There Is No Condemnation

The idea of needing to earn God's love keeps rousing its ugly head here and there in various ways, revealing an insidious monster that penetrates souls and prevents them from receiving the abundant life Christ promised.  Of course, spoken in such clear fashion, the idea is laughable.  Who could really believe they needed to earn God's love?  If you ask people, likely most if not all would know in their heads the right answer.  Yet, as the prophet Jeremiah put it, "more torturous than all else is the human heart" (17:9).

This false belief that we need to earn God's love appears beneath the visage of everything from scrupulosity and perfectionism to affected piety and hypocrisy.  In each case you can trace back the problem to the root sin of pride.

Diagnosing pride's sinfulness in this case, however, merely returns us to the need to be humble enough to receive God's love and hence back to the beginning of the vicious cycle of needing to earn God's love.  Yet, as Saint Paul said: "There is no condemnation in Christ Jesus" (Rom 8:1).  Also, Jesus Himself says: "Is there no one who condemns you?  Neither do I condemn you" (see John 8:10-11).

Certainly pride exists within our hearts, but let us look beyond this sin to other forces at work in our subconscious minds and hearts.  As Americans, we live in a country founded on a principle often known as the "Protestant work ethic."  That idea essentially amounts to the need to work hard that we might achieve everything by our own efforts (and hence extends easily to spirituality with the idea of needing to earn even God's approval and love).

Furthermore, American ideals arose out of the principles of the Enlightenment whose thinkers essentially eschewed Christianity for Secular Humanism.  Instead of God being responsible for all that was good and the sole arbiter of goodness, mankind took that role for these thinkers who believed in the supremacy of reason and science.  Isn't it ironic that such a perspective would then invade Catholicism itself which Enlightenment thinkers had rejected?  Yet to me it seems it has: we have somehow absorbed this false idea that we of our own power must achieve human perfection.  Yes, that is what it means to believe that we must earn God's love: it means to believe that we are responsible for our own sanctification rather than merely accepting His free gift to us.  Take that to its logical extreme and it means that we believe we do not need God; we essentially make ourselves our own god.

Before you find my perspective too cynical, however, let us look even deeper into the human psyche.  As intelligent beings, we naturally seek the cause for every effect.  Consequently, when some negative emotion assaults our hearts, we immediately want to know the purpose.  If we feel bad, we want to know why.  We want to know whose fault it is.  We are not content to remain ignorant.  Hence we either look outward for a scapegoat, blaming someone or something else, or we look inward, blaming ourselves.

The latter perspective, seen in the light of religious tradition, becomes that much-referenced catholic guilt.  The phrase is suitable because of the meaning of the word catholic: universal: we all feel guilt when we know we have transgressed our moral code.

One common response to that guilt is to lower one's standards to the point at which one can no longer transgress them and thus cannot experience that negative emotion.  For this reason, many believe that we ought to repudiate religion, and specifically Catholicism, because it causes people to feel guilty, which leads to a vicious cycle of psychologically-unhealthy responses to spirituality.  Now I would argue that by that same logic we ought to outlaw food because it causes people to feel cravings, which lead them to overindulge and become gluttonous.

On the opposite side of the spectrum, someone might become so focused on pious practices as to be rigidly bound up in them and demand that all others abide by the same rules.  Everyone else thus must be wrong in order to preserve that fragile shell of security formed by legalism.

As Aristotle so aptly pointed out, the virtue must lie between the two extremes.  What, then, is the answer?

Love.

Perhaps that might seem too simple an answer.  Let me put it another way:

God.

Yes.  God is Love.  Therefore, we can say also that Love is God.

Consequently, if your encounter with the Truth has been anything less than an encounter with Love than you have not truly found God.  Furthermore, I'll wager a guess that if you find within yourself on some level the belief that you must earn God's love that it is because you believe also that you are unlovable.

Do you recognize that lie within yourself?

That is the lie masked by the belief that you must earn God's love along with all its various permutations.  If you believe that you must do something in order to be loved, whether by God or by anyone else, then you believe that you are lovable based upon what you do rather than who you are.

