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Spiritual Life

The humiliation of crucifixion and God’s love

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Thursday, 23 May 2013 05:11

When Jesus sweated blood in the Garden of Gethsemane and asked his Father to let the cup of suffering pass him by he wasn’t, for the most part, cringing before the prospect of brute physical suffering. He was cringing before the prospect of a very particular kind of suffering that is generally more feared than physical pain. When he asked God if it was really necessary to die in this way he was referring to more than death through capital punishment.

Crucifixion was devised and designed by the Romans with more than one thing in mind. It was designed as capital punishment, to put a criminal to death, but it aimed to do a couple of other things as well.

It was designed to inflict optimal physical pain. Thus the procedure was dragged out over a good number of hours and the amount of pain inflicted at any given moment was carefully calculated so as not to cause unconsciousness and thus ease the pain of the one being crucified. Indeed they sometimes even gave wine mixed with morphine to the person being crucified, not to ease his suffering, but to keep him from passing out from pain so as to have to endure it longer.

But crucifixion was designed with still another even more callous intent. It was designed to humiliate the person. Among other things, the person was stripped naked before being hung on a cross so that his genitals would be publicly exposed. As well, at the moment of death his bowels would loosen. Crucifixion clearly had humiliation in mind.

We have tended to downplay this aspect, both in our preaching and in our art. We have, as Jurgens Moltmann put it, surrounded the cross with roses, with aesthetic and antiseptic wrapping towels. But that was not the case for Jesus. His nakedness was exposed, his body publicly humiliated. That, among other reasons, is why the crucifixion was such a devastating blow to his disciples and why many of them abandoned Jesus and scattered after the crucifixion. They simply couldn’t connect this kind of humiliation with glory, divinity, and triumph.

Interestingly there is a striking parallel between what crucifixion did to the human body and what nature itself often does to the human body through old age, cancer, dementia, AIDS, and diseases such as Parkinson’s, Lou Gehrig’s, Huntington’s, and other such sicknesses that humiliate the body before killing it. They expose publicly what is most vulnerable inside of our humanity. They shame the body.

Why? What is the connection between this type of pain and the glory of Easter Sunday? Why is it, as the Gospels say, “necessary to first suffer in this manner so as to enter into glory?”

Because, paradoxically, a certain depth of soul can only be attained through a certain depth of humiliation. How and why is this so? It isn’t easy to articulate rationally but we can understand this through experience:

Ask yourself this question with courage and honesty: What experiences in my life have made me deep? In virtually every case, I will venture to say, experiences that have deepened you will be incidences that you feel some shame in acknowledging, a powerlessness from which you were unable to protect yourself, an abuse from which you could not defend yourself, an inadequacy of body or mind that has left you vulnerable, a humiliating incident that once happened to you, or some mistake you made which publicly exposed your lack of strength in some area. All of us, like Jesus, have also been, in one way or another, hung up publicly and humiliated. And we have depth of soul to just that extent.

But depth of soul comes in very different modes. Humiliation makes us deep, but we can be deep in character, understanding, graciousness, and forgiveness or we can be deep in anger, bitterness, revenge-seeking, and murder. Jesus’ crucifixion stretched his heart and made it huge in empathy, graciousness, and forgiveness. But it doesn’t always work that way. Many of our worst mass-murderers have also experienced deep humiliation and it too has stretched their hearts, except in their case it has made them deep in bitterness, callousness, and murder.

Several summers ago, I was at a conference at the University of Notre Dame where the Holy Cross community had gathered to prepare itself for the Beatification of its founder. Reflecting upon the spirituality of their founder, one Holy Cross member offered this challenge to his community: If you live inside of any family for any length of the time, at some point that family will wound you and wound you deeply. But, and this is the point, how you handle that wound, with either bitterness or forgiveness, will color the rest of your life!

