were made for, opens for the slightest moment, and we are wounded with a taste, a touch of what is beyond our wildest hopes. With St. Augustine, we cry out, “I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.”

 

 

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The Love that Dare not Speak…Part II

Posted on July 11, 2014 by admin

(Please note: in the following, I use the term “gay” for people who have “come out” and either practice same-sex genital acts, or are open to such acts. “People with SSA” is a broader category, including both “gay” people as well as people with unwanted SSA who neither practice nor are open to same-sex genital acts.)

Certain family constellations or childhood and adolescent experiences have been consistently linked with the development of male SSA. All are based on the boy’s failure to attach to and identify with his father, leading to a starving for healthy male affection and bonding; or a failure to connect healthily with same-sex peers through competition, companionship, and rough-and-tumble play, also leading to a hunger for male connection. The trauma of not making the connection leads to 1) “defensive detachment”, in which the boy puts up an emotional wall against the father or male peers to avoid the continued hurt; and 2) sexualization of the needs for paternal and male peer connection, experienced as SSA.

The classic, but certainly not universal scenario is of the passive, abusive, or emotionally distant father and the dominating, smothering mother. Another more benign scenario involves a father whose job or health has unavoidably led to extended absences from the family, especially during the crucial window of male identification with the father, between ages 2-5. It is crucial to note that this is not about “blaming the parents”, since the psychological trauma can have so much to do with the SSA male’s perceptions of parental connectedness.

A third scenario includes healthy connections with parents, but a disruption of male peer relationships upon entering school, for a variety of reasons. These can include childhood illnesses such as rheumatic fever or severe asthma, preventing participation in sports; or a more sensitive, artistic nature making connection with male peers more difficult (although in this case, a good connection with Dad goes a long way). A fourth scenario involves sexual abuse by an older male before or at the start of puberty. This leads to confusion about sexual identity: it is particularly outrageous that gay affirmative therapy frequently seeks to confirm this confusion as “gay identity” when it is so clearly rooted in abuse – effectively compounding the abuse.

In any case, the God-given, powerful need for a boy to connect with his father; to separate appropriately from his mother; and to connect healthily with same-sex peers gets short-circuited, usually quite early in life. This need gets sexualized as puberty kicks in (although sexual feelings may begin well before then), and it is experienced as a deeply rooted drive. However, acting out sexually with other males ends up in disaster: it is “scratching the wrong itch”, since the sex actually blocks the paternal and peer connection so desperately needed.

The lack of male identification makes heterosexual men and masculinity seem mysterious to the SSA male; leads to a sense of inferiority around such men; and results in a sense of greater comfortability with females. This is why gay men often have many (male) sexual partners, but their closest friends are much more commonly female. That is, although very few gay men wish to be female, they generally experience the masculine as “different”, and the feminine as “familiar”.

The main argument for gay marriage and for the steady pressure to forbid any discrimination against gay people in the workplace, even for religious institutions, states that gay people are an oppressed minority exactly as are, e.g., African-Americans or Latinos. Underlying such an argument is that gay people are “born that way”. Hence, just as it would be wrong to wrong to deny marriage or employment at a religious institution ot other minorities, so it would be wrong to deny these rights to gay people.

There are several problems with such an approach. First, whereas there is scant evidence to support the gay-as-genetically-determined hypothesis, ancestry (and therefore, genetics) obviously underlie African-American and Latino identity. While a person’s identity as African-American or Latino gives me some broad information about his/her ancestry, it gives me no information whatsoever about his/her behavior. In contrast, gay identity is defined by participation in or openness to a particular kind of behavior, not by ancestry or genetics: gay people are those who are either practicing same-sex genital acts, or are open to them. Christianity, orthodox Judaism, and Islam (although the latter deals with this with a harshness the former two find abhorrent) all view such behavior as immoral, so that those working in their institutions should neither model nor condone such behavior.

Second, because all people, whatever race or nationality, possess gender, all people are  capable of contracting the legal union of two people of opposite genders that is marriage. To so alter the definition of marriage that it can include two people of the same gender is to destroy marriage altogether. Any two (or more) people are free to contract legally any number of lifelong associations. However, only the union of husband and wife is, by nature, capable of producing children;  provides for the safety and nurture of the offspring in a way that will prepare those offspring to marry and raise children themselves at the appropriate time; and (I would argue) possesses not only the anatomical but also the personal complementarity that marriage requires.

Marriage is the building block of society, because society must provide for and protect its children. No other relationships (however committed and sincere) inherently, in the normal course, result in offspring; no other relationships therefore require the unique societal and legal status that marriage – one man, one woman – enjoys. In a powerful talk about coming from the gay lifestyle into committed Catholicism, Wade Ryan (who had been a pioneer in the gay rights movement) offeres a further, Christian perspective. He noted that the state does not “make” marriage. Marriage was instituted by God, His first act after creating the universe; and it flows out of the reality of male and female complementarity and fruitfulness.

I should note that some committed Catholics with SSA believe that they and some proportion of others with SSA are “born that way” – but they see this as due to the disorder in creation stemming from Original Sin. That is, one can be “born gay” in the same way one can be “born anxious” or “born bipolar” or “born prone to alcoholism or depression”. Being “born that way” doesn’t excuse people with SSA from being chaste, just as a genetic predisposition to alcoholism doesn’t excuse me from sobriety. Further, in this view, people who move from SSA into heterosexual identity are born heterosexual, but sexual abuse or other traumas first have to be resolved for them to move into their heterosexual identity.

Those with this view are experiencing from the inside something I am viewing from the outside. I don’t want to shoehorn people’s experiences into my theory. However, I do offer an alternative hypothesis: the trauma preventing maturation into heterosexual identity could occur so early that the person has no awareness of it; and the wound may be so deep that reparative therapy would have little or no effect. But by definition, anything rooted in the unconscious can never be proven. In the end, “born that way” or not the essential question.

Reparative therapy is not required for those with SSA; nor should those with SSA who attempt reparative therapy without benefit be accused of “just not trying”. An inspiring blog by a faithfully Catholic man with SSA (www.stevegershom.com) illustrates that reparative therapy is appropriate for some, not others. In fact, the main Catholic group – Courage – supporting chastity for committed SSA Catholics has no official stance on reparative therapy. Living a holy and fruitful life is attainable for all Christians, with or without SSA.  As Patrick Coffin on “Catholic Answers” quips, “Be a saint! What else is there?” And as Wade Ryan wisely noted, in Heaven, any lacks, wounds, or disorders will be completely healed, transformed, loved into wholeness beyond our wildest imaginings.