Modern psychology will happily point out to you the importance of your childhood development for the formation of your image of God.  Now before you happily blame your parents so you don't have to feel guilty about having a false idea of God (as you do if you believe you must earn His love), let me point out to you that they could not give you what they themselves had never received.  How could they show you that you were loved unconditionally if they had not themselves believed in and received unconditional love?  In this fallen world few of us have received that love.  Perhaps we flee it because it is too much for us.  Perhaps we flee it because we are afraid.

Fear.

If you look again at those two responses to guilt, you might see fear operating beneath them both.  The same is true for the idea that we must earn God's love: for if we can earn it, then we are in control of it, and it is far more comfortable to think of being in control than of facing the infinite God who is the Unknown who yet stoops down to us that we might know Him.

 "Perfect love casts out fear." (1 John 4:18)

Only God's infinite and unconditional love can cast the fear out from our hearts, but we must let Him, and that letting Him seems to be a life-long process.  It seems to take so much to unravel the knots we tie about ourselves.  Sometimes perhaps it may seem futile and we may wonder why He allows us to tangle ourselves so deeply in the lies of the enemy, but there we are left with the mystery of iniquity, the mystery proclaimed in the Easter Exultet as "O Happy Fault!"  Only a God of infinite love could bring good out of the dark shadow that sin and shame cast over our hearts.

Take courage, then, in whatever darkness you walk and listen to the wisdom of Saint John Paul II whose feast day we celebrate today: "I plead with you — never, ever give up on hope, never doubt, never tire, and never become discouraged.  Be not afraid."

It takes great courage to open your heart to God and to allow yourself to be vulnerable enough to encounter Him in the depths of your being where He speaks love through His silent presence, imperceptible to your senses.

Will you let yourself be loved?  Sometimes I think that is the most difficult thing in all the world.

Thus I leave you with the resounding words of Saint John Paul II, taken from Christ's own words in Scripture:

"Duc in altum!  Put out into the deep!  Be not afraid."

Let Us Become Like Palms and Olive Branches

Chanting the Liturgy of the Hours must be the most beautiful way to enter into Holy Week.  I am much grateful for that gift Luke is sharing with our parish.  Because of it, I found myself reflecting on the second reading in today's Office of Readings which comes from a sermon by Saint Andrew of Crete.  Its words struck deeply into my heart, reflecting there some thoughts stirring there of late.  I want to share some of them with you:

"Let us go together to meet Christ on the Mount of Olives.  Today He returns from Bethany and proceeds of His own free will toward His holy and blessed passion, to consummate the mystery of our salvation."

What a beautiful phrase: to consummate the mystery of our salvation of His own free will.  Yes, His own free will.

Sometimes perhaps we forget—or merely do not understand—how willingly He goes into the suffering of His passion. It is easier to think that He did it because He had to do it. For who could possibly choose to suffer so much pain by His own free will? Who would choose to embrace the Cross? Surely only the One who loves more deeply than we can understand—who loves more deeply than we can bear.

How then do we respond?

"Let us run to accompany Him as He hastens toward Jerusalem, and imitate those who met Him then, not by covering His path with garments, olive branches or palms, but by doing all we can to prostrate ourselves before Him by being humble and by trying to live as He would wish.  Then we shall be able to receive the Word at His coming, and God, whom no limits can contain, will be within us.

"In His humility Christ entered the dark regions of our fallen world and He is glad that He became so humble for our sake...."

Humility.

It is the foundation of all the virtues, the foundation of freedom, and the foundation of joy.  Yet somehow it is the most difficult of the virtues to embrace in more than mind's intellectual assent.

Why?

I think it is because we fear our own vulnerability—our own woundedness.  We try in every way possible to shore ourselves up lest we fall crashing to the ground, lest we become a hopeless mess, lest we do what we would never wish....

Vulnerability.  It is a word that has haunted me whatever path I have taken: it drew me to theatre, to charismatic prayer, to friendship, to psychology, and again to prayer....

