Guardian angels

Have you ever used the expression: “I don’t know what got into me!”?

We say that when we do something that surprises even ourselves.

That expression describes perfectly where the idea of angels and demons came from. We humans find ourselves doing things that we did not plan to do, we did not expect to do, we could not even imagine ourselves doing.

I would put the experience in different words: we human beings find ourselves following an unexpected script.

All of our behavior follows familiar patterns. We could call each pattern a script. We get a script in our head and we play the role. This is so common that in sociology the concept of role is one of the most central concepts. The term “role” is a term taken from drama, from the stage. One of the most famous sociologists in the not too distant past, Erving Goffman, made his reputation by exploring the extent to which our behavior is like the behavior of actors on a stage.

We get our scripts from daily experience, beginning from our earliest childhood. We also learn scripts from hearing stories about other people. Some of the scripts are good, such as the stories of lives of the saints, and some are bad, such as stories of robbery and murder.

For some reason, we occasionally find ourselves playing scripts or one kind or the other without consciously choosing to play that script. It is as though some outside force has “gotten into us” and caused us to do things we never expected to do. The script could be good or it could be bad. We describe the experience by saying that an angel touched us, or that a demon touched us.

Christians and Jews have insisted that God is the source of good scripts in our lives. In the Old Testament, passages often talk about an angel in one verse and God in the next verse, so that you cannot distinguish God from an angel. The authors wanted to describe how closely God was involved in a situation, but then they were afraid of making God too human-like, so they switched over to the language of angels.

The language of guardian angels is another way of expressing our belief that God is involved with us in loving ways, guiding us from day to day. God is involved with each one of us in a loving way.

In some passages of scripture, each nation has a guardian angel. Nations do follow scripts. Some of the scripts are good and some are bad.

For example, what is happening in Syria these days can only be described as some demon taking control of the whole country. Syria’s leadership has been following an evil script, with the result that millions of people have been driven from their homes, thousands have been killed, and no one can see a way out of the situation.

We Americans believe that an angel must have been operating in the beginning years of our country, when the colonial leaders somehow came up with a political system that has resulted in immense good. Those men and women somehow followed a script that no one could have predicted, because no one in history had ever experienced such a script before.

So today, as we celebrate a feast entitled “Guardian Angels,” we are celebrating the closeness that God has to each human being. God’s love surrounds us, envelops us, sometimes keeps us from falling into dangers that also surround us.

My earliest experiences of prayer took place by my bedside, where there was a picture of a child crossing a wooden plank with a crack in it, so that the child was about to step into the crack. But an angel was behind the child, watching over the situation, guarding the child from that danger. That is how close God’s love is to us.

We know of course that we do not escape all dangers. We do fall through cracks and we do get hurt or even killed. Evil is a reality. The story of Jesus—the script of Jesus’ life and death that we Christians follow—has a loving ending even when the early parts of the script include suffering and defeat and death.

In the garden of Gethsemane Jesus said that he could have had thousands of angels coming to his rescue. But only one came, carrying a cup, which Jesus freely took and drank. That script is our script too. 

God loves us, each of us. We each have a guardian angel.

Spiritual but not religious

Surveys tell us that more and more people in the U.S. describe themselves as "spiritual but not religious." What does that mean?

Sociologists have observed for a long time that we are a very individualistic people. Being spiritual but not religious fits that characteristic perfectly. Being spiritual means that my story is just my own. I am not part of a larger sacred story. Being religious means that my story is part of the story of a larger community. The word "religion" comes from a Latin root meaning "tied together."

Being spiritual but not religious means that I am floating free of a story that ties me to others.

That seems fine when you are young, and when you are putting distance between yourself and the people who have "raised" you. But as we get older, I think we appreciate more the importance of being tied in to larger stories.

I join a small group of people every weekday for Mass. That ritual ties us together as a group. Most of those people are of retirement age, as I am. The ritual also ties us very much to the story of Jesus. We use bread and wine the way Jesus used it at the Last Supper, so that the bread and wine are the physical presence of the story of Jesus, just as Jesus' physical body was the presence of his story when he was among his disciples. (This is how I like to interpret the theological term "transsubstantiation.")

So the ritual of the Mass very much ties me to a whole range of stories. I know who I am, and I feel very comfortable knowing that.

