Speaking of prayer, in the last chapter, without speaking of God, has been intensely artificial. For God is the dialogue-partner of prayer. He is the one to whom I speak, or, better, the one into whose presence I come since not all prayer is speaking. Sometimes it is just a quiet repose, a deep satisfaction to just be in the presence of God. As a matter of fact, it was not possible to speak of prayer without mentioning God, and he came in time and again in the chapter. But now the time has come to focus directly on the other pole of that personal encounter. How do I experience God in my life?

I find God, to begin with, in nature. Its limitless expanse, its intricacy, its striking beauty tell me of him.

The heavens declare the glory of God, and the firmament proclaims his handiwork. Day pours out the word to day, and night to night imparts knowledge; Not a word nor a discourse whose voice is not heard; Through all the earth their voice resounds, and to the ends of the world, their message (Ps. 19:2-5).

The peace of a distant green field, the grace of clear running water, the beauty of autumn leaves or a sunset, enough almost to take your heart away all speak to me powerfully of the presence of God who made them and sustains them by his hidden presence.

Perhaps my years in the minor seminary, out in the country, where I used to take long walks, bred in me such a love of nature. Though I was born and spent my childhood in the city, and still love its excitement, there is a part of me that longs for the quiet, the open or wooded spaces beyond. I remember particularly being once at Mt. Savior Monastery in western New York. I had walked to the top of a hill. On the other side I saw spread out another wide valley, fringed by trees. It was about sunset, and I was reminded how God walked with Adam in the Garden in the cool of the evening. Everything seemed almost alive, so eloquently did it all speak of the Creator. Augustine tells of a similar experience in his search for God:

I asked the earth, and it answered: "It is not I." Whatever things in it uttered the same confession. I asked the sea, the depths, the creeping things among living animals, and they replied: "We are not thy God; look above us." I asked the airy breezes, and the whole atmosphere with its inhabitants said: "Anaximenes is mistaken; I am not God." I asked the sun, the sky, the moon, the stars: "Nor are we the God whom you seek," they said. And I said to all these things which surround the entryways of my flesh: "Tell me about my God, since you are not He; tell me something about Him." With a loud voice, they cried out: "He made us." My interrogation was my looking upon them, and their reply was their beauty.(8)

Another time, I was skiing in the Swiss Alps. At one point I left the regular ski trail, and took a small, deserted path through the woods. Suddenly I stopped. The fir trees towered high above me, each with its snowy burden. There was a hush, such as only a blanket of snow can create. Sunlight filtered softly through the dark branches. I sensed that God was near. "Since the creation of the world, invisible realities, God's eternal power and divinity, have become visible, recognized through the things he has made" (Rom. 1:20).

The Deist idea of God had him creating the world, and then leaving it to its own devices. But classical theology has a more intimate doctrine: Creation is, in its every moment, sustained by God. I experience God in this way: as the Sustainer of every creature. Sometimes I entertain the image of an immense and mighty hand that upholds all things, and on which they rest.

I experience God, as well, in the unlimitedness of questions. The six-year-old with his incessant "Why?" can formulate more questions than even the wisest adult seems to be able to handle. In my own learning, I have discovered that every question answered usually gives rise to a couple more. I had heard it said, but experienced it for myself when I completed my doctoral dissertation. It was really a humbling experience: I realized how many questions I had left unanswered on my own topic of research. Even more, I was aware of the myriad topics I knew next to nothing about. As I look about me, I see this endless quest for knowledge continuing. Libraries are built, and filled to overflowing when the building is hardly finished. And still the products pour out books, articles, research reports, convention papers; and there is no one to call "Halt! We know enough for the time being; let's see if we can absorb some of this information."

I have the sense that the questions will go on and on until the end of time. I have the sense also that no last bit of information is going to fit in the final piece of the puzzle. I have the feeling, in short, that man's quest is for more than any finite amount of information will ever satisfy. Only God, I believe, is the Answer to the primordial question that we form by our very being. Thus, I experience him as pure Intelligibility. God himself is the ultimate response to our queries, the only truly satisfying answer, the last Word that needs to be, or can be, spoken. God is the frame of intelligibility around the picture of the world. Without that frame, the world is unlimited, undisciplined, disorganized; it makes no sense. The part cannot be understood if the whole is senseless. Sartre was right about that. If I experience myself, my life, my world as having meaning, it is because it is embraced by and draws life from an Infinite Meaning.

In a similar way, I experience God in the ceaseless desire and yearning of the human spirit. I remember when I was a boy, and I slept in the front room of the house. During the warm months the door would be open. On the next street there were two immensely tall trees, side by side. They never seemed to be still; there was always a breeze murmuring through them, rustling the leaves of the highest branches. That subdued but ceaseless movement became a symbol of my own restless heart. As I lay awake at night and listened to the soft sighing of the wind in those trees, I felt a conviction that life was more than I knew or experienced of it. I didn't know what it was that I wanted. I was just learning about girls, and had a vague presentiment it might have something to do with love. I was only sure that there was something missing.

When I was a young priest I would leave the office almost every night, when I was too exhausted to do anything more, get in my car, and drive to the lakefront. As I sat on the seawall, the endless slapping of the waves told me the same story about my restless spirit. ". . . for Thou hast made us for Thee and our heart is unquiet till it finds its rest in Thee," as Augustine put it so well. (9) I still know that yearning, but I realize now, as I did not as a boy, that it can find no finite satisfaction. Whatever wonderful things I experience, it persists through and beyond them. Like the curiosity that quests ever for knowing more, this restless yearning will be satisfied with nothing less than the ultimate Good, the final Happiness, the unlimited Beauty.

An essential aloneness is therefore a mark of the human condition. For all I will say about friendship in the next chapter, it is, in the end, limited. Sometimes we love someone so much that we want to be literally inside, totally merged with him or her. But an otherness always remains. I am I, and you are you. I can never totally know you, nor you me. I can never get totally within your experience of the world. We are finally separate, alone. Only in an unmediated union with God could I hope to have such a perfect community of knowing and loving. ". . . then I shall know even as I am known" (I Cor. 13:12). But in our this-worldly experience God is present only in being simultaneously hidden and absent. Consequently, our infinite desire to love, our longing for an unlimited good, cannot be fulfilled by another finite person; nor is it perfectly answered to, in this life, even by God. So I experience God as the elusive goal of that unlimitedly restless yearning.

Abraham Maslow calls them "peak experiences." They are the fleeting moments in which everything appears to "come together" perfectly, a situation in which nothing seems to be lacking for one's consummate happiness. Their very transience makes them at once limited and precious. They occur infrequently; but when they do, they make all of life seem worthwhile. Even one such experience, while it lasts, seems to more than compensate for all the dull days, the drudgery, the frustrations, the attacks, the bitter hurts. That is something of a comfort to me when I think how fortunate I have been, how many advantages I have been given, and how, by contrast, some people spend their whole lives in grinding poverty. Or others, in the history of the world, have been born and died within a time completely upset by war; still others have by injustice been consistently denied their chance, until they died in total frustration. But if in the whole of that life there was one such perfect moment, then I cannot feel that it was all not worthwhile.

What are the conditions for such an experience? They are hard to discern, and what can be said is more negative than positive. Externally, one's physical needs have normally been met. A person cannot be sick, or hungry, or tired. It is usually a time of leisure, not of work or rush. It often follows upon an accomplishment, some sense of a work well done. One has achieved a "place" in one's world. In a social context, that normally means acceptance by a group there is no feeling of being a stranger, a misfit, or an outcast. The peak experience may happen alone, but if not, then it is with someone a person is at least comfortable, if not intimate, with. Conditions are such as to allow a concentration on the present.

Internally, the person must be at peace with himself. His internal conflicts are resolved, and he is in an expansive mood. There is an "at-homeness" with all of nature, and the universe seems a friendly place I often experience these moments out-of-doors. There is a feeling of benevolence toward all of humanity. I have a number of times had these experiences in encounter groups. Such groups go through somewhat predictable stages. The first is one of superficialfriendliness the kind of politeness that society teaches us to observe, and that lubricates most of our daily contacts. Fairly soon, confrontation begins. Undiplomatic truths, usually suppressed, are spoken, and negative feelings articulated. When these are absorbed, a genuine liking develops in the group, but there is still a desire to remold others into a better way of being. Finally, and it usually happens at the end of the days together if it does at all, there is a time when everything seems to fall together perfectly. Each person is accepted exactly for what he or she is. The peculiarities that annoyed at first are now noted only with wry amusement. Everything that anyone does or says seems the perfect thing to do or say, because it is exactly "what he or she would do." For a moment, there is a glimpse of a new way people could be with and relate to each other.

But whatever conditions might be listed as usually required, there are really no rules for peak experiences. Still less is there a way to plan or bring them about. I think occasionally of Anne Frank's Diary of a Young Girl. She lived in Europe during some of the bitterest days of the 20th century, and belonged to the group most intensely persecuted by the Nazis. Her family's situation was desperate, and the external constraints on their life enormous. And yet, she would awake some mornings, and being alive and in love was joy inexpressible. I cannot pity her.

I find in such peak experiences an intense experience of God. I don't know how I know, and I can't fashion an argument out of it. I grasp, deep in my heart, that such an exquisite confluence of conditions could not be an accident; I know, in my bones, that what is happening is so obviously gift it could not be imagined without a Giver. It may be trite, but I recall at such times the poem of Browning:

God's in his heaven, and all's right with the world.

There is another way I experience God: with those I love very dearly. This is not all the time. Very often I am so absorbed in a friend that I am, at best, minimally aware of God. But there are times when the relationship seems so good, when friendship is so comfortable, when the joy of being together is so intense, that I become aware of God as a silent third party to the relationship. He it is who somehow creates it, because all deep love is of God. He it is who formed me to be a gift to him or to her, and formed him or her as a gift to me. God by his presence blesses and guarantees the goodness we share with each other.

Finally, and above all, I experience God as Father. He has chosen to be intimately related to me. "I shall be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me" (II Sam. 7:14; cf. Apoc. 21:7). It is hard to conceive that Jesus gave us any more precious revelation than this. He made known the deepest secrets of God when he taught us to pray, "Our Father. . . ." As he himself confessed,

Father, Lord of heaven and earth, to you I offer praise; for what you have hidden from the learned and the clever you have revealed to the merest children. Father, it is true. You have graciously willed it so. Everything has been given over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him (Mt. 11:25-27).

Bonhoeffer has spoken of "man come of age." I don't deny the historical changes he discerns, but I prefer a different image. The essential dignity of man, and it remains so no less today than when Jesus announced it, is to be a child of God. "I assure you that whoever does not accept the reign of God like a little child shall not take part in it" (Mk. 10:15). The meaning of Adam's sin, as I read it in Genesis, was wanting to be like God "trying to be too big for his britches." That remains today, I am convinced, a compelling temptation for man.

I have singled out this experience of God as Father because my spirituality is very Father-centered. I rarely pray to Jesus or to the Spirit. No doubt this has been influenced very much by the experience of the liturgy, especially in pronouncing the priestly prayers. For the Canon and the official prayers of the liturgy are invariably addressed to the Father. In specifying this emphasis in my prayer, however, I am making no value judgments. I am not saying this is the best or only way to pray. I have surveyed the Christian tradition on this point, and find that no hard-and-fast rules can be discovered. If the liturgy addresses itself, in its most formal expressions, to the Father, there are also, dating to the earliest days of the Church, more informal expressions of piety, such as the "Gloria," that speak for the most part to the Son. The earliest pagan reference we have to Christianity is the Letter of Pliny the Younger. If we can trust the accuracy of his feel for theological nuance, the early Christians "sang hymns to Jesus as to a god." Some of the great spiritual writers exhibit what I call a "Father-mysticism," but others, equally renowned, reveal a "Jesus-mysticism." Hence I am not making rules for anyone else's prayer, but only describing my own.

In the relationship with God, then, I experience a Father's love; and the effect on my life is freedom the "freedom of the children of God" (Rom. 8:21). For his love is an acceptance of me simply for myself. "It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us; that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us" (Rom. 5:8). It does not depend on my becoming worthy of his love. Still less is it a love that is dependent on my talents, my accomplishments, the fulfillment of my duties. It is a love that regards what is deepest in myself; it brooks no qualifications or conditions beyond that. Such a love is freeing, because it does not demand that I do anything particular, or act in any special way; I only have to be me, since I am loved just for myself.

No doubt, such an experience of God's love does not arise in a vacuum. I don't think I would have understood the meaning of an unfettered, freeing love unless I had glimpsed the possibility of unconditional love in human friendships. Beyond that, I suspect, I could not conceive the meaning of a Father's love without a secure home and sense of acceptance as a child, and an experience of the love of a human father and mother.

God's love creates around me then a zone of freedom, a "play-space," in which I am called to do nothing but be my best self. I find in this notion the solution of a problem arising from our pervasive psychologizing. The language of the Gospel is one of self-abnegation: The Christian must "die to himself." "Whoever would save his life will lose it, and whoever loses his life for my sake will save it" (Lk. 9:24). But the language of psychology is of self-fulfillment. A person is invited to become all that he can, so that he has the healthy ego strength to say, "I'm okay; you're okay." This is a dilemma. Am I to seek to die to myself in a prayer group, and come alive in an encounter group? Do I deny myself on Sunday, and affirm myself during the week? Do I reject the Gospel as masochistic, and look for psychological salvation? Or do I cling to the tradition, and try to disregard psychology as best I can?

The image that God creates around me a play-space, in which I am invited only to be my best self, answers to this difficulty. For it is God himself who loves me, and wants me to become all that I can, to realize all my potential, to be my own truest self. Hence there need be no conflict between Christian experience and psychology; the two fit together perfectly. In fact, I am given new reasons for growth and self-fulfillment. If a person gives me a gift, he does not want me to throw it away or set it aside neglectfully. If God creates me, he wants me to make the most of that. If he has given me a play-space, he desires me to dance mightily within it. If God loves me, then I must indeed be worthwhile.

Realize that you were delivered from the futile way of life your fathers handed on to you, not by any diminishable sum of silver or gold, but by Christ's blood beyond all price . . .
(I Pet. 1:1819).

But what about the language of self-denial? Does that have to be abandoned? I don't think so. The fact is, we are not simple, integrated beings. There are many discordant pulls within our living, many different levels within ourselves. The process of becoming fully oneself is a process of integration. But in that process, some of the discordant aspects of myself will have to be suppressed or abandoned. I must die to superficial elements of myself, so that my deepest self the one loved unconditionally by God can live more fully. After all, in even the most severe of Jesus' statements, one dies to oneself not to die, but to discover a deeper life: ". . . whoever loses his life for my sake will save it" (Lk. 9:24). The ultimate meaning of Jesus' message is not death, but life: "I came that they might have life, and have it to the full" (Jn. 10:10). Therefore the Gospel's ultimate call is not to self-denial, but to self-fulfillment. Self- denial is only a means of arriving at that goal.

If this offers a theoretical solution to the dilemma, there are still some practical cautions to be added. Becoming fully oneself can involve a great deal of suffering and dying. Take the image of the dance. A ballet can create an extraordinary impression of light, grace and ease. But anyone at all familiar with the art knows the hours of practice, the years of rigorous training that go into such a presentation. Thus even "play" is not opposed to "discipline." Paul said the same thing in the image of the athlete: "Athletes deny themselves all sorts of things. They do this to win a crown of leaves that withers, but we a crown that is imperishable" (I Cor. 9:25). Second, selfishness is an ever-present tendency, and it is easy to confuse what I want with true self-fulfillment. This is to settle for a superficial satisfaction rather than a deeper growth. Another point is that I do not always know what my best self is, or what path I must take to achieve it. Often I discover this gradually as I try to live the Gospel, to listen to my own voices, to discern the best possibilities opening up to me. To become fully my deepest self, I must listen carefully to my truest and best impulses and desires. In this world stained by sin and marked so strangely by the blood of Christ, the call to growth may take me down some very unexpected paths and demand some unusual kinds of dying. If I myself cannot predict where my growth will lead, as I dance this playful-serious dance in God's play-space, even less, finally, does the secular psychologist have an infallible knowledge of what constitutes true human growth. Everything touted as self-fulfillment in the human potential movement is not necessarily so!

