BETWEEN OURSELVES

God and emptiness

Dear Donagh,

I wonder if you can help me. I cannot feel God’s love. And if God is love then perhaps I cannot find God.

A little background may help me to explain my problem. For many years I struggled with Buddhism but what defeated me was the demand that I attain enlightenment by my own efforts. Instead, I found that the harder I tried the worse I got, the more miserable I became. And dwelling on my negative karma (growing faster than ever now that I was trying to do something about it) and its consequences for my future plunged me into chronic anxiety and despair. Even I can laugh - a bit - about the absurdity of this in retrospect, though it has left deep scars. Christianity beckoned to me because it acknowledged and accepted me as I was and even embraced my failure.

But as I have studied the great mystics like Eckhart I have begun to see that what they were talking about is awfully like the Buddhism I left behind. It was precisely their instruction to abandon the self completely that so confounded me as a Buddhist. Again, it seemed that it was up to me to attain the impossible or suffer the consequences of my failure. Where was the God who accepted me for who I am now, warts and all? And if God was less a ‘person’ with whom I could have a loving relationship than Eckhart’s ‘negation of a negation’ then He seemed very like the emptiness that Buddhists speak of, an emptiness that affirms nothing at all, least of all love. Suddenly, God became impersonal and His love not so much a comfort as a hurricane which promised to dash me to pieces and scatter me to the four directions.

I am beginning to wonder if I have been deceiving myself. Christianity is not an easier, more comforting route. The work that needs to be done is the same in any language and God’s love is perhaps not like any kind of love I am familiar with. But once more I am left with my own failure. I don’t run from it so much these days but I can’t seem to get beyond it. Life seems bleak and hopeless and God has become something remote, unreachable, even hostile.

I don’t know whether this makes any kind of sense to you but if you can help in any way I would be so grateful. I have lived most of my life with depression and I can feel it claiming me again. Depression leaves one weak and numb and the spiritual path seems so unreasonably difficult. Where is God’s love in all this?

Kind regards

David

Dear David, Thank you for your letter, which I thought best to reproduce in full.  I usually reproduce just the key point of a letter, but yours is a description of a journey, so it would not be right to omit anything. 

Describing spiritual effort St Augustine said, “Act as if everything depended on you, knowing that everything depends on God.”  It seems very wise.  If I were to try to live by just one part of that sentence – whether the first part or the second – I would be on a very uncertain road.  If I were simply to say, “Everything depends on God,” I would not be inclined to make any effort at all.  The result is that I would then be unable (or unwilling) to internalise and make my own what God has given freely and for nothing.  On the other side, if I were to say, “Everything depends on me,” I would feel crushed with responsibility and a feeling of failure.  This second position seems to be where you are at present. 

So, St Augustine’s ‘map’ suggests that you might take the direction of ‘Everything depends on God’.  I think in every genuine spirituality this comes into focus sooner or later – even when people don't use the language of Christians.  Nobody can enlighten him or herself, we are told.  Any enlightenment that comes your way comes as a complete surprise, not as the completion of a project – even when you have been working hard towards it.  Some famous enlightened teacher once said, “I was never enlightened!”  This came as a surprise to many of his students – until he spelled it out.  The ‘I’ – the ego – never becomes enlightened.  Enlightenment is precisely joyful freedom from this ‘I’, freedom from the ego’s control.  Enlightenment then means discovering one’s true nature, which lies deeper than the ego. 

In Christian terms this is “dying to oneself” (see John 12:24-25).  Because we remember the way Jesus died we tend to think of this is as an awful experience.  But it means being freed of a false narrow identity and being drawn into a deeper life in Christ – an experience which is the source of all joy for us.  ‘Emptiness’, ‘nothingness’, ‘the void’… these terrifying words are not what they seem.  They are not suggesting that there is really nothing out there.  They are not statements about external reality at all.  They are about the mind that is free of ego: free of the urge to be selfishly independent, to be in fact one’s own god. 

Yes, we are left in no doubt, Christianity is for sinners.  The parable of the Prodigal Son (Luke 15) is deeply moving, unforgettable.  Jesus could have put together any kind of story he wanted; he could have put in lots of qualifications; he could have concluded, as religious story-tellers mostly do, with a great deal of moralising.  But he did none of this.  The parable stands there on the page, totally free.  It was Jesus’ way of describing the mercy of God.  It is this that encourages us to keep on trying, even when we have failed over and over.  God embraces us just as we are, and doesn’t wait till we improve.  This is a source of great joy. 

Christians use the language of human relationships when speaking about God (see the Gospel commentary for March 5th, ‘08).  This should help prevent our spirituality from becoming cold and impersonal.  (Of course it doesn’t always do so, when people’s human relationships have been troubled in the past; but it is meant to do so.)  Even when Christian mystics speak about “the dark night of the soul,” or about God as “Nothing” (St John of the Cross and Meister Eckhart), the language of human relationships is not put aside but deepened and widened.  They are saying that God is our Father in a way that surpasses any thought or image or experience that we have ever had.  You wrote, “God’s love is perhaps not like any kind of love I am familiar with.”  Yes, because God is not a creature; but human love is a distant pointer to God’s love.  When the Christian mystics use negative language, saying God is not this or that, what they are denying of God is not the quality itself (love, for example) but the human limitation in it.  “God is love,” St John wrote – and we know it has to be love beyond our imagining. 

“Life seems bleak and hopeless,” you wrote, “and God has become something remote, unreachable, even hostile.”  I really hope and pray, David, that this painful part of your journey will soon lead onto a wide open joyful path, where you will know that when God moves beyond your reach, it is to lead you on, not to abandon you.  As a practical thing to do, I would suggest that you read that story of the Prodigal Son every day.  In fact the whole of chapter 15 of Luke’s gospel is parables about being lost and found: the lost sheep, the lost coin, the lost son.  If you read it often enough your reading will move beyond reading and become a kind of immersion. 

God bless and keep you, David,

Mistakes

Dear Donagh,
…. I seem to have a knack of getting myself into problems and mistakes, haven't I?  I would like to have a better relationship to God, but I don't know if I'm up to it.  I know I'm a loser and I'd probably make a [mess] of that too.  Anyway, take care of yourself, man. Jim H.

        Dear Jim, I'm sorry that I have to shorten your letter drastically.  I don't think it necessary or appropriate for everyone to know the details. 
        Do you like jazz?  Someone said to me once that God is a jazz musician!  We play a false note, and God improvises around it.  God does it so skilfully, he said, that the false note is somehow just the right note.  Why do you call yourself a loser?  That's other people’s description of you.  You told me so in your letter.  You’ve come to believe it, and now you repeat it yourself.  If you keep looking only at your own performance you will miss the game.  Our life is not a game of solitaire: other people have parts to play in it.  A culture of pure individualism has nothing left but competition.  So it keeps telling us in a thousand ways that winning is what matters, and that losing is a disaster.  What a brutal world that is: a world of nothing but competition.  No friends.  No God.  No joy.  No jazz.  Just me alone.  That's much worse than losing.  It is missing the game completely. 
        You can't be a loser with God, unless you walk off the pitch.  The first person in the Christian era to make it to paradise was the thief who was crucified with Jesus.  Jesus enjoyed the company of sinners and failures and outcasts much more than he enjoyed the company of the religious people of his day.  Those Pharisees had set up the rules in such a way that only they could win.  He gave them hell (but he didn’t drive them off the pitch).  There’s hope for everyone, even for religious people! 
       You mentioned your interest in making sculptures with scrap metal.  I think that is pure poetry, especially in your case.  I have a hunch that it’s the way you are going to go.  You have been calling yourself scrap, haven't you?  You are that scrap metal!  Your taking it in hand and making something of it is your spiritual path!  This is God calling you.  I want to encourage you with all my heart.  Did you know that Picasso took a turn with scrap metal?  He used to go out to the city dump sometimes and collect pieces of it.  He would bring them home and weld them together to make sculptures.  You know how the bull seems to be a very strong symbol for Spaniards (something about macho, I suppose).  Picasso found the saddle of a bicycle one day and picked it up.  Then he found handlebars.  He set up the saddle on the wall, nose pointing downwards, and the handlebars overhead!  The bull!  El torro!  Some people might say it was still only scrap metal, but that would be like saying that music is only sound.  While remaining scrap, it is also a work of art.  Who but Picasso would think of it?  God is not only a jazz musician but a sculptor. 
        Enjoy every minute of it, Jim.  Give it your whole heart.  It’s your way to God.  I can feel for this better than for anything in the world.  I trained as a potter many years ago.  Clay is like dirt.  It is so like dirt that a few well-meaning people cleaned up my workshop, once, while I was away and threw out the clay, thinking it was only rubbish.  (In fairness to them, it was clay I had dug myself and it didn’t look smooth and neat like the clay you buy.)  Clay is a wonderful substance.  So is scrap metal.  What wonderful games we play!  And God is our most ardent fan!
Donagh

Love

Dear Donagh,
….On Sunday mornings no one stirs in our house except myself.  My husband goes to Mass only a couple of times a year including weddings and funerals.  Our younger son stopped going last year, and as far as I know our married son and his wife never go.  It still upsets me when I think about it and I tried every way to persuade them. It was a constant battle, and eventually they just started making fun of it.  A priest told me there was nothing I could do but keep going myself and pray for them. I'm doing that, but a year on I'm beginning to feel like an oddity in my own home.  We seem to be living in a harsher world than the one I grew up in.  What am I asking you?  Not how to get the men in my family to go to Mass but how to keep my own faith going when people around me are turning away from it.  
            Our younger boy showed me how to use the internet and I enjoy reading the things you write.  Maybe you can tell me something that will give me a bit of strength. 
            Thank you.
            Christine H.

Dear Christine, I'm glad you are not asking me how to get people to go to Mass, because I don't know.  Every question comes back to oneself in the end, and you have wisely seen that.  Certainly the world around us has changed and society no longer provides active support for faith.  But in a way, that is to be expected.  Religion can't expect to fit comfortably into society, and it often thrives better under a bit of persecution – or a diminished form of it, ridicule.  Jesus didn’t fit in.  God doesn’t fit into the world.  When believers fit comfortably something is probably wrong.  A colleague of mine got a standing ovation after a homily and he was inclined to boast about it afterwards, until another colleague, teasing him, said, “Jesus preached and they crucified him; you preach and you get a standing ovation!”  So don't be surprised if you have to stand alone. 
            The understanding we hear on all sides is that religion has become a private matter.  In very visible ways it has, in the western world.  It has been happening for a long time now.  Everything attests to it.  In 1920 D.H. Lawrence wrote Women in Love.  I remember a particular passage, which I have just gone and found again for you.  Let me quote part of it. 
            “The father drew more and more out of the light. The whole frame of the real life was broken for him. He had been right according to his lights. And his lights had been those of the great religion. Yet they seemed to have become obsolete, to be superseded in the world. He could not understand. He only withdrew with his lights into an inner room, into the silence. The beautiful candles of belief, that would not do to light the world any more, they would still burn sweetly and sufficiently in the inner room of his soul, and in the silence of his retirement.”
            Superseded in the world, withdrawn into the inner room of the soul.  That paragraph, like much of Lawrence, reads as if it had been written just yesterday.  And yet I don't think it’s the whole picture.  I got a glimpse of something else quite recently.
            I performed my niece’s wedding ceremony last month.  She married an Englishman, who is an Anglican.  70 of his family and friends came to Ireland for the wedding.  Many of them came a week early, to ensure that there would be no strangers at this wedding.  There were four generations of his family present – from his grandfather to his 10-day old niece.  As the days went by I was more and more aware that the love between these two young people was anything but a purely private matter.  In coming together they were drawing all the generations of both families together.  More, they were drawing England and Ireland together, and they were drawing the Anglican and the Roman Catholic Churches together.  We were keenly aware of this at the wedding Mass itself.  Love appears to be a purely private matter, but it draws whole worlds together.  We could see one another in mathematical terms, each individual just one.  That's what statisticians do.  I've always had a distaste for the statistics of religious practice.  My niece and her husband add up to two, mathematically; but the total impact of their coming together is beyond calculation.  I think love is always like that.  And if religion isn’t love, what is it?  It resists all statistics and talk of majorities and percentages. 
            In your religious practice you may be alone in your family, but there is no calculating the impact that your Christian practice has.  So don't lose courage, Christine.  When you are sincere in your religious belief and practice you are drawing worlds together, in ways that no one can calculate. 

SIMPLE

Dear Donagh,
….Why is the Christian religion so hard to understand?  For no particular reason I looked up predestination on the net – or it may be I looked it up because it was the hardest word I remember in religion.  Whenever I try to get deeper into religion I'm hit with a volley of impossible words.  When I looked up predestination I got these beauties (I wrote them down).  Omniscience, determinism, supralapsarianism (wow!), infralapsarianism, immanence, transcendence, premotion…. How many people know what those words mean?  Can I get deeper into my religion without studying all that [material]…? I thought Christianity was for everyone….. JH 

Dear J, Yes, it’s for everyone – including people who addle their brains with supralapsarianism, etc.  But they would be quite a small constituency, I'm certain.  The Christian faith is very ancient; it has spread and developed in many different cultures since the beginning.  Instead of trying to be a self-contained package, it has always tried to integrate with each culture in which it found itself: theologically, philosophically, socially, every way (with varying degrees of success).  And so, much of the language of theology reflects debates that were vital in their time, but are now long-forgotten – by everyone except professors of theology.  Every one of those issues is fascinating, if you had time to go into it.  But so is astrophysics, I’m told!   
            Not everyone who tries to unravel predestination will enter the kingdom of heaven.  There’s no mention of it in the gospels.  It was a theological question that occurred to people centuries later, as they reflected on the Gospel.  I'm aware that your question isn’t about predestination as such, but about whether depth necessarily leads to complexity.  
            I don't think it does.  The deepest things are utterly simple.  That's what makes them difficult to grasp.  Up to a point, we are more at home with complexity than we are with simplicity.  A complex notion (like a complex object) can be taken apart and examined piece by piece, but a simple notion has no parts: it has to be grasped whole.  For example, if we weren’t so used to zero in mathematics, we would find it very difficult to grasp.  You can imagine ancient people asking, “Why do we need a symbol for nothing?”  In religion too they talk about ‘Nothing’, but I’ll come to that. 
            It struck me very forcibly once when I was celebrating the Eucharist with a group of people, that we would not be here doing this thing if Jesus had not walked the roads of Palestine.  Each of us would be somewhere else, doing something else; we would not be praying these prayers or saying these things to one another, nor sitting, standing, moving in the way we do; this building would not be here, arranged in the way it is…. Nothing but the fact of Jesus makes sense of what we are doing.  This makes him as present and as real as the walls around us and the roof overhead.  The roads he walked lead to here.  There is no separation, no distance.  His sandals are lined up with ours.  There is no abstraction; it is all as concrete as anything could be. 
            It doesn’t matter now whether we are infra- or supralapsarians.  What matters – and what has always mattered – is the presence of Jesus in us and between us, and in everything we do.  This presence isn’t something you can check out with instruments; it is spiritual presence – which means real presence, not something imagined.  If someone knew the whole history of the debates about predestination but didn’t know this presence, he or she would not have entered into any depth of the Christian faith. 
            Sometimes a Christian has moments when the mind is clear of all thinking and there is just presence.  It is an awareness so free of the clutter of thinking that the mystics have spoken of it as an experience of ‘Nothing’.  It’s not that there is nothing there!  It is that there is no thinking there, there is nothing to say because there is no distance.  Meister Eckhart spoke about becoming “pregnant with Nothing.”  To get passing glimpses of what he experienced is much more important than to become entangled in the thoughts of people who may never have had that experience at all.  
            What I would suggest, PJ, is that you develop an eye for the things that are so simple and so constant that we usually don't notice them at all.  This is the path that leads into the depth of our religion. 
            God bless,      

[motives]

Hi, thanks for your beautiful website, I find it so helpful, it’s a real treasure…. I always go to the questions and answers first …. I'd like to ask you a question myself if you don't mind. I always try to help my friends and my family as much as I can by being there for them and by helping them…. But sometimes I wonder am I only doing it for myself?  I mean am I only doing it to be liked by everyone? It worries me because I must be a very superficial person if it’s true.  Can you say something that would help me?  Thanks for everything. Love, Deirdre 

Dear Deirdre, I notice that you used the word ‘help’ six times in your letter! – four times in the parts I used here.  Everyone loves a helpful person.  But I understand your question: there’s always the question of motives.  Are you superficial, you ask.  The fact that you ask the question is a sign that you are not.  A superficial person has no question about superficiality. 
            But let’s go digging!  May I quote what some of the ‘heavies’ have said about this?  Dogen Zenji (13th century) wrote: “One who does good for others, or for the future, without being noticed and without considering for whom his actions are good, is truly a good person.”  Strong medicine!  In the ‘Gospel commentary’ section this month I quoted a rabbi (can't remember his name) who said that perfect generosity was when the giver didn’t know who was receiving and the receiver didn’t know who was giving.  It’s always interesting when people who are centuries and worlds apart say the same thing.  Meister Eckhart said, “When a virtuous deed seems to happen by itself, simply because one loves goodness and for no other reason, then one is perfectly virtuous and not be­fore.”  There! – three heavies. 
            Other creatures in this world don't have the difficulties that we have.  They just balance their needs with their fears, and that's usually a simple equation.  Then they go ahead and do what they do, without wondering how it looks or what other animals will think of them.  The other animals couldn’t care tuppence, so long as it doesn’t interfere with their interests.  But we are more complicated!  We have the “wound of knowledge” – we are able to think and imagine beyond the facts that face us.  Ordinary human consciousness is like a mirror palace: everything in us is reflected again and again, often grossly distorted.  It’s very hard not to look in a mirror when it’s right in front of you.  So we get used to checking.  Soon, we can find ourselves looking for mirrors, and even feeling that nothing has reality unless it is mirrored.  If we were to take it to the end we would be like film stars: all image, little or no reality.  It says something interesting about our age that most of our heroes are film stars and other figures from the entertainment world. 
            Those people I quoted seem to say we should ignore the mirrors.  That means an effort in concentration.  It means giving our full attention to what we are doing at each moment.  When I walk, let me be where my feet are at each moment, not a hundred metres ahead.  When I eat, let me taste my food.  When I rest, let me really rest – no TV, nothing, just rest.  Then when I do something for someone, I just do it.  I won't be bothered much by images and reflections.  I won't even have to worry if such things are there: they will be just like insects flying around, or like sounds that don't bother me.  It’s easy.  As Dogen Zenji said, “It is not that it is difficult to do, but to do it completely is difficult.”
            There, Deirdre, you get advice from two 14th-century characters, and from another of uncertain age.  And you thought you were just writing to me!
            I hope this helps.  Take care. 
            Donagh

Hi Donagh,

What good news can you give to a person who has failed horribly, not once, not twice, but many times? In trying to start myself up from the pieces of my failures, I ask the million dollar question proving my immaturity: where was God during all this?

Was he on vacation? Was he indifferent? Was he carrying me like the famous story titled "Footprints in the Sand"? Does God create a life of failures?

Or maybe it was all my fault.  My life is a failure and I accept full responsibility for it. Frankly, to me this makes the most sense. But please help me reconcile the full responsibility of my failures, and the faith of a loving God who is Emmanuel --- God with us.

 Thanks in advance for your time.

Dear Francis,
What a heavy word that is: failure!  I always glimpse a judge with his wig and gown when I hear it.  When you have heard it pronounced over you not once but many times you must feel weighed to the ground.  The judge in this case isn’t wearing a wig and gown, because he is no other than yourself.  But this makes it worse, if anything; he is in session every day, he even sits at night.  I would love to be able to help you out from under his heavy judgments. 
            The first thing I would like to say is that the word ‘failure’ doesn’t travel by itself; it is part of a pair.  The other word that is always with it (but often out of earshot) is the word ‘success’.  Failure is always relative to some idea of success.  There can be no such thing as absolute failure.  So it is necessary to look at what we want to call success. 
            There are criminals who get away scot-free; you would have to say they are successful in terms of what they themselves would call success.  Prisons are full of unsuccessful ones – failed criminals.  (Mustn’t forget, though, that some people in prison may not be criminals at all.)   So, just as success isn’t always a good thing, neither is failure always bad. 
            We live in a world that worships success in a way that approaches the absolute.  There are countless books on how to be a success.  I even saw one entitled ‘How to be a Successful Criminal’.  It’s time to put in a good word for failure!
            Jesus was a failure!  Not one or twice, but to the end.  Mark’s gospel says about his visit to his home town, “He could work no miracles there” (Mark 6:5).  Many people deserted him when he said things they didn’t want to hear: “Many of his disciples turned back and no longer went about with him” (John 6:66).  When the crunch came, all his followers deserted him (again according to Mark).  Crucifixion was failure in the extreme.  The Christian faith is founded on his courage to face utter failure, and on God's response to it.  So Christians have a special understanding of failure.  We are not afraid to place crucifixes in our homes and churches, and we even wear them around our necks. 
            Where was God when Jesus said with his dying breath, “My God, my God, why have you deserted me?”  He was one with God as he had always been, but in his human heart and soul he felt utterly abandoned.  This gives Christians their perspective on failure and suffering.  But it gives more than perspective – more than a philosophical point of view.  It gives power and grace to face failure and never to give up hope. 
            The saints have understood this, and it is encouraging to read what they said.  I love to quote Johann Tauler who said, “We must go into our house, our souls…. When we go into our house and look for God there, God in His turn looks for us and ransacks the house. He behaves just as we do when we are searching for something, throwing aside one thing after another until we find what we are looking for. This is just what He does to us. When we have gone into our house, when we have searched for him in the depths of our souls, God comes and searches for us and ransacks our house…. And when I say that God seeks us in his house and ransacks it, I mean that in this house, in the depths of our souls, we are utterly deprived of all the ideas and conceptions of God by which we have ever thought of him before. Our house is ransacked; it is as if we had never known anything about God at all. As God seeks, for us, this happens again and again; every idea that we ever had of him, every manifestation of him that we have ever known, every conception and revelation of him which we ever had will be taken away from us as he searches to find us.”
            This is what the saints expect to experience.  The ancient teaching is that this world is a place of soul-making.  Suffering, failure, and death itself are ways of growing towards God.  But what if my suffering and my failure are my own fault?  You asked this question yourself.  May I quote Tauler again at some length?  “Sometimes people say to me, ‘Father, I am in great trouble and distress,’ and when I tell them that they should be thankful they say, ‘Oh no - because I am afraid I have brought it on myself through my own wickedness.’  My dear, dear child, set your heart at rest. Whether you have deserved it or not, take your suffering as coming from God, thank Him for it and be at peace and at rest. Every trial sent by God has been specially arranged to lift us up through suffering to higher things. That is why He has placed so many obstacles in our path. God could have made loaves of bread grow out of the ground instead of corn if He had wanted to. It would have been just as easy for Him. But He wanted us to be tried in all sorts of ways…. He has arranged and provided for each one of us, with more care than the best painter in the world would bestow on a masterpiece.  You know how an artist will ponder over every stroke that he will paint into his picture, planning whether it is to be long or short, how wide it should be, a tinge of red here and a shade of blue there, every little touch exactly right to make the picture a masterpiece. God is infinitely more skilful than any human artist If only we will accept as we ought these trials which are God's gifts to us, He will shape us to his own design with many a stroke of the brush, many a tint of suffering, until He has finished us to His perfect satisfaction.”
            I hope these thoughts, and especially the passages from Tauler, will be of some help to you, Francis.  Courage!  And thank you for writing. 
            Donagh

[Silence of the heart]

Dear Donagh, Thanks for your reply to my question last month and the emails you sent in between.   I've spent half an hour meditating every morning for the last month (except Sunday mornings).  I found the practical approach a breath of fresh air after all the out-of-the-world things we hear.  I found your distinction between method and state clarified the thing a lot.  Thank you.  I have another question…. I follow the method of concentrating on the breath.  But I find that my mind is very busy and it takes ages to get right down to being quiet.    I know the answer – concentrate on the breath!  But is there some method for doing that more effectively…?  George.

Dear George, A method of putting the method into effect: that could go on to infinity!  You are right: just concentrate on the breath.  Concentrate on it as if you had never drawn breath before - as if no one in the world had ever done so.  It’s hard to see something in all its particularity, because we are drunk on language.  All language is abstract, except sounds like ouch! and ugh!  -  if they are language.  The word ‘tree’, for example, is supposed to be a concrete noun, according to the grammar books.  But can you see how abstract it is?  Compared to the tree at my window, it’s an abstraction.  Likewise the breath: draw your breath as this breath, not breath in general, or one of a thousand breaths.      
            See if this helps.  There are times when the mind is like a stream, rushing purposefully on its course.  But it is often just meandering and sometimes almost stopped.  When you are sitting in meditation, facing a wall or whatever, in theory the mind should be stopped.  Instead, it seems to keep on moving pointlessly.  You see the movement in the dead leaves and twigs floating on the surface - images, memories, scraps of language…. What keeps them still moving?  In a word, I think desire keeps them moving.  The heart is as addicted to desiring as the mind is to meandering.  Even after we have chosen to be where we are, we keep vaguely wishing we were elsewhere, or different, or doing something else, or with someone else…. We keep picturing what could be, rather than sinking into what is.  Or, depending on temperament, what should be.  That is also a kind of desire.  This is the force that keeps the rubbish moving around.  The moment you become aware of it, you neutralise it.  Or I should say: your very awareness of it neutralises it.  When it is not active you have what you might call silence of the heart.  There's no silence of the mind if there isn't silence of the heart. 
            But don’t carry this imagery into meditation with you.  Forget about stagnant pools, etc.  Imagery is a little less abstract than abstract description, but don't make a business of it.  It’s just a way of speaking.  When you are sitting in meditation, concentrate on your breath, always this breath, and don’t give up!
            Good luck, George,
            Donagh

Dear Donagh…, I love the new look of your website.  I remember you said the designer is your nephew.  Congratulate him for me.... Now my question.  You often write about meditation.  In the last few months, for reasons I need not go into, I've become interested.  I would like to know how it should be done.  It seems there are different approaches and different explanations, even different ideologies and religions.  Is there a reliable way that isn't too ideological – I don’t want to get caught up in some weird movement :)  I would be interested to hear what you say.  Thanks again for your website.  It’s neat.  George H.

Dear George, And thanks for your question.  Yes, many people throughout the world are involved in some practice of meditation.  It’s probably a measure of how crazy the world has become!  I don’t mean that people are crazy because they meditate; I mean that they meditate because the world around them is crazy.  Around them, and partly in them.  Meditation is the part of a person that hasn’t gone quite crazy. 
            There's a bewildering variety of meditation techniques around today.  And inevitably, some of them reflect some of the craziness of the world we live in.  But we should think about the ones that lead like streams into the big river and ultimately the ocean. 
            Christians have confidence that the Christian way leads to the ocean of God’s being and love; it has led countless people there.  It was known as “the Way” before it was known as Christianity.  In our own time it has been given a very clear expression by Dom John Main (1926 – 1982).  Christians have always talked about meditation, but usually under the name ‘contemplation’.  When people attempted to describe it they usually went into very abstruse explanations, so that it often appeared to be only for specialists.  Language is always trying to run away with itself, nowhere more so than in religion and philosophy.  The great advantage of John Main’s approach is that he makes it quite practical.  In fact, at the front of every publication by the WCCM (World Community for Christian Meditation) they print a very brief description of the method.  Here it is.  I'm sure they won't mind if I quote it in full. 
            “Meditate for Thirty Minutes.... Remember: Sit down. Sit still and upright. Close your eyes lightly. Sit relaxed but alert. Silently, interiorly, begin to say a single word. We recommend the prayer-phrase "Maranatha." Recite it as four syllables of equal length. Listen to it as you say it, gently, but continuously. Do not think or imagine anything—spiritual or otherwise. Thoughts and images will likely come, but let them pass. Just keep returning your attention—with humility and simplicity—to saying your word in faith, from the beginning to the end of your meditation.”
            This is not the only way that a Christian can meditate, but it is a very effective way.  Some people (not the WCCM) might prefer to concentrate simply on the breath.  You can regard the breath, if you will, as a wordless mantra.  But whatever method you follow, it is vital to be aware that (in John Main’s words), “Meditation is not learning to do, it is learning to be.”  There is often a great deal of confusion between descriptions of a method and descriptions of a state of meditation.  The paragraph I quoted describes a method.  Please don’t try to describe, even to yourself, the state of meditation.  If you do, you will begin to talk like Heidegger!  You will sound very profound and mystical, but you won't be saying anything.  It’s better just to be silent.  It’s no big deal.  If you were to move your fingertips along the table you would be lost for words to describe that too.  But it’s easy to tell someone how to do it.  You can find out more if you google ‘wccm’. 
            Keep going, George, don’t give up!

{Pottery Retreats]

Dear Donagh, A little bird told me that you are starting up your pottery again.  Can you put us in the picture?  I loved your book ‘Go down to the potter’s field’.  Any chance of having it reprinted?  And will you have pottery retreats in Tallaght…?  Love, Paula.

Dear Paula, Yes that bird’s report was right!  To put other readers in the picture: recently I got a new job. I'm in charge of a retreat house 10 km from Dublin.  The move came as a shock to me at first, but I've realised that it’s a good thing to be repotted from time to time!  It has given me new energy – enough to revive the ‘Potter retreats’ that I had been conducting for 30 years.  Because they are very labour-intensive I had discontinued them this year.  But I found that I missed them, and I especially missed my workshop, my ‘potter’s house’.  (By the way, the name of that book was ‘Go down to the potter’s house’, not field!  The Potter’s Field was the one bought with Judas’ thirty pieces of silver!)  Here in Tallaght I have a little workshop that I love.  So here goes for another 30 years, or until I go down to the potter’s field (you know what that field was used for!)
            That little book is from the distant past and is out of print, so I thought I'd reprint a page of it here. 

Here at the wheel is my best place for thinking. I am a little afraid of the thinking that is done at desks; it is all too likely to be spinning out of itself. The mind can detach itself with ease from the other faculties and senses, and produce a cloth     that is beautiful but unwearable.
   God guard me from those thoughts men think In the mind alone;
   He that sings a lasting song
   Thinks in a marrow-bone.
             W B. Yeats
The ironical thing about these thoughts we "think in the mind alone" is that they lay the heaviest claims to everlastingness but in fact they decompose much faster than the others. In liv­ing experience the universal is discerned by attention to the particular, and abstraction is distraction. The whole mind and body have to work in harmony at the wheel. Sometimes there are special moments when that harmony gives such a felt sense of balance and buoyancy that everything is full of light, and everything is in its own place. I have learnt to value these moments and not to judge them by less perfect ones.
A pot is made in a few minutes. Whoever invented this method six thousand years ago (or so) was a kindred spirit to Copernicus and Galileo. The potter no longer moves around the pot. Like the sun he stays in his place and the pot moves. "Eppur' si muove!" It was a benign technology since it did not replace the potter but demanded a new skill of him. The speed of throwing gives the moment a magical air. A moment ago there was nothing and now there is a kind of presence.
'Presence' is not too strong a word, for a pot is not unlike a person. It encloses a little darkness, a small mystery; it has a real interior. The irreconcilable difference between interiors and exteriors has puzzled and drawn me since childhood. Once when our home was being reconstructed, a door was opened to the outside through a wall that seemed the most re­liably solid wall in the world. Places that were twenty yards apart were now together. I remember a vague feeling of out­rage. The exterior had invaded the interior; and the house, the symbol of security, had been disembowelled like a rabbit. Pots too, like houses, are symbols of the self and have an in­violable secrecy. This metaphor is strengthened by the anthro­pomorphic language that potters use for different parts of a pot: the foot, the belly, the shoulder, the neck, the lip. And the most satisfying shapes have a discernible relation to the human body. From long looking at many pots, I know when I like a particular one: it is when my hands get itchy to pick it up, like a baby. It was with delight and recognition that I read what Kawai, a great Japanese potter, said when asked how people were to recognise good pottery.  "With their bodies!" he said.
My young friends return after their walk and make enthusi­astic comments about the new pots. I have to make several other shapes on request: open shapes, tall shapes, bulbous shapes…. I expound the equation between pots and people, and they make fun of identifying each other. Her spirit is like an open shape, a bowl, an uncomplicated manifestation. His is an enclosing shape, a concealment. And I recall Kierkegaard's powerful line that depth in one's life is "a vital relationship between concealment and manifestation."

From Go Down to the Potter’s House: A Journey into Meditation, Donagh O'Shea
(Michael Glazier, Inc. and Dominican Publications, 1988)

[Judging people]

Dear Donagh, I have been dipping into your website for years and I've gotten a lot of help from it.  Maybe you can help me now with something that bothers me a little, or more than a little.  I have a habit of making very unkind judgements about some people.  Even when they do good things I'm right in there with my judgement - he’s just a hypocrite, or she’s just trying to look good.  I hate myself for this and I just wish it wasn’t part of me….  Can you suggest a way of getting clear of this?  Thank you….   Carol

Dear Carol, It’s a question that goes to the heart of the matter, I think.  Jesus says, “Do not judge,” but we have some investment in judging one another.  It goes on and on, even when we know it’s not right.  Nor is it useful to us on the practical level.  So it’s a real puzzle.  This suggests that it has deeper roots, or at any rate that its roots go down elsewhere. 
            I'll go straight to what I think is the point: the ego is not capable of stopping itself from judging, because it exists on judging.  Judging is its lifeline, its oxygen.  Just as you cannot kill yourself by just deciding to stop breathing, the ego by itself cannot stop judging. 
            "Do not judge, so that you may not be judged. For with the judgment you make you will be judged, and the measure you give will be the measure you get” (Matthew 7:1-2).  How are we to read this text?  Could God be as mean as we are?  Could God's way of judging be as partial as ours?  I think it means: the measure you give is the measure you are capable of receiving.  We not only limit the other person by our judgments: we limit ourselves correspondingly.  It has nothing to do with the great heart of God; it’s about the ego getting an egoful of the other person.
            What is this ego, anyway?  The ego is my image of who I am, the bag of experiences that define “me”.  Starting at a very early age I made (and continue to make) this collection by selecting some things (and experiences and people…) that I identify with, and excluding others.  This is what I mean by saying that judging is the ego’s lifeline.  I become so used to this identification that I see it as my identity.  So then, it’s not only to a police officer that I “show my identification”; I am doing it all the time to everyone!  This identification is not rock solid; it’s a house built on sand, because experience is constantly changing, and so is one’s interpretation of experience.
            Talking about the ego is not some modern psychological fad, as some writer claimed.  The word ‘ego’ is just the Latin word for ‘I’.  Henry Suso (14th century) distinguished five meanings of ‘I’ or ‘self’.  The fifth, which, he said, “belongs to a person exclusively as his or her own, is one's individual human self,” and corresponds to what we now call ego.  Then he added, “Now what is it that leads people astray and robs them of happiness? It is exclusively this last self.” 
            How are we to stop this ego from judging, since it has no capacity to do so itself?  By making good judgments in place of bad?   By saying that everything and everybody is wonderful?  That would be dishonest, as well as being exhausting.  And besides, it usually doesn’t work.  If we were on a moving train, it wouldn’t matter much whether we walked towards the front or towards the back.  If we wanted to stop moving, we would have to step off the train. 
            Meditation means stepping off the train.  It means abandoning, as far as we are able at that moment, all our identifications.  It’s not so heroic; our identifications are not our identity, and the more often we disown them the more clearly we see that.  Gradually we lose interest in judging other people; it doesn’t make sense any more.  Even Jesus doesn’t judge the world (“I came not to judge the world, but to save the world” John 12:47), so what grounds could we have for doing so? 
            God bless, Carol

Dear Donagh, I'm feeling very low and I'm hoping you can help me…. My marriage ended nearly 20 years ago and I brought up my two sons myself, holding down a job to support them.  Now the younger one is 15 and all of a sudden I just feel utterly weak and discouraged.  I would love to give up my job, I have no enthusiasm for it any more, but I can't afford to give it up.  I'm on sick leave at the moment and I feel completely empty and frightened and alone…. I don’t know where to go from here…. Can you help me?  Joan.

Dear Joan, what an anguished story you have to tell!  I'm truly sorry to hear how hard your life is.  In the past we have spoken in person a few times and several times over the phone, so I know more about your situation than the readers do.  I know for example that you have had a medical check-up, and that you are getting help and advice from many people. 
            I'm far from home as I write this.  I'm in Norway, and the ground  is covered with ice.  I've learnt the hard way how careful one has to be when walking on ice.  Now I watch the Norwegians.  They take short steps and they place their feet flat on the ground.  They even have special verbs for this kind of walking: staure and subbe.  I went for a walk shortly after reading your letter, trying to imagine myself into your situation; and I realised how different this careful kind of walking is from the usual way.  It may be that it holds a kind of secret  -  or a hint about how to carry on with our lives when conditions are terrible. 
            When you think about your whole future, as you say you often do, you are trying to take an impossible step.  Only very smug people feel capable of doing that.  It’s not possible for any normal person living with problems.  When you shorten the odds and think just about next week, even then you are taking a long step.  I would suggest very short steps: when your mind begins to sweep you away, get up and do some simple task, like cleaning the mantelpiece, or making a cup of coffee, or sowing in a button…. These may sound like trivial pursuits, but they have clear boundaries and they let you taste success within minutes.  I know from experience that ordinary tasks carry a kind of redemption.  When we are upset we tend to look over the rim of things, away into the abstract; and the vision we see is just an image of our own discouragement.  I would say: believe in what is immediate.  Spend time with small things.  This is like putting your feet down flat on the ground.  No spring forward, no leaping or bounding.  Just this sip of coffee.  The taste of it.  It takes time to taste things.  Then the slow realisation that our life is entirely made up of brief moments.   They won't all taste the same, but all of them are brief.  Break your time down into brief moments.  This is not a gimmick, it is what meditators are always attempting to do.  You have a lot of company. 
            Another useful practice is to look at something  -  a tree in your garden, for example  -  and keep looking at it until the word ‘tree’ is no longer good enough to describe it.  The word ‘tree’ is abstract; it fits every tree in the world.  How does it do that?  By not fitting any of them really.  Words are like that: one size fits all.  When you dwell in words and descriptions  -  particularly gloomy descriptions  -  you are allowing yourself to be pulled away from the very things that can bring you reassurance and healing.  Everything real is particular.  Pay attention to particular things. 
            We have talked about these things before.  I hope that seeing them in print may be helpful to you in some way. 
            God bless and support you, Joan

Absence/presence of God

Dear Donagh, Thank you for your website, I open it every day and I always find something helpful. I wonder if you can help me with my struggles to pray…. I used to get a lot more out of it in the past. I used the feel very close to God and when problems arose I knew I could bring them to God…. Now I don’t feel any enthusiasm about it. I put in the time, it’s something I wouldn’t miss, but there’s no feeling in it really. Maybe I have betrayed God in some way? Why can't I feel His presence….? Thank you. Margaret.

    Dear Margaret, My advice is to keep going and not be surprised at anything or disappointed with anything or worried about anything. From the longer version of your letter it’s obvious that you are on a good path. A path has a lot of steps. Don’t look forward, don’t look back. Just keep going.
    I'm not giving you this advice off the top of my head. It’s the advice that the saints and mystics through the ages have given us. I'll quote a brief passage from Johann Tauler, a 14th-century German Dominican (the same one who is provides the text for this month’s ‘Wisdom Line’). He spoke of God ransacking your house. We might translate that as messing up your mind. The message seems to be that God isn't neat and tidy, and we can expect that our life with God will have its storms and its doldrums, and a lot of periods when nothing seems to be happening.
    “We must seek for the depths of our souls and we must find them. We must go into our house, our souls…. When we go into our house and look for God there, God in His turn looks for us and ransacks the house. He behaves just as we do when we are searching for something, throwing aside one thing after another until we find what we are looking for. This is just what He does to us. When we have gone into our house, when we have searched for him in the depths of our souls, God comes and searches for us and ransacks our house…. And when I say that God seeks us in his house and ransacks it, I mean that in this house, in the depths of our souls, we are utterly deprived of all the ideas and conceptions of God by which we have ever thought of him before. Our house is ransacked; it is as if we had never known anything about God at all. As God seeks, for us, this happens again and again; every idea that we ever had of him, every manifestation of him that we have ever known, every conception and revelation of him which we ever had will be taken away from us as he searches to find us.”
    This is a wonderful text, and I'm sure I've quoted it here before. It’s wonderful because it dispels all our expectations and it turns the question right around: it is God who is searching for us. Or rather, it’s a two-way search. This means that it’s a real drama, and not a lonely programme of our own.
    The wise ones also tell us that the God we are searching for is already closer to us than we know. God isn't like an object that is lost, sought, and then found. The process continues forever. Our whole life is a search for deeper union with God. Now I want to add something to that.
    What does presence feel like? Your hands are fully present to you, never absent. But you have no particular feelings about them, probably. You weren’t even thinking about them till I mentioned them. It is the same with your heart, your lungs, every part of you. You have no feelings about them. But if you had an organ removed you would have intense feelings about it. When it is present you feel nothing. Presence feels like nothing. There are lots of holy people who talk excitedly about their relationship with God. Don’t pay any attention to them. Above all, don’t try to imitate them. Come back to the bedrock: your daily practice of prayer. Nobody else can play your part in the great drama. Tauler’s teacher, Meister Eckhart, gave a great piece of advice: “Take everything evenly from the hand of God.”

    God bless, Margaret.
    Donagh  

[Christian meditation]

Dear Donagh…. I was at a meditation thing lately and I was listening to someone talking about meditation.  It was in a retreat house and I assumed that it would be about Christian meditation, but there was not much mention of Christ or anything you could call religious.  He talked about depth and stillness and so on.  He always began with a prayer, but after that I could not be sure of it.  There is a lot of this going on now, and I am just asking for some clarification I suppose.  Someone told me about a Buddhist giving talks on meditation to Catholics.  How could people like that know anything about the Christian faith?  I sometimes get the impression that your own website is a bit fluffy, but in fairness the main part of it is about the Gospel.  What are your comments?  JTC

Dear JTC, Thanks, it’s a good question.  My short answer is: Don’t judge the book by the cover.  There’s a passage in Matthew's gospel that speaks to this.  "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 7:21, and the parallel passage in Luke 6:36).  There are people who never stop talking about Jesus but have none of his spirit, just as there are people who seldom mention him but are filled with his spirit.  We put a heavy emphasis on words  -  perhaps much too heavy.  In that retreat house, I'm sure, everything proclaimed that this was Christian meditation.  The pictures on the wall, the timetable, the meals, the people there: everything was saying “This is done in the name of Jesus.”  Why should they have to keep on saying it over and over in words as well?  “If the walls could talk…” we say.  But they do.  They do.  And what a relief that they do!  Places, rooms, contexts, pictures, gestures…. everything is a language  -  a language, but not speech.  We’re living in one of the most talkative cultures the world has seen: newspapers, magazines, radio, TV, the internet, mobile phones… all piling up waves of words that wash over us.  In this deluge of words the Word is going unheard.  Is it any wonder that people want to be silent?  No doubt there are Christians who are unsure of what they believe, but I know that many go for meditation in order to hear the Word, not in order to exclude Christ. 
            I doubt very much that a Buddhist was just giving talks on meditation.  They generally prefer to do it rather than talk about it.  I've never heard of any who just talk about it.  Christians are the ones who are more likely to do that. 
            Now I want to ask you a question.  If what Christians affirm is really true, and not just an attitude or a way of looking  -  a ‘blik’, as an English philosopher once called it  -  then would you not expect it to be visible to others in some way?  -  imperfectly, perhaps, but visible in principle?  If a tree is really out there in the garden, and not just in your mind, would you be surprised that your neighbour could see it too?  He sees it from a different angle, it may have a different significance for him, and he may not love it as you do, but it is not invisible to him.  You have to be careful when you stress the special nature of Christian faith that you are not diminishing its truth claim.  Jesus praised the “faith” of a Roman centurion, who was a pagan.  "Truly I tell you, in no one in Israel have I found such faith” (Matthew 8:10).  This ought to make us reflect deeply on what we mean by faith.  Clearly it must mean much more than a badge of identity.  That Roman pagan was not a member of the community of faith.  In fact Jesus himself was regarded as an outsider and a blasphemer. 
            I realise just now that the reading for the 26th, and my comment on it, are around this topic.  To finish, what can I say to you?  Your instinct is right, I think, up to point where it threatens to run away with you.  We have to “test the spirits to see whether they are from God” (1 John 4:1), but we shouldn’t be tempted to think we know in advance what the result will be.  Keep going, J; more power to you!