Yet still the word looms like an insurmountable tower, its gates impregnable against my weak-willed assault.  I gaze at it like a puzzle, wondering how to unlock it.  Yet in truth I am made ungainly by my own weighty mail with all its interwoven rings of steel, my own walls of protection stacked stone upon stone over the years, and cannot grasp with my armored claws something so soft and simple and small.

Of course we need our gates and walls to keep out the evils of the world.  The problem is mainly that we forget to let down the drawbridge when the King comes knocking, especially because He comes without fine array, riding on a donkey.

"So let us spread before His feet not garments or soulless olive branches, which delight the eye for a few hours and then wither, but ourselves, clothed in His grace, or rather, clothed completely in Him.  We who have been baptized into Christ must ourselves be the garments that we spread before Him."

When we admit our own vulnerability—that we are naked before Him—then we know that we must be clothed in His grace and in His very self.  That humility allows us to throw ourselves before Him to tread upon as He enters the heavenly Jerusalem in glory where one day—after our own journey to Calvary—He will raise us up to reign with Him and to enjoy our own resurrection.

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!  Hosanna in the highest!

Speak, Lord, Your Servant Is Listening

Thus said Samuel according the advice of the priest Eli: "Speak, Lord, Your servant is listening."

It is such a simple and powerful prayer.  It is also a prayer of vulnerability.

We mortal creatures don't like vulnerability.  We flee it like the proverbial plague.  Of course we say we want to hear the voice of the Lord, but we rarely allow ourselves to wait in silence and darkness to truly hear what He might say.

The story of Samuel has great comic potential.  It follows the formula for a comedic routine: he hears someone calling his name and immediately hops up to go ask Eli why he called him, but Eli tells him he must be imagining it and sends him back to bed.  The same exact thing happens the second time.  There you have your context set up.  The third time when it happens, it starts out the same way, but all of a sudden Eli realizes that God is calling Samuel.  If it weren't such a serious matter (and we hadn't heard the story a few too many times), we would laugh uproariously at this sudden upturning of our expectations.

It is easy to laugh at Samuel for not knowing that God was calling him because of course it is obvious to us.  Somehow, though, it doesn't seem that obvious in our everyday lives.

Perhaps we don't follow the Rule of Three in our lives, but I daresay there is enough material for humor there nonetheless.  We say we want to hear God's voice and so we start telling Him everything we need Him to do for us and how He ought to answer us and what our requirements and needs are and so on.  Then, before we have bothered to so much as ask Him what He thinks of all that, we hurry on to our duties and responsibilities and get all weighed down by what He isn't making clear for us.

Do you see the comic potential?

Open the Doors of Your Heart

"Beauty will save the world," said Dostoevsky.  His words may be taken in a general fashion or referring to the Creator Himself.  Either way, he speaks to a deep truth.

Gregory Wolfe supports the power of this statement in his beautiful essay titled "The Wound of Beauty" in which he defends the need for beauty.  He also writes of the power of beauty to strike us to the very depths of our being: "Beauty itself wounds us, pierces our hearts, opens us up."

If beauty wounds, then where shall we find healing?

Ultimately the source of our healing can only be found in the Incarnation.  For there the great rift between God and man is healed by the Creator becoming His own creation.

All of us are called to participate in that great work of healing through incarnating truth in our very selves.  Those of us called to be artists must take that incarnation a step further, revealing the depths of God through various mediums that reflect the core of our very selves.

Yet we artists are no less broken.

Unless we participate in the great work of redemption—the great work of healing—we fail in our vocation.  Our art becomes worthless, a merely shameful display of our talents and self-worth, an excuse for pride and vainglory.  Yet when we allow ourselves to collaborate in Christ's redemptive sacrifice, our handiwork has power beyond what we can imagine.

The question I would propose for you to ponder is this one: how does healing come through art?

I would argue that it comes through much the same way as when Christ healed.  He looked for an open heart—a heart of faith.  When He healed a man who was deaf and dumb, He said: "Ephpheta, which is, 'Be thou opened.'" (Mark 7:34)

It is through being open that we are healed.  Returning again to the theme of the wound of beauty, you can understand how it ties in here: the act of wounding is a means of making an openness.  Whether we allow that wound or whether beauty strikes us without our awareness, opening up our brokenness, we find ourselves in a perfect position to be healed because we have that openness—that vulnerability.  In so doing, we may find ourselves becoming channels of God's grace as well.