 

 

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off on The Love that Dare not Speak…Part II

The Love that Dare not Speak…Part I

Posted on July 4, 2014 by admin

The next two posts dealt with same-sex attraction from a Catholic and psychological perspective. My fear is that gay people or others with same-sex attraction (SSA) who read these posts may hear them as condemnation or rejection, and that is the last thing I want to do. The evidence strongly supports that SSA begins with a very early experience or perception of paternal rejection – either outright, or through a failure to connect and bond at the deep level required. Either are deeply painful – in fact, traumatic. The pain is very frequently intensified by isolation, rejection, and bullying by same-sex peers once the person with SSA enters school.

If involved in a church, the child or adolescent may continue to experience rejection, if the clergy or church members fail to love and accept people with SSA (while rejecting same-sex genital behavior). He or she may generalize this rejection to God, the Father. People with SSA are far more likely to have experienced sexual abuse than other people – another source of pain and betrayal. To sum up, people with SSA have necessarily undergone a tremendous deal of suffering, much of it stemming from rejection and exclusion. Heaven forbid that I add to your suffering: you have gone through enough already!

As I wrote in a previous post (Speak out, Shepherds!), the “safeness” of much of Catholic preaching – while Western civilization is collapsing  – can be frustrating and demoralizing. But I’m realizing that I can suffer from the same fear of speaking out lest people dislike or even hate me or what I’m saying. For example, I would give my eyeteeth to hear a strong, loving, balanced homily on same-sex attraction (SSA) and “gay marriage” – one that compassionately addresses the suffering and struggle that people with SSA deal with, while recognizing the tragic spiritual, emotional, relational, and even medical toll pursuit of the gay lifestyle entails – but I have failed to address it more than in passing in this blog.

SSA, gay identity, and “gay marriage” are topics that sorely need to be addressed. They are issues that I am passionate about and deal with frequently in my practice. The media are shouting their own mile-wide inch-deep distorted version, while the Church at the parish level is virtually silent about the issues. They are issues that I am passionate about and deal with frequently in my practice. However, I know that speaking out about it will generate misunderstanding and perhaps hatred from some readers. Also, the reparative therapy I use with same-sex attracted clients who desire to mature into heterosexual identity – or at least reduce unwanted SSA – has just been outlawed as a treatment for minors in California, based on caricatures and misrepresentations of what such therapy actually involves. The move is the first time a state government – rather than state licensing boards – has so intervened. In the present political climate, reparative therapy will probably be outlawed completely; we mental health professionals who feel ethically bound to continue to practice it are correspondingly likely to lose our licenses. But being silent about the truth – besides being wrong in itself! – will “save” us no more than St. Thomas More’s silence “saved” him from a corrupt system determined to destroy him.

“The love that dare not speak its name”, a line from an 1894 poem by Lord Alfred Douglas, was quoted at Oscar Wilde’s trial for homosexuality, and has been used as a euphemism for gay romantic love. But there is another love that scarcely dares to speak in this day and age: the love that speaks the truth, including  difficult and unpopular truths about SSA.

The need to speak is pressing. Even many devout Catholics and other Christians – in the teaching vacuum left by the Church on the parish level – have come to accept the media wisdom that people with SSA are 1) “born that way” and 2) cannot mature into heterosexual identity. This is with scant evidence that (1) is the case, and with plenty of evidence that (2) is not the case. At the end of the study trumpeted by the media as supporting a “gay gene”, the author himself cautions against his study being so hijacked for political purposes. In his conclusion, he states that gender identity is far too “complex and multidetermined” to be attributed to a single gene. Nevertheless, many well-intentioned people reason that forbidding sexual activity and marriage for those with SSA – since they are “born that way” – is the same as forbidding, e.g., Latinos or people with disabilities to have sex or marry; that is, sheer bigotry.

Because the trauma that generates SSA can happen so early in life, the person with SSA’s sense that “this is my identity; I was born this way” is understandable, but, according to the research, inaccurate. (The roots of SSA are complex, so I can only address them briefly here. Please go to www.narth.org and www.peoplecanchange.com for in-depth resources as well as hundreds of testimonies of people who have come out of the gay lifestyle into heterosexual identity.) My area of expertise is with the development of male SSA (far more common than female SSA), so that will be my focus. However, both male and female SSA are rooted in disrupted attachments to parents or same-sex peers.To be continued…

 

 

Posted in Psychology | Comments Off on The Love that Dare not Speak…Part I

The New Atheism – Part II

Posted on June 27, 2014 by admin

As I noted in “The New Atheism – Part I”, one of the New Atheism’s most striking flaws is its inability to account for the essential elements of being human. For example, one retreat director noted that, after an arduous mountain climb, he met a hiker from a completely different culture. He and his companion gazed in awe at the magnificent scene below. No words were exchanged, but the kinship of shared wonder was evident. According to the New Atheism, both hikers were simply products of the evolutionary process – more highly evolved, but not possessing a “nature” distinct from primates or lower evolutionary forms. Yet monkeys, crows, and earthworms do not pause in shared awe when they encounter majestic mountain scenery. Mountain goats don’t get giddy over the beauty (nor the height, presumably) of the Colorado Rockies. An appreciation of beauty has no evolutionary value whatever: in the Darwinian struggle, artists are no more likely to survive than uncultured ignoramuses. So why would such a peculiar and unpragmatic quality survive the eons of evolutionary time? And why only in humans?

On a broader level, how is it that the qualities that we admire and love most in humans are the ones that are the most useless in terms of survival? Why do we recoil from Nietszche and Nazism’s brutal “might makes right” philosophy, in which the weak and “unfit” are murdered or discarded, and the perfect and “genetically pure” are given special privileges? Wouldn’t it be better for the species, evolutionarily speaking, if we did eliminate the weaker, less intelligent, less skilled, less fit from the population?

To be fair, many are doing just that: most babies with Down’s syndrome or other genetic defects are being murdered in the womb, so they don’t have to clutter up our streets and schools and homes. The ailing elderly are routinely euthanized in Holland. In Belgium, the state, with or without the parents’ consent, can kill infants up to one year of age if they are deemed too disabled to have a decent quality of life. In the United States, the consistent message to the disabled or very ill that (by not being young, beautiful, and medically perfect) they are unwanted and better off dead leads many to seek assisted suicide in states where this has been legalized. Those doing the elimination, of course, are acting out of compassion: the elderly, the infants, those with MS, are suffering so much. It’s pure mercy to put them out of their misery; it’s not that we’re sparing ourselves the difficulty of loving and caring for them in the long term.