[Forgiving oneself]

Dear Donagh…. Maybe you can help me with something that has been bothering me a long time.  I know that God forgives me for everything I did but I have great difficulty forgiving myself.  Nothing seems to lessen my sense of guilt and no amount of assurance does me any good.  It works only while the person, usually the confessor, is speaking, but the next minute I'm as worried as ever.  Can I ever be free of this?  I'd appreciate whatever advice you can give me. TC

Dear TC, Your question leads to a wider one: is it ever possible to forgive oneself?  Is the very idea an impossibility, like trying to pull oneself up by one’s own bootstraps?  I think it is.  Forgiveness is something you have to receive; it’s not something you can give yourself. 
            It may be useful to try and see how the knot is constructed.  The refusal to forgive oneself has something uncompromising about it  -  which makes it look very religious.  It must be coming from an interesting place if it waves aside God's forgiveness and waits for something better!  It looks not only religious, but super-religious.  I believe it comes from the ego, which would like to be its own judge and jury, its own god in fact.  It would push God off his throne of judgment and sit there itself.  It’s the normal pattern of the ego: it wants to be its own world apart, with its own god, condemning and acquitting according to its own law.  Once you see this deeply it falls away from you. 
            Is this making things very easy?  Oh yes!  I would much rather “fall into the hands of the living God” than fall into my own.  God is the “Father of Mercies”, but the ego knows no mercy. 
            Julian of Norwich, the 14th-century English mystic, said a very intriguing thing that is relevant here: “I saw most surely that it is quicker for us and easier to come to the knowledge of God than it is to know our own soul. For our soul is so deeply grounded in God and so endlessly treasured that we cannot come to knowledge of it until we first have knowledge of God, who is the Creator to whom it is united.”  That is from chapter 56 of her book, which goes by different titles, depending on the translation  (but the title doesn’t matter, since she has only one book).  The ego’s project is to know (and judge) itself apart from God, but according to Julian this project is doomed to failure. 
            Since you ask for advice I would advise you to immerse yourself in Julian’s book.  It has brought comfort and reassurance to many, with its vision of “our familiar and courteous Lord.”   May he lighten your step.
            Donagh

 Scholasticism

Dear Donagh, I saw an article recently […] where the writer said the Church had sold out on scholastic philosophy and theology.  All the present-day confusion and uncertainty is because of this, he said.  When he was in the seminary everything was subject to rigorous proof, but now everything is just vague suggestions and pretty sayings.  There’s no consistency any more.  Theology has been taken over by scripture scholars, and Aquinas has been shelved.  He was convinced that the only hope is in a return to scholastic method.  What’s your reaction to this?  Stephen  

Dear Stephen, I haven’t been able to find the article you referred to, so I can make only general remarks here. 
            The first thing I would say is that the Christian life is a life before it is a system of thought.  Thomas Merton put this well: “The spiritual life is first of all a life.  It is not merely something to be known and studied, it is to be lived.”  (I use the full passage as this month’s ‘Wisdom Line’.)  The truth has to be consistent with itself, but consistency alone is no guarantee of the truth: a person could be consistently wrong.  The search is for the truth first of all.  If it is indeed the truth it will prove in the end to be consistent. 
            The mind, of course, always looks for consistency, and from the earliest Christian times there have been efforts to understand and present the various themes of the faith in a coherent way.  But the attempt to set it all out in a single vision that took account not only of the Scriptures but also of philosophy, tradition, ethics, etc. is a somewhat later development.  Though St Augustine in the 5th century brought his probing philosophical intelligence to bear on almost every aspect of the faith, most of his works were written in response to particular crises in his own time and place.  The fully systematic approach began later, with Peter Lombard’s work in the 12th century, which came to fulness in the mediaeval scholastic tradition, perhaps best exemplified by St Thomas Aquinas’s Summa Theologiae. 
           Two points about that massive book.  First of all, in the preface he states that it is for beginners.  He is far from suggesting that this is the last word on everything!  Secondly, the format makes the same point.  The book’s great divisions are called ‘Quaestiones’.  Each quaestio is divided into a number of articles, every one of which is itself a question.  Before he attempts to answer a question he gives an array of arguments that suggest the opposite of what he is going to propose.  In the Summa, this number is usually about three, but in his other works it can be up to twenty.  It is a tragedy that his life’s work was mangled into 24 philosophical propositions by the Roman Congregation of Studies in 1916, which the 1917 Code of Canon Law then made obligatory for all professors in Catholic institutions of learning throughout the world.  It bred a couple of generations of theologians  -  ‘theo-logicians’ rather than theologians  -  who were more interested in system, in consistency, in ‘proofs’, than in Scripture or spirituality.  These subjects were treated more as ‘afters’ than as the main course.  This was a gross caricature of Aquinas.  He was never a reactionary.  On the contrary, he insisted on reading Aristotle at a time when it was forbidden to read him; he was forever exploring new ways, opening new paths.  But these dogmatic caricatures were like trees fallen across the path. 
     The integration of the various themes of the Christian faith takes place in a living body  -  a body growing and changing through time, a living tradition  -  not in a set of abstract propositions.  In this connection I often remember François Fénelon’s description of abstract religious thinkers: “They are like those conquerors who ravage a world without possessing it."  Aquinas showed a way of integrating different fields, and he will be read again when the caricatures of him have been put aside.  Reactionaries have no business looking at Aquinas; he would be horrified at the uses he has been put to.  I haven’t been able to find the article you mentioned, but I recognise its tone.  I always want to say to such people: if you think you can save the world by going back a generation, why didn’t you save it at that time?    
Happy reading, Stephen!

  FEAR

Dear Donagh…, Maybe you can help me.  I suffer a lot from fear.  I have to say I'm suffering from it all the time.  People would be very surprised to hear me saying this because they don’t know.  I even dream about terrifying things at night.  I'm often being chased by an animal- that's the most common.  I hardly ever have any nightmares about bad things happening to my family, it’s nearly always about myself.  I don’t know if I should be thankful for that or ashamed of it.  I'd like to be free of it, what I'm really afraid of is that it might get worse, I don’t want to think about that.  I'd be grateful for any advice.  Mairin. 

Dear Mairin, I learned a trick about dealing with fear, and I'm happy to share it with you.  Like you, I had a frightening dream and couldn’t sleep after it.  It was then I learned the trick: become the thing that is frightening you.  In your case, become that animal; feel its power and see how alive it is.  Take a good look.  I mean, after you wake up!  (But it would be even better if you could do it in the dream!)  The lion is not actually in the room, it’s in your head and it’s a powerful charge of energy.  Whose energy?  Yours.  That lion is you.  It’s a vast amount of energy, and you have simply forgotten that it is yours; so it appears in your sleeping mind as a dangerous animal. 
            You are lucky that your fear hasn’t grown to the point where it is affecting you visibly.  (You said people would be surprised if they knew.)  And you are also lucky that your fears concern yourself rather than the family.  Don’t feel ashamed of that: your nightmares would be of no use to them! 
            Some people will tell you to try to find out what lies at the bottom of it: what you are afraid of really.  But some part of you already knows!  Your unconscious knows, and it symbolises it in this brilliant way.  Why would you reject such a perfect image of fear and go searching for tortuous words and explanations to put around it?  I'm suggesting that you accept the image that came to you and relate to it.  Continue the conversation rather than stand back to analyse it.  What's wrong with the unconscious’s own language?   
            Yes, get to admire and even love that lion, that animal!  Are you sure it’s not a lioness?  It’s the lioness that usually does the killing!  Whether lion or lioness, it’s you.  So you have a certain claim over it that one doesn’t have over a real lion.  You can make it male or female, to suit.  Another remarkable thing about such creatures is that they all can talk!  This is a great advantage; it means that you can engage them in conversation.  The first few conversations may be a bit strained, but after a time you can be the best of friends.  At that stage, unfortunately, the animal will stop visiting you.  It means that you will no longer be suffering from fear. 
            Let me know how you get on.  I'm eager to know. 
            Donagh

Dear Donagh O’Shea,
            …I feel I don’t know what love is anymore…. I always end up on my own.  I've had to learn to live with my husband’s remoteness…. Anyway, I never had more than a part share in him.  His work was always coming up between us.  Then the children… always had their own friends and were always running off to see them or going out with them… The last straw was when my daughter took off for America with hardly a thought about how it would affect me.  We get breezy e-mails every week that actually make me cross.  I don’t expect you to know much about it but can you tell me what love means, if anything?  Is it just empty talk?  Does anyone care any more? Do you have any thoughts on this subject.  C.

 Dear C., I hope you don’t mind that I abbreviated your letter to the above. 
    I tend to agree with you that there is too much talk about love.  Talk is capable of becoming a substitute for the reality.  Still, it can be helpful to make a few distinctions. 
    I’d like to make a distinction between loving and being loved. 
    Everyone would like to be loved  -  “loved to bits”, as the phrase now has it.  There’s nothing wrong with this in itself, except when it becomes the dominant theme of one’s life.  It feels like an enrichment, an enhancement of one’s own life, a lucky stroke.  But like many strong feelings  -  and many strong substances  -  it quickly becomes addictive.  Then, like any addict, one has problems of supply, as well as the problem of begging and craving, and the problem of withdrawal: ‘cold turkey’.  There’s a useful book entitled Love and Addiction by Stanton Peele.  I'm not suggesting for one moment that you are addicted!  -  but addictions are a useful study: they are the extreme versions of ordinary appetites; they can show us in lurid colours what may be less visible in its ordinary shading. 
    Loving, on the other hand, is about giving, not about getting.  If there is no twist in it, no disguised neediness, it is quite simple and straightforward.  Its temperature is usually moderate, because it’s our nature working as it was meant to work. 
    Some people so stress the difference between these  -  calling them ‘need-love’ and ‘gift-love’  -  that they equate gift-love with pure unselfishness, suggesting that it is simply self-sacrifice.  I'd prefer to say that love is a communion  -  a communion of lives, or interests or wills or whatever.  While it may often be self-sacrificing, it is not identified with self-sacrifice.  It doesn’t mean becoming nothing, or becoming a slave to the other.  It means becoming one with the other: expanding oneself to include them  -  as other than oneself  -  in oneself. 
    I have a special relationship with Norway, and recently I have been reading Ibsen’s play, ‘Little Eyolf’.  The peculiar thing about it is that all the characters think of love as possessive and therefore competitive  -  with tragic results.  Recurring motifs are the fear of dividing oneself, and the need to have the other all to oneself.  This kind of consuming, predatory love is bound to end in tragedy and emptiness.  The parents of Eyolf realise, after his death, that neither of them loved him.  With their obsessions, that was hardly surprising.  The mother saw the child only as a wall between her and her husband.  The father saw him only as an ideal that he, the father, wanted to realise.  “Our lives are empty wastes,” says the mother at the end.  A critic described the play as “a horrifying experiment in vivisection, conducted with deadly skill.” 
    The colours of our ordinary experience are intensified by a great dramatist, but that is what theatre does.  “The play’s the thing….”   When love is not a communion it is a fight for property.  The ego’s parody of love has nothing really to do with love. 
    I can't comment on the other things you mention, C., but it strikes me from your description that your children are normal and extravert young people, and you are lucky to have a daughter who writes to you every week despite all the excitement and distraction of foreign travel.  She may be trying to cheer you up with her breezy emails.  Why not identify yourself with her excitement and her adventures?  You can do that without a visa or an air-ticket!  Then her joy will be yours, and you will not feel alone in the world.  It must be very difficult to be a parent.  It is your way to God.  May God bless you and lighten your step.
    Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, Thanks for your website, and I love the new picture gallery. I loved especially the picture of Glencar waterfall with the Yeats poem. I've been using these pictures as a meditation….
    I'm not sure how to put my question…. I don’t feel serious about leading a spiritual life and yet it’s my whole life. I haven’t studied it properly and there's so much I don’t know. I talk to [a priest] quite often and he tells me about all the documents and books I should be reading. He lends me books but I don’t get anything at all out of them. I find them very heavy, I just feel ignorant in the end. He gets irritated if I question anything and he tells me I should be more systematic. He’s always quoting Latin things and then saying I won't understand them anyway…. I love the Gospels, especially the parables. Is there a short course I could do where they wouldn’t be spouting heavy stuff at me all the time? I really do want to study more. A correspondence course would suit me, because I'm working…. I live in Cork. Again I love your website because I keep finding surprises in it. Keep up the good work. Many thanks. Karen

    Dear Karen, Thanks, I'm glad you like the site, and that you enjoy the photos. I enjoy taking them, and it’s a pleasure to show them to other people.
    Your question made me think about the parable of the treasure in the field (Matthew 13:44). The Kingdom of God (= the presence of God) is like that, Jesus said. The man who found the treasure (or the pearl, in the next verse) hadn’t been systematically looking for it. It was a surprise to him. If he had been looking for it, he would not have been surprised to find it; he would have felt it was the least he could get for all his digging and searching. He would be a surly farmer thinking that the world ought to thank him for working for himself. There would be no joy. But because it was a surprise the man in the parable was filled with joy. Then, because of his joy he was able to part with all the other things he had, and the treasure became his whole life; the joy of that chance discovery filled his whole life. It’s an illuminating image of the spiritual life. It’s about grace, the surprise of an undeserved gift, and not about systematic labour.
    Other parables have a similar lightness about them: the net (Matthew 13:47), the leaven in the batch (Matthew 13:33; Luke 13:20)…. Only a little leaven was needed, and it was enough to raise the whole batch. Theologians, I think, used to feel it was their duty to put a ton weight of depressing commentary on the faith - though things are improving a little now. I knew one who was clearly bored out of his tree by it all. There were no adventures for him, no discovery, no joy; he had all the answers, no questions, and you could see that he never fully engaged with theology at all. He never had the courage to doubt anything, all his doubts had been driven into the unconscious, where they sapped his energy to believe anything really. What was left on the surface was boredom and dogmatism. Don’t take much notice of such people, or they will saddle you with the heaviness they feel themselves. You need to meet people who can meet your particular interests; that's important for keeping your interest alive.
    Yes, I can recommend a good course. The Dominicans in Tallaght run a Distance Education programme that has several modules: spirituality, Scripture, theology, philosophy. Here’s a paragraph from their literature: “While the main work of each module is done from home and at each person's own pace, there is a network of student support to offset the 'loneliness of the long-distance learner'. Thus every student is linked with one of the twelve centres around Ireland, and each centre is stocked with basic reading resources, as well as having a local co-ordinator who liases with the students. There are two study days in a number of the centres during the fifteen-week module, and an academic tutor who is available via e-mail on a weekly basis to help students with their study. Participants are also encouraged to meet informally during the course of the module, on the belief that theology flourishes through such interaction and discussion.” Ask them about the spirituality or the Scripture module.
    The Priory Institute, Tallaght Village, Dublin 24.
     enquiries@prioryinstitute.com     www.prioryinstitute.com
    Meanwhile, Karen, more power to you! And may your life be full of surprises!
    Donagh

Dear Donagh…. People who know me would say I have been very lucky and I have everything going for me. But I don’t see it that way…. I suppose I've been successful in the sense that I'm secure and I have my family around me. I've seen to everyone of them and they are all right. But I feel I have nothing to look forward to…. I wouldn’t say I'm unhappy. But I'm unsatisfied. I should be very grateful to God, and I am, I tell God I'm grateful. But I feel I'm not grateful enough, because I'm looking for more, even though I don’t know what I'm looking for….. Is there some prayer I could? Am I in a bad spiritual state? Joseph

    Dear Joseph, I hope you won't mind that I shortened your letter to the above. It doesn’t appear to me that you are in a bad spiritual state. You seem rather to be at a very important place in the spiritual life.
    A meditation teacher said to me once, “Boredom is the beginning of wisdom.” We tend to classify boredom as a bad thing and try to get as far away from it as possible. This is what keeps us running forever, until we drop down dead. It would a very wise thing to stop running long before then. If you find now that the chase is unsatisfying, congratulations! You are on a path of wisdom. This spot is exactly the entrance to the path.
    When we are at this place we get all sorts of good advice except the one kind that might help us. “Shake yourself up, Get a new interest, Take up golf, Try gardening….” All this has the appearance of being good advice. They are all telling you to run away from the feeling of emptiness. But it is impossible to do that, because the feeling is your own, it is you. There is another way. Don’t run. Don’t run from this feeling, don’t judge it in advance, don’t try and replace it with some other feeling. Instead remain open and soft towards it, and just look at it in friendly way. Do this for one minute, and then take a rest if you need to! Do it when the feeling of emptiness comes over you strongly. Hold your ground, gently and firmly. This is remarkably easy to do, but only if you are serious about doing it. This seems a very simple remedy, and that is what it is. But it is the key to a radically different way of being in the world. The commercial world defines us as ‘consumers’. How demeaning that is! But we set ourselves up for it by always looking for something. Only when we stop looking for something else - something that is not given - will we look at what is right in front of us. What is not given is somehow attractive just because it’s not given. This instinct is probably a throw-back to the time when human beings were hunters and gatherers - and it may be that that is what we are still, though with wider tastes than our primitive ancestors. All over the world there are people trying to recall us to meditation - that is, to ourselves, to the present, to what is given, to our concrete existence. This is the road to wisdom and to God. The ego has its own religion, but predictably it is a religion of accumulation. You are blessed that you are not blindly spinning the wheels of desire. You have begun to breathe a different air. It is frightening at first, but don’t be afraid. The other is far more frightening in the long run.
    That momentary pause is a very small key, and this may be why so many clever people overlook it. It is a kind of prayer. It is better than any set of words, but when you become familiar with it you can put your own words on it if you like - just as markers, to help you come back to the place.
    I heard someone pouring sarcasm on the Sermon on the Mount, particularly “the lilies of the field.” Childish, he called it. Jesus said, “Look at the lilies of the field….” A businessman would have told you instead how to make money out of them. Then the next problem is what to make out of the money. And if the appetite for acquisition is uncontrolled, that madness continues forever. Better to stop and look, and that is what you are already doing.

    God bless the work, Joseph.
    Donagh

Dear Donagh, I was at a meditation meeting recently and the speaker used the word “mantra” at one stage. One of the people there reacted very crossly and said it was something that Christians should have nothing to do with. The speaker was very patient and tried to explain, but I think it upset everyone there. I heard later that the man was telling people not to go to that prayer meeting anymore because it was heresy. Can a Christian use a mantra or should it be avoided? I try to do a bit of meditation myself and the mantra seemed a good idea. What do you think? Miriam

    Dear Miriam, The word ‘mantra’ is a Sanskrit word, and for a start it is just that: a word. To say that Christians should have nothing to do with mantras is like saying that Christians should have nothing to do with words. The use of mantras (though not under that name of course) goes back to the early centuries of the Church. Mantras have a practical use: our concentration is mostly flickering and intermittent, and the repetition of a sacred word is an aid to concentration in prayer.
    Here is what the author of the 14th-century classic, The Cloud of Unknowing, wrote about it: “Take a short word, preferably of one syllable…. The shorter the word the better, being more like the working of the Spirit. A word like ‘God’ or ‘Love’. Chose which you like, or perhaps some other, so long as it is of one syllable. And fix this word fast to your heart, so that it is always there come what may. It will be your shield and spear in peace and war alike. With this word you will hammer the cloud and the darkness above you. With this word you will suppress all thought….”
    When Christians speak about ‘mantra’ they are using the Sanskrit word to refer to something that is part of the Christian tradition - because the Christian tradition did not supply a word for it. Let’s not be scared off by a word. English is brim full of words from every part of the world. ‘Bungalow’, for example, is a Hindi word - it is related to ‘Bengal’ - but I don’t hear anyone say that we should therefore have nothing to do with bungalows. Lots of words come from Hindi: bangle, cot, dungarees, jungle, shampoo, etc. etc. One in particular ought to be of special interest to witch-hunters: the word ‘juggernaut’. It should strike terror into them, because it is named after Juganath, a Hindu god whose image is carried in procession around the town once a year in a huge cart. No, we mustn’t react to words in a pre-human way. That person’s reaction to ‘mantra’ was like a dog’s reaction to ‘sit’ or ‘walk’.
    If you want to follow up on contemplative prayer using a mantra, look at the website of the World Community for Christian Meditation (just google wccm). There you will find useful information, profound teaching, and a list of local contacts. It is a method of contemplative prayer, based on the Christian tradition and adapted for modern use, devised by John Main, a Benedictine monk (1926 – 1982). The movement is now worldwide. Click on your part of the map of the world and you will see local information. You can also have a weekly teaching posted to your email address.
    Take care, Miriam.
    Donagh

Dear Donagh…, I notice your comments on meditation from time to time.  I do a bit of meditation myself a couple of times a week. I'm just wondering now how much of it I should do.  Is there a minimum and a maximum?  What would you recommend?  Thank you for your website.  I find it a great help.  Caroline

Dear Caroline, Thanks, that’s a question everyone has, once they begin a practice of meditation. 
            As I come downstairs many times a day I can't help noticing through a window an elderly couple in their house across the street.  I noticed a vague question in my mind one day: Why are they always there?  Then immediately I saw what a dumb question it was.  They are there because they are at home.  They don’t need a reason to be there; they would need a reason to be somewhere else, but they need no reason to be at home.  Home is where you don’t need a reason to be.  It helped me with meditation.  Meditation is home.  Meditation is when you are not away from your own reality.  In computer language, it’s meant to be our default mode.  Most things we do need a reason for doing them, but you don’t need a reason to meditate. 
            We sometimes find it hard to meditate, just as we are sometimes restless at home and looking for distractions such as TV.  My home is only a house, not a real home, if I am unable to be quite unoccupied there when there is nothing that needs to be done.  Meditation is the home of home.  If I know that home and can return there anytime, I can be deeply at home no matter where I am. 
            Is there a recommended length of time for meditation; is there a maximum and a minimum?  The ideal is that I would be fully present and at home in every moment of the day: that’s the maximum!  The minimum is one instant!  In practice we need to devote a certain amount of time consciously to just sitting in meditation every day.  I could say to myself: I’ll just try to be aware in everything I do, so there’s no need to set aside a special time.  But my every-minute awareness would be very wispy and shallow; and I would not be aware of that fact, because I would have nothing to compare it with.  So it’s necessary to set aside a special time, and then try to bring that awareness into the rest of the day.  How much time?  I won't say, because I'm not you.  To attempt too much too soon might give you a surfeit.  Begin with a short time: 10 or 15 minutes.  Then as time goes by, increase it.  You will know from the inside what is the right length of time; meditation itself will teach you. 
            It’s very helpful to meditate with a group on a regular basis, if that's possible for you.  Of course you are not limited to the amount of time the group spends in meditation.  Somewhere between the minimum and the maximum is the optimum  -  that's the one to look for! 
            God bless the good work, Caroline.
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, [….] Why can't I be happy? I have tried so hard. I try to be friends with people, but they always reject me in the end. In the last two months alone I have been very hurt by three people, four if I counted another person who didn’t look at me when I passed her on the street. I can't see what they have against me. I'm a good person and I try to do my best. I wouldn’t mind if I was trying to hurt people or annoy them, then I could understand it. My mother tells me to be happy but how can I be happy with this situation? [….] Anne

Dear Anne, Notice that the word ‘I’ occurs in every sentence of your letter, including all the parts I omitted here. This is not the road to happiness; it’s more like a tree fallen across the road. Judging by your letter I would say you think about yourself too much. I know that all of us are inclined to do that when we are in pain. But you won't lessen the pain by thinking more.
            So what do I say? Forget about yourself? Yes, something like that. But that’s not a simple instruction. We can't just decide to forget. What we can do is decide to think about something else. The wisest words ever addressed to me were, “It’s not about you.” Life isn't about you, in this sense: it’s not about the ‘you’ that is trying to be happy. It’s not about the ego that is forever trying to establish itself and maintain itself and promote itself. There's a deeper you that doesn’t care about these things. The problem is not how to make the ego happy, but how to discover your deeper identity.
            You have tried very hard to be happy. It hasn’t worked. Then give it up, try something else. Concentrate on something else for its own sake and not because of how it affects you. Lavish your affection on a plant or an animal, but don’t stop there. Some do! Pick some old lady who has trouble doing her shopping, and do it for her for free. For free means: without looking for any kind of return. The simplest kind of return is money, and obviously don’t look for that. The more complicated and demanding return is gratitude and affection. Don’t look for them. Be free, and enjoy the freedom. When you can enjoy that freedom, know that you are living from your deeper identity. You know you don’t have to be grateful to yourself when you do your own shopping: you are free of the need for it. If you can be equally free of it when you do someone else’s shopping, then there is no difference between someone else and you. That's how we forget about ourselves, and that's how we learn the art of happiness, and that's how we discover our deeper identity. People have known it for a long time: “Love your neighbour as yourself.” When we take care of other people, their happiness becomes our happiness, their joy is our joy. Then it matters much less how ‘I’ feel, or how other people regard ‘me’.
            I hope this may be of some small help, Anne.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…, Thank you for your website, I look in it every day and it’s a great help and support. Here’s my question. I'm having a lot of trouble with a neighbour lately. I won't bother you with the details, I just want to make the point that I'm not someone who’s always having trouble with neighbours. This is new to me in fact. In all honesty I'd have to say I hate him, and this bothers me. It’s against my religion, and it’s a constant irritant. I'm afraid it’s making me hard. Have you any practical suggestions? Many thanks. JS

   Dear JS, Thanks for your letter. You have already done a great deal by not accepting the situation as normal; and also by putting it to yourself, and to me, as a question.
    The best thing I know on anger is a book by Thich Nhat Hanh, called simply Anger. He teaches how to take care of it, like a baby. It’s a long time since I read the book, and I don’t have a copy, so I can't claim to be telling you what he wrote. I'm just giving you a useful reference.
    We usually disown our own anger along with the person who is the occasion of it. We disown it even while being swept along by it.
    Treat it as you would any physical ailment - like a sore head. Or better: see your anger as if it were a sick and distressed child. Hold it with tenderness, without judging or interpreting it. If you don’t hold it, it will spill out blindly and damage the human environment. Hold it, the wise man said, and become familiar with it. It is you, or at any rate it is yours, so you don’t need any further reasons for holding it and getting to know it.
    It is very important to isolate the feeling of anger, just as it is: as a feeling. Your feelings are yours - they are your baby. But the story of what triggered them on this occasion - the injustice done you, or the aggression, or the insensitivity - is mainly about the other person. So going over the story again and again will not move you forward at all; it will keep you back, in a cycle of endless repetition. Each time you go over the story, the feelings arise again; and if you don’t give them the specific kind of attention they need they will be there forever, just waiting to be stirred by another repetition of the story. That is a very important distinction: between the story and the feeling.
    If you can accept that feeling and hold it, without repeating the story, it has a chance to show you something of great value.
    We are often told to forgive and forget. When we are told to forgive, without being told how, that is useless. And when we are told to forget, to “put it out of your mind,” that too is useless. It’s an impossible instruction. Perhaps the person who says such things feels better for having given ‘good advice’, but it is not good advice, it’s useless. Memory doesn’t work like that. You cannot choose to forget.
    But there is something you can do. When the story comes into your mind you can choose to use the occasion to be present to the feeling once again. This is how it can become a spiritual practice. There is no spirituality if we do not leave ourselves open and vulnerable. Held in the right way, your anger can lead you to this opening of the heart.
    People often have the impressions that angry feelings are sinful, and they feel guilty for having them. There is nothing wrong with anger as such: Jesus was angry on a couple of occasions (Mark 3:5; 11:15). What matters is what we do with our anger. It’s sinful to keep cooking it, like Tam o’ Shanter’s wife (in Robbie Burns’ poem of that name) who sat at home “nursing her wrath to keep it warm.” That's what we do when we keep going over the story and using it only to aggravate the feeling.
    That’s the best I can do, JS. God bless the work.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, Thank you for your website, and thank your colleague Simon for me. I enjoy the new material every month and I always look forward to it. I don’t think I'd have the courage to put myself out there in public every month in the way that you do. My own problem is related to this. In my job I have to speak in public; I'm a lecturer in […] Institute of Technology. You would expect that I would have become used to it by now, but I am as nervous before a lecture as I was when I started about ten years ago. The subject-matter is not the problem; the problem is facing a crowd.. I feel as nervous as a kitten, even though I am twice their age. My throat tightens and I hear myself speaking in an unnatural voice. Afterwards I'm exhausted for hours. I’m becoming very tired of it. I can't understand it. I've read books on public speaking, but they make my situation worse, if anything. Since I read you every month I thought I might ask your view about this. You always have suggestions; would you pitch a few this way please? J.

    Dear J, Thanks for your kind words. Yes, ten years is a long time to have a dry throat. And the hours of exhaustion…. Yes, I’ll share your woes and make a few suggestions.
    I have to do a lot of public speaking too. Unlike you, I don’t find it a strain. But I will never forget the beginning - and especially the time before the beginning. I lived in dread of the day when I would have to speak in public. In practice sessions my knees used to knock and I used to crouch down like a beaten dog. Left to myself I would never have started. When I did start, it was awful: one of the audience began to laugh so much that she had to leave. I hadn’t said anything funny; she was laughing at me, and I knew it. The odd thing is that I don’t remember any more after that. No I didn’t pass out or anything! Maybe I've just suppressed the memory. But somehow I recovered from that terrible day long ago.
    Among all the teachers we have had since childhood, a few were naturals. I remember three in particular. Make a list from your own experience and then narrow it down to one. Imagine that particular teacher beside you, proud as punch of his former pupil, and the way he might look at you. His presence, even in imagination, is a powerful support. I say ‘his’, because the impression I got from your letter was of someone feeling fatherless up there on the rostrum (which is not to suggest that you feel fatherless in other situations). We have to be inducted into different roles, and a father figure eases the way. Remember how kindly, how fatherly, that old teacher was. You may not feel it, but that is what you are to your students: a father figure. We say all sorts of more liberated things such as: partners in research, etc. - all very cerebral. Don’t get locked into the definitions of ‘teacher’ and ‘students’; in the world of studies you are their father. Get infected with fatherliness from the memory of that old teacher, and pass it on.
    Fear is always fear of something. We’re afraid of making fools of ourselves in public. My first job was teaching philosophy in England, and I was totally intimidated by all those posh accents. To make matters worse, fixing a squeak in the floor of my office on my first day, I put a nail through a copper water-pipe and flooded half the college! Strangely, it helped! Within a few days I was no longer afraid of making a fool of myself - because I knew that this information was now in the public domain! It was a great liberation. It put something human into my relationship with the students, to supplement the dry bread of philosophy.
    There’s a sense in which there’s no such thing as public speaking. Every student listening to you is as vulnerable in him or herself as you are - and would be relieved and encouraged if they realised you had this in common with them. At some level every one of them is a lost child, looking for a father to lead them into a wider society. Make sure you look at them. I don’t mean scan you eye across the room: that is exactly what turns them into ‘the public’. Look at individuals. Then you are speaking to individuals; it’s no longer ‘public speaking’. Try and get to know their names, if you don’t already. Be a father to them, but don’t tell them that in words; tell them by your presence, and by your interest in them. Be playful and gentle like a father.
    Must go now! An bhfuil cead agam dul amach?
    Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to question@goodnews.ie ]

Dear Donagh, Thank you and your colleague Simon for your website. I find it very helpful, especially the question and answer page. I want to ask you about the Eucharist. I know all the right things to say about it, but I suddenly realised one day at Mass that I don’t really know what it’s about. “This is my body” is so familiar, but what spiritual meaning does it have? Isn't it enough that he gives the Spirit? Why the body? I'd appreciate a very brief answer. I want to get the heart of it. Many thanks. Brigid.

A Dominican Sister who had worked for many years in South Africa in the days of apartheid told me she once had to go to a black township to talk to a group of people about the Eucharist. She wondered how she would explain it to them. “What did Jesus mean when he said, ‘This is my body’”, she asked them. After a pause one man began the speak. “I’m a miner,” he said. I go down the mines in the morning before the sun is up, and when I come up in the evening the sun has gone down. I never see the sun all day. When I get overtime I’m happy to spend even more time down there. I know it’s not a good place to be. In a few years this body of mine will be all worn out and diseased. I do it to keep bread on the table for my family. When we sit down to our meal on Sunday I know what Jesus meant when he said ‘This is my body, which is given for you.’”

            Donagh

Dear Donagh…. I want to ask you if it’s possible to be happy. I feel I come near it sometimes, but just when I'm beginning to relax something always happens to ruin it…. It can be something my sister says or does, or something in college - anything at all in fact. I look around to see if there are any happy people. If there are they are very scarce. Should we even try to be happy, with so much suffering in the world? Is it selfish to want to be happy? Thanx. Jen.

Dear Jen, Thanks for a very fundamental question. I have often wondered about it too. I feel there must be some hidden dividend in unhappiness; otherwise there wouldn’t be so many who are unhappy without any apparent reason.
            “The pursuit of happiness” is an inalienable human right, according to the American Declaration of Independence. I've always been puzzled by that phrase. I don’t know what the drafters of the Declaration were including or excluding by it, but certainly when it is lifted out of its context it is a puzzling phrase. In general, I feel that happiness is more likely to be a by-product in the pursuit of something else: such as truth, or justice, or helping others, or even just one’s own work. It comes as a gift, not as a prize.
            What is happiness? Is it a feeling of excitement? Or on the contrary is it a feeling of deep and quiet contentment? We use it of both, which shows how confused a notion it is. In your question I think the meaning is probably the second. One could even ask whether it is a feeling at all. In modern usage, certainly, it is a feeling. But when mediaevals wrote about ‘beatitudo’ (as they called it) the emphasis was not on the feeling but on the objective state. If you were in a rightly ordered state of life you were happy, no matter how your feelings were. It’s possible that in 1776 when the Declaration was written, there was still an element of this meaning; they had not made happiness an entirely subjective matter, as we have.
            As regards the feeling of happiness (as contentment), I think the pursuit of it is some kind of contradiction. How could I be content if I am pursuing contentment? The very pursuit implies that I don’t have it, and for as long as I continue to pursue it I won't have it. But if I were to stop pursuing it I may have it then. It’s rather like a cat chasing its own tail.
            But I seriously believe that we pursue unhappiness! For some people, as I said, there is some secret dividend, some strange satisfaction in unhappiness. Just as there are people who love tension, there are some who love unhappiness. It gives them an heightened feeling of existing. Graham Greene once said that it is much easier to draw an unhappy character in a novel than a happy one, because unhappiness is so personal, while happy characters are usually lost in something bigger than themselves. In unhappiness you feel every twitch of your nerves, you really know that you exist. But when you are happy you forget about yourself. If you ask children who have been playing in the garden, “What were you doing?” they will probably say, “Nothing!” But if they have been having a fight, they will tell you without being asked! Happiness has no story to tell; unhappiness has all the stories. A liking for unhappiness is a manifestation of ego - nothing is more certain. The ego is a constructed identity, my idea of who I am. It is a set of thoughts and strategies that I began to evolve in early childhood, in collusion with others. It is not my true self, which lies deeper and which doesn’t need to prove or defend anything. Lasting happiness is possible only to the true self, because that is the self that is able to relax and forget about itself.
            In a society that sets such store by speed and achievement and acquisition, it’s almost inevitable that many people become incapable of living in the present moment or relaxing or enjoying anything. But it is just by living in the present that I am in touch with my real self.
            You ask if it’s selfish to want to be happy. No, because real happiness is entirely unselfish. And besides, it’s contagious.
            Take care, Jen.
            Donagh

 Dear Donagh, A friend keeps saying to me “God loves you as you are.”  Almost every time we meet.  She means well, but instead of consoling me it makes me feel worse.  God would have to be mad to love me as I am.  It’s enough that the world is mad.  My religion is very important to me, but I feel very discouraged with my performance as a Christian.  Is there anything you can say to help me?  Don’t tell me God loves me as I am, because I know myself too well….  Valerie

Dear Valerie, Thank you for your email.  You don’t mention any particular reason you feel so discouraged, so what I say will have to be very general. 
    Why not go into detail with a friend who is a good listener?  He or she may then be able to refer you to someone else  -  if need be  -  who has some skill in helping you further.  That would be a start.  Here, I'll just comment on a couple of things that struck me in your letter.
   Yes, God is mad!  St Catherine of Siena (14th century) used to keep repeating this.  “O mad lover!  And you have need of your creature?  It seems so to me, for you act as if you could not live without her, in spite of the fact that you are Life itself, and everything has life from you and nothing can have life without you.  Why then are you so mad?  Because you have fallen in love with what you have made!  You are pleased and delighted over her within yourself, as if you were drunk with desire for her salvation.” 
   Anyone who knows anything of the Christian tradition will repeat to you, as your friend does, that God loves you as you are.  There…I've said the very thing you told me not to say!  But it is a statement about God, not about you!  It doesn’t say you are so good that you have earned God’s love.  If we felt we had to merit God's love it would be an unbearable burden, not a consolation.  Our relationship with God is not an equal relationship; we are not trading partners.  If we were, there wouldn’t be much in it for God, and nothing for us but guilt.  It would be a suffocating relationship.  “We can breathe again, my brothers,” said St Bernard of Clairvaux to his monks, “for if we are nothing in our own hearts, perhaps there is another opinion of us hidden in the heart of God  -  Father of mercy, Father of those who need mercy.  Why do you set your heart on us?  I know, I have the answer: your heart is where your treasure is.  How can we be nothing if we are your treasure?  In your sight all are as if they were not… yes indeed, before you, but not within you  -  in the judgment of your truth, yes, but not in the love your fatherly heart.” 
    Notice that both made the same point: God loves us within himself.  It’s not, then, as if we were somehow ‘over there’ from God, who sizes us up and decides to love us if we show signs of promise.  If you loved someone as they could or should be, you would not love them at all, but only your idea of them.  You have to love them as they are: that's where everything begins.  To love them as they should be is to begin at the end.  It has the reverse effect: it leaves them exactly where they are, and burdened now with guilt.  When we know that God loves us as we are, we somehow become better than we are.  That's the effect that love has on people.  It’s not a condition, it’s an effect. 
   Valerie, we’re all discouraged at our performance as Christians.  But can you imagine someone who wasn’t!  I wrote the ‘Gospel commentary’ for November 1 with your letter in mind.  If God saw only our performance we would be in a bad way.  But it is the commercial world that sees only our performance; God sees our being.  It’s a mercy to have come to the end of the performance: to have seen through some of our illusions, to have come to the end of our resources.  It is the only way to learn something about God's grace.  Thank God you have gone deeper than trading with God.  Now you can enter the drama of a great love-story. 
    God bless. 
    Donagh   

  My wife and I are grateful for our faith. We try to model the importance of putting God first to our three young sons. But it is becoming increasingly clear how diverse the Catholic faith is—rigid and rule-burdened at one extreme, casual and self-directed at the other. I told my pastor about how beautiful I find the Catechism to be, and he cautioned me about taking it too literally. As we chatted he complained about some of the daily communicants who come to our parish during the week, and then write letters to our bishop to point out violations of protocol for which he’ll be called on the carpet. He said Jesus warned his own faith community about getting too distracted by all the little rules and missing the larger point—love, mercy, compassion. These are just a few examples of our increasing sense of division within the Catholic faith; it’s beginning to feel less like a unified family and more like a random (but righteous) crowd at a bus terminal. Everyone has an opinion. One scoffs at a devotion. Another calls the Pope names. Another kneels on the floor to receive Eucharist. Another receives it with the triviality of trying a free sample in a food market. Even the bible is subject to many kinds of interpretation and debate. As a result, we suddenly find ourselves feeling quite alone. Left to ourselves, my small family can’t rely solely on our own discernment—we need guidance. How can we find the truth?  Tom

Dear Tom, Many thanks for your heartfelt letter, and I hope I can convey my conviction that the middle ground is by far the largest domain in the Church.  You are certainly not alone. 
            In every group I think the noisiest people are in the wings.  This is seen in politics, journalism, and just about everywhere.  This is especially true today when there is a media-fuelled greed for the unusual, the extreme, the ‘news-worthy’.  I saw a magazine advertised as being “opinionated”  -  apparently a term of commendation!  You will never see a headline that says, “Priest agrees with his bishop!”  -  even though there are far more who do than there are who don’t.  It is distressing to see how ego-driven many (not all) of the most vocal people are  -  left-wing and right-wing alike.  When one or two ego-driven people make noise, suddenly they have an audience, then a movement  -  which attracts others who like to be a bit different and who enjoycontroversy.  This serves their need to feel special, different, even a little heroic.  There are many who want to be little popes in their own circles.  There’s a retired policeman in the west of Ireland who utters condemnations of preachers  -  practically bulls of excommunication.  With no theological education at all such people imagine they can sniff out heresy everywhere.  I have to sympathise with your pastor who has a one- or two-man Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith in his parish.    The irony of the right-wing ego is that it is not at all different from the left-wing, as became very clear in the schism of Mgr Lefèbvre.  Right-wing people are just as willing (or rather more willing) as left-wing people to tear asunder the body of Christ. 
            Of course that doesn’t explain it all away; but it explains a large percentage.  Among honest people too there are real disagreements, about matters that range from the less to the more essential.  I believe that the biggest challenge now is to discern and hold the essentials of the faith: the vast stream of wisdom that flows to us from the age of the apostles.  The aim of The Catechism of the Catholic Church was, like that of the Second Vatican Council, “to strive calmly to show the strength and beauty of the doctrine of the faith” (Pope John Paul’s Apostolic Constitution introducing the Catechism).  It was, the pope said, “a reference text.”   It was the fruit of “intense work done in a spirit of complete openness and fervent zeal,” and he expressed joy that “the harmony of so many voices truly expresses what could be called the ‘symphony’ of the faith….It testifies to the Church’s catholicity.”
            ‘Catholicity’ is the key word.  The word ‘catholic’ means universal, not left-wing or right-wing.  In the Catholic tradition there is a largeness of mind and heart that has nothing to do with vagueness: there is nothing vague in the thinking of St Thomas Aquinas, for example.  The word ‘orthodox’ is being appropriated by people of extreme narrow and rigid views, who then describe all others else as woolly liberals.  This is a travesty of the tradition.  If you want a good example of the refreshing vigour of the Catholic tradition (from a period that even the most right-wing person would have to consider safe  -  long before the Second Vatican Council!), see G.K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy (1908), which is available on the internet (www.ccel.org). 
            Finally, ours isn't the first time that Christians have been at loggerheads with one another.  The history of the Church provides not just examples of it but rather one continuous example!  In 57 AD St Paul had to call the Corinthians to order and to unity: “It has been reported to me by Chloe's people that there are quarrels among you, my brothers and sisters.  What I mean is that each of you says, ‘I belong to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’  Has Christ been divided?” (1 Corinthians 1:11-13).  In our own time, the very fact that the Catechism was brought out was an acknowledgement of the diversity on the ground, and a practical guide to finding our way through it. 
            So what I would suggest, Tom, is that you shouldn’t take much notice of what those individuals in your parish do or say  -  there’s no accounting for what individuals do or say.  Study the Catechism and don’t be afraid to read the classics of the faith, stay with the great truths, and “speak the truth in love” (Ephesians 4:15). 
            God bless you both and your young family. 
            Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I hope you can help me. I suffer a lot from anxiety and its been growing on me for a couple of years. My parents are always at me to go out and enjoy myself, but even the thought of it tenses me up. I'd love to go out just as I used to when I was younger, but I just can't build myself up to it. I read you website and your answers to peoples questions, and I like them. Is there any word of advice you can give me? Thank you. Miriam

P.S. I'm 26 and I live in Dublin. You may know some place where I could get help.