As the spiritual but not religious people continue through their lives, I predict that they will begin to look for connections to some larger story that will tie them to other people and to God. I would think it would be a fearful thing to be in the presence of a living God all alone. If you think it is just fine, maybe you don't know God very well.

You will say, Jesus taught us that God is like a loving parent. But good parents set boundaries for children. A parent who sets no boundaries ends up with a child running all over the place not knowing who he or she is or what he or she might do well or do poorly. And a good parent reacts in a life-giving way when the child violates the boundaries, as we all do, as children and as adults. The most important boundary that this loving God sets for us is that we approach God with others, as people who love others and are involved with others, especially as those others are involved with God.

I like the psalms because they remind me of all the people who have made those words part of their stories relating them to that living God. They remind me that I am part of a community that contains people who have done bad things and are still doing bad things. They remind me that I can do bad things and yet I can be forgiven.

It is good to come into God's presence with others. Being religious helps me do that. Being spiritual just doesn't cut it.

Postscript.

I know some people who might use the language "spiritual but not religious" as a cover for their anger at God. These people live lives of real love for others, real involvement with others in ways that we religious people might envy. There is an integrity in such people. I trust very much that God will not let them get lost.

As Psalm 103 says, God knows of what we are made. God knows that sometimes people react to evil done to them in ways that appear blasphemous. I think of Job telling God that the day of his birth should be a day of mourning, that he would have been better off if he had never been born. But at the end of the book, God defends Job as having a more true idea of God than his three friends, who kept trying to wrap Job's whole situation up in a neat philosophical framework. Job's anger did not bother God.

Who am I?

Who am I?

When I was in graduate school, back in the 1960s, there was great interest in what the psychologist Erik Erikson called "identity." Who am I? The term "identity crisis" was common--young people drifting around not knowing who they were.

My theory: my identity is my story. Or, more accurately, the stories of the groups of people who have influenced my life.

Catholics have been the center of my story, starting with the parish of St. James in Decatur, Illinois in the 1940s. The story of that group of people has been more important to me than, for example, the story of the residents of Decatur. Decatur was mostly Protestant. Decatur was not my story.

My race has not been part of my story. Being white has been to me like the water to the fish. There is no story involved. If I had been born black in this country, my black community, as black, would have been very important in my story. If I had been born into a black church family, that church family would have been important too. It might have been more important than the racial group; my Catholicism story was the story of a minority amid a majority Protestant city. Maybe a black child's church community would have been more important in that child's life than being black, because the church story would have shaped the experience of being black in a majority white society.

If I had been born to a single mother with few ties to a larger kinship group, my story would have been that mother's story. The story would have included the events that led to the mother's being isolated--perhaps she had gotten pregnant and been rejected by her family. Perhaps she was a nonconformist and was rejected for the same reason. Perhaps she herself had been raised by a single parent who did not have the time or experience or resources to groom her for entry into a school. So her story would have been a story of being left alone a lot, without relatives, going to a school where she was not doing well and where perhaps most of the other children were in the same situation she was in. Gradually their stories would have become her story.

A story gives you "scripts," plans for little scenes in life that you can follow. For example, how to relate to a teacher in school, or to a policeman. How to deal with a parent who is living with a partner who is not your biological parent. How to react to abuse by a parent-figure.

Examples of the scripts in my story: how to answer the sister who was teaching me in school. How to serve Mass in the parish church.

After eighth grade I entered the Franciscan seminary. The Franciscan community became part of my story. It eventually became the most significant part, even after I was ordained a priest.

The Catholic and Franciscan communities each had their own stories, and as I studied history, I became part of the stories of the Christian and Catholic community, and of the followers of Francis of Assisi.

I was also an American, and the stories of the founders of our country were important to me. The Second World War was in progress as I began grade school, so I lived the story of the heroes who gave their all to defeat evil enemies like the Germans and the Japanese. There was a book titled They Were Expendable, which I found inspiring. It told the stories of men who offered themselves to be chewed up by the enemy because the larger cause required that sacrifice.

