The sea frozen inside us

...I am uncomfortable writing this, because we have a way of talking easily of what death (not to speak of life) means, as if from our vantage point we had clarity about these things...

...Isn't it decent of us to behave compassionately...

...What does all of this have to do with traditional religion...

...or it is considered a system of ideas...

...We are not comfortable (and there is no way to be comfortable with this idea) with knowledge that, if Christianity is true, it changes everything...

...They can stand in the way of transformation...

...Our ordinary understanding of Christianity has everything to do with the Enlightenment reduction of religion to the realm of the subjective...

...A book must be an ice-ax to break the sea frozen inside us...

...There can be no resurrection without it...

...This understanding made it clear that our emotions are at best the psychic shadows of real spiritual events...

...They may have been heretical in some ways, but certainly not here...

...A revelation, a vision which was meant to break through our ordinary perceptions in order to free us becomes instead a comfortable and familiar part of an old landscape, or a piece of our soul's furniture, something like the accustomed feeling of a bannister we touch every night on our way up to bed: it is a comfort to know that whatever else happens in our life, this at least will remain the same...

...or they can reassure us that we do not have to change at all...

...Liturgy, spiritual direction, and the other guides we have ought to make more profound demands on us...

...Most of what we consider compassion is not only not like that, but contains an element of removal which makes entering the pain of another absolutely impossible...

...it is something we feel in our hearts, and it may be that it is important to us spiritually in direct proportion to our helplessness before it...

...Kafka wrote a letter once in which he said something which applies to religion as well as to literature: "If the book we are reading does not wake us, as with a fist hammering on our skull, why then do we read it...

...Good God, we would also be happy if we had no books, and such books as make us happy we could, if need be, write ourselves...

...JOHN GARVEY...

...When Jesus encountered people their response was either defensive, or one which involved an awakening-in Kafka's terms, a thaw...

...So that it shall make us happy...

...Seldom does the misfortune of another strike us as a misfortune which we suffer ourselves...

...We feel a longing which is not yet capable of achievement...

...to ask God to change us in the trial is to ask for a radical change in our situation...

...This is precisely the wrong way to go...

...But one of the few good things about the world of established Christendom was that Christianity was seen as something so much more real than emotional or psychological response, so much more like the moon or the sun, that even those celestial symbols were less important than trinitarian and angelic ones...

...This is so persistent a temptation that for some people it is a religion's main use, its reason for being...

...The agony of someone we love helplessly, as we love our children, pierces us...

...They should not take our feelings for granted as good things, but ought to force us to question our feelings as deeply as we ought to question our thoughts...

...Later in the same chapter Bloom says that one of our dangers is the fact that "when we realize that we can no longer depend upon all that we are accustomed to find reliable around us, we are not yet ready to renounce those things...

...He speaks of the need to acknowledge this fact at its deepest point, where "despair has led us to faith," and emphasizes the importance of making sure that we do not despair of final victory but rather "of the means we have used to reach it...

...In a discussion of the Lord's prayer in his excellent book Living Prayer (Temp-legate, 1966) Metropolitan Anthony Bloom says that to pray "deliver us from the evil one" requires "such a reassessment of values and such a new attitude that we can hardly begin to say it otherwise than in a cry, which is as yet unsubstantiated by an inner change in us...

...As something which demands a thorough transformation of everything in us, everything we are, it is invisible...

...There is no better proof of that than the ordinary state of ordinary Christians...

...The presence of Jesus transformed everything...

...Sometimes the feelings, particularly the most powerful ones, are seen as proof that we are on the right track...

...They can serve as challenges to every dimension of our life, as agents of transformation...

...Everything about us needs transformation...

...Our approach to religion and religious education now aims too often at arousing appropriate feelings in us, in the hope that the feelings will lead the feeler to something deeper and more substantial...

...Ordinarily we feel another's pain only by a kind of analogy: I would hate to be in that position (whatever it is), and try to imagine it...

...The Gospel speaks of life, and he speaks of death and suicide...

...We claim to believe that there is someone who loves us so deeply that he died to show us the depths of that love, and because of that love offers us a life which we cannot imagine...

...We regard compassionate action as a matter of choice, something done "from the goodness of our hearts," and admire those who are tirelessly compassionate, as if they were only doing more frequently, and with more energy, what we sometimes do ourselves...

...We put so much stock in feelings, as if it were primarily through feeling that we could come to understand the world...

...But to feel that distress is the beginning of change, and is necessary...

...But in regarding compassion this way we are more sealed into ourselves than we were when we were unreflectively selfish...

...Unless the Gospel comes to us fresh, as real news, what we receive is not the Gospel but a story which uses the same words, characters, and descriptions of events to turn the Gospel into its opposite: it becomes a reassurance that nothing really has to change, as long as we obey the rules and don't stray too far ethically...

...It may seem strange to compare this to the Gospel, which means "good news," when Kafka speaks of ill-fortune and distress...

...When we allow another's misfortune to affect our life in any way, we think of this as a moral luxury...

...I am afraid that for most of us -priests, laypeople, religious-the churches serve too often as means of reinforcing emotions we do not want to see challenged in any basic way...

...It is a self-protection which collapses sometimes, when someone we love deeply suffers...

...it is a form of psychic self-protection...

...We could, after all, have chosen not to...

...On the whole we remain relatively unmoved by this fact...

...To question this idea, or to doubt that in some significant way we are the sum of our feelings, is nearly heretical...

...I do not want to return to a world in which Christianity was as taken for granted as we take the law of gravity, if there ever was such a relaxed version of Christendom...

...Its validity is seen as dependent on the depth of the emotions it arouses, or the tenacity (if not the depth) of our emotional commitment to it...

...Francis of Assisi said that God led him to lepers, who had previously repelled him, and he "entered into the pain of their hearts...

...This removal involves an element of satisfaction or gratitude that we are not ourselves suffering as the other does...

...As Kafka said, we are frozen inside...

...The love which is not a matter of choice but a condition of our being, the love we cannot help, which ties us-however we feel about it-to another, is most like God's love, or the love Saint Francis was led to...

...But what we must have are those books which come upon us like ill-fortune, and distress us deeply, like the death of one we love better than ourselves, like suicide...

...or it is considered an institutional allegiance, or a heritage to which one ought to be loyal...

...But the good news of the Gospel is not cheery, and the life involved is a life so directly related to death that we place the cross at the center of our places of worship...

...Christianity is currently associated with states of mind, convictions, proper as opposed to improper emotions...

...Our distractions are so thick, our sleep so profound, that it took his death just to get our attention...

...Because this causes discomfort, it becomes necessary to make Christianity more comfortable, to tell the same story in a way which reverses its moral, rather than succumb to a discomfort, a despair, and a distress with the means of self-protection we have developed to keep us from being changed...

...The gnostics compared our ordinary state of mind to sleep, to dreaming, to drunkenness...

...We may boil with feeling, but it is a feeling remarkably unrelated to the real situation of any human being outside ourselves, and is only related to our own situation in a confused and murky way...