Sometimes I think our greatest challenge as artists is to embrace that vulnerability and not to flee from it.  We are often masters of flight.  We disguise our cowardice as perfectionism or scorn or pride or any manner of things.

In the end, when we allow ourselves to be powerless, we experience the freedom of true creation.  That is the paradox.  As Saint Paul said: when we are weak, then we are strong.

That experience of freedom—whether through creative work or through some other means—touches the very depths of our being.  It fills our restless hearts and we want nothing more.  For where we open ourselves to His working, we become one with Him, and He brings healing.

The presence of God hurts.  Beauty wounds.

Yet just as sometimes a bone must be re-broken to set aright or a wound opened to be drained, pain precedes healing—it opens the way.  So God sometimes hurts in order to heal.

All we need to do is open the door of our hearts.  When we have the support of those around us and see their own battle-wounds, we may find the courage to choose the glory of what feels to us like death.

For ultimately the battle for openness lies within the boundaries of our own hearts.  We must go into the desert there and wrestle with ourselves.

A seed must die to bring forth fruit.

Reaching Out

So often fear binds us in our interactions with others. We find ways to shield ourselves: alcohol or virtual communications or certain attitudes and ways of presenting ourselves to the world that hide our true selves.

Of what are we so afraid?

We are afraid of rejection certainly. We are afraid of misunderstandings. Yet perhaps we are even more afraid of vulnerability.

What if we are more afraid that others will see us for who we really are instead of seeing the facade we present to the world? Do we fear more that they shall see the face behind the mask and the heart aching for love when we want to pretend that we are indomitable?

There is fear too of forcing others to respond out of politeness. Do we dare reach out to another who may feel himself bound to answer even when he does not wish to? If we make the initial effort, we never know if the other cares to deepen our relationship. So sometimes we wait, hoping that the other will make the first move. Yet what if we then wait forever?

Deep down we are all afraid. It is not fear that matters, but our response to it.

Day by day we form ourselves as cowards or as great warriors. It is not fear that distinguishes the two; it is action. The cowardly soul denies himself the will to act because of his fear while the courageous soul steps into the breach in the face of fear.

Verso l'alto!

"We are our own aptest deceiver." - Goethe

"...he forgot for the while what experience had taught him—
that no human being can really understand another,
and no one can arrange another's happiness."

The Heart of the Matter
by Graham Greene

Those last two phrases in particular sound out in bold ringing tones, like a bell struck hard in an old abandoned church tower that grates out a harsh unused and funereal tone, scattering pigeons into flight and drawing the gaze of those working nearby in the fields.  So it might catch us, striking us out of the stolid comfort of our own assurance.

Sometimes we get caught up in thinking we can make others happy.  That desire often places upon us an undue burden, leading to pain or mental illness.  We may despair because of the impossibility of even understanding what will produce another's happiness.

In the sense of the above quotation, trying to arrange happiness becomes a sort of manipulation.  All too often that is exactly what our love is: an attempt to control others.  Thus even what is good—namely love, which is willing the good of the other—has become corrupt.  We may not realize how deep is the decay of our intentions.  We continue to deceive ourselves in focusing on doing the other good, but it is a good that ultimately seeks to give us a sort of power over them.

Similarly, the desire to please others leads us into the trap of manipulation.  The logic in our heads is as follows: if we do what others wish, they will be happy.  It is good logic.  The problem is in the premises; after all, receiving precisely what we want does not make us happy, ridiculous as that fact is.

Furthermore, as long as we are trying to force a result, we are manipulating, controlling, dominating.  We are not free to give and receive.  Henri Nouwen expresses this idea perfectly in his book called The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom:

"A lot of giving and receiving has a violent quality, because the givers and receivers act more out of need than out of trust.  What looks like generosity is actually manipulation, and what looks like love is really a cry for affection or support."