If I had been born to a Native American family, what would my story have been? I would likely have been taken from my parents when I began school. The official policy was intended to prevent me from learning the story of my parents and their stories. I would have been story-less. Perhaps the teachers could have tried to help me relate to the stories of Christian saints, but when you do not know the stories of your own parents, I would think it would be hard to own another story.

As I sit here reflecting on all the people who have become part of my story, down through the centuries, a feeling of comfort comes over me. I know who I am. The people who shared those stories with me have given me a great gift.

Pope Francis talks a lot about "evangelization." The word has taken on a negative connotation in my society, as meaning "trying to get others to join your church." Perhaps it should simply mean "sharing stories of your church community with people who might be helped by those stories."

Being bathed in stories is being bathed in membership in communities that extend far beyond my immediate time and place. It means we know who we are. Being bathed in stories is a great gift.

Religion as fun, religion as narcotic, religion as stimulant

Way back in my graduate school days I thought of religion as fun. Why do people do religion, I asked? Beause it is fun. It is enjoyable. It enriches one's day. Without it life is dull and drab and colorless.

I still think that is true. It is fun to sing with other people (if we have good singing leadership). It is fun to work with others to make the world better in some way. It is fun to hear the stories of "saints"--people who lived heroic lives.

Fun comforts me.

Does it comfort me too much?

Karl Marx attacked religion because it comforted people too much. "Pie in the sky when you die" he said. Religion masks the pain of life in the name of some illusory future bliss. Forget religion. Be a man. (Perhaps Marx was not a male chauvinist, but I bet he was.) Get up and do something about oppression. Fight it. Don't wait for redemption. Make it happen.

Then there was Sigmund Freud, with a similar criticism. Religion makes you go back to the womb. It infantalizes you. Face reality. It's a cold and heartless life. Be a man. Quit drugging yourself with thoughts of bliss.

These days the criticism is in the opposite direction. Religion fires people up too much. It motivates ISIS fanatics to go around beheading people. It gives motivation to sociopaths who kill in the name of God. It tells people that being gay is a curse of God, and for a society to acknowledge that gayness is destructive. The world would be much better off if religion were wiped off the face of the earth.

I must admit that I am tempted to think this way when I reflect on how politicians in our country have to pay attention to religious fundamentalists. It used to be godless Communism that was the enemy; now it is godless liberalism or Muslim fanaticism. The real man stands up and fights for virtue and holiness.

I keep using the term "man." Maybe the real problem lies in some deep-rooted human tendencies, like male chauvinism and the easy resort to violence to solve any problem.

That brings me to forgiveness. Why was the idea of forgiveness so central to the preaching of John the Baptist and Jesus? Why is the "forgiveness of sins" listed as part of the Apostles Creed? Why do we pray "Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world"? Why do the words of consecration in the Mass, traditionally the most sacred part of the Mass, mention forgiveness? "This is the chalice of my blood, . . . which was poured out . . . for the forgiveness of sins."

Forget about original sin. That term sets us off on a line of thought that too easily gets co-opted by the politics of religious sectarianism. There is plenty of sin to go around without worrying about where it came from, and about membership in what group will take care of it. We are bathed in sin. Male chauvinism, our tendency toward violence, our limitless desire for possessions and for the symbols of possession (like stock options). The old list gave us seven "deadly sins."

Let's look at that list.

Pride. I have questions about this one. Psychology has taught us that many people suffer from a lack of self-confidence, which could be interpreted as a lack of pride. The term calls to mind obedience, which has functioned as a tool of oppression in too much of our Christian history. So I find it questionable to refer to pride as a deadly sin.

Covetousness or avarice. Now here we are onto something. The great myth of the Invisible Hand has freed us from the vice of avarice. It makes avarice into a virtue. That leads to the games that impoverish much of the human race. I can go into the Philippines and drive people off the land so that I can dig there for copper, leaving the place an environmental disaster. But as long as my actions benefit my bottom line, all is well. I am virtuous.

Lust. The internet has not helped us. We can look for sexual pleasure at any hour of the day or night, and in the process lower our productivity (lust competing with avarice) and poison the sexual dimension of our family lives.

Anger. Now it is true that the emotion of anger is not evil in itself. What is evil is the behavior that the emotion can lead to. Too many of us have problems with "anger control." Once we let anger control us, we can mess up the rest of our lives, for example by landing us in prison.