I experience a Father's love, then, as one that sets me in a zone of freedom, prizes me for myself, and invites me to realize my most authentic identity. I am given by the gift of his grace to play in the world in his presence.

To this point I have been speaking, clearly, of God the Father. To round out an account of Christian experience, the role of Christ and the Spirit in my life must also be articulated. In the history of spirituality the Christian life has often been conceived of as the "following of Christ." Another favorite approach is the "imitation of Christ." But my spirituality is not so much one of following Christ, or even of imitating him, but of identification with him. It is not so much that I follow Christ or imitate him; I am Christ.

That sounds like an extremely presumptuous statement. How would one dare . . .? And yet, I believe there is an important strain in the New Testament tradition that warrants this. Paul said: ". . . the life I live now is not my own; Christ is living in me" (Gal. 2:20). It is as if the whole person of Paul had disappeared, to be replaced by that of Christ. There are also the syn- words in Paul, a prefix he adds to make strange new compounds. ". . . He co-vivified us with Christ . . . and co-raised us and co-seated us in the heavens in Christ Jesus. . ." (Eph. 2:5-6).(10) In this text our identification with Christ is so vivid that even his glorification our future salvation is already somehow present in us. Again, Paul says:

We have been co-buried with him through baptism into death, so that as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might walk in newness of life. If we have become co-sharers in the likeness of his death, we shall be as well in his resurrection. We know this: the old man was co-crucified, so that the body of sin might be destroyed, so that we should no longer be in thrall to sin. . . . If we have died with Christ, we believe that we shall also co-live with him. . . (Rom. 6:4-6,8).

There are also Jesus' words to Paul when he is knocked from his horse: "Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?" (Acts 9:4), and Jesus' explanation at the last judgment scene: "I assure you, as often as you did it for one of my least brothers, you did it for me" (Mt. 25:40).

The First Letter of Peter also witnesses to this thought. ". . . he has bestowed on us the great and precious things he promised, so that through these you who have fled a world corrupted by lust might become sharers of the divine nature" (I Pet. 1:4). This text became a very important foundation for the theology of grace in the Greek Fathers, as they loved to repeat that God became man, that man might become divine.

In this union with Christ, I identify above all with Jesus in saying "Abba, Father." This consciousness of his Father, this awareness of living "toward the Father," was a crucial part of Jesus' life. We see him often going aside to pray, sometimes for whole nights. Even as a child he is aware of the transcendent call. "Did you not know I had to be in my Father's house?" (Lk. 2:49). He explains to the disciples, "I have food to eat of which you do not know. . . . Doing the will of him who sent me and bringing his work to completion is my food" (Jn. 4:32, 34). The preservation of the Aramaic form in the Greek text persuades us that we have here a precious memory of the very word that Jesus used. "Abba" is an intimate term, somewhat like "Daddy," and departs radically from the usual Old Testament reserve in speaking to God. In sum, it constitutes a one-word revelation of Jesus' intimate relation to the Father. Thus I identify with Christ, in this intimate relation to the Father, when I pray, "Abba, Father." In fact, I think that through me (and other Christians) man continues to voice this "Abba" to the Father when Christ is no longer present in his mortal flesh to pronounce it. If, again, that seems presumptuous, we have Paul's warrant for it:

The proof that you are sons is the fact that God has sent forth into our hearts the spirit of his Son which cries out "Abba!" ("Father!").... The Spirit himself gives witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:16).

The priest has particularly been traditionally imaged as alter Christus, another Christ. He is called upon to pronounce in the first person the very words of Jesus, "This is my body; this is my blood . . . . " No doubt the experience of presiding over the liturgy has also given an impulse to this spirituality of identification.

To be one with Christ, to address the Father as "Abba," as he did, seems a wondrously exalted dignity and it is. "See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God! Yet that is what we are" (I Jn. 3:1). It is not a witness to my worthiness, but a manifestation of the incredible generosity of God. "To him whose power now at work in us can do immeasurably more than we ask or imagine to him be glory in the church and in Christ Jesus through all generations, world without end. Amen" (Eph. 3:20- 21).

One of the paradoxical results of this spirituality of close identification with Christ is that it is hard to form a clear image of him. He is almost too close to be seen it is like trying to look at your nose. Since I rarely pray to Jesus, there is not the subject-subject relationship there is with the Father. At the same time, there is a sense of intimate closeness and oneness. "Christ is closer to me than I am to myself," to paraphrase Augustine.

Another implication of the spirituality of identification with Christ, however, is that the picture of Jesus in the Gospels becomes a revelation of what I am, and what I am invited to grow into. As I see him praying to the Father, preaching, healing, loving, suffering, dying, rising, then I know I am called to continue these same activities.

Growth in Christ, in this spirituality, means becoming increasingly transparent, so that the Christ within shines out in all that I do, all that I say. The areas in which I have not yet grown, the parts of myself that cannot be integrated into my one, best self these form an opaqueness that keeps the light of Christ from shining out to others. "In the same way, your light must shine before men so that they may see goodness in your acts and give praise to your heavenly Father" (Mt. 5:16). Growth in the Christian life is therefore the gradual elimination of these opacities, the process of becoming transparently what I am in hidden germ.

The Holy Spirit, of all the three Persons, presents the most elusive image in the Scriptures: "The wind blows where it will. You hear the sound it makes but you do not know where it comes from, or where it goes" (Jn. 3:8). I find it similarly hard to focus the presence of the Spirit in my life. But three images are particularly important to me.

The first is that the Spirit creates the bond of love between myself and the Father.

The proof that you are sons is the fact that God has sent forth into our hearts the spirit of his Son which cries out "Abba!" ("Father!").... The Spirit himself gives witness with our spirit that we are children of God (Gal. 4:6; Rom. 8:16).

I have quoted these texts above, but I cite them again for what they say of the Spirit's role. It is he who forms in me the love I bear to the Father; it is also the Spirit who assures me that I am a son of the Father. As the Spirit drove Jesus into the desert (Mk. 1:12), so there is a force within me that escapes my understanding and conscious awareness. "The Spirit too helps us in our weakness, for we do not know how to pray as we ought; but the Spirit himself makes intercession for us with groanings which cannot be expressed in speech" (Rom. 8:26).

The image of the wind is the root metaphor of "Spirit" in the Scriptures. The Spirit is a presence difficult to locate, but it blows around me, in me, and through me. He is the atmosphere in which I live.

Finally, I think of the Spirit as the divine Sculptor, the finger of God that forms me progressively into the image of Christ. "All of us, gazing on the Lord's glory with unveiled faces, are being transformed from glory to glory into his very image by the Lord who is the Spirit" (II Cor. 3:18).

I have described in turn a relationship with the Father, the Son, and the Spirit; together they constitute a Trinitarian experience. Some reflections on this are in order. The implication of the spirituality of identification with Christ, as may have been noted, is that one enters, somehow, into the Trinitarian life itself. If I am Christ, if I can say "Abba" to the Father, if the Spirit prays in me in an ineffable fashion, then I partake in some way, at least analogously, in the very relations of the Three Persons.

This means that you are strangers and aliens no longer. No, you are fellow citizens of the saints and members of the household of God. You form a building which rises on the foundation of the apostles and prophets, with Christ Jesus as the capstone. Through him the whole structure is fitted together and takes shape as a holy temple in the Lord; in him you are being built into this temple, to become a dwelling place for God in the Spirit (Eph. 2:19-22).

Or, to put it conversely, the Trinity no longer dwells in light inaccessible, but is plunged into history. This happens first of all, of course, in the Incarnation, where mankind voices in Christ, in a human way, the eternal relationship of Son to Father. But that immersion into history is continued in myself, as I also become a point of insertion of the Trinitarian life into human history. In me Jesus once more says "Abba" to the Father; in me the Spirit prays in a way that no human speech could convey. The death and resurrection of Jesus is continued in me, to appeal again to Romans, chapter 6.

I find this a salutary emphasis for bringing the mystery of the Trinity back into the mainstream of Christian living. Theoretically one of the most important affirmations of faith, the doctrine of the Trinity has become a peripheral concern in the life of most Christians. There must be something wrong here; and the spirituality outlined above may be one way of taking this doctrine from its usual highly theoretical existence and bringing it back into life-giving contact with Christian living.

The history of Christianity has in time placed a unilateral emphasis on the divinity of Christ. This is probably to be dated especially to Nicea, 325. Arius had denied the divinity of Christ, and the Church was forced, in response, to emphasize the equality of Christ with the Father. There is a movement in theology today, and even in popular culture, to rediscover the humanity of Jesus. I find that a spirituality of identification with Christ is very timely in this search for the human Jesus.

At the same time, there are appropriate limits to be set to such a theology of identification. It is also Scriptural to distinguish with John between the Son (huios) and the sons (tekna ). Jesus often speaks of "my Father and your Father" not that they are two persons, but that the relationship is different. Jesus alone is the "first-born of many brothers" (Rom. 8:29). The ultimate difference is always there: Jesus is an Uncreated Person, I am a created person.

I discover this distinction especially and most painfully in the experience of sin. This remains a part of Christian living: "All of us fall short in many respects" (Jam. 3:2). When I sin, I feel that I am far from any possible identification with Christ. "Leave me, Lord I am a sinful man" (Lk. 5:8), as Peter said. In the experience of sin there can be no commonality with Christ. "For we do not have a high priest who is unable to sympathize with our weakness, but one who was tempted in every way that we are, yet never sinned" (Heb. 4:15).

In the first chapter I described something of the experience of prayer, which is both a paradigmatic and the most direct experience of God in my life. In this chapter I have developed other modes of my encounter with him: in nature, in the endlessness of questions and the ceaselessness of human yearning, in peak experiences, with those I love dearly. 'In the experience of God as Father, above all, I find the freedom of the children of God, and discover a spirituality of identification with Christ. Already in this chapter, then, I have spoken of "significant others," and attention must now focus on that communitarian element in the Christian experience.

"Community" means, first of all, those men and women contemporary with myself, those with whom I share this globe. In accordance with the movement so far, my consideration will begin with what is nearest myself, and move outward from there.

The new branch of investigation known as the sociology of knowledge has shown us how important surrounding social groups are for belief. No one really believes, or accepts as valid a basic way of looking at the world, without the support of his social environment. Community is important then, if for nothing else, to sustain us in the beliefs that we hold. That is why faith is never a purely personal project; it is lived only in and with the Church, which establishes a "climate of belief." "Faith comes through hearing . . ." (Rom. 10:17).

In my own life, no group is as important to me as a small circle of close friends. It is here, above all, that I have learned what it means to love and to be loved.

I remember very distinctly my first experiences of mature friendship. They took place when I was in my late college years, at the age of twenty or twenty-one. This doesn't mean, of course, that I had enjoyed no friendships previously; I had had not only chums but persons I felt particularly close to. But there was something so distinctly different about these experiences that they seemed of a quality quite apart from the prior ones. Whatever the reasons for this difference, they retain in memory the sense of a pristine opening of totally new personal horizons. As I was in the seminary at that time, these experiences were with men; but I have had many experiences of friendship with women since then, and have not found them to be radically different. The same reactions, to be detailed in a moment, merely take on new modalities.

With the caution that the experience was in many ways too deep for words, I think I might capture it best in the following terms: awe and wonder, acceptance for myself, self-confidence and humility, gift, another, loveableness. Such concepts, of course, unfold an organic unity, and thus they are all intertwined in more ways than could ever be detailed.

The basic marvel of it all, I think I could say, was that someone loved me. Someone that is another limited, sometimes weak, sometimes silly, but nevertheless real, flesh-and-blood human being. Loved how can you put it into words? He cared for me, valued me, understood me as no one else in the whole world. But above all, the surprise was the me. Why me? What was there about me? I could see other people to be attractive, but what was there in myself?

Still, I experienced myself to be loved. I was valued precisely for myself. Not for what I would do for him, not for any talents, not for my looks, not for what I had achieved, but just for me. I can remember very clearly stacking my self up against other persons at a high school age. I was better than this one at studies, but he always beat me at chess, I had to admit. . . the other one was smarter than I, but perhaps I compensated by being better at athletics. . . . This line of thought always ended rather sadly. For unless you were a genius in some line or another (and despite considerable talents in various fields, I wasn't), there was always someone who was better, if you extended the competition widely enough. So you tried to resign yourself to never being more than a big fish in a small pond.

What a different feeling this was! No longer was there a necessity to compete, or measure myself against anyone else. For I was loved for just myself. I could have argued in this new experience that I was a unique person, and in that at least no one could duplicate me. But somehow even argument seemed idle I just existed peacefully in the warmth of my friend's love.

The full acceptance of this wonderful revelation must have taken a discrete time—1 cannot now reconstruct how long it was before I lived with this new feeling and was brought to realize it deeply. But the effects were eventually far-reaching.

The primary feeling might be identified by a syllogism: If he loved me, then I was lovable. The logic, however, was not of the mind, but of something deep inside. I came to experience, in other words, my own value as a person, rather than as a function of a group, a role to be played, or a cog in a wheel. This deep realization that I actually was loveable led immediately to the grasp of a paradox about self-confidence and humility. Though I had in endless daydreams toted up abilities and talents, I discovered now that I had never really valued myself. Else why should I have been so surprised that someone could love me? Now I began to have a whole new self- confidence. But though I valued myself much more than before, somehow it was at the same time a much humbler attitude. There was no need any longer to arrogantly compare myself with others. If I could be loved for myself, then talents and achievements were rather incidental.

The experience was both self-reassuring and humbling, particularly because I was so aware that the love I received was gift. The love was free I could only be open to it. He could give it or not. Whatever self- confidence I might come to have, it could never be a proud or haughty one, because I felt so strongly the profound gratitude I owed to him for the gift that made me fully a person.

Since that time I have had many deep friendships. I have gradually come to accept the fact that I am lovable, that I too can be a gift to someone else. But in every new experience, especially at that exciting point where barriers are first beginning to fall down in self-revelation a process that happens much more quickly and easily now I never fail to experience something of that same thrill of awe and wonder when another person says to me, "I love you for yourself."

My own sense of who I am, then, is not a solitary or personal achievement; it is a gift of those who have loved me deeply. They have left a profound mark on my life, whether we are still friends, or whether we have in the intervening years drifted apart as so often happens in our mobile society.

Freed by this gift to be myself, I also learned in friendship what it means to love. For loving another is the converse of this experience. It is the effective communication to the other that he or she is worthwhile, lovable just for himself or herself. It is the message that a person is prized for what makes him or her unique; and while saying that is important, usually the words get through because they have been backed by deeds.

Love must regard what is deepest in the person; it can attach no other qualifications or conditions. I desire that my friend grow, that he become his best possible self. But beyond that I dare not specify. It is not for me to decide where that person's growth will lead him; it is not for me to impose on him my own visions and dreams of what he needs, in some false program of "personal improvement." Love does not bind, but opens up a room to grow. I return here to a favorite image: Love creates a play-space, a freedom zone, for the person. I imagine myself saying to a person:

In the gift of love, I create for you a space to play in. Others may coerce you to do this or that, to be one thing or the other for them; but in my play-space you are free. You need answer to no external criteria not even my own! You can just be yourself. If you want to be serious or silly, sad or slap-happy, you can. I only want you to be yourself, to grow into the truest possible you.

