I have heard it said in different ways and I have also read it at different times, that the one true possible regret in life (when all is said and done) is the regret of not having been a saint. Now, this sounds both pretty lofty and quite intense but I think that the song of a popular singer can help us here. The singer is Carrie Underwood and the song is “So Small“.

What you got if you ain’t got love, the kind that you just want to give away … Sometimes the mountain you’ve been climbing is just a grain of sand … When you figure out love is all that matters after all, it sure makes everything else seem so small.

When we figure out that love is all that matters after all – the love that you just want to give away…

The lesson that the saints learned and the task that stands before us all is to learn to love with the very heart of Christ – with the love that gives away.

Now, we can replace this love with all sorts of things (we are very adept at this). We can even try to avoid this love but it must be stated that we are always less for it. It is of great benefit to us to notice in the parable of Lazarus and the rich man (Lk. 16:19-31) both what we are told and also what we are not told – both in regards to the rich man’s possessions and his very self. Both what is made present to us and what is left absent from us in the parable have something to teach here. Jesus says, “Once there was a rich man who dressed in purple and fine linen and feasted every day…” This man had all the best that the world could afford but what is not mentioned? What is absent from this succinct summation of the man’s life and “possessions”? Joy. In the midst of all the fine dining and all the sumptuous living, there is found a noticeable absence of joy in the man’s heart.

This absence, this vacuum is indicative of a loss of personhood. This is the other part of what we learn from what is left unsaid in the parable. Jesus intentionally does not name the rich man in the parable. We know the poor man’s name – Lazarus the beggar – but not the rich man’s. His name stands forgotten. Name is personhood. It is identity. So, somewhere along the line, this man lost not just his capacity for joy but tragically even more so. The man lost his very self.

To learn the lesson of the saints, to learn how to love with the very heart of Christ (to figure out in our lives that which is most important) means both to find joy and to gain true personhood. When we love with the heart of Christ, with the love that gives away, we gain our name – our very selves. And this is a beautiful thing to behold!

But you, man of God, shun all this. Strive to be holy and godly. Live in faith and in love, with endurance and gentleness. Fight the good fight of faith and win everlasting life to which you were called… (1 Tim. 6:11-12)

If I may be so bold as to paraphrase. In the light of God’s grace, seek to shun all that reduces the truth of who you are and live the love that gives and by so doing discover the very name that God alone has given you.

When we figure out love is all that matters after all, it sure makes everything else seem so small.

The one regret is not to have been a saint…

I have a pet theory about reading and books; my theory is that it is not always us who choose the book, rather it is the book itself that choses us at the right time and when we are in the right space to appreciate it and hear what it has to teach. More than once I have found myself “led” to a certain book which I never even knew was out there by other books and authors I had encountered. I have “stumbled” across books just at the right moment which have helped to answer and enlighten the latest churnings in my mind. This happens too often to be coincidence (thus my theory) and has just happened again.

The latest book to have chosen me is A Secular Age by Charles Taylor. I came across it in a bookstore, the reviews by Alasdair MacIntyre and Robert Bellah drew me straight into its covers and before you knew it I was purchasing it at the counter. Blissfully snagged – hook, line and sinker!

The book is a monumental undertaking certainly for Taylor to write and also for a person to read. Measuring 776 pages (before notes), it is a daunting thing to pick up. I can proudly say that I have gotten to page 29! Now just 747 more to go…

But already the book is teaching and helping to connect the latest churnings in my mind. Taylor wastes no time and jumps into the question of what is secularism, but rather than being content to just define secularism in terms of the regression of religion and religious practice from the public sphere or the reduction of number of people living their faith, Taylor digs in deep in order to point out the underlying “shift in background” that has occurred. The question is, have we (good Christian people that we are) even noticed this shift – its true depth and breadth? My assumption, probably not…

Taylor proposes that the whole understanding of what constitutes human flourishing has shifted to an exclusively humanistic understanding that leaves no room for the Transcendent. A wall has been thrown up where the Transcendent is not even considered as a real option – or, maybe at best, one option among many.

“… a humanism accepting no final goals beyond human flourishing, nor any allegiance to anything else beyond this flourishing.” (Taylor, 18.)