Gluttony. Need I say more?

Envy. This is the gasoline that drives avarice and anger. We see what our neighbor has and we cannot live with the situation.

Sloth. Maybe this isn't our problem. But maybe we drive ourselves so relentlessly because we secretly fear that we will relapse into eternal rest if we let up for just one minute. We certainly project our own insecurities about our laziness onto the "less fortunate" in our midst. Those people are just lazy. They don't want to work. We understand that line of thinking all too well. So we kill our ability to enjoy life in order that we not be like those other sinners.

So.

Religion does comfort us but it also challenges us. It is fun, but it also tempers our fun with the awareness that we can and do mess up, and therefore we are in constant need of forgiveness. For some reason God has created us as unfinished creatures. We stumble and blunder as we learn to grow in love.

But God does call us to grow in love. God does call us to to be involved with each other passionately, respectfully, vulnerably, and faithfully.

I think that call allows us to enjoy life without lapsing into either passivity or fanaticism.

A homily for the Fourth Sunday of Advent

“For by grace you have been saved through faith, -- this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”

             Words taken from the second reading today, the Letter to the Ephesians

People sometimes ask me: “What is going to happen to the Church? So many people seem to leave the Church, especially young people, especially our young people. Children who went through years of Catholic schooling leave the Catholic Church for another church, or for no church.”

What are we doing wrong?

I have thought about that question for years. There is a theory that values come from actions. We do not do things because we value them. We value things because we do them. That’s perfectly good psychology. The reason people no longer value the Faith is that they have quit doing the things that strengthen faith. They have quit taking time for praying to God, for thinking about God, for reading about God. Going to church once a week is at least an action that reinforces the value of a relationship with God in our lives. When we quit taking time to do things that express our relationship to God, things like going to church or taking time to pray during the day—that relationship no longer has value for us.

I think that story of why people leave a religion makes sense. But it is a story that a good Pharisee would have told. A good Pharisee would say “you need to be circumcised and obey all the kosher laws about what you eat, and observe the sabbath by not doing any physical exertion on that day. If you don’t do those things, you will drift away from God.”

That way of looking at religion has it backward. It makes us the cause of our faith. If we can just get people to do the external actions that strengthen faith, their faith will return.

Paul was a good Pharisee. He was an up and coming star in the Pharisee world. And then Jesus met him. In fact, you could say that Jesus attacked him. Jesus knocked him to the ground and blinded him temporarily. Paul came away from that experience with the conviction that we do not love God because we do things to make that love happen. We love God because God comes at us first. In the words of the letter to the Ephesians that I quoted at the beginning of this homily, “For by grace you have been saved through faith—this is not from you; it is the gift of God.”

Gift. It is gift that is the key. We do not love God because we pray. We pray because God first loved us. Our faith is a gift.

We have said that for years—faith is a gift—but maybe we have not understood what we were saying. When we use the word “gift,” we imply that there is a giver. Someone has done something for us that we did not earn, we did not pay for. That makes us dependent. We are not in control of the relationship.

Compare this to a marriage. When two people are married, they have to do things that will keep the value of the marriage alive. They have to be courteous to each other, to do little actions that show the love. If they do not do anything physical to show love, the love will die.

But the physical actions are not the most important thing. The most important thing is that the love of the other partner is a gift. We do not earn people’s love. We do not pay for love. We receive love as a gift. That makes us dependent. We are not in control of the relationship. Without that sense of dependence, no amount of loving behavior will work.

We grow out of love because we lose the realization that the other person is a gift. We take the relationship for granted. We come to think that we deserve love. We pay for love by doing the things that love requires. If we pay for something, we expect that something to happen.

We make the mistake of the Pharisees. We forget that love is a gift, and every gift implies a giver. The person we are wanting to love does not have to love us. That person freely gives us love, freely does things to show us love.

Our relationship with God is the same way. When we forget that God is a giver, that God does not have to give us anything, then we forget that God loves us. And when we forget that, our faith is gone.

We live in a country where we are used to controlling things. If something bad happens to us, we blame somebody who didn’t do what should have been done. We sue somebody. We pay to make sure that nothing but good things happen to us, and that should take care of any situation.