The elimination of the above  “difficult” populations is scarcely a higher state of evolution: it represents a desensitization to the uniquely human qualities of compassion for the suffering and the desire to help those in special need. It is admirably human to tear up at the joy of a special needs participant whose team has won a relay at the Special Olympics; for one’s heart to ache and be moved when entering the Missionaries of Charity’s Home for the Dying and Destitute; to be horrified at the mountain of concentration camp inmates’ shoes at the Holocaust Museum. The New Atheism simply cannot account for these reactions. In one debate, Christopher Hitchens stated that such responses needed no explanation. He argued that compassion and decency and other moral qualities are “innate”. “Innate” apparently means, in this context, “something Hitchens can’t for the life of him account for.” A strict evolutionist should expect our “innate” qualities to be “qualities that give me a better chance of surviving long enough to reproduce”: neither pity nor mercy qualify, by that standard.

The Atlantic, a magazine I formerly respected for its thoughtful articles and sound moral approach on controversial issues, lost that respect with an article about the “hookup culture” on college campuses. The writer approved of – nay, reveled in – the practicality of college students who wanted sex but were too busy for relationship. The article stated that the average woman has 10 hookups (that is, one night stands with no expectation of commitment by either participant) during her college career. The crudity and in-your-faceness of the interviews implicitly condemned any reader who experienced repugnance or moral qualms about the hookup culture and the depravity it embodies. A morally unanaesthetized society would be outraged and shut the magazine down. We, instead, experience (perhaps) some minor discomfort and turn the page. I would argue that such progressive moral desensitization is dehumanizing: it makes us less human. It animalizes us. But the New Atheism allows for no such boundary between the human and the animal.

The New Atheism prides itself on its rational approach. The primary evolutionary advantage that humans have over other primates, in their view, is our greater intelligence. But the most admired and loved humans are not necessarily  the most intelligent ones. With some groups – e.g., scientists, engineers, and some academicians – this may be the case. But regarding Gandhi, Desmond Tutu, Albert Schweitzer; Florence Nightingale, Abraham Lincoln, Dietrich Bonhoeffer; St. Francis of Assisi, John Paul II and Mother Teresa: some of these people were quite intelligent, but they are admired most for their compassion for the unfortunate, their integrity, their courage, their holiness, or their commitment to reconciliation. Brilliant people who lack these qualities – e.g., who are also arrogant and selfish – may still be admired, but with strong reservations. Qualities like commitment to reconciliation or courage may be evolutionarily adaptive in certain situations: but for the advancement of the individual, if not the species, honesty and protection of the weakest (except infants and children) are evolutionarily maladaptive. Why would such traits survive? Are they genetic faults? If so, why are they generally admired?

The situation of the New Atheism is analogous to a detective who has solved every aspect of a murder – except: who did it; why he did it; and how he did it. The New Atheism fully accounts for human nature – except its most crucial aspects.  It is a profoundly unsatisfying, shallow approach, often fueled by contempt and intellectual pride, whose proponents’ lives, if at least marginally moral, are morally inconsistent with their philosophy; or who are sociopathic and depraved  when consistent with their philosophy. In contrast, Christianity and its account of reality satisfies every desire of the human heart and mind; and those who practice it most deeply are the most deeply admirable of people – we call them “saints”.

 

Posted in Apologetics | Comments Off on The New Atheism – Part II

The New Atheism – Part I

Posted on June 20, 2014 by admin

My son and I have had many conversations on the “new atheism”, whose main proponents are Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens. Many aspects of the new atheism are alarming, chief being how rapidly it has spread and how widely and uncritically it appears to be accepted, at least among the 20- and 30-somethings.

The problems with the new atheism: where to begin? Dawkins and Hitchens state that religion keeps people miserable and is the source of every ill imaginable. The weakness of their argument is that they refuse to acknowledge any good that religion in general, and Christianity in particular, may have done for mankind. For example, the abolition of slavery in England and America; the end of the exposure of infants to wild beasts and the elements in the Roman Empire; the establishment of hospitals and orphanages and hosts of other charitable institutions; the recognition that all human beings have inalienable rights; sponsorship and inspiration for the greatest music, art, literature, and architecture of the last (at least) 1500 years: all are the legacy of Christianity.

In a recent debate with his wiser, Christian brother, Christopher Hitchens made the mad statement that the horrors of Stalin’s regime were due to the influence of the Orthodox Church! – that is, the influence of Orthodox clergy whom Stalin murdered wholesale, whose churches he ransacked and destroyed. He and Dawkins insist that atheists are inherently “nicer” than Christians, and that the social order that atheists would set up would also be “nicer”.

I’m not saying that there are no nice atheists, of course – but those who are “nice” are clearly so despite their atheism. That is, they either haven’t thought through the implications of their atheism – that without God, there are no moral absolutes, no basis for right and wrong, and so (as Dostoevsky wrote) “everything is permitted”. Or they have thought it through but find it distasteful to act on their conclusions. Even Sartre, worshipper of absolute freedom, eventually realized that a social order based on his brand of atheism could not possibly work. He even joined with a group of other intellectuals and activists to condemn Hitler and Nazism – while believing that with no objective basis for morality, no action, freely chosen, can ever be condemned.

The atheistic regimes that have risen and fallen, or that still endure, have been spectacularly “not nice”: the USSR under Stalin; Germany under Hitler; China under Mao Tse Tung (with human rights abuses still rampant there); North Korea; Cuba; the brutality of the Calles regime in Mexico in the 1920s; the Reign of Terror after the French Revolution. How the New Atheists cannot connect the dots – that no God means no morality, so that Godless regimes will act without any moral constraints whatsoever – defies explanation. I can only think that “hope springs eternal” (like the saying, “A third marriage is the triumph of hope over experience”): yes, there’s been Stalin, Mao, Pol Pot, Castro, etc., etc., but maybe this time the promised Utopia will come to be.

Of course, the atheist will argue that Christian regimes have also done horrible things. True. But a closer look at those horrible things tends to reveal that they were doing no worse than the surrounding culture (e.g., when slavery was a universal institution), or that the perpetrators were nominal Christians operating not from Christian principles (how does a committed Christian get around “love your enemies”?) but from greed or a desire for power. Those professing Christianity must inevitably run up against the Sermon on the Mount – forcing them either to repent or to rationalize. An atheist doesn’t have this problem – there is nothing in a thoroughly atheistic account of the world to stop him/her from any crime, however heinous; or lead him/her to regret the crimes, once done. There is no One to say that it’s wrong. Stalin, Mao, and their ilk were being completely consistent with their belief system; Christians who performed similar acts have not been.

Besides the bloodbaths that giving control of nations and worlds to atheists have routinely led to, the other most telling argument against the New Atheism has to do with its complete inability to address the deepest desires of the human heart. But that’s for another day – stay tuned!