This is our background. It is not the young Church in the background of a pagan world, or the Church in the background of Medieval Christendom, or the Church in the background of an at least nominally Christian society. No, we are the Church in a secular age – the context is different and this raises a whole series of important questions on both what it means to be Church and how we act as Church. (As a college chaplain and director of youth ministry, a question raised for me by this observation is: Are we preparing our young people to live their Catholic faith in an awareness of the background of today as opposed to one the Church may have at one time found itself in or maybe even one which is nostalgically yearned for?) We need to recognize the background we find ourselves in now in order to be Church for today.

Come and worship; let us bow down,
kneel before the Lord, our Maker. (Ps. 95: 6)

In the light of the above background and its exclusively humanistic definition of flourishing, the very call to pray – to look beyond the self and equate true human flourishing with relation to God – takes on a truly subversive quality. Prayer itself is the choice to live by something more than the limits of the secular and today it truly does take a conscious determination of will to make this choice.

Prayer as a rebellious act … who would have thought it?

(Expect more dispatches from A Secular Age as I journey through its pages.)

Guillermo del Toro, the director of Pan’s Labyrinth, has noted that, “The sign of true friendship is when you forgive success.” (“Three Amigos” by John Kavanagh, America, July 2-9, 2007). In other words, when one is able to truly rejoice in the happiness and good fortune of a friend without any hint of jealousy or resentment – this is the witness of true friendship. At the heart of this awareness of what constitutes true friendship is love that seeks the good of the other. Therefore, true friendship means letting go of self in favor of the other and here also, interestingly enough – as if planned, is found the path to true joy. God himself reveals it. This is the very type of love that God has for us and it also reveals the abundant joy that God has in us.

It is telling that in both images from this coming Sunday’s gospel (Lk. 15:1-10), – the shepherd and the found sheep, the woman and the found coin – the first words spoken by both the shepherd and the woman after finding what was lost are, “Rejoice with me…” Have joy with me as I now already have joy.

Both the shepherd and the woman let go of self in order to seek out that which was lost. The shepherd leaves behind the ninety-nine sheep (his livelihood) and the woman lets go of the seemliness and propriety of her status in order to turn the house upside down searching for a coin. Their focus is not on themselves but on what is lost and what needs to be found. In this letting go is ultimately found (not just the sheep or the coin) but joy itself. The realization of joy breaks through just as the anxiety of searching is left behind. “Rejoice with me…”

Letting go of self is at the heart of joy. It is also at the heart of mercy. God also reveals this. “Christ Jesus came into the world to save sinners,” writes Paul in the first chapter of 1st Timothy and then a little later he continues, “To the king of ages, incorruptible, invisible, the only God, honor and glory forever and ever.” Christ lets go of all his glory and kingship in order to come into the world, to be born, to suffer and die – all in order to bring salvation to that which was lost. “Be merciful,” teaches Christ, “just as your Father is merciful.” Mercy requires a letting go of self and a willingness to focus on the other. Mercy, therefore, is a path to joy.

This is the depth of God’s approach toward us – not just mercy but a letting go of self in mercy, not just joy in self but really a joy for the other. In God, mercy and joy meet. In us, who are made in God’s image and renewed in Christ, mercy and joy can meet – in our letting go of self.

“Rejoice with me, I have found that which was lost.”

With the publication of Mother Teresa: Come Be My Light (compiled and edited by Rev. Brian Kolodiejchuk) new light is being shed on the depth and complexity of this little woman of Calcutta. Comprised mainly of her correspondence throughout life, the book reveals the five decade-long struggle Teresa had with the absence of God in her inner and spiritual life.

But yet she loved Christ and she gave her all to serve him and through guidance and grace she even eventually came to embrace the absence itself as a sharing in the Passion of her Lord. A request she herself had made at one point with no expectation of how it was to be ultimately granted. Isn’t God funny that way…

Mother Teresa’s half-century long experience of the absence of God does not call into question her belief rather it unveils her faith’s true depth.

There are many insights to be gained from this survey into the inner life of Mother Teresa but there are two that, for now, seem to stand out for me. One is the true reality of the range and depth of love and the second is the depth of our true anthropology.