We turn everything into a market transaction. We pay for what we get. If we do not pay, we do not get. If you do not have what you need, it is because you have not paid for it. You are lazy or have made stupid decisions.

We even turn gift-giving into a business. Christmas is a huge marketing season. We give gifts so that we stay in control of a relationship, and we receive gifts because other people owe us. We don’t count the exact dollars and cents in a gift, but we make sure that the balance is fairly even—we get back what we give.

The result is that we cannot love.

The reason that so many of us, especially our young people, leave our churches is because all of us, young and old, have forgotten what it means when we say that God loves us.

To say that God loves us is to say that we do not earn that love, we do not deserve that love. It works in reverse. God does not deserve our love. If we love God, that love is a free gift on our part. We do not earn God’s love by going to Mass every Sunday. We go to Mass every Sunday because we want to give freely of our time to God.

“Stewardship” seems to be a big word in church circles these days. “Time, talent, and treasure.” Those are things we can give to God. But we have to give those things. We do not use those things to pay for God’s love.

Paying versus gift. That was the big issue for Paul in his move away from the Pharisees. They wanted to earn God’s good will by doing all 613 precepts of the Law. Paul learned that observing precepts will not do the trick unless we realize that God first loves us, and we do the precepts because we want to love, freely, in return.

As Paul says, by grace you have been saved through faith—this is not from you; it is the gift of God.

Piggy-backing on God's memory

For about ten years, from 1955, when I entered our novitiate, to around 1965, when we quit using the Latin breviary, I prayed the psalms in Latin.

In those days we went through the entire psalter every week. If you multiply ten years by 52 weeks, you get 520 times I prayed through the entire psalter. For the first eight years or so of that time, we prayed them out loud, either chanting them (on the tone of "F") or reciting them together in community without chant. So the words of those psalms have become burned into my memory.

Enter the ICEL psalter.

The ICEL psalter (the acronym stands for "International Commission on English in the Liturgy") was first accepted by the U.S. bishops when it came out in the mid 1990s, and then, in one of the most foolish moves in the modern history of the Church, was banned for communal use by the same bishops because some bureaucrat in Rome decided that its language was part of a feminist revolution endangering the Church.

The ICEL translation removed sexist references in the text. Not only did it remove texts that spoke of "man" or "him," ("horizontal inclusivity"), but it removed them in reference to God ("vertical inclusivity"). These changes did indeed change the original wording of the text, but the ICEL version was meant for praying, not for study, and since half of the people (women) presumably use the psalms for prayer, and some of those women find sexist language offensive, texts meant for prayer should be changed to adapt to their sensitivities.

Of course not all women find such language offensive. However, many men, myself included, do find it offensive. I like to quote St. Paul, who was writing to early Christians who accused him of hypocrisy because he continued to observe Jewish dietary laws even though he argued that Christians were not bound to such laws. "If my eating pork causes my brother (or sister) to lose their faith in God, then I will never again eat pork" (even though I know that objectively my eating pork would not offend God). If my using sexist language causes some of my fellow Catholics to quit praying the psalms, then I will quit using sexist language. I think it is more important for people to be able to benefit from the riches of the psalms than for scholars to be comforted by my continuing to pray with a literal translation of the original text.

Example: Psalm 96, verses 1-3:

New American Bible translation (the official Catholic translation): "Sing to the Lord a new song; sing to the Lord, all the earth. Sing to the Lord, bless his name; announce his salvation day after day. Tell God's glory among the nations; among all peoples, God's marvelous deeds."

ICEL translation: "A new song for the Lord! Sing it and bless God's name, everyone, everywhere! Tell the whole world God's triumph day to day, God's glory, God's wonder."

The two "his's" in verse 2 are removed.

Over the last three or four years I have been engaged in a massive project. (I keep asking myself if this is a massive waste of time.) First I began using the ICEL psalter for my private morning and evening prayer. But the way we use new "breviary," now called the "Liturgy of the Hours," we do not use all the psalms. We pray morning and evening prayer, but there are psalms assigned for midday and night prayer, and for the "office of readings," and we never pray them. I made the decision to pray those psalms too. That meant getting the text of those psalms into some readable form.