Of course, no human being gives that gift perfectly. In the limitations of finite human love, it is impossible to fully realize this ideal of totally freeing love. I have to have absorbed deeply the message that "I am lovable, good and worthwhile" before I can even conceive that I may be a gift to someone else. My past hurts and my present jealousies may, even then, mar the freedom I offer to the one I love. Still, in my experience, one human being is able to create for another a great deal of freedom, a considerable amount of room in which to grow.

The problem, in fact, is often the opposite. Though it may seem the easier part, many people are simply not ready to hear that they are lovable. They will do anything to drown out the message, to thwart the communication, to turn away the fearful truth with a jest, to read a compliment as a criticism, to ignore an insistent affirmation. It seems almost endemic to the human situation, like some dire consequence of original sin, that we grow up insecure and afraid, no matter how much love has been showered on us. The teenager, as he or she begins to grapple with the question of his or her personal identity, starts with the awful handicap of being quite uncertain and un- self-sure. For all the attractions of youth, I have no desire to experience such insecurity again. Even for an adult, the word of love may have to be spoken for long years and with incredible patience before the person really hears it, and begins to flower. And I am afraid that some are so closed to the communication, so sure that they cannot really be lovable, that they will never hear the message. They go on through life, making misery for all around them by their lack of self-esteem, but unwilling or unable to let anyone help them by the validation of a word of love. Indeed, I believe that is one of the ultimate questions of the ministry: how to make known to someone, not just verbally, but in an effective communication, the good news that he or she is lovable.

That may seem extreme, but I see the presence or absence of this feeling of personal worth, this self- confidence, self-assurance or sense of self, this "ego strength," as a linchpin of human behavior. The lack of this acceptance of oneself comes out in many destructive ways. Some persons never achieve anything because they don't believe enough in themselves. A subtle variation on this is the person who never risks anything because he is overly afraid of failing. Already disbelieving in himself, he is unwilling to assemble any further evidence of his worthlessness; at the same time he makes it impossible to demonstrate that he might sometimes succeed! A similar self- defeating attitude is seen in those who set unrealistically high goals for themselves, and then say, when they predictably fail, "See, I knew I could never do anything worthwhile." The shy person is often saying to the world, "Please don't pay any attention to me, let me shrink into my corner, as I'm not worthy of note." In the limit, such persons seem to be constantly apologizing for their existence. Others manifest their lack of a self-concept by demanding constant reassurance. They are ever seeking to be complimented extravagantly on whatever they achieve; but the void of self-doubt is a bottomless pit, and no amount of praise is ever really satisfying. The insatiable appetite for reassurance may in cases become quite tyrannical. Still others show their self-hatred by gaining weight or deliberately "looking their worst." Being overweight, especially in a woman, since our society puts so much stress on her figure, may be both a self-fulfilling prophecy and a "sacrament" a visible sign of, and a piece of evidence for, her unworthiness.

The pernicious effects of a poor self-concept may also be more subtle. The person who works constantly and compulsively may seem at first sight to be the exact opposite of the person discussed above, who is able to accomplish nothing. Yet fundamentally the same difficulty may be at work. Because the person does not value himself, he is forced to find his value in what he accomplishes. Often, however, this doesn't seem to be enough to establish his self-worth, and so he is forced to work harder and harder. The person who has to be constantly "doing for" someone else may be revealing that he does not feel he can be a gift just by "being for" another. Something similar may be noted in the defensive person who, precisely because he is insecure, has to constantly try to prove himself. The lack of a positive self-regard may often be at the bottom of much "role-playing" and many "fronts." The person in effect is saying, "I'm not really much good personally, but if I create a good enough front perhaps I can convince people otherwise." In the long run, of course, such behavior is self-defeating, because mature people do not care to relate to a front, but prefer to meet a real person; to the extent that he or she rigidly maintains the front, the person ensures that all his or her relationships will be superficial. Close to this behavior is that of the person who hides behind a role usually an authority role because he does not feel his personal value sufficiently to stand alone. Because he has placed his whole security in the role rather than in himself, he is likely to be unduly insistent upon the prerogatives of his office, and very threatened when anyone steps out of a subordinate role. Many "two- bit" tyrants would seem to be of this type.

The lack of self-worth may take on even more camouflaged forms. The loud braggart, who would seem to be supremely confident, might only be trying to convince himself. The person who is the "life of the party" may be only playing a role; in reality he may be the shyest person in the group. The aggressive criminal may be desperately trying to call to himself an attention he feels he will never achieve through more socially acceptable channels.

The absence of a healthy self-acceptance, then, can be seen as the root of many negative and destructive behavior patterns. But a description of the mature person may also be formed by simply reversing these characteristics. The self-accepting person has a solid sense of himself. He apologizes to no one for his existence, his uncontrolled feelings, both positive and negative, his legitimate desires, his reasonable thoughts, his own unique and personal experience. Because of this, he is able to avoid all the largely self-defeating personal styles described above. He values himself enough to be able to achieve his actual potential; at the same time he is not afraid of making mistakes, because he knows he will still be worthwhile. He sets reasonable goals for himself; if they prove too steep, he readjusts them without a catastrophic sense of failure. He is not overly shy, as he is confident he has something to offer to others. He appreciates praise but has no need of constant reassurance; he does what he does because he chooses it, and not because others will approve.

Confident of his ability to achieve, he has no need to drive himself unreasonably, or to constantly prove himself to others. While appreciating the importance of roles and even of defenses, he is not afraid to be himself in any situation. He wears his roles lightly, as it were, rather than oppressively imposing them on others; he is not afraid to redefine his role in accord with the needs of the persons he is dealing with. Such a person is creative; because he values himself, he implicitly understands that persons are more important than rules, regulations or social conventions; he is willing to adjust the rules when necessary to serve the needs of all the persons concerned.

Such a degree of positive self-evaluation may seem dangerously close to complacency, but the two should not be confused. For the very reason that he is self- confident, the mature man has no need to imagine himself as a paragon of perfection. Because he knows his basic value as a person, he is free to admit his weaknesses, his lack of abilities, the areas in which he especially needs to grow. But he continues to value himself positively in spite of his never-ending need for further growth; or, to put it another way, he values himself in his very openness to further development.

Perhaps it should not be passed over that, although immature behaviors are largely self-defeating, the mature human person has not therefore immediately entered into a realm of sweetness and light. Precisely because he continues to deal with people, many of whom are immature, he can expect some to be threatened by and to resent his maturity. Precisely because many people are compulsive in their work patterns, he may expect to be resented for his "laziness." Precisely because many people in their undervaluation of themselves place an inordinate security in rules, conventions and hidebound traditions, he may expect to be resented for his freedom in creatively dealing with and sometimes breaking those rules and traditions. But the mature person has no desire to regress to an immature stage he values his own growth too much for that just to please others; and he is confident that the deeper possibilities of human living open to a mature person far outweigh the problems "created" by his maturity.

What I have learned about love by experience and observation in friendship has been seconded by a more disciplined and systematic study. I have at times been called upon to do pastoral counseling, and Carl Rogers' model of "client-centered" therapy has proved most helpful in that endeavor. It has become for me, not just a "counseling technique," but a whole formulation of my mode of relating to others. I sometimes wonder if therapists choose one model of therapy over another because it is "better," or because it fits their own personalities more closely. In any case, I am sure that I find Rogers' thought so congenial because it agrees with my own personality and approach to life. To explain that, I shall have to give some account of his thought.(11) This will not be an academic presentation; I am interested more in conveying the "feel," the inner dynamics of the counseling relationship, as I have experienced it.

As "client-centered" therapy implies, the process of counseling is in this approach directed by the counselee himself. For a person unacquainted with the method, I find, that whole idea seems very hard to swallow. The first reaction is usually, "Well, no doubt it's called nondirective, but I'm sure it really is directive after all when you examine it." The model of the "layman" going to the "expert" for advice is such an all-pervasive model, in psychology as in many other fields, that it is difficult to imagine any other. The very word "patient" seems to deny that he can be an "agent." The second reaction, if and when the person becomes convinced that "nondirective" is meant quite literally and seriously, is that the idea makes no sense.

Why in the world should one let the client direct his own therapy? Isn't that the blind leading the blind? And why would anyone want to pay good money for the dubious advantage of having the patient explain to the therapist what he the patient thinks his own problems are?

To understand how there might after all be some sense to such an apparently backward procedure, the process as Rogers envisions it must be examined in more detail. It might be broken down into two steps: empathic listening and accurate reflection.

The first step is that of a very attentive listening to the client. Listening is often thought of as a passive process, but in the full meaning of the word it is an extremely active one. The therapist mobilizes every resource he has intelligence, feeling, past learnings, life experiences and focuses them intently, as it were, on what this particular person is saying. As the listening gathers up everything in the therapist, so it attempts to grasp the client's meaning on all the levels on which a human being communicates the information he may be offering, the particular feelings with which it is spoken, what is said in the lines and between the lines, the qualifications subtly introduced by intonation or gesture or facial expression.

After some experience of such listening, the therapist or trainee may discover with some surprise that people rarely listen to each other. Like the debater who is searching his opponents' statements for weak points and formulating mentally his riposte while his opponents are still speaking, many people are more taken up with their own thoughts and feelings than with those of the persons they are conversing with. Ordinary conversation, if examined, is usually found to be replete with feeling-cues unnoticed, obvious openers not taken up. Empathic listening, therefore, is a very active process, and a demanding one. After a few hours of such intense listening the counselor may well feel quite drained.

The second step is accurate reflection of what was spoken. The counselor attempts to put into words what he understands not just intellectually, but with his whole person the client to have said. The therapist does not of course attempt to say everything that he has heard. The re-expression is limited to what the counselor feels the client said more or less clearly and consciously or directly, and is also limited mainly to the "feeling content" of the statement. The last phrase needs some explanation.

Most statements contain both an intellectual and a feeling component. For example, suppose a person says, "I forced myself today to apply for a job." This revelation might be responded to in numerous ways. But questions that would tend toward information would be: What company did you apply to? Do you think you'll get it? Did they mention a salary? -How long have you been looking for a job? What type of work was it? Questions on the other hand tending to head toward feelings would be: You seem to have had to push yourself why was that? Did you feel good about it once you forced yourself to go? What's your aversion to job interviews? How do you feel about working? The Rogerian therapist would ordinarily be more interested in questions of the second kind than of the first.

Extreme cases of statements, of course, might be found that do not have both components. A statement in a scientific treatise tends to focus on conveying information to the total exclusion of feelings. A scream on the other hand may be pure emotional content and express no information as such at all. But the vast range of statements lies somewhere between the extremes. The meaning here is not that the feeling and intellectual components are neatly separated compartments; they shade off into one another. But it is clearly possible to stress one aspect or the other, as in the questions above. One further thing should be noted, however, about the above statement concerning the job interview: The feeling content is verbally present. In other statements it may just as well be expressed in intonation or gesture.

In the second step of the process, then, the counselor tries to express in his own words the feeling content of the client's previous remarks. He tries to do so without interpolating his own meanings or desires into the statement, his own further interpretations; he tries also not to blame the patient for any of hi? feelings, nor in reexpression to edit or censor some of the feelings out because he does not approve of them. Nor, finally, does he make his statement in a dogmatic fashion, but with at least an implicit question mark. If the client responds, "Yes, that's exactly how I feel!" he may reasonably conclude he has understood well. If the client says, "No, that's not exactly what I meant," then the therapist will listen again and try to form a more acceptable version.

Rogers likes to characterize the attitude of the therapist as "unconditional positive regard." In both his listening and his reflection he strives to make no judgment about the client, but simply to grasp and formulate his feelings. This is true no matter how hostile, negative, antisocial or unreasonable the person's feelings may be. Unconditional positive regard is not to be confused, however, with reassurance of the client. The counselor is called upon to mirror the client's own feelings, not to second them with his own. He is not to say, "You feel you hate your mother, but that really isn't so bad; cheer up, lots of persons have those feelings." Such reassurance departs from the nondirective method, and is in fact counterproductive, because implicitly it says to the client, "Your problem is not really important, let's just ignore it; you're too weak to really handle this, so just relax and let me take the responsibility." The Rogerian counselor's reaction would be the opposite "Let's explore your negative feelings about your mother, let's get them out on the table, let's not pretend they don't really bother you."

Such a reaction obviously demands that the counselor has come to terms with his own feelings, a state Rogers names "congruence." This means that the therapist is totally present to his own feelings, formulates them for himself, and can formulate them for the benefit of the client if appropriate. If the counselor is not congruent, he is likely to distort or censor the client's statement due to his own unrecognized feelings. Further, without a great deal of open and nondefensive experience of his own feelings, he is not likely to have the background to grasp empathetically the feelings of the client.

What advantages does such empathic listening and accurate reflection purport to yield? The reflection, which may at first sight seem mere banal repetition, serves two functions. The first is that it constitutes a check on the counselor's own understanding. The second and more important function is that it "objectifies" the feelings. To have the feelings put clearly into words and to have those words spoken by another person, who stands to some extent outside the client's experience and therefore has a certain objectivity, usually reduces the feelings to their often modest importance. Bottled up inside a person, poorly formulated, confused and reinforcing one another, such feelings may seem impossible to deal with. But once the client sees that the therapist is not terrified or shocked by his feelings, once he faces them squarely, he can almost immediately grasp for himself positive actions that would be a more constructive way of coping with his feelings.

The client really does lead in this kind of therapy. He comes to counseling in the first place because he has a problem. That free initiative is highly important. The therapist does not squander it by taking over the process and telling the client what his problem is and how he should solve it. The client states his own situation. If the therapist has his private theories of what is going on, he does not burden the process with them, but keeps them to himself. The person selects the topics that are to be discussed, and reveals himself to the extent, at any point, that he chooses. He decides what constructive actions he will take the counselor will, at most, explore options with him. The client will ultimately decide when it is time to terminate the relationship.

If this has been a long digression, it may be possible now to see how it illuminates all I said above. For I found the Rogerian method to cohere very well with what I had learned already about love, growth and acceptance. Rogers' whole approach postulates that there is a deep desire within everyone for growth and self-betterment. That is the mainspring of the whole method; without it, there would be nothing to bring the client to therapy, nothing to keep him there through its difficulties, nothing to indicate which direction the process should take. This basic thrust toward one's own good, one's personal growth, I identify as what is deepest in a person. This is what must be loved and fostered. Rogers' presupposition of the essential goodness of man I found to be highly congenial to my view of creation. Everything God makes, including man, comes forth good and unspoiled from his hand.

The counselor's refusal to discuss theories or move off into generalities is an implicit affirmation to the person that he or she is unique. By his careful listening and reflecting, the therapist validates the counselee's own account of the matter, and, in time, his own solutions to it. He is never telling the client what he the client feels, but is listening and asking. His basic gift to the client is not his expertise, but his acceptance of him as a person. This "deed" of kindly acceptance, sustained over time, is much more important than the words spoken.

The counselor's acceptance is in fact like a love without qualifications or conditions. It does not specify a rigid pattern of growth, nor does it impose on the client's feelings external or conventional criteria. In other words, it creates a play-space for the person, where he can freely explore his own feelings, both positive and negative. More directive therapies can run the risk of sustaining and perpetuating a dependency, which is often the client's very problem. A therapist who solves a patient's problems for him can create, instead of freedom, merely another need. The more superficial problems may be addressed, and even solved; but the deeper lack of self-esteem is not touched it may even be reinforced. But perhaps it is best not to dogmatize too much on rival models of therapy. The acceptance and concern of the therapist are much more important, I am convinced, than the methods he chooses to use.