Dear Miriam, I’m happy that you wrote: even writing an email is a kind of going-out.  I'm sure you have no shortage of people to advise you: most people are quicker to give advice than to find out what’s going on.  I once saw someone give instructions to a girl who was trying for the first time to make a pot on the potter’s wheel.  He was full of advice, both positive and negative.  But the reality was that he wasn’t able to do it himself  -  which was soon evident when he sat at the wheel!

So I won't presume to give you advice, Miriam.  But I can put you in touch with people who have the same difficulty that you have.  They are the only ones who can understand you deeply and help you.  I made some enquiries and I discovered that the Recovery programme is very active in Ireland, with 27 groups, 15 of which meet in various locations in Dublin: Abbey St., Beaumont, Blanchardstown, Clontarf, Drumcondra, Eccles St., Killester, Marino, Swords, Bray, Clondalkin, Deans Grange, Quarryvale, Rathgar and Tallaght.  The programme has been in existence since 1937, and active in Ireland since 1971.  It’s a non-profit organisation whose purpose is to help people with nervous and emotional difficulties, through methods and coping techniques learned at weekly meetings.  These meetings are led by trained leaders who have themselves recovered through the programme.  The atmosphere of the meetings is very relaxed and supportive, and you can bring a friend along with you, if you wish.  For more information you can ring 6260775, or email recovirl@indigo.ie or write to Recovery Inc., PO Box 2210, Dublin 13.  The website address is http://indigo.ie/~recovirl

There’s a great line in one of the psalms: it says that God “surrounds us with cries of deliverance.”  If we could always do that for one another…!  There are many whose hobby is surrounding us with cries of alarm, peddling fear and discouragement  -  not only individuals, but sections of the media.  We all have to arm ourselves! 

            There’s a great book by Pema Chodron entitled The Places That Scare You (Element books, HarperCollins Publishers, 77-85 Fulham Palace Rd, Hammersmith, London W6 8JB).  It’s not Recovery literature, but it’s one of the best book I've read in a long time.  It is full of ‘cries of deliverance’ from a woman who knows what she is talking about. 

I took your question and my reply and ran them by someone who has experienced (as far we can tell) something like what you are experiencing.  He got great help through an online programme (www.onestepatatime.com), presented by a psychiatrist who went through panic/anxiety attacks, and specialised thereafter in the treatment of anxiety/ocd disorders.  The approach in both Onestepatatime and Recovery is Cognitive Behavioural Therapy.   The built-in difficulty with going to meetings, my friend said, is that someone suffering from anxiety is likely to find the very idea of meetings a threat! But until you feel strong enough to venture a meeting, there is a lot of help you can get through reading and online.  “The good thing [about Onestepatatime],” my friend wrote, “is that he has online meetings and hundreds of small courses/workshops that are a complete recovery step by step  - aguided chat room meetings and weekly newsletters.  They also have online trained psychiatrists who can give a one-to-one e-therapy…. The only way through is by fully understanding why one’s symptoms are happening, what's causing them, and taking the necessary steps in manageable chunks to alleviate and eventually completely free yourself from the loop.  The real issues are frequently just below the surface…. You learn so much about yourself in the process.”

            God bless,

Donagh

Dear Donagh, thank you so much for your site, it has helped me immensely and I look forward every month to the new content. I love the questions and answers in the part called Between ourselves…. Now for my own question. I pray with a group of 5 or 6 people once a week, and I've been finding it a great help to me, especially when things trouble me. I used to feel great peace afterwards. But a few months ago we were joined by a man who never stops preaching at us. It’s not preaching really but giving out. He’s the only man in the group, and he’s always correcting people’s prayers and telling us that priests are no longer preaching the gospel. He's a right wing Catholic and he has ruined what we had going. One of the others said to me I should ignore him, but I don’t find it possible, he sees to that. I don’t look forward any more to Wednesday evening, I come away cross and I'm temped to drop out. But that would be giving into him. The others have the same problem with him. What would you recommend us to do? Thanks again…. Angela

   Dear Angela, You got a live one there! I’ve met more than a few people like him. I would suggest that you tell him quietly and clearly about the effect he is having on your group and that you are not willing to let it continue. If this does other change his behaviour, ask him to leave. If he refuses to leave, disband the group, and then regroup somewhere else. This is just common sense: measured escalation. From earliest times Christian communities have had to work out ways of dealing with erring members. "If another member of the church sins against you, go and point out the fault when the two of you are alone” (Matthew 18:15). ‘Sin’ is not too strong a word in your situation. It’s an intolerable arrogance to correct someone’s prayer. It is different only in degree from disrupting a Mass or a Baptism or a wedding. To continue the text from Matthew: “If the member listens to you, you have regained that one. But if you are not listened to, take one or two others along with you, so that every word may be confirmed by the evidence of two or three witnesses. If the member refuses to listen to them, tell it to the church; and if the offender refuses to listen even to the church, let such a one be to you as a Gentile and a tax collector.” An early Christian writing called The Didachè gave instructions on how to deal with wandering speakers, some of whom, clearly, were promoting themselves, not faith in Christ. Such a person, it said, should be welcomed, but later on “you must test him and find out about him.” If he was subversive, they were to pay no attention to him. He was not to stay more than a day or two. If he stayed three days he was a fake. Notice that there was no pussyfooting. Prayer-groups today are sitting ducks for bullies and control-freaks, because they are usually made up of people who feel that they always have to be kind and nice. That difficult member is in clover. You’re a perfect audience. What could suit him better than a group of women who never challenge him? But you are not actually being kind to him by tolerating his behaviour.
    A friend of mine told me about her parish priest (in the time of Pius XII) who said to one of his parishioners, “Isn't it wonderful that the pope has changed the rule about fasting from midnight before Communion? Now you only have to fast for three hours!” The man said nothing for a while, and then he said, “Do you think, Father, that the pope is a steady man?” There are still people who think they are more Catholic than the pope. When you hear them out you come to see that what they are attached to is not the faith but their own opinions. Let’s not forget that a large group of such people, with Mons. Lefèbvre, went into schism some years back. The irony of it is considerable: because they thought themselves more faithful to the Church than others they separated from the Church.
    There’s a pathetic sort of Catholic fundamentalism that is not based on the Scriptures but on the penny catechism. And just as Scriptural fundamentalists rely on a handful of ‘proof texts’, so these pick and choose what suits them from the penny catechism. You won't hear them taking to heart what it said, for example, about “rash judgment, calumny, and detraction.”
    The fundamental problem is ignorance of the faith. “People are just thirsting for the truth, Father!” said a contemplative nun to me, laying her hand on her heart, dimming her eyes, and inclining her head to one side. But I soon discovered what she meant by the truth: a few simplistic definitions, and paranoia about ‘New Age’. She is not representative of her kind, thank God, but all over the world there are millions of people clinging to shreds and calling them the truth. However, there’s a positive side. There are more laypeople studying theology now than ever before. I have some small involvement with a ‘distance learning’ programme of theology, run from the Priory Institute in Tallaght, Co. Dublin, and it is very heartening. Education alone can drive out fundamentalism. Someone said, “Education is expensive, but it’s not as expensive as ignorance!”
Courage, Angela!
Donagh

  Dear Donagh, I've been meaning to write to you for a long time, I think you may be able to help me. […] I was married for 18 years and widowed three years ago, but I pulled my life together and I carry on, but with an empty feeling at times. […] There’s a woman at work to whom (I have to admit) I'm very attracted. She is single, and I worked out that she is ten years younger than me. She has always been friendly towards me, but then she's friendly to everyone. I fantasise about our friendship developing. I would love to spend the rest of my life with her, but I could never get up the courage to ask her out for a meal or a drink. If she thought I was too forward it could destroy everything. When I think about doing it I feel like a kid and Im too embarrassed. I'm afraid too of what my own children would think of me. So I'm stuck there. When I read this long letter now I don’t really know what I'm asking you. I was going to scrap it, but I'll send it anyway. If there’s anything you can say to me I'd be grateful. Tom

    Dear Tom, Thanks for writing, I'm glad you did. I omitted the parts that would identify you and where you work - this internet is a very public place, you know! Unless, of course, you wanted your friend to discover your feelings this way…! But I think not.
    I'll take one aspect of your letter and try to respond to it here, and I'll send you an email in which I'll talk about the ‘heart’ issue - I have no experience or skills in that area. I noticed a theme of hesitation running through your letter, and I'll take that up here.
    When we hesitate, things immediately begin to look bigger and more difficult. A letter to be written weighs just a few grams in reality, but in the mind it weighs a ton; and it keeps putting on weight every day that we don’t write it. Everything, even the smallest thing, becomes a problem - because of postponement. Soon, everything is a burden. To ask your friend if she would like to go for a coffee or a meal with you is nowhere near a proposal of marriage. But if you think long enough about it you’ll start wondering if you should get down on one knee. Since there’s a friendly atmosphere in your office, it would seem to me - and to anyone else, I think - the most casual thing in the world. If you are really terrified, ask her while you have some papers in your hand, so that you can mask your anxiety by pretending to be busy with them, if she says she has an appointment with the hairdresser. That's what I would do, anyway.
    But to get back to more general considerations (that's what I specialise in!): postponement is the trick for burdening oneself. It is a kind of holding back, from fear or from laziness: fear in your case. But the space created by the holding back is the very space in which your fear grows. Fear is irrational in this situation, and that makes it all the easier for it to manipulate your rationality. You think of a thousand things that could go wrong: all very rational - but irrational.
I heard the other day that if the wren (the second smallest bird in Ireland) were the size of a human being, its voice, magnified in proportion, would register on the Richter scale. It would have no trouble filling the National Concert Hall! Everyone would have to have earplugs. Maybe even seatbelts. But we human beings use only a trickle of our energy. That constriction is caused by thinking too much, which in turn is caused by fear. Your approach “could destroy everything,” you said. What's the ‘everything’ it could destroy? There's nothing there: you’ve put nothing on the table. If we were to think long enough about anything we could list a thousand reasons for not doing it. When something is right we don’t need any reason at all for doing it. What reasons do you need for eating when you are hungry or going to bed at night? Or, to go back a step further: what reasons did you have for being born? What reasons will you need to die? If we were consulted about these things we would never do either of them.
    I did two other sections of this month’s material with your question in mind. Take a look at ‘Jacob’s Well’ and ‘Wisdom Line’.
    Someone said that today is the tomorrow you were thinking about yesterday. But now that it’s here you do nothing with it, and you start thinking about another tomorrow…. My advice to you is: do it now! And the best of luck to you, Tom!
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Fr. O’Shea, I am appalled at the world scene, I am an old man now and when I look at the declining standards in personal morality among the people I am angry and disillusioned. The Church seems to be unwilling or unable to stop the decline: those clergy who are willing are unable and those who are able are unwilling, that is my assessment. If people cannot take responsibility for their own lives should governments not intervene to insist on standards? In an earlier age they would not have hesitated to do so. What is your assessment? J. Lovegrove

   Dear Mr Lovegrove, I don’t wish to disillusion you further, but I believe that governments are by and large more immoral than individuals. It’s not difficult to think of examples, but to recite them would be to get away from the general point you make. With your question in mind I looked back over some books I read years ago, and this is what I found.
    The anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived for two years with a Ugandan tribe, the Iks, and described his experiences in a book called The Mountain People. They are seen as utterly brutish, selfish and loveless. They never sing, and they laugh only at one another’s misfortunes. They turn their children out to forage as soon as they can walk, and they abandon the old to starvation. They soil and destroy one another’s property. Presumably they were once a normal easy-going people, but the government took over their lands to create a national park, and these hunter-gatherers were reduced to farming the poor hillside soil, at which they failed miserably. Along with their way of life they lost their culture and even their humanity. It is a depressing picture.
    The biologist Lewis Thomas, in The Lives of a Cell, sketched a theory about them - and about human beings in any society.
    “The solitary Ik, isolated in the ruins of an exploded culture, has built a new defence for himself. If you live in an unworkable society you can make up one of your own, and this is what the Iks have done. Each Ik has become a group, a one-man tribe of its own, a constituency…. This is precisely the way groups of one size or another, ranging from committees to nations, behave. It is, of course, this aspect of humanity that has lagged behind the rest of evolution, and this is why the Ik seems so primitive. In his absolute selfishness, his incapacity to give anything away, no matter what, he is a successful committee. When he stands at the door of his hut, shouting insults at his neighbours in a loud harangue, he is a city addressing another city. Cities have all the Ik characteristics. They defecate on doorsteps, in rivers and lakes, their own or anyone else’s. They leave rubbish. They detest all neighbouring cities, give nothing away. They even build institutions for deserting elders out of sight. Nations are the most Ik-like of all…. For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation. Nations, by law, are solitary, self-centred, withdrawn into themselves…. They bawl insults from their doorsteps, defecate into whole oceans, snatch all the food, survive by detestation, take joy in the bad luck of others, celebrate the death of others, live for the death of others.”
    He concludes, “We haven’t yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses. The Ik, in his despair, is acting out this failure, and perhaps we should pay closer attention.”
    Note that it was a government that plunged them into this condition, by stealing their land.
There are lessons here for Christian community too. Despite hearing the Gospel, times without number, we are capable of living instead by the gospel of greed. Society breaks down around us, and we fail to create Christian community, receding into ourselves and living out our lives, Ik-like, as solitary egos. Christian spirituality challenges us to be moral, but has not been offering much towards the systematic understanding of the root of immorality: the ego. The ego cannot love, though it can produce an imitation of love, for strategic purposes. Whenever it pretends to form community with others there is a built-in flaw. As W.H. Auden once said, we have to learn to love one another or die. I don’t think we can expect very much from governments - certainly not the reform of a people’s morals. It is when governments claim the high moral ground that we have to be particularly suspicious of them. I think it is by living a Christian life of love, rather than by requiring it of others, that we stand any chance of improving the world around us.
    Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to question@goodnews.ie ]

  Dear Donagh, a passage from Luke's gospel caught my eye recently, the passage about the widow who kept pestering the judge until he gave her justice. Then Jesus said, won't God grant justice to those who call on him? “Will he delay long in helping them? I tell you, he will QUICKLY grant justice to them.” Does God keep his promises?!!! James L.

   Dear James, it’s a good question, and that passage (Luke 18:1-8) has often raised eyebrows. There is certainly a puzzle here, even within the passage itself. ‘I tell you, God will quickly grant justice to them’ (verse 8). So why then do we have to ‘pray always and not lose heart?’ (verse 1). Why do we have to persevere? If God is willing, even eager, to give us what we want, why do we have to keep on asking?
    It isn’t about God. There is no reluctance on God's side. Even nature gives you everything it is able to give at the time (including, of course, lots of things you haven’t ordered!). The trees don’t begrudge you fruit or shelter, the fields give you crops, the rivers flow gladly for you…. Likewise our Father in heaven: ‘If you who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’ (Matthew 7:11).
    It isn’t about God, it is about us. I once knew someone who would never accept an invitation until he had been asked twice! He said he wanted to make sure that the invitation wasn’t given out of mere politeness. This probably freed up his diary remarkably, but he was happy to know that he was wanted when he was invited a second time. We wouldn’t want to say that God is being precious when God lets us ask again and again. But there is a parallel all the same. I'm afraid we do often ask God for things out of mere politeness and for the sake of good form. In the ‘Prayers of the Faithful’ at Mass, especially, we slip easily into this. ‘For the poor, the old, the lonely….’ How could we take in such a vast swath of human misery in one smooth phrase? I imagine God simply unable to hear smooth phrases. God listens to the heart, and there is often no echo of heart in the things we pray for.
    We don’t really want what we pray for. We want half of it. We want the bit that will make us comfortable. Or we want to be rid of the things that challenge us, the very things we prayed for yesterday, thinking they would make us comfortable. So we have to ask many times before we know what we want, or before we know with our whole being that we want it. Would I go through fire and water for it? Would I die for it? If not, I don’t really want it; I would like it but I don’t want it. It’s the difference between starving and being ready for your supper. If I really wanted it, God would give it immediately, granting that it was God's providence for me. ‘Truly I tell you, if you say to this mountain, “Be taken up and thrown into the sea,” and if you do not doubt in your heart, but believe that what you say will come to pass, it will be done for you’ (Mark 11:23).
    We want half of what we ask for, because we want to remain in control. If we threw ourselves fully behind something we would feel too vulnerable. We don’t want to lose our grip. But faith means losing our grip, entrusting ourselves, not just a few details of our affairs, to God.
    Keep the faith, James, and thanks for your question!
    Donagh

[If you would like to put a question, send it to question@goodnews.ie ]

  Fr. Donagh, you have an excellent web-site. I haven't seen any better on the Internet. Jesus said: "Whatever you ask the Father in my name he will grant you." He also said: "Ask and you shall receive, seek and you shall find, knock and it shall be opened for you." Why, then, do we pray for so many good things, and rarely is our prayer answered. I believe this is the main reason why so many of us don't pray much. God is not keeping his promises. What can you say about this?
I have another question, but I will keep it for another time.
Leo L.

    Dear Leo, thanks very much for your words of encouragement, and for asking such a fundamental question. I'm sorry: somehow I lost your email address after I copied your question, and so I was unable to send you a personal reply as I had promised.
    Here are a few ideas that I hope may be of some help.
    In the 19th century a man named Francis Galton suggested that prayer of petition should be put to the test: that one half of England should pray for rain and then compare the rainfall with the other half.
    He was not in fact the first in the world to apply the experimental method to this subject. In the Book of Judges, Gideon said to God: ‘In order to see whether you will deliver Israel by my hand, as you have said, I am going to lay a fleece of wool on the threshing floor; if there is dew on the fleece alone, and it is dry on all the ground, then I shall know that you will deliver Israel by my hand, as you have said….’ Gideon had the mind of a true experimentalist: the following night he turned his experiment back to front to test God a second time: ‘Do not let your anger burn against me, let me speak one more time; let me, please, make trial with the fleece just once more; let it be dry only on the fleece, and on all the ground let there be dew.’ (Judges 6:36, 39)
    We know by some instinct that all this is nonsense. Prayer isn’t simply a way of getting what you want, and if you treated it as such it would turn out to be a pretty unreliable way.
    There are many people who, in reacting to the crudity of this attitude, go to the opposite extreme of never asking God for anything - while having no difficulty with prayer of praise, thanks, and so on. There must be a Christian attitude to prayer of petition that avoids these mistakes.
    First of all, if it makes sense to thank God for something, it must also make sense to ask God for it. But if we ask with both eyes on the goods and no eye for God, we are only acting the beggar. Prayer is not a cheap way of getting what we want; it is a way of relating with childlike frankness to the Father who knows and loves us intimately. ‘Why, every hair on your head has been counted’ (Luke 12:7). A beggar doesn’t see you at all; he has eyes only for the goods. God does not want us to be beggars, but beloved sons and daughters.
    One of the most precious images of prayer that Christians have is the Gethsemane scene. Jesus went there in inner turmoil and asked the Father to let him escape impending torture and death. The astonishing calm, the dignity and trust in his Father that he showed during his trial that night and at his execution the next day, were surely the Father’s answer to his prayer.
    God doesn’t always give us the very thing we ask for; but we trust, then, that God is giving us better. An enlightened parent doesn’t give a child everything he or she asks for. A cut-throat razor, for example, might seem a great toy to a young child. Some of the things we set our hearts on may be just as dangerous and harmful to us, for all we know. But even in the case of things that are not harmful, wise parents don’t always comply with a child’s every wish. Their job is to rear the child, as best they can, into a loving and caring person. If they just followed the child around, satisfying his or her every whim, the child would learn to see them only as providers, not as wisdom figures. And they would be training the child to see the world as a kind of shop-window where everything could be had for the asking. The child would never learn anything about him or herself, or the parents, or the world. God educates our desires as we ask for what we need, or think we need. But God cannot do that if we stop asking. ‘If you who are evil, know how to give your children what is good, how much more will your Father in heaven give good things to those who ask him!’ (Matthew 7:11). Luke’s gospel has a variation on this: ‘…how much more will the heavenly Father give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him!’ (11:13). What God ultimately wants to give us is the Holy Spirit, that is, God's own life. Other things are given us in relation to this.
    John’s gospel uses a telling phrase: asking ‘in my name’. ‘I will do whatever you ask in my name,’ said Jesus, ‘so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it’ (14:13,14). ‘Until now you have not asked for anything in my name. Ask and you will receive, so that your joy may be complete’ (16:24). In the Scriptures, ‘name’ means more than a label, it means ‘presence’. There are lots of things we could not ask in the presence of Jesus. That shows that we have good breeding, and that we really are being educated by God.

I'm looking forward to your next question, Leo!
Donagh

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Dear Donagh, My husband is sending you this question from both of us. Our daughter married a very nice boy two years ago…. We now have a 5 month old grandson….. We were waiting to be told about the baptism, but waiting we were. When I asked my daughter about it she said they're not going to have him baptised nor teach him any religion, but to let him decide for himself when he’s old enough. I was stunned. This doesn’t sound to me like my daughter’s thinking; it’s more her husband’s. But it is very troubling for us, it’s a fright to think that they have a little pagan in the house and they don’t care. They're doing everything for the baby except the most important thing. Is there anything I can say to her…? Maura

     Dear Maura, Your daughter and her husband are thinking the same way that millions now think. At the present time, children (even babies) are often thought of as if they were adults, with equal say in everything that relates to them. If many adults are now confused about the identity of children, it is because they are confused about their own identity as adults and parents.
    This confusion (or lack of self-confidence) has been a long time in the making. For many years now it has been open season on the family, especially on fathers. Various brands of psychotherapy have long romanticised children and blamed their parents for everything that went wrong in a child’s life. Even children’s cartoons portray fathers as selfish, incompetent clowns. This didn’t start with Homer Simpson (amusing though he is); I used to follow Dagwood Bumstead enthusiastically when I was a child. Dagwood’s specialities were snoozing on the couch, eating gigantic sandwiches, and being late for work. Joke-books are mostly cynical and corrosive on the subject of family. The last straw is when parents see that their children are better at computers and at programming a video recorder than they are. The show is over: they abdicate.
    No human being is blameless, but parents are still blamed for everything that goes wrong in the life of a child. (I took the opportunity to expand on this in another page of this site: see ‘Jacob’s Well’.) After a few years of parenthood they discover with dismay that there are all-pervasive influences on their child over which they the parents are almost powerless. There is a popular culture, sometimes depraved in its values, that targets their children with precision. It is able to diffuse itself through all the most sophisticated means of communication. It is child-abuse on a wide scale.
    It is naïve of young parents to believe that their child could somehow remain ‘neutral’ through all the years of his childhood and make an impartial judgment later on. Nature abhors a vacuum; the mind even more so. He will absorb without question, as if it were second nature to him, whatever is thrust on him without question. It’s like putting him in a sweet-shop and expecting him to eat nothing till he is old enough to make a rational choice between chocolate and whole-wheat bread. By the time he became a teenager he would have a solid foundation of chocolate! Would that in real life it were as harmless as chocolate! As soon as parents abdicate their responsibility (and even sooner), thousands rush in to fill the vacuum.
    What can you do? I would suggest that you proceed by gently asking questions of your daughter rather than by making statements. If you talk only about religious practice they will reject your statements out of hand, no matter how valid. Tease out with her the consequences of the course of action - or rather inaction - that they are planning, keeping the good of the baby firmly in focus. You can pick out some examples of what abandonment to popular culture does to young people. Ask them if that is what they want for their child. Grandmothers are wisdom figures. Now is your time.
    On the subject of infant baptism you might look at the article entitled “The Whole Apple” on this site, a few months ago (in ‘Jacob’s Well’). And keep praying for wisdom. God bless your work.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh,
     I have only just discovered the website and am getting great enjoyment out of it.  I am drawn to it and anything religious/spiritual that I can find.  I believe I'm on "my search" but seem to go two steps backwards for every one I take forwards.  I always thought there was 'believers' and ' non-believers' however, I am a 'non-believer' desperately trying to believe. Like the 2 on the road to Emmaus - my heart burns when I hear Christians speak of their experiences - but I'm afraid that what I'm really feeling is envy/self-pity because I cannot feel I will ever belong.
     My problem is that whenever I feel - or imagine I feel - the presence of God (usually when I try praying/meditating )  the question that keeps nagging at me is - Am I trying to believe in God because I need to ? and not because I know he exists? My greatest fear is that I will never move beyond this doubt.
     I am consoled by the title to one of your retreats recently ( which I was regrettably unable to attend ) - The obstacles are the path. -hopefully there is a way around this obstacle for me ?
     Many thanks for your inspiration to date.
     Patricia

     Dear Patricia, Thanks for your letter and your interest. When you say you are “a ‘non-believer’ desperately trying to believe,” I'm reminded of the man in the gospel who said, "I believe; help my unbelief!" (Mark 9:24). In both cases belief and unbelief are mixed together, though differently. Still, from your letter it seems clear enough that you are already a believer, struggling to deepen your faith. That is a noble struggle, and not something to be ashamed of. Don’t be anxious: no one, if they are honest, can be 100% sure of their motives. I have the deepest distrust of people who scream conviction at us; I always have the feeling that it is fuelled by its exact opposite. Such people are shouting to convince themselves, because they are afraid to look at their own uncertainties. The world is filling up with such fundamentalists. Faith is not a conviction that we dredge up from our own resources, but a gift from God. To the extend that it really is a gift, it is received with humility and gratitude, and spoken of with respect and wonder. That may sound like a number of platitudes, but it is what lifts faith above the commotion of our own moods and feelings, and gives it a serene unconditional quality. Even in the absence of any special experiences or feelings I may have very strong faith - much stronger, it may be, than the faith of someone who relies on experiences or feelings. I would suggest, Patricia, that you pay no heed at all at present to other people’s accounts of their experiences. Even if these experiences are authentic, they are personal to those people and have nothing to do with you. Read the gospels yourself and let your heart be touched by the great heart of Christ. Continue to pray and meditate in your own way, and be faithful to what arises there for you.
     You say you take two steps forwards and one step backwards. That means that at least you are moving, you are not clinging like a fundamentalist. Faith means trust. A fundamentalist doesn’t trust at all; he clings, and he hates everything that moves. The great irony is that people who cling are inclined to think that they have really firm faith. But you are moving, trusting, trying to trust. Can we be sure which way is backwards and which is forwards? Success and failure have their ordinary definitions reversed by the Cross of Christ. What I call success may well be a failure, and vice versa.
     You said, “I cannot feel I will ever belong.” The need to belong, though it is very basic in human nature, frequently leads people astray. It is quite ambiguous in itself. Many of the greatest Christians have experienced profound rejection, even by their own. But before their minds, no doubt, stood the image of Christ on the Cross, rejected and betrayed, yet mysteriously raised up by the Father. His death and resurrection were the origin of the New Community, the Church. That Community was born out of extreme isolation; it was not the fruit of group psychology, but of the Spirit. Real belonging is never simple. Gradually you will recognise the community of faith, but don’t make a feeling of belonging a precondition.
     Likewise, don’t worry about feeling the presence of God. Feelings, like the need to belong, are quite ambiguous. Without them, it’s true, we would be like robotsl but they have no compass of their own: they can lead us in any and every direction. Just be faithful to what is given you in prayer and meditation, and it will grow.
     “Am I trying to believe in God because I need to, and not because I know he exists?” Yes, that is a constant question for believers: what are my motives - as far as I can discern them - for believing in God? If I were to think that my belief in God was just a thing organised by my own mind, then I would have every reason to be doubtful about it. But it is much more than that. Compare if, if you like, to the instinct a salmon has to return to the place of its origin. That ‘knowledge’ of its origins is not something that the salmon worked out for itself; it is more like the opposite: it is knowledge that is working (almost by itself) in the salmon. The salmon certainly “needs” to get back to its origin, but this need doesn’t make it a false effort. In my search for God I may indeed be driven forward by my neediness, my emptiness…. But that doesn’t make it a false search. Without that spur I may not bother to seek God at all. In the case of another person, it may be a sense of exuberance that brings them to God. It hardly matters. Keep to your own path, and “go with God.”
I wish you every blessing for the journey, Patricia.
Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to question@goodnews.ie ]

Dear Donagh, I enjoy my visits to your site, and may I compliment you on the new look! It’s quite lovely…. My son who runs a business was very impressed by it and asked me to ask you who your web designer is. He is not happy with his own website and would like a change.
     Now for my own question. I have another son living in Canada who worries me a little. He’s a good-living boy, It’s just the way he talks sometimes that worries me. When I was over there in a few weeks ago he passed a remark on two separate occasions that life has no meaning. I put it out of my mind at the time, but it keeps coming back to me. I know that he goes to Mass and he’s interested in things like meditation. I feel he thinks too much about things, he’s very serious. Do you think I should say anything to him, and what should I say? Can you make any suggestions? Many thanks. I'll appreciate any help. God bless. Maudie

    Dear Maudie, Thank you for asking an easy question along with the difficult one! There's an easy answer to the easy one. My nephew Ciarán designed and maintains our website. He does that kind of work for a living. Your son can contact him through Ciarán’s own website, "http://www.soscreative.com"
     I wish there were an easy answer to the hard question too. Since your son is a serious person, practising his faith while searching into the heart of it, I don’t feel that you need to be worried. Deeply interested, of course, but not worried. Many people make such remarks as his only when they have already abandoned the search, but he is doing it from the inside; and that makes all the difference. It’s remarkable how many of the saints experienced that apparent loss of meaning. It doesn’t mean that they were convinced life had no meaning, but that the ready answers had become inadequate for them. As your son was constantly growing out of his clothes in the earlier part of his life, he is now growing out of the intellectual and religious answers that were adequate for him before.
     If there’s anything in the following that you think might help him, you could paste it into an email to him, or print it out, telling him (truthfully!) that you found it on the internet. Don’t forget to edit it. I also wrote something in another page of this site (‘Jacob’s Well’) that may be of some relevance. And the passage from Bede Griffiths in ‘Wisdom Line’ is also related to the theme.
     The gospel of John begins with the words, “In the beginning was the word….” In Greek, the language in which it was written, the word for ‘word’ is ‘logos’. But ‘logos’ in Greek has a far wider meaning than ‘word’ in English. ‘Word’, in English, refers usually just to the printed word on the page, or the spoken word in the air. But in Greek, ‘logos’ means in addition ‘meaning’, ‘inner principle’, ‘harmony’…. So you could read it this way, “In the beginning was the Meaning, and the Meaning was with God, and the Meaning was God…. And the Meaning became flesh and lived among us.” The Logos, the Meaning, became flesh - our flesh, our human nature. We are the Body of Christ, as St Paul kept repeating. (Have a look in ‘Jacob’s Well’ for instances of this.) A Christian doesn’t have a meaning; a Christian is the meaning - in Christ.
     Does life have a meaning? What is a person looking for when he or she looks for the meaning of life? It can hardly be just a formula of words clipped onto it, some theory, some so-called explanation - like an additional page clipped onto the end of a file. This wouldn’t do justice to the struggle of the saints, nor to the struggle of ordinary Christians through the ages. They were searching for far more than a theory about life, or an explanation. They were seeking to satisfy not just their minds but an unquenchable hunger in their hearts and in their whole being. There are armchair seekers, of course, but they are just curious or clever people, not real seekers. You could say that life does not have a meaning; it is the meaning. Its meaning is not now something external to us, because the Logos has taken flesh in our nature. Its meaning is closer to us than the mind is able to discern.
     Better than any other Christian writer St Augustine expressed this aspect of the search in his Confessions, particularly in the much-quoted passage: “Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me and I was outside….” That 5th-century classic has somehow shaped the thinking of everyone in the Christian tradition who has ever taken seriously the search for God and meaning. Some ‘things’ are hard to see and find, not because they are far away but because they are so near. It is our very thinking that puts them at a distance.
     I don’t know what your son might think of that, Maudie. I hope anyway that it won't finish him off altogether! It was his mother’s prayers, interest, and support that sustained St Augustine. Without a doubt it can be the same in your case.
     God bless.

               Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…. Thanks for your site, I often return to it, II feel you're not just giving pious answers. Maybe you have something for my aunt. We have this aunt who is very religious and who is always offering us advice we don’t need and telling us how ungrateful we are to God for all the things he's given us. She won't listen to anything we say, she just says we're wrong. I'm often on the verge of losing my patience with her, but she’s a good person, there’s no harm in her, but her sermons are very annoying, especially when she doesn’t know what she’s talking about. Could you suggest a way of turning her off that wouldn’t hurt her but would really work? It would be great for my nerves if you could! Lorna

    Dear Lorna, A remedy comes to mind straight away. Ask her if the God she’s talking about is the same as the one those Chechen terrorists praised as they blew up hundreds of young children with their parents and teachers. Insist on a yes or a no, and pursue the consequences of what she says. There's only one God, so she doesn’t have much of a choice. That should slow up the most fervent preacher. In fact it should slow up everyone, or even stop us dead from using the word ‘God’ at all….
Or should it? I've been remembering a passage from Martin Buber on this very point. He was a Jewish writer, 1878-1965, and this is from his book, The Eclipse of God.
    "’Yes,’ I said, "[the word ‘God’] is the most heavy-laden of all human words. None has become so soiled, so mutilated. Just for this reason I may not abandon it. The generations have laid the burden of their anxious lives upon this word and weighed it to the ground; it lies in the dust and bears their whole burden. Human beings with their religious factions have torn the word to pieces; they have killed for it and died for it, and it bears their finger marks and their blood. Where might I find a word like it to describe the highest! If I took the purest, most sparkling concept from the inner treasure-chamber of the philosophers, I could only capture thereby an unbinding product of thought. I could not capture the presence of the One whom the generations have honoured and degraded with their awesome living and dying. I do indeed mean God whom the hell-tormented and heaven-storming generations mean. Certainly, they draw caricatures and write 'God' underneath; they murder one another and say "in God's name." But when all madness and delusion fall to dust, when they stand over against Him in the loneliest darkness and no longer say, "He, He," but rather sigh "Thou," shout "Thou," all of them the one word, and when they then add "God," is it not the real God whom they all implore, the One Living God, the God of the human race? Is it not He who hears them? And just for this reason, is not the word 'God', the word of appeal, the word which has become a name, consecrated in all human tongues for all times? We must esteem those who interdict it because they rebel against the injustice and wrong which is so readily referred to 'God' for authorisation. But we may not give up. How understandable it is that some suggest we should remain silent about "the last things" for a time in order that the misused words may be redeemed! But they are not to be redeemed thus. We cannot cleanse the word 'God' and we cannot make it whole; but, defiled and mutilated as it is, we can raise it from the ground and set it over an hour of great care.”
    We say (and sing) a lot of blood-curdling things in the Psalms without batting an eyelid. For example, Psalm 149:
   Let the praise of God be on their lips
   and a two-edged sword in their hand,
   to deal out vengeance to the nations
   and punishment on all the peoples;
   to bind their kings in chains
   and their nobles in fetters of iron;
   to carry out the sentence pre-ordained:
   this honour is for all his faithful.
This is the language of terrorists. People will say it has to be balanced against all the wonderful things in the Psalms. But nothing balances terror; it shouldn’t be on the scales at all. The “religions of the book” (Judaism, Christianity and Islam) have a shameful record of praising violence and relying on it. Christianity too? Yes. From the Inquisition to my boarding school! Anger and violence are so deep in human beings that they come out everywhere, even where we are looking for a remedy for them. Take this for example: “Judgment will be without mercy to anyone who has shown no mercy; mercy triumphs over judgment” (James 2:13). Even apart from the internal contradiction, this is inferior to many things in the Old Testament.
    Oh, I just remembered your poor aunt! There's no need, of course, to drop all this high explosive on her; just a few ounces should do the tricks! (Is this violence?!)

               Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh.... Someone recommended your site to me and I look at it sometimes. I'd like to pop this question to you. You’re not the first one I popped it to, I can tell you! Why is religion so boring? Religious people are always talking about LIFE as if it was going out of fashion. Life life life. We had a religion teacher in school who never stopped talking about life, and he bored the [expletive] off us for three years. I’ll never forget it. I remember looking at my sister’s cat one time and thinking the cat is less boring than that teacher. So I'm asking now, why is it so boring? (don’t give me a boring answer!) Ed W

    Dear Ed, Thanks for your letter: it wasn’t boring in the least!
Yes, one of the great mysteries of religion is how we succeed in making it so boring. I think it has something to do with giving answers to questions that were not asked. Teachers are apt to think they are preparing us for life, in the sense of loading us up with provisions that will last us forever. It’s like being given the whole bakery when all we wanted was one slice of bread, or even a single bite.
    But you graduated from school, and now you are free to choose your own forms of boredom! Now for a really boring answer that will make your former teacher look good! I'd like to say a good word for boredom. It’s the underdog that everyone loves to kick. I'd like to stand up for it!
    I was delighted to find a really appropriate passage to quote for you. It’s by a great Korean Zen master, Seung Sahn, still alive and well, I hope. Here it is, in his distinctive English.
    “Boring is very important word. If you attain boring, then everything is boring. Then this is no desire, no anger, no ignorance. Desire is boring; anger is boring; ignorance is boring; everything is boring. Then, you will get Enlightenment. So boring is very important. Everything is equal. But people don't like boring. They want something, and boring is not interesting. It's like clear water. Clear water has no taste, but no taste is great taste. Everybody likes ice cream, but eating ice cream all day is not possible. However, if you're thirsty, clear water is wonderful any time - better than honey, better than ice cream, better than anything. The truth is like this.”
    Was your teacher ever able to match that?
    Boredom is lying there in waiting for everyone, no matter what their race or religion. There's no such thing as a life in which there is no boredom. You know this already. The question is what to do with it. Do you spend your life running from it, or do you stand and face it? Modern life offers us millions of ways of running from it, but we can never get away from it, because we carry it inside ourselves. I remember a therapy group in which one person announced loudly one day, “I’m bored!” Quick as a shot, the facilitator said to him, “Would you like to tell us how you’re boring yourself?” He sent the ball right back over the net! We were not boring that man, he was boring himself. The world is not boring, it’s an endlessly fascinating place. Our boredom is really our own; that's why we can never get away from it. So let’s stand and face it. That's what Seung Sahn is telling us to do in that passage.
    A Zen master once said to me, “Boredom is the beginning of wisdom.” During a Zen sesshin you sit in the meditation room for a total of nine or ten hours a day, facing the wall! It is a situation designed to bring on boredom. Then you face it, which means facing yourself. A thousand times you would love to get up and walk out, but a thousand times you decide to stay there. The immense background of silence allows you to become aware of your inner chatter. You listen to that chatter - worse than any religion teacher, or at least just as bad. You begin to see where it comes from, how it is driven, where it is trying to push you. A whole world of ‘wanting’ begins to show itself. This is the power that drives that chatter. It is a disease of the will, abstract; call it ‘wantingness’: wanting for the sake of wanting, wanting so as to escape from oneself. It drives the mind into a spin, and when that spin gets stronger it drives our lives into a spin. Go out on the street and take a look. The success of advertising relies entirely on our suffering from this disease.
    A Zen sesshin is an extreme measure. There are all sorts of less drastic measures that one could practice. When you find boredom coming down on you don’t start running right away. Take a look at it, for half a minute. It’s not as awful as it seems. It’s yours, anyway! Don’t have any ideas about it. Make friends with it. Strange to say, that is the only cure for boredom! Later you will get the courage to dive right in. All of our consciousness is foreground, except this. This is background. This is you. For the present, pick these special moments and look at them. After a while it’s remarkable how you can study them. It’s like having a cavity in a tooth that you can't leave alone. Very small, nothing really; but the secret of the world is there! If you can live these empty moments, these cavities, then nothing can knock you down. These tiny cavities are the door to meditation.
    I tried to match the next two sections of this site (Jacob’s Well and Wisdom Line) to your question. And if you look in the archive list in this section you’ll find a previous question on boredom. Greet your former teacher if you meet him. And my respects to the cat.

               Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to question@goodnews.ie ]

Dear Donagh, Thanks for your website, I'm finding it a great help, especially some of the questions and answers. I got back an interest lately in praying. I hadn’t prayed really since I was a teenager, twenty years ago or more. I pick up things to read about it, but while I'm reading there’s always a doubt at the back of my mind. Isn’t praying the easy way out? Easy if it works, I mean. Is it even a bit childish like Ask your Dad, instead of doing it yourself? It’s something I want to ask the writer of every book and article I read on prayer. I hope you don’t mind me asking you. Thanks for everything. Lisa.

Dear Lisa, I appreciate your letter and I'm happy that you are asking that question. The question that is always there is the important one. A question, I always think, is like a door. If it’s wide open there’s no curiosity, no discovery. But a real question often seems like a closed door, and for that very reason we have to try it. Prayer is a mysterious attraction, and it is that same attraction that draws you to this door. We have to love our questions!
I hope my answer won't take away your question! That's the trouble with answers. A real answer, I imagine, would lead you deeper into your question. God is an ocean of Being, attracting us mysteriously. "If you would go to sea, embark on a river," wrote Mde Guyon, the 18th-century French mystic. Our questions are the river.
What do you think of this passage by W.B. Yeats? He was telling of an old man, Paddy Flynn of Ballisodare, who was a well-known figure on the streets of Dublin. “He was a great teller of tales,” wrote Yeats, “and unlike our common romancers, knew how to empty heaven, hell, and purgatory, faeryland and earth, to people his stories. He did not live in a shrunken world, but knew of no less ample circumstance than did Homer himself…. He was fond of telling how Columcille cheered up his mother. 'How are you to-day, mother?' said the saint. 'Worse,' replied the mother. 'May you be worse to-morrow,' said the saint. The next day Columcille came again, and exactly the same conversation took place, but the third day the mother said, 'Better, thank God.' And the saint replied, 'May you be better to-morrow.'”
Paddy Flynn would have made a stimulating spiritual director! He didn’t live in a prurient little world of psychological peeping and prying; he was a rag-man living in a world of many dimensions. He had to live by his wits and by God's Providence - both. We all should, I'm sure, but we won't until we have to. God will have to drag us out of our safe places.
Columcille’s responses to Paddy’s mother don’t seem very consoling. But he took her seriously! She should not make God accountable for her health; she was accountable for it herself. He was teaching her to live by her wits, just like her son Paddy. Our Faith proclaims that we are God's children; “God's children: that is what we are” (1 John 3:1). But when we hear the word ‘children’ we think immediately of young children. That is what we are not. A person could be sixty years old and still their parents’ ‘child’ in John’s sense. Our Faith doesn’t sponsor any childishness in adults. It really doesn’t, even though there are many in the Church who have no interest in urging us to an adult faith.
You are right to question whether praying for something is the easy way out. Over the Christian centuries there have been many perspectives on it. Here is yet another.
God is speaking to us through every creature; reality is our Father revealing himself to us. “Every creature is a word of God,” said Eckhart. God's word, God's voice, is not a flattering one; it breaks through our illusions and our selfishness. A thousand times a day, if we try to hear, it says yes and no to us. In this way of looking at it, God is answering our prayer every moment. But we cannot leave it at that. The engagement of a Christian with the realities of life is not an impersonal one. By the instinct of faith we bring our troubles and burdens to God our Father. We could hardly call him Father if we didn’t. Jesus didn’t only pray when he felt ecstatic; he prayed when he was in deep trouble. And he told us, “Ask the Father” (see John 16:23). This asking is not an alternative to engaging ourselves fully in the reality of what we are asking about. We might say, it is the depth of that engagement.
It is hard - maybe impossible - to get the balance right. St Augustine in the 5th century said, “Act as if everything depended on you, knowing that everything depends on God.” It’s not a clever formula, it doesn’t flatten out the question, as many answers do; it leaves it there as a living thing, three-dimensional. It is an instruction on how to go on, rather than an answer. Thomas Merton once said, “We are not meant to resolve all contradictions but to live with them….”
May you never lose the attraction, Lisa. Johann Tauler (a disciple of Meister Eckhart in the 14th century) said that the attraction to God was like the attraction of iron filings to a magnet, or like a hound catching the scent of a hare. Paddy himself would have been impressed!
Donagh O'Shea

[JH, Celibacy]

Dear Donagh, Thank you for your website, I love it, it’s one of my all-time favourites. I hope I'm not being presumptuous in making a suggestion. I notice you put up new content every four weeks. Why not follow the calendar month instead? It would have this advantage. The new uploads would seldom begin with a Sunday. I checked it, and I found that only one or two months in each year begin on a Sunday. At present you always begin with a Sunday. Some of us are on the lookout during the week for a few ideas for a Sunday homily, and your uploads come just a bit late!