Over the course of two or three years I ended up typing the text of the entire ICEL psalter into my computer. Then I arranged the psalms into the Liturgy of the Hours, and added the antiphons for each season of the liturgical year. This was beginning to use a lot of paper, but then came the Kindle. I uploaded my version into the Kindle, where length causes no problems.

The satisfied me for a couple of years, but then I began to reflect on the Latin version of the psalms.

Bottom line: I uploaded the Latin text from a website and copied it into my ICEL version, so that I can reflect on the Latin words as I pray the English ones. (It helps that I have been teaching Latin for the last few years.)

I keep imagining how many men and women down through the centuries have used these Latin words. Monks and nuns in the middle ages used them. Men who lived in the ruins of monasteries that I saw in Ireland used them. Those words. Those very same words.

Then I began to think of God's part in all this.

I believe that God stores every act we do in God's memory, and will return that memory to each of us when we get to the resurrection. (Aside: I got to this conclusion by reflecting on the phrase in the Apostle's Creed: "I believe in the resurrection of the body.") So God is remembering each time those monks and nuns prayed these words. That really makes me feel close to those people ("the communion of saints"). It makes it easier for me to feel close to my friends and relatives who have died. Most of them did not pray the psalms much, but most of them prayed, and much of our prayer in general is based on the psalms.

So every time I pray one of these psalms, I am piggy-backing on God's memory. I am joining all the people who have prayed them before me, and all the men and women praying them in the world today, right now, as I pray. Orthodox monks and nuns in Russia, refugees in camps in Syria--we are all praying these words in one language or another. God is recording all these prayers. We are really one in the Lord when we do that.

And I am joining my own present to my own past, knitting my life into a whole that I hope is giving glory to God.

So, as I go about uploading more of the psalms into my Kindle (the project is only about half done), I keep asking myself if I am using my time foolishly. Maybe I am, but the actual work of doing this seems to draw me closer to God and to the communion of saints. And I enjoy doing it.

I'm 79 years old, and I'm entitled to some enjoyment, right?

Praying with the Big Bang

Knee replacement surgery plus some other commitments in June have kept me off line for months. 

They tell us that the ancients, people before we knew about the solar system, thought of the earth as surrounded by spheres. The first sphere contained the clouds, with the rain behind it. Then came a sphere with the sun and moon, and beyond that was a sphere with the stars. God was outside all of the spheres, but still not terribly far away. After all, we could see the last sphere, and God was just on the other side of that.

If I am going to relate in a personal way to God, I have to have some kind of image of God and of where God is. The sphere system gives me such an image. For centuries it made it easy for people to pray to God.

Medieval theologians, and probably Greek philosophers before them, believed that God is a spirit, so God has no visible features, but that didn't bother believers. Believers know that God is spiritual; they just need a crutch to lean on when they want to pray.

Now we have the Big Bang.

The term "Big Bang" is a label for a scientific theory of how our universe began. I cannot stress enough that this theory is accepted by the vast majority of scientists who work with astronomy and physics. Here is how the theory goes.

About 13 billion years ago, our entire universe was compressed into a space the size of a pinhead. The pinhead exploded, and its parts kept expanding outward. Eventually the parts coalesced into stars and galaxies, and into solar systems like our own, including our earth. The expansion is still going on, so that the universe looks something like an expanding balloon. All its parts are getting farther and farther apart, and farther and farther from the place where it all started.

Now visualize this: our earth is pretty big, so big that it was centuries before human beings realized how big it is. The solar system where our earth exists is much bigger. Our sun is 93 million miles from the earth. But our sun is only one among about 300 billion suns in our galaxy.

Our galaxy is a disk-shaped collection of stars circling around each other (all the while still racing away from the center of the universe). 300 billion suns is a lot of suns.

But that is not all of it. Scientists say that there are several hundred billion galaxies out there, just like our own galaxy. Try to imagine how much "stuff" is included in several hundred billion galaxies, all of it coming from a pinhead.

Scientists really believe that. They really do.

I used to have trouble believing that God could be personally involved with each of the seven billion people in the world today. I believe that God is behind the pinhead. If the universe comes from a pinhead--and remember, science really believes that--believing that God is involved individually with seven billion human beings is a piece of cake.

So I have a new picture of the universe. It is that big balloon, constantly expanding. God is just on the other side of that balloon, just like God was on the other side of the spheres that the ancients believed in.