In the crucifixion, Jesus was humiliated, shamed, brutalized. That pain stretched his heart to a great depth. But that new space did not fill in with bitterness and anger. It filled in instead with a depth of empathy and forgiveness that we have yet to fully understand.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is president of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

The only place where we are fully understood

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Thursday, 23 May 2013 05:11

“I was born into this world with a tortured complexity. For long time I have puzzled over the causes of my psychological anguish.” Ruth Burrows, the renowned Carmelite writer, begins her autobiography with those words and, like the famous words with which St. Augustine opens his Confessions, they too set the tone for a very mature spiritual reflection.

I was browsing in a bookstore one day, glancing at titles and examining whatever looked interesting, when I read that line in Burrows’ book. Instantly, I was drawn to the book and a number of thoughts ran through me: This will be someone who understands life, who won’t be so simplistic and pious so as to require me to step outside of my own skin in order to be spiritual and religious! This will be someone who helps me accept the complexity of my own life and yet shows me how I might still will the one thing! I wasn’t disappointed. Burrows is an exceptional spiritual and religious writer.

I had already sensed the same motif in Henri Nouwen. He too was honest in admitting his own tortured experience and in naming the near-contradictory proclivities that pull us in different directions inside our own hearts.

Life isn’t simple: We want the right things, but we want the wrong things too. We are drawn toward generosity but drawn toward selfishness too. We like to be honest, but we find it easy to rationalize and not tell the truth. One part of us wants to be humble and not stand out, even as another part of us is prideful and wants to be recognized. We would like to pray but are drawn toward entertainment instead. We crave depth of soul but crave too the pleasure of sensuality. We want to give ourselves away in sacrifice, but we want too to experience the pleasures of life. A deep part of us wants to kneel in reverence even as another part of us is cynical and resistant. We crave both purity and promiscuity. We are drawn both towards the things of God and toward the things of earth. It is not easy, as Kierkegaard once said, to will the one thing.

We create difficulties for ourselves when we admit this, but even more difficulties when we don’t.

How do we live our spiritual and religious lives as if things were simple when, like Burrows, what we are experiencing is a tortured complexity? How do we make ourselves feel the right things when we are, in honesty, feeling a lot of other things? How do we make ourselves feel pious when so much inside of us wants to rise up in rebellion? How do we deny the fact that our sexuality frequently colors the purity of our relationships? How do we assert that we feel loving when what we are feeling is anger and resentment? How do we honestly say that what we are doing for others is really other-centered when much of it is coming out of our own ambition? How do we deny that we are frequently jealous of others? How do we deny that we sometimes have near-blasphemous feelings of irreverence? How do we deny that so many of our actions arise out of our own stubborn and wounded pride? And how do we pretend that, right at the heart of where we should feel faith and prayer, we often feel boredom, disinterest, and an inner deadness?

But to feel this way does not, of itself, make us unspiritual or non-religious. Feelings of impiety, anger, ambition, greed, jealousy, sexual temptation, irreverence, and boredom only prove that we are human and emotionally healthy. The very essence of a good spirituality is that it must meet us precisely within this complexity. Serving God in this world does not require that we step outside of ourselves or that we deny our own experience. It only asks that we integrate our experience in a way so as to make it life-giving for others and for ourselves.

Thomas Aquinas once wrote that the adequate object of the intellect and will is all being. I first read that when I was a 19-year-old seminarian studying philosophy and I remember how liberating it was when I first understood what this meant. I was being introduced to myself, to my own tortured complexity. What, Thomas Aquinas asks, would it take to fully satisfy the longings inside us? His answer: Everything! So we need not be surprised that we are sometimes pathologically restless and out-of-sorts during our lifetime here.