That's my suggestion. I also have a question, before coming to the real question. Where do you get your photos? Do you take them yourself?
Now for the real question. It’s unfair to ask, of course, but I'm just bouncing it, let’s say. Have you any wise thoughts on celibacy? No need to give a long answer, one idea would be enough, something to go on with. I find most of the things written on the subject too abstract, idealistic and unreal. I'd appreciate your reaction. Many thanks, Donagh. JH

Dear JH, I’m really thankful to you for your suggestion. Like all good ideas it’s obvious once it’s said. I’ll ask my nephew, who is our webmaster, to change it right away. (His website, by the way, is (www.soscreative.com).
The photos: I take them myself with a digital camera. I travel a lot, giving retreats mainly in Ireland, but in many other countries as well. In fact I'm in Norway as I write this. I’ll put some Norwegians pictures with these uploads....
Celibacy, in quick time! Yes I have one practical idea.

Do you know Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s book, On Death and Dying? She was a pioneer, as you know, in the modern study of death and dying. To recap quickly. From her observation she distinguished five stages that the dying person typically passes through. First there is disbelief, then bargaining, then anger, then depression, and finally serene acceptance. (I’m not sure that I have these in the right order.) This was based, as I say, on observation and experience, not on any theories about how people ought to die! In due course other people soon began to apply it - like all good discoveries - to other areas of life, to see if it was also true there. They found that the bereaved typically went through the same five stages - a little differently, but nonetheless really. The stages can last longer with the bereaved, because they have more time! Then people began to observe patients who had been maimed or who had lost a limb, and they found that they too passed through these stages. It has proved a useful insight into the human reaction to any trauma whatsoever.

Now here’s the suggestion: why not apply it to celibacy! Celibacy is more than just a trauma; it has a positive side. But we tend to talk so idealistically about its positive side that we don’t respect or care for the traumatic side of it. There is a sense in which it is an on-going trauma. I don’t know if all of the Kubler-Ross stages might be identifiable in the living of celibacy, but it is very tempting to identify the stages at which different people tend to get stuck - and especially oneself! There’s a day soon after final profession or ordination to the deaconate when a person says, “What have I done?!” That could be the disbelieving stage! As for the bargaining stage, you’ll have to fill it in from your own experience. The angry and depressed stages are very obvious, and unfortunately they can last for a lifetime. But finally there’s no one who wouldn’t want to come into an open serene space where the agonies and confusions of the previous stages are past. I always say we haven’t really given up something until we have given it up with joy. But it has to be real joy that has emerged from the pain of experience, not a feigned joy learned from books. There are joyless celibates, but there are also joyful and serene ones. We have to mourn the loss of marriage and family, so that eventually our joy will be real.

That's just a quick thought, J. Thanks for your kind words, and for your suggestion.
Donagh

[Lena, Ways of praying]

Hi Donagh, I was at a retreat last year and the priest was telling us how to pray.  It was all about imagining scenes from the Gospels and putting yourself into them and talking to different people there.  I told him that wasn’t the way I prayed but he said this is the way to do it.  Ever since then I feel uneasy about praying and I'm not sure I'm praying at all.  I used to say an Our Father and then just sit there knowing I was close to God.  Then at the end I would pray for my family and my friends and for everyone.  Now I don’t know what to do, I try to do a bit of what he said and a bit of what I used to do, but I end up completely restless.  It has no attraction for me any more.  What's the right way of praying?  Thanks for your website, I found it just the other day.  Lena

Dear Lena, Thank you for your email and welcome to the site! 

The way you used to pray sounds great to me!  But that's not the point.  The point is that it was your way and it was working.  You are not the first person I've met whose way of praying was disturbed by the interference of a director.  I believe we should be great experimenters with ways of praying, and not bother much about other people's ways (except to see what might be interesting). The trouble with many spiritual writers and retreat-leaders, especially in the past, is that they imagined that their favourite way was the only way.  But Jesus said, "In my Father's house there are many dwelling-places."

Here is what Johann Tauler (a disciple of Meister Eckhart in the 14^th century) said about the matter.  "Do not go adopting other people's methods or spiritual exercises; that is blindness.  Our various ways to God are as different from one another as we are ourselves.  One person's spiritual meat is another's poison, and the graces we are given vary in many ways, to fit the needs of our particular constitutions and natures.  So leave other people's practices alone.  Imitate their virtues, if you like: their humility, their gentleness and so on.  But when it comes to external observances, follow your own particular vocation.  Concentrate on knowing what you yourself are called to do, what God is asking of you, and do that."

And here is what his teacher Meister Eckhart said.  "I will tell you how I think of people. I try to forget myself and everyone and merge myself, for them, in unity."  He means he merges himself in God for them.  This was also the solution that St Thérèse of Lisieux devised for herself.  She had been asked by so many people to pray for them that it was becoming impossible for her to remember them all.  So she just said, I put all these people in my heart, and I give my heart to God; that's enough.  Otherwise her prayer would become just a long litany of names.

Mde Guyon, the 18^th-century mystic, wrote, "The Spirit of God needs none of our arrangements and methods; when it pleases Him, He turns shepherds into prophets: and, so far from excluding any from the Temple of Prayer, He throws wide the gates, that all may enter; while Wisdom cries aloud in the highways, 'Whoever is simple let him turn in here' (Proverbs 9:4)."  And her mentor, Bishop Fénelon, wrote, "The one who prays perfectly is never thinking how well he prays."

In the same vein Thomas Merton said, "Many poets are not poets for the same reason that many religious people are not saints: they never succeed in being themselves."   And a Rabbi (whose name I forget; let's call him Eleazar) said, "At the Judgment God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Abraham?  Why were you not Moses?' but 'Why were you not Eleazar?'"

If I quote all these people it is not to put forward a model but to reassure you that you are not alone in the way you pray, or used to pray.  Go back to your own way with a good conscience.  And, if you please, include me in your prayer….

Donagh O'Shea

Between Ourselves

I feel very pessimistic when I look around me today. Honesty and human decency and respect for life seem to be becoming things of the past. In the Church too there's just too much division and confusion, not to mention the many scandals. What hope can you offer me for the future? - Robert

   I've been turning similar questions over in my mind. And I think now (against all English usage) that Christian hope is not, and never was, for the future! It is for the present.
     May I speak about the word 'hope' first? In English, hope is almost a negative word: you hope when you don't know what the future will be; and you hope when there is nothing you can do about it anyway ("we can only hope"). It's tied up entirely with the future, and of course the future is always out of reach. Basically therefore it is a feeble word. But we try to improve it by mixing it up with optimism. Optimism is always a sitting duck for satire, as was Leibniz's "best of all possible worlds" for Voltaire. It's nice to be optimistic, I'm sure, but I don't think that the Christian faith has anything much to do with that.
     St Paul spoke about the greatest of all gifts, the "three things that last: faith,hope and love"
(1 Cor. 13:13). But we make hope the poor relation of the other two. In the New Testament the word's usage is generally much stronger than in English. It's not something you indulge in when all action fails; on the contrary it's the fruit of persistence: "Perseverance brings hope," he said elsewhere (Rom 5:4). It's not a dreamy outlook on the future; it's about daring and enduring in the present.
     We are always willing to postpone good things, someone said, but bad things wedo right away! We would like to postpone faith, hope and love: to put them over the horizon and into the future; but fear, greed and anger we attend to immediately. Hope is one of the good things - one of the best, St Paul said. So it must be for now or never.
     Yes, the contemporary world takes our breath away. We're on the high seas of change with no land in sight. It came on most of us suddenly, or so it seems: we haven't had time to get our sea-legs. Most of us would like to be ashore, never again to set out to sea. We are unhappy, we blame one another for being where we are, and we are nostalgic for old times when everything seemed fixed and safe. In this predicament, I tell myself, optimism would just be the mirror image of nostalgia: a safe harbour ahead mirroring the safe harbour behind. Both are somehow a refusal of the present. We are at sea, whether we like it or not.
To refuse that experience is to have an aversion to sailing. Yet sailing (the 'barque of Peter') is an abiding image of the Church.
     There was One who calmed the storm (the account doesn't say whether it was the inner storm of fear or the outer storm at sea), and said, "Why are you fearful, O men of little faith?" (Mark 4:40). Through the centuries Christians have remembered this image in times of terror and despair. I pass on to you the words of the 4th century Desert Mother, Syncletica, who said to a group of monks, "Those who put out to sea sail at first with a favourable wind.... But later the winds become adverse. Then the ship is tossed by the waves and is no longer controlled by the rudder.... So it is with us, when we are driven by the spirits who are against us; we hold to the Cross as our sail and so we can set a safe course." Notice that the storm is still raging, the anchor and the rudder useless: she is talking about a different kind of safety. She was a tough woman: she once said to a group of monks, "You're the women and I'm the man!"
     I don't know if these thoughts are helpful to you. I myself find it useful to look for echoes of our present experience in the Christian classics, particularly in the early ones (before we became too settled on dry land!). It's like reaching for an identity that is wider and deeper than our individual ego. I feel that that is what being members of the Church means: beyond our individual selves we have the Christ-nature in us. "When we were baptised," Paul said, "we went down into the tomb with him and joined him in death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the Father's glory, we too might live a new life" (Rom 6:4). There is no refusal of reality there, no flight from the present - however terrible - no rejection of death, no nostalgia, no optimism; just a pure expression of hope.
     Every age is terrible. In the Church too. We tend to idealise the early Christian period as opposite in every way to our own. But St Clement of Rome (to pick an example at random), writing to Christians in about the year 95, said, "Why is there strife and passion and divisions and schisms and war among you...?" Clearly, all was not well at the end of the first century! And all is not well at the beginning of the twenty-first! As Voltaire's Candide said (and it is the final sentence of the book), "Everything is not so good as in El Dorado; but everything is not too bad."

Peace, Robert!

Donagh

I suppose I'm a bit alienated from all institutions - and more than a bit! Organizations, parties, movements - they all leave me cold, - when I see anything like that I want to run the other way. But the church is the oldest organization of all! I don't know how there's anyone still in it! At the same time I believe in the spiritual side of life - it means a lot to me in a way I can't spell out very well. It's the deepest part of a person. But why does that have to be tied up then in an institution?!! What have institutions got to do with it! They're only interested in their pecking order and in promoting themselves. I can't see Jesus in any of that. What do you say?

Years ago, Alan Watts wrote (I'm quoting from memory, but quite accurately I believe) that the Church has in her possession, as in a trunk, the purest mystical wisdom, but she isn't opening it up for the world - because of the sheer weight of so many clerical gentlemen sitting on the lid! Most, I would add, don't know that they are sitting on anything; they are just not evoking a level of experience that they ought to be evoking, not mediating the mystery: not mediating it even to themselves. Nothing is so much out of a man's sight as what he is sitting on! You have every right to complain and to walk away wherever you see that.

What do I say? The institution and the spirit are always in tension. But there's good and bad tension.

There's the kind of tension that diminishes people: that frays their nerves and wears them down, that dulls their idealism and prevents miracles. Even Jesus couldn't work in that atmosphere. "He could not do any miracles there," Mark said (6:5).
(It was his home village, and the people wanted to keep him in his place: a village is often the worst kind of institution.) Yes, we all know many institutions that are interested only in controlling people. The control-freak rises to the top, setting up and reinforcing patterns of dependency that reduce rather than enlarge people. Some of the greatest crimes of the 20th century were committed by people who claimed they were just doing what they had been told to do by their superiors.

But there's another kind of tension: the kind that is part of all life and without which we would just
be organic blobs on the floor. The spirit needs opposition! It needs constraints and it dissipates itself if it doesn't find any. Imagine a wide lazy river with no banks: it just spreads out wherever it wants; it's going nowhere in particular, it has no depth nor power; it just evaporates in the sun. Imagine also the depth and the power it would have if it were flowing between banks (the narrower the banks, in fact, the more depth and power). This is how I interpret Jesus's saying that the gate to life is narrow. "Enter through the narrow gate; for wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it" (Matthew 7:13).

Every Church community is meant to be part of the Body of Christ, but often it is no more than a power-structure that robs and diminishes you instead of enriching and enlarging you.
Or it becomes something that is neither one nor the other. What a tragedy it is, and how far from the original intention! Writing in the 5th century about the Eucharist, St Augustine said, "All of that is about you! The mystery being celebrated on the altar is the mystery of you! You became Christ's body and his members [at baptism], when you said, 'Amen!' to that mystery of what you are. Now also in the Eucharist you receive his Body and you say, 'Amen!'"

To look back even closer to the origin: an ancient book called the Didachè, written in the first century (earlier than much of the New Testament) was discovered in 1883.
It contains an account of the Eucharist and the words that were used then. Here is one sentence of it. "As this broken bread, once dispersed over the hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your Kingdom." It is a beautiful image. The grains of wheat were gathered from the fields and hillsides and made into this one loaf; likewise the people, whose homes are scattered all over the hills, have come together to form one community - one Bread, one Body of Christ. And may that gathering be endlessly wider and deeper, till Kingdom come!

Christian community grows out of the Eucharist, not out of canon law, and never out of power politics. It would be hard, I think, to extract 'spirituality' from canon law! Maybe canon lawyers can! But the Eucharist is endless. Even a simple part of it like the Sign of Peace is full of meaning. On the surface it may be just a winter handshake with a stranger in a badly heated church. But its deepest meaning says: I don't know your name or anything about you, but in the broken body of Christ I would lay down my life for you.

May I leave you with a single phrase from the Scriptures? "In Christ we, who are many, form one body, and each member belongs to all the others" (Romans 12:5).

I find it harder and harder to believe in God. I don't mean that I've been thinking
about proofs of his existence and saying, "No, that one is false, and so is that," and concluding that there is no God. It's more that the whole idea looks ready to fall away by itself, like Santa Claus. Even without existing, come to think of it, God could still do a lot of good, like Santa Claus! And I suspect that a lot of people who say they believe in God, don't really. But you must do, since you're putting up this stuff on the net and getting nothing for it. Do you believe rock-solid in the existence of God, and do you never even for a minute suspect that maybe...just maybe...there's nothing up there? - Aidan

You take me out of my depth! I can't reach the bottom; all I can do is splash around!
If there were some facts that might prove the existence of God, or some other facts that might disprove it, we could try to sort out the two kinds. But for someone who believes in God everything proves (or at least shows, or is consistent with) the existence of God, while for someone who doesn't, everything equally fails to prove it. The claim is that God is the creator of all that exists, so in the nature of the case nothing could count against God's existence. But equally, that is just what removes
the basis of all argument, for and against! That's why I say I can't put my foot down and touch any solid stones or even sand...!

There are probably very few people who stop believing in God because of a purely intellectual argument. It's much more common for belief in God just to slip, like a coat slipping off the shoulder; or like belief in Santa Claus, as you say. In fact the loss of belief in Santa Claus could be a practice run for the other! I remember a famous description by Sartre of his own loss of belief. I have it here. "One morning in 1917, at La Rochelle, I was waiting for some companions who were supposed to accompany me to the lycée; they were late. Soon I could think of nothing more to distract myself, and I decided to think about the Almighty. He at once tumbled down into the blue sky and vanished without explanation.... I have never since had the least inclination to revive him." It was the same Sartre who was to write the epoch-making book Being and Nothingness.

I'm sorry for quoting passages from writers, but I want you to see that I'm not just concocting ideas to meet your question. May I bring up the words of a writer who was more than a writer - a man who was ablaze with God, if ever there was one. Meister Eckhart wrote in the 14th century: "Anything you see, or anything that comes within your ken, that is not God, because God is neither this nor that. Whoever says God is here or there, do not believe him. The light that God is, shines in the darkness. God is the true light: to see it, one must be blind and must strip from God all that is 'something'. A master says: whoever speaks of God in any likeness, speaks impurely of Him. But to speak of God with nothing is to speak of Him correctly. When the soul is unified and there enters into total self?abnegation, then she finds God as in Nothing. It appeared to a man as in a dream - it was a waking dream - that he became pregnant with Nothing like a woman with child, and in that Nothing God was born, God was the fruit of Nothing. God was born in the Nothing."

This is the only passage in which Eckhart referred to his own enlightenment, or in fact to himself at all. It is startling language, but it is normal with the Christian mystics, as with mystics of every religion. The famous seven-times repeated "nada" of St John of the Cross is the best-known example, but there are countless others. Nothing. God has to fall away! God as object has to tumble down into the blue sky, as Sartre put it. Many people smile at the idea of the Old Man in the Sky with the White Beard. But any idea of God as object comes to the same thing. While we continue to imagine God as a kind of object - a super-object, of course! - the language of objects will do: we will discuss animals, vegetables and minerals and God, using the same deeply-embedded categories of thought. Millions of people have become so dissatisfied with 'God as object' that they almost know what an atheist feels, and they think that they are therefore atheists. God as an object: obiectum, 'something thrown against'. That kind of God would be a limited God, an idol. But when you deny God as object someone will say you are making God 'subjective'. It is not a case of denying one side of a distinction in favour of the other, but of denying the distinction itself. God leaps over that distinction.

So, to answer your question, do I suspect that there may be nothing up there? There are lots of objects up there, but I'm not tempted to think of God as one of them. Every day of my life I'm drawn to prayer and meditation: I go willingly; I get up very early in the morning to do it. Everything I do during the day seems shallow if I miss it. What do I do while I'm sitting there for a couple of hours? Nothing! And when I catch myself doing something I stop it! Something in me is trying to come awake. I intend to stay there every morning and evening for the rest of my life. That's my search for God...such as it is. It couldn't possibly be the only way, but it's mine, and it's the way of many people. I could pass the time looking at myself, the subject; or I could pass the time thinking about the Object. But I will try to stay in that clear 'space' where the ego has nothing to project and nothing to project onto. I believe that that space is the Christ-nature in us. He is still struggling to be born. I don't know if this throws some light for you, Aidan. Take a look at two other sections on this site, Wisdom Line and Between Ourselves. Take care! - Donagh

I've been reading your web page since my son showed it to me and I've got a lot of help from it. You may be able to help me even more if I tell you my own problem. As a matter of fact I've more than one, but I don't want to go on about them! And I don't want to go into details on the net, but it's about living with financial disaster. My husband and I had a very successful business. He's very trusting and unfortunately he trusted the wrong people. We have enough to live on and our family are reared. But having this bitterness in me every day is awful - for my husband too, though he's a lot calmer than I am. I'm no help to him this way. For his sake as well as my own, could you say something that would calm me down and help me to get rid of this bitterness? - Vera

    I'm sorry to hear about your financial disaster, Vera (and the details that you sent in a separate e-mail message); and especially about the effect that it has been having on you. If only words could put everything right...! I'm afraid I can't claim to know from experience what it's like to suffer a financial disaster. I started out with nothing, as someone said, and I have most of it left! But I don't have a family, so most of nothing is plenty for me! What can I say to you? I know little enough as an individual, but I am a mediator of a long tradition. Whenever there was a loss of any kind on the farm where I grew up, my father would say, "Trouble isn't too bad so long as it stays outside the door!" He meant that you couldn't compare the loss of a crop, for example, to sickness or an accident. I've quoted those words of his (and many a word of his) hundreds of times, it may be. He was born in 1897 and died in 1977, and how strange to think that words of his, spoken perhaps forty or fifty years ago in a tiny farmhouse in the back of beyond, would now float in cyberspace for the comfort of a fellow-sufferer! We are a vast family, we human beings!
     Vast - and compassionate too, when we want to be. Think of that bitterness in you as a wound. Look after it, be kind to it and careful about it; watch it hopefully for signs of healing. All the ages that have gone before us knew what it's like to carry this wound. My beloved father wants to comfort you from his grave. What wisdom he and people like him had was won in the stony fields of experience, and I'm sure that's the only way that wisdom can be won.
     You said you wanted "to get rid of" this bitterness. It's not a friendly phrase! If you remain unfriendly towards that bitterness, it will cause you a lot more trouble. Attend
to it without rehearsing the story. Don't say it is about that so-and-so who swindled you. The wound is in you, not in him (though he has another wound, whether he realises it or not). Don't try and figure it out for him; let him do that. When you injure your hand, for example, you don't just keep looking at it and repeating how it happened. You attend to it. Think of it as a child in need, a wounded child. One of
your own. How you would look after it and mother it! You remember well. And the
same child is also your husband's child. As you say, for his sake as well as for your
own, healing is needed.
     It became clear to me once: the answer is always in the question, the solution is always in the problem. So if you were to "get rid of" the problem you would also get
rid of the solution. Stay with this wounded child in you; healing will arise in the child's own body, nowhere else. Just as each of your own children was a stage in your life, so
is this. You suffered with every one of them; they are part of your history, they are you.
Through this new one, your life is taking a further refinement of shape. This existence of ours is honing you down. And there are many fellow-sufferers, fellow-Christians, who would wish to
pick up the shavings, with reverence.
     A woman said to me once, with sudden illumination, after she had been looking
back over the path of her difficult life, "The obstacles were the path!" Her own newly-discovered wisdom took hold of her, and her face softened in a way that I will never forget. She needed no more, and she left. She said, "Thank you so much!" but it was just out of politeness. By God's providence she had discovered her own wisdom. So
will you, my friend.... And my father's wise eyes will follow you, somehow, as they
have always followed me.
     God bless you, Vera! Donagh

   This may not seem a big problem or a spiritual problem, but it's affecting every part of my life. I'm married with three growing children, and between work and home-life I never have a minute I can call my own. That's not so bad, but what gets to me is the feeling that I'm taken completely for granted. I know this sounds old hat and I'm a bit ashamed as I see it now on the screen. I'm not actually looking for sympathy. I'm asking if there is some way I can adjust something so that this doesn't continue to impact on me in the way it has been doing. Can you say anything that could help? Michael G.

   Dear Michael,
     It's good that you can put it out there, on the screen or wherever - rather than biting the bullet as so many men feel they have to do. When we lock up such things over a long period they become the stuff of large-scale resentment.
    There are two things that I can pass on to you.

   1. I can't help but remember the advice the Vietnamese monk Thich Nhat Hanh gave to a young man who asked the very same question that you asked. I don't have a copy of the book, which I read many years ago, so I can't quote his reply, but I remember the substance of it.
    The time you spend playing with your small son in the evening, he asked, is it time spent only for him? Is it not also your time? If you are one with him, it is also your time. Your life is not on hold while you are playing with him; you are living it: it is your time. If you say it is not your time, then you have somehow divided yourself from your son. Likewise the time you spend with your wife, is it not also your time? In fact all your time is your time - if you don't divide yourself from what you are doing. That was the substance on his answer.
    It would be hard to improve on that. And it works! I have found repeatedly that it puts me back in the right place when I have wandered far away. And it's not a shallow rule of thumb; it goes all the way down. It challenges the ego, it makes the "dying to oneself" of the Gospel a practical reality - and a joyful liberating one.
  

    2. About being taken for granted. Another monk, Thomas Merton, translated some texts from Chuang Tzu, a Chinese sage of the 3rd century B.C. Again, my copy of the book disappeared, just days ago, but I have some recollection of a few passages. One in particular may be of use to you.
    If you step on a stranger's foot in the marketplace, he said, you make a profuse apology and you give an explanation: "I'm so sorry, this place is so crowded!" But if you step on your brother's foot, you just say, "Sorry!" and no more. No more is needed. Now if you were to step on your own son's foot, you would just smile or tousle his hair; there is no need for words, because the relationship is so close; it's like stepping on your own foot.
    If your people seem to take you for granted, think of all the other things they also take for granted: the walls of the house, the roof, the solidity of the earth, the constancy of sunrise, the turning of the seasons....all the strong stable things in the world. It may not be right, in a particular case, for someone to take you for granted, and they may need to be taught appreciation. But from your side of it, being taken for granted need not be a problem. The ancient monk recalls us to the Gospel: dying to oneself. But it's practical and workable: to die to oneself by becoming like the walls of the house, or the roof over one's family. Or the ground they walk on...!
    I hope these monks may have cast some ray of light to help you, Michael. Thank you for your letter. God bless you. Donagh O'Shea

If you would like to put a question to us, please email us below,
sidom@eircom.net

I would appreciate guidance on the particular issue of the morality or otherwise of legal tax avoidance. It is generally accepted that avoiding tax by illegal means (e.g. through lying, deceiving or cheating the tax authorities) is sinful and the New Catechism has stated this. It would seem from this that legal tax avoidance, including the exploitation of tax law loopholes (since the amount of tax to be paid in a particular situation is no more or less than what is prescribed by the tax law) is not explicitly stated to be sinful in the New Catechism . However, I recall reading in the catechism promulgated by the Bishops of England and Wales in the early 1980s that inequitable forms of legal tax avoidance were also sins against justice and requiring restitution. This is a very relevant topic in the Ireland of today and any guidance or elaboration would be most helpful.

Wishing you well,

Regards, Liam

Dear Liam,
                Thanks for your question on the morality of legal tax avoidance. We gave your question to a moral theologian, not feeling competent or experienced to reply to it ourselves. Here is what he wrote. It is very brief, and I hope it throws some light on the subject.

"1. Tax evasion by illegal means is obviously wrong, though there is a tradition which regards it as a matter of "penal law" - i.e., not morally obliging except in the matter of paying the penalties that may be imposed if one is found guilty.
2. There is a general moral obligation in distributive justice to pay one's fair share towards the upkeep of the community. This general moral obligation is determined - translated into figures - by the civil tax laws. Availing of loopholes in this is not necessarily immoral so long as one is not doing so to avoid accepting one's fair burden to a notable extent."

Very cryptic!
God bless!
Simon

How does one fall out of love?!Lorraine

Dear Lorraine,

    You don't give away much information! Would I be right in guessing that the 'one' is yourself? Falling out of love: is it something you are just thinking about in a general way, or is it something you are already in the horrors of? And are you a person of few words, or is it that the subject is too painful to write longer about? Since I don't know the answers to these questions, I have to shoot in the dark! I'm sorry if a lot of what I say goes astray.
     If you want to fall out of love, part of you already has: your mind and will. Then what is left is addiction. Any wounded veteran can tell you: human beings, not heroin or marijuana, are the most addictive substances in the world! So don't be shocked at yourself for getting hooked! The chances were always high that you would: there are human beings everywhere!
     Are you ready for a dose of very strong medicine? Just glance at it first, and if it looks too strong, skip it! It's from the writings of a wise man, Scott Morrison.
     "Our problems are not with love, but with the things we call love, which are really clinging, craving, depending, projecting, manipulating, and trying to control. These bring endless misery and loneliness. They are the process by which we torture ourselves unknowingly, out of ignorance. When we confuse and betray ourselves by pretending these have something to do with love, we trade our sweetest happiness and peace for a front row seat in any number of hell realms."
     Strong medicine, but I would not make light of your pain by offering you a palliative. Why not try and learn about addiction from the experts - for example, from Alcoholics Anonymous? Their twelve-step guide to recovery embodies the deepest and most practical wisdom. Read some of their literature and adapt it to your own case. Self-pity, they know, is the trap in which many come to grief. Also: distorted thinking, resentment, rationalising.... There! - that's a practical step. They hand their lives over to "the Higher Power" every day, and they ask to stay sober just for today.
     A recovering alcoholic once told me that in his drinking days he saw a large notice one evening in a pub: 'Free drink here tomorrow!' He managed to find the same pub the next day, and stepping inside he saw that the notice was still there, 'Free drink here tomorrow!' He enquired of the barman, who said, "Yes, just as the notice says: tomorrow!" In his befuddled brain he knew that something was escaping him! The free drink was so near and yet so far! He looked up the word 'tomorrow' in a dictionary. "The day after today," it said. But every day when it comes is today, he told himself. It was a kind of enlightenment! "The word 'tomorrow' (he told me) must be the only word in the English language that has no meaning!" When you look at the future you probably see nothing but an endless succession of days without your former friend. So just look at today. Everything passes. You fell in love, but you can't fall out of it - you have to climb out. The hard way is probably the only way in the end, and you will be a deeper person after this. There are things that can be understood only after your heart is broken. The great Sufi poet Rumi wrote, "People often describe the process of growing closer to God as climbing a spiritual ladder. This may seem to be an apt metaphor. But only when you stumble and fall off the ladder, plunging into the depths below, do you truly come close to God."
     When you begin your struggle (if you are not already in the throes of it) you may try to move, as many do, towards hatred. We have always been told that the opposite of love is hate. It is not true. To hate someone is to be deeply involved with them at the emotional level; love and hate have a lot in common. The real opposite of love is indifference. If you are attempting to hate that other person it is useful to know that the more you succeed the more you will fail; you will be even more entangled in the end. Attempting to hate is like attempting to fall in love: the effort involved is enough to prove that it is not real. It requires something else.
     The truth will set us free; everything else will tie us up in knots. Sometimes shout to yourself: "Cling to the truth!" - the truth of what you feel, the truth of now, the truth of your situation, the truth of the other person's situation. Don't exaggerate or put a different face on anything. Look at now, not at tomorrow. "I know a man" (as St Paul put it) who on a winter evening sat alone before an image of Christ, and made absolutely no attempt to evade or explain anything; he sat in the December darkness, with nothing but the naked promise, "the truth will set you free." It was a turning point, a moment in which something very deep was learned, something to be grateful for till the end of one's life.
     You know God's vulnerability now because you are vulnerable yourself. Life is here, trembling, mortal and profoundly human. This emotional upheaval that you are probably feeling now is a path to God.

    God bless and strengthen you,
    Lorraine.
    Donagh O'Shea

BETWEEN OURSELVES

Everyone around seems to be so upbeat in the way they talk, and at the same time suicide and crime and pollution of the earth (to mention only those) seem to be growing exponentially. To me the upbeat talk sounds desperate, like whistling in the dark. All the hooey about the millennium left me cold. My daughter and two sons, two of whom are at university, don't seem to be interested in ideas or arguments as we were when we were their age; instead they go for gimmicks, they never tire of talking about their mobiles and computers. They don't seem to have the slightest interest in religion either; they are neither for nor against it, just neutral. I don't want to be preaching to them, I'm just worried for them as human beings. What are we turning into? Are we on the eve of something terrible? Obviously I don't expect answers to these questions! But anything at all would be welcome. - J.K. Soames

Dear J.K.,
      Thank you for your letter, a cri du coeur not only for your family but for our times. It's right to look at terrible things, otherwise our faith hope and love are all false. Real faith hope and love send us into the world, not out of it. That has something to do with the Word becoming flesh.
      Yes, the millennium.... It took a thousand years to get here, but it was gone in a minute. I think most people were sick of hearing about it. It was mostly a celebration of gimmickry and gadgetry; there was little reflection around it. At the turn of a century there is usually a lot of effort to assess the times in the light of the past, and to visualise the future: a lot of reflection; but this time there was very little, except of the science-fiction sort. That is odd enough at the turn of a century, but at the turn of a millennium it is ten times more odd. The future has become not only unpredictable but unthinkable.      Look at what happened last time around. The 'Futurist' movement at the beginning of the 20th century began in Italy in the art world and spread rapidly to other areas. It was a rejection of all traditions, and it attempted instead to glorify contemporary life, mainly by emphasising its two dominant themes: the machine and motion. It celebrated change and innovation, and it glorified the dynamism, speed and power of the machine, and the vitality and restlessness of modern life in general. (The car had recently been invented.) Its influence travelled in every direction: it is 'credited' with direct input into Fascist doctrine, and the early development of the Soviet Union.
      Turn up the volume, speed up the cars, move from Kitty Hawk to Cape Canaveral, and you have ourselves! Futurism is remembered today as a kind of adolescence, and like adolescence it didn't last long, fizzling out about 1916. It may be that our new version of those obsessions will fizzle out too - about 2016!
      But today we still worship the machine, especially the car, and again we repudiate the past, and we are even more restless than those early 20th-century 'futurists'. Their cult of modernity looks comical beside ours, so far have we outdone it. Though we should have learnt something from that experiment, when we try to visualise our future we don't see a world filled with goodness, justice and love; instead we imagine a world filled with computers and robots - which are morally neutral.
      Are we on the eve of something terrible? you ask. W.B. Yeats, who was deeply worried by the Soviet Revolution, spoke of "a vast image" that "troubles my sight." With the prescience that great poets have, he wrote of something with "a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun," an approaching beast "moving its slow thighs..."
           What rough beast, its hour come round at last,     
           Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?
Pray that we are not giving birth to some great beast. Pray that our obsession with machines and with speed, coupled with our ambiguity about moral values, will not have the terrible carry-over that futurism had. Pray that there aren't ferocious beasts towering over us invisibly - invisible to us, but plainly visible to posterity.
      But we have to look for signs of hope. We have to rake over the Christian tradition - because we know we haven't gathered it all: no age ever does that. There are luminous things there, words spoken in the crucible of suffering, words that come straight from the heart. And we also have to look for signs of God's work in our own times. We can apply the words of Jesus to our times, "My Father is always at his work to this very day, and I too am working" (John 5:17).
      God is able to appear anywhere, even in a desert - and perhaps especially there. You described the spiritual desert that many young people are living in. Jung said it bluntly: if young people have no experience of God in their lives they will become neurotic. He also said that no one over thirty-five recovered from a neurosis without an experience of God.
      You mentioned indifference to large ideas and to religion. It is visible in very many ways: there is boredom, listlessness, detachment and loss of will. Many people like to say, "We were never bored when we were young," but I'm not sure that it is such a new thing. There is evidence that it has been known in every age. The earliest Christian monks in the Egyptian desert called it 'accidie', from a Greek word, akedia, meaning 'not caring', and they included it in a broad categorisation of 'logismoi' or thought-types. Such lists, no longer seen as analyses, became in later times the 'seven deadly sins'. And there at the end of the list is accidie, or sloth as we call it. It is more widespread today, of course - and we have the means of knowing the extent of it. But it was always there in different forms. However, popular culture today does nothing to help us through it but plunges us more deeply into it.
      Beside it, however, there are strong signs of hope: there is Taizé, for example, where thousands of young people gather in fairly austere conditions to pray and seek God. There are the L'Arche and Sant'Egidio movements, extraordinary for the dedicated service freely given by young people; and many other groups.
      There is also a widespread interest in meditation. It is the mind-numbing popular culture of today that is fuelling this interest - in part, at least. I heard a wise person say once, "Everything destroys itself by its own excess." If so, then the worse things become, the better! We are already imagining alternatives to a consumerist self-indulgent culture. It has often been proved that the human spirit is hard to crush. In our times (we may hope) it will be proved that it is also hard to smother.

God bless, Donagh O'Shea '

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

    I'm reading about fourteen books on spirituality! All at the same time. Bits of this and bits of that. They often contradict each other, or they're so different that I can't see they're about the same subject at all. For example, [....]
     My question is, Are there basic principles in spirituality? I don't mean religion. - I can see that religion gets complicated. But does spirituality have to be so complicated? Andrew

Dear Andrew,
          Thanks for your letter, and I'm sorry I have to bracket the examples you gave.
          I appreciate the need for simplicity. There are countless things gathered under the name of spirituality today. In the post this morning, for example, I got promotional material for a course on "aligning one's subtle energies." How to find one's way through the maze?
     (I don't want to go into the distinction between religion and spirituality; not now; it would only add further complications.)
     There has always been a search for simplicity. For example, when Jesus was asked, "Which is the greatest commandment of the Law?" (Matthew 22:36) he selected just two from the many hundreds of prescriptions. Those were: Love God, and love your neighbour. Likewise the Christian Creeds are simple statements of the common faith of Christians.
     But equally there is the urge to unfold and expand the implications of the faith. The simplified expression is capable of becoming rigid and closed, and it needs to be held close to lived experience if it is to remain a valid expression.
     These two movements - simplification and expansion - are the way the mind works, and both are necessary.
     You could truthfully say there is no such thing as spirituality! It's not a commodity, nor even a subject that can be studied, like physics. It's more like a story. There is God's Spirit and there is the human spirit, and how we are with each other is the story of spirituality. We often want to make a simple restatement of our relationship with some friend - a kind of summing up. But what would such a relationship be without all the detail? Likewise our relationship with God.
     What advice can I give you, briefly? Don't be afraid of detail! But equally don't feel you have to run after it! Everyone brings his or her detail into the story; what is important is not that you follow others but that you bring yours. Be one with God and with your neighbour and enjoy the view!
     But there are better expressions of it than that. One of the best is St Paul's. "We have different gifts, according to the grace given us.... Love must be sincere. Hate what is evil; cling to what is good. Be devoted to one another in brotherly love. Honour one another above yourselves. Never be lacking in zeal, but keep your spiritual fervour, serving the Lord. Be joyful in hope, patient in affliction, faithful in prayer. Share with God's people who are in need. Practice hospitality. Bless those who persecute you; bless and do not curse. Rejoice with those who rejoice; mourn with those who mourn. Live in harmony with one another. Do not be proud, but be willing to associate with people of low position. Do not be conceited. Do not repay anyone evil for evil. Be careful to do what is right in the eyes of everybody....Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good" (Romans 12).

Donagh O'Shea

BETWEEN OURSELVES

    I am an American male, 25 years old. I graduated with a Master's degree in Electrical Engineering two years ago, and I have been working in industry (in Los Angeles, California) since then. I was raised a Catholic, and I still go to Mass on Sundays, although sometimes I admit I would rather do something else. I have never been married, no children...just a young man trying to make it through.
     I want to ask these questions: what is the purpose for living? What makes life worthwhile? There are times when I am happy, but it is always temporary and then somehow or another I feel sad. My mother described it best when she said "life is like a wheel," because there are time when I am up, and times when I am down. I am old enough to know that money does not hold happiness, although it will get rid of A LOT of problems. I have found that I can be really happy in possessing something, but it wears out and becomes old after some time. Friendship, companionship, and sex give me happiness also, but people have their defects (including me) and then cracks form in the relationship. It also gets old after a while. It is not perfect.
     It seems like, I am always running around in this life: problems arise, relationships need to be cultivated and worked at, more money is needed, the family is giving me problems, the vacation is over and I need to work tomorrow, the project report is due, I am sick and/or a family member is sick, new technological gadgets need to learned, I need to advance in my career, I need a vacation, when is the weekend?, what am I going to eat?, etc. The list goes on. How can I ever be "at peace"? I ask this because I remember seeing a priest in an empty church, just sitting there. He looked to me to be very much serene and at peace. Is he really, or is he praying about those same worries and anxieties I have? I hope I don't sound too psychotic or nuts. I give my thanks to you in advance.

Romulo

Dear Romulo,

    Thanks for your letter. I guess there isn't even one person in the world who doesn't know that feeling that you describe: the feeling that everything is passing and nothing gives satisfaction for long. We knew this dissatisfaction as children - perhaps even as babies - and we still know it today. There is an immense literature about this, and all the moods are constantly being explored. The light of the mind is a flickering light, the human heart is restless, everything is impermanent. The other creatures we share this planet with are content to go along just as their remote ancestors did, never changing; or changing only minimally. Yet they pass away, of course. Everything is passing. The difference is that we know it and think about it, while the other creatures don't appear to. What are we to make of it? How do you like being a human being? When I was a child I used to try to imagine what it would be like to be a dog or a bird or a fish, and wonder why I was me and not one of these. Human beings have the ability to imagine themselves into every creature in the world. Aristotle went further. "The human soul," he said, "IS, after a fashion, everything." Someone said that the being of an animal is something perfect and complete like a circle, but a human being is like a circle with a gap in the circumference. Through that gap, all of reality can go in and out. It is the chink that leaves us open to infinity. The spiritual quest, the search for God, happens at that critical place. So, in experiencing the passing nature of everything and the dissatisfaction that follows every satisfaction, you yourself are already involved in that search.     "Boredom is the beginning of wisdom!" a wise man said to me once. He meant that unless I go through the psychological wall of boredom I will be forever running after this and that and unable to give myself to anything. Marathon runners often go through a psychological wall after about 20 miles, I'm told, when they are strongly tempted to give up. If they keep going, however, they get new wind to complete the race. The spiritual search is similar in that respect. Don't give up when you hit the wall!
     I'm sure you've noticed that while we are eating our dinner or doing anything we thoroughly enjoy, we seldom if ever ask questions like "What's the meaning of all this?" It's only when the pleasure has passed that we ask such questions. The temptation then is to keep packing ourselves with pleasurable experiences so that we will never face the meaning of our life. But that's an exhausting programme, as you have discovered.
     The alternative is meditation, where we regularly sit and allow reality - and even the source of reality, God - to reveal itself to us. Call it facing the wall of boredom, or call it facing reality, or call it facing God. It can be all of these things. That priest whom you saw in church may indeed have been deeply immersed in the mystery of God. But unless he was a saint or a mystic, he also had moments when he was distracted by clouds of thoughts. Human consciousness is nearly always flickering, like a candle. Why not try and find him and ask him what he was doing there?! There are a great many websites that offer detailed instructions and encouragement to meditators. Good luck, Romulo! We'll meet along the way!

Donagh O'Shea [If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

I have grown abruptly, last Saturday when my 14 year old brought a boyfriend home. During the hours he was at home my mind went into all the things I've said to my daughter and all the things I have not, like what do I believe about honesty, love, self respect, our bodies, sex, drugs, alcohol etc. We have talked about this issues in the past, in a general way with the reply on her side, I know it all ...She took him to his room, I panic, was not sure myself what I do believe about it, we had a long discussion with my husband in the kitchen, and we both believe different things, my instinct told me I should intervene, so leaving an unfinished conversation I rushed upstairs went up and ask him if he could make the fire. Those hours went so slow, because of all my background thoughts. He was polite, and actually I admire both of them to have the courage of coming, neither me or my husband would have done it. Despite that I strongly believe in the importance to meet my daughters friends and parents. it was a bit of a shock. When his father came to pick him back, he told us that my daughter has been to their house. My heart was sad because she hasn't told us, and my thoughts went further what other things 'I've not been told? Later with new eyes I became aware she's got new clothes, a mobile phone, that I've not bought, all will be fine but the problem is that we don't give her pocket money. Maybe we should start giving to her. What all these things and others are telling me is that despite our conversations, our church going, key things are not there. Can I still inculcate some values to my children? Is it too late? I personally need a crash course on this issues, I am not quite sure what are the key issues one need to address children nowadays, where would you start if you were in my situation. How could I guide my children (I've got 4 girls) and ourselves through this stage of life. I need to refresh my own thoughts on all these issues, I am a catholic, but being honest with you, my beliefs are there, but not deeply rooted either and to make matters more exciting, my husband is agnostic, this in the past has enrich our lives, every christening, holy communion and confirmation has been exciting discussion, but as you can see it has not gone very deeply. On the other hand my daughters are lovely children, and I would just like to say the right things, and sometimes anger and frustration and ignorance on how to deal with these issues makes me say the wrong things, and hurt them. Sorry, I think I have touched lots of subjects in not a very organised manner.