 

Posted in Apologetics | Comments Off on The New Atheism – Part I

The War on Manhood

Posted on June 16, 2014 by admin

It so happened that my wife and I attended an “Unbound” conference this Father’s Day weekend at a local parish. The conference, based on the book and ministry of the same name by Neal Lozano, deals with the ministry of prayer for deliverance. Defining that ministry is beyond the scope of this post, except to say that its focus is to enable people to obtain greater freedom to enter into their identity in Christ. It was a great weekend, and Mary and I, as part of the prayer ministry teams, were privileged to pray with a number of people and see them experience liberation in dramatic ways.

Many testimonies written about in book Unbound, as well as given at the conference, included a lack of fathering. “I had a difficult relationship with my father”; “My father was never there for me”; “I don’t feel that I ever really knew my Dad”; “I wish my father could have protected me from ___”. In many cases the lack of fathering was implicit. For example, the person might have been abused or demeaned by a stepfather or brother after the father abandoned the family, or the parents divorced with the mother getting primary or sole custody.

I’ve noted in previous posts that we live in a culture at war with marriage and family. But masculinity and fatherhood are particularly under attack. This isn’t a coincidence: it is a calculated strategy of the Evil One. The author of Unbound notes that not only does God have a plan for our lives: so does the Evil One. The latter’s plan, of course, is to attack God’s plan. God’s plan for men and fathers is that we exercise loving, protecting authority in our households; that our own characters are marked by sacrificial, disciplined, courageous love that lays down our lives for spouses and children rather than let the Evil One ravage our families. We are to conduct ourselves in a mature, calm, confident, and reasoned way: steady and solid, like protecting oaks, as one female friend noted.

This doesn’t rule out playfulness, rough-and-tumble physicality, and joy: certainly, the birth of my son Michael unlocked reservoirs of playfulness in me of which I’d had no idea. But the traditional masculine virtues of solidity, steadiness, maturity, courage, and sacrifice are primary. I almost forgot to add the virtues of modesty and purity: that real men are respectful of women and conduct themselves with modesty – perhaps the most foreign of concepts to present culture.

The entirety of God’s plan for masculine and fatherly identity is under attack in current American culture, however, through secular education, the media, and the political system. Models of manhood include sports heroes, often known at least as much for their sexual exploits or enormous accumulation of material goods as for their athletic prowess. Hollywood male icons are splattered across “People” and “The National Enquirer” when they father their latest “love child”, destroy their fifth marriage, or buy their latest multimillion dollar yacht or mansion. Male sitcom characters are sarcastic, incompetent buffoons continually getting into scrapes out of which their level-headed, equally sarcastic, competent, mature girlfriends or wives have to rescue them. In commercials, husbands wait on their wives’ advice for everything from cereal to finances to home improvement; as in the sitcoms, the men goof off while the women get the practical work done and hold the family together. It is the “mirror opposite” of the caricatures of male and female roles seen in the sitcoms and commercials of 50 years ago. In the media’s distorted vision, there are no men: only overgrown boys with overgrown toys.

In war, science fiction, fantasy, and superhero movies, one does see some admirable, even noble male characters. However, their virtues can be obscured by the violence that saturates many epic movies. I believe that these movies are so very popular among men (myself included) because they fill a void. At the deepest level, men are made for the heroism, courage, sacrifice, integrity, camaraderie, and discipline that many of the characters in the epic “guy” movies exhibit. The problem is to transfer those virtues from the realm of fantasy to real life, or even from war to civilian life. Very little offered by popular culture facilitates that transfer.

The most recent salvo in the attack on male identity has been the frighteningly rapid, recent advance of GLBT psychology and sociology; differing viewpoints and research conclusions are severely punished by the academic community. In the GLBT and feminist view, gender is solely a social construct. Physical realities of anatomy and genetics have no bearing on gender: I am as male, female, or androgynous as I care to be, and can shift among these categories at will. Any traditionally male or female characteristics beyond strict anatomy and secondary sexual characteristics are completely controlled by environment and free decision -as in The Taming of the Shrew, Act IV, Scene 5, when Katherine caves in to Petruchio’s irrationality:

Then, God be bless’d, it is the blessed sun;
But sun it is not, when you say it is not;
And the moon changes even as your mind.
What you will have it nam’d, even that it is,
And so it shall be so for Katherine.

The doctrine that gender is a figment of my imagination flies in the face of mountains of research, anthropological findings, and everyday observation. However, that the myth of genderlessness exists only in the minds of academics, artists, journalists, and secular mental health professionals has not prevented laws being passed based on that myth. In the latest act in the three-ring circus of political correctness, schoolchildren in some states now may use restrooms according to whatever gender the student feels he/she is on a given day. Is it possible that that law could be abused by a predatory student, or be alarming to his/her possible victims? Apparently not.

In this environment, men not only have nothing to offer. Men and women, strictly, do not exist: we float along the gender continuum, depending on how we feel on a given day. With all of these forces at work, it is no wonder that so many men not only are formed by, but confirm the media stereotype: they are passive, unengaged, absent; impulsive, addictive, violent, immature; lustful, demeaning, sarcastic, and immodest. So many of us have no fathers, figuratively or literally. So few of us have healthy, solid male models in real life to look up to. We are children without a father; sheep without a shepherd.

John Eldredge, in his excellent book on Christian manhood, Wild at Heart, outlines the problem and its solution extremely well. I recommend his book to every Christian man I know; if they’re open to it, to every man I know. As Eldredge notes, the first victory we can win in this battle is to realize that it is a battle. We have an Enemy, and he wants to destroy is. Our discomfort, our alarm, at how things are going are well grounded. Our desire to be warriors, superheroes, is also well-grounded: we were born into a world at war, and God has planted the desire for battle in our blood. However, “Our battle is not against flesh and blood, but against the principalities and powers, the rulers of this present darkness, the evil spirits in regions above.(Eph 6:12)”

One way to fight the battle is to take the campaign onto our own ground. To immerse myself in the media without discernment is to immerse myself in its distortion of masculine identity. I cannot be a whole, healthy, Christian man and at the same time indiscriminately consume all that Hollywood, Washington, and Wall Street throw at me. I need to seek out media, literature, recreation, and entertainment that spring from a healthy, reality-based, Christian (because Christ and His truth are reality) vision of male and female identity; of husbands, fathers, wives, mothers, sons, and daughters. Some of that means going back to classic literature, movies, music, and other form of entertainment. Some of that means choosing family time and activities over the worship of and addiction to pro and college sports that has so many fathers and husbands missing in action.