And there’s a sad irony in all this: So many people who want to be honest to their own experience distance themselves from religion precisely because they feel that religion makes things too simple, that it doesn’t understand, and especially that it can’t honor their experience. For many people, religion, all of it, is too simplistic to respect human experience because it doesn’t take into account our tortured complexity. But the irony is that, ultimately, it is the only place where we are fully understood.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Too bruised to be touched, a cause of suicide

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Thursday, 23 May 2013 05:11

The poet, Hafiz, wrote a poem nearly 700 years ago entitled, “We Should Talk About This Problem.” In it, God addresses a wounded soul:

There is a Beautiful Creature

Living in a hole you have dug ...

And I often sing, but still, my dear,

You do not come out.

I have fallen in love with Someone

Who hides inside of you.

That's God's feeling, and perhaps ours too, when someone is in a suicidal depression. Few things can so devastate us as the suicide of a loved one. There's the horrific shock of losing a loved one so suddenly which, just of itself, can bring us to our knees; but, with suicide, there are other soul-wrenching feelings too, confusion, guilt, second-guessing, religious anxiety. Where did we fail this person? What might we still have done? What is this person's state with God?

What needs to be said about this? First, that suicide is a disease and generally the most misunderstood of all sicknesses. It takes a person out of life against his or her will, the emotional equivalent of cancer, a stroke, or a heart attack. Second, we, those left behind, need not spend undue energy second-guessing as to how we might have failed that person, what we should have noticed, and what we might have done to prevent the suicide. Suicide is an illness and, as with any sickness, we can love someone and still not be able to save that person from death. God loved this person too and, like us, could not, this side of eternity, do anything either. Finally, we shouldn't worry too much about how God meets this person on the other side. God’s love, unlike ours, can go through locked doors and touch what will not allow itself to be touched by us.

Is this making light of suicide? No. Anyone who has ever dealt with either the victim of a suicide before his or her death or with those grieving that death afterward knows that it is impossible to make light of it. There is no pain like the one suicide inflicts. Nobody who is healthy wants to die and nobody who is healthy seeks to burden his or her loved ones with this kind of pain. And that’s the point: This is only done when someone isn’t healthy. The fact that medication can often prevent suicide should tell us something.

Suicide, in most cases, is an illness, not a sin. Nobody, who is healthy, willingly decides to commit suicide and burden his or her loved ones with that death any more than anyone willingly chooses to die of cancer and cause pain. The victim of suicide (in most cases) is a trapped person, caught up in a fiery, private chaos that has its roots both in his or her psyche and in his or her bio-chemistry. Suicide, in most cases, is a desperate attempt to end unendurable pain, akin to one throwing oneself off a high building because one’s clothing is on fire.

Many of us have known victims of suicide and we know too that in almost every case that person was not full of pride, haughtiness, and the desire to hurt anyone. Generally it’s the opposite. The victim has cancerous problems precisely because he or she is wounded, raw, and too-bruised to have the resiliency needed to deal with life. Those of us who have lost loved ones to suicide know that the problem is not one of strength but of weakness, the person is too-bruised to be touched.

I remember a comment I overheard at a funeral for a suicide victim. The priest had preached badly, hinting that this suicide was somehow the man’s own fault and that suicide is always the ultimate act of despair. At the reception afterwards a neighbour of the victim expressed his displeasure at the priest’s homily: “There are a lot of people in this world who should kill themselves,” he lamented, “but those kind never do! This man is the last person who should have killed himself because he was one of the most sensitive people I've ever met!” A book could be written on that statement. Too often it’s the meek who seemly lose the battle in this world.

Finally, we shouldn't worry too much about how God meets our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide. God, as Jesus assures us, has a special affection for those of us who are too bruised and wounded to be touched. Jesus assures us too that God’s love can go through locked doors and into broken places and free up what’s paralyzed and help that which can no longer help itself. God is not blocked when we are. God can reach through.

And so our loved ones who have fallen victim to suicide are now inside of God’s embrace, enjoying a freedom they could never quite enjoy here and being healed through a touch that they could never quite accept from us.

Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser, theologian, teacher, and award-winning author, is President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio, Texas. He can be contacted through his website www.ronrolheiser.com

Turning inner chaos into a peaceful garden

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Thursday, 23 May 2013 05:11

Almost all spiritualities have a special place for deserts, wilderness, and other such places where we are unprotected and in danger from untamed nature, wild beasts, and threatening spirits. This concept has deep roots inside both ancient religions and the human psyche itself.

In ancient Babylon, for example, wild, uncultivated terrain was seen as something that was unfinished by God and which still participated in the formless chaos and godlessness of pre-creation. It was seen both as unfinished and as a place where dangerous forces lurked, beasts and devils. Thus when people took possession of wild, uncultivated land, it was understood that certain religious rites had to be performed which, in essence, claimed the land for God, for civilization, and for safety. For ancient Babylon, a cultivated garden was a safe and sacred place whereas an uncultivated desert was dangerous and in some dark way in opposition to God.

Similar ideas were present too in other cultures which saw wilderness as a place inhibited by satyrs, centaurs, trolls, and evil spirits. Myths and folklore abound with these images. Medieval Europe, as seen in our fairytales, added the idea of “deep and dark forests” to this concept. These too were seen as uncultivated, dangerous places, places where bad spirits or evil persons might capture you or as places within which you might hopelessly lose your way. Deep, dark forests were not places you were to venture into without proper guidance.

But it was also understood that these wild places were not meant to lie forever untouched by us and God. The idea was present inside of Christian spirituality that we, men and women of faith, were meant to help God finish creation by taming these wilds, exorcizing the bad spirits there, and turning the wilderness into a garden. And so Christianity developed the idea that men and women armed in a special way with divine light and protection, monks and nuns, could and should go into these uncultivated places and turn the unsafe wilderness into a safe garden. Among other reasons, this was why medieval monks and nuns often chose uncultivated places to start up their monasteries and convents.

This fear of wild, uncultivated regions was also partly behind the church’s fear of inquiry into and exploration of outer space. Galileo knew this first-hand. The church had been warning: Stay away from certain dark places.

In subtle ways both this concept and its concomitant fears are still with us. What frightens us today is not untamed geography (which we now see as inviting peace and quiet). Rather for many of us, the untamed, the wilderness, is now visualized more as a gang-infested area within a city, crack houses, singles’ bars. Strip-clubs, red-light areas. These are understood as lying outside our cultivated lives, split off from the safety of home and religion, godless places, dangerous, a wilderness.

But what frightens us still more, are the untamed and uncultivated deserts within our own hearts, the unexplored and dark areas inside of us. Like the ancients, we are frightened of what might lie in hiding there, how vulnerable we might be if we entered there, what wild beasts and demons might prey on us there, and whether a chaotic vortex might not swallow us up should we ever venture there. We too fear unexplored places; except our fear is not for our physical safety, but for our sanity and our sanctity.

And this fear is not without its wisdom. It is wise to not be naïve. For centuries parents told their children frightening fairytales about evil things lurking in dark forests, looking to devour little children or bake them in ovens. These stories were not told to children to give them nightmares but rather warn them not to be naïve about whom or what they met. Not everyone can be trusted and it is wise, particularly when you are young, vulnerable, and unarmed, to stay together, to stay away from dark places, and to be safe.

Nonetheless, our Christian faith invites us to go into those areas, face the wild beasts that dwell there, and turn those dangerous regions into cultivated land, into safe gardens. After all that is what Jesus did: He went into every dark place, from the singles’ bars of his time into death and hell itself, and took God’s light and grace there. But he wasn’t naïve. He heeded the advice of the old fairytales and didn’t venture there alone. He entered those underworlds with his hand safely inside his Father’s, not walking alone.

Faith is meant rid us of fear, including fear of the wild beasts and demons that lurk inside the deserts of own minds, hearts, and energies. We are meant to turn those wild, dark areas into safe gardens. But we should heed both our own instincts and the instinct behind the old fairytales: Never venture into the dark woods naively and alone! Make sure you are armed with a sturdy creed and that you are walking hand-in-hand with your Father.