The growth that can actually take place in friendship and the counseling situation is an extraordinary and beautiful thing. In friendship it is watching and sharing as the loved one meets new challenges, shoulders new burdens, learns deeper personal truths, suffers through difficulties to a more mature wisdom, and becomes capable of a stronger and wider love. Sometimes it is even observing the first wondrous dawning of the realization: I can be loved for myself. In the counseling situation, it is following the way a person can move from being confused, upset and discouraged or even desperate to being purposive, serene and self-confident. The problems have usually not disappeared, but it is a new person meeting them. At times there is the distinct feeling that the person has grown before my very eyes, from initial insecurity to a person at the end of the sessions who is able to speak calmly, to an equal, about the directions of his future growth. There are few things I find as thrilling as such palpable evidences of human growth.

I like to recur, in thinking about growth, to the image of the rosebud. There is a dynamism to the opening of the bud that will pursue its course even if the rose is cut from the stem and placed in a vase. At the same time, there is something indescribably delicate about the growth. To pry the rose open, in order to hasten its growth, would be violence unspeakable. It would only ruin the rose. Human growth is much like that: Its law is not force, but waiting. Growth cannot be pushed, but only attended to with love. It has its own principles and its own pace, which are not of our devising. I love one of the simple Gospel parables, occurring only in Mark:

This is how it is with the reign of God. A man scatters seed on the ground. He goes to bed and gets up day after day. Through it all the seed sprouts and grows without his knowing how it happens. The soil produces of itself first the blade, then the ear, finally the ripe wheat in the ear (Mk. 4:26-28).

It might be well to recall the direction of the discussion. I began my reflection on community with the relationship "nearest home": close friendship. The "revelation-experience" of being loved for myself led me to reflect on the correlative experience of loving another. I defined that as "opening up room for growth" by a basic affirmation of the other. The inability of some persons to accept this affirming introduced an examination of the positive and negative implications of self-confidence and its absence. Such reflections, derived from the experience of friendship, were then seen to be seconded by the findings of psychology, at least in its Rogerian form. A final meditation on "growth" rounded out this section on community as close friendship.

To summarize, Christian experience involves not only the self and God, but also a community of significant others. It is in that milieu that a person first learns to be loved, and to love. I have chosen my experience of friendship as a model of that interchange between persons. But close friendships do not exhaust the possibilities of community. Spreading around them in larger circles are many other types of community, in which some of the same dynamics are present, though usually in analogical and fainter ways.

Surrounding the circle of close friends is a larger group of acquaintances, more casual friends and family. Family members may, of course, be close friends as well, and then everything said above applies to them too. But they are not necessarily so. There is no guarantee that a blood relationship will also produce a close personal relationship. Even if not, however, there is a bond that links family members together. Brothers and sisters may fight like gamecocks, but when one of them is attacked, or comes into real danger, they will quickly rally to a common defense. It is a link in the blood, ineradicable, born of growing up together. "Home is where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in," as Robert Frost has it (12) I remember that as a boy we played cards with decks that always had the same picture on the back. A dog.-chained by his doghouse, was straining at the leash. "There is a tie that binds us to our homes," the legend read. I used to puzzle over its meaning, between hands. The literal meaning was obvious, but I felt, without knowing what, that a metaphorical sense was also implied. It's clearer to me now. The experience of father and mother and sibling rivalry forms a layer in the budding personality far too deep for rational control. I have observed people who have left home to establish successfully a whole range of relationships still struggling, in their thirties and well beyond, to work out a satisfactory dialogue with their parents. Whatever new relationships are formed, those ancient ones loom, dimly but massively, in the background, for good or ill, for blessing or curse.

In some societies, the families seem particularly close. Luigi Barzini in The Italians explained that in a history of confused and shifting political alignments, the Italians learned that they could really fall back only on their families. Consequently, these became very tight-knit. Jewish families also seem particularly close, perhaps for similar reasons. In our country generally the extended family used to play a role of acting as a buffer between the individual family unit and the rest of society. But the mobility of American society has gradually destroyed any such proximity, and now that role, if it is to be played at all, must be filled by closer or more distant friends. I once had a vivid experience of that. During the four years I studied theology in Rome, I was some five thousand miles from home. Classmates over that time became practically "family," and some of those relationships have persisted for more than a decade since.

The larger circle of more casual friends is also important. They can second one's sense of worth, make a distant place seem special, give a hand in a time of need, share their own and perhaps highly different experience of life "here under the sun." All, as they come into or perhaps pass out of my life, leave a definite mark on it.

The widening boundaries of community take in also larger and more formal Church communities. These might be the school in which one teaches, the parish where one lives or works, the diocese. Here a distinction must be made between "functional communities" and "formal communities." Formal communities are, ideally, real communities. But, often enough, they don't live up to that ideal. Many parishes, for example, are too large to offer much personal interchange. That point is long past with most dioceses. Even some schools have become huge institutions. Functional community, on the other hand, is where one actually finds support, encouragement, and understanding; a place to play, to grow, to pray together, to share hopes and dreams. Such community may be found in a formal structure, where it is supposed to be; or it may be discovered in other, quite unexpected, places. Functional community is "where you find it."

But the more formal communities, even if they don't fill this more personal role, are not without their importance. The relevance of institutions is for the "long haul." They embody and preserve a human thrust, carrying it over generations. "The king is dead; long live the king!" is an expression of this permanence. Unless something is institutionalized, it is likely to die out relatively quickly. But if an effective change in society is desired, the long-term view is the relevant one. I was at Fordham University in the late 1960s when the student protests reached their peak. There was a great flurry of activity as students were placed on practically all the university committees, and much talk ensued about radical reforms of the educational structures. The same thing happened, I believe, in many places. Now, all that new machinery has either rusted into obsolescence by disuse, or students have to be dragooned into filling out the committees. It is not just that student passions are notoriously volatile the consuming interest in remaking the world may give way, next semester, to beer parties and football. The deeper factor is that students are normally present at a university for only four years; they are essentially transient. For better or for worse, long-term policy can only be created by the faculty and the administration, who alone have an enduring commitment to the school.

There is a well-known tension between the administrator and the reformer. They do need each other. The institution is dependent on the reformer for the thrust of life that sets it in motion. The reformer, on the other hand, will have no impact beyond his generation unless his innovations are institutionalized. And yet, the two move in opposite directions. The reformer is fiery, personal, flexible and excited; he accepts no compromises. The institution is bland, faceless, rigid and bureaucratic; it manages to adapt the reformer's superhuman ideals to more ordinary folk. Such insouciance can be the despair of reformers themselves. Francis of Assisi was already in his lifetime, I suspect, disillusioned with the institution that had sprung up around his ideals. Chairman Mao, I believe, faced the same dilemma in China. He always hearkened back to the rigorous but committed days of the Great March. Building a modern industrial state requires a great deal of stable institutionalization, which is bound to lessen revolutionary fervor. Periodically, Mao would become restless with this fading of "ideological purity," and would release the Red Guards in an attempt to re-create the life-and-death commitment of the Great March. But it seemed moot whether this succeeded in renewing the spirit of revolution, or merely in disrupting the economy, indulging the undisciplined idealism of youth and making life miserable for the technicians of the new society. Perhaps the Great March, like "once upon a time," never comes again.

The reformer, like it or not, must in the end reckon with his own mortality. If anything of his impulse is to survive, it must be through an institution. He must be grateful for small favors, as much as he dislikes the watering down that will inevitably take place. "Something's lost and something's gained, In living every day," as the song has it. The genius of an institution is survival; that much must be said for it. Take the Franciscans, to return to the example of Francis. They have survived over seven hundred years. Rarely have they recovered the heights attained by their founder; the general level, as one surveys the whole scene, is probably a comfortable mediocrity. The glory of past days is, for the most part, only a gleam in the novice master's eyes. Yet through this institution thousands of men and women have marched under the banner of Francis to influence literally millions of others, with a cumulative impact that probably outweighs (if a calculus for such imponderables could be found) anything Francis accomplished in his own lifetime. It remains yet to see what the Little Red Book will engender.

Many institutions are still around years after the last signs of life have been discerned, goes the joke. But the jest can be turned the other way: somehow, institutions do hang on with incredible tenacity. William Faulkner, in The Sound and the Fury, gives a long introduction for each of the characters. But when he comes to Dilsey, the black maid and mainstay of the family, he says but two words: They endured. I have a certain grudging respect for survival.

A high-temperature reformer's impulse preserved in a low-temperature institution, then, is the law of human affairs. This melancholy truth can be traced in the fate of the Protestant Reformation. Luther, a hot- blooded reformer if there ever was one, was, by tragic mistakes, forced out of his "sponsoring institution," which stood sorely in need of his reforming energy. Within but a hundred years of Luther's death, however, a Protestant scholasticism formed around the thought of the Aristotle whom Luther so despised. By now, some four hundred years later, all the denominations stemming directly or indirectly from Luther show signs of that same bureaucratic malaise he was so prophetically impatient with. The reaction of many Protestant churches to the charismatic movement has been interesting to watch. Though it embodies much of what Luther was calling for a personal religious experience, a "priesthood of the laity," it has been met coolly, if not with downright hostility, in many denominations and local churches. Thus are the fiery dreams of every reformer hammered into more malleable form by the passage of time and the perverse ordinariness of human events.

Organized groups exist today that possess a sophisticated awareness of this "law of institutionalization." They insist on calling themselves a "movement," lest they be mistaken for anything as static as an institution. Or they deliberately devise procedures to counteract any institutional "hardening of the arteries." But I doubt that changing a label, or even deliberate intentionality, is likely to fool or change this law of human process. I find it better to admit outright both the inevitability and the need for institutions. I tend to think the best solution is to stick with an institution that is open enough to entertain a periodic surge of reform.

Communities, both functional and formal, are the locus of liturgy, or group prayer. This can take many forms, from intimate "shared prayer" to public celebrations involving thousands of people; but its primordial shape is the Eucharist. The Christian Eucharist takes a basic form of human sharing, the meal, and transforms it into a deep expression of the unity of man with man and man with God. All other forms of group prayer, I find, are ancillary to this central set of symbols. The Eucharist is the basic celebration of the Christian community's faith, an expression of its fundamental vision of reality.

The Second Vatican Council's Decree on Liturgy defined the Eucharist as the summit of the Christian life. I prefer to think of it as a symbol that "gathers in" the meaning of life. It is not so much one supreme part of life, but all of life gathered to a focus and brought to explicit self-consciousness, much as I see personal prayer as a paradigm of all my life's activities.

Years ago, when the Eucharist had become rather routine for me, I came to the reluctant conclusion that I had attended too many liturgies, and was too professionally involved in their performance, for them ever to be any other way. It was not that I had negative feelings about it; I didn't mind the celebrations, and attended out of a willing sense of duty. I just resigned myself to the fact that it would never be, as it once was, an emotional or exciting or absorbing experience. I was wrong, which shows how risky it is to attempt to discern the direction of one's own future growth. When I went to Fordham for my doctoral work, I fell in with a small group of men and women who met daily for liturgy. There were others who came and went, but we constituted the core. As the year wore on, we also became good friends, and would get together for a late- night snack, a picnic, a party, or for studying together. As that group of friends grew closer, I found the liturgy to become the perfect expression, complement and completion of all else that we did. It was as if our lives had become a perfect circle: Our other times of being together flowed into the liturgy, and the liturgy flowed back into them. We came together, once again, to give thanks for all our "being together," to reflect explicitly on the gift from God our lives had become to each other. In the liturgy we were given an opportunity to savor, express and render gratitude for the joy of our common life; we only danced with more conscious attention the steps that lightened our daily lives. That is what I mean by saying that the Eucharist "gathers in" the meaning of life. The liturgy became a profoundly satisfying experience for me that year, and often when I came upset or angry or anxious, I found that a palpable peace would descend over me, and I would depart with a lightsome spirit. That noonday Eucharist remains for me an ideal of what the liturgy should be and express.

The wider circle of community includes dioceses, regions, national groups and so on. I believe the appropriate response here is a sincere loyalty. The Church is the Body of Christ, and these organizational subunits are its members. But this loyalty is not to be uncritical. Certainly a lot of chicanery can parade under the banner of religion, and the individual Christian, as much as he loves the Church, should not be blind to that. I find that I am nourished and supported by institutions, and want in return to contribute my energies to them and cooperate willingly in effecting their purposes. But I also want a little room to move about within the institution. I do not want to be manipulated by group pressure or coerced into community projects. I want to have enough space to consult my own conscience on the direction the group is taking and the motives that impel its initiatives.

If, in an account of the Christian's experience, the discussion of community focuses almost spontaneously on the Church, the reality of civil communities is not therefore to be overlooked. It used to be called "patriotism"; how strange it now seems! It is not that it is hateful or disturbing it just seems quaint, like spinning wheels or winnowing fans. Still, I find there is a validity to the attachment to home and country. There is something real about this rootedness and this particularity, something precious about the contingent circumstances in which I grew to be myself. It is something unreasoned, like family ties, but just as inescapable. But the critical nature of this loyalty must be stressed, even more here than in dealing with the Church. Surely the debacle of Vietnam, the Nixon presidency and the Supreme Court rulings on abortion have disabused anyone of the illusion that the United States is necessarily about the work of God. This suspicion of earthly institutions is, I believe, authentically Christian. "For here we have no lasting city. . ." (Heb. 13:14). "God and country" can no longer be accepted unthinkingly as a natural pair like "grits and sausage."

Finally, a Christian is called today, I am convinced, to be, in some dimension of his consciousness, "uncitoyen du monde" a citizen of the world. Our regional and national loyalties cannot be allowed to blind us to the larger needs of mankind.

Returning to the theme of the Church, there is need for a parallel awareness of the world Church. In an age of a "shrinking globe" and a growing clarity that the struggle is between an authentic religious faith, on the one hand, and a militant secularism and an aggressive hedonism, on the other, the importance of a world movement and a world consciousness becomes more obvious. I suspect it will, in time, become even more so.

As a final point on the Church as community, I want to point to the community of the Church as the "union of simple believers." The real Church is not, in the long run, the bishops and the priests, the renowned theologians and famous authors. It is constituted essentially of the unsung, numberless men and women who in their unsophisticated goodness embody the message of the Gospel. These people are truly the "salt of the earth." Their number is legion, though their name is unknown.

One Sunday afternoon I was driving down from Boston to New York. In some small town in Connecticut I stopped at a parish church for the evening Mass. I was a stranger, and, in typical Catholic fashion, no one made any move to welcome me. The liturgy was standard fare; the priest was no better than average, and the homily was all right, but nothing extraordinary. In sum, a run-of-the-mill parish. In view of all my "liberal credentials" as a post-Conciliar priest, I should have concluded that this was just another sad failure of the liturgical movement to revolutionize parish living. But that wasn't my feeling at all. Rather I felt intensely in touch with the Church in the whole world. For its life is lived in ordinary, struggling parishes just like this one, rather than in any exotic groups or experimental liturgies much as I might have enjoyed those experiences. That is something of what I mean by the phrase "union of simple believers."

I have been speaking about community, to this point, in terms of my contemporaries. But community can have a larger meaning, and it is time, once again, to expand the horizons. For I find myself in community, not only with the Christians of my time, but with the Church of history, the gathering of believers through the ages.

I will begin with the topic I just left the union of simple believers. This can be extended also into history. Once again, the Church is not essentially the famous cardinals and saints, the Fathers of the Church and the Christian kings. The millions of Christians, obscure in their birth and all but unnoticed in their passing, who took to their hearts the Christian message and lived it out, sometimes in quiet heroism but more often in muddling mediocrity, yet nevertheless kept the flame of faith alive and managed to pass it on to their children these are the stuff of the Church. Cardinal Newman, in his On Consulting the Faithful in Matters of Doctrine, maintains that, at the zenith of the Arian heresy, practically all the bishops had become Arian. The true faith was preserved, in that instance, by the belief of ordinary folk. I fully subscribe to that thesis.