How many times have we gone to others looking for love, begging for them to fulfil our needs while trying to hide from them the fact that we were in need at all?  So many times we reach out in hope that another will fill the void within.  Sometimes we dare not even risk that much vulnerability and turn to pleasures instead.

Yet there is a way to break out of this crippling circle of insanity.  As Nouwen himself puts it, we must first experience love in the depths of our being:

"When you know yourself as fully loved, you will be able to give according to the other's capacity to receive, and you will be able to receive according to the other's capacity to give.  You will be grateful for what is given to you without clinging to it, and joyful for what you can give without bragging about it.  You will be a free person, free to love."

That is the key to achieving the liberty of being able to love generously: we must set others free from our desires for them and accept the fruit of our efforts and offerings made out of love, no matter whether we achieve success or failure.  We must do our duty and leave the rest to the One who is All-Powerful.

Yes, we must surrender our wills.  We must surrender everything to the Creator and Healer of our souls.

Yet if it is love we desire, how could we do better then to lay ourselves in whole-hearted surrender at the feet of the One who is Love?  It is hard many times to receive love from One so intangible.  It seems impossible to entrust ourselves to One so hidden.  How can we reasonably expect One so unseen to care for us?  And yet He does.  And He does so according to our capacity to receive, according to our surrender.

In the end, He is not after all so invisible.  It is we who are blind.

Life is Pain

"Life is pain, Highness; anyone who says differently is selling something."

-Westley in The Princess Bride

These days nearly everyone is selling something.  Whether it is engagement jewelry or cheap soda, vacation home timeshares or the latest technological gadget, our society centers around consumerism.  Our economy improves primarily based upon how many unnecessary bits of paraphernalia you, the consumer, will purchase, even if you must rack up thousands of dollars in debt to do so.

Clearly—if you will believe the advertisements thrust upon you from every quarter—you must own a desktop computer, laptop computer, mp3 player, iPad, iPod, iPhone, new car, new house, stereo system, barbeque grill, printer, scanner, Ninja blender, ride-on lawn mower, golf cart, 4-wheeler, motorcycle, moped, DVD player, CD player, 62GB USB stick, digital camera, telescope, binoculars, electronic keyboard, LED lights, water skis, etc., etc.  You need caffeine, alcohol, drugs, and fifteen different kinds of painkillers.  In short, you need anything that increases your pleasure and decreases your pain.

Consequently, we ought to be the happiest people in all history.  Yet are we?

Depression, anxiety, and other mental illnesses continue to increase dramatically.  Current statistics state that one in five adults in the U.S. suffer from a mental illness each year.  Yes, a fifth of our adult population is struggling, not to mention the prevalence of mental issues among children and teens.  And the number of suicides only continues to rise.

Why is this?

When we listen to the voices of the world and believe that we are not smart enough, strong enough, or beautiful enough, we shrink in our own estimation.  When we are told we have the wrong hair color, skin color, body type, or gender, how are we supposed to be happy?

By changing our exteriors?  Then we only build up layer upon layer of mask behind which to hide.  And we know very well how to hide.

Yet there is another course.  Theatre teaches us how great is the value of vulnerability: in laying bare our very selves and refusing to flee the pain, we find a deep inner strength.  By coming to know ourselves and accepting who we are, we discover the unique perspective we alone can offer the world.

How do we find the strength to face that pain?

Leaving aside the facts, let me speak personally for a moment: I find it daily in the love I receive from my family and my friends who love me because of who I am with all of my eccentricities.  I have found the greatest happiness in my life not by trying to change myself to fit the pressures of the world and become someone else, but by learning to love myself as I am and to become daily more myself.

Sometimes the pain returns when relationships fail.  Caught up as others are in their own pain and hectic lives, they do not see our need for love and support.  Nor do they understand how much their love bridges the chasm of loneliness.

Yet even there we can stand strong in the face of agony, for there is One who never fails.  Looking back upon my life, I see that my Lord has always been there for me.  Even when all around me may seem to fail me, He is there, carrying me along my way, in sickness and in health, in good times and in bad....