Psychoanalysis teaches that we construct our personalities, what we might call our “character armor,” as a defense against our experience of loss. There is, perhaps, no greater human suffering than that of loss, than of facing the truth of the fact that everyone and everything that we love, including ourselves, will die. So, much of what we take to be our lives, to be our very selves, is constituted by our means of evading and forgetting the reality of loss and death.…[read more]
“If I give myself glory, my glory is nothing. It is my Father—of whom you say, ‘He is our God’—who gives me glory; and you have not known him, but I know him. And if I say I do not know him, I shall be a liar like you; rather, I know him and keep…[read more]
Yesterday I experienced one of those exceptional and, in a good way, disturbing moments in life. A very good friend said to me: “As a religious community in the Church, you guys don’t have the right to just say who you are on your own. You have a responsibility to us, and you need to dialogue with us who we need you to be.”…[read more]
As, in a liturgical and scriptural sense, we move inexorably toward the mystery of the passion, death, and resurrection of Jesus, we are drawn into the profound paradox of human experience that it is only in ceasing to flee from suffering and sadness that we come to recognize and realize the joy that is beyond telling. We know from psychoanalysis that it is the nature of our unconscious to crave and seek pleasure and to avoid pain. Yet, as pleasure and joy are not at all the same thing, to live unconsciously, as the Pharisees do, is to never know…[read more]
One thing we can say, without hesitation, about the Jesus of the gospels is that he is, above all, a witness to the truth. His testimony is true and valid because he knows where he comes from and where he is going. There is but one judge of the truth and validity of the path he is walking, and that judge is God, Jesus’ Father.…[read more]
This lent is becoming a most challenging one for me. I have known, at one level, for a very long time that at the very heart of the Christian faith and form tradition is the call to forgiveness. “Forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us.” As I’ve often noted, the great scholar of religion Houston Smith has pointed out that the 3 great monotheistic religious traditions highlight a unique aspect of the call to follow the One God “unreservedly,” as we hear in the reading from Daniel today. The Jewish tradition focuses obedience; the Islamic…[read more]
Some days ago, a friend shared with me a lecture that Jacques Barzun had given in 1969 entitled “Present Day Thoughts on the Quality of Life.” It had just recently been rediscovered and was published this month in “The American Scholar." In it he speaks of, for all their questionable tendencies, the valid critique of western culture that inhered in the revolutionary movements of the late 60’s and early 70’s. Given the secular and rational-functional reductionism of our culture, we have come to identify usefulness with human value. And if this was true in 1969, it is even more true…[read more]
As one who came of age in the Church immediately following the Second Vatican Council with its proper restoration of the meaning of the Incarnation for our humanity, I have always found the foundational spiritual teaching of today’s reading from Jeremiah a difficult one to comprehend fully and truly appreciate. “Cursed is the one who trusts in human beings. . . .” Yet, if I hear the entire sentence which qualifies the “curse” as applying to one who trusts human beings solely, then I can begin to recognize its truth in my own experience.…[read more]
A couple of days before my father died, I was helping him eat his lunch. I cut the meat that was on his tray, and, in a contorted attempt to communicate my respect and appreciation for him, I said to him that I could not do this the way he could. His response was one that truly put me in my place: “I’m no better than anyone else.”…[read more]
Adrian van Kaam says that every human person we encounter is an appeal to us. He describes that appeal as, “Please be with me and for me.” Van Kaam is saying that whatever we “think” we are asking for, we are always, at a deeper level, making this appeal for the presence of the other with us.…[read more]
Psychoanalysis teaches that we construct our personalities, what we might call our “character armor,” as a defense against our experience of loss. There is, perhaps, no greater human suffering than that of loss, than of facing the truth of the fact that everyone and everything that we love, including ourselves, will die. So, much of what we take to be our lives, to be our very selves, is constituted by our means of evading and forgetting the reality of loss and death.…[read more]
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