This "simple believer" should not be over- romanticized. If I came face to face with him, I might be put off by his barbarous speech, his simple-minded repetition of traditional formulas. If Newman's ordinary believers were the disciplined anchorites in the desert, they were also the mob that trampled to death the Arian bishop George of Cappadocia. I do not wish to condone any evil in the history of the Church; but I also do not want to be too fastidious to recognize a kinship with a faith that is more "rough and ready" than my own. In a paraphrase of Terence, nothing truly Christian is alien to me.

The Church, in short, is not above, but in, human history. It must be loved in all its historical concreteness. I am very suspicious of a spiritual church that "floats above history." It is true that in some ways "the Church" does function as an ideal type. The Church Paul speaks of, the bride of Christ, "without spot or wrinkle" (Eph. 5:28), is obviously not simply identical with the Church we know. The empirical Church is always lacking and sinful. But in the last analysis, there is only one Church, and it is the concrete, contingent Church we find in history. "The Church," in Bellarmine's bold formulation, "is as visible as the Republic of Venice."

Above I spoke of the relationship between the religious reformer and the institution that preserves his memory and his work. The Church is the institution that stems from the reforming impulse of Jesus. As such, it is the work of God, divinely intended to carry on in time and through space the earthly ministry of Jesus, and the meaning of his death and resurrection. At the same time, it escapes few of the ills to which institutions are heir. Francis of Assisi, I suspect, could well have sympathized with the words of Christ to the Church at Laodicea: "But because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spew you out of my mouth" (Apoc. 3:16).

I imagine the Church sometimes as an ashy log in the fireplace. It is rather gray and unspectacular, encrusted with the residue of the ages. No flame escapes, and it looks quite dead. And yet, there are live coals underneath, which can glow and flare in a moment's notice with the breath of the Spirit which happens, now and then, in the most surprising and unexpected ways. I believe the Spirit is present to the Church, and that a special Providence overlooks this particular institution as it wends its way through history, to preserve it from going radically astray and to keep it in the living truth.

This active, Spirit-engendered force is tradition. Tradition is the lifeline of both believer and theologian to the life-giving events of their collective past. The Christian is well aware that he does not generate the meaning of his life from his own resources, that he does not create the model for his living through his personal ingenuity. In the image I used above, I have learned to say "Abba, Father" because Jesus has provided the example. The Christian has received the meaning and model of his life from his predecessors, and they in turn from the previous generation of the faithful, in an unbroken chain back to Christ himself. The believer who spurns his tradition is as nonsensical as the man who saws off the log on which he sits. The theologian who abandons his tradition fatally cuts the rope on which he is suspended. The importance of tradition is that it provides an objective check on personal experience. The Christian not only draws his inspiration from the tradition, but he must constantly recur to it to measure himself. This whole account of Christian experience began with myself. It has expanded now to include the historical tradition, providing an antidote to the extreme subjectivism that might result from such a starting point.

The tradition functions not only as a norm on the authenticity of the individual Christian's experience, but it can also provide a criticism of the contemporary Church. Within the centuries-long tradition, the experience of the primitive Church has a certain pristine purity. Reform movements within the Church have practically always had recourse to the New Testament Church for a model of what the institution should be, along with a criticism, inevitably implied, of what the Church had become. The gift that belonging to the larger historical community gives to the contemporary Christian is a freedom from any parochial allegiance to the common sense and the presuppositions of his own culture, his own Zeitgeist.

In the larger perspective created by attention to the community of history, a word may finally be added on the Eucharist. For if the Eucharist unites man with his contemporary, it also joins him to the Church of the ages. The liturgy not only evokes the meaning of all our life activities, but it creates the living memory of the Christian tradition. Jesus said, "Do this as a remembrance of me" (Lk. 22:19); in doing so, we join the unbroken line of those who have followed that instruction, and thereby "come to know him in the breaking of bread" (Lk. 24:35); in doing so, and evoking that memory, we make him present in our space and our time in all the power of his Person.


Retrospect

I began in the first chapter with myself, but voiced a plea at the same time that only the requirements of discursive thought excused a separation of what really occurs together in a simultaneous and vital interaction of the self with others and with God. In the course of the chapters on self, God and community these interactions have often been mentioned. But it may be worthwhile at this point to highlight explicitly these connections, and rectify to some extent the imbalance created by the necessity of speaking about things one at a time.

If it was not obvious in the first chapter, it certainly became clear in the second and the third: No individual develops within a vacuum. I mature within a community, without which I would have neither tradition nor identity nor knowledge of God nor, in all likelihood, even the simple necessities of life. For the person of faith, there is also the vital interaction with God. Only by the sheerest abstraction can the individual be thought of in complete isolation from those contexts.

These contexts, further, are related in subtle and intricate ways. I say that God loves me, and I dare to call him "Father." But I don't believe I could do that unless I had some prior experience of human love, and some prior experience of a father. Still, our experience of God is not necessarily limited to the imperfections found in the love of friends or family. Once I accept the fact that God loves me, his love begins to take on its own unique reality. If I am sometimes disappointed in human love, yet I know that beyond this failing of love, God is ever faithful. I begin to experience human love as an overflow, a gift from, a pale reflection of the love that is God himself. God's love becomes a model against which all other love is measured. Yet, even now, the delicate interrelationship continues. I think I would find it hard to sustain the conviction of God's love without at least occasional manifestations of love in human communities. These are almost palpable affirmations that love is a reality and a possibility.

The security of being personally loved that I experience in prayer is closely allied to that same feeling in friendship. The two nourish and help define each other; in turn, they make clear to me what kind of security I want to offer to another in loving him or her. Because others have accepted me, I can accept myself; because God accepts me, I have the courage to accept others. My own growth is a gift of the love of God and the human communities surrounding me; in turn, I desire to create the conditions of growth for others. God creates for me a play-space within which to be myself, just as others had done, by their love; as a result of that freedom, I want to create play-spaces for others to be themselves. "As the Father has loved me, so I have loved you.... Such as my love has been for you, so must your love be for each other" (Jn. 15:9; 13:34).

I have learned and I believe it is one of the most painful lessons of love that I must love a friend unqualifiedly. Even if I know what a person should be doing for his further growth, even if I am sure he is wrong in the course he is pursuing, I cannot impose that on him. In other words, I have to take a person "where he is," not where I would like him to be. As I have absorbed that knowledge through struggle and mistakes, I have come gradually to take a different attitude toward myself.

If I must take others where they are, I must do the same for myself. I cannot simply dictate my own development, and I should not be overly impatient with the slowness with which I change. I have to accept myself in all my weakness and inconsistency; only then can I hope for real improvement to take place. Again, that may sound like complacency. But I return to the image of growth. I am also the rosebud that is opening by the laws of its own devising. I am also the farmer's field, in which the growth takes place in ways that often escape my own comprehension or even awareness. As I have learned to be gentle with others, I am gradually learning to be gentle with myself.

Personal and liturgical prayer are also much more closely related than their separate treatment might suggest. The vision of the world discovered within personal prayer receives support from the group witness of liturgical prayer. This mirrors the communitarian nature of truth. The self-acceptance I experience in personal prayer is fittingly celebrated in the loving presence of a community. Personal and liturgical prayer need each other. Without group prayer, personal prayer may come to seem too private and purely personal, some idiosyncratic project of relating to God that has nothing to do with the rest of humanity. Even more so, liturgical prayer without a background in personal prayer quickly becomes a mere ritual, a routine fulfilled with ultimately no meaning at all.

I detailed, finally, in the second chapter, the ways I experienced God; but that account must be rounded out in the light of the horizon of community. I experience the presence of God in the love of friends, in the warmth of small communities, in the Church. I can also experience God intensely when a community of which I am part turns to God to give him praise and thanks in liturgical prayer.

The account has moved from myself, to my dialogue with God, to the communities in which I live, including the historical community of faith. Now the horizon must be expanded again, to take in all of human history.

There is one central image I have for all of history: the love relationship. After a brief attempt to explain and justify this choice, I will draw out some of the characteristics of the love relationship, and then detail how they can be applied to human history.

The Old Testament employs frequently the image of God in a love relationship with his chosen people. Hosea portrays this no doubt most vividly, by actually taking to himself a faithless wife.

In the beginning of the Lord's speaking to Hosea, the Lord said to Hosea: "Go, take a harlot wife and harlot's children, for the land gives itself to harlotry, turning away from the Lord" (Hos.1:2-3).

But God does not plan to abandon his people, however unfaithful.

So I will allure her; I will lead her into the desert and speak to her heart. From there I will give her the vineyards she had, and the valley of Achor as a door of hope. She shall respond there as in the days of her youth, when she came up from the land of Egypt. On that day, says the Lord, she shall call me "My husband," and never again "my baal" (Hos. 2:16-18).

Ezekiel develops the same image in arresting detail, but this too concludes with a promise: "Yet I will remember the covenant I made with you when you were a girl, and I will set up an everlasting covenant with you" (Ez. 16:60). Jeremiah employs the same theme (ch. 3), and Isaiah has God addressing the people of Israel:

No more shall men call you "Forsaken," or your land "Desolate," but you shall be called "My Delight," and your land "Espoused." For the Lord delights in you, and makes your land his spouse. As a young man marries a virgin, your Builder shall marry you; and as a bridegroom rejoices in his bride so shall your God rejoice in you (Is.62:4-5).

Again, even more eloquently:

The Lord calls you back, like a wife forsaken and grieved in spirit, a wife married in youth and then cast off, says your God. For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great tenderness I will take you back. In an outburst of wrath, for a moment I hid my face from you; but with enduring love I take pity on you, says the Lord, your redeemer (Is. 54:6-8).

The Song of Songs can be read literally as a story of human love, but it has also traditionally been interpreted as a metaphor of the love relationship between God and his people.(13)

The New Testament, as well, is not without its appeals to the same image. Paul's comparison of the love of Christ for his Church to the love of a man for his wife is well known (Eph. 5:22-23). Elsewhere he says, "I am jealous of you with the jealousy of God himself, since I have given you in marriage to one husband, presenting you as a chaste virgin to Christ" (II Cor. 11:2). Jesus himself describes his presence in this way: "How can wedding guests go in mourning so long as the groom is with them? When the day comes the groom is taken away, then they will fast" (Mt. 9:15). In the parable of the king who gave a feast for his son's wedding (Mt. 22:1- 14), it is also not difficult to conclude that the son is Jesus himself. It follows immediately the parable in which the landowner sent his son to collect the fruits of his vineyard, and the general setting is Jerusalem, where Jesus is locked in conflict with the Jewish religious leaders. Finally, what may be conceived as the high point of New Testament revelation is formulated by John: ". . . for God is love" (I Jn. 4:8). Rahner's commentary on this verse is highly pertinent:

Of all that man has learnt by experience about God in saving history, the decisive thing is that out of his grace God the Father has called us in his Son to the most intimate community with him: it is summed up in the proposition: ho theos agape estin. . . . When we say that God is love, and that this is what finally characterizes God's free, historical behavior in the fullness of time, in the kairos of the New Testament, we mean to say two things. Firstly, this is in fact a free act of God in Christ, an Event, not an attribute: the coming to pass of the New Testament in Christ. Secondly, it is the event in which God's inmost life is communicated to men, in his love for them, fully and without restraint.. . . Ho theos agape estin ia not primarily, then, a statement, illuminating in itself, about the nature of God, but the expression of the once-for-all, undeniable and unsurpassable experience in which mere man has come to know God in Christ: an expression of the experienced fact that God has bestowed his own entire self on man. (14)

If, in fact, the summit of revelation is the loving attitude God adopts toward man, then it seems appropriate to conceive all of history in those terms. The multiple usage of the bridal image in the Scriptures underlines its fittingness. Still, this difference must be noticed between the Scriptural analogy and the one used here: the Old and New Testament speak of a relation between God and his special people, whereas the application here is to all of human history.

In examining this central image, the unique character of a love relationship should first of all be noticed. It is a human and spiritual event, not merely a physical process. Further, each love relationship is like no other. Lovers often have the feeling that their relationship is altogether different from any other, though they realize at the same time that they have hardly invented falling in love.

Another aspect of a love relationship is almost too obvious to mention: it involves two persons. Like a dialogue or the tango, it can't be done alone.

Every relationship begins in silence. It has to start, in other words, at some point, which is preceded by a nonrelationship. Sometimes this moment is quite noticeable. The ancient ploys of dropping a handkerchief, or blurting out "Haven't I met you somewhere before?" are ways to get beyond the first awkward situation where the other is only a stranger. But this initial silence is not just something that stops when the relationship starts. It has a reality and a solidity of its own. It sets off a conversation as a picture does a frame. There remains the possibility that the two persons might never have met, or never have spoken to each other. Even when the relationship is established, silence remains a background, an option, a noncommunication into which the friendship could once again subside.

A love relationship is also free. It cannot be forced from either side. The unrequited lover who complains, "I love her so much, why doesn't she love me?" while his feelings may be understandable does not really grasp the nature of love. No matter how much I love a person, that can operate on him as no constraint that he love me. Even if there were a way of forcing the gift, it would not be worth the effort. For unless it is freely given, it is not love at all. Neither person is bound to break the silence that is their initial situation; nor is the other bound to respond.

The freedom of the love relationship can be seen particularly in the choice of a partner. There are many who could conceivably be chosen, but the choice will fall on one. Some of those not chosen may feel very unhappy at not being that one. Sometimes the person himself finds his choice a source of wonder: Out of all the women (or all the men) in the world, somehow, I chose you!

A further aspect of the love relationship, closely associated with this freedom, is that normally one of the partners must take the initiative. The initial silence will not automatically melt away, nor can both persons very well start talking at once. The dynamics of such an initiative can be illustrated by the situation at a dance. Couples don't miraculously find themselves on the floor. The boy usually asks the girl "Would you care to dance?" She then has the option of responding yes or no. Girls sometimes feel that the boys have an advantage. They have more control over the proceedings; they can act if they want to, or ignore the whole situation if they prefer. If a boy doesn't want to be with someone, he is perfectly free not to ask her; an unattractive girl may have to sit out the whole evening. There is not much she can do but look her best, and wait patiently for fortune to light upon her. On the other hand, the boy pays a price for his independence: he has to take a risk in approaching the girl. He may nerve himself for half an hour to ask someone he admires for a dance, and she may coolly say "No, I prefer not." Then he feels on his back the pitying glance of the other girls at her table, as he stumbles in confusion back to his own place. Sometimes it is "ladies' dance," and then the roles are reversed. But in either case, one person has to take the initiative.

This matter of taking an initiative is not limited to the beginning of a relationship. At each step in the development, at each move to a deeper level of relating, another initiative must be taken. This holds true for the whole life of the relationship. If at any time both parties cease taking initiatives, then the relationship will stagnate, and eventually cease. The dynamics here are complex. Usually one person tends to take the initiative more than the other. This can be a comfortable fit for their two personalities. But it cannot become too pronounced, or the first person will begin to resent having to take the leadership all the time.

But a relationship is equally marked by reciprocity. An initiative that is not positively responded to comes to nothing. A dialogue involves not only two speakers, but the willing cooperation of both. No matter which partner takes the initiative, the response is equally important in determining the course of the relationship. Again, this is true not only at the beginning, but throughout the relationship. If a person at any time in a relationship ceases to respond to further initiatives, then the relationship will never become deeper than it is at that point. The freedom of the two persons is involved, and there is no way one person can force a deeper sharing on the other.

Nevertheless, the love relationship in its initiative constitutes a personal challenge. The boy at the dance is perfectly free to ask or not to ask, to ask this girl or that. But once he poses the question, the girl is practically forced to say something. In turn, the positive response to an initiative constitutes a further challenge. The relationship develops in the continuing and deepening interchange of these personal challenges. He may break the silence by asking "Do you know what time it is?" but they both know that this initiative is no mere call for information. Persons often shy away from beginning a new relationship because they have a dim presentiment of all the implications to which it may lead. Their intuition, of course, is quite correct, because the relationship tends by its inner dynamics toward an ever-deeper personal challenge.