Yours sincerely Judy

Dear Judy,

    Many thanks for your letter, and congratulations on having four "lovely children" as you described them. The fact that they are lovely would make anyone even more anxious to protect them and help them to turn out right. Having no children of my own, I can only experience that anxiety indirectly. So I'm a by-stander in that respect! A by-stander's angle will never replace that of the players themselves. Still, it's an additional angle, even if it's only a secondary one. What occurs to this particular by-stander is that your four lovely children are living proof that you have been doing something right! You are being successful parents. Look at everything that's positive and good in them, and be thankful for it. There's no indication that you have any special reason for alarm. Yes, a little bit of secrecy on the part of your 14-year-old, but where's the 14-year-old who girl who doesn't love to have a few secrets?! For 12 years I used to give retreats to teenagers, and I noticed that that was always a normal ingredient! If she has no pocket-money she must feel rather isolated from her friends, and it's not so surprising that someone has come to her aid. In itself it doesn't sound sinister to me. The fact that the boy's father came to pick him up indicates to me that they likewise are a caring and responsible family; and I can't imagine that they would be careless about what happens in their house. Why not have a chat with them if you are still anxious? Why not invite them over for a visit? It would make the young people feel very affirmed and very adult; and they would be correspondingly less likely to feel that they inhabit some sort of separate and secret world of their own; they would be safeguarded by the feeling of a shared family environment.
     The nearest I've come to a parental role (though it is still light-years away from it, probably) is when I was in charge of novices here for 4 years. They were teenagers, too - some of them, anyway. I found that there was no alternative to trusting them. They will never become trustworthy unless they are trusted. And when I trust them, they grow a little every time.
     I'm sure there are millions of parents around the world who know the special kind of anxiety you have, Judith. You're not alone in that feeling. The miracle is that so many young people grow up into decent and fine people, despite all the dangers.
     So, God bless the great work that you and your husband have been doing, Judith. And God bless your beautiful children. Sincerely,

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

May I make a point that may not seem very civil?
I hope you can take questions like this, and not be shocked or offended by them.
No offence is intended.
    Sometimes I'm close to giving up when I hear clerical gentlemen claiming that the Catholic Church is the only authentic Church there is and that Christianity is superior to all other religions (described as 'gravely deficient'). They claim they're defending Christ and his work, but I wonder if they know how it turns people away? Religion is made to seem a cheap self-advertising thing. If it wasn't for two or three examples of real sanctity I would be gone. I'm blessed in knowing a few genuinely saintly people, and everything about them proves that real religion is exactly the opposite of claim and brazen assertion. It's hard not to sound angry, but I'm not so much angry as troubled and disillusioned. Despite everything I am looking for a way of surviving in the Catholic Church, but I want to live in it without that kind of claim being made on my behalf.
    I know that I am very far from being alone in these sentiments. What can you say to people like me?

Arthur M.

Dear Arthur,

    Yes, I know for a fact that you are very far from being alone: I have been asked your question many times. It is a burning question for our time, and it calls for serious reflection. I've been trying to reflect on it for some time, inadequately but as well as I can. I offer you the following brief instalment. But please don't be limited by my limitations.
    A friend told me I have a tendency to talk about language when the pressure is on! But I believe that that makes sense: pressure of argument is pressure on language; and it is when words are bearing a lot of weight that they may be discovered to be the wrong words for the job. There is a question that will never go away. It is: What kind of language is religious language?
    We cannot just say: it is language about God and "the things of God" (that pious phrase that evaporates when you look at it). Atheists could talk about God. But it would not be a language of experience of God - if they were genuine atheists. It might be theoretical language about God. Or it might be about their own experience of being at a loss for the meaning of religious language, and so on. Believers also sometimes use such language of loss, yet they remain all the more believers. The author of the 14th-century classic of Christian mysticism, The Cloud of Unknowing, wrote, "Now you put me a question and say: 'How might I think of [God] in himself and what is he?' And to this I can only answer thus: 'I have no idea.' For with your question you have brought me into that same darkness, into that same cloud of unknowing where I wish you were yourself." That was not the end of the matter for that writer; it was more like the beginning. Knowledge of God (rather than knowledge about God) is not knowledge of an 'object' - not even if we capitalise it 'Object'. This is not a quirky side-show of Christian theology; it is mainstream. Thomas Aquinas wrote that we are joined to God "as to the unknown," tamquam ignoto.    What I am bringing it to is this: at the deepest level the language of religion of a language of love, not a language of objects. Objects are 'out there', distinct from the 'subject' (the thinker or speaker) - even in the case where we are thinking about ourselves. In other words this kind of knowledge creates a distinction between subject and object. But a language of love is a language of union or communion; love unites - even while we know perfectly well that the loved one is a different person (or thing). "If God were in me and I were not in God, or if I were in God and God were not in me, there would be two," said Meister Eckhart. God and I are not two, he says; God is another kind of reality that cannot be counted along with a creature. We are not two. But neither are we one in being. We are one in love.
    What does it mean then when a Catholic or a Christian says, My Church, my religion, is the best? It means what it says. It is the language of love. St Francis de Sales wrote to the nuns of the Congregation he had founded, "You need not believe that your Congregation is the best in the world, only that it is the one you love best."
    This will surely sound like relativism to anyone who believes that the fundamental language of religion is a subject/object language. Such an objection shows a disbelief in the language of love, and even in the nature of love. But the language of love is a valid language. The man who says his wife is the most wonderful woman in the world is saying something perfectly valid (if he means it). He has come to that expression by his love, not by a process of elimination. Nor is he bound in consequence to say that all other women in the world are "gravely deficient." In certain moments she may put pressure on him to say just that! But if he is faithful to the nature of love he will resist it; it would be changing the nature of the discourse into something else: an assessment that is almost certain eventually to choke up love with jealousy and comparisons. The full mystery of marital love is revealed to the man through this woman and no other. He was never in a position to assess all the woman of the world and declare her the winner. And even if he were to declare her a 'winner' in some sense, it would put her in a very competitive and insecure position. His love is unconditional, it doesn't depend on what others are like. Likewise he is not in a position to line up all the religions of the world and adjudicate between them objectively; that would be to play God's role. The full mystery of God's love is revealed for a Christian through Jesus and no other. And a Christian's love for him is unconditional. That's the nature of love.
    I'm happy that you are immersed in this question. Don't give up! It is a wonderful exploration - dangerous too! Love is an eternal apprenticeship, and we all make many mistakes and say gauche things. But forgiveness too is part of love! You are blessed in having living examples of sanctity before you. In living we are one with what we do, in talking we may well be separate from it. At least it is clear that our Faith is a way of living before it is a way of talking.

Donagh O'Shea

sidom@eircom.net ]

Hi Donagh! Kathy here. I like your website. I look forward to the new pieces each month. What a joy to read. I have a question, rather a request. The Mass limps for me. It was not always so, perhaps, it is the sameness, we have become addicted, afflicted really, to the rapidly changing stimului of the box and radio. I would appreciate a few words from you on the Mass. Sometimes I read one of the Eucharistic Prayers by myself and that's is a help. Remind me of what it is about and the meaning of presence. Thank you. Cheers. Kathy Heath

Hi Kathy!

   Thank you for writing. Yes, it's true: however beautiful the thoughts we have about things, the experience on the ground can be...well, pedestrian. But something tells me to make a case for the pedestrian! Catholics apply the "daily bread" of the Lord's Prayer to the Eucharist (among other things), and those two words, 'daily' and 'bread', suggest a celebration of the ordinary. Of course if we think about the Eucharist it is something truly extraordinary. But it is first and foremost something we do - and something we do frequently, even daily.
   This, for me, has been a key to open up something about the Mass. It is something we do, it's a lot of different things we do: standing, sitting, watching, reading, listening, responding, singing, walking, eating, being silent.... It is a rite, or ritual. 'Ritual' is not a favourite word today, and it often goes with the word 'empty'. But this betrays a disregard for the external and visible. We are in the age of psychology, which puts a powerful emphasis on internal experience, often at the cost of the external. But we can't live on internal experience alone. We live also in a world of material things and visible activities. The ritual of the Mass acknowledges this. Another thing about ritual: it is repetitive. This too is out of favour. As you say, radio and TV provide us with a rapidly changing barrage of stimuli. Newness is their nature: they are news and entertainment providers. Likewise the print media. No newspaper will carry the headline "Canterbury cathedral still standing," or "Big Ben continues to strike the hour." Yet what would life be if all the things never mentioned in the news were suddenly to disappear? We depend our lives on lots of things continuing to be the same and continuing to behave the same as always. The ritual of the Mass, by being always more or less the same, expresses this too.
    I lived in Rome for seven years, in a 12th century house attached to the 12th century church of San Clemente. In the 19th century archeologists discovered the extensive remains of a 4th century church beneath the 12th century one! The walls were covered entirely with frescoes, depicting scenes from the Scriptures. Some of the original flooring was still intact. It is a very moving experience to go down there: to walk on the floor where Christians walked in those early days, to look at pictures that countless eyes looked at in that remote past. One of the frescoes shows St Clement saying Mass. What he is doing is instantly identifiable. Somehow you feel connected. We are not spinning aimlessly and pointlessly in space in this 21st century, we are in connection with all that went before: what they did involves us, what we do involves them.
    The Mass, of course, goes back beyond St Clement to Jesus himself. There is a very precious early Christian document called the Didachè, discovered only in 1873, though Christian writers through the ages always knew of its existence. It was written sometime between the years 50 and 100, and so it is even earlier than some of the New Testament. It contains the very first use of the word 'Eucharist'. Here is a paragraph from it that I often read: "At the Eucharist, offer the eucharistic prayer in this way. Begin with the chalice: 'We give thanks to you, our Father, for the holy Vine of your servant David, which you have made known to us though your servant Jesus. Glory be to you, world without end.' Then over the broken bread: 'We give thanks to you, our Father, for the life and knowledge you have made known to us through your servant Jesus. Glory be to you, world without end. As this broken bread, once dispersed over the hills, was brought together and became one loaf, so may your Church be brought together from the ends of the earth into your kingdom.'"
    Despite all the new means of communication in our time (including the internet!), many feel alienated and absent from one another. I find the Mass to be a most intimate connection not only with the people who are present but with all the ages of the past and with people from "the ends of the earth." All those ages mysteriously live again for us; they become present. Above all, it is the deepest kind of communication - in fact identification - with the Lord himself, and through him, with God, the eternal source.
    Having said that, I believe that very many priests stand in the way of the Mass, not allowing it to appear as it is. There's a lot of carelessness and sloppiness - and routine (which is ritual that has lost its soul). There are homilies that have neither a thought nor a feeling in them. Yet there never were so many aids to Liturgy and preaching as there are now in circulation. It is when you see it done right that you become aware how bad it normally is. But don't lose hope....
    I hope these thoughts may be of some use to you, Kathy. If not, keep searching. God bless you now and always.

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh,

I've been to Taizé five or six times and occasionally I attend a Taizé group here at home. I love the atmosphere. Something about it pulls me in. Maybe it's the crowds, maybe it's the simplicity, maybe it's even the lousy food! This is what I want to ask your opinion about. When someone said to me a few days ago, "You're into Taizé, aren't you?" I started to think about 'into'. Could there be a touch of brainwashing or a bit of mild addiction about all these things we get 'into'? Is it right to trust this feeling about Taizé? Maybe it's just another product for spiritual consumers. What do you think?

Kevin R.

Dear Kevin,

'Into' is not a bad word! We're in an age of alienation and isolation and loneliness; or at best we're trying to get over it. It is (or was) the age of the outsider, the lost soul, the sovereign ego. The Gospel is about being 'in': the prayer of Jesus was "May they be one in us, as you are in me and I am in you" (John 17:21). There's no need to suspect the feeling of solidarity and community in itself. I remember a story by Camus in which the whole meaning of a character's life turned on a single letter. In a script found after his death, there was an indecipherable word: was it 'solidaire' or 'solitaire'? It's a question for everyone: is my life to be lived in solidarity with others or is it a solitary matter?
     But today it's more complex: against a general background of alienation there's a host of in-groups. This is so in the Church as in society at large. Many years ago Karl Rahner predicted that the vitality of the future Church would lie largely in small groups. It has proved an accurate prediction. It's astonishing to look at the year-planner of any retreat centre today: the acronyms of those multitudinous groups are like a new algebra!
     No one pretends, I think, that there aren't dangers. Everything alive is dangerous. It's a question of discernment. If a group is elitist or exclusive we can begin to have suspicions about its spirit. Jesus reached out to "the weak, the sick, the wounded, the strayed, the lost" (see Ezech 34), and he told the disciples to go out to the whole world. He shed his blood "for all." In the early centuries the Church decisively broke with gnosticism, which had just those characteristics I mentioned. The danger in a group, it would seem to me, doesn't lie in the intensity of the feeling of belonging but in a rejection of the outside; not in what the group is 'into', but in what it feels 'out of'.
     The inside feeling tends to want to authenticate itself without reference to the outside; it would like to be a world unto itself. But it is the outside that keeps it on the map. If you were buying a house you would pay equal attention to the inside and the outside! Both are real aspects of one and the same house. If a group doesn't want to place itself in the wide perspective of the Church (the landscape, so to speak) but rather to replace the Church community in some way, then we can begin to be suspicious of it. It is the wide perspective keeps a group from becoming a sect or a cult.
     I don't think anyone could accuse the Taizé movement of being elitist or narrow. On the contrary it has a vast vision, challenging all the Churches and calling them to a deeper unity than they are perhaps willing to settle for. It is a gift to the Churches and a concrete vision of what the Church can be. Don't worry, Kevin: even the living-quarters in Taizé discourage any feeling of settling down or settling in! Enjoy it with a good conscience!

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Fr. The Gospel is simple and clear, but you clergy explain it so much that noone can understand it any more. I appreciate your brief comments on the daily gospel, and that it why I write to you - you may have some influence with your colleagues. The clergy hedges everything around with conditions and qualifications till we can no longer see the Jesus of the Gospels. You limit his mercy. "Has no one condemned you? Neither do I. Go and sin no more" (John 8:11). In Hebrews 8 we read that God not only forgives sin but forgets ("I will be merciful towards their iniquities, and I will remember their sins no more"). We read it also in Isaiah and Jeremiah. What a fine message, the mercy of God. -Our sins are forgiven and forgotten, disappear in the ocean of God's mercy. We will never be confronted with them again even on judgement day. But then you clerics get to work. Wait a minute, you say! Don't forget the "temporal punishment due to sin", even if you think you're safe from eternal punishment. And did your repentance satisfy all the conditions? And did you have a proper purpose of amendment......? No wonder many people of my generation were tortured with scruples - and some still are. No wonder people have such doubts, such uncertainty, and now such indifference. Please comment. Geoffrey Pinfield

Dear Mr Pinfield,

     Yes, we Scribes and Pharisees have a lot to answer for. I remember (vaguely I'm afraid) a Herman Hesse novel in which a deceased musician's enjoyment of eternal bliss was greatly diminished by a multitude of little black and white entities that followed him around constantly. What were they? They were all the superfluous notes he had ever played. A similar fate, I'm afraid, awaits all of us who spend our lives talking.
     The case you mention is the weightiest of all possible cases: downplaying the mercy of God. The revelation of God's mercy is the centrepiece of our faith, and nothing should be allowed to "hedge it around"; on the contrary everything should serve only to set it off. I remember a poem (again imperfectly: I don't have the book) by the New Zealand poet James K. Baxter, a rare one from him about Jesus; or rather I remember the refrain.
      Love - he said; and Truth - he said.
      But his dearest word was Mercy.
Baxter's own life and death were a challenge to the Christians around him. He had had some kind of conversion experience that changed him from a glitterato to a tramp. Early one morning as he walked barefooted on a street he had a heart attack. There was nobody around, but he managed to drag himself up the steps of a religious house and ring the doorbell. Someone opened the door, looked down and saw what appeared to be a drunkard on the ground, and closed the door again. Baxter died on the steps, experiencing no human mercy in his last moments. If we ever downplay the mercy of God, it must be that we are measuring mercy by a low standard of our own. Human beings are often indifferent and merciless: the mind can dedicate itself to vengeance (calling it justice) and become a stranger to mercy. Witness the support that still exists in many quarters for capital punishment. The Church too has often been a stranger to mercy: the Papal States had their own hangman until 1870.
      But the point you make is not about practice (in which everyone is a bit of a failure) but about teaching. What is the meaning of "temporal punishment due to sin"? May I quote a passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church? "Grave sin deprives us of communion with God, and therefore makes us incapable of eternal life, the privation of which is called the 'eternal punishment' of sin. On the other hand every sin, even venial, entails an unhealthy attachment to creatures, which must be purified either here on earth, or after death in the state called Purgatory. This purification frees one from what is called the 'temporal punishment' of sin. These two punishments must not be conceived as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin" (p 331f).
      If you say that a lifelong cigarette-smoker is now 'punished' with lung cancer and heart disease, you are not suggesting that God is laying into him; you are saying that he is suffering the inevitable consequences of smoking. You are talking about the law of cause and effect. The passage just quoted describes 'punishment' for sin in the same way. In various ways sin destroys our capacities: it brutalises our sensibility, pollutes the mind, weakens the will. This is not even to mention the damage it does to others. Through sin we become incapable of God and of proper human living. 'Karma' is a word that is frequently heard nowadays and little understood. But this teaching is closer to 'karma' than it is to any crude version of 'punishment'. ItÕs a pity that the word 'punishment' is used at all. It calls God a punisher. The word 'Purgatory' comes from the Latin purgare, which means 'to purify', not 'to punish'. The text above interprets Purgatory in this sense.
      I might add that the teaching on Purgatory is very far from the ghoulish images it normally suggests. It is in fact a powerful affirmation of God's mercy. In the following way. Our life is for soul-making: we are to become increasingly transparent and purified, we are to become more deeply human and closer to God, we are to 'crystallise' as God's children. If I were told that this process will stop when I die, this could be very bad news for me indeed! Instead, the teaching on Purgatory says that God's mercy does not run out when my clock stops: the purification can continue after death. Purification is generally a painful process, but someone in the state of Purgatory - freed now of the ego's greed and self-interest - must be experiencing joy and gratitude above all else. What a disaster that this should ever have been described as 'punishment'!
      I hope these brief comments may help your reflection in some way. May I refer you to the previous section on this website, Wisdom Line, where Meister Eckhart has much to say that is relevant to your question.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Fr. O'Shea, Thank you for your letter last month and also for the private correspondence since then. I think you might take up this one as a sequel to the first. We were discussing ‘punishment’ for sin, and you gave a strange interpretation of it, but since you say it came from the Catechism I have to accept that it’s not your own invention. I still have some difficulty with it. If God made reparation for all sin why is it necessary for suffering to continue in the world? in any form! Is it that the clergy cannot admit the miracle of God's healing grace. This Purgatory before and after death, how do you square it with the gracious healing mercy of God. The Gospel's show us a God of abundance, why not an infinite abundance of his mercy in healing all and everything! Maybe I'm pushing this too far, but my big fear is that the church is clawing back something from us. Please comment.

Geoff Pinfield

    Dear Mr Pinfield,
Thanks for your letters, and for your determination to make this a real conversation.
     I agree, it is always possible, and even probable, that when we speak of God we are using ‘God’ as a kind of scarecrow to keep the birds away from the seeds (as I heard it expressed the other day). We are very likely to project our own mean-mindedness onto God: to create God in our own image. That's a permanent and universal possibility, and everything we try to say about God has to be questioned by it, again and again. We should never be guilty of trying to ‘claw something back’, as you put.
    Should God's mercy prevent all suffering? One thing we know for certain: suffering exists. And one thing we know for certain in faith: God is merciful. So God's mercy does not in fact prevent all suffering. What we have to do is try to make sense of this.
    Have you ever met anyone who never suffered? What would such a person be like? He would have no depth, no growth, no awareness; he would be absolutely juvenile; he would be a complete idiot. Imagine parents who protected their child from everything! “People who have not suffered, what do they know?” said Henry Suso, a man who suffered more than most in a century (the 14th) that suffered more than most. Here is his statement in context:
     "There is nothing more painful than suffering, and nothing more joyful than to have suffered. Suffering is short pain and long joy. Suffering has this effect on the one to whom suffering is suffering, that it ceases to be suffering…. Suffering make a wise and practised person. People who have not suffered, what do they know…? All the saints are the cup-bearers of a suffering person, for they have all tasted it once themselves, and they cry out with one voice that it is free from poison and a wholesome drink.”
    The one to whom suffering is suffering. He was being precise about this. To many who suffer, suffering isn't suffering as such, but misery and anguish and rejection of suffering. The word ‘to suffer’ in English means ‘to allow’, whereas the word ‘anguish’ comes from the Latin ‘ang(u)ere’, which means ‘to choke’. There is a proverb in Greek, pathemata mathemata: literally, ‘things suffered, things learned.’ It is the same insight as Suso’s: “People who have not suffered, what do they know?”
    This is not to claim that we who have suffered now ‘know’! It is not book-knowledge or factual knowledge; it is experiential knowledge that continues day by day and is never finished. It is not the kind of knowledge that gives us security and control (which would be a kind of closure) but which opens us up to experience, to life in the raw.
     If you or I or anyone were to think that God's mercy should have protected us from every kind of suffering, then we would have a big problem with God, would we not? God's mercy did not protect Jesus from suffering, nor Mary, nor any of his disciples through the ages. We cannot expect that it will protect us. It would be protecting us from life, and that would be no mercy.

Donagh O'Shea

 Dear Donagh, I'd like to hear your views on eastern spirituality. There seems to be a lot of it around these times in bookshops and workshops and everywhere you look, and I've heard different views on it. I've heard it called a threat to Christianity, but if it is, why can you find it in Catholic bookshops and retreat houses? In other words, is it as good or as bad as it’s cracked up to be? - Joe Nagle

    Dear Joe, thanks for your letter and your wide-open question! It leaves me with a lot of choice on how to reply.
    The first point I'd like to make is this: Christianity itself is an Eastern religion. But to approach your question from that side would take us into things you are not asking about. I’ll just refer you to an introductory book on that subject, The Spirituality of the Christian East: A Systematic Handbook, by Tomas Spidlik, translated by A.P. Gythiel (Cistercian Studies Series: # 79, Cistercian Publications Inc., Kalamazoo, Michigan, 1986).
    What you are asking about, I think, is Eastern non-Christian religions, such as Buddhism, Taoism, Hinduism….
    We know more about our neighbours now than ever before. The sacred books of all the world religions, along with shelves of commentary, are available in bookshops almost everywhere, as you noticed. This must be very bewildering for many people, giving the appearance of a religious supermarket; and the ‘local shops’, so to speak, don’t like it. A Catholic journalist recently headed his piece “Spirituality: religion without the effort”. But such reactions, while revealing a great deal about the writer, say nothing at all sensible about spirituality, either Christian or non-Christian. These neighbours are here to stay. Call them immigrants if you wish! Here they may appear to be fringe elements, but at home they are part of an ancient culture.
    From the beginning, Christianity has borrowed massively from other sources. This is another vast subject, and again I will refer you to a very accessible book, The Study of Spirituality, edited, by C. Jones, G. Wainwright and E. Arnold, SPCK 1986. Take just two instances. Referring to the work of the Greek philosopher Plato (428 BC - 347 BC), one of the contributors, Anthony Meredith, writes, “It is impossible to exaggerate the influence of such language on all the Christian mystical tradition from Origen [b. 185 AD] onwards.” It would be equally hard to exaggerate the influence of Aristotle (384 BC - 322 BC) - famously on St Albert the Great and St Thomas Aquinas.
    But here lies the key, perhaps. Ultimately it may require saints and scholars of their stature - or something like it - to make profound dialogue with these religions. The Christian dialogue with Buddhism and other Oriental religions is in its early stages, but it has begun. It is interesting that it is through monasticism on both sides that the most promising advances are being made. See for example the Bulletin of the Monastic Interreligious Dialogue Commissions (DIM/MID). If religions are to move closer and talk to one another, it must be through their most contemplative voices.
    It is easy to notice lines of convergence and even similarities of expression, but this is just the beginning of an acquaintance. It is like meeting some strangers and finding to your delight that you can understand a few words of their speech. There is a long way to go before they become your soul-mates. The Dalai Lama often refers humorously to people’s attempts “to put a yak’s head on an ox.”
    It seems to be a universal rule that when you try to make two groups of people into one, you end up with three groups! There will be the new ‘unity’ group, and there will always be people on both sides who refuse to move: that makes three! I think there can never be a question of unifying even Christian denominations in that way, let alone world religions.
    It’s not a question of merging; initially it’s not even about agreement. It’s not so much about unity of mind as unity of heart: mutual respect and appreciation. Without these there is no way forward. Last year, sadly, Cardinal Ratzinger gave the world an example of how not to do it: in an interview published in a French magazine he referred to Buddhism as “a form of spiritual auto-eroticism.” What in heaven or on earth could be gained by insulting 300,000,000 people?
    But there is a positive way. It is when I meet a real stranger that I find out new things about myself. Someone said that Buddhists are the first real strangers Christians have had to talk with. They can show us our blind spots (even without intending to) precisely because they are strangers. Many Christians have discovered depths in their own religion through contact with Buddhism and other religions.
    But some go further. When Western people abandon Christianity and embrace a non-Christian religion, they cut their own spiritual roots and leave themselves open to being lost between two worlds. What they get from the Oriental religion is what a Western person can get, which may not be what the Oriental religion has to give. (I still remember an American saying to a group of us, many years ago, “You with your Western mentality….”) But only God can follow what happens in people’s spirits at that level.
    As for superficial borrowing: I'm reminded of the story of the actress who invited George Bernard Shaw to marry her, “Our children would have my looks and your brains.” Shaw replied, “But what if they had my looks and your brains?” There is no guarantee, when it comes to mixing anything, that we will get the best of both. It’s even chances that we will get the worst. In matters religious the chances may be considerably less than even. A religion is a deep and subtle mystery, and only its great mystics get to the bottom of it - but they are the very ones who say they know nothing. The rest of us, not knowing that depth, will look for similarities. But if we are forever looking for similarities we will eventually live in a very boring world! - and that’s the worst of both.
    Let’s come out at the really shallow end. Part of the problem may be shelving! I've found the Vedas and the Tao Te Ching in the ‘New Age’ section of several bookshops! The earliest Vedas - Hindu Scriptures - date from between 1300 BC and 1000 BC; and The Tao Te Ching is from about 500 BC! Yes, we’re inclined to put the deepest things in the shallowest bag!
           (You might also want to look at the reply to Arthur M. [April-May])

Donagh, First, I love your website. I browse it frequently ---it is very thought-provoking and helpful as I go on in this journey called life. And your books (I Remember Your Name in the Night, In a Fitful Light, Take Nothing for the Journey) are great!
   As an American, I would like to know your thoughts on the events that have transpired this past week. Are there any "today's good news" when people are tragically being killed, I live in fear, I have a lot of anger and hate in my heart, and we are on the verge of war? Right now a lot of us Americans are emotionally-charged (patriotism maybe?), and so some of us are not thinking too straight (like me!). Help us see these events in a proper perspective, and for once in a very long time, provide us some of "today's good news"!

Sincerely,
Longing for Good News
R.Broas

Dear Robert,

   Dear Robert, It’s good to hear from you again, but the circumstances are unspeakably sad. We will always remember September 11 as we remember November 22, 1963; and we will not only remember the date but also where we were and what we were doing when the terrible news broke. I went to church with my brother and his family on the following Friday, which was a national day of mourning in Ireland. We are getting used to half-empty churches, even on Sundays; but in that vast church on that Friday there was standing-room only. This was how it was throughout Ireland and in countless other places too.
   Words are a thousand times inadequate, but that silent presence of millions of people throughout the world is an affirmation of human feeling and solidarity - so badly needed after the very notion of humanity has been so brutally attacked. In the ordinary dimensions of evil we can ‘rely’ on a baseline of selfishness: every criminal wants something for himself, and we can somehow deal with them on that basis. It’s the ugly side of human nature, but it is human nature. However, with suicide bombers that baseline falls away and we don’t even know how to talk or reason with such people. Their actions are off the scale of evildoing. This adds a feeling of helplessness and bewilderment to the anger and sadness that we feel.
   The awful reality is that they are human: the scale is wider than anyone knew, or knew clearly. In the 17th century Blaise Pascal wrote movingly about discovering the greatness and the baseness of humanity, and how these discoveries go hand in hand. Already within one week, many are talking about the deeper bonds of humanity that have arisen, the heroism and the love. The human spirit is unconquerable. In Ireland we have had thirty years of terror - on a smaller scale, yes, but it tastes the same to the individuals who are directly affected. And I have noticed that it is those most directly affected who first learn to forgive. This in itself is very mysterious. I have always felt that when we are in the presence of such a person we are in the presence of God. It is the ground of hope for humanity.
    May I quote from an article that a friend sent me from the US.
    "In the aftermath of Tuesday's heartbreaking events I have been leaning on the words of my heroes…. I think of Mahatma Gandhi, Nelson Mandela, and our own American hero, Martin Luther King, Jr….
    "I believe that these people would tell us that strong and just action in the face of evil is legitimate. But they would also say that such action must not mirror the terrorist's actions. They would say that we have a historic opportunity to demonstrate a different kind of action, and in doing so to unify and heal our global community. This is what Martin Luther King called a "double victory." In speaking to those who sought violence against him and his dream, King said, "We shall so appeal to your heart and conscience that we shall win you in the process, and our victory will be a double victory."
    This is direct evidence of that greatness of the human spirit that Pascal spoke of. No one knows yet how to speak and reason with a suicide bomber, and it is correspondingly difficult to forgive. It is hard to see any evidence of either heart or conscience in a terrorist. By the time he becomes a terrorist it is too late. But there are people in his society - though hardly in his organisation - who think and feel and know that such foul deeds are a shame on the human race. To reach out to them is the great challenge.
     It is the people on the spot who have the best right to speak to you. So I leave the remaining space for the author of the article.
    "People have asked me how each one of us might contribute in some way to the spirit of healing. In my own life, I prefer to "think globally, act locally." Here are some "local" things each one of us can do:
    ". . . pray for those who lost their lives in such frightening and violent ways. Pray for those grieving the loss of family members and friends. Pray that the cities of New York and Washington, DC, and the people who live there, recover their trust and their zest for living. Pray that the leaders of the United States and other nations will use restraint and wisdom as they search for answers and justice in this crisis.
    ". . . make time during these days to slow down, quiet your mind, and open your heart to the grace and wisdom of a higher force. Be mindful of your own reactivity and judgments. It is so important to be guided by a steady and quiet heart, not fear or speculation. Fear breeds the kind of actions we witnessed on Tuesday. When you feel waves of terror rising within you, stop for even a few breaths, and listen to the quiet voice of peace that is the harbinger of wisdom. And when you feel the strong pull of anger and the very human urge to retaliate, rest gently for a while in a love that transcends bitterness and hatred.
    ". . . resist focusing only on blame. Search deeper, for the causes of pain in the world. For even as we bring these particular madmen to justice, so too we can root out the madness in a world that perpetuates hunger, torture, poverty, inequality, and environmental destruction. What happened on Tuesday is connected to what happens everyday to people within our country and those far from America's shores. Truly we are all one people.
    ". . . dedicate your life to spreading love in your daily interactions at home and work. Do not be afraid to take a stand for love. In his famous letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King wrote, "Though I was initially disappointed at being categorized as an extremist, as I continued to think about the matter, I eventually gained a measure of satisfaction from the label. Was not Jesus an extremist for love? 'Love your enemies, bless them that curse you.' Was not Amos an extremist for justice? 'Let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever flowing stream.' Will we be extremists for hate or for love?"

    We are all with you in this sad and terrible time.
    God bless you, Robert
    Donagh O'Shea


[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Even the question is hard to phrase - how to find peace, as an old cleric - when I have suffered all my life from obsess. com. disorder and perfectionism. Religion is not good news and spirituality also eludes me. Fear of God is the bottom line. I can’t get the 12 Steps or Grow to work. Confusion and cowardice - supposed to judge for myself and afraid to accept advice. In a bind. Very hard to pass on the Good News. Brian

Dear Brian,

    I'm glad you wrote this letter and grateful that you wrote it to me. If I change your name it’s not because I feel there's anything to hide, but because it allows us to talk more freely.
    Here we are. Your pain is deeply felt and particular, and yet we are talking about it on the internet! For once, I think, this internet can mirror the human reality very well: human suffering is always particular, and yet it touches us all. Thank you for allowing your wounds to be seen. I wish we all had the courage to call out when we need to.
    I'm aware that words - printed ones - are not an adequate remedy for anything in themselves; but they are pathways that link us together as a human family. To type or read a word is like gesturing across a room.
Your letter has gestured to a lot of people - more, it has touched our hearts. The first thing that struck me when I read it is how much more human it was than the excited success story I had heard just an hour before. Suffering makes us honest and humble. But more than that, it opens wide doors to one another. May I read a passage to you from an address that Timothy Radcliffe made to a general assembly of Dominicans as head of the order? He took a verse from John’s gospel (20:19): “Jesus came and stood among them and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ And he showed them his hands and his side. Then the disciples were glad when they saw the Lord.” Then Fr Radcliffe said:
“It is the sight of the wounded Christ that frees the disciples from fear and makes them glad. It is the wounded Christ that transforms them into preachers.
    One cannot be a preacher without getting wounded. The Word became flesh, and was hurt and killed. He was powerless in the face of the powers of this world….
    When we see the wounded Christ, then we can face the fact that we are already hurt. Perhaps we have been hurt by our childhoods, by growing up in dysfunctional families, or by our experience of religious life, by botched attempts to love, by ideological conflicts in the Church, by sin. Every one of us is a wounded preacher. But the good news is that we are preachers because we are wounded. Gerard Vann, an English Dominican, was one of the most famous writers on spirituality in the English-speaking world since the Second World War. He struggled with alcoholism and depression all his life. That is why he had something to say. We have a word of hope and mercy because we have needed them ourselves. On my bookshelves I have a book written by an old French Dominican called Les Cicatrices, (The Scars). In this book he tells how he came to Christ through the hurts of his life. And when he gave it to me he wrote a dedication, ‘For Timothy who knows that the scars can become the doors of the sun.’”
    You can’t get those programmes to work, you said. Is it possible that you try too hard and you exhaust yourself? When we have a problem, people usually tell us to “do something about it.” I have always felt this to be the equivalent of a push in the back! They are trying to push us into action, when the problem may well be that we are too active already. The problem may be that we cannot stop and rest. If a wheel is spinning in the wrong direction it has to stop dead before it can go right. What prevents you from stopping? What robs you of your peace?
    Fear of God, you said. Does it go hand in hand with the perfectionism you mentioned? If you are not perfect, you have every reason to fear God: is that it? You are right: that would not be good news, it would be unbearable news. That mean little word ‘if’ is not a word of God, and no place in our relationship with God. Ban it today! God's love is unconditional; there are no ‘ifs’ about it. Stop running from God in your mind.
    I have found a useful device for bad times: micromanage your mind for a few minutes. I'll explain what I mean. Instead of thinking, “How am I going to endure the coming week, or tomorrow, or even the rest of the day?” reduce the scale to a minute or even a second or two. “How am I going to endure the next few seconds?” Easy; I’m doing it already, even before I finish asking myself the question. “What do I really lack in this second and the next?” Nothing; I have what it takes to survive. Say to yourself, like a mantra, “Just this moment…just this moment….” That’s my trick - micromanagement, or microsurgery, whatever we call it - and it works very well. It’s the salty taste of existence; the rest is only made of thoughts.
    Stay in the present moment. Don’t let those other times - the past and the future - crush you out of that holy place that is your mind. They are nothing. The past is gone, and the future doesn’t exist. Stay in that small quiet place: that is where your God is. It is the Holy of Holies; it only seems small: the God of heaven and earth lives there. I don’t know what to say about the God of your past or the God of your future. They sound to me like absolute tyrants. I don’t recognise them as God. Try and banish them. The God I know a little is the Father of Jesus, the God who is close to the broken-hearted. “The Lord is close to the broken-hearted; those whose spirit is crushed he will save” (Psalm 33).
    Certainly you can pass on the Good News. Better than people who think they have all the answers. “When I am weak, then I am strong,” St Paul said. That gives hope to every one of us. We don’t have to be strong; we only need to accept our weaknesses gracefully in the full knowledge of God's infinite mercy. Then all the paradoxes of the Gospel shine through us, and we are the Good News.

God bless you now and always.
Donagh O'Shea

[You can find more of Fr Timothy’s letters and talks at:
www.op.org/curia/mg/engdef.html ]

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh, My father died three years ago and my mother is not coping with his death. I’m sending you this letter she wrote to you.
“My husband died in August 1998 after 10 months of cancer. He was always so strong, doing everything, but in the end he couldn’t lift a cup. There isn't a day but I miss him. I should be getting over it by now, but sometimes I think it happened only yesterday. I'm blessed with good friends and family who take me out and do their best for me, but it’s always there when I come back. I can't really enjoy my time out with them because I know it’s waiting for me when I come home. My daughter was telling me about your internet and your answers to people, and I wrote this and I'm asking her to send it to you. She has her own family and troubles, and I don’t like to be bothering her. His name was Jimmy. Is there anything you could say to me that would help me? May God bless you. Yours sincerely, Bríd [ ]”

   Dear Bríd,
   Thank you for your heartfelt letter. It will touch the hearts of many people who read it here on the internet. The internet is like a great family spread all over the world, and I'm certain that very many of them will feel as if they had written the words themselves.
   I showed your letter to Simon, who runs this internet site with me, and he gave me these words for you. They are from an ancient Irish source. Your husband’s name is still Jimmy; think of him saying this to you: “Grieve not nor think of me with tears. But laugh and talk of me as though I was beside you. I loved you so. It was heaven here with you.” God alone knows who wrote those words, or what kind of life that person had, so long ago. But it was someone who knew the sadness of separation, and also knew that the final word about death is not separation but a new kind of presence. Life can go on, and has to go on. It need not be a constant looking back with regret; it moves forward, and there is still joy for you. I remember the words of Peig Sayers, the storyteller from the Blasket Islands. She had lost several of her children, yet she could be wrapped in a kind of joy. One day, walking down the hillside she was gripped by the beauty of the island and the sea, and she prayed, “Well I know your holy help, because I was often held by sorrow with no escape.” She had emerged from her great sadness and could still find joy in her life.
   We often say, “Tomorrow never comes,” because when it comes it is today. Now, why not look in the same way at the past: at our yesterdays? We never lived through a yesterday, because every day we lived was a today! The past is not full of yesterdays, it is full of today's! I often pass the house where I came into the world more than fifty years ago. It was a nursing home then. I always think of my mother on that day, September 3, all those years ago, emerging through that door, looking much younger and holding a squalling bundle that I have to admit was me. She has been dead for twenty years, but somehow that moment (and every moment of her life) still lives, somehow, mysteriously. Everything is held in the presence of God. To God there is no past: every moment is equally present. As Jesus said, “God is a God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive" (Luke 20:38). He didn’t say: ‘We can remember them and think of them as if they were alive;’ that would only be make-believe. He said, “They are alive” - God. You could say, God is their address; that's where they are to be met, that's where they are alive. Jimmy is in the care of God. Jimmy, c/o God. We could even improve on those ancient words; we could strike out the words ‘as though’, and change ‘I loved you’ to ‘I love you’, and ‘it was’ to ‘it is’.
   A piece of practical advice, Bríd, if I may: if you haven't done so already, change some things in the house. Don’t keep it trapped in the past, because then it will keep you trapped. Put in some new things, give a few of the older things to your daughter. Every time you look at that new chair or picture, you are reminded that you and Jimmy and all of us live in an eternal Now, which is not stopped but flowing.
   May it flow into ever greater and greater depth for you, Bríd, so that your pain of loss becomes an open way to God.

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh, I read a lot and I notice that I keep meeting the word ‘interconnectedness’. I know it’s a clumsy word, but it sums up the ecological awareness that is becoming very popular now. I wonder if the Church has kept
itself up to date on this one? Would you care to say something about it?
Brendan W.

Dear Brendan,
    Yes, the word ‘interconnectedness’ is a clumsy one; it gives the impression of someone fumbling to make connections that don’t really care to be made. There’s a braver little word that goes much farther than it: the word ‘one’.
    “That they may all be one,” Jesus prayed, according to John's gospel. But what if they tell us now that we should also feel one with the earth? I must admit I never heard a sermon on it. And theologians in my young days were much more apt to pride themselves on the vast number of distinctions they could make; it was the authentic sign of intelligence! The natural and the supernatural were not only distinguished from each other, but separated in practice - always to the dishonour of nature. This distinction is not found as such in the Scriptures, but it was made to appear almost like the separation of light from darkness in the Book of Genesis. Whatever about that, the rallying call now is for oneness with nature, not separation from it.
    Nature. But what does it mean? Mountains and animals and flowers are natural, of course, but isn't a cancerous tumour also natural in some sense? It’s not supernatural, anyway! Nature seems very gentle and innocent when you look at selected bits of it, but in fact people have taken terrible headlines from nature. “Nature red in tooth and claw.” Darwin’s ‘survival of the fittest’ is rather bare of poetry, and the downside of his theory of evolution - degeneration - is even barer. From nature too came dialectical materialism, laissez-faire economics, and a host of other disagreeable doctrines. A poet may be expected to do better than that, but Francis Thompson could write, “I do not believe that Nature has a heart; and I suspect that, like many another beauty, she has been credited with a heart because of her face.” The word ‘nature’, I suppose, is like the word ‘love’ in this respect: it means whatever you want it to mean. I think it was Oscar Wilde who said, “We find in nature the lessons we ourselves have hidden there.” Can nature itself teach us how to treat nature? A cult of Nature is too ambiguous to be a religion: nature is like a compass that shows every direction as north. It needs a magnetism from beyond to show us a way that doesn’t end in confusion.
    But just as we continue to talk about love we continue to talk about nature. Really we need to, urgently. Nature, like love, is not something ‘out there’ from us. We are part of it; it is not only about flowers and lakes; it is about us too.
    Christians have had a way of talking about this world that made us just tourists in it. Our true home, we said, was in heaven. This would be all right if it wasn't joined to a primitive cosmology that thought of heaven as another location. “This world is but a passing show / Deceitful joy, deceitful woe; / There’s nothing true but heaven.” Victorians used to write such things in one another’s autograph books. This alienation of affection from this world wasn’t so bad; it was largely insincere; and so long as we didn’t have the power to pollute and destroy our world it was not dangerous thinking. But now it is highly dangerous. This is the reason, no doubt, why ecological thinking is now so urgent. It even has echoes of the language of Christian apocalyptic: great misery will descend on the land, there will be famines and earthquakes in various places, everything will be destroyed….
    We have to stop polluting and destroying the earth. It is a self-renewing source, but our greed has caught up with it and can now exceed its capacity. One wonders if there is any hope. Many individuals and groups are deeply concerned, but governments are criminally slow to move on pollution and destruction of the earth. “History has remained criminal,” wrote Mauriac (see Gospel Commentary for Dec. 16).
    If not from love, then from necessity we will have to care for the earth. But why not do it out of love? Well, that idea hasn’t surfaced for centuries! The catechism I learned in my childhood told me that “God made the world to show his power and wisdom, and for man’s use and benefit.” Break it down: God doesn’t love the world, but he created it to show how strong and clever he is (this is not so surprising, since there is no mention of love in the section on God); and secondly this world isn't going to be loved by us either, but only used. And that is just what we have been doing. How well we learned our catechism!
    We will have to banish polluted teaching, and go back to cleaner sources. For Meister Eckhart, creation is a kind of original Scripture in which God is revealed. “Every creature is full of God and is a book,” he wrote. Listen to a few other things he said: “Every creature is immediately related to God.” “Everything that exists loves and seeks God's likeness, and likeness is a kind of unity.” “Every creature below the human has been made to God's likeness and is an idea of something in God.” “Christ is ‘the first born of all creation,’ that is, he is set before every creature as the exemplar to whom they are to be patterned, just as a painter sets a picture before an apprentice for him to copy.” Tauler even says we should be “docile, humble, and subject to God and to every creature.” Thomas Aquinas said, “It is quite clearly false to say that it is a matter of indifference what one thinks about creatures, provided one has the right opinion about God; an error about creatures leads to false knowledge of God.” I found these astonishing statements by making just a quick random check. The Christian tradition is very rich: I dug up these passages in an hour; what would you not find in a week?
    I think, therefore, that it’s not only a question of the Church keeping (or failing to keep) up to date; it’s also a question of failing to keep up to the past! No age, and certainly no individual, can carry the full tradition; we lose bits of it along the way, and another age has to recover them, while losing other bits. Mauriac mentioned that there is always a Francis of Assisi, but society goes on ignoring him. Most people feel they know a little this man, Francis, who wrote
   The Canticle of the Sun:
   All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Earth, our mother,
   Who feeds us in her sovereignty and produces
   Various fruits and coloured flowers and herbs.
But the next lines pull us up sharply, if we have been romanticising nature.
   All praise be yours, my Lord, through Sister Death,
   From whose embrace no mortal can escape.
There, perhaps, is an example of how the tradition can correct us and balance us.
    Ecology has its icon: that photograph of the earth taken from space. No previous age ever saw the earth like this. It almost makes us think of it as a living organism. The astronaut Schweickart wrote: “From the moon, Earth is so small and so fragile, and such a precious little spot in that universe. Then you realise that on that spot, that little blue and white thing, is everything that means anything to you - all of history and music and poetry and art and death and birth and love, tears, joy, games, all of it, right there on that little spot that you can cover with your thumb.”
    Take care of yourself, Brendan - and of everything!