A second way is to choose your friends and associates wisely. If you find a wise, Christian man, to quote the proverb, wear out his doorstep. Hang out with men you want to be like: who can be heroes to you; who are thoroughly Christian in outlook and action. Mentor younger men: realizing that someone is looking to us to be an example can sometimes put us on our best behavior. Get involved in faith sharing and Bible study groups that confirm masculine identity in a Catholic and biblical way. One such program is the marvelous “That Man Is You” (https://www.paradisusdei.org/) series that offers DVD presentations, study guides, and other resources free of charge to Catholic parishes. It has touched hundreds of men from my parish, and thousands throughout Omaha and the U.S. When I went through the three-year program, I saw men stepping into their roles as men for the Lord – single and married – in dramatic ways. I can’t recommend it too highly, but I also know there are other, similar programs available. If there isn’t one in your parish, start one!

Finally, I cannot overstress the importance of committed, daily time with the Lord: that is, fifteen minutes or more daily (a half hour to an hour is even better) reserved purely for time with God. That’s apart from prayers shot up to the Big Man throughout the day, or the rosary or chaplet you may say in your car, or time spent listening to Christian radio or contemporary Christian music – as good as all of those things are. I mean sitting in the adoration chapel, or your living room or den or bedroom, just you and the Lord, with a Bible, devotional, or notebook, talking to Him and letting Him speak in your heart. Consider it very basic training for the battle: you are equipping yourself for the daily battle with a world that largely hates men, women, families, commitments, virtue, and particularly Jesus Christ.

During that time with the Lord, the Lord Himself will equip you. He will tell you who you are: His beloved son, in whom He delights. He will reveal to you your weaknesses to guard against, and your strengths to build on. He will enable you to resist temptation and live in virtue. He will give you the extra strength and love needed to be a bearer of Christ not just to your workplace, but to your family and friends. God cannot be outdone in generosity: your tithing of time to Him to begin each day will bear unbelievable fruit. The world needs you to be the man of God that you are; to be a warrior for the Lord; to be a hero; to be a man.

 

 

 

 

 

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Creating a Catholic Home

Posted on June 6, 2014 by admin

I was reviewing the subtitle of this blog, “Thoughts from the heart on the new evangelization.” Something that I tend to take for granted, since it has been a part of our life for years, is the evangelizing power of a thoroughly Catholic, Christ-centered home. Through such a home, we not only remind ourselves in a thousand ways who we are and what our lives are about: we also evangelize our children, their friends, our relatives, and our friends. That one’s family is a committed Christian family should be obvious to anyone who spends even a small amount of time with us..

In Deuteronomy 6:4-9, Moses exhorts the Israelites to cling to their identity as the people of the covenant, and to teach their children to do likewise. He knew that the people of Israel would be surrounded by pagan nations, filled with idolatry and with abominable practices such as child sacrifice and ritual prostitution, and Moses knew the danger of adopting pagan ways. In order to retain their identity and their fidelity to the Lord, Israel developed a way of life that was imbued at every level with the worship of God and faithfulness to the Torah (a lifestyle we still see today among, for example, Hasidic Jews).

Catholics and other Christians live in a similar atmosphere today: the secular culture of death makes war on Christian beliefs and values at every level. It invades our homes and minds through much of the content of the Internet and popular music and movies, and most prime time TV programming. Any child educated in the public school system – as well as in many “Catholic” schools – is relentlessly  evangelized with the gospel of political correctness from pre-school on. Long gone are the years when one could count on a Catholic school education, weekly Mass attendance, an occasional family rosary, and parish picnics to ensure one’s children would grow up committed Catholics; I doubt if such a situation ever existed.

So Moses’ exhortation applies just as surely to us as to the Israelites to whom he spoke:

“Hear, O Israel: The Lord our God is one Lord; and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.   And these words which I command you this day shall be upon your heart;  and you shall teach them diligently to your children, and shall talk of them when you sit in your house, and when you walk by the way, and when you lie down, and when you rise.   And you shall bind them as a sign upon your hand, and they shall be as frontlets between your eyes.  And you shall write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates.” (Deut 6:4-9)

I offer the following as ways my wife and I have found helpful for building a thoroughly Catholic home atmosphere. First, have religious art in every room – not to make your home an art museum, but to convey visually that every space in your home is dedicated to the Lord. Let the art be truly beautiful – so that your family and your guests associate God, the Author of beauty, with beautiful objects. This doesn’t have to be expensive: my wife bought a lovely rendition of Our Lady of Perpetual Help for about $5 at a rummage sale. Besides the religious art, have a corner of a room, or if possible, an entire room of your home set aside for prayer. We have an antique crucifix with the abovementioned picture of Our Lady, with a candle on a stand, in one corner of our living room.

Second, make family prayer a habit. Regularly say grace before meals. Every morning, in some way pray with any available family members: to consecrate the family to the Lord, offer the day to the Lord, and ask for protection and guidance. Every night, gather the family for brief prayers: ours have been very simple, consisting of at least one thanksgiving and one prayer request per family member; other families say a decade of the Rosary, an entire Rosary, or read Scripture, for example. Finish up family prayer by signing each other’s foreheads with the Cross and saying a brief blessing (“God bless Michael”, for example.) Start longer family trips with a Rosary. If a family member is sick or having a tough time, pray with him/her briefly for healing or comfort, with your hand on his/her head or shoulder. Pray briefly with and bless your spouse just before going to sleep – spontaneously or with some memorized prayer. Have a regular prayer time yourself: at least 10 minutes a day, but a half hour or more is even better. Scripture is an essential part of that prayer time, and, if desired, a devotional meditation and some journaling.

Third, bless the house as a family on a regular basis – weekly worked well for us as our son was growing up. Walk through and consecrate each room to the Lord’s glory; ask the Lord to cleanse the house of anything not of Him, using holy water; ask the Lord to fill the home with His angels and Holy Spirit; ask Mary and Joseph’s prayers to make your home and your family holy. My wife and I have also found it to be invaluable to pray at length on a weekly basis for our marriage, family, relatives, and all those that the Lord puts on our hearts, as well as to thank and praise Him for our many blessings. It is a wonderful experience of spousal intimacy and of God’s goodness.

Fourth, talk about and practice the seasons of the Church year, as well as Sunday. Keep the Sabbath: avoid using Sunday as catchup day. Within reason, keep it free of work and make it a day for worship and family recreation. Talk about what you might give up or do extra for Lent, and why. Go to the special Triduum services – Holy Thursday, Good Friday, and the Easter Vigil, if the children are old enough. Use the Advent Wreath for nightly prayer. Midnight Mass, with post-toddler children, can be wonderful for conveying the beauty, peace, and special quality of Christmas. Have special family traditions for Sunday, feastdays, and holy seasons.