A love relationship is mysterious. Any person, to start with, is a mystery. I have spoken above of the essential aloneness of the human being. No one person can ever fully understand another. For that matter, no one ever fully understands himself. Since a relationship involves two persons, it begins with a double mystery. But the interaction of the two mysteries constitutes a third. It is a mystery that the two persons ever met, and that one person freely took the initiative to break the silence between them. The other's willing response was equally mysterious. The relationship continued to develop and deepen in ways that escaped the comprehension of either person. "How strangely wonderful it is," two lovers might say, "that we met and that our love flowered, when so many other encounters came to nothing, so many other friendships began promisingly, and then drifted apart." No matter how long the two are with each other, the mystery remains.

Yet the mystery does not remain totally unspoken. A love relationship will also include a naming, a formulation, a declaration. Probably in the first conversation the two persons will exchange their names. If they are not formally introduced, they will probably manage to say at some point, after they get the first inkling that the relationship might come to something, "Oh, by the way, my name is . . ." and "Yes, I was wondering; my name is.. . ." A person who neglects to do this, or forgets the name, may find himself in an awkward situation at the second meeting. Once the name is given, further specification may follow: where each lives and works, an exchange of telephone numbers. Gradually the two persons assemble a profile on each other where she was born, what school she went to, her experiences, her likes and dislikes, her successes and her concerns, and so on.

As the relationship deepens, the friends will formulate their feelings toward each other. "I don't know quite what's happening to me, but I've been having the strangest feeling toward you. You're always coming to mind, and I so enjoy being with you." While the mystery never disappears, the two persons nevertheless attain a growing clarity in their feelings for each other. Finally, there is the momentous occasion on which one says "I love you," and the other responds "I love you too."

The conversation between the two lovers quickly takes on the character of testimony. Though a name and an address may be independently checked, the formulation of an inner feeling can find no such objective appeal. The person speaks of something deep within himself or herself, to which he or she alone is privy, and the listener must simply take the word of the speaker. Such testimony unveils the inner mystery of the person, and the sole access to the knowledge of that mystery is through that person's word. It is a question that may cause a great deal of anguish: Does he really love me? Or is he just saying so?

The opposite pole of testimony is, of course, trust and belief. Since the sole access to the person's inner mystery is his own witness, then the witness must be accepted, if anything of the mystery is to be known. If one person reveals himself, but the other refuses to credit his word, then no real communication has taken place. There seems, in fact, to be a certain violation. The proper atmosphere for the unveiling of oneself is a tender trust; if this trust is absent, then the revelation of the mystery is highly inappropriate. A worse violation can exist in the opposite direction: Someone who exploits the trust of another by bearing false witness about his or her inner feelings is destroying the very basis of deep communication. The dialogue, then, will not progress far without some measure of trust and belief in the other's word; and its gradual deepening is measured by the intensification of that very trust.

Such trust is allied to the next characteristic: commitment. The relationship can hardly start without some commitment to the other person and to the process of dialogue. A person involved in a serious love relationship quickly realizes that he is not just flirting. A real commitment of his time, his energy, his talents, his concern himself is gradually being asked for. Such a commitment is not easy to give; this hesitation underlies a great deal of the humor at bachelor parties.

If, in the beginning, their love relationship seemed a purely private affair, the commitment of a couple gradually begins to take on social dimensions. This is particularly obvious at a wedding ceremony, where the bride and groom publicly exchange their vows. But it operates also in many simpler and subtler ways. Friends and family begin to think of the lovers as a pair, and invite them together to their homes. Their social circle expects of them a fidelity to each other, appropriate to the depth of their relationship. If this social commitment is denied, it may create problems for the partners. Some time ago Wayne Hays married without inviting his mistress, Elizabeth Ray. Her pique may or may not have been understandable. But the subsequent end of his political career is an effective if painful witness to the way that any relationship even such a secretive and furtive liaison as this was intended to be inevitably intertwines two lives together and implicates them in a larger social web.

In the development of initiative and response, in the deepening personal challenge, in the ever more serious commitment, this aspect has already been referred to, but it must now be made explicit. For the love relationship is characterized by growth. It does not spring into being full-blown; it must develop gradually, organically. This growth is one of self- revelation, and especially of the revelation of love. Correlative to this, as seen already, is a growth in trust and belief. In the deepening commitment can be discerned a growing gift of self. There are a series of levels of this gradually more intensive self- revelation, trust and self-gift, and they must be passed through in turn. I do not know if there is such a thing as love at first sight, but some relationships develop extremely quickly, because of an instinctive trust and rapport, and perhaps because the two persons have learned in past experiences to give themselves more quickly and spontaneously. Even so, the same levels must be traversed, however quickly this be done. The growth of reciprocal trust is particularly important, and it is wrong, I believe, to try to force a relationship to a deeper level before having a sense that the other person is worthy of this trust. To act otherwise is to put too light a value on oneself. That would raise the question whether a proper sense of self-worth was present.

The love relationship proceeds through a dynamic interpenetration of words and deeds. If a great deal of stress has been put on the verbal formulation and declaration of love, this does not mean to rule out the complementary witness of action. The profession of love is highly significant, and, in a properly developing relationship, will be credited with trust and belief. Nevertheless, it cannot be validated, or even completely understood, until it is ratified by and embodied in years of tireless devotion and service. In this complex communication, the words and the actions support each other. The words call attention to, focus, clarify and interpret the actions; but the actions also concretize, establish, give weight to and discover the hidden implications of the words.

The love relationship is also marked by conflict; the foregoing account would seem too idyllic, too serenely positive if this reality of human dialogue were not also brought out. Conflict may come from outside: societal conventions, financial pressures, a cantankerous mother-in-law. "The course of true love never did run smooth," as Shakespeare said. But conflict also develops from within the love relationship itself. If there is growth in a friendship, it is rarely a smooth upward curve, but a pattern of advances and regressions. Its course will be marked by lover's quarrels, by "kissing and making up." Marital spats are at least a constant fly in the ointment of domestic bliss. More serious differences develop, and there looms always the possibility of breaking off the relationship entirely. Some relationships are interrupted for a time, to be resumed perhaps years later. The contemporary epidemic of divorce bears witness to the reality of a more or less definitive termination of a dialogue.

Of the conflicts arising within a relationship, some are caused because one partner deliberately or unwittingly offends the other. This can be remedied only by an apology and an act of forgiveness. Even then, if the hurt is deep, injured feelings may remain long after. But in some conflicts, the one partner almost seems to cause difficulties for himself. A person, particularly, who does not have an adequate sense of himself will continually be jealous, in constant need of assurance, unable to deal with certain facets of the relation or events that occur. He will create most of his own problems, but in the process will make it difficult for the partner too. This is in many ways harder to handle than an outright offense. How is the other partner to tax the person with his insecurity, his unreasonable jealousy, his sense of inadequacy? Any criticism will probably only make the situation worse. If both persons have this lack of a sense of self, the difficulties obviously multiply. Edward Albee's George and Martha reveal the lengths to which the ensuing destructiveness can go.

Finally, the love relationship has its particular shape. I began by saying that each relationship is unique, but here I mean more than that. Or perhaps I am trying to point to a special facet of its uniqueness. A love relationship is "anchored" in particular times and places. Lovers can often recall the precise circumstances of their first meeting. South Pacific's "Someday you may see a stranger, across a crowded room" evokes the mystery of that contingent starting point. A couple will have their favorite places, which have become hallowed by their repeated meetings, or by the significant events that have transpired there. A song will always be recognized as "their song"; a restaurant will be remembered as the scene of his engagement proposal.

The distinction is often made between "clock time" and "psychological time." Clock time runs evenly, imperturbably, second by second, from minute to minute, into the hours, days and years. But psychological time is infinitely more varied. It flies when a person is absorbed, but slows to a crawl when he is bored. It experiences a hiatus in sleep, but becomes almost unbearably crowded when too much is going on. The love relationship takes place, of course, much more in psychological than clock time. The special occasion with the beloved always ends too quickly, to be followed by the endless days of waiting while she is away. All the moments of the relationship are, clearly, not of equal importance. There are the largely negative moments of conflict. There are the humdrum moments, where nothing special seems to be happening. But the growing friendship will also have its "privileged moments"; times together that seem to sum up the whole relationship in the past, disclose its deepest meanings in the present, and point it with promise into the future. These privileged moments are times of heightened self-revelation, of deeper commitment and self-giving. The partners become translucent to each other and give the illusion, at least, that they could simply blend into one another. Such events occur only rarely in the relationship, yet they have power to reveal the meaning of more ordinary times. Their memory is treasured against the threat of boredom and indifference. The song "Try to Remember" is an attempt to conjure up those special moments of a past relationship. But the events are not recalled merely for fond memory; there is a hope that their vivid recollection may restore enthusiasm to love grown familiar, may reestablish the deeper significance of a relationship, not absent yet, but almost forgotten. "Try to remember . . . and follow, follow, follow!"

Such privileged moments may occur as the "official" or expected moments. The wedding day, the engagement supper, the honeymoon, the birth of the first child these are the times that are "supposed" to be special, the occasions created precisely to celebrate, savor and concentrate on the relationship. But the privileged moments may also occur, as often as not, at unexpected and "unofficial" moments: the time they missed their plane and had the leisure and privacy in the airport to speak their love as they had never done before; the incident when he fell into the pond, and they laughed themselves silly over his wounded dignity; the occasion on which they met by chance and shared a lunch; the time they discovered, almost by accident, how passionately they were involved with each other.

Each relationship, then, comes into being with its own special times, its own special places; it experiences its own privileged moments, out of which it fashions its own special tale and becomes, as it were, a very "history" unto itself.

Having examined some of the characteristics of the love relationship, it remains only to apply it to human history as a whole. This can only be done analogically, of course. At some points the comparison will fit well; at others, it will seem most inappropriate. In either case, I believe, the image is instructive.

To say that human history can be imaged as a love relationship is to say, first of all, that it is a uniquely spiritual, personal and dialogic reality. That stamps this analogical view as a particular vision of history, and immediately sets it off from a number of other visions. It is antithetical, for example, to the atheistic-existentialist version, which sees history as absurd "a tale full of sound and fury, and signifying nothing," in Shakespeare's words. It is opposed to the Marxist view of history as economic determinism. The basis of history is the iron laws of economics, and everything else, for Marx, is superstructure. But history as a love relationship cannot be reconciled with such blind and subhuman forces. The Greek notion of ineluctable fate, however, is equally rejected. History takes place in the atmosphere of love and choice, and not in that of impersonal necessity. Similarly, the modern scientific notion of a universe evolving by chance is unacceptable. While the love relationship is mysterious, it nevertheless implies elements of purpose and intelligent choice. Certain visions within the Christian tradition are closer: Luther's idea of history as the triumph of God, or Augustine's as the realm of God's Providence. But even here there is a nuance of difference: these visions do not stress as strongly the dialogic nature of history.

For, like any love relationship, the dialogue of history involves two persons. Here, however, the notion of "person" must be taken analogically in regard to either partner. For the one dialogue partner is God the Father, who can be understood as a "person" only in some supereminent and trans-human way. If whatever is limited in the human person can be shorn away, if whatever is positive can be disengaged and then magnified to an infinite degree only then can God be called a person. The other dialogue partner, however, is "man"; not any one individual, but man taken as a unit, somewhat in the sense of the "corporate person" familiar in Biblical thought. Again, this can only be understood by some analogy to the individual human person. Nevertheless, I do not believe it to be unmeaningful to speak of a dialogue of love between God and man. As urged already, the message of the Scriptures encourages precisely such a mode of speech.

The I-Thou encounter between God and man, while a true dialogue, is nevertheless not entirely equal. Man, on his part, discovers his I preeminently in the Thou of God, as I have above spoken about the sense of self-identity flowing from prayer. God's encounter with man, however, is not to discover him as another, but precisely to create him, to make him be a Thou; for God's love and knowledge is not dependent, but creative.

A love relationship begins in silence, and that applies as well to the dialogue between God and man in human history. Karl Rahner's anthropological vision is appropriate here: Man is the being who by his very nature is open to the Infinite, and thus stands before the silence of God. This implies that he must be attentive to a possible word that God might give of himself in human history. However, that word is sovereignly free, and God's silence remains also a possibility.

Thus in spite of its openness to the transcendence of the finite spirit, the absolute being of God appears as a being that speaks or remains silent, in other words as the God of a possible revelation through speech or silence. And so the basic human situation is always essentially one of standing before a God, free with the as yet unfulfilled and incalculable possibilities of his freedom....(15)

There has been much question in recent theology whether the categories of "natural" and "supernatural" are not outmoded and counterproductive. Certainly they seem to have the musty smell of days gone by, as well as provoking unhappier memories of the Christian tradition. In the shift from metaphysical to personal theology they do not fare well. Yet I believe that the reality they point to is not dispensable. The question here is whether the silence of God is a reality or not. What is at stake is the solidity of that silence, the possibility that it might never have been broken, the fact that it remains the background and the permanent "frame" within which God speaks. For if grace is collapsed into nature, then God's intimate sharing of himself is implied in the very existence of man, and the silence of God is at most a temporal postponement of what must inevitably come into bloom. The reality of God's silence is intimately bound up with the freedom of his initiative in speaking to man.

Viewing this discussion more comprehensively, and pursuing it back to its roots, there are actually two "silences" involved here. Rahner speaks of the silence God freely breaks, within human history, in order to reveal himself. But in the background is another "silence," the primordial serenity of God's own being, out of which he chooses, again with absolute freedom, to create this universe. This, too, is not a mere gap, or a momentary lapse in a necessary process; it is a personal and spiritual silence, which just as personally and freely issues into created splendor. "Then God said, Let there be light ..." (Gen. 1:3).

Already the characteristic of freedom has been broached. God freely chooses to create, as he freely chooses to redeem man. In the Old Testament, this sovereign freedom of God becomes an explicit topic of meditation: "It was not because you are the largest of all nations that the Lord set his heart on you and chose you, for you are really the smallest of all nations. It was because the Lord loved you . . ." (Deut. 7:7-8). More strikingly, it is implied in the freedom with which God chooses Jacob over Esau (Gen. 25:23; see also Mal. 1:2-3; Rom. 9:10-13), Ephraim over Manasseh (Gen. 48:13-20), David over his brothers (I Sam. 16:1-13). In the New Testament, this theme turns into wonder at the depths of God's love: "But God is rich in mercy; because of his great love for us he brought us to life with Christ when we were dead in sin" (Eph. 2:4-5). Again,

At the appointed time, when we were still powerless, Christ died for us godless men. It is rare that anyone should lay down his life for a just man, though it is barely possible that for a good man someone may have the courage to die. It is precisely in this that God proves his love for us: that while we were still sinners, Christ died for us (Rom. 5:6-8).

John, too, underlines the loving nature of this choice. "Yes, God so loved the world that he gave his only Son ..." (Jn. 3:16). Jesus emphasizes the inexplicable generosity of God in the parable of the eleventh-hour workers (Mt. 20:1-16).

But this transcendent freedom of God is coupled, in this love dialogue, with the real freedom of man. The fact that God creates every shred of being in the universe does not stand in the way of his creation of man precisely as free. Nor is this gift partial or provisional; God faces man as the patient and supportive friend rather than the anxious parent, who is quick to revoke or restrict a freedom when the child misuses it. The freedom of man is always taken in the Scriptures with the utmost seriousness.