Now I can start to apply some of the things that the Bible, sacred Scripture, tells us about God. We Christians believe that God is triune, "Father, Son, and Holy Spirit." We believe this because of things that Jesus did and said. Theologians speculate that God is triune because God is love, and love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, involvement of one person with another. So God is an infinite involvement of love.

Then, say the theologians, that kind of love cannot just stay within itself. It has to explode outside itself. The fifth-century philosopher called "Pseudo-Dionesius" claimed that "goodness pours itself out" (in Latin, bonum est diffusivum sui). Medieval theologians applied this idea to God. God created because God just had to share God's internal involvement with someone outside God's self. So God created human beings.

Paul's letter to the Colossians says that Christ was before all that is. John's Gospel says that anything that came to be came to be because of the Word.

This is a Franciscan line of thought. It is different from the more common line of thought that says that God became human in Jesus Christ because Adam sinned, and only a divine savior could remedy that sin. That line of thought, which I think was emphasized by Martin Luther, and since him by most Protestant theologians, makes sin central to the story of human history.

The Luther theory seems to me to make the Father something of an ogre. If Jesus Christ does not save us, the Father will condemn us to hell. Jesus becomes, in a way, more important than the Father or the Holy Spirit.

There are passages in Scripture that can be used to back up that theory, but I prefer the Franciscan theory, because it makes God's love the most important thing, and makes Jesus the first-born of all creation because Jesus is the climax of God's love for human beings.

In the Franciscan theory, the entire Trinity, Father, Son, and Spirit, is involved with me. God created me, God shares my humanity, and God's Spirit bathes me and the world in love. This is a God I can believe in.

So now I have a God who is infinitely involved internally in love, and who is infinitely involved outside God's self in creation, including me, and who is involved with me as Father, as Word, and as Holy Spirit. I'm in pretty good shape with all of that.

I can mess up. Sin exists, and I am sinful. Even hell exists, though I think some Christian spiritualities make hell far too central to their understanding of God. That is the topic of another essay I wrote several years ago, which I will attach to this piece.

Back to my praying

For years I have been suspicious of spiritualities that make God so personal that all mystery seems to disappear. I know how easy it is for us to "project" our beliefs into our vision of reality. For that reason I have fallen back on prayers that have been around for thousands of years, the psalms. I don't trust my own words. I will piggy-back on someone else's words. Centuries of people have piggy-backed on the psalms. I think of all the thousands of monks, for example, who prayed them daily down through the Middle Ages.

The psalms have their problems. Some of them are beyond understanding--they have been so corrupted in transmission down through the centuries that we no longer can be sure of what they mean. But the overall tone of the psalms is what captivates me. Even though some of the psalms are vengeful, the more dominant tone is one of gentleness and trust in a loving God (think of the beloved Psalm 23, "The Lord is my shepherd . . ."). Jesus prayed these psalms. I believe that the psalms helped to shape Jesus's human understanding of God.

So I pray the psalms, all 150 of them in the course of four weeks. As I pray I think of that expanding universe, with the mysterious, triune God just beyond it, personally involved in my life. I look at the beauty around me--trees, birds, infants, parents, young people, old people--and remember that all of this came from that pinhead. It was a loving God who guided evolution to produce such beauty. There is such a massive wealth of beauty (look at any issue of National Geographic) that I cannot but think that beauty is the most important product of God's creation. So God must be beautiful. (Think of St. Augustine's prayer: "O beauty, ever old and ever new . . .")

God wants us to be beautiful and to create beauty around us. Even sin and death can become beautiful when they are surrounded with love. That is the story of Jesus's death, and resurrection.

Science doesn't threaten my belief in God. It makes it far richer. It makes it far easier to pray.

On Hell

When I think of hell, I think of three famous literary descriptions of it. The first is Dante’s Inferno. The second is the sermon, “Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God,” by the famous New England Congregationalist, Jonathan Edwards. The third is James Joyce’s description of an Irish Catholic retreatmaster’s sermon in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

What is my description?