Fifth, strive to make your home a place of hospitality and peaceful joy. Make it open to friends or acquaintances who are in transition and need a place to stay. (The several times we’ve had longer-term guests have been a great blessing.) Teach and practice the value of having quiet times and time alone. Avoid the frantic pace that disrupts many families, ricocheting from one sports, school, social, or even church activity to another. In your relationships with each other as family, be truthful, courteous, slow to anger, quick to forgive, quick to apologize (I end up doing a lot of that!), and unashamed to express your love for and delight in each other.

As Moses exhorts, make praying to, loving like, and speaking about God as common and natural as breathing: not wedged in, but flowing into and out of everything you do. “Whatever you do, whether in speech or in action, do in in the name of the Lord Jesus, giving thanks to the Father through him.” (Col 3:17) Let your home and family life be an unmistakable testimony that “in Him we live, and move, and have our being.” (Acts 17:28) It won’t be perfect, of course, but it will be very, very good.

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Men, Identity, and Friendships

Posted on May 30, 2014 by admin

Someone commented to me about a sentence from my “As the Deer Longs…” post: “For many men, our last experience of a really close male friend was in high school or college, although we may have many acquaintances.” She agreed that this seemed to be true and wondered why that might be.

It’s a great question. What first came to mind was C.S. Lewis’s chapter on philia (friendship) from The Four Loves. Commentators on this chapter have noted that C.S. Lewis’ description of friendship applies well to male friendships, of which he had many, but perhaps not so much to female friendships; not surprising, given his experience of being in almost exclusively male environments from the early death of his mother on. In the following, I have friendships between men in mind.

Lewis notes that an appropriate portrait of friendship would features two faces in profile looking at something else together – unlike romantic love, in which the two faces would gaze at each other. Friendship, he writes, arises as an unforeseen but delightful byproduct of a shared, intense interest. This is certainly true for men: e.g., I and an acquaintance both like hunting; or poker; or the Chicago Bears; or playing and singing 70s soft rock; or golf outings; or English literature; or Marvel comics; or Halo. We get together to do these activities or talk about what we’re a fan of. 95% of our time is focused on the common interest – but in the process, we start to get to know each other, in bits and pieces. We learn a bit about each other’s parents and siblings; a fair amount about each other’s spouses and children, and each other’s workplace and colleagues.

Dave Barry, the syndicated humor columnist, has a lot of great stuff regarding “how guys work”. In one column, he talks about how he, his wife, and another couple go camping. His wife and her friend spend the weekend catching up on each other’s lives, kids, hopes, dreams; at the end of the weekend, they’ve laughed and cried together and their bond is deeper and richer. Meanwhile, the most intimate moment shared between Dave and his friend is that his friend got to the Unseen Presence level of a video game the latter has just gotten into. Absolutely. I’ve gotten off the phone after an hour chat with a Chicago friend, Jim, and my wife Mary will ask: “So how are Beth and Will (Jim’s wife and son)?” “Um…the subject didn’t come up.” (Jim and I had instead been wrestling over some theological or political points.)

In contrast, my wife and her friend Nikki will get together and dive into emotional, meaningful topics without a preparatory pause. I call it their “Cone of Silence”: bombs could go off, archbishops can stop by and greet them (the latter actually happened at a church function), and their intense, female conversation would flow on uninterrupted. Both of them are energized afterwards; whereas most guys (myself included, and I’m a psychologist, into emotions, right?) would be exhausted by a fraction of their conversational depth. We don’t like to go to emotions very much, or for very long. Men’s faith-sharing groups I’ve been in take – literally – at least six weeks to scratch the surface of emotions women’s groups get to during their first meeting. When male friends do talk on a more emotional level, it actually can be very good and meaningful for both; something each will remember as a special and important experience. But it tends to be a window that opens briefly and then closes quickly. Even rarer but greatly valued is when male friends directly express their love and appreciation for one another – memorable for both, but an even briefer window.

One would think that men can’t have close friendships, then: friendships where there’s a deep love for the other; great enjoyment of the other’s company; really missing the other when they’re separated; thorough understanding of how the other works. Or that men’s friendships are necessarily not as deep as women’s. But that’s not the case. It’s quite mysterious, but very real. A men’s Bible group a friend and I started about 10 years ago is still going; one at my current parish has been going about 15 years. Very rarely have we talked on a deep emotional level, or shared much about personal crises or struggles. Much of the time, it’s the playful, affectionate giving each other a hard time that is a constant in men’s gatherings. The rest is talking about the Bible passage we’re studying, although wwe tend to go far afield on very loosely related topics. But we all get a great deal out of it: the groups keep going, and growing. We enjoy each other; a real bond has grown; we wouldn’t want to miss it. Within the group, one-on-one friendships have also developed.

All of that said, it is still easier for men to get together with other men in a group setting than to make the transition to one-on-one friendships. We do enjoy such things, when they happen to “happen”: that is, if there are guys we hang out with at work, or other baseball or soccer dads we get to know through coaching or attending our kids’ games, fine. And if our work or recreation throws us together one-on-one with someone we enjoy, and a friendship develops, that’s great.  But we hesitate to seek out a men’s group activity, still less individual friendships. Why is that?

External factors such as greater isolation from neighbors (for many reasons, we stay indoors a lot more now than 50 years ago, and our recreation isn’t neighborhood-centered) and increased transience certainly play a part. Yet women deal with these same factors and remain more socially connected. So the deeper reason has to do more with how men and women differ in their motivation for relationships.

Women’s sense of self-worth and contentment tend to be closely tied to the quality of their relationships, and how those they are connected with are doing. Men’s self-esteem and contentment are more related to how competent and respected we feel (at work and in other activities), as well as to how much recreational fun we can have. Our respective energies are therefore directed to what we value most. Women are often better at maintaining family and friendship ties even when geographical distance intervenes; women tend to seek out new friendships when they move; women feel more comfortable moving from the group to the individual level in friendships – because being connected helps them feel better. Men tend to be better at staying focused at work (compartmentalizing) regardless of issues outside of work; and we put effort into ensuring that peers and supervisors regard us as reliable, competent workers. We also like to keep an eye out for recreational opportunities: we like to have fun, and we know how to do so!

So for men, friendships are a pleasant but not central concern that we may pursue in our spare time – away from work. Often, by the time we’re finished with tasks at home and time with the spouse and kids, we’re tired. We may watch some TV, chat with our spouse, and then go to bed – to rise next morning to repeat the cycle. Our wives often have plenty of stuff for us to do at home, and with their emphasis on family relationships, they will expect (reasonably enough!) that we spend quality time with the family.

Because relationships are a priority for them, they will make the extra effort to have time with their friends during the week or on weekends. They may also pursue friendships with other couples: but often, the wives maintain bonds better outside of the couples get-togethers, so that the women are the glue holding the friendship between the couples together. But for men, friendship can get lost in the shuffle of our other priorities.