Dear Donagh, I took up meditation about three months ago and I'm finding it very helpful. I do it every morning as soon as I get up. But the very minute I sit down I find distractions pouring in. I start thinking about my husband and my children and their problems, about the future, about the washing and the wash-up. What can I do to stop these distractions? I used to find it very peaceful, but now I don’t know. Is there something wrong with me? Please tell me something that would help me. Liz.

    Dear Liz, thanks for putting it in a nutshell! We’re all like you! That's the way the mind is. Then we work on it. In terms of that work, your question is much more important than my answer. At the heart of your own question you will find the answer that is right for you. A question is like a door opening, an answer is like a door closing. What I offer you is not really an answer but some kind of encouragement to keep going.
    The fact that you want to meditate, and that you do so every day, is the clearest possible commitment; it’s a kind of love. You want to be there, even when you don’t feel that you are getting anything out of it. That fidelity is something perfect. Every day you are there for your husband and children: that’s already a way of being there for God. Now, in the last few months, you want to be there for God in this very explicit way. That wanting is the main thing. What goes on in your head after that is secondary. That's how it is in family, and I hope that's how it is with God! Meditation is a little like marriage, I suppose: you take it on for better or worse, for richer or poorer, in sickness and in health, till death do us part! Ideas such as ‘success’, ‘progress’, ‘perfection’, are enemies of meditation (and perhaps enemies of marriage too!). They are only ideas and judgments; don’t put your meditation in such company. Put it with things like brushing your teeth, eating, cooking, putting out the rubbish…. It has to become a part of your ordinary day. It has to become nothing special. Special things are only for special times or special people or special places, but meditation is for always.
    During meditation our defences are down: we are just there, a sitting target for whatever comes to us. The first thing we are aware of usually is how restless and noisy the mind is. There is a lot of ‘static’ when we are not tuned to the present moment. Below a certain level of presence there is just static and a confusion of sounds. But behind all that noise there is a background of silence. This silence is at the back of everything: it is the absolute background. We don’t have to go searching for it; it is there all the time, but the noise is concealing it.
    If only we could turn off that noise, that compulsive thinking! If only there were an off-button! Well, in a way, there is! Here is the best advice I ever got on this point: “Try a little experiment. Close your eyes and say to yourself: ‘I wonder what my next thought is going to be.’ Then become very alert and wait for the next thought. Be like a cat watching a mouse hole. What thought is going to come out of the mouse hole? Try it now.” (Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now). What we find is that we have to wait longer than we expected! During those moments when we were just alert and waiting, we were meditating. That’s the off-button. Now we know! But let’s not be disappointed when thoughts sneak in again (disappointment would show that we were working out of some idea of ‘success’). We just become alert again - and again, and again…. That's the work of meditation.
    Some thoughts are just vaguely hovering and they happen to get sucked into the mind, but other thoughts seem to have an energy of their own - sometimes very powerful - and they come straight at you. Thoughts that are shaped and driven by anger, or fear, or a habit of greed, tend to be very powerful and they try to force their way in (or is it that we powerfully attract them?). These have something to tell us, or rather show us. If we lose our sense of presence we are away over the hills with them, rehashing the story of them, adding new thoughts to them, identifying ourselves with them, rationalising once again the fear or the anger or the greed…. But if we can just look at them without identifying ourselves with them, if we can let ourselves experience the feeling without going into the story yet again, if we can regard them just as traffic that is passing while we hold our station, then their visit will have been turned to good. We will have experienced that feeling directly, without self-defence, without projection, without a drama or a story; and that is probably what it needed most of all! That is what is came for!
    We won't feel that we have ‘done’ anything (meditation relieves us of the idea of ‘achievement’, as it relieves us of ‘success’, etc.). We may get up from our meditation, feeling that we have gained nothing (it relieves us of the idea of ‘acquisition’ too). But later on when we meet the person who triggered our anger or fear, etc., we just may see a difference, or the beginning of a difference! That is the fruit of meditation (as long as we don’t look for it!).
    ‘But where does God come into this?’ one may ask. I would reply that God doesn’t ‘come into’ anything, because God is already there. God is in everything, all Christian teachers have tried to tell us. We go searching for God as if God were lost. In the 5th century St Augustine put a shape on this searching for God. Let me quote you this famous paragraph from his Confessions:
    “Late have I loved you, O Beauty, so ancient and so new, late have I loved you! And behold, you were within me and I was outside, and there I sought you, and in my deformity I fell upon those lovely things of your creation. You were with me but I was not with you. The beautiful things of this world kept me far from you, and yet if they had not been in you they would not have existed at all. You called me; you cried aloud to me; you broke through my barrier of deafness. You shone upon me; your radiance enveloped me; you put my blindness to flight. You shed your fragrance about me; I drew breath and now I gasp for you. I tasted you, and now I hunger and thirst for you. You touched me and I burned for your peace.”
    In this translation there are 146 words, but in the original Latin there are only 82 - and 26 of those are words of two letters or just one! It is a beautiful piece of writing, and notice that it includes all five senses! The search for God is not a search for a formula or an answer or an explanation to satisfy the mind…. It is a search that involves us in our entire being: body, soul, and spirit, and every faculty. No one was more conscious than Augustine that it is a two-way search: the real search is God’s search for us; we are the ones who are lost. Or rather we think and feel that we are lost, though we have the Christ-nature in us. We are just to lay our hearts open and uncluttered: then we may occasionally catch a hint of the One who is searching for us.
    God bless the good work, Liz!

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I wonder if you can help me. I'm always worrying about the past, if I did the right thing…. My husband gets impatient with me at times and he tells me I have little to worry about compared to a lot of other people. But I always feel that God must think me terrible. When I think of the catechism we learned in school I wonder am I a Catholic at all…. All this worrying makes my husband unhappy, and cross with me at times. He only gets cross in order to help me, he says. But I wish I could stop worrying…. He suggested writing to you, and he’s going to send it for me. I'd be glad of any help you could give me…. Anne

    Dear Anne, Thanks for your long letter, and I hope you don’t mind that I shortened it to the above. I'm sending you a few suggestions privately, but here in public may I add just a couple of things.
    That school catechism that you mentioned at length was republished recently. I looked through it in a bookshop, and I was deeply shocked. In the first section - which is about God - there is no mention of love! It says God is the Creator, the Lord, the rewarder of virtue and punisher of wickedness; but nowhere does it say that “God is love.” What does that do to us? A God who is not love, and yet who “sees all things, even our most secret thoughts and actions,” is a nightmare, and truly a horrible caricature of God. We older people grew up with that, and we pray that it didn’t sink in too deeply! But it did go deep with many sensitive people. I don’t know the motives of the publishers who recalled this nightmare stuff to us; perhaps they believe that people are longing for old certitudes in a world of rapid change. That is undoubtedly true, and it’s a good thing to get down to basics at such a time. But the basics are the gospels, and not a dated catechism. There’s a sad sort of Catholic fundamentalism that thinks the catechism, and not the Gospel, is the bedrock of the faith. I assure you, Anne, the word that renews and strengthens us - and sets us free - is the word of God. The other thing did not come from some golden age of the past, but from a low period in Catholic spirituality. I pray that you will be healed of these wounds; and since I situate myself in the continuity of Catholic preaching I apologise to you for those wounds you suffered and still suffer.
    When John the Evangelist (the one who said “God is love”) was a very old man he used to be brought along to speak to the Christian community. He would just repeat, “Children, let us love one another.” They got tired of hearing this over and over, and they asked him to say something else for a change. “But it is the Master’s whole teaching,” he replied.
    If we lose sight of love we lose sight of the Master, and without him there is no Christianity. The catechism looked tough and hard-edged - no nonsense - and it could make talk of love seem weak and sentimental. But Christian love is first and foremost about knowing God: without it, we don’t know what we are talking about when we talk about God. John wrote, “The one who does not love does not know God, for God is love” (1 John 4:8). After that, it is about loving our neighbour. It is not a weak and self-indulgent feeling, but something real and practical.
    Don’t be surprised at this shift of emphasis from the days of the old catechism. The Christian tradition is constantly correcting itself. It is a walking along the Way (the Christian faith was known as ‘the Way’ before it was called Christianity). Walking, when you look closely at it, is a kind of leaning from side to side - now to this side and now to that. What you need to lean on now, it seems to me, is the love of God. “This is the love I mean,” wrote St John, “not our love for God, but God's love for us” (1 John 4:10). This is the bedrock. Without it, nothing stands. I'd suggest, Anne, that you spend some time every day reading that first Letter of John. Read it as slowly as you can! Take one line, or even a word or two, and sit back and let them fill your mind and then your heart. Be in no hurry to get through it. Spare it: it’s only 8 or 10 pages! They are the inspired word of God; they are Jesus speaking directly to you. Let this wash over you and heal your wounded conscience. Most of us have consciences that are hard to get at: that may be why we were not too badly wounded! But you have a delicate conscience: you need the healing love of God all the more.
    In addition to the Scriptures there is a vast Christian literature to dip into as we need it. Julian of Norwich could become a special friend to you and do you much good. Get her book, or ask your husband to get you the short readings from it on this website.
    God bless and take care of you, Anne

Donagh O'Shea

 Dear Donagh, I want to ask you about Confession. Like most people I don’t go as often as I used to. The priests in our parish never talk about it. Is it being phased out deliberately, or is it just being neglected? If it was so important before why is it so unimportant now? I feel myself that's it’s important, I've often found it very helpful, but I seem to be almost on my own. Tell me something about it - wise me up! Ita McC.

    Dear Ita, Thanks for asking this question; it’s an important subject, and one that is largely passed over in silence, as you say.
    Most people would feel that it was overused in the past. Before the time of Pius X, many people received Communion only once a year. It was taken for granted that before going to Communion they would need to go to Confession! Then when frequent Communion became normal, the frequency of Confession increased to keep pace with it. Many people felt they had to go to Confession each time before going to Communion. This didn’t have to be so. Today the rule is that you should go to Confession when you are conscious of having serious sin on your conscience. God grant that that's not too often! In addition, it’s recommended to go more frequently, but no particular interval is mentioned.
    A teacher told me that she asked a child in her First Communion class how one should prepare for the sacrament of Penance. “First you have to commit some sins….” We often repeat now that the older approach was focused on sin rather than on the mercy of God. Part of the problem is that everything is simplified for children, and then they never learn a more adult way of using this sacrament. After a while they become embarrassed by the baby talk: “I didn’t love God when I used bad language…!” Yes it was sin-centred, and the training of confessors was the root cause of this. The confessor was taught to see himself as a judge of guilt and of the sincerity of repentance. For some more than others this obscured the real point of the sacrament: that it was a fountain of mercy.
    Another problem in the past is that the whole practice was so utterly private and individual. All the other sacraments were celebrated in a crowd, “in the midst of the Church.” But this one was hidden in a box. This obscured the fact that the confessor was representing the entire community - head (Christ) and body (believers). In confessing to him you were confessing to the whole Church, but it was hard to see this from a confession box. It was not only obscured; it was obliterated from view. We now have a better sense of the Church, I think, and this is bound to impact on the old way of confession. The sacrament can now be celebrated in different ways: on special occasions there are Penitential Services, where people assemble first for a proclamation of the word, singing, reflection, etc. This restores the sense of community. In the Liturgical books there is a rite of general absolution, but at present this is not in use.
    Is there a policy of neglect, or just a fact of neglect? There’s certainly no policy of neglect. The fact is that fewer people use this sacrament now, and less frequently. But in my experience it can be all the more meaningful now. Confessors have more time, they are not just waiting for a list of sins, they are aware that it is you yourself you bring to the Lord, not just your sins; they are willing to listen and they want to be of some service to you.
    Whatever form of the sacrament we use, it can be immensely meaningful. It’s very important to throw out the rubbish! The heart is the more fertile place in the world: anything we keep there will grow. If we keep weeds there they will produce a fine crop! Opening the heart takes us out of our isolation and terrible privacy: we get the grace to know that there is a mercy in our life that we haven't had to earn. It is a meeting with Christ.
    I hope this reply to your question isn't too long, Ita. God bless!

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I notice you’ve been keeping silent about child sexual abuse. I've been looking at your site since the beginning and you haven't answered any questions about it. We are distraught at the continuing sexual abuse cases involving priests and religious. What organisation could allow such people continue to exercise positions of trust? Today the Gospel condemnation of those who harm children has new meaning. Where do we look for leadership? Who can we trust now? Conor and Joan

    Dear Conor and Joan, Thanks for asking this question. The reason I haven't mentioned the subject before is that no one sent us a question about it. In real life many ask me questions about it, but you are the first to ask on this site.
    It’s a subject painful beyond words. Painful and scandalous: it’s hard to imagine how anyone would molest a child. Life is hard enough, and the odds are stacked against them by a heartless commercialised and sexualised culture; how could anyone have any instinct but to protect them? How could anyone - let alone a carer - make it worse for them? People have run out of words to describe this evil. This happens too in war and terrorist situations: people feel helpless to describe the devastation. But war and terrorism are highly visible. The abuse of children has been like a slow hidden smouldering terrorism against the most vulnerable people in society - so vulnerable that they were often unable to tell anyone about it and had to carry the horror of it alone.
    What strikes many as especially bizarre is that this was going on silently in years gone by when everything was very strict, even oppressively strict, in Church practice. The very people who were abusing children were preaching that it was a sin to do a bit of gardening on a Sunday. The pain and humiliation of the Church at the present time is healthy at least. It’s better that this evil has become visible and that it is now almost impossible that a child can be abused by a priest or religious. In Ireland there is now in place a set of procedures for handling abuse cases. A lawyer friend of mine described them as draconian in their strictness. See Child Sexual Abuse: Framework for a Church Response (Veritas, Dublin 1996).
    We are spared one thing: no one has invented an anodyne language to describe these horrors - in the way that war and terror victims are called “collateral damage”, or the unborn child “foetal matter”. This must be because it is not a government or a pressure group behind it, but isolated individuals.
    Many people are still dissatisfied. They feel that at the higher levels of authority there has been an attempt to conceal the full truth. That issue is being fought out at the present time. It is certain to take its full course.
    I feel deeply humiliated and angry that a number of priests and religious have so abused their position of trust in relation to children. Not only have they destroyed their own ministry but they have made the ministry of every priest and every carer more difficult, almost impossible. I realised this fully recently when a child came to me in a confessional room for the Sacrament of Reconciliation. I froze in the seat! And even in public a priest can no longer show even minimal friendliness towards a child. I feel angry about this, because I love children and enjoy their company. We are all made to feel guilty by association.
    Society itself, and even more so the Church, is based on trust. If that trust is completely undermined, it is impossible to continue. Who can you trust now, you ask. Ironically it should be easier to trust priests and religious now than it was in the past when few thought of distrusting them. The Church that will emerge from this will be a very humble one, conscious of its own sinfulness and betrayal. It will be a Church that tries as a Church to live the Beatitudes rather than just recommending them for private use. For the first few centuries St Peter was represented in Christian art with the rooster at his side: a reminder of his betrayal of Jesus, who said “before the cock crows you will have denied me three times.” This was to give a reminder of hope to the many who had betrayed the Gospel in time of persecution, and who now wanted to return to the fold. But later when the Church’s accent was on power, Peter was represented holding the keys of the kingdom of heaven. We are now once again in the age of the rooster. There is hope for us all, victims of every kind, and even for criminals.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh,
A few of us were discussing our efforts to pray, something we don’t do too often! - discussing it, I mean! One woman said she always prayed to Jesus, but another one said she prayed just to God. Then someone asked her did she mean God the Father, or just God in general - you know what I mean. What about praying to Our Lady and the saints? Can you enlighten us? Deirdre M.

    Dear Deirdre, Thanks for your question, which goes to the heart of the matter.
    In the gospels the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray. It seems to us a strange request. Jews prayed every day since childhood. Why would they ask him now to teach them to pray? They were asking him for a distinctive prayer as his disciples. John's disciples had a special kind of prayer, but Jesus's disciples apparently did not. In answer to their request he taught them the Our Father. This makes it very special: it is not just any prayer, it is a distinctively Christian prayer.
    But look now: there is no mention in it of any of the Christian mysteries! There is no mention of Jesus, nor of his passion, death and resurrection, there is no mention of the Trinity.... What sense can we make of this? Here is how I came to some kind of clarity on it.
    I remember praying a few years ago at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, surrounded by Jews. It’s the only remaining part of the Temple which was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 A.D. There is a very deep nostalgia, it seemed to me, in their prayer.
    My tears have become my bread,
    By night, by day,
    As I hear it said all the day long:
    'Where is your God?' (Psalm 41)
They have a custom of rocking back and forth as they pray. It is as if it is too much for the mind and has to overflow into the body. I thought of Jesus, a Jew, as I stood there groping in my mind for words. I realised that any Jewish person at that Wailing Wall could pray the words of the Our Father and not find them the least bit alien. Jesus was among his own people. But how then can the Our Father be the distinctive prayer of a Christian?
    Suddenly it came to me: if there is no mention of Jesus, his life, death or resurrection, nor of any of the Christian mysteries, it is because this was his own prayer - this was how he prayed himself. In prayer he was seized by one single awareness: the Father; he was not thinking about himself. When we pray the Our Father we are not praying to him, but with him; we are praying his prayer. We are so close to him that we cannot see him; like him, we see only the Father. We are, as it were, inside his head, looking out through his eyes: seeing the Father, and seeing the world as he sees it. There is no distance, we don’t see him somehow ‘over there’. We are totally identified with him - we are indeed his disciples. We are praying through him. Our prayers usually end with the words, “through Our Lord Jesus Christ….”
    In her Shewings Julian of Norwich spoke of “Adam’s tunic”, by which she meant human nature. It is worn by Adam, which means all of us (“in the sight of God all humankind is Adam and Adam is all humankind”), and of course by Jesus. Jesus wears our tunic, our human nature. This phrase of Julian’s is a vivid image of our ‘incorporation in Christ’. We could also speak of ‘the Christ-nature’ or ‘the Christ-mind’, as Buddhists speak of the Buddha-nature and the Buddha-mind. “Let the same mind be in you that was in Christ Jesus,” St Paul wrote (Philippians 2:5); and “We have the mind of Christ,” (1 Corinthians 2:16). He puts it even more strongly, “It is no longer I who live, but it is Christ who lives in me” (Galatians 2:20). You could apply this to prayer and say, “It is no longer I who pray, but it is Christ who prays in me.”
    Have you noticed that the Eucharistic Prayers and all the prayers at Mass (except just one) are addressed to God the Father? Then at the end of the Eucharistic Prayer it says, “Through him (that is, Christ), with him, in him, in the unity of the Holy Spirit, all glory and honour is yours, almighty Father, for ever and ever.” The Liturgy teaches us how to pray. This is the structure, always the same. We pray to the Father, through the Son, in the Spirit. To pray is to be drawn into the intimate life of God - not just ‘God in general’, but Father, Son and Spirit.
    Having said that, I have to say something else! It makes perfect sense to pray to Jesus, as millions have always done, and still do. Many people find it easier, somehow more intimate, to pray to Jesus. We can't imagine that he would somehow keep our prayer to himself! Everything given to Jesus passes through his mind and heart to the Father. The same goes for praying to Mary and the saints. It’s no problem; whatever helps, helps. We’re not robbing Peter to pay Paul, we’re the family of God. When I was young it didn’t matter who wore whose socks, so long as they fitted, more or less. That's what a family is. The blood running in the veins of the Christian family is the blood of Jesus. The Catholic understanding is that we are all part of the Communion of Saints, and no one is less likely to distract you from God than a saint.
    So, Deirdre, my advice is: pray any way you can. But don’t forget, too, that the Liturgy shows us the great lines, the great structure, of prayer.
    God bless the work!

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I saw a programme on religions and it seems there is no God in Buddhism but hundreds of them in Hinduism. The Christian Creed says, We believe in one God. What are we to say? is our belief in one God better than belief in none, and not as good as a belief in hundreds!!! Another thing. -Is the Christian God now so soft and gentle that he’s doing a disappearing act? - like the Cheshire cat?! Can you say a few words about this on your site? Daniel M.

    Dear Daniel, thanks for your letter, which brings us to the heart of the matter. Your question would require a very long answer indeed. In this space I can only draw some very rough sketches.
    The number of deities in Hinduism is said to be 33 crores. A crore is ten million. Obviously the word ‘deity’ or ‘god’ in that context doesn’t mean what Christians mean by it. Hinduism is better seen as a family of religions than as a single religion. It embraces a great variety of doctrines, cults, and ways of life; and the worship of local gods does not exclude belief in a single high God. Local gods are also seen as manifestations of a high God. It is said that no religious idea in India ever dies or is superseded; it is just combined with the next. Hindus are inclined to revere the divine in everything. This sounds alien to a Christian mind, but then many of the things we forget or never knew about our own religion sound almost as alien. For example, St Thomas Aquinas could write, “God is one in reality but multiple according to our minds; we know him in as many ways as created things represent him.” This is not to imagine that the Hinduism and Christianity could be ‘synchronised’ in some way - why would anyone be tempted to do such a thing? At present, the best we can do with other religions is to realise we don’t understand them, to have the grace to respect them, and perhaps to learn through them how little we have plumbed the depths of our own.
    Buddhists were gravely offended a few years ago when the pope described their religion as “atheistic.” The Buddha was a Hindu of the 5th century B.C. When questioned about God he remained silent. He neither affirmed nor denied the existence of a God or crores of gods. He refused to be drawn into the jungle of speculation. His silence was his answer. Was that atheism? One might as well call St Thomas Aquinas an atheist, who said, “Neither Christian nor pagan knows the nature of God as he is in himself.” Or Meister Eckhart, who said, “God, who has no name - God has no name - is ineffable.” This is not to pretend to capture the two religions in one view, but it is to see at the very least that the other religion is worthy of respect and consideration. There are about 300 million Buddhists in the world today. They were given even greater offence when Cardinal Ratzinger described their religion as “a form of spiritual auto-eroticism.” It beggars belief that anyone, let alone a Christian so prominently placed, should utter these degrading words. Please don’t repeat that Buddhists are atheists. It doesn’t describe the ones I know, it doesn’t even describe the way they talk. Jesus praised the faith of people of other religions and none: Samaritans, Roman centurions, the Syro-Phoenician woman…. And he said, "Not everyone who says to me, 'Lord, Lord,' will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven” (Matthew 7:21).
    Christians ‘inherit’ the one God of the Old Testament, but he is changed in the process - something we don’t always sufficiently acknowledge. For example, there’s a passage in the Old Testament that Christians especially love to quote. It’s about “God in the gentle breeze.” That passage is about the prophet Elijah’s encounter with God. “There was a great wind… but God was not in the wind; and after the wind an earthquake, but God was not in the earthquake; and after the earthquake a fire, but God was not in the fire; and after the fire a sound of a gentle breeze.” (1 Kings 19:11-12). In another translation it’s even nicer: instead of the gentle breeze there is “sheer silence” (NRSV). Other translations say, “a still small voice,” or “the sound of a soft breath,” or “a quiet whispering voice.” All this would seem to make us think of the God of the Old Testament as a soft, gentle, unchallenging Presence - until we read on and hear what he said to Elijah in his ‘soft whispering voice’; he told him take up his sword and put his enemies to death! You could say that we Christians misread this text - and many others. We take it out of context and apply it wholesale. But we have always been doing this with the Old Testament.
    The Old Testament is not the last word. God's word to us is primarily in the New Testament. We don’t look at the New Testament from the standpoint of the Old; we look at the Old Testament from the standpoint of the New. We take what suits us, reinterpret it, and pass a blind eye over the rest. Even when we read the most gruesome things in the Old Testament - some passages in the psalms, for example - we read them differently. Every Sunday in the Prayer of the Church thousands of gentle people placidly recite the words of Psalm 149, “Let the praise of God be on their lips and a two-edged sword in their hand!” These words are the classic headline for religious terrorism, but we don’t really hear them; we gloss over them for the sake of the rest of psalm 149, which is beautiful!
    Christians know something about the gentleness of God that people of the Old Testament could not have known. One name for the Holy Spirit is ‘Paraclete’, translated sometimes as “the Comforter” (John 14:26). Does this soften our religion to the point of weakness? What kind of comfort can we expect from the Comforter? Look more closely at the word ‘comfort’. Modern usage has weakened its meaning to softness and gentle touches; in fact its real meaning is just about the opposite! The word comes from the Latin ‘confortare’, which means ‘to strengthen’; ‘fortis’ means ‘strong’. Comfort therefore means strength! The Holy Spirit will make us robust. This is not weakness, but neither is it the unrestrained violence of the Old Testament. St Paul gave a list of the ‘fruits of the Spirit’: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, goodness, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control” (Gal. 5:22). If you had no love in you, you could hardly claim to be a Christian; likewise gentleness (and all the others). This is our way. Christians have very often been unfaithful to it. But being faithful to it doesn’t require that we do the dirt on other religions.
    This answer is already over-long for here, Daniel, but I hope you will continue to read and reflect on this question of God, the ultimate question. But above all, these things make sense only when we pray them.

Dear Donagh, I had a wonderful fiancee and we intend to marry. However I was overcome with crippling anxiety and we postponed it. We are still together and as always we get on great, herself, myself and her son. I have an abundance of love respect and admiration for her. She is truly a dear person. However because of all my anxiety I question do I really love her enough and I am so confused as to the right path to take. Will my confusion pass? Should I
turn the problem to God? Richard

    Dear Richard,

Thanks for your letter, and for putting your uncertainty ‘out there’ - which must be a help in itself. The uncertainty is very clear, even in the first line! You seem unsure whether you are talking about the past or the present: “I had,” you said, then “we intend.”
    Of course no one can tell you what to do. It would be wrong for anyone to do so, because then it would not be your own decision, and you would still not have faced your indecision. But we can encourage you, we can tell you that we all feel a bit like that when we have important decisions to make; we can even be very clear in the annoying way that outsiders can be clear about matters of the heart!
    Your anxiety is making things difficult for you. Anxiety is a form of fear. Fear is normally quite focused: I'm afraid of heights, or of speed, or of that particular person…. But anxiety is unfocused fear; it’s a fear not only of what is but also of what could be. This means that no matter how many things I check out I cannot put it to rest. When there’s no real object to be afraid of, anxiety creates an object. It leaves no room for any other consideration. For this reason it’s a bad counsellor. St John said that “perfect love casts out fear” (1 John 4:18). We could also turn it around and say: perfect fear casts out love. How so? In fear I divide myself. Part of me wants to take the step, another part holds back, and so I remain rooted to the spot. The civil war within me absorbs all my attention and energy, and there is none left for this great self-giving that is love.
    In a strange way anxiety makes me idealise the other person. Because I am always putting her just beyond my reach she will soon begin to have a kind of aura about her. Within a few years she will be on the way to becoming a goddess, and I her unworthy devotee. This may look like deep spiritual intimacy, but it is only my anxiety pushing her away into a safe niche.
    I'm talking quite freely, Richard, and little or none of this may be relevant to your own situation. You’ll have to be patient!
    The future is a perfect arena for anxiety - because it includes everything that lies ahead, and none of it can be checked! But look at it this way: if we knew the future it would no longer be the future; it would be a kind of past. That would be some kind of nightmare! There would never be anything new or surprising in one’s life. In a while we would feel nothing, or we would feel dead. Nothing looks so sure of itself as a stone; that's because it’s not a living being like you or me.
    I would, suggest that the way through this is to look at the anxiety itself. Watch it, study it, see it coming, learn to recognise it, notice what triggers it, be aware of what it does in the body, and be aware of how it controls what you do and what you don’t do. Watch how it puts a drop of poison even into the best moments you have with your fiancée. Even while you are enjoying her company the anxiety is spoiling something. It’s a spoiler; that is its speciality. “Will my confusion pass?” you ask. Not while you continue to create it. It’s the product of anxiety, and for as long as anxiety controls you the confusion will continue and will even grow.
    “Should I turn the problem to God?” you ask. It’s always a good thing to turn our problems to God, but check whether you are seeking in a subtle way to avoid the decision you have to make. God won't decide for you, because you already have the wonderful God-given capacity to make decisions. St Thomas Aquinas said that our human gifts are our participation in God's providence. God's providence doesn’t overrule us or set our efforts aside; God takes us into the decision-making process, in the way that parents will take their eldest child. The eldest often becomes a sort of third parent. That is how God respects us and waits for us.
    Sometimes a good remedy for fear of the future is to think of the distant future! Imagine yourself as an old man looking back on your life. What kind of life would you like to have lived? I think we would all like to be able to say: I lived intensely, and even if I made mistakes it was with a good heart, and that must undo much of the damage.
          I shall be telling this with a sigh
          Somewhere ages and ages hence:
          Two roads diverged in a wood, and I -
          I took the one less traveled by,
          And that has made all the difference.
It was impossible not to think of Frost’s Road not Taken! I can think of no better remedy for anxiety than his laid-back wisdom. Why not make it your theme-song!
God bless, Richard.

Donagh O'Shea

 Dear Fr. Donagh, I have always felt that each one of us was born to do
something for the Lord that no one else can do. I used to worry that I
would die without accomplishing this. Now, I just pray, daily, that I will
have the courage, humility, and compassion to find out what this task is
and do it. So, it is one day at a time for me to try to be the presence
of Jesus and Mary to all that I meet that day. Unfortunately, I fall very
short of this frequently. I would appreciate your thoughts on this,
Father. Thank you very much, Esther

    Dear Esther,

    Thank you for your letter. Yes, I'm sure each of us is called to something that no one else can do. We are all different to the fingertips, and even our fingertips are different! Even if we were to try to imitate another person exactly we would not succeed at all. We don’t have to try to be different; we can't help being different. It’s not surprising then that the Lord calls each person to a unique service.
    This may provide some kind of key to a response to your letter. If your work is coming from the heart, then it is uniquely and distinctively yours; and if your heart is good, then your work will be good. Of course it is possible to make mistakes, but a good heart is about the best guide we have. The 14th-century mystic, Meister Eckhart, wrote, “People should not worry so much about what they have to do, they should consider rather what they are. If people and their ways were good, their deeds would shine brightly. If you are righteous, then your deeds will be righteous. Do not think to place holiness in doing; we should place holiness in being, for it is not the works that sanctify us, but we who should sanctify the works.”
    Eckhart's penetrating insights are a great reassurance, as well as a challenge. As the ‘Wisdom Line’ this month I will use another passage from his writings that has a bearing on your letter.
    I'm reminded of a passage in Matthew's gospel: “Enter by the narrow gate, since the road that leads to perdition is wide and spacious, and many take it; but it is a narrow gate and a hard road that leads to life, and only a few find it” (7:13-14). The word translated here as ‘spacious’ is an obscure Greek word that could also mean ‘for tomorrow’. There may seem to be no connection between ‘spacious’ and ‘tomorrow’, but when you think about it, tomorrow is the most spacious day of all! I did a few tours of duty in the Philippines, and I noticed that in Tagalog the word ‘bukas’, pronounced differently, means both ‘tomorrow’ and ‘open’. Tomorrow has room for all the things I postpone, and for all the things I don’t want to face. It’s limitless: I could save the world tomorrow! It’s limitless because it exists only in thought. I can think and imagine a thousand things simultaneously, but in reality I can do only one at a time. Reality is today. In comparison to tomorrow it seems very narrow and ordinary, it’s a “narrow gate and a hard road.”
    I think the emphasis in all this is on the ordinary. My feeling is that the Lord's will for us is not revealed by some obscure calculus but through our fidelity to the ordinary things of every day. Why should the Lord's will for us be one task that we have to “find out”? Why shouldn’t it be a whole series of tasks, day by day, that don’t add up to one discernible pattern - another name for a career? And why should it have one’s name on it? If we try to be different from others we show that we are afraid we may be the same; if we try to be the same we show we are afraid we may be different. We don’t have to try to be different: we are different; we don’t have to try to be the same: we are the same. We are just ordinary, and we do the things that come our way. That's where your “courage, humility and compassion” come into play. You don’t have to waste them on the effort to find out what unique career lies waiting for you; you can use them all up in the present! The present is able to absorb everything we put into it, and more. When you fail you need not lose heart. Failure is one of our best teachers: it shows us the difference between our illusions and reality.
    To “try to be the presence of Jesus and Mary to all that I meet” is a wonderful programme. It works well the other way too: to see in everyone I meet the presence of Jesus and Mary. As Julian of Norwich expressed it, “Jesus is everyone who is going to be saved and everyone who is going to be saved is Jesus.” Then, as a monk of Spencer Abbey put it, the question ‘Who am I?’ transposes into the question, ‘What do they need?’
God bless you, Esther.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, We are terribly worried about all the mindless violence in the world today. We can't watch the news without being horrified. Where’s the natural kindness of people gone? What's the explanation? Is it because of all the rapid change in the world? Is there anything we can do to stop violence? Can you say something about this? Thanks. Jim and Eleanor

    Dear Jim and Eleanor, You ask a question that is burning in everyone’s brain. The wisest people in the world ask it and try to answer it, but still violence continues. It has so many forms and aspects that one wonders if it isn't totally bound up with modern civilisation. But then we look at the past and we see no great difference except in degree. Our greater organisation makes it possible for us to be violent on a wider scale then before. We are extraordinary beings: a mixture of tenderness and cruelty, of refinement of feeling and utter barbarity. The Scriptures express it plainly enough: “What race deserves honour? The human race. What race deserves contempt? The human race” (Ecclesiasticus 10:19).
    No list of the ways of violence is ever complete. You could mention aggression at the individual level: anger and hatred, physical violence, injustice, prejudice and exclusion, abusive language and abusive behaviour - all aggravated by alcohol and drugs…. But the list can go on and on. What strikes me is that many of these forms of violence are so tied up with other aspects of our world that they are inseparable from it. Even our leisure activities, our sport and entertainment, frequently rely on violence for effect. Violence sells novels and videos, and it keeps TV tam ratings up. Violence is not only portrayed in films now, it is exaggerated and gloated over; it is the pornography of violence. Think too of that contradiction in terms, ‘blood sports’. I knew someone who spent all his weekends and holidays killing animals for ‘sport’. Anyone who enjoys killing is a damaged human being. Animals kill, but only for food, or in defence of their young, or in self-defence. They don’t kill for fun. We are far and away the most vicious and blood-thirsty species on earth. What we see on TV is not alien to us - it would have no appeal for us if it were. The violence on screen connects with the violence in ourselves. It is ourselves that we see: the violent side of ourselves. It is well to bear this in mind. One of the greatest tragedies in every post-war period is that people look back and blame it on ‘them’, ‘the enemy’. But it is truly about us. We should say, “Now I see that there is a potential Hitler in me, or a Stalin, or a Mao Tse Tung.” Because we don’t acknowledge the violence in ourselves we are always destined to fight another war. Unrecognised or unacknowledged violence can have even more far-reaching effects than visible violence. One’s way of life may appear perfectly peaceful, but in some countries it is being financially sustained by their governments selling arms to emerging countries, sometimes to both sides in a conflict.
    Television programmes are not alone in glorifying violence: a great deal of the world’s literature glorifies war and killing. And the national anthems of very many countries glorify and celebrate violence.
    It makes you think of the Ik! The Ik are a small tribe in northern Uganda, who were formerly nomadic hunters. The government turned their territory into a national park and they were forced to become farmers on poor hillside soil. The anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived for two years among them and wrote a book about them, entitled The Mountain People. The dismantling of their society and traditions changed them radically. He found them totally brutalised - selfish, loveless, solitary. They share nothing, they never sing, they send out tiny children to scavenge, they abandon the old and let them starve to death. They breed without love or even casual regard, they soil each other’s doorsteps, they laugh only at one another’s misfortunes….
    The biologist Lewis Thomas (in The Lives of a Cell) has a theory. The Ik, he said, are individually behaving in just the way that societies do! Their society has been destroyed, so each individual becomes a sort of society in him or herself.
    “Now everything falls into place,” he writes. “This is precisely the way groups of one size or another, ranging from committees to nations, behave…. In his absolute selfishness, his incapacity to give anything away, no matter what, [the individual Ik] is a successful committee. When he stands at the door of his hut, shouting insults at his neighbours in a loud harangue, he is a city addressing another city.
    “Cities have all the Ik characteristics. They defecate on doorsteps, in rivers and lakes, their own or anyone else’s. They leave rubbish. They detest all neighbouring cities, give nothing away….
    “Nations are the most Iklike of all. No wonder the Ik seem familiar. For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation. Nations, by law, are solitary, self-centred, withdrawn into themselves…. They bawl insults from their doorsteps, defecate into whole oceans, snatch all the food, survive by detestation, take joy in the bad luck of others….”
    It is hugely tempting to apply this to present-day societies. As traditional society breaks down in many respects, the individual becomes sovereign and begins to behave like a society. Every day on TV we see how societies behave: we see countries reneging on treaties and agreements, refusing to take responsibility for polluting the planet, waging war and terror on other countries…. These are headlines in every sense: they are not only news headlines, but headlines for individual behaviour.
    What are we to do? It’s clearly not enough to talk about violence and non-violence. We have to be non-violent, we have to embody non-violence. It helps if we understand violence a little and watch the movement of it in ourselves. It’s possible to be a violent promoter of non-violence - to be driven by hatred even in a good cause. We have to watch ourselves like hawks, because in a sense we are hawks! - only more predatory. But if we become peacemakers, rather than people who talk about peace or lament violence, we can do incalculable good. So I hope and pray. If we understand our bad side while living on our good side, there’s hope for us all.
    I hope I haven't depressed you more! The liturgical greeting becomes more urgent than ever before: “The peace of the Lord be with you always!”

Donagh O'Shea

   Dear Donagh, We live nextdoor to an elderly couple who have no family or near relatives to look after them really. They get Home Help and a nurse visits them, but they seem so lost, like small children. . I drop in to see them and I spend a bit of time with them every day that I'm able - but I'd like to make that quality time, instead we spend ages talking about the cat and what she did and didnt do. That cant be what life is about. How can I talk to them about deeper things? But I dont want to alarm them either as if theyre going to die any day!! Can you make any suggestions? Thanks…. Maureen

   Dear Maureen, you have a good heart, and your letter shows how important neighbours are! We choose our friends, someone said, but mostly God chooses our neighbours for us. Your presence is a blessing for that elderly couple, even on the days when you can't be with them. They are being cared for by the Home Help service and the nurse; because of you they also know that they are being cared about. These are two kinds of help that can never replace each other; one is as important as the other.
    I wouldn’t worry about the cat conversations! A cat is more than a cat. That particular cat is their cat. They have a need to look after her and to tell you about her doings and non-doings! The lives of elderly people, I suppose, become narrower as their movements become more restricted. To an active person that seems less bearable than it does to them. Everything is relative. They may not feel quite as lost or lonely as they look. Because you have an eye for this it will not escape you if they become lonelier than they are now. If they want to talk to you about the cat, that's all right; it’s to you they are talking, not to the cat. One of the great Christian mystics, Meister Eckhart, said, “Indeed, a person will not get more of God by meditation, by devotion, or by ecstasies… than by the fireside or in the stable.” He didn’t mention cats, but the principle is the same. He also said, “We need not worry that we are missing anything. For with God one can miss nothing. With God one can no more miss anything than God can miss anything.” When the heart is in the right place it doesn’t matter what we talk about. Which brings me back to ‘presence’.
It is your presence to them that counts. It doesn’t matter greatly what you say; what matters is that you are there, and willing to be there. I often think that our presence is our first language. What we speak is our second language. If someone were in hospital and you visited them to explain to them why they were sick (eating too much or too little, smoking, not taking exercise…) and asking them what they were going to do about it, you wouldn’t be very welcome after a while! But if you went and just sat with them you would be doing something of great value. The world in many ways is like a hospital: it is full of pain and suffering. God's response was not to send us an explanation of where we went wrong, but to become one of us in the Incarnation. “The Word was made flesh and dwelt among us.”
    God bless the good work, Maureen.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I'm sure there's no answer to the problem of ageing, but one's attitude to it makes a difference I'm sure…. I'm looking back at 65, so it's becoming a very actual question for me. Could you give a few perspectives on it please? I find your web site very helpful. Miriam

Donagh O'Shea

    Dear Donagh, I heard a diatribe today from a fundamentalist Catholic about God's punishment for our sins. It sounded strange to me, for the first time in my life. I'd like to hear what you have to say on this subject. George L.

    Dear George, Thanks for your letter. 'God's punishment' sounds strange to me too, I must say. Some older people have a chilling version of the 'Act of Contrition': it says they are sorry for their sins "because they deserve thy dreadful punishments, because they have crucified my loving Saviour Jesus Christ, but most of all because they offend thy infinite goodness, who art so deserving of all my love…." The dreadful punishments come first in the list, so we can't take seriously that "most of all". And there is something sick in the occurrence of those two words 'punishment' and 'love' in the one sentence. We were being asked to love a God who would condemn us to unimaginable torment for all eternity if we didn’t love him. What a way to twist our emotions! What did such a thought do to people who really took it in when they were children? Most didn’t, I think - judging from the versions of the Act of Contrition I still hear from time to time. Here is a composite of all the odd bits I've heard: "O my God, I am hardly sorry for having offended thee, and I do test my sins above every evil, because they do please thee, my God…. And I firmly dissolve…never more to defend thee, and to end my life." In many cases a misunderstanding is a mercy.
    What is at stake is our understanding of God. God is not punishment, God is love. Commenting on St John's statement that "God is love (1 John 4:8)," Meister Eckhart said: "I beg you to mark my words. God loves my soul so much that His life and being depend on His loving me, whether He would or not. To stop God loving my soul would be to deprive Him of His Godhead; for God is as truly love as He is truth; and as truly as He is goodness, He is love. That is the bare truth, as God lives."
    What then about punishment for sin? Is there no such reality? There is! But as the Catechism of the Catholic Church puts it, this "must not be conceived as a kind of vengeance inflicted by God from without, but as following from the very nature of sin (n. 1472)." It's a pity that we use the word 'punishment' at all. 'Consequence' would be a better word. The consequence follows the cause as a hangover follows a drinking binge. It is something we do to ourselves rather than something God does to us. I found a very good image for this in a 5th-century Christian mystic, Dionysius the Areopagite. He said sin is an attempt to push God out of one's life: it is like being at sea in your little boat and seeing a great rock in your path. You reach out your oar and try to push it out of your away, but of course you only push yourself and your boat away from the rock. In his own words, “If you are standing in a boat and you try to push away a rock that is in your way, that will not affect the rock, which stands immovable, but will distance you from it; and the more you push, the more you are distanced…." God doesn’t cast us away ("God is love"), but we attempt to cast ourselves away from God.
    May I refer you to another question that came in some time ago: you'll find it, with an answer, in the archive as "Geoffrey Pinfield: necessity of suffering."
    I hope this short answer is of some use to you.