We live in a time that so readily, so eagerly and so compulsively equates the fullness of love with feeling – in our relationships with one another and even in our relationship with our Lord. “If I love someone, if I am loved by someone then I will feel it all the time … and if I do not feel it, well then the love must be lost, absent.” Mother Teresa’s fifty-year ache for her Lord starkly contradicts our society’s myopic equation of love solely with feeling. It teaches the truth that love moves beyond the bounds of feeling; even into the exercise of the will. In the absence of God and in the midst of its pain, Mother Teresa chose to love, she chose to believe, she even chose (at some point) to understand the darkness itself as a precious gift from her Lord.

There is such a thing as the dictatorship of feeling and both in contrast and reply to this Mother Teresa’s struggle shows the true freedom of the Christian who is able to move beyond all that binds and seeks to enslave. I have seen this tyranny of feeling in the lives of people I have ministered to and I have even experienced it in my own life at different times. I have also seen it in regards to faith. There is such a thing as a feeling-only approach to faith which is very prevalent in our day and age and which ultimately limits true growth in faith and maturity as a Christian. This temptation to equate faith so stringently with feeling alone does a great disservice I believe to the one who is seeking to understand the things of Christ.

Secondly, the depth of our anthropology. If one wants to know what it looks like to be truly and fully human then don’t look to the business moguls, power brokers or celebrities of society (although they might be fine people in and of themselves). Look to the saints in order to know what it looks like to be truly and fully human.

I believe it is fair to start acknowledging the differing anthropologies that are present in society. We do not all have the same understanding of the human person. For example, an understanding of the human person that seeks to leave God out of the equation is by its nature going to be a limited understanding not just because there is no room left for God in heaven but also because there is no room left for talking of man and woman as being made in the image and likeness of God. When we leave God out of the equation we automatically stunt ourselves, no matter how much we may try to pretend otherwise.

The saints reveal the depth of being that we are capable of precisely because of their connection with God. They reveal the truth of who we are meant to be, what we can achieve, and even what we can endure. The saints are our elder brothers and sisters. To put it bluntly, they are not stunted in their development.

Its interesting to contrast this new revelation of Mother Teresa’s experience of the absence of God with secular society’s imposed absence of God and wonder who is better off? Who, in the end, is more fully human?

Mother Teresa’s letters reveal the depth of her faith and in reading them one quickly comes to realize that it truly is a humbling thing to stand in the presence of a great soul.

A paradigm is a world view, a way of thinking. It is how we view ourselves, others and reality. Paradigms often work on subconscious levels, in ways that we are not immediately aware of, but nonetheless exert vast influence and control over our lives and our actions. In many ways, paradigms are those “things” that we have learned to assume as being “just the way things are and have always been.”

Jesus, in his apparently harsh teaching, “If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple” (Lk 14:26) is instructing us that in the life of the disciple there always is the possibility of the renewal of our minds (the paradigms we live by). We are not meant to be enslaved. By Christ we have been ransomed, set free for the truth of who we are meant to be.

The family and ties to the family, in Jesus’ day, exerted an enormous control over people’s lives even to the point of hindering ones openness to God’s call and to the call of discipleship. In this teaching Jesus is not disparaging the role of family and its honest commitments (a reality which he honors in other parts of Scripture), rather he is putting the ties to family, kin, clan and nation in proper order vis-a-vis relation to God and the Kingdom of God – what is ultimately best (by God’s design) for the person involved.

Paradigms that stay in proper order and relationship to God (the source of all truth) give life. Paradigms that get out of proper order and even seek to supplant God’s role, quickly become demonic and life-stealing.

Jesus is laying down the condition that to be a disciple means to be willing to let the light of God’s grace search and cleanse the paradigms we live by – even if it means pain and discomfort. To be a disciple means to maintain, on our part, the willingness to be transformed by the renewal of our minds.

Paul’s letter to Philemon is one of my favorite epistles in the New Testament exactly for this reason. This short letter is abundant in the action of grace in the renewal of minds. Paul’s mind is being renewed in his growing appreciation for the newly baptized Onesimus. Onesimus’ understanding is being transformed by his inherent dignity of being a child of God, a member of the Body of Christ. Philemon is being asked to let his perspective on his runaway slave Onesimus shift from one of viewing the imprisoned slave as just disobedient property to the recognition of a fellow human being – a brother in Christ. Paul’s short epistle witnesses to the abundant work of grace in Christ transforming all the paradigms of the day, all the things taken for granted as just being the way things are supposed to be.