But if the wicked man turns away from all the sins he committed, if he keeps all my statutes and does what is right and just, he shall surely live, he shall not die. None of the crimes he committed shall be remembered against him; he shall live because of the virtue he has practiced. . . . And if the virtuous man turns from the path of virtue to do evil, the same kind of abominable things that the wicked man does, can he do this and still live? None of his virtuous deeds shall be remembered, because he has broken faith and committed sin; because of this, he shall die (Ez.18:21- 22,24).

Jesus is quite as clear: "But I tell you, you will all come to the same end unless you reform" (Lk. 13:3).

The king will say to those on his right: "Come. You have my Father's blessing! Inherit the kingdom prepared for you from the creation of the world. . . ." Then he will say to those on his left: "Out of my sight, you condemned, into that everlasting fire prepared for the devil and his angels . . ." (Mt. 25:34, 41).

Finally,

As for the cowards and traitors to the faith, the depraved and murderers, the fomicators and sorcerers, the idol-worshipers and deceivers of every sort their lot is the fiery pool of burning sulphur, the second death (Rev. 21:8).

The initiative in that love relationship between God and man that constitutes human history is fixed: it always proceeds from God. This was precisely the issue between Augustine and Pelagius. Augustine, being "twice born," had no doubt an awareness of man's sin and need for redemption keener than the average. But he formulated the insight for the whole Christian community: salvation proceeds exclusively from grace, from God's free gift in Christ Jesus, and never from nature. Grace is not man's creation, nor his sound upbringing, nor his spontaneous honesty, nor the commandments, nor knowledge of the commandments, but only a free and unmerited gift, bestowed graciously and without necessity on man. Redemption is a fresh and loving initiative of God, in no way demanded or implied in the fact of man's creation. For that reason, it escapes man's own best efforts and native powers. But if this explicit, almost technical formulation is a product of the Pelagian controversies, the truth is not new to the Christian tradition. "Love, then, consists in this: not that we have loved God, but that he has loved
us . . ."(I Jn. 4:10).

During Augustine's life, and after his death, the debate continued. The theological compromisers known as Semi-Pelagians hoped to salvage something of Pelagius' teaching. A sick man, they pointed out, cannot heal himself; but he can, at least, call the doctor. Similarly, they suggested, man could on his own take at least the first steps toward salvation. The Church again rejected this evasion: Even the very first movements toward salvation are already a gift of grace. The initiative, in this dialogue, lies wholly on the side of God.

If God takes the initiative, man must still respond; reciprocity is as crucial here as in the human love relationship. Again, man's freedom is fully real, and even God cannot create a loving dialogue without man's free response. Luther, in his own twice-born experience of his personal inadequacy and in the revelation of his need for an absolute trust in God, wished to set at nought the role of man in the process of salvation. His experience was that God did everything, and man did nothing. Not only could man not approach God by his own power; he was not even to be credited with the will to respond to God. This may be good mysticism, but it is bad metaphysics. To destroy man's free will is also to eliminate the reality of his response. There is no way, within such a view, to preserve the truly dialogic nature of human history. History is not alone the triumph of God; it is as well the story of man's cooperation or refusal to cooperate with God.

A personal challenge, in the love relationship of God and man, moves from God to man. God's revelation of himself, his making known his inner secret life, is no mere piece of information that man can attend to or ignore. It addresses the depths of man, and evokes, willy-nilly, some response.

Indeed, God's word is living and effective, sharper than any two-edged sword. It penetrates and divides soul and spirit, joints and marrow; it judges the reflections and thoughts of the heart (Heb. 4:12).

At one point Jesus says, "He who is not with me is against me, and he who does not gather with me scatters" (Mt. 12:30). But elsewhere he says, "Anyone who is not against us is with us" (Mk. 9:40). That seems to leave no middle ground. Indeed, once a man truly hears the word, his life cannot but be changed, for better or for worse. This situation is redolent of Moses' parting challenge to his people:

Here, then, I have today set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land which you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live . . . (Deut. 33:15-19).

The stakes in this personal challenge are immense. "What profit would a man show if he were to gain the whole world and destroy himself in the process? What can a man offer in exchange for his very self?" (Mt. 16:26).(16)

There is an inequality in the love relationship of God and man in relation to mystery. On the one hand, it constitutes no mystery to God. "The nether world and the abyss lie open before the Lord; how much more the hearts of men" (Pr. 15:11). Again, "Nothing is concealed from him; all lies bare and exposed to the eyes of him to whom we must render an account" (Heb. 4:13). But on the part of man, the threefold mystery of any love relationship is present here, only heightened in this instance. For man faces not only the mystery of another person, but the Mystery of God himself: "How deep are the riches and the wisdom and the knowledge of God! How inscrutable his judgments, how unsearchable his ways" (Rom. 11:33). Man, of course remains a mystery to himself: "Truly you have formed my inmost being; you knit me in my mother's womb. . . . Such knowledge is too wonderful for me; too lofty for me to attain" (Ps. 139:13, 6). Finally, the interrelation between the divine love-initiative and its human, free response is no less mysterious. Paul never lost his sense of wonder that God had chosen him: "I am the least of the apostles; in fact, because I persecuted the church of God, I do not even deserve the name. But by God's favor I am what I am" (I Cor. 15:9-10).

While the mystery can never be dissolved, there is nevertheless a naming and a gradually deepening articulation that takes place in this relationship as well. Before the birth of Israel as a nation, Moses is concerned to know the name of God.

"But," said Moses to God, "when I go to the Israelites and say to them, The God of your fathers has sent me to you,' if they ask me, 'What is his name?' what am I to tell them?" (Ex. 3:13).

God responds to Moses by revealing the name of "Yahweh." Some Scripture scholars take this answer as a refusal of God to give his name. "I am who I am" is to be understood as meaning precisely that: "I am who I am, and that is for me to know, and for no mere man to grasp." But even if that is the case, this strange nonnaming comes to function as a name, as Moses is instructed: "This is what you shall tell the Israelites: I AM sent me to you" (Ex. 3:14). The very ambiguity of the name constitutes a perfect symbol of the simultaneous hiddenness and self-revelation of God.

When Moses returns with his people to Mount Sinai, God favors him with a further revelation of his nature:

Thus the Lord passed before him and cried out, "The Lord, the Lord, a merciful and gracious God, slow to anger and rich in kindness and fidelity, continuing his kindness for a thousand generations, and forgiving wickedness and crime and sin; yet not declaring the guilty guiltless, but punishing children and grandchildren to the third and fourth generation for their fathers' wickedness" (Ex. 34:6-7).

The prophets give deeper insights into what God expects of his people. Ezechiel, for example, reveals a deeper awareness of the personal responsibility of man:

Thus the word of the Lord came to me: Son of man, what is the meaning of this proverb that you recite in the land of Israel: "Fathers have eaten green grapes, thus their children's teeth are on edge"? As I live, says the Lord God: I swear that there shall no longer be anyone among you who will repeat this proverb in Israel. For all lives are mine; the life of the father is like the life of the son, both are mine; only the one who sins shall die (Ez. 18:1-4).

Jeremiah envisions a new and more intimate aware ness of God's demands.

But this is the covenant which I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within them, and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God, and they shall be my people. No longer will they have need to teach their friends and kinsmen how to know the Lord. All, from least to greatest, shall know me . . . (Jer. 31:33-34).

God explicitly declares his love for his people in the chapter. Though they often prove unfaithful, God does not abandon his people. "Can a mother forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget, I will never forget you" (Is. 49:15). If many individuals fall away, yet God is still creating a people for himself. To the discouragement of Elijah he responds: "Yet I will leave seven thousand men in Israel all those who have not knelt to Baal or kissed him" (I Kings 19:18).

Ultimately, God speaks not only in words, but in the Word. "In times past, God spoke in fragmentary and varied ways to our fathers through the prophets; in this, the final age, he has spoken to us through his Son . . ." (Heb. 1:1-2). "The Word became flesh and made his dwelling among us, and we have seen his glory: the glory of an only Son coming from the Father, filled with enduring love" (Jn. 1:14).

The character of testimony is verified quite as much in the relationship of God and man as in any other, with the exception, again, that the burden of accepting testimony lies solely upon man. God reads the hearts of men, and John says of Jesus, "He needed no one to give him testimony about human nature. He was well aware of what was in man's heart" (Jn. 2:25). But on the other side, even more than in a human relationship, the inner secrets of God are hidden to man, and the sole access to them is through the testimony of God. "No one has ever seen God," John says. "It is God the only Son, ever at the Father's side, who has revealed him" (Jn. 1:18). Reason is of no help here, and the pretensions of human knowledge can make no headway in penetrating this Mystery.

Father, Lord of heaven and earth, to you I offer learned and the clever you have revealed to the merest children. Father, it is true. You have graciously willed it so. Everything has been given over to me by my Father. No one knows the Son but the Father, and no one knows the Father but the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.

The appropriate response to God's self-testimony is man's trust and belief. Abraham stands at the head of salvation history as the exemplar of faith, and Paul insists that the just man lives by faith (Rom. 1:18). As in the human relationship, where a self-revelation not accompanied by an appropriate trust constitutes a violation, so here the self-revelation of God that is not met by faith leads to dire consequences:

For when men have once been enlightened and have tasted the heavenly gift and become sharers in the Holy Spirit, when they have tasted the good word of God and the powers of the age to come, and then have fallen away, it is impossible to make them repent again . . . (Heb. 6:4-6).

But there is in this case no danger that the testimony will be false. God cannot deceive, for that would be contrary to his nature. "I am the way, and the truth, and the life . . ." (Jn. 14:6).

The commitment of God to his people is represented, in Biblical language, as "covenant." God makes a covenant with the Israelite people at Mount Sinai. In Jeremiah, as already cited, a new covenant is spoken of. Jesus, bidding farewell to his disciples at the last supper, conceives of himself as instituting this new era: "This cup is the new covenant in my blood ..." (Lk. 22:2). This is a once-for-all accomplishment, as the Epistle to the Hebrews insists (7:27,9:25-26,10:11-18).

The real commitment of God must be matched by man's response. In the Old Testament, the commandments are seen as the covenant provisions, the conditions man is to adhere to as his part of the agreement. The new covenant demands a similar attentive response:

No, you have drawn near to Mount Zion and the city of the living God, the heavenly Jerusalem, to myriads of angels in festal gathering, to the assembly of the first-born enrolled in heaven, to God the judge of all, to the spirits of just men made perfect, to Jesus, the mediator of a new covenant, and to the sprinkled blood which speaks more eloquently than that of Abel. Do not refuse to hear him who speaks (Heb. 12:22-25).

This commitment must be total, as Jesus reaffirms: ". . . you must love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength" (Mk. 12:30).

Curiously, even the social nature of human commitment finds its analogue in the divine-human relation. The Jewish people attempt to exert a certain "social pressure" on God to uphold his promises: "Why should the Egyptians say, 'With evil intent he brought them out, that he might kill them in the mountains and exterminate them from the face of the earth?' " (Ex. 32:12). But even God himself does not find this motive strange: "But respect for my own name kept me from allowing it to be profaned in the opinion of the nations in whose sight I had brought them out" (Ez. 20:14).

The love relationship between God and man exhibits a pattern of growth. Even in the face of man's initial sin, the Proto-evangel gives assurance that God will not be totally absent from his people (Gen. 3:15). In Abraham, a new phase of God's dialogue begins, which bears fruit in the creation of a chosen people at Sinai. The beginning of the' kingship is marked by a special covenant with David, and in the ensuing years, as already seen, a new covenant is spoken of. Irenaeus has a beautiful image, appropriate here, of the Word of God gradually accustoming men to his presence.

In the earthly life, death and resurrection of Jesus, the dialogue between God and man reaches a certain climax, never to be surpassed. Yet the growth of God's presence still continues. Luke lovingly records the growth of the infant Church in the Acts of the Apostles. Paul images it this way:

Rather, let us profess the truth in love and grow to the full maturity of Christ the head. Through him the whole body grows, and with the proper functioning of the members joined firmly together by each supporting ligament, builds itself up in love (Eph. 4:15-16).

In the letter to the Philippians this same thought is put more personally:

My prayer is that your love may more and more abound, both in understanding and wealth of experience, so that with a clear conscience and blameless conduct you may learn to value the things that really matter. . . (Phil. 1:9-10).

Even this is not the end, for a final self-revelation and self-gift is promised. "Now we are seeing a dim reflection in a mirror; but then we shall be seeing face to face. The knowledge that I have now is imperfect; but then I shall know as fully as I am known" (I Cor. 13:12).

Then I saw new heavens and a new earth. The former heavens and the former earth had passed away, and the sea was no longer. I also saw a new Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down out of heaven from God, beautiful as a bride prepared to meet her husband. I heard a loud voice from the throne cry out: "This is God's dwelling among men. He shall dwell with them and they shall be his people and he shall be their God who is always with them . . ." (Apoc. 21:1-3).

The interaction of words and deeds is mirrored in the dialogue of God with man. In the Old Testament, the word of God makes clear the meaning of his great acts in human history; but the deeds, in turn, give weight to and authenticate the words. There is the same interrelationship in the prophets. The word of God is given them to interpret the meaning of history; yet the truth of that word will in turn be proved in the event. Matthew's Gospel, with its alternation of the words and deeds of Jesus, gives singular witness to this interaction, just as the words of Jesus are given concrete embodiment in his way of life and especially his death. The Second Vatican Council sums it up very well:

This plan of revelation is realized by deeds and words having an inner unity: the deeds wrought by God in the history of salvation manifest and confirm the teaching and realities signified by the words, while the words proclaim the deeds and clarify the mystery contained in them.(17)

The reality of conflict looms in the divine-human love relationship as it does in the relations of human persons. Such conflict is known as sin. If the conflict is always provoked by the failings and perversity of man, the fact of conflict is somehow mirrored on God's side as well. The Scriptures speak of God's anger as well as his love, of his judgment as well as his mercy.

The conflict between man and God is not a minor element in their relationship. It marks the dialogue in the persons of man's first parents, and it dogs their interaction until it reaches a fatal summit in the flood. The history of Israel appears as a pattern of advance and regression, especially in the Deuteronomic writings like the book of Judges. Paul gives the following schematic history of sin:

Therefore, just as through one man sin entered the world and with sin death, death thus coming to all men inasmuch as all sinned before the law there was sin in the world, even though sin is not imputed when there is no law—I say, from Adam to Moses death reigned, even over those who had not sinned by breaking a precept as did Adam, that type of the man to come (Rom. 5:12-14).

The very existence of this mystery of evil has always perplexed man. If God is truly good and all powerful, how can he allow so much sin to abound? An atrocity like the death of six million Jews at the hands of the Nazis seems to simply escape the framework of a loving dialogue between God and man. Wouldn't it be a mockery to even begin to conceive of this as a "word of love"? What is a person to say in the face of such utter horror?

Perhaps it would be best to say nothing at all. The mystery of evil is as inexplicable, in its own way, as the Mystery of God. Some, like Elie Wiesel and Victor Frankl, have been through the ordeal and have, as it were, "earned" the right to speak about it; maybe others should just keep silence. Certainly the book of Job reveals that his friends did better in their first three days of mute commiseration with Job than in all the wordy vindications of God they subsequently indulged in. Still, the theologian is a word-smith, and he is almost compelled, against his better judgment, to voice his .thoughts, however inadequate. "What have we said, my God, my Life, my holy Sweetness or what can anyone say when he speaks of thee? Yet, woe to those who do not speak of thee . . ." as Augustine said.(18)

Such tragedy within human history, first of all, is to be seen more as a "word of conflict" than a "word of love." If the dialogue of God and man contains the negativities of conflict as much as a human relationship, then these monstrosities of evil certainly fit into hat category. They are sin, in the most perverse, almost diabolical, sense of the term. Perhaps they are likened best to that kind of conflict that one party in a relationship brings entirely upon himself. Still, it must be admitted that even such actions do not escape the providence of God, and so are at least allowed by him to happen.