Dear Donagh, Thank you and Simon for your wonderful site - you two are doing good work. Can you send me a bundle of your new bookmarks - I'd like to pass them around to some friends of mine…. It's useful to have the address and a brief description in such a handy format.
      My question may be too general for an answer on your page, but it's a question that keeps coming back to me for several months now. Even a few words would help. What's the meaning of life? Or does it have a meaning? Obviously I must think it has, otherwise I'd have gone crazy in some way. But I'd like to get some sort of real answer, instead of the usual clichés. What does it mean, why are we here? Is it just some sort of cosmic joke? Are we just playthings of evolution? If it's too general just say so. I'll understand. Thanks again. Brendan McC.

    Dear Brendan, Don’t worry about your question being general: it's a lot easier to respond to general questions than to particular ones! - easier because no one expects much of an answer. We're lucky if we can get even a fleeting glimpse of something.
    What's the meaning of life?
    Doesn’t it have to come with the package, somehow? It's hardly likely to be something that isn't there already. So I tell myself, anyway. The answer in the penny catechism didn’t take us very far: really it took us nowhere. We are here, it said, "to know, love and serve God, and by this means to be happy with him forever." 'By this means'. So, knowing loving and serving God was just a means to an end: the end being our own happiness. God was not the Ultimate, but a tool for our happiness. If a man said such a thing about his wife we would say he knew nothing at all about love.
    Is the question 'what's the meaning of life?' different from the question, 'what's the meaning of this moment?' My sense is that they are the same question.
Well then, what's the meaning of this moment? Again, my sense is that this moment doesn’t have a meaning; it is the meaning. That's why I say the meaning must come with the package. I think the answer is always in the question, the solution in the problem.
    If I look at this moment with only one interest - to find some verbal formula claiming to express its 'meaning' - then I am not looking at this moment. Or rather I'm not living it; I'm stepping back from living and I'm talking about living. We have tended to become fatally entangled in explanations, and we end by thinking that our religion itself is nothing but a big explanation. But it was called "the Way" before it was called Christianity, and long before it was ever seen as an explanation (see Acts 22:4; 11:26). To the extent that we see it as an explanation of the world, to that extent it has become a philosophy. Even a very famous theologian whom I was reading the other day used the word 'spirituality' in a dismissive manner, contrasting it with what he called "the hard intellectual work" of theology. However necessary this hard intellectual work may be, it isn't the full story - any more than hard manual work is the full story. To think so would be a kind of activism. Spirituality necessarily includes the passive as well: we have to hold our spirit in readiness, empty like a bowl. "All discipleship is feminine," someone said, and he didn’t mean that it was only for women. He meant that it is not a matter of imposing one's intellect and will on the world, but of having the wisdom to wait for wisdom. "My soul is longing for the Lord, more than watchman for daybreak" (Psalm 129). The watchman cannot bring daybreak about, nor can he do nothing to hasten it; but there are different kinds of waiting. We are both active and passive, and spirituality takes both seriously. "You know my resting and my rising," the psalmist says to God.
    In that resting we may get some wisdom about our rising. In that resting or waiting - call it meditation, or contemplation, or anything you like - the question, "What's the meaning of life?" will be changed and deepened. If there was just curiosity in it, or restlessness or unhappiness or an impulse to control, these will be transformed into wonder. See how often the word 'wonder' occurs in the psalms. May I suggest that you live with Psalm 138 for a while? It has great resonance. It's a good place to live with your question.

        O Lord, you search me and you know me,
        You know my resting and my rising,
        You discern my purpose from afar.
        You mark when I walk or lie down,
        All my ways lie open to you.

        Before ever a word is on my tongue
        You know it, O Lord, through and through.
        Behind and before you besiege me,
        Your hand ever laid upon me.
        Too wonderful for me, this knowledge,
        Too high, beyond my reach.

        O where can I go from your spirit,
        Or where can I flee from your face?
        If I climb the heavens, you are there.
        If I lie inn the grave, you are there.

        If I take the wings of the dawn
        And dwell at the sea's furthest end,
        Even there your hand would lead me,
        Your right hand would hold me fast.

        If I say: 'Let the darkness hide me
        And the light around me be night,'
        Even darkness is not dark for you
        And the night is as clear as the day.

        For it was you who created my being,
        Knit me together in my mother's womb.
        I thank you for the wonder of my being,
        For the wonders of all your creation.

        Already you knew my soul,
        My body held no secret from you
        When I was being fashioned in secret
        And moulded in the depths of the earth.

        Your eyes saw all my actions,
        They were all of them written in your book;
        Every one of my days was decreed
        Before one of them came into being.

        To me, how mysterious your thoughts,
        The sum of them not to be numbered!
        If I count them, they are more than the sand;
        To finish I must be eternal, like you….

        O search me, God, and know my heart.
        O test me and know my thoughts.
        See that I follow not the wrong path
        And lead me in the path of life eternal.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I work part-time in…retreat centre…and recently I'm coming across something I haven't met before, or very seldom. People ring to suss out the content of the courses and clearly state that they don’t wish to attend a retreat with "a Jesus content." They are interested, they insist, in the development of their own body/mind/spirit, but it seems to end there. I was shaken by this when two such enquiries were made recently in relation to courses over the same weekend. Have you any comment to make on this? Thank you and Simon for your site. A.H.

    Dear A.H. I worked for twelve years in a retreat centre myself, but it was some years ago, and much has changed in Ireland since then. But even then New Age awareness was well established, and the bookshops were full of New Age titles. The movement, as you know, just took in anything that seemed different: I've seen books on astral travel right beside books on zen! This is even more marked now, because of effortless and almost cost-free access through the internet to every opinion in the world. There is no going back on this: we can 'uninstall' a computer programme, but we cannot 'unknow' something we have come to know, nor 'unexperience' something we have experienced. That's putting it in almost negative terms. Still in negative terms: it's impossible now to make large claims for a narrow spirituality. In the positive terms of St Paul's phrase, "All things are yours, and you are Christ's, and Christ is God's."
    I have to admit I'm at a loss when people talk to me about cleansing their chakras. It's far from chakras we were reared! At the same time I prefer to listen to such people than to fundamentalists who would like to condemn all this profusion and go back to Catholic life as it used to be. Time doesn’t run in that direction. These would like to separate Christ from the crowds, but the most characteristic thing about him in the gospels is his mingling with people of every description. He may seem at times to be lost, but he is about his Father's business. In the gospels he never sits in lofty separation from people; he is the Good Shepherd, seeking out the lost sheep. It is not those who say the right things, "Lord! Lord!" who will enter the Kingdom of God, he said, but those who do the will of the Father. Many sign up to the faith, like the son who said "Yes I'll go," and didn’t go. But Jesus praised the son who said No and then went. "Tax collectors and the prostitutes are going into the kingdom of God ahead of you," he said to the pious. Perhaps the most subversive thing he said was, "Nowhere in Israel have I found such faith." It was subversive because he said it of a Roman centurion - a pagan! What does faith mean if Jesus can praise the faith of a pagan? That pagan could not have recited a Creed; but then, neither could any of the Apostles!
    If someone specifically wants the "Jesus content" excluded from a retreat, it must be that they have had a dire experience of it, and it's not hard to see how this could be. Many older people - and some not old - have suffered dreadfully in early life from a mean-spirited introduction to the faith. To every single one of them I can say, "Me too." But I take it for granted now that there has never anywhere been a perfect way. Every experience is partial; every image of the faith and of Christ is inadequate. But for that very reason we have to remain open even to expressions that baffle and challenge us. "It is not those who say, 'Lord, Lord.…'!
    It was common some years ago to hear about "the anonymous Christ." It's a phrase that has gone out of currency; it began to seem a bit underhand. But perhaps it still has a place at the back of the mind if not at the front. There is a shyness about recognition. I wonder about people who "find Jesus" in front of television cameras. But I don’t wonder at all at people who find him in a moment when some person with a positive and beautiful vision has really cared about them and their innermost feelings, and has shown them respect and love. Sadly, they sometimes fail to find this in Christian circles, and so they seek it elsewhere. But the poet's phrase, "Christ plays in ten thousand places…."

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, I was left rather baffled by your answer to last month's questioner; or rather, by the verse you quoted from the Gospel, where Jesus praised the faith of a pagan. You asked a question yourself but didn’t answer it: "What does faith mean if Jesus can praise the faith of a pagan?" Could you comment on this, please? James H.

    Dear James, thanks for your letter. Clearly, in the context described in the gospel, faith cannot have meant an intellectual formulation. That Roman pagan did not have a theology; what he had was great trust in Jesus' ability and willingness to heal his servant (Luke 7:6-9). This shows that trust is the primary ingredient in faith. A faith (or even a theology or a philosophy) that made verbal formulation its primary concern would be about nothing. The rational mind is good at analysis, which is a secondary thing - because it requires that there be something to analyse. A faith that was constructed only on intellectual positions would not be faith at all. The great tragedy is that it has often been presented (even to children) as if it were just that.
    "Faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love" wrote St Paul (1 Corinthians 13:13). They are a kind of trinity; they are three and also one. Faith and hope will pass away in eternity - there will be no need for them. They will not pass away into nothing; they will pass into love. If so, they must be one with it already in essence. We may speak about them as if they were different, because we can say only one thing at a time; but when we speak about one of them we are really speaking about all three.
    Catholic theology has tended to speak of trust (fiducia) under the heading of hope. Martin Luther in the 16th century insisted that it was the essence of faith. And so there followed another tragic chapter of misunderstanding among Christians. It doesn’t seem to me to matter much how you file it or how you describe it - so long as you have it. But this much is clear from experience: if we think there can be faith without trust (hope), we will present to the world a barren logic in place of the word of God. A great deal of Catholic preaching is descended from that dismal vision. It's not surprising that it doesn’t engage the interest of many people. Jesus did not come to give us a few religious axioms for safe keeping in our minds; he came to save "the weak, the sick, the wounded, the strayed, the lost" (see Ezechiel 34). For this he required in people an attitude of faith. We are to understand this primarily as trust. Of course this later becomes elaborated into theologies, but they have to be such that they do not distort its meaning.
    Let me know if this throws any light on the subject for you.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh …I promised I'd send you a question, so here it is finally. An elderly relative of mine (you know who I mean) has taken to saying 'Praise the Lord!' whenever she hears anything good - a thing I'm beginning to find very tiresome, though I haven't the nerve to tell her so! - She would put me down as an atheist right away and she would take to praying for me every day. I suppose there can be aged Charismatics just as there are aged hippies, so I've been quite nice to her really. But it has made me think about the whole idea of praising God. I have to say, it stopped making sense the moment I began to think about it. How could a person of any depth endure being praised all the time? What makes us think that God would enjoy it? Would he not die of boredom if everyone kept praising him round the clock? If he needs that he must be very insecure! I know you'll say he doesn’t need it, but why do people do it then? …Do your best, and try not to be so balanced! Larry.

    Thank you, Larry! If you were to tell your "elderly relative" (!) about your problem her prayer of praise would instantly change to prayer of petition! So you know what to do….
    We've talked a little already about this subject, so I'll sum up.
    Yes, God doesn’t need our praise. One of the Prefaces of the Mass says, "You have no need of our praise, yet our desire to thank you is itself your gift." Very balanced! Everything is there.
    Still, something can be perfectly correct and still not right. I always avoid that particular Preface…. It sounds a bit 'back of me hand to you'. Even though love is about giving rather than needing, love won't allow the other to say "You don’t need anything from me." And the Scriptures say God is love. Meister Eckhart, the least likely of all to make little God's transcendence, wrote, "God needs our friendship so much that He cannot wait for us to pray to Him: He approaches us and begs us to be His friends." Eckhart spoke from the heart of experience. Logic would leave us with a cold self-sufficient God (close relative of Aristotle's prime mover), but people who write from experience do better. Our relationship with God can be understood only through the experience of friendship and love. "Whoever does not love does not know God, for God is love" (1John 4:8).
    Only love knows how to praise, pure and simple. The praise that the ego offers is almost bound to be strategic; there's a hidden agenda, as they say. I praise so that I will appear to have good taste (= popular taste at the time). The ego knows far more about competition and self-promotion than about praise. The more the ego praises, the more resentment builds up underneath. That kind of praise is as bad for the giver as for the receiver.
    Real praise finds it hard to breathe today. We are in a culture of increasing distrust and cynicism. There is much to distrust, it's true, but this atmosphere is extremely corrosive. Imagine sitting down to a meal with a group of friends, and then being joined by a cynical person who loves no person place or thing. What power such a person has! Praise, like everything that comes from an innocent heart, withers and shrivels up in an atmosphere of cynicism.
When cynicism is spread very thinly on a decent person its name is irony. There are very many writers and commentators today who would be ashamed to praise anything in a straightforward way; instead they come sideways at it, with a mortal dread of appearing naïve. A Frenchman told me once that for him it was the mark of the English language!
    To praise is to go out of the ego. It is to go beyond the tight package of the self. You could say it is to merge oneself. We are quite familiar with what Eric Fromm called the "lower mergings of the self" - the Nuremberg rallies in the '30s in Nazi Germany, the loutish behaviour of street-gangs, the strange allure of cults; and less destructively the adulation given to pop-stars, and perhaps the harmless ecstasy of football fans…. We seem to have a need to give ourselves up to something beyond ourselves. The tragedy is that what we give ourselves to is sometimes not worthy of us. But there is a "higher merging of the self," and its name is love or God - genuine love, and not addiction or some other counterfeit. If we become cynical about this we are left with some lower merging. In his book on 19th-century atheism, God's Funeral, A.N. Wilson wrote, "Dethroning God, that generation found it impossible to leave the sanctuary empty. They put man in his place, which had the paradoxical effect, not of elevating human nature but of demeaning it to depths of cruelty, depravity and stupidity unparalleled in human history." Nietzsche seems to have been right: we cannot just eliminate God and expect everything else to stay in place. If we stop praising God we are likely to forget how to praise anything at all.
    To finish, here's something from W.H. Auden (from In memory of W.B. Yeats) - words that have stayed somehow in my memory.

    In the deserts of the heart
    Let the healing fountain start,
    In the prison of his days
    Teach the free man how to praise.

Give my love to your ancient relative!

Donagh O'Shea

  Dear Donagh,
…I'm very worried about my husband who is a recovering alcoholic. He's off the drink for 4 years now and he attends his AA meetings every Wed. and Sat. He was drinking heavily when I married him and we had a terrible life for nearly ten years - I won't go into it. It's great to have enough money now for decent clothes and proper food…. I read in a magazine that the Church has condemned AA. Is that true? If it is I can't understand it. Our life would still be hell only for it. I'm terrified that my husband will find out it's condemned and go back on the drink. He's very religious. How can it be wrong when it does so much good for people…? Can you tell me something about that document…? Theresa

    Dear Theresa, Thanks for your letter, and I hope you don’t mind that I shortened it to the above. The magazine was referring no doubt to a recent document from two Vatican bodies, the Pontifical Council for Culture and the Pontifical Council for Inter-Religious Dialogue, entitled "Jesus Christ, the Bearer of the Water of Life - a Christian reflection on the 'New Age'”. No, I can tell you straight away, it is not true that the document condemns AA or any of the twelve-step programmes such as Narcotics Anonymous or Gamblers Anonymous…. Notice that the document calls itself a "reflection", not a judgment or a condemnation. Thank God for that! - for it would be difficult to name any movement that has been even half as effective as these twelve-step programmes in helping people who are struggling with addictions.
    The one and only reference to these programmes is in a section entitled "Health: Golden Living," where it gives a list of about 25 so-called 'New Age' approaches to promoting holistic health. It includes the twelve-step programmes in that list. Attempting to describe these approaches, the document says, "The source of healing is said to be within ourselves, something we reach when we are in touch with our inner energy or cosmic energy" (2.2.3). Elsewhere the document says that New Age thinking involves the "rejection of the language of sin and salvation, replacing it with the morally neutral language of addiction and recovery" (2.4).
    If I could make just two points about this: 1. I doubt that any AA or Al Anon member could see in these phrases anything resembling their own or their family member's struggle for recovery. From listening to hundreds of AA members over many years I can say that what impresses me continually is their deep understanding of the need to hand over their lives daily to the 'Higher Power'. They come on their knees begging help from God. (The usage 'Higher Power', rather than 'God', was adopted by the founders of AA, not because they were vague about their faith, but because they wanted non-believers too to come to recovery.) 2. Alcoholics (and this may be true of other addicts too) are nearly always crippled with guilt; they have no doubt at all, deep down, about being sinners. They come to AA precisely because all their own moralising - and that of others - has failed to help them. In AA they begin to learn that there is not a simple equation between sinner and addict (even though all human beings are sinners); they begin to understand the nature of addiction and they begin to find some glimmer of hope for recovery. Many do recover. This is a way that works. It begins where preaching fails. All the themes of the AA and similar programmes are deeply spiritual, as anyone can see from reading the Twelve Steps. (I put them in as this month's "Wisdom Line", the last page on this site.)
    So, rest assured that AA is not condemned in this document. It's a pity that the twelve-step programmes were referred to at all. You asked for further comments on the document itself. It is written in a new style - almost chatty. It doesn’t quite come off, however. It appears rather gauche at times, probably because it is so new. I'm afraid the old style lies just below the surface! For example, "this is very much an 'either-or' situation" (6.1) is a reasonable translation of anathema sit! There are many similar examples. The document tries to get a handle on the New Age movement as such. It has to admit of course that this is less a movement than a cultural climate with very unclear boundaries. "The mere use of the term New Age in itself means little, if anything" (6.2), it says, and some things "are frequently labelled 'New Age' for commercial purposes" (1.4). Having said that, it goes on, surprisingly, to speak of it as if it did indeed mean one thing: "The gnostic nature of this movement calls us to judge it in its entirety" (4). No dialogue here! Only a box of answers! It calls itself "a provisional report," and "an invitation to understand the New Age and to engage in a genuine dialogue with those who are influenced by New Age thought" (1); it "does not aim at providing a set of complete answers to the many questions raised by the New Age" (1). Yet by pasting onto it the names of ancient heresies - 'Gnosticism' (2nd century), 'Pelagianism' (4th century), 'Quietism' (17th century) - it does indeed prejudice the case against it; name-calling is hardly a form of dialogue. Neither is it analysis: to say 'A is like B' is not to analyse A, because A is also in fact unlike B (inescapably so when A is 21st-century and B is 2nd-century). It admits that "the term New Age has even been abused to demonise people and practices" (6.2). The document itself, despite its own disclaimers, has many passages that are examples of just that.
    I think there is no substitute for going into each of the practices alluded to by the woolly term 'New Age' - painstakingly, one by one. When dozens of useful practices are put in the same bag with things like Satanism and sorcery, everything in the bag gets soiled. This is not the way to understand anything. In the 13th century the philosophy of Aristotle, as it came into the West in the translations of Islamic scholars, must have appeared to most Christians as a "deterministic" system, in that respect a little like Aquarian thinking. While some people went along with it uncritically, others condemned it out of hand, and others again went along happily with both (a position known as duplex veritas - 'double truth'), St Albert the Great and St Thomas Aquinas set themselves the much more laborious task of studying it in depth and painstakingly integrating much of it into Christian theology. There's no substitute for that labour.
    The situation is also like (and unlike!) that at the beginning of the 20th century. Then too the Church, under Pius X, had to take account of a new climate of thought. It named it 'Modernism', summarised it, formulated it in its own way, and condemned it with extreme violence of language, initiating what has been called "a Reign of Terror in the Church" that lasted fifty years. The present reaction, thank God, is very different. The manner is friendly, more humble, more human, often tentative, and the word 'dialogue' is used even if there is still a long way to go. But we're on the way….
    According to the Gospel, the way to judge something is by its fruits. "By their fruits you shall know them." I pray that your husband will continue with AA, which has already brought such blessings to your family.

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…. It occurred to me when I was reading something that we never hear about souls any more. I still remember when it was all about saving our immortal souls. But what I want to ask you is not about souls, it's about change. If saving our souls was so important then why isn’t it now? There are lots of other things too that we never hear about today…. Everything may look the same but it sounds different…. Is our religion changing? I know the pope is always trying to bring people back to the past, but is he succeeding? I’d like to talk to him for half an hour. Is it still the same religion? Could you give me some assurance that we weren’t fooled up to our eyes in the past? – or that we’re not being fooled up to our eyes now? T.O’C.

    Dear T., Thanks for your letter. Anyone can be deceived but only a fool can be fooled. No, you were not and are not being fooled: the proof of it is that you have kept your head and you are asking questions.
    Yes, the world is changing around us and in us. I'm writing this as I cross by ferry to Fishguard in Wales. Looking out at the sea (it’s very stormy) I ask myself the same questions, and the sea answers me. Yes, everything is changing continually; wave succeeds wave, taking our breath away at times; at times everything seems full of menace but at the same time aimless - the sea is going nowhere. I may think I know where I'm going, but the sea cares nothing about that. If I say that the sea is eternal, that doesn’t do much for me, somehow…. Especially not this afternoon on this boat: the storm is very unsettling. A storm doesn’t only upset the stomach, it upsets the head….
    [Later] The engines have stopped! There's silence from below decks. The captain spoke reassuringly a few minutes ago (that's a little scary!), saying very little, but he mentioned stabilisers. We are not far from Tusker rock, where an air disaster happened about 40 years ago…. I said to you that the sea is going nowhere. Now, we are going nowhere too!
    [Half an hour later] The captain was back on the air just now, telling us we’ve lost all power from the engines and we are drifting at sea. He said there’s a tug on its way from Rosslare to pull us out of the way of Tusker rock. Never been shipwrecked before…! There’s an odd correspondence between your question and my experience at this moment! The Church was called the barque of Peter, and many think it’s on the rocks! [I couldn’t have invented this!]
    [Later] It gets better! There are helicopters hovering overhead to haul us off if necessary, the captain said. I photographed one of them for the top of this page. I phoned my niece, who said, "We're watching it on TV! I hope you're enjoying it!" Shipwreck isn't what it used to be!
    [Later] They got one engine up and going again, enough to pull us out of danger of the rock. They're working on the others.
    [Later, on land] They eventually got three engines working. It was the engine cooling system that caused the problem. I was disappointed that we didn’t get hauled into the helicopter! It would have seemed very heroic, and my niece would be proud of me! Instead we came very slowly (8 hours instead of 3 and a bit) to harbour, but it had to be a different harbour, Pembroke instead of Fishguard. The passengers were very good-humoured; the announcement about helicopters was greeted with laughter of disbelief and then a chorus of mobile phones! As we disembarked, there was only one person in a nervous mood. But a man with a Dublin accent said to her, "Wouldn’t it be worse if it was a plane!" (We'd have been up there all day, as the story goes.) We were met by a TV crew and dazzling lights!
    I'm now in a B&B in Tenby. When I switched on the TV the first thing I saw was the story of our sea adventure! How quickly news travels nowadays: even news about nothing.
    I'm sure our adventure is full of analogies with the plight of the Church at the present time. You ask if our religion is changing. Yes and no! It is unchanging in the sense that it has never stopped changing: we are, and always have been, at sea! The Church is not the Kingdom of God, it's a means of conveyance to it. (I don’t mean that the Kingdom is only in the next life.) There has been a lot of play on the image of the Church as rock (the Rock of Peter), but I think it's better to think of it as the Barque of Peter. I'm reminded of a Scriptural passage. "A great windstorm arose, and the waves beat into the boat, so that the boat was already being swamped. But Jesus was in the stern, asleep on the cushion; and they woke him up and said to him, 'Teacher, do you not care that we are perishing?'' He woke up and rebuked the wind, and said to the sea, 'Peace! Be still!' Then the wind ceased, and there was a dead calm. He said to them, 'Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?'" (Mark 3:37-40). I'm sure the three gospel-writers who included this story were fully conscious of its application to the early Church. If it ever ceased to be applicable it is highly applicable once again. We have to keep on learning how to sail. People who are terrified of sailing stay on land; people who are terrified of change (In other words, life) cling to a rock. Why do many people ask nothing of God or Christ or the Church but safety? Why, because there has been such play on fear. But look at the words in this story: "Why are you afraid? Have you still no faith?" Fear and faith are contrasted here as opposites. Better to be at sea than to be filled with slavish fear. Quite often in the past when we spoke of saving our souls we meant saving our skin. The Lord is with us, even if he sleeps a lot! St Thérèse of Lisieux took great courage from this image: describing a terrible time in her life she said, "The Lord was asleep in my little boat, as usual."
    This reply is already over-long. Thanks for accompanying me on my shipwreck!


Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh…. I look at a lot of Christian stuff on the net and I'm surprized at how different it all is, I mean some of it is all fire and brimstone, and more of it is the very opposite. Is it the same Jesus they're talking about? Which of them is right, or are they all making it up? Please throw some light on this. Robert M.

     Dear Robert, Thanks for putting your finger on something very important. It's true to some extent that we all invent our own Jesus, but that's not so surprising: in a way we all invent our own world. Two people look at the same landscape: one loves it, the other hates it or is bored by it. Two people watch some event, and their accounts of it are often entirely different. What we like and dislike says something about ourselves; sometimes it's more about ourselves than anything else.
    Is there anything true then, you ask; is everything just opinion? No. I think the fact that we argue about something shows that we still believe that truth is possible. Imagine two people arguing, even bitterly, about something: they are far nearer to each other than two others who just shrug their shoulders. What looks like total disagreement is never quite that.
    Yes, we hear many different versions of the Gospel, and we are presented with many different kinds of Jesus. We are often asked to believe in a Jesus who belongs more in the Old Testament than in the New. Many fundamentalist Christian preachers, it seems to me, feel far more at home in the Old Testament. We can hope that we are all on a route (with many stages, and a slightly different Jesus at each stage) that will eventually lead us to the real Jesus.
    A great deal of ordinary Christian preaching presents us, I think, with John the Baptist rather than with Jesus. Repent and believe the bad news. Let's compare John with Jesus as they first appear in the New Testament.
    John the Baptist said the most awful things to his own people: he called them "a brood of vipers," and he said they deserved nothing but destruction. He came from the desert, where "he wore a garment made of camel-hair...and his food was locusts and wild honey" (Matthew 3:4). His message was equally rough: he didn't begin, "My dear brothers and sisters..."; he began, "Brood of vipers...!" (Luke 3:7). Could he be the Messiah, the Promised One, people wondered. Many thought he might be! This shows that they had no glamorised image of the Messiah. They expected a thrashing! God would burn up most of them up like chaff, John promised. This was a significant phrase: the Pharisees used to say that the common people were chaff - empty husks. John's words must have cut them to the bone.
    And still the people flocked to hear him! How is that? He must have been playing by accepted rules. Criticism is acceptable if it doesn't come too close. John was their theatre; he was the horror movie of his time. He was even dressed for the part! Parish missions with fire and brimstone, even in my lifetime, were greatly enjoyed by all. There was no TV then.
    Jesus came from the desert too, but he was much friendlier. He sat down to table with all kinds of people that the locals would call scum. He spoke of mercy and forgiveness and hope. He said that prostitutes would enter the Kingdom of heaven ahead of the pious (Matthew 21:31); he praised the faith of people of other religions and none: Samaritans, Roman centurions, the Syro-Phoenician woman.... This was clearly breaking the rules. They wanted their theatre (as we all do) to be safely 'out there': they went "out" to John the Baptist (Luke 7:26). But Jesus came in; he saw them from the inside; he didn't "play the prophet," as he was challenged to do (Luke 22 :64). He believed in them; he said of them, "The harvest is rich but the labourers are few..." (Matthew 9:36): in other words, he didn't see them as chaff (as the Pharisees did) but as harvest - ripe and full of life. He respected them; but because he got into their minds and saw what they were made of, they rejected him. He knew them too well; if their illusions were to live on, he had to die.
    It's strange: John was distant and scolding, and they accepted him. It's clear that he loved people less; he preferred to put the fear of God into them! Jesus was close and friendly and he was rejected. Human psychology is very strange.
    "Who are you?” the people asked John the Baptist. "How do you see yourself?" These are questions we ask one another to this day. But today we ask these questions especially of ourselves; today we tend to turn the searchlight inwards. 'Who am I?' 'How do I see myself?' In our complex world these are not trivial questions. There are many who are willing to offer us ready-made identities. Some of these identities are intensely tight-fitting: our world is full of cults and fanatical movements, secular and religious. Many look at you and don't want to know who you are; they see only the identity they would like to impose on you. We need to know where to find our real identity.
    "Among you stands one whom you do not know," said John, referring to Jesus. We do not know him because we cannot get away forever with imposing an identity on him - though we try all the time. Jesus the Catholic, Jesus the Protestant, Jesus the Baptist….
    Perhaps the real test is whether it's working for us. Jesus said, "The truth will make you free." Are we actually being set free? He said, "Love one another as I have loved you." Can we detect any signs of it? If we can we're on the right path. Keep going!

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh…. Would you care to say something about celibacy, a subject we hear a lot about lately.  Will there ever be married priests? I know a number of priests who would be much better off, I think, if they were married  -  happier and more relaxed….  I hope you don’t mind my asking…. Siobhán.

     Thanks for your letter, Siobhán, and I don’t mind at all  -  why should I? 
               Will there ever be married priests?  There are many already!  In the Catholic Church, celibacy is required only of clergy in the Latin Rite.  Catholic priests of the Eastern Rite are married, just like Orthodox priests.  The requirement of celibacy is a disciplinary rule, not a doctrine.  In other words, it could be changed without any retreat from doctrinal positions.  It came into force only from the 11th century, and it took several centuries to become widespread.  At the present time there are many former Anglican priests who became Roman Catholics and now minister as Catholic priests while remaining married.  The first such case was in the time of Pius XII, about fifty years ago.   At the present time you can find a married priest and a celibate priest working side by side in the same parish.  
In his recent Encyclical the Pope pointed out the absolute centrality of the Eucharist in the life of the Christian community.  But as Ray Lyons wrote in The Universe, “he did not seriously address the one issue that prevents over half the Catholic population of the world from partaking regularly in the Eucharist  -  the failure of the Church to provide enough priests to preside at the Eucharist and the other sacraments that flow from it.”  Many countries in South America, Africa and Asia have only one priest per 10 to 20 thousand Catholics.  Meanwhile there are many thousands of priests who left the ministry to marry, and who are not allowed to return  -  even though, as I mentioned earlier, there are many married priests (former Anglicans) active in the ministry.  This is the perplexing situation we are in now. 
The Church holds that the rule of celibacy is in keeping with, though not required by, the NewTestament.  The principles on which the rule of celibacy is based are that a celibate priest is able to serve God with more freedom and with undivided heart, “for the sake of the Kingdom”; and that celibacy is a higher vocation than marriage. 
I have to admit that I have always found these arguments unsatisfying and even puzzling.  Thinking is often shaped by buried metaphors  -  images that are not recognised as such and therefore no longer operate with the freedom of images.  A dead image creates clouds of confusion.  In this case, there is a tendency to talk about love/intimacy as if it were some sort of material substance that must be spread very thinly in one place if it is to be spread thickly in another.  It’s easy to see that someone might often be short of time if he mixes ministry with family life, but the argument for celibacy is not a practical one about dividing time; it’s about dividing the heart: i.e., love or intimacy.  When you look clearly you see that these are not lessened by being spread around: on the contrary, it is their very nature to spread.  It is not true at all that if you love a human being more you will have to love God less.  It is no more true than the other conclusion that follows equally: that if you love God more you will have to love human beings less.  
Marriage is a sacrament, celibacy is not.  It is therefore hard to see how celibacy can be a higher state of perfection than marriage.  The argument for celibacy as “asceticism and self-restraint” is not convincing.  I suspect that it is easier for a priest to be entirely celibate than for a married man to be celibate towards every woman except his own wife.  And only married people know the self-restraint that is required in marriage  -  celibates do not.  There has been a negative obsession with sex, and most of the arguments for celibacy have arisen from this, as I see it.
What is the remaining argument for it, then?  I think there’s a practical case for it in religious orders.  And there are individuals who have received a gift or charism of celibacy.  But beyond that, I don’t see any convincing arguments.  If celibacy is a gift (as is so often repeated in Vatican documents) there can be no arguments for it, any more than there can be arguments for the gift of prophecy or the gift of tongues; a gift is something that is beyond argument and necessity.  When we turn a charism  into a rule we are trying to order around the Holy Spirit.  The Spirit moves where it will.  I know several lay people who seem to have a genuine charism of celibacy, and I know several priests who do not  -  even though they are faithful to the rule. 
What will happen in the future?  God alone knows.  Celibacy should not be a battleground; we should listen more to the Spirit.  I am a member of a religious order myself, and whether because of age or grace I am content with my celibacy.  But I can't see how it is essential for a diocesan priest.  We need to do a lot of listening and reflecting and praying.  The key factor is the Kingdom of God, and what best serves to promote it. 
 
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…. I make a 6-day retreat every year… at the time I feel that it does me a lot of good. I always come away feeling great and convinced that I'm a changed person. But it only takes a cross look from my boss or a bit of misbehaviour from my son to put me right back where I started…. What can I do to keep the experience? I would love to be able to go back to it at will. Would spiritual direction help me? What would you advise? Mary H.

     Dear Mary, thank you for your letter. I don’t think that the value of a retreat depends on having and retaining some sort of special feeling. Feelings and experiences have their own importance at the time that they are 'live', but they come and go, like the weather. (In fact we use much the same language to describe inner and outer weather: depression, bright spells, etc.) But whatever the weather is like, life goes on. As people say, the retreat begins the day it ends. In other words the measure of its value is the way you are next day with your boss or you son or indeed with everyone and everything.
    The Christian life is about unconditional love. It would not be unconditional if it depended on having certain feelings and experiences. A small but interesting sidelight on this is the German word for 'unconditional': unbedingt. Ding means 'a thing'; unbedingt means 'un-thing-ed' (if there were such a word in English) - not tied to any thing. It is for all weathers. It is nice to feel close to God, but I may be even closer to God in times of desolation than at times when I feel wonderful. "The Lord is close to the broken-hearted," says Psalm 33. Many saintly people have experienced this, some with great intensity. "My suffering was severe," wrote St Thérèse of Lisieux, "but I must admit that, in spite of my tears, I felt a great peace deep down within me. Yet this inner peace did not prevent my feeling an immense sorrow. And Jesus was silent. He seemed to have left me and nothing revealed his presence to me. That day the sun dared not shine, and from the gloomy clouds…the rain poured down as I wept." (The inner and outer weather mirrored each other!) More recently many were surprised to hear that Mother Theresa suffered great inner desolation and uncertainty. In both cases, however, life went on, unconditional love went on.
    This opening up, this unconditional quality of love, doesn’t leave us. It is in us as God's gift, even if we manage only occasionally to bring it to the surface. Catholic theology speaks of 'infused virtue'. I love this. It tells us that our lives are not measured by our own weak efforts at self-improvement. There is something in us from beyond. It is an unconditional gift of God, and in us it doesn’t lose that quality, even if it is never activated. It is a permanent possibility. No matter what I think of myself I am capable of loving others as Jesus loves them. This is deeper than experience: I may never have experienced it, but I am still capable of it. It doesn’t go away when we forget, or when I act without it, or against it (unless totally and deliberately against). "We have the mind of Christ," St Paul wrote (1 Corinthians 2:16). We can talk about "the Christ-mind" as Buddhists talk about "the Buddha mind". We are members of Christ's body: we can talk about "the Christ nature". This is our birthright. We are never cut off from it. We often imagine that something has changed when only our thoughts and feelings about it have changed. We create a separation where none exists. This separation - this loss - is only in thought.
    Would spiritual direction help, you ask. It can be helpful to check things out with another person; we are not alone on our journey. Many people take possession of something only when they hear themselves claiming it. Don’t forget, however, that the other person has illusions too! And don’t allow yourself to be beguiled by the air of professionalism that some people give it. (One can even get a diploma in it!) Your 'spiritual director' is a companion on the journey, not an expert on your life. If he or she can help you to keep up your courage in bad times as well as good, that is something to be thankful for. But every person and thing in our life can be our 'spiritual director', in the sense that they can pierce our illusions and help us to discover the truth. We usually don’t learn much from pleasant situations - that's when we are coasting. The real journey is often through the difficult situations - that's when we learn our weakness, our dependence on God's grace, and the need to have a heart.
                God bless you on your journey, Mary.
 
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, Thanks for your website. I'm a regular visitor. I'd like to ask you something. As I get older I find myself thinking more and more about my sinful life. I never killed anyone of course but I wasn’t exactly what you'd call a very good Christian. I dwell on it a lot. I think a lot too about all the evil in the world today…. Could you say something about this? Mary M.

    Dear Mary, Thanks for your letter, and I hope you don’t mind that I omitted the detail and the many illustrations you gave.
    I think it's normal enough to look back, and since no one in this world has a spotless record, of course we see our sins. Our sins, like shadows, are more visible in the afternoon of our life. But we have to be careful how we focus on them: if we focus only on them they can bring down a gloom on the heart. When we think of our sins without also thinking of Christ, the picture is all darkness. We are all too prone to wallowing in guilt instead of bringing it to Christ. This wallowing is just another way of being attached to sin. St Augustine said that if you put your sins under your feet they will lift you up to God. The Pharisees were attempting to be perfect (and because that is impossible they were attempting to seem perfect), but Jesus was severely critical of them, while he befriended sinners in a way that was remarkable in his time. "As he sat at dinner in the house, many tax collectors and sinners came and were sitting with him and his disciples" (Matthew 9:10). Those people, outcasts of society, knew and admitted that they were sinners, and they were therefore open-hearted, unlike the others. They came to Jesus, while the others remained at a distance, criticising.
    Sometimes it's not easy to identify our sin in a practical way. There is just a vague feeling of being unworthy; it is like an unlocated pain; it is something more general than anything I could include in a list of sins. Such a feeling, left to work in us, saps our taste for God, it robs us of the energy we have for goodness. We should bring this too immediately to Christ. St Peter had to learn this, just like everyone else. His first impulse was the wrong one: "Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man" (Luke 5:8). But the Lord did not; he came, he said, not to call the virtuous, but sinners (Matthew 9:13). Read the story of the Prodigal Son: he is every one of us, including Peter. Our Father sees us when we are a long way off, "he is moved with pity, runs towards us, clasps us in his arms and kisses us tenderly, saying, 'This son of mine was dead and has come back to life; he was lost and is found'" (Luke, chapter 15).
    There is another useless sort of wallowing. It is when I become pessimistic about the evils of the world: war, violence in our cities, addiction, the emptiness of popular culture…. These are terrible evils, and in your letter you detailed many of them at length - as well as all the problems in the Church. But an abstract and hopeless preoccupation with them doesn’t do any good at all. If I am not actually doing something about them I am only spreading discouragement and bringing no light. It is like talking always pessimistically about the weather. Our faith is not sociology, nor journalism, nor even theology. It is faith, a word that means belief, confidence, trust. It is a positive and strong attitude that makes us want to move into action, not into discouragement. Our faith was known as "the Way" before it was known as "Christianity" (Acts 9:2). The way to follow the Way is to put a practical foot on a real path: help a neighbour, smile at a young person, do whatever lies within your capacity. This is harder than just thinking about failure. But in a true sense it is also easier.

God bless, Mary.
 
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh, would you please say something about the next life? It's something I think about more often lately, and a friend of mine is always raising questions about it. I get the impression that a lot of people don’t believe in it any more, and I don’t rightly know what to think of it myself. Thank you. James P.

    Dear James, thanks for your letter. I agree: one hears the question raised more often now than in the past. That is probably because many people have questions and doubts about it now who took it for granted before.
    What if I were to say that there is no next life? I'm serious in this sense: life is always in the present, never in the future. The future is not a life, it is only a thought. A recovering alcoholic was telling me recently about his drinking days. One evening in Belfast he entered a pub and to his great surprise he saw a notice over the bar that said, "Free drink here tomorrow!" He could scarcely believe his luck, and told himself that he must be sure to come back to this particular pub tomorrow. He did manage to find it again, and sure enough, there was the sign, "Free drink here tomorrow." The penny didn’t drop, and he asked the barman about this 'free drink'. "Yes, you're in the right place," said the barman, "come back again tomorrow!" Still the penny didn’t drop (alcohol does that to you). On his way to the next pub he passed a library and on an impulse he went in and asked for a dictionary. He looked up the word 'tomorrow', and it said, "the day after today." "That's pure madness!" he said. "There's no day after today! Every day that comes is today!" It was a moment of tremendous clarity for him; it went right to the core of his being and he never drank again. He had been sober for four years when I met him, and he had never slipped in that time. That's what I mean by saying that there is no next life.
    Tomorrow is created by the mind, as a way of postponing today. Think of all the gallant things we've promised to do tomorrow! Such promising gives us the impression that we have almost done the things, but we have done nothing but talk about them. Everything real exists in a tremendous Now. We tend to hide this from ourselves by the way we say things - even by the way we translate the texts of the Liturgy. "…And bring us to life everlasting," we say. In the New Testament the word is 'aionios', which should be translated 'eternal'. 'Aionios' does not mean life that goes on and on forever (what a nightmare that would be!); it means 'God's kind of life'. That of course is beyond our imagination, so we settle for something we think we know: time stretched out endlessly. You could say, then, that eternity is not a long time! It is not time at all: it has no duration. So what will happen at death? The mystics say things like: We will be united with God. We will be engulfed in an eternal Now. We will enter the ocean of life, not the drop-by-drop life we experience now. This is something we cannot think clearly about at all, because the very thinking process creates past and future - creates time. But that is by no means the end of it. If clear thinking alone could set our limits, then computers could live our lives better than we can. We have intuition, and passion, and feeling: we are human beings and we know life from the inside. Rational thought is an attempt to view it from the outside. That is a valid perspective in its own right, but it isn't the only one. It's a wonderful thing that people are no longer satisfied with pat answers about 'the next life'. They want to dig down deeply, and when they try to do that they find that it is the same question as the existence of God.
    For Christians everything regarding this is underpinned by the resurrection of Jesus. He trusted God so fully, he even lived his death so totally, that "God raised him up." "In him," says the Liturgy, "our hope of resurrection dawned."
    I hope you never have this question 'answered', James! An answer is a closing of an account. A question is an opening. To stay teasing this question forever is to stay searching for God. And may God bless your searching.
 
Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…. Can you tell me what the Catholic Church’s attitude is to politics, war, ecology, and other religions? …. I'd like to know what the inside story is about the Church and these subjects…. How much are we being told, what's the bottom line? So what do you say? …. Raymond G.M.