Why aren’t our prayers always answered?

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Thursday, 23 May 2013 05:11

There are several places in the Gospels where Jesus assures us that if we ask for something in his name we are guaranteed to receive it.

In Matthew’s Gospel, for example, he says: Ask and you shall receive, because everyone who asks receives. In John’s Gospel he promises us that if you ask anything in my name, the Father will grant it.

Why doesn’t this always work? Sometimes we pray for something, pray for it in Jesus’ name, and our request isn’t granted. Sometimes we literally storm heaven with our prayers and heaven seems shut against them. Did Jesus make an idle promise when he assured us that God would give us anything we ask for, if we ask in his name?

Spiritual writers and apologists have offered a number of answers to this question: Maybe our prayer wasn’t answered because we asked for the wrong thing. A loving mother wouldn’t give her unknowing child a knife to play with, would she? Or perhaps our prayer was answered, but at a deeper level and only in time will we understand that answer. C.S. Lewis once quipped that we will spend most of eternity thanking God for those prayers of ours that he didn’t answer!

There’s merit in all these answers, though they are not the answers that Jesus used. Indeed, when he promised us that our prayers would be answered, he didn’t add that it is on the condition that we ask for the right thing. He invited us to ask for anything in his name. He didn’t specify that it be the right thing. So why aren’t our prayers always answered?

Jerome Murphy-O’Connor, a renowned Scripture scholar, suggests that in Matthew’s Gospel, as well as in much of the rest of the New Testament, prayer of petition is linked to concrete charitable action within the community. Hence to pray truly for someone involves also reaching out concretely to help that person. To pray truly for justice and peace involves working actively for justice and peace. When we pray “through Christ” we pray not just through the resurrected Christ in heaven but also through the “body of Christ” on earth, ourselves. We need to be involved in helping answer our own prayers. Thus when our prayer doesn’t seem to be answered it might mean that we, Christ’s body on earth, have not been enough involved in trying to answer our own prayer, that we haven’t in fact prayed “through Christ.”

Karl Rahner, in commenting on Jesus’ promise in John’s Gospel that anything we ask for in his name will be given us, offers us this reflection:

To ask for something in Jesus’ name does not mean that we invoke him verbally and then desire whatever our turbulent, divided heart or our appetite, our wretched mania for everything and anything, happens to hanker for. No, asking in Jesus’ name means entering into him, living by him, being one with him in love and faith. If he is in us by faith, in love, in grace, in his Spirit, then our petition arises from the centre of our being, which is himself, and if all our petition and desire is gathered up and fused in him and his Spirit, then the Father hears us. Then our petition becomes simple and straightforward, harmonious, sober, and unpretentious. Then what St. Paul says in the letter to the Romans applies to us: We do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us, praying the one prayer, “Abba! Father!” He longs for that from which the Spirit and Jesus himself have proceeded: he longs for God, he asks God for God, on our behalf he asks of God. Everything is included and contained in this prayer. .... [If we pray in this way] we shall see that God really answers our prayer, in one way or another. Then we shall no longer feel this “one way or the other” is a feeble excuse offered by the pious, and the Gospel, for unanswered prayer. No. Our prayer is answered, but precisely because it is prayer in Jesus’ name; and what we ultimately pray for is for the Lord to grow in our lives, to fill our existence with himself, to triumph, to gather into one our scattered life, the thousand and one desires of which we are made. ... To pray in Jesus’ name is to have one’s prayer answered, to receive God and God’s blessing, and then, even amid tears, even in pain, even in indigence, even when it seems that one has still not been heard, the heart rests in God, and that—while we are still here on pilgrimage, far from the Lord—is perfect joy.

Until we have prayed like this, Jesus can truthfully say to us: “Up to now, you have not asked for anything in my name. You may have tried to, you may have meant to, but you have not yet made me the strength and burden of your prayer.”