The first problem I face in trying to describe hell in my own way is the mismatch between the image of God preached by Jesus and the idea of unending torture inflicted on his creatures by that same God. My problem is not new. Already in the 200’s the theologian Origen had suggested that God ultimately redeems everyone. The Church rejected his suggestion. A watered-down version of the same idea is one that I have held for many years: “I have to believe in the existence of hell, but I don’t have to believe that there is anyone actually present in it.” Is my solution too easy?

Metaphor

“Eternal fire.”

These two words are metaphors for hell. Jesus himself used them in his description of the last judgment in Matthew 25. I want to examine them one by one.

Fire.

Many writers, including Dante, see the term “fire” as a metaphor for other kinds of punishment. Part of Dante’s hell is a frozen wasteland.

But what about Jesus’ use of the term? Doesn’t he use the term “fire”?

Yes, he does. But Jesus often used metaphors in his preaching. He told his followers that if your right hand causes you to sin, cut it off. I know of only one person in Christian history who took that statement literally. St. Anthony of Padua is supposed to have restored the foot of a man who cut off his own foot because he had kicked his father. Instead of praising the man, Church tradition praises Anthony for reversing the action.

However, once the Church had made peace with using judgment and power as legitimate ways to further Jesus’ kingdom, fire became a useful metaphor for social control. Christians, both Catholic and Protestant, who burned heretics and witches, no doubt justified their behavior by saying that such punishment is trivial compared to the fires of hell. The fire metaphor has served to justify many practices that we today consider inhuman.

We no longer burn heretics. Most thoughtful Christians today probably see fire as a metaphor for “a really bad experience,” and quit trying to spell out the details.

But we have more trouble with the other metaphor, “eternal.” I can see how some people deserve really bad punishment for the evils they have done. But eternal punishment? The punishment is disproportionate.

The term “eternal” immediately suggests the human experience of time. Some theologians reject the relevance of that experience for life after death. They describe heaven as a sort of an instantaneous “now,” with no relationship to time. There is something to be said for this. But I have two problems with the explanation.

The first problem is that, when I hear the word “eternal,” my human way of thinking seems naturally to go to my experience of time. The second is our belief in the resurrection of the body. For me, “body” means “physical,” and “physical” means “time.”

I recognize that Einstein shook up our human conceptions of time. Perhaps an Einsteinian theologian could come up with an eternal “now” that would be compatible with what we understand as physical. But the solution seems far-fetched. We humans know what we experience as time, and it is not compatible with an instantaneous “now.”

Why could we not see the term “eternal” as metaphorical in the same way that we see the term “fire” as metaphorical? Maybe what Jesus means was just “a really long time,” just as he meant “a really bad experience” when he used the term “fire.”

I would like to think that the resurrection of the body means that heaven, and hell, will continue our experience of time. More specifically, heaven and hell will continue the most significant aspects of our experience, our interaction and involvement with others and with God. If love is passionate, respectful, vulnerable, and faithful involvement, the experience of such involvement will be the essence of heaven.

But what about hell? Theologians agree that hell will be the absence of love. Presumably a man or woman whose life here on earth was characterized by an absence of love will continue that experience in eternity.

I like to think that purgatory will be my having to face each person I have harmed, and work through the painful process of reconciliation with that person. My lack of love in this life will be healed by the fire of a reconciling involvement in eternity.

I have wondered if God’s redeeming love is so powerful that there is no person who will not be able to experience that kind of healing. But suppose that the lack of loving involvement will continue indefinitely. Suppose that hell means that I will continue to reject all attempts by others and by God to involve me in love. Here is where the mystery of our experience of eternity joins up with the mystery of our experience of freedom.

Surely heaven will not mean the end of my experience of freedom. I will continue to love freely. But if I can continue to love freely, perhaps I can continue to reject love freely.

Our Christian belief in hell seems to imply the possibility that I could go on indefinitely in a free rejection of love, on and on and on in a self-perpetuating cycle from which I will never escape. As the theologians say, it is not God who puts me into this state. I do it to myself, freely.

Will it never end?

Our faith forbids us to answer that question. We are like Job, addressed by God after all his friends have tried to explain his suffering rationally. “Be still. I am God. That is all you need to know.”

Scary thinking. Jesus may have been using metaphor when he spoke of “fire” and “eternal.” But he did not take away the mystery that surrounds our existence as creatures who experience time, freedom, and love.