What about us? What are the paradigms that we live by? What are the paradigms in our individual lives and in our times that may have gotten out of proper order, the paradigms that need a word of truth spoken to them? I can think of a few: a societal view that equates worth solely with achievement and productivity, an insulationist tendency rooted in fear and mistrust, a consumer only approach to life and relationships. Just to name a few.

To be a disciple means to name these paradigms for what they are and, if need be, to call them back to proper order. On our own we cannot do this, the depth of the movement is beyond our grasp. But not God’s. This is why in the Book of Wisdom (9:13-18) we hear the author lamenting, “The deliberations of mortals are timid, and unsure are our plans … scarce do we guess the things on earth … when things are in heaven, who can search them out?” But the lament quickly turns to confident assurance in the presence of God when the author acknowledges, “Or who ever knew your counsel, except you had given wisdom and sent your holy spirit from on high? And thus were the paths of those on earth made straight.”

As disciples, we do not look to our own wisdom but to God’s and we have the confident assurance that God does reveal his wisdom to us if we but learn to listen. God will speak to us and reveal truths that we cannot arrive at by our own effort. The fact is God does this all the time.

Paradigms can shift, God’s grace is present. We can be transformed by the renewal of our minds.

The word is “humus”. It is Latin and it signifies ‘earth’ and from it we get the words humble and humility. To be a person of humility therefore means to be a person who is close to the earth, one who is well-grounded, one who does not think too highly of himself or herself. It is to be “earthy” in the best sense of the term. To be a person of humility means to be someone who knows the truth of himself or herself.

The Catholic faith is an “earthy” faith, which is appropriate being that it is sacramental. Grace is not opposed to the “stuff” of the earth (grain ground up, the flow of water, the scent of oil, the wax of candles, the touch of hands in blessing, even ones very blood, sweat and tears). Grace does not stand in opposition to any of this – in fact, grace works through and transforms through these very “earthy” realities.

Over the past few years I have developed an interest in iconography even to the point of learning to write (paint) my own icons. I have learned much through this process and one thing that has shifted for me through all of this is my appreciation of the complexity of the human face. I look at people differently now due to the discipline of iconography. I have come to appreciate the number of colors and differing hues present in the face of the person I encounter. We tend to think, “Well, a person is one color or another…” and write it off at that but this is not necessarily so. The human face consists in an amazing variety of colors and hues – reds, yellows, differing shades and levels of brown and also green … in fact, an earthy shade of green. In every face, especially in the shaded areas, there is found a hue of green. This is why in iconography one of the base colors used for skin is an earthy green. I also wonder if it might be where we get the saying “green with envy”. (Maybe its God’s way of engineering within our very makeup a way of letting us know when we are getting ahead of ourselves and that we might do well to remember our roots. A spiritual mood ring, so to say.)

To be a person of humility is to know oneself. It is to realize that we are close to the earth and to realize that grace is not opposed to this but rather works within and through this truth. And that in humility itself can be found a place of encounter with grace.

“For everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” (Lk 14: 11) Jean Vanier has remarked that in this command Christ is not just giving his disciples an easy remedy to the temptation of pride – the ever-present temptation of seeking after the higher places – but in the command Christ is also directing our attention to a location, to a specific place of encounter with the Divine.

To seek the lowly place, to humble oneself is to go where the “lowly” are found. Those not deemed worthy of a seat of honor in the world’s banquet. Here are found the outcasts, the poor and little ones, the ones of little or no worth in the world’s eyes but the ones who are beloved of God. The ones who enjoy the companionship of God. To “humble oneself” therefore means to go to that place where God can be found – the place that is lowly, the place that is earthy. This place might be found in the exterior action of the disciple seeking the other, it might be found in the interior action of the disciple going to the lowly places of his or her own heart. Either way, God is encountered.

Humility is a virtue and it is also a place – a place of encounter between the self and God. It is where God is companion and we realize the truth of who we are – both earthy and graced.

“Whoever exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.”