To Unveil Our Faces

The original faith question as experienced by the Judeo-Christian tradition was not "What is the individual supposed to do with his or her aloneness?" but "What to do with God's concern for all humanity?" The Jews consistently avoided that question and the Lord's answer, and, sure enough, they were a prophecy for what Christians would also do. We have not been journeymen like Jesus in pursuit of wisdom and communion. Instead we have been landed gentry, clutching and protecting our small certitudes.

At this point, probably at every point, only the poor in spirit can rightly hear the gospel. The rest of us are not free just to walk, to walk alone, to walk with God, to walk with others, and to walk into new and uncharted places.

This pattern has been most apparent in what we have allowed to happen to Christian family and Christian marriage. These are gifts which find nurture and protection only under the cope of community and a larger church which also sees itself as family or community.

For example, many well-married people in our community needed to be encouraged to form friendships with other brothers and sisters. As their self-knowledge increased and their level of communication deepened in the Lord's safe environment, it became possible to know and even to deeply love others of the opposite sex with the full expectation that it would only deepen their marital love and their family commitments.

Such love is next to impossible in the world, where one walks unprotected spiritually and psychologically and relationally. But when sharing of honest feelings and love of the truth pervade the atmosphere, a whole new freedom is offered us.

"If we will live our lives in the light, as he is in the light, we will live in communion with one another" (1 John 1:7). "To walk in the light" has been spiritualized to mean something salvational or transcendental. Why can't we give John credit for being real and dealing with the same practical issues that we are? John knows that Christian community is just the natural result of people who have learned how to live an honest and conscious life in the Lord. Conversely, we have learned that Christian community not only makes the conscious and transparent life possible, but makes it a necessity and a great treasure.

Christian marriage, family, and community must above all else be places where the truth is actively sought and actively shared -- not just some ideological or dogmatic truth -- but the truth of who we are, the truth of what is happening between us, and the truth that is seemingly unknowable or unsharable. As Simone Weil put it, "Christ likes us to prefer truth to himself, because before being Christ, he is truth. If one turns aside from him to go toward the truth, one will not go far before falling into his arms."

The kingdom language of Jesus, with all of its words of waiting, trusting, believing, hoping, and forgiving, is telling us that in great part truth is the searching for truth, and understanding is the quest for understanding. But the non-kingdom world seems to like conclusions rather than process, security rather than journey, and even quick and easy answers rather than questions.

"I have married a wife, and therefore I cannot come" (Luke 14:18-20). Surely this has to be the strangest of all responses to Christ's beckoning. How could anyone imagine that marital love would conflict with "the love that moves the sun and moon and the other stars"?

And yet Jesus implies that if the two calls are honestly in conflict there is no doubt about the absolute primacy of the call to the kingdom. Before one can enthrone faithful married love, he or she first has to dethrone it in favor of God's love. One's journey toward understanding leads to a right ordering of love, so that married love can be insured, nurtured, and protected.

This ordering of love in terms of the kingdom frees Jesus further from the world's agenda so that he can even recommend and himself live the unthinkable: "There are some who are celibate for the sake of the kingdom. Let anyone accept this who can" (Matthew 19:12). Later we see that Paul seemed to live and understand this same call (1 Corinthians 7:7, 25). As he advises others, so he himself seems to "have firmly made his mind up, without any compulsion and in complete freedom of choice" (7:37). A new and free and open space is being created by the love between the Father and the Son.

Absolute newness, creatio ex nihilo (creating from nothing), is always an assurance that the Spirit has been heard. Free celibacy, impossible for the world, is therefore a most radical sign of the kingdom. But if celibacy has come upon hard times even within the bosom of the church, it is likely because the church has lost its sense of intimacy and familial relatedness, which support the charism of true celibacy.

We are seeing the gift arise quite naturally among some of our most healthy and receptive members in community. It is not tied to any sense of ministry, efficiency, or "victim offering," but appears to be a deep word of truth that is heard in the context of personal prayer and real sharing. It is a sense of vocation and integrity which, like all prophetic actions, has a hard time explaining itself or justifying itself to anyone else -- and often even to the individual who has chosen it. It is an absolute newness which says that God is sufficient, but it is also an absolute solitude which says the world is lonely and passing away.

Celibacy is communion with the ever-new God and compassion for the old and tired world. As communities open to the whole tradition evolve, the charism of celibacy is sure to blossom with new freshness and creativity.

The accepted order of family relationships and sexual roles in American culture is not encouraging us to uncover the freedom that the gospel offers us. It seems that we might have to create communities where this growth is really expected of us or even demanded of us before we are going to learn more constructive patterns of human relationship.

Our age tends to be much more in touch with its shadow than with its self. If we are to believe the testimony of much, if not most, of modern drama, literature, and cinema, we are, in fact, almost obsessed with our shadow. Modern humanity is so aware of its darkness (while refusing to call it darkness!) that it seems to doubt that there is anything beyond the shadow. Humanity is therefore largely controlled by the shadow and imprisoned within half of its soul. Church tradition would call this original sin.

It is not surprising that the tradition would also say that the only antidote to original sin is baptism, which is the initiation rite into the Christian community. We still have baptism. But what, practically, is it initiating people into?

We do not have many functional Christian communities which can walk the journey with us and help us discern between darkness and light, our shadow and our true selves in Christ. We need relationships of duration and truth "to unveil our faces so that we can reflect like mirrors the brightness of the Lord." In Christian community we will "all grow brighter and brighter as we are gradually turned into the image that we reflect; this is the work of the Lord who is Spirit" (2 Corinthians 3:18).

We know ourselves only in mirrors, only in relationship. God's life is always mediated. We wait in darkness, unaware of ourselves, living in illusions and shadows, as C.S. Lewis says, "until we have faces." There is such a fear of our unknown selves and a concomitant fear of our sexuality that people in general are unable to trust or entrust themselves to other people.