In a related vein, the woman who encouraged me to write about men’s friendships noted – and I have to agree – that wives, more than husbands, tend to be possessive of their spouses’ time. If the wife wants to get together with her friends, the husband is more likely to say, “Fine – have fun!” then is the wife in the reverse situation. The wife is more likely to ask for and be aware of a need for such time. And not being as relationally driven, the husband is unlikely to push for social time with his friends. He instead settles into socializing only with his wife, her family,  and couples who are more her friends. There may be a sense of something missing, and a nostalgia for the kind of buddies he had during his school, or the military, or at some friendly work setting – but he won’t feel it deeply enough to remedy the situation.

Often, a man’s wife is his only real confidante. This is a real loss, because however well-intentioned a wife, she can’t possibly know a man’s struggles from the inside out. And it’s more difficult to challenge him with the kind of bluntness-with-affection that a guy friend can employ. Men need male confidantes – and I don’t mean just therapists!

Men with good friends are simply happier then men without – and when I say “good”, I mean in terms of character as well as reliability in friendship. John Eldredge, in his marvelous, indispensable book on Christian manhood, Wild at Heart, notes that God places in every man’s heart the desire for a “band of brothers”. Eldredge uses the “fellowship” in The Lord of the Rings as a brilliant and stirring example of men (well – males, since it includes hobbits, a dwarf, and an Elf!) who share a quest and challenge each other to heroism and virtue, while thoroughly enjoying each other’s company and having a lot of fun. Men with male friends make better men – and incidentally, better sons, brothers, and husbands. I urge wives reading this to encourage their husbands in their friendships; to make sure that they have time to get together with “the boys”. We need it more than you know.

Recently, some friends and I started playing poker together monthly: it is totally irrational how much I look forward to that! We have a blast. Men have a deeply ingrained need to just have fun with other men – and the fun together bonds them. Once we experience it again – often years after our last good friend, in high school or college – it gives us a new lease on life.

For men reading this who are aware of a gap in the area of friendship: I urge you to get something started yourselves. The poker night referred to above got started when I felt envious of a client who had a regular group of buddies getting together for some (I don’t remember what) male bonding activity. It was great that the guys I approached for the poker night have been just as enthusiastic as I – as if they were just waiting for someone to get it started. So start it! If you’re on the shy side, get an outgoing buddy of yours to.

Jesus says to us, “I no longer call you slaves…but friends” (Jn 15:15). I wonder if that verse speaks even more poignantly to men than to women. Besides the special effects, humor, and adventure they feature (all great – watching “The Avengers” in Imax 3-D was practically a religious experience for my son and me!), movies like the Marvel comics series or “Saving Private Ryan” pull men in because of the friendship, sacrifice, and respect the heroes have for one another. We need to get that in real life, not just through Captain America. God made us that way.

 

 

 

 

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Heroes

Posted on May 23, 2014 by admin

With some of my clients, when it seems likely that their present difficulties have a lot to do with childhood influences, I’ll have them fill out a handout called a “Life Script”. The Life Script helps clarify how the client perceives him or herself, as well as others. For example, the client is asked to describe what each parent was like during the client’s childhood. The descriptions often yield information about how the client perceives men and women (since how we see men and women is so influenced by our fathers and mothers, respectively), as well as people in general. There are also questions regarding what one sees as one’s best and worst points; nicknames and one’s response to them; “What would be heaven on earth for you?”; and other more or less open-ended questions.

One question has two parts to it: “Who was your childhood hero/heroine?” and “Who is your hero/heroine now?” It’s a revealing one. Almost all of my clients recall at least one childhood hero. If not, this often reflects a barren, if not abusive, childhood environment: one with few positives, not much affection or warmth, and especially, little or no encouragement to be creative, use one’s imagination, dream, and play.

To lack an adult hero or heroine is more common: not quite as troubling, but still a cause for concern. I believe that it’s foundational to a happy, full, directed, fruitful life to have heroes – really, the more, the better. Some of our heroes may embody almost all of the qualities we strive to have; others may typify one or two qualities that we find very important. Who our heroes are, almost beyond anything else, points to who we really are; who we strive to be; what our passions are; what we most value; what we believe life is all about.

St. Francis of Assisi, for example, has been a longtime hero for me. I love his joy; his humility; his delight in nature, in people, in the Lord, in life. I love that he did nothing by halves: if he gave away his possessions, it was to the point of literally stripping himself naked; if he was moved by the fact that Jesus, Love Incarnate, “was unloved”, he wept until he actually almost went blind. To overcome his horror of lepers, he didn’t just force himself to spend time with them – he kissed one (very surprised!) leper on the lips. I also love St. Francis’s heart for reconciliation: during the Crusades, rather than slaughtering the “enemy”, he went to Saladin, the Muslim chief, to speak to him about the love of Christ. This was a surefire recipe for martyrdom, yet St. Francis so impressed Saladin that he let Francis go unharmed.

St. Joan of Arc is another hero: I marvel at her courage, her devoutness, her absolute obedience to the Lord, as His will was expressed through the saints who spoke to her. These were in the face of ridicule, fantastic odds, and ultimately betrayal by the Dauphin whom she loved and championed. Mark Twain, who wrote a novel about her, literally believed that she was the only good person who ever lived!

One wonderful history of St. Joan poetically chronicled her heroic death, moving me even as a child. Joan always wore a ring with the name of Jesus on it. She was burned at the stake for heresy by an English Catholic church court – a supreme irony, wholly politically motivated. “As the flames enveloped her, she cried out the name on her lips, the name on her ring, the name in her heart: ‘JESUS!’ And with that, she died. One of the soldiers watching said, ‘We have killed a saint.'” Amazing.

Interestingly, it seems that the Lord spoke to my heart at one point about my worries (I was young and foolish) that maybe I could never be exactly like St. Francis: “Sean, I don’t want you to be another St. Francis. I already have one of those! I want you to be you: that’s why I made you.” So any heroes, including the saints, are not to be copied as such. They are to be pointers: inspirations to free us to aspire to levels of heroism, virtue, fullness of life, and sanctity that we would otherwise be afraid even to dream of. Even Jesus is not, precisely, to be copied slavishly: we already have the gospels, based on His life. Our vocation is to allow Him to live out His life in and through us, creating a whole new life, a whole new living of the Gospel: so when people look at me, yes, they see Jesus: but Jesus refracted through the unique, unrepeatable prism of my personality.