    Dear Raymond, You will be surprised, I suppose, to see your letter cut down to the above! It was a long list of questions rather than one question, and in an email to you I've tried to sketch in a few lines on each of them. For this site I picked out a single theme that seemed to run through your long letter: the question of inside/outside. Who has the inside story of our Faith? Who are the ‘insiders’ in our Church, and who are the outsiders?
    First we might ask: what is the inside or the centre of the Faith? Let me give you a remarkable quote from St Thomas Aquinas: “As Aristotle says, 'It is plain that each thing can be identified with its predominant characteristic.' Now it is the grace of the Holy Spirit, given through faith in Christ that is predominant in the law of the New Covenant, and in that its whole power consists. So before all else the New Law is the very grace of the Holy Spirit, given to those who believe in Christ." (Summa Theologiae, 1-2, 106, 1). It follows that anyone who has the grace of the Holy Spirit working in him or her is living in the very heart of the Faith, and consequently of the Church. No office in the Church carries any guarantee of actual grace in the person who holds that office. If you are more responsive to the Holy Spirit than the Pope is, you are more an ‘insider’ than he is. Then you will know the real inside story yourself, and the bottom line!
    It strikes me that we live in an inside-out world now. The private details of people’s lives are scattered around the street, so to speak - in the media. And meanwhile the life of the street has invaded people’s homes by way of TV: robberies, car-chases, murder…. This is a very radical change in consciousness. Popular culture hardly believes in any interiority at all. We have come to suspect any kind of inner life: it must be guilty if it is secret, we think. This wrecks a basic structure of human life: the right relationship of inner and outer.
    This affects the way we think about everything: even the spiritual life. What is faith if we see it only as the hidden ideology of a power-group? We need to experience things more deeply. As it happens, on another page of this site (Gospel commentaries) there were a few references to inside/outside: see October 14, 15 and 17 above. Think about these and about the gospel passages that go with them. Take a look too at the article in 'Jacob's Well'. When we talk about the Faith or the Church, I feel it is very important that we talk about them in a way that lets them be what they are.
    The Faith is not an ideology: the pagan centurion in the gospel had no religious ideology at all, yet Jesus said of him, “In no one in Israel have I found such faith” (Matthew 8:10). The Church is not just another political structure, it is the Body of Christ: “Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it” (1 Cor. 12:27). If you can get hold of a copy of the Catechism of the Catholic Church you would find it very useful, I think. Or you can find it on the internet.
    I hope this, along with the email, will be of some small assistance to you, Raymond. Keep the questions coming! A question is an opening, and through an opening something can come in. God bless the work!
 
Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh, Thank you people for your website. I often go to it and find it helpful. I wonder if you can give me some help with my son who is 24. I know that he has been messing with drugs but from what I hear from his friends he hasn’t been on heavy drugs and it isn’t very serious. Two of them told me this and I can believe them. His problem was finding money, they said. I can't separate these two things in my mind. I think it’s all one problem. But there’s another side to it now. He was approached by… [a religious group] who have taken him in hand. They seem to be trying to get him away from us and from his friends. I don’t trust these people, I'm fearful that they will only mess him up further. He’s easily led and I feel that these people have no interest in him for his own sake, they only want to recruit him…. What can I do without making it worse? Can you suggest anything? … May L.

    Dear May, thanks for your letter. I have met several people in similar situations and so I have some awareness of how you must feel. I share your apprehensions about that particular group, and I would be suspicious of anyone who offers to help you on condition that they can play with your head. He seems reluctant and yet constrained to go to their meetings, you said. There are many such groups that zoom in on vulnerable people, to recruit them. Help without hooks attached is a rare thing and we have to know where we are likely to find it.
    I gave a retreat recently to a group from Alcoholics Anonymous, and I am full of admiration for their programme. (I have to add that AA does not sponsor any activities such as retreats; very wisely it sponsors only AA meetings. The people who attended the retreat were individually AA members, but were not meeting as AA.) A zen master has said that AA has been America’s great contribution to spirituality: that while Spain gave us John of the Cross and Germany gave us the Rhineland mystics, America gave us AA. At any rate it is now a worldwide movement, and it has been extended to the management of other addictions: there are now many groups (such as Gamblers Anonymous and Narcotics Anonymous) under the general heading of ‘Twelve Step Programmes’….
    I have done some research and I am sending you information about NA meetings in your town. Your son will have to approach them himself: unlike the religious group you mentioned, these do not recruit members. Besides, they are interested only in supporting him in his struggle with addiction: in that sense they are a non-religious group. That leaves it to ourselves to decide what real religion is: playing with people’s heads, or helping people in a disinterested way.
    If your son needs help to extricate himself from that group, you can find all the information, the links and the help you need by looking in www.dci.dk , then click on the Irish flag. It's an organisation based in Denmark, with sister organisations in several other countries, including Ireland. It's an ecumenical trust supported by all the mainline Churches.
    I hope he can find all the help he needs at this time, and that he will choose his friends wisely. Sincerely, Donagh
 
Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

  Dear Donagh,
….I was in religious life for five years before leaving fifteen years ago. At first things worked out well for me. I got a good job and then I suppose it's not a bad marriage. It's not great, but I know lots of people who are worse off. We have no children and I suppose I tend to brood too much. It was so different when I was in religious life. I certainly didn’t have time to brood, and people were there for each other. My life now feels bleak at times, and I wonder if I've missed my vocation. I can never figure out why exactly I left. It wasn’t that there was anything wrong. I had some sort of greed for something more. I think I should have stayed where I was, but I feel guilty saying that, because there's the marriage. On the other hand I feel guilty about throwing away my vocation: it was something God gave me and I had no right to leave it. I'm caught between these two waves of guilt. Can you give me some advice? Geraldine

   Dear Geraldine, thanks for your letter. As I read it, I thought about the word 'vocation', but more so about the connotations that the word has gathered over time. The meaning of the word is quite clear: it is a call. But I think it has gathered a connotation of 'sentence'.
    I looked up the word in the OED, and this is the first definition given: "The action on the part of God of calling a person to exercise some special function, especially of a spiritual nature, or to fill a certain position; divine influence or guidance towards a definite (esp. religious) career; the fact of being so called or directed towards a special work in life; natural tendency to, or fitness for, such work."
    God's word and God's action are seen to have an absolute meaning: they do not depend on time or circumstance. When the rich young man asked Jesus what he should do, Jesus did not reply, "Well, what would you like to do?" Thus the idea of vocation seems to go beyond likes and dislikes. This makes it look like a sentence handed down by a judge, a life sentence in the case of a religious vocation. But a judge in sentencing is subject to the law he or she administers. The judge's word is not the law; the law is the law. But God is not subject to any law other than his own nature.
    Your call to religious life was not an eternal decree, like the call to holiness; it was a particular disposition of God's Providence towards you at that time. Whether or not you were wise to leave does not alter the fact that you are now a married person and God's Providence has never been withdrawn from you. "I have loved you with an everlasting love."
    There is a passage in Meister Eckhart's Talks of Instruction, alternatively entitled Counsels on Discernment, that contains a great deal of common sense in this matter. I would like to quote it at length for you.
    "Whatever good God has done and given in one way [of life], can be found in all good ways. For in one way [of life] you should take all good ways and not cling to the peculiarities of the way. For you must always do one thing, you cannot do everything. It must always be one thing, and in that 'one' you should take everything…. Choose a good way and keep to it, introducing all good ways into it and bearing in mind that it comes from God, instead of starting one thing today and something else tomorrow; you need not worry that you are missing anything. For with God one can miss nothing. With God one can no more miss anything than God can miss anything. So, take one way from God, and embody in it all good things" (no. 22).
    In that passage Eckhart is advising us not to jump around from one way of life to another, as if our salvation depended on getting the 'right' one. Everything that God can give you God gives you in your present way of life. You are wondering whether your departure from religious life was a betrayal of your vocation. I would be inclined to say: this very wondering is itself a sort of betrayal of your marriage. "God is a God of the present," Eckhart added. "As He finds you, so He takes and receives you, not as what you were but as what you are now."
    I'm quite certain that if you were in religious life you would experience bleakness too. This is part of any life. What matters is what we do with it. Don’t waste your energy on guilt: guilt that doesn’t lead to some practical measure is futile. If there is some kind of emotional 'scarcity' in your marriage, do what you can to remedy it, but also remember that scarcity is of great spiritual significance - often greater than plenty.
    I'm aware that this is simpler to say than to do. I beg your pardon if I have seemed presumptuous.
    God bless you now and always,

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

 Dear Donagh,
I have visited your website several times. One article - Falling Out of Love - I sent to my sister, she found it helpful and passed it to her friend too. So I send her address of your website. It is good to have an opportunity to ask an question and receive an open answer. Thanks for that. I try to find "my cardinal question" that I have been solving for very long time: Why should a person love her/himself? Where can he/she find reason for it? Sometimes I try to be perfect, but it does not work, does not bring love or happiness. When I fail "to be perfect" according to my images (ideas), I become unhappy and often self-destructive. It is such a sad circle. I know that love should be "without conditions", but for me that is only words, I cannot live it in reality. Something is wrong and I cannot see what. How can I get over it? I feel that the relation to myself affects all other relations. When I do not accept myself because of something I cannot accept others.
Things in my life can be black or white, nothing between. Such world is quite sad. I am judging the others and I fear their judgements and non-acceptance. Sometimes I feel that such a world is false, that I live in world of my images and prejudices. I keep hope that God can help me because He is Way, Truth and Life and because "the Truth will set you free". But I am afraid that if my image of love is wrong, my image of God is wrong too and I am blind and wrong. Sometimes I am tired and discontented by worshipping "my God". On the otherhand I believe that world is not only black and white.… Silvia

   Dear Geraldine, thanks for your letter. As I read it, I thought about the word 'vocation', but more so about the connotations that the word has gathered over time. The meaning of the word is quite clear: it is a call. But I think it has gathered a connotation of 'sentence'.
    I looked up the word in the OED, and this is the first definition given: "The action on the part of God of calling a person to exercise some special function, especially of a spiritual nature, or to fill a certain position; divine influence or guidance towards a definite (esp. religious) career; the fact of being so called or directed towards a special work in life; natural tendency to, or fitness for, such work."
    God's word and God's action are seen to have an absolute meaning: they do not depend on time or circumstance. When the rich young man asked Jesus what he should do, Jesus did not reply, "Well, what would you like to do?" Thus the idea of vocation seems to go beyond likes and dislikes. This makes it look like a sentence handed down by a judge, a life sentence in the case of a religious vocation. But a judge in sentencing is subject to the law he or she administers. The judge's word is not the law; the law is the law. But God is not subject to any law other than his own nature.
    Your call to religious life was not an eternal decree, like the call to holiness; it was a particular disposition of God's Providence towards you at that time. Whether or not you were wise to leave does not alter the fact that you are now a married person and God's Providence has never been withdrawn from you. "I have loved you with an everlasting love."
    There is a passage in Meister Eckhart's Talks of Instruction, alternatively entitled Counsels on Discernment, that contains a great deal of common sense in this matter. I would like to quote it at length for you.
    "Whatever good God has done and given in one way [of life], can be found in all good ways. For in one way [of life] you should take all good ways and not cling to the peculiarities of the way. For you must always do one thing, you cannot do everything. It must always be one thing, and in that 'one' you should take everything…. Choose a good way and keep to it, introducing all good ways into it and bearing in mind that it comes from God, instead of starting one thing today and something else tomorrow; you need not worry that you are missing anything. For with God one can miss nothing. With God one can no more miss anything than God can miss anything. So, take one way from God, and embody in it all good things" (no. 22).
    In that passage Eckhart is advising us not to jump around from one way of life to another, as if our salvation depended on getting the 'right' one. Everything that God can give you God gives you in your present way of life. You are wondering whether your departure from religious life was a betrayal of your vocation. I would be inclined to say: this very wondering is itself a sort of betrayal of your marriage. "God is a God of the present," Eckhart added. "As He finds you, so He takes and receives you, not as what you were but as what you are now."
    I'm quite certain that if you were in religious life you would experience bleakness too. This is part of any life. What matters is what we do with it. Don’t waste your energy on guilt: guilt that doesn’t lead to some practical measure is futile. If there is some kind of emotional 'scarcity' in your marriage, do what you can to remedy it, but also remember that scarcity is of great spiritual significance - often greater than plenty.
    I'm aware that this is simpler to say than to do. I beg your pardon if I have seemed presumptuous.
    God bless you now and always,

Donagh O'Shea

  Dear Donagh, I appreciate your website and I dip into it every so often.…
    I want to ask, why is everything so boring in the church? Boring people, boring bishops, boring masses, boring everything. How could this be what Christ wanted? Is it the same in other churches and religions? AO’D
   
Dear A, thanks for your letter. I hope you don’t mind that I shortened it so drastically. (I cut out the boring bits!!) What you say is true: there's an atmosphere of vast boredom in many parts of the Church today. It's likely that there are very many causes of this, not just one cause.
    Your question fans out to a wider question, and bear with me while I take a wider glance around. Boredom is a major fact of life in modern industrialised societies. This is a puzzling thing. How is it that in a world so full of exciting things and events we are now more subject to boredom than ever before? When I was a child we had a totally simple life, with none of the toys or amusements that children have now, and yet I never remember being bored. This could be a trick of memory, to some extent: it’s hard to remember emptiness. But I think it’s more than that. We had less expectation of novelty; a little of it went a long way. Children are able to create worlds out of almost nothing: a few sticks and stones become a house, a village, a world…. The world is very different now. But possessing more things doesn’t necessarily alleviate boredom; in fact it may even increase it. Boredom is about being unrelated to what I have; it's an emptiness of the heart. If I may put it this way: boredom, and its opposite (contentment), are not quantities but equations.
    Children's toys today are mostly finished products: the toy car looks in every detail like a real car…. There is no call for imagination. The child can relate to it only as an owner, and ownership does not fill the heart. Yes, he is allowed to press buttons to make it go, but pressing buttons is about indirect action, distance, non-engagement. It is not experience. D.H. Lawrence wrote, "The great and fatal fruit of our civilisation, which is a civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience, is boredom. All our wonderful education and learning is producing a grand sum-total of boredom. Modern people are inwardly thoroughly bored." He lived long before the invention of television and computers. What would he not say of us today?
    "A civilisation based on knowledge, and hostile to experience." When we in the Church try on this cap it seems to fit very comfortably! In a series of excellent articles in Spirituality a few years ago James Kelly described the aftermath of the 17th-century Quietist controversy. "The resultant condemnations… were the occasion and cause of the subsequent spiritual tragedy which Henri Bremond has dubbed the 'rout of the mystics'. Thereafter the whole interior, spiritual and mystical life was viewed as dangerous and held in suspicion within the Church…. Thereafter we witness the gradual rise of the external dogmatic institutional element within the Church until it almost subsumed the whole reality during the latter half of the 19th and the first half of the 20th century." (Spirituality,1998, # 20. See also # 21; 1999, ## 22, 23, 24).
    Yes, there has been a lop-sided emphasis on dogma, and it continues to the present. There are more 'theo-logicians' than theologians: the logos is not moving in them, but only the categories of logic. That bias is not limited to academic theologians; it is visible everywhere and at every level. Two years ago I read this in a liturgical calendar: "We are greatly helped not only by theological investigation but also by that heritage that is the lived theology of the saints." This one sentence stands out in my memory. So theology, it seems to say, is first and last; and the sanctified life is just an illustration of theology! Reflection is first, and only then (if at all) comes experience! But surely reflection by its very nature (and as the word implies) comes second.
    The deepest cause of boredom in the Church, I believe, is this endemic rationalism that fails to nourish the spirit or even the imagination. People are bored because the Faith is presented to them as a finished product (like the modern child's toy). All we are called to do is to declare it ours. "Let us stand to profess our faith!" (For contrast, look at the Rule of St Columcille in 'Wisdom Line',.)
    But the Spirit is always moving in the Church. There are so many new initiatives happening. For example, millions of Christians everywhere are discovering meditation and contemplative prayer. There are meditation groups everywhere I go; I marvel at the number of them. In Cork, where I live (a tiny city), there are at least 20 meditation groups. I have friends who are totally committed to the faith in a variety of practical ways. There are great things happening in the Church. Take a look, for example, at www.integritas.ie. This young married couple are dear friends of mine. The Spirit is moving in the Church. Learn where to look!
    It was said that religion is what you do with your solitude. You could also say it is what you do with your boredom. There is some sense in which we have to be empty if we are to receive. Boredom isn't all bad. What freedom would be ours if we could sit down sometimes with our emptiness (empty feelings especially) and see it not as something to be avoided at all costs, but as a purification and a clearing of space for something new to be born! In fact we would never come to anything new if we were afraid of emptiness; our whole lives would be only a rearrangement of what we already have.
    All these new initiatives need to be gathered in; they give life to the Church. Or rather, they are an expression of its life. That is the meaning of the word 'integritas' in my friends' new initiative in Co. Kilkenny. If left outside, a new initiative runs the risk of becoming unbalanced and elitist. There is always the danger of false separations: private versus public, informal versus formal, individual versus universal…. For balance, everything has to be gathered in.
         I hope this has been of some help, A. God's blessing!

Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

    Dear Donagh…. Now for my question. I belong for years to a prayer group in our parish and it has been a great support for me especially when I was having problems in my family. But now I don’t look forward to Tuesday nights any more. There's a bad atmosphere in it now. For the past two months there's a new member and she has changed everything. She's always correcting everyone, and she often accuses people of heresy. The worst was when she threatened to write to the bishop when another member prayed for the Church, saying there was too much suspicion of good people in it. We take turns leading the group, and everyone hates the job now. You can see they're not at ease. The spirit is gone. What do you suggest we should do? Sometimes I think we should ask her not to come, but then is that resisting the Spirit? Maybe there's something the Lord wants to tell us. I'd be glad of your advice. Lorna

    Dear Lorna, thanks for your letter. If it's any comfort to you, I know several people just like the one you describe. I'm quite sure the bishop knows even more! They seem to be on the increase. People like that are part of every bishop's cross.
    We could get very delicate about the Spirit and the danger of resisting the grace of the Spirit, but as St Paul wrote, "God did not give us a spirit of timidity, but rather a spirit of power and love and self-discipline" (2 Corinthians 1:7). You shouldn’t be afraid to confront someone who is destroying your prayer-group. Confronting doesn’t have to meaning quarrelling. You just need to face this person, out of love for everybody concerned (including her), and tell her that her interventions are not appropriate in this kind of meeting. Your group is a prayer group, not an inquisition. If she persists, you have every right to ask her not to return. If it comes to that, it would be useful if perhaps three of you were to ask to meet with her. Make it a formal meeting; that will give it more force and make it a little less personal. Better to do this than to let the group be wrecked and the person in question allowed to continue unchallenged and unchanged.
    Prayer groups are sitting targets for difficult individuals. Everyone there is so charitable that these people get away with behaviour that wouldn’t be tolerated anywhere else. There's no need to speculate about the motives of the person you mentioned, but there are people who just have tyrannical wills.
    If I may talk in general… you will see for yourself whether the following has any bearing on your situation.
    There are people who feel that they exist only if they are controlling everything around them. This is a malady of the will; I don’t know if it has been named, but we know it when we see it. The need for power in some shape or form is fundamental in human beings. Many people are damaged in that area: they may have been controlled in humiliating ways in their childhood, or they may have felt a need to fight for notice in their family, or they may have been treated unjustly at some key moment in their early life. If there is some problem in that area they will spend the rest of their lives playing power games. They hardly even notice it themselves, because it has become second nature. They have a hawk's eye for weakness in other people, sensing it instantly.
    Let's say such a person is in a prayer group! (I don’t want to presume anything about your woman!) When the group sits there singing "Melt me, mould me!" she is only too willing to oblige; and she will think she is doing the Spirit's work! If she is true to type she basically despises all such expressions of passivity, seeing them only as weakness. If the group tolerates her power game she will despise them all the more. Come to think of it, she can't be that powerful if she chooses such an easy target. What easier target is there in this world than a prayer group? Why doesn’t she get into local politics? In a prayer group people have let down their defences. What an invitation!
    So, to come back to your case. My word to you is that you don’t have to tolerate that person's onslaughts. You are not breaching Christian charity by telling her so. In fact you are more likely to be helping her, because you will do it kindly, no doubt. And kindness is not one of the rules of a power game. By being strong and kind at the same time you are confounding her rules, and it may lead her to an insight into herself.
    God bless the work!
    Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh, A million thanks for your website [etc.]…. Our parish priest is a dear old man, very sweet and a little doddery. He's a frequent visitor to our house. But I spotted him in town a few weeks ago… and he looked so quaint, so pitiful, so out of place in the crowd. He looked so different from the old man I've known for years - as if he had just stepped out of a very old photograph. Around the church and sacristy and even in my house he appears just ordinary, but on the street he really looked as though he belonged to another age, not this one. When I mentioned this to my husband he said, Yes, the Church is fading away. It makes me feel so sad. Why isn't there renewed vigour in the Church? Didn’t Jesus promise that it would last till the end of the world? [….] Helen M. G.

    Dear Helen, thanks for the kind things you said about us, and thanks for your letter.
I can see the old priest you describe: there are many like him, and I'll be like him myself in a decade or two if I'm lucky! In fact any elderly person looks a little out of it today, there's such a stress on youth and novelty and speed. Older people are going out of date and we should be given the consideration of a protected species! We just hope that before we die the world will have turned again to nostalgia, as it does by cycles, and then we'll feel very special. Have you seen that book, The Past is a Foreign Country? It illustrates how quickly things become nostalgia items nowadays: wind-up telephones, Button B, the music of the 60s…. Christians are always repeating that time is linear, not cyclic. But I wouldn’t rule out cyclic entirely! Linear time is for young people, who have too much energy. Cyclic is more restful!
     But to be more serious: is the Church fading away?
     Christians hold on to that last verse of Matthew's gospel: "Remember, I am with you always, to the end of the age" (Matthew 28:20). It is reassuring to know that Christ will always be with his disciples.
     But how reassuring is it? - or rather, what does it reassure us about? Does it reassure us that the Church organisation has always been just as we know it today, and will remain unchanged for all time? Of course not. Does it mean that no matter what we do we have the support of Christ? Of course not. It says only that Christ will be with his disciples till the end, he will not abandon us. This is no warranty against change and decay. Everything in this world is changing and passing away - and we too. In fact if there wasn’t breath-taking change in store for his disciples, Christ would not have had to reassure them that he would be with them always. It is when ships are pulling out of port and heading into the high seas that people say such things. The Christian faith does not promise to protect us from change - even though many cling to it as if it did precisely that. Those early disciples led turbulent lives and many of them met violent deaths. Yet he was with them throughout it all. "Jerusalem (which means 'city of peace')," wrote Tauler, "was a place of true peace but also of trouble." Indeed Christ promised those disciples that they would have trouble (John 16:33).
Christian piety often tak     s the sting out of it and tames Christ, turning him into pure sweetness. Repository art and sentimental piety conspired to take all the challenge out of his teaching. Then gradually all this sweetness went flat. People's palates couldn’t take it any more. "Thou hast conquered, O pale Galilean; the world has grown grey from Thy breath," wrote Swinburne, quoting, I suppose, Julian the Apostate. The Church has the grey face of depression at present. We have grown grey - but not from Christ's breath. There was nothing pale about him, and his breath was the Spirit of God. We have grown grey because a former style of spirituality has faded away and we are only beginning to learn a new one. Moreover Church teachers, by and large, are not offering any realistic help, concentrating instead on condemning new movements, while a) trying to revive an old style and b) presenting the teaching of Christ as a controlling ideology. Many don’t wait around to experience the liberating impact of Christ's "new creation" (2 Corinthians 5:17, Galatians 6:15).
     Is the Church fading away? A particular way of being Church is fading away - as everything in the world is fading away. What we do know is that Christ is not dead. He is risen. He is with us. He is still breathing. He is breathing his Spirit. But what that Spirit is calling us to - or dragging us into - only God knows! "God, who searches the heart, knows what is the mind of the Spirit" (Romans 8:27).
     Courage, Helen, we are all dying out! The Christian way to say it is: we are dying with Christ and rising with him. Whether we look old and sweet and doddery, or young and exhausting, it doesn’t really matter much. A wise friend of mine used to say, "Everything matters, but not much!" It's not about appearances, anyway. In winter there's no appearance of life on the surface of the earth, but life is there all the same, deeply hidden. There will be a new Springtime, in God's time.
    Donagh O'Shea

[If you would like to put a question, send it to sidom@eircom.net ]

Dear Donagh,

....I try to meditate with reasonable regularity, but I find it hard to stay at it, to stay motivated. Any tips? Micheál O'S.

Dear Micheál, Thanks for your letter. It's always a pleasure to get a question on meditation, because it's the easiest subject in the world to write about! Doing it, though, as you know well, can be a different matter.

Here's my first tip: regularity is the key. If you do it regularly - I mean every day - it stops being a burden after a while; it becomes a natural part of your day, and you would no more want to drop it than you would want to drop breakfast or brushing your teeth.

Which is more natural, to meditate or not to meditate? Until I can say it's more natural to meditate than not to meditate, it will remain a burden, something I have to motivate myself to do. We give reasons for things that we consider optional. But what are your reasons for breathing? What are your reasons for sleeping? For eating? For doing anything that it normal and natural? We don't need to give ourselves reasons for doing those things. On the contrary, we would need to have very good reasons for not doing them. "To seek aright is easier and more natural to us than breathing," wrote the 17^th-century French mystic, Jeanne-Marie Guyon.

If you commit yourself wholeheartedly to a practice of meditation, you will no longer need reasons for doing it; you will need reasons for not doing it. I find I have only a limited belief in reasons! Reasons can be shifty things; the mind is very clever and can just as readily find reasons for doing the opposite. When you hear a lot of reasons you sense some kind of reluctance. There is nothing wrong with the rational mind in itself, it is one of God's gifts to us; but it has a habit of taking itself to be the only source of wisdom. Then it tries to impose its edicts, and this makes you a divided kingdom: part of you wants to meditate and the parts that haven't been consulted don't. This is the root of all that resistance. The mediaevals thought of the human faculties as a kind of body politic, with reason as ruler. Very well, but if the fundamental image is ruling and politics, then what you get is politics all the way through. The faculty of will then becomes, what, the army; and all the other faculties are under suspicion of being dissidents and subversives! No, keep politics outside the skin! (Think of reason, if you must, not as a separate 'faculty' but as the clarity of all the 'faculties'.)

In the past people used to marry for reasons, but the reasons had to evolve into something less political and controlling if the marriage was to be a true marriage; you couldn't spend a whole lifetime married for reasons. Likewise meditation. I think of commitment to meditation as a sort of marriage. If you take it up, it has to be "for better, for worse; for richer, for poorer; in sickness and in health, until death do us part." Like marriage it has to penetrate the ego, and our rationality is so used to being in the service of the ego that we have to treat it with some suspicion and look for surer footing in a wider place.

               I hope this doesn't dishearten you in any way, Micheál. My intention is the opposite. When I say our commitment must be wholehearted I don't mean that we should meditate all day! I mean that if we meditate even for just five minutes, we should do it wholeheartedly. This makes it easier, in fact. A lot of energy is drained away by reluctance and indecision: dawdling is exhausting, as well as being a complete waste. Rather than waste your energy in that way put it into meditation. Then you may find that you are able to meditate for half an hour, or an hour, or even much more!

               More natural to meditate than not to meditate? Yes, when you are doing nothing, do nothing. We have all the means of filling empty spaces today: TV, CDs, DVDs, computer games, a bewildering variety of magazines, piped music in supermarkets and churches.... It indicates how terrified we are of silence. It's not natural, it's a neurosis. It is more natural to meditate than not to meditate.

This thought also protects you from a very insidious temptation in religion: the feeling that you deserve brownie points for doing good. You have been a good boy, obeying the ruler reason, and you deserve a treat! But good is its own reason and its own reward. "If you ask a good person, 'Why are you doing good?'" said Meister Eckhart, "he [or she] will reply, 'For goodness' sake!' 'Why do you love God?' 'For God's sake!'"

               My second tip: join a meditation group if possible. These usually meet only once a week, but it's a support structure for your daily meditation. You may have some searching to do before you find one that's right for you. Meditation is counter-cultural, so we need some support to stay with it. If you don't find one, you can still create a structure for yourself - by meditating always at the same time and in the same place.

               Bail ó Dhia ar an obair! God bless the work!

Donagh O'Shea

Dear Donagh…. I went to see Mel Gibson's film, The Passion of the Christ, and I came out with very mixed feelings.  I still don’t really know how I feel about it. I was moved at certain moments of the film, but my overall feeling was revulsion.  Then I thought, This is more or less how it was in reality.  We've made our religion just cosy and we needed to be shocked to our senses…. What do you think?  Julie

Dear Julie, I had mixed feelings about it too, and I believe that many people have.  On the one hand, this film, like all works of art, is entitled to have its own angle on things.  Even the four gospels have four different angles on the life and death of Jesus!  On the other hand, the art in question is photography, and a photograph, as Roland Barthes put it, is "not distinguished from its referent [what it refers to]," so it appears to convey a scene or an event "as it really happened."  In other words it appears to have a greater truth-claim than any other representation.  It appears to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.  But not even in a court of law, where people are sworn to it, do you hear that; every case would last forever. 

               This film, then, is a choice of what to tell.  What is tells is brutally clear: every detail of the torturing to death of Jesus.  What it leaves out is vast.  Above all, it leaves out the meaning of that death.  What is human suffering without its meaning?  It is animal suffering.  It has then the same meaning (whatever that is) as the suffering of a deer brought down by a lion, a worm eaten by a bird.  It makes no sense to isolate the suffering of Jesus from his preaching.  It makes no sense to omit all accounts of what attracted the crowds to him and what stirred the hatred of others.  Before you have "the lamb silent before its shearers," you have all the discourse of Jesus  -  the words that give meaning to his silence.  And before you heard about his suffering you had heard who he was: the Son of God.  It is not sufficiently clear in the film that the meaning of all this suffering was incorruptible love.  Furthermore, in this film, effectively you hear nothing of the resurrection.  Jesus makes a brief reappearance, true, but it is represented as a solitary event, a thing in itself, out there; it is not a disclosure to a believer or a group of believers.  There is no new community born from his passion and resurrection. 

               Shorn of before and after, what can all that pain mean to a cinema-goer?  It could be argued that cinema-goers are expected to bring the context of faith with them.  But that is too much to expect.  Besides, it is a film, not a liturgy.  What it offers is more of the same, it is what people have become used to on TV and in the cinema.  Recently in California a primary school-teacher was sacked from his post for recommending the children to see this film, though it has an "R" rating.  He defended himself by saying, "In this age with all the violence we see, the violence is not too much."  Our sensibility has been brutalised, and if this film is remarkable it is because it has increased the dose.  Since the suffering of Jesus has been prised out of its own context, it will inevitably find a new one: in the psychology of the viewer.  There is every possibility that many viewers, vague on the faith of Christians, will enjoy it as they enjoy Kung Fu films or the Sopranos, or indeed any kind of violence.  There may not be a high proportion of sado-masochists in a society, but there are very many now with a streak of it.  On the other hand, if the suffering is not embedded in any new meaning, then it is just Kafka-esque. 

I feel especially uneasy about the enthusiasm that many right-wing Christians have for pushing this film.  It seems to answer to a violence in themselves.  In contrast to this the gospels are very nuanced and low-key, stressing above all the profound freedom that Jesus displayed throughout his suffering: "No one takes my life from me, I lay it down of my own accord" (John 10:18).  Throughout, Jesus is a hero, not a victim. 

               Another thing occurred to me: if there is no background of debate with the scribes and Pharisees and chief-priests, not only is the death of Jesus detached from its meaning, but these people too are refused a chance to have their say.  They had a point of view that made perfect sense to them, but the only one allowed them in the film is pure hate.  It is not so surprising that the film has been called anti-Semitic  -  particularly when you see the Roman governor Pilate transformed almost into a sensitive soul.  

               The best-balanced comment, I think, was from the archbishop of Paris, Cardinal Lustiger.  "We Christians live in the world of sacrament.  At every Eucharist we are in touch with the full mystery of Christ's passion and resurrection.  It is not given to us in the form of a spectacle to watch, but as an act of God's life-giving power.  Visual representation…touches our feelings very deeply, and our imagination, but it can be highly ambiguous.  I don’t say it is bad.  Everyone has his or her own preferences, but I prefer the icon to a photographic representation of an actor playing the role of Christ.  And I prefer the sacrament to the icon.  It is more helpful to my prayer-life, and to others too, I think." 

Dear Donagh, I'd like to hear what you have to say about suffering.  The reason I ask is that a dear friend of mine has been going through hell for the last few years, one thing after another…. There’s no problem getting through to her.  She talks to me a lot about it, not complaining or anything  -  she’s not like that  -  but just sharing.  The other day she said something that scared me.  She asked me if I thought they were being punished by God for something.  That way of thinking would be completely foreign to me, but I didn’t know exactly what to say, other than that.  Could you suggest a few things I might say to her if she brings this up again?  Thanks for your site.  I'm a regular visitor.  Patricia

Dear Patricia, thanks for your letter and, if it’s for me to say so, for your concern for your friend.  As it happens, someone else asked this very question recently.  Without a doubt it’s one of the oldest questions in the world.  It was put to Jesus a few times.  "’Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents, that he was born blind?’  Jesus answered, ‘Neither this man nor his parents sinned; he was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.’” (John 9:3; see also Luke 13).  This was a novel approach at the time.  For centuries the attitude of people in the Old Testament was that suffering was a punishment for sin.  Incredibly you can still hear some fundamentalist Christians repeating it, along with its corollary: health and wealth are signs of God's favour.  This so-called ‘gospel of wealth’ isn’t gospel at all.  For one thing, only a wealthy person would ever be likely to proclaim it.  It’s not news to anyone; it’s just the way of the world.  Jesus's teaching is entirely different. 

               But even mainline Christians hang onto the idea of suffering as punishment.  Take the Catholic doctrine of Purgatory.  The penny catechism described it as “a place or state of punishment where some souls suffer for a time before entering heaven.”  This, even though the word ‘purgatory’ itself means ‘purification’.  [See a previous question on Purgatory on this website.]  We should see suffering in this life too as purification.  In the traditional phrase, this world is the place of soul-making.  If we can suffer gracefully, without complaint or blame or self-pity, our suffering is a path to God. 

               There is no ‘answer’ to the question why we suffer.  What is an answer?   -  an arrangement of words to satisfy the mind’s need for a clear picture.  Answers are important in many situations (especially when our suffering is self-induced) but they never fully satisfy a person who is suffering deeply.  We should speak instead (I believe) about a response to suffering.  Christ is God's response to our human situation.  God could not stay at a distance from our suffering: the Word became flesh in Christ and lived among us, not just tasting our chalice of suffering but drinking it to the dregs.  Then God raised him from death in “the surprise of the Resurrection”.  It was a surprise  -  an act of the Father’s gracious will  -  not an answer or a solution. 

               The Father’s work was revealed in the Resurrection of Jesus.  These were the words that Jesus used of the man born blind.  “He was born blind so that God's works might be revealed in him.” 

               The Cross of Christ is the central icon of our Faith.  When we suffer we look at it and stay by it, or cling to it.  Through the centuries Christians have known just this alone.  The Desert Mother, Amma Syncletica (3^rd  or 4^th century), said, "Those who put out to sea sail at first with a favourable wind.  Their sails spread out.  But later the winds become adverse.  Then the ship is tossed by the waves and is no longer controlled by the rudder….  So it is with us…we hold to the Cross as our sail and so we can set a safe course."

               The best we can do for one another in talking about suffering is to pass on the wisest things from the tradition that we have found.  Here, for example, are a couple of lines from Henry Suso (14^th century): “Suffering makes a wise and experienced person.  Those  who have not suffered what do they know…?   All the saints are on the side of the sufferer; for indeed they have all tasted it before us, and they call out to us with one voice that it is not a poisoned chalice but a wholesome drink.” 

               But you have something even better to offer your friend, Patricia.  You can be present to her directly  -  as you have been.  You are already doing the best that we can do for one another.  It is even the best that God can do for us. 

               God bless.

               Donagh

[control freak]

Dear Donagh,

               ….I had a row with my daughter a couple of months ago and we said hurtful things to each other that we both now wish we hadn’t said. Later that day we made up but you can't unsay things you said, and we have had to do a lot of mutual reassuring since then. The thing that won’t go away is that she called me “a control freak” that day, and I've been waiting but she has never taken it back. She is not ungenerous, and I feel that the reason she has never taken it back is that it’s true, or that she thinks it’s true. She’s a good girl, sensible in her way (she is 17), and I should trust her more. My fear now, strange to say, is as much for myself as for her. I want to be someone she can turn to later on when she is married and rearing her family, but if she sees me as a control freak she will tend to hide from me rather than confide in me…. Can you suggest anything for a control freak?! Miriam

Dear Miriam,

               ‘Control freak’ is very strong language, and it might suggest that this condition is rare - freaks are a rarity in nature. But instead I think it’s quite common, even normal. I was with a family the other day where there is a 2-month-old baby, and the mother’s behaviour towards the baby could be described as that of a ‘control freak’ - but the word ‘freak’ would be entirely inappropriate there. If our mothers weren’t totally intent on our wellbeing during the early stage of our life we might not have survived. So don’t consider yourself a freak for wanting to control what happens to your daughter.

               Of course your daughter is now more than 200 months old! There are lots of things she can do very well for herself, and lots of other things that she can do badly. But how do we learn to do anything? By doing it badly! How did she learn to walk? By walking badly at first. How did she learn to talk? By talking badly. If you had never allowed her to walk or talk until she could do them perfectly she would still be unable to do them. I know of course that you are fearful she will get hurt in the wicked shallow world of pop culture. You have every reason to be afraid of that. But you cannot isolate her from it. You can foster her inner strength and self-confidence; these are the things that will bring her safely through it. And you can be the one she confides in when she is hurt and confused. But, as you are so aware, she will not do that if she sees you as over-controlling.

               Your question was about yourself, not about your daughter. You want to trace the source of your urge to control. In fact you have done so already, in your letter. It is fear. Fear is a very powerful instinct - perhaps often the most powerful. It creeps in everywhere, not only into our weaknesses but into our strengths. It makes us cling, even when that is against our best interests, as in the case of a drowning man. You can already see the reaction in your daughter. It doesn’t follow from this that you will now find it easy to release your hold and give her freedom in wise measure. I don’t know if there is anyone who can tell you how to do that. You have the grace of motherhood, which I don’t have. You just have to rely on it; it’s your source of wisdom.

Here’s my suggestion. Distinguish your mothering from your fear. Think about them separately. If you use a journal, write extensively for yourself about each of them, separately, keeping in mind to distinguish them and keep them apart. This is not easy. But it is essential work. Later, you can bring them together and see how fear is interfering with your mothering.

Fear is not only a powerful instinct but a subtle one. It knows how to disguise itself, and you have the job of unmasking it. You could ask yourself, for example, why you want your daughter to confide in you later on. Any mother would want that, I'm sure, but in your case could it be a need to control her through the years ahead? Only you can say, when you look very carefully and for a long unhurried time.

If you don’t control your fear, it will control you, and through you it will try to control your daughter. You have to break the cycle. You can help yourself to control your fear by looking carefully at it. Where does it come from? It is a natural instinct, but it is not enough to say that. You have to see in detail how it works in you, where it comes from, what activates it, what you typically do when it comes at you….

If you look at the archive list under ‘Jacob’s Well’ on this site you will find two articles, ‘Fear’ and ‘Fear and Faith’. And in this month’s ‘Wisdom Line’ I used a passage from the Lebanese Christian writer Kahlil Gibran. These may be of some help to you.

God bless the work!

Donagh O'Shea

  [Eithne: Creation]

Hi, I was wondering if you could answer this question, as it has been on my mind a lot, and an explanation would help enormously. We know creation came into being a long time ago. Can you explain to me what is meant by 'creation' as told in Genesis?  To what creation does it refer? Thank you for your patience.  I'm sure you are very busy,  and the answers given in the other page are very full and thought-provoking. But some sort of clue as to what it means would help. Eithne

Dear Eithne, Thanks for your email. The word ‘genesis’ means ‘origin’, and the creation story in the Book of Genesis is about the origin of everything - the whole caboodle as they say. It is a question that almost every society and almost every human being asks sooner or later: why is there something rather than nothing? It is the easiest and the hardest of all questions: easiest to ask, hardest to answer. Even when we try to trace the genealogy (same word as genesis) of our own family we become quite vague after a while: how much does the average person really know about the life and times of, say, their great-grandparents? How hard then to say anything about the origin of the whole universe! But it is a question that doesn’t go away, even when we become impatient with it. We might give ourselves the ‘Shut up and eat your cake’ answer, but the question never stops coming back. (A child on a tram with his father. The child says, “Daddy, what makes the tram go?” “The wheels make it go, son.” After a while, “Daddy, what makes the wheels go?” “The engine - the engine makes the wheels go.” Then, “What makes the engine go?” “Well…the electricity.” After a pause, “Daddy, what's electricity?” “Shut up and eat your cake!”)

               People of all times have looked up at the night sky and wondered just what it all was and what it was all about. I remember a Neil Diamond song that was just a long random list of names of people from every period of history, ending with the lines, “Each one there / Had one thing to share: / They all sweated beneath the same sun / Looked up in wonder at the same moon / And wept when it was all done / For being done too soon.” Our own lives seem fleeting when we look at the big picture. Wonder will never cease.

               Astrophysicists take us quickly out of our depth, and they are humble about being out of their own depth. Parts of the Book of Genesis are thought to go back to about 1000 BC, and to rely on much earlier traditions. The lives of those people must have been unimaginably different from ours, but they too “looked up in wonder at the same moon.” They were not astrophysicists and their way of looking at the world was religious, not scientific. They had profound insights into the mystery of God and the meaning and destiny of human life and the world. These insights were dimmed by misunderstanding on the part of many Christians in the past (and some even in the present) who took them to be literal accounts of creation that ought somehow to be ‘proved’ by science. This would now be seen by the great majority of Christians as a bizarre view, even though it was common into the 20^th century.

               The Genesis story of creation (actually there are two in the Book of Genesis) is that God created the world in six ‘days’. It is obvious that we cannot take this literally, because the sun was created only on the fourth day; how could there be a literal day before there was a sun? Some people have suggested that a ‘day’ meant an ‘aeon’, an age. But this is to strain the thing while still missing the meaning. The works of the first four days are works of division: light is divided from darkness, the waters above from the waters below, the land from the sea, and day from night. All of this is about order and meaning. They see the world as fundamentally ordered and reliable. Throughout the work God looks at what he has made and declares that “it is good.” This declaration is repeated six times in the first chapter of Genesis. The sixth time, “God saw everything that he had made, and indeed, it was very good” (1:31).

               These are fundamental affirmations about God and the world. There is only one God, ‘Yahweh’, who is the source of all that is. Every existing thing depends on God for its existence, while God depends on nothing. The Chaos from which God made things is not a separate and personified power, as in other Near Eastern creation stories. God is supreme over creation, and creation is good, not evil. Creation is accomplished by a spoken word, not by victory over some mythical monster.

               The creation of human beings is of particular interest to us of course. "Let us make humankind in our image, according to our likeness….So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them” (1:26-27). That is an affirmation that does not date; and notice that male and female are on an exactly equal footing as images of God. In the second Genesis account of creation (chapter 2), God said, "’It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner.’ So out of the ground God formed every animal of the field and every bird of the air, and brought them to the man to see what he would call them…” But still his heart was empty, so God made a partner for him who was “bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." She alone was his equal. There is a play on words here that is providentially repeated in English. The Hebrew word for man is ‘ish’, and for woman ‘ishah’. They are the same and yet a little different, like the words ‘man’ and ‘woman’. This from the Bronze Age, but it is still a live issue in the Space Age!

               One last point: “God formed man from the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and the man became a living being” (2:7). The story affirms the divine element in human beings, the breath of God by which they live. The word ‘spirit’ comes from ‘spirare’, which means ‘to breathe’; spirit = breath. In the New Testament there is an echo of this detail of the Genesis story. Jesus appeared to the disciples after his resurrection and “he breathed on them and said to them, "Receive the Holy Spirit” (John 20:22). They are, as it were, created anew; they have a new and deeper intimacy with God.

               I hope these few remarks will be of some help to you, Eithne.

               Donagh O'Shea

Donagh O'Shea