There is great gender identity confusion and real inability for many males to trust female love and for many females to ever trust male love. This situation could be described as the most subtle, certain, and total way of destroying a people. The vulnerable and trusting love of Jesus is the only sign of salvation that can be raised up like a white flag in a cold war.

Our sexuality is our symbolic self. It cannot be treated lightly and must be allowed to come to consciousness. There must be a safe and trusting place where this can be allowed to happen, or our symbolic self will remain in the world of guilt, repression, and unconsciousness, where it will indirectly but certainly control us.

One of the most hopeful signs in familial church communities is that these issues have a safe environment where they can be dealt with openly. It is okay to show affection here, and it does not mean that we are leading up to a genital relationship. It is acceptable to feel here, and you do not have to be afraid or ashamed. Of course, you are going to fall in love! That is the meaning of life. I hope it happens many, many times.

In community it can happen creatively, "in spirit and in truth," but not without great pain. I am convinced that the problem with so much aberrant sexuality today is not that people feel too much desire or too much passion, but rather that they do not feel enough. We must find a place where we can feel the full range and greatness of human emotion, the agony and the ecstasy, and therefore put our sexuality in healthy perspective.

For Jesus, the kingdom is the possibility of universal compassion: it is community and not just kindly coupling. Marriage is a school, a sacrament, and a promise of the coming kingdom but not itself the final stage. Jesus dethrones married love in order to enthrone it in proper perspective. The specific love points to the universal, but only the "love that moves the sun, the moon, and the other stars" can finally protect and preserve and make possible the specific love of a man and a woman.

Jesus seems to be concerned about widening the family circle to include all the life that God is offering. He knows how paralyzing and even deadening the familial relationships can be when they have cut their lifelines from the larger truth and more universal love. Family can be both life and death. Church also can be both life and death. Church and blood family both have the greatest power to wound and the greatest power to heal.

The gospel believes in family, but it is never going to limit itself to the blood relationships and call that alone family: "Anyone who prefers father or mother to me is not worthy of me. Anyone who prefers son or daughter to me is not worthy of me." Good American Christian religion would never dare to say those words on its own. When we do, we recite them falteringly, because we cannot really understand the radical nature of Jesus' vision.

Paul develops Jesus' teaching in the context of his faith communities. He is convinced of the supreme importance of shared faith and shared life within the marriage partnership: "Do not refuse each other except by mutual consent, and then only for an agreed time, to devote yourselves to prayer" (1 Corinthians 7:5). With our unintegrated emphasis on sexual relationship today, it would be hard to imagine the Christian leader who would have the courage to preach on that text today without feeling naive or old-fashioned. The absolute primacy of the kingdom is no longer agreed upon among believers. Prayer is not conceived as a possible stronger bonding than intercourse.

If the community model of church has seldom taken hold, it can probably be attributed to many causes: individualism, authoritarianism, clericalism, fear, plus an overly intellectualized communication of the gospel. But the cause that I would like to deal with here is a certain kind of apathy (a pathos: no feeling), a fear of passion, which has consistently and ironically kept our incarnational faith from dealing with relationships, sexuality, emotions, bodiliness, and the power of love in general.

I am hard put to find a single century in our 2,000-year history since the Word became flesh in which there has been consistent and positive church teaching on the sexuality of this enfleshed creation. We have run from it, denied it, camouflaged it, sublimated it, died to it, sacramentalized it (thank God!) -- but we have only in rare and mature instances really faced it, integrated it, and allowed it to raise us to God. We are afraid of the Word become flesh, we are afraid of heaven much more than we are afraid of hell. We live in an endless fear of the passion of God, who feels fiercely.

I believe that for this more than any other reason the church has historically avoided seeing itself as family and as community. To do so would have necessitated relationships. It would have involved feeling, especially love and anger, and intolerable passion. It would have necessitated communion and communication instead of law and dogma. It would have necessitated lifestyle Christianity instead of efficient and impersonal religious service stations. It would necessitate really wrestling with the angel of Yahweh instead of just reading about him, proving him, and using him to legitimate our cultural biases.

Quite frankly, it would necessitate falling in love and losing a bit of precious control. It would lead us into pursuit of understanding when what we want is certainty.

Maybe it could all be characterized as a crisis of friendship. Is caring and compassion capable of being structured into a society? Can we expect it and factor it into the process, or will it always be a gift, a surprise, a bit of an enigma in a world of structured conflict?

We have so accepted the functional and the competitive nature of most human relationships that any deep friendship between two men or two women is immediately suspect of homosexuality. We are all affected by this climate of fear and mistrust of ourselves and of others. The usual solution is to remain aloof, since there is no support system which can hold on to us through the ups and downs of darkness and light.

The natural family has shown itself incapable of meeting the crises. The spiritual family of the church has the right theory, but lacks the practice, experience, and lifestyle setting. We need quite simply to found places of sharing where the Word can be shared, and where hearts and bread can be broken and passed around.

John Henry Newman said that "so much holiness is lost to the church because brothers refuse to share the secrets of their hearts one with another." This intellectual giant had as his cardinal's motto, "Cor ad cor loquitur," "Heart speaks to heart."

If the church is to be renewed, if family is to happen anywhere, we must again make it possible for heart to speak to heart. All else will finally show itself to be doctrinaire and ideological, but heart speaking to heart, little places of sharing the truth, have every chance of being the "two or three gathered in His name." These will be the places of incarnation from which Christ will again be born.

Father Richard Rohr, OFM was pastor of the New Jerusalem Community in Cincinnati, Ohio, and did editorial work for the journal Catholic Charismatic, when this article appeared.