I can’t help but comment on how amazingly surrender to Jesus – making Jesus my prime Hero – brings out levels of uniqueness that I’ve seen nowhere else. For example, at the men’s Bible study at our parish that I co-facilitate, I am constantly amazed how, with each man present, “God broke the mold”. How can we all read the same passage and draw such radically different life lessons from it? The way each man communicates, listens, jokes, acts, reacts: a more motley crew (I say that affectionately, and include myself) could scarcely have been assembled. Yet it works! Of course it does: it’s a microcosm of the Body of Christ. But I think it’s good to have other “sub-heroes”, not “just” Jesus. He embodies all heroic and good qualities: we need more “specific” heroes, too, that particularly speak to our unique calling.

The absence of heroes is cause for concern when it emerges during the Life Script. It very often goes with a lack of life direction or passion, or a difficulty with identifying one’s unique gifts, or a general sense of something missing. It often includes some cynicism or trust issues: the client may have been let down by significant people, or had his or her own dreams and goals dismissed; might have learned not to trust in or hope for too much from anyone. When I encounter this, I invariably encourage the client to “find a hero”. Sometimes, as we go deeper, the client is able to identify possible heroes: people with at least some qualities he or she admires and wants to emulate. That is a hopeful sign.

In our world-weary, tired, sophisticated society, the mission of many appears to be to demolish heroes: to expose the seamy underside of admired public figures; to dig up scandal; to cut extraordinary people down to size. “He/she is just like all the rest.” It is democracy gone bad: a fatal distortion of “all men are created equal”. Maybe the glory or beauty that shines forth from heroic lives exposes our drabness; maybe we’re afraid to hope that we are made for glory; that our lives matter; that we can make a difference. We are afraid to trust, to hope, to care too deeply. We’ve lost childhood, where we literally and figuratively “looked up to” so many people. In Chesterton’s poignant words, “We are children no more: we have sinned and grown old.” So clearly, we need to grow young. We need to “change, and become like children.”

A moment I’ll treasure for the rest of my life happened recently when my son and I were having  “Boys’ Time”, our monthly going out to lunch, just he and I. We were at Harold’s Koffee House, a local Mecca of great breakfast food, and I was talking about how much we need heroes: how crucial that is to psychological and spiritual help. I asked Michael, “Who is your hero?” and he said…”I’m looking at him.” And we both cried; I don’t know and don’t care what the servers and other patrons thought! A tremendous gift; a dream realized. As Maria sang in “The Sound of Music”, “I must have done something good”. Praise God.

Folks, we need heroes. If you don’t have one, get one! At the same time, choose wisely, as I’m sure you will. Heroes are our North Stars, guiding us in a particular direction, through particular waters, to particular lands. They form us and our perceptions. If they are in Heaven (or Purgatory), they also pray us through our journey. They reveal ourselves and our hearts to us. They are the royal road to becoming heroes ourselves.

 

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To Kiss the Face of Christ

Posted on May 17, 2014 by admin

I went on a silent retreat about a month ago, and while there I got the news that someone in the extended family had died. Geographical distance made it impossible for me to get there very soon to comfort or support those close to him, so I at first felt powerless to help. It then occurred to me that being on a retreat, with  lots of time to pray, was perhaps the best place I could be. So I and those on retreat with me prayed a lot for him and all those affected by his death. The priest leading the retreat was kind enough to ask if he could offer Mass on the extended family member’s behalf, as well as the latter’s family. It was a very consoling and powerful experience of being a loved member of the Body of Christ.

During the Mass, the priest’s homily on finding Christ in the poor hit me hard. He told the story of a devout woman in the Minneapolis area with whom he was privileged to spend part of his seminary training. Part of her ministry to the poor is literally to wash their feet: to get down on her knees, holding their smelly, or bleeding, or otherwise distasteful feet; to look up at them with love, and to wash them. The bishop from the retreat master’s diocese retired there to work with this woman and to wash feet. Not a pretty ministry, but beautiful. After his homily, I had to ask, “What, Lord, am I actually doing for the poor – directly? Show me how to love You in them.” He seemed to open something in my heart: the sense that face to face encounter with the poor was not an option, but a necessity if I was to encounter the heart of Christ.

Right after Communion, I had an unusual and completely unexpected experience: an interior vision in which I was kissing Jesus. But it was so painful, because the thorns on His head made it hard to get close; I wanted to stroke His face and hold His shoulders, but they were bloody and bruised and covered with welts; I wanted to touch His hair, but it was sticky with blood. It was an emotionally jarring yet profoundly moving and intimate encounter; unique in my experience.

When I met with the retreat master for spiritual direction, he commented, “Perhaps the vision of kissing the suffering Christ has to do with the poor. Loving the poor is not necessarily sweetness and light; it can be quite disturbing to encounter Christ in His ‘distressing disguise’ as one of His poor or broken ones.”

He was right on target. Shortly after the retreat, my wife and I each had a couple of distressing encounters with a different kind of poverty than I’d anticipated: the poverty of people who were suffering greatly, but who were most difficult to love in their suffering. These people had so pulled in to themselves, and were lashing out so at others. My normal reaction would have been anger – a basic “To heck with them!” But the encounter with the image of Christ suffering forced me to step back: here, indeed, were the poor ones He wanted me to kiss, to embrace, to love. “If you love those who love you, what merit is there in that; even the pagans do that…” But, Lord, don’t I need to show them how wrong they are?” It would seem not.

It is so hard to love people who regard your love as trivial or don’t even notice that you’re trying to love them, much less express appreciation for it. It is harder still to love people who strike out at you for trying to love them; when their thorns prick your face, or their wounds and welts leave you a sticky mess. As a teaching assistant during my doctoral program, I used to joke, “I only want to work with people at the top of Maslow’s scale: people who are self-actualizing, having peak experiences, extraordinary in every way.” Was I entirely joking? People who aren’t at the top can be so much work. Dare I admit the periods in my own life when I was emphatically not at the top myself? When I myself was a bloody, sticky mess? Do I fear to kiss the leper because I was – sometimes still am – a leper myself? Dare I look back to the times when my own insecurities, anger, selfishness, or blindness repelled those who lovingly tried to kiss me?

St. Therese of Lisieux noted that, ironically, the sisters in her convent who were most showered with love and affirmation – the mature, balanced, pleasant, engaging ones – were the ones that least needed it. Conversely, the sisters who most needed love and affirmation – those who were immature, unhappy, difficult, frustrating – might be cordially or dutifully tolerated, but rarely were sought out or affirmed. Her resolve was to offer her love and friendship to these latter ones: the starving ones who sometimes seemed to do everything possible to repel her “kiss”. It was a “banquet”, she realized, that cost her nothing: a smile, a kind word, a listening ear, a loving presence; that she could give to these least ones.

It’s very easy. It’s very difficult. It’s doing baby steps. It opens the heart, a little bit at a time. It is a difficult, painful embrace. It is a life-giving, lovely embrace. I shrink from it; I need it desperately. It is the kiss of Christ.

 

 

 

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