Another factor at work is man's freedom. God respects man as a dialogue partner, and tenders him his freedom unimpaired, even to the point where another man might scream, "Enough! This freedom has been so abused that it must be completely annihilated." Perhaps this incredible patience of God is hinted at in the conclusion of the flood story:

When I bring clouds over the earth, and the bow appears in the clouds, I will recall the covenant I have made between me and you and all living beings, so that the waters shall never again become a flood to destroy all mortal beings (Gen. 9:14-15).

Sometimes the evil itself seems to provide its own antidote. The theme of a haughty evil overreaching itself, of the hubris of a man bringing about his own downfall, is a staple of Greek drama as well as Biblical thought. "For everyone who exalts himself shall be humbled and he who humbles himself shall be exalted" (Lk. 14:11).

God does not employ his strength to put an end to evil; rather, in the most unexpected of gestures, he submits his weakness to the worst man can do. In Jesus, God is truly, in Whitehead's words, "The fellow-sufferer who understands."

Though he was in the form of God, he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped at. Rather, he emptied himself and took the form of a slave, being born in the likeness of men. He was known to be of human estate, and it was thus that he humbled himself, obediently accepting even death, death on a cross (Phil. 2:6-8).

Finally, an appeal must ultimately be made to mystery. This is the answer given by the book of Job. After Job has voiced his complaint, God appears to him, and in so doing silences him. Man is in the last analysis simply unable to challenge the wisdom of God.

For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the Lord. As high as the heavens are above the earth, so high are my ways about your ways and my thoughts above your thoughts (Is. 55:8-9).

No doubt in the final vision of God man will be able to appreciate better the wisdom of God's whole plan. 'Those that sow in tears shall reap rejoicing. Although they go forth weeping, carrying the seed to be sown, they shall come back rejoicing, carrying their sheaves" (Ps. 126:5-6). "At nightfall, weeping enters in, but with the dawn, rejoicing" (Ps. 30:6).

A love relationship has a particular shape; that idea can also be profitably applied to the dialogue of God and man that constitutes human history. The totality of human history, to begin with, is a particular series of events, initiated by God, responded to by man. It is not Leibniz's best of all possible worlds; it is simply this world, this universe. The theologians of the late Middle Ages spent a great deal of time trying to discern what would be true of God in all possible worlds. Catholics and Protestants disagree on many questions, but they share a common conclusion about the sterility of this period of the Christian tradition. It would seem better to concentrate on the particular shape of our story with God.

A love relationship has its beginning point, and the beginning here is creation. The Israelite people first came to self-awareness as the people created in the exodus from Egypt, but in time they realized that their Redeemer was also their Creator. Thus the Bible opens, "In the beginning God created heaven and earth." Special attention is accorded the creation of man: "Let us make man in our image, after our likeness" (Gen. 1:26). As the image of God, a knowing and loving being, man was the fitting dialogue partner of God. From the creative hand of God he came forth completely good. "God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good" (Gen. 1:31).

But the very start of this dialogue is marred by man's no. Not satisfied to be what they were, the man and the woman aspired to "be like gods who know what is good and what is bad" (Gen. 3:5). In violating God's trust, and in pursuing the specious promise of the serpent, however, they did not become like gods, but more like the devil. In their subsequent punishment, God yet affirms his continuing yes to man: "I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and hers; he will strike at your head, while you strike at his heel" (Gen. 3:15).

The ensuing history in Genesis seems an evil amplification of that first no, starting with Cain's wanton slaughter of his brother Abel. Man's negative response to God is stifled, as seen already, in the flood, but only for a time. The whole history of Israel seems a continual backsliding from the true worship of Yahweh. At the same time, man's yes is not totally absent from the story. Abraham is the paragon of faith, and Moses the familiar friend of God. David, for the most part, is generously faithful, and the prophets tell the message even in persecution. Thus, through it all, the yes of God resounds ever more strongly: the pact with Abraham, with the people of Israel, with David and in the promise of a new covenant.

The center point of human history is found in Christ Jesus. He plays a unique role in the dialogue between God and man. He is the Word of God to man; but he is also, at the same time, the word of man to God. The Incarnation is a plunging of the Trinity into human history, as shown in chapter 2. That truth can now be seen in the full context of human history. At the center of all the generations of men stands the Man in whom the inter-Trinitarian, loving yes of the Word to the Father becomes man's own word to God.

When you lift up the Son of Man, you will come to realize that I AM and that I do nothing by myself. I say only what the Father has taught me. The One who sent me is with me. He has not deserted me since I always do what pleases him (Jn. 8:2829).

Similarly,

Wherefore, on coming into the world, Jesus said: "Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you have prepared for me; holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight in. Then I said, 'As is written of me in the book, I have come to do your will, 0 God' " (Heb. 10:5-7).

But the very presence of this perfect yes seems to provoke an intensified no.

The world is incapable of hating you, but it does hate me because of the evidence I bring against it that what it does is evil. . . . Why do you not understand what I say? It is because you cannot bear to hear my word. The father you spring from is the devil, and willingly you carry out his wishes. He brought death to man from the beginning, and has never based himself on truth; the truth is not in him. Lying speech is his native tongue; he is a liar and the father of lies. But because I deal in the truth, you give me no credence (Jn. 7:7,8:43- 45).

After the temptation scene in Luke, an ominous suspense is created: "When the devil had finished all the tempting he left him, to await another opportunity" (Lk. 4:13). His return is noted by Jesus as he is betrayed and taken prisoner in the garden: "But this is your hour and the triumph of darkness!" (Lk. 22:53). Somehow the full force of evil gathers itself into a paroxysm of refusal, voicing a cumulative and concerted no to God.

. . . until retribution overtakes you for all the blood of all the just ones shed on earth, from the blood of holy Abel to the blood of Zechariah son of Barachiah, whom you murdered between the temple building and the altar (Mt. 23:35).

Paradoxically, the crucifixion of Jesus is at the same time man's ultimate yes to God.

In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to God, who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence. Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered; and when perfected, he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him, designated by God as high priest according to the order of Melchizedek
(Heb. 5:7-10).

In the words of Paul,

Jesus Christ. . . was not alternatively "yes" and "no"; he was never anything but "yes." Whatever promises God has made have been fulfilled in him; therefore it is through him that we address our Amen to God when we worship together
(II Cor. 1:19-20).

Jesus forms the pivot of human history, then, precisely because in him meet the unsurpassable statements of both no and yes to God. In Paul's graphic image, "For our sakes God made him who did not know sin, to be sin, so that in him we might become the very holiness of God" (II Cor. 5:21). Those who implemented this act were of course unaware of the enormity of both the no or the yes involved. "Forgive them, Father; they do not know what they are doing" (Lk. 23:34). Indeed, this fated no and yes to God is not some discordance audible merely in our past history; it is a line of division running through each one of us. We join in that collective no insofar as we are subject to sin, and yet pronounce the yes to the extent that we are identified with Christ.

If the death of Jesus is his final yes to the Father "Father, into your hands I commend my spirit" (Lk. 23:46) then the responsive yes of the Father is the Resurrection of Jesus.

Because of this, God highly exalted him and bestowed on him the name above every other name, so that at Jesus' name every knee must bend in the heavens, on the earth, and under the earth, and every tongue proclaim to the glory of God the Father: Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil. 2:9-11).

As Peter begins to preach the Good News, he announces: "Therefore let the whole house of Israel know beyond any doubt that God has made both Lord and Messiah this Jesus whom you crucified" (Acts 2:36). Not only is the Resurrection of Jesus a personal vindication of his way of love, but it constitutes a promise of resurrection to all men, a vivid sign that evil is, in principle, already overcome. "But as it is, Christ is now raised from the dead, the first fruits of those who have fallen asleep" (I Cor. 15:20).

If human history has a fulcrum in the events of the life, death and exaltation of Jesus, that is not the end of the story. The particular shape of man's odyssey is fixed as well by its final destination. Then death will not only be overcome, but completely done away with. "He shall wipe every tear from their eyes, and there shall be no more death or mourning, crying out of pain, for the former world has passed away" (Apoc. 21:4). The timing of that event, however, is not open to deduction. "As for the exact day or hour, no one knows it, neither the angels in heaven nor the Son but the Father only" (Mt. 24:36). This final revelation will be a fresh and final self-gift of God, not demanded by anything that has preceded. It will form the final word of love in God's dialogue with man.

The center of history in the great works of God, accomplished in Jesus, and the end of history, in the final self-gift of God, lend a shape to our present history as precisely a time-in-between. Gifted already with the possibility of becoming one with Christ, we yet await a fuller redemption.

Not only that, but we ourselves, although we have the Spirit as first fruits, groan inwardly while we await the redemption of our bodies. In hope we were saved. But hope is not hope if its object is seen; how is it possible for one to hope for what he sees? And hoping for what we cannot see means awaiting it with patient endurance (Rom. 8:23-25).

This mid-time is the time of the Church, the time of the continued presence of Jesus in the Spirit, and the time in which God continues his dialogue with man through that same Spirit.

This much have I told you while I was still with you; the Paraclete, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will instruct you in everything, and remind you of all that I told you. . . . He will not speak on his own, but will speak only what he hears, and will announce to you the things to come (Jn. 14:25- 26, 16:13).

"And know that I am with you always, until the end of Church is the "privileged place" of God's dialogue with man, and, to the extent it truly listens to the Spirit, it is the bride of Christ, "without stain or wrinkle" (Eph. 5:27).

This character of intermediate time, this contrast of fulfillment yet expectation, decrees as well the value of civilization. It is a real but limited value. This is implied in the disparate images of the end time. On the one hand, there are images of continuity: "See, I make all things new" (Rev. 21:5), but there are also images of fire and destruction. Man's work in the world makes a real contribution toward the Kingdom. But nothing that man accomplishes, even in Christ, is perfect enough to be taken immediately into the Kingdom.(19) It must first be purified, so that in effect the final Kingdom constitutes a fresh and unmerited gift of God the new dwelling place, not built by human hands. Paul expresses it this way:

Thanks to the favor God showed me I laid a foundation as a wise master-builder might do, and now someone else is building upon it. Everyone, however, must be careful how he builds. No one can lay a foundation other than the one that has been laid, namely Jesus Christ. If different ones build on this foundation with gold, silver, precious stones, wood, hay or straw, the work of each will be made clear. The Day will disclose it. That day will make its appearance with fire, and fire will test the quality of each man's work. If the building a man has raised on this foundation still stands, he will receive his recompense; if a man's building burns, he will suffer loss. He himself will be saved, but only as one fleeing through fire (I Cor. 3:10-15).

There is continuity, then, because the "new heavens and the new earth" are still a heaven and an earth, only renewed. But there is also discontinuity.

The notion of "privileged moments" clarifies the relationship of world history to "salvation history." For the latter can be seen as a series of privileged moments in God's love relationship with man. As privileged moments sum up and interpret the meaning of the whole love relationship, so salvation history concentrates and discloses the meaning of all human history. It sums up the whole of man's past, reveals his deepest meanings in the present, and points him with promise into the future. These are moments of heightened self-revelation, of deeper commitment, of more complete self-giving. Yet they are not simply to be set over against the rest of history. For there is no clear boundary line between privileged moments and the remainder of the relationship, and privileged moments serve to manifest precisely the meaning of more ordinary times. Salvation history only makes clearer, more explicit and more vivid the love-dialogue God carries on with man in every time and every place. ". . . he wants all men to be saved and come to know the truth" (I Tim. 2:4).

The series of privileged moments within human history are no mere aggregate, but constitute themselves a growing intensity in God's making himself known to man. Thus these events constitute a "history within a history," and they exhibit their own particular shape. It is this fact that creates the "scandal of particularity," as it is known in the Christian tradition. Why did Jesus wait so long to come? Why did he come where he did? "Can anything good come from Nazareth?" (Jn. 1:46). Theologians try to provide answers for these questions, but all we really know is that we live in this particular world, so strangely shaped by these contingent events.

The privileged moment par excellence within human history is, as already stated, the life, death and exaltation of Jesus. These events sum up and disclose the meaning of all human history: that love is stronger than death; that evil is overcome, not by being crushed by force, but by being absorbed into and nullified by love; that good has the last word over evil. Here is revealed, to return to the images of the opening chapter, the deepest reason for both the Christian's play and his seriousness. He plays in a world redeemed by God: "O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting?" (I Cor. 15:55). Still, he knows that evil persists, that it can only be overcome by love, and that this will occasion suffering. "In my own flesh I fill up what is lacking in the sufferings of Christ for the sake of his body, the church" (Col. 1:24).

The memory of privileged moments is treasured by lovers against the boredom and indifference of more prosaic life. I recur for the final time to the thought of the Eucharist, for the same happens in the divine-human relationship. The Eucharist is a deliberate attempt to remember that privileged moment par excellence when in the death and resurrection of Jesus God and man spoke most openly and lovingly to each other. This loving act of recollection, however, is not just for the sake of a fond musing on the past; rather the vivid summoning up of past memory becomes itself a new moment in the dialogue of God and man. Enthusiasm is restored to love grown familiar, while the deeper significance of the relationship, not absent, but almost forgotten, is effectively remembered.

If human history is a love relationship between God and man, then it constitutes a unity. It is all of a piece. "Salvation history" is usually given a narrow and technical sense and made to refer to the series of God's special revelations within history. I have used the word in that sense above. Yet, on deeper thought, the term is perhaps an unhappy one. For, in the perspective presented here, all of history is literally "salvation history," and the more limited use of the word refers only to privileged moments within that relationship. I would want to underline that they only reveal more vividly the meaning of the whole. The countless eons where man knew not how to write, and so could leave nothing of himself behind but a cave painting, an arrowhead or his skull; the dawning of a spring morning 30,000 years ago when the tribe realized another winter had passed; the hopes and schemes of the great men of history, and the lives lived out unnoticed in hidden valleys; the tumultuous years of war and plunder, and the private pleasures of times of peace; the rise of great institutions and the intimate circle of family and friends; the great projects, the noble and base aims, the success of injustice and the exploitation of the poor; the idealistic effort and its occasional success all these, however disparate, are part of just one drama. Sometimes ecstatic, sometimes stormy, often distracted and losing its way, always precarious, but never finally broken off that is the love affair of God and man.

The focus of this account has moved from myself to the dialogue with God, to community, to the historical Church, and to a culminating vision of world history. This last chapter shifts back to the more directly personal in its attention to morality. If the above presents a Christian view of reality, then what style of behavior flows from that view? I do not, of course, propose to develop a whole treatise on morality, but to draw out some of the implications for practical action of the personal theology of the preceding chapters. The treatment will move, again, from the individual to the general.

In regard to myself, my first obligation, I believe, is to a healthy self-affirmation. I am a human being, possessing an intrinsic value. When I was in the minor seminary, the rector had a paper weight on his desk with the legend inscribed: Homo, res sacra Man, a sacred thing. I share that dignity. Many friends have valued me just for myself, and thereby made an act of faith affirming that worth. I live within a Church that has from the beginning affirmed the essential dignity of man. Finally, in Christ Jesus I recognize myself as a child of God, who is my Father a prizing that surpasses any conceivable human recognition. The first thing I have to do, then, is to accept that dignity, to act on it, and, if necessary, even to insist on it.

I don't mean by that, of course, that I should always try to have my own way, or be punctilious about my titles or my achievements. If anything, an awareness of such a deep and interior dignity shows up all exterior honors and recognition to be so much claptrap. The Christian who wants to incarnate the Master, who overcame evil by love, will have to be infinitely flexible in trying to contribute his measure of good to the world. He will not stand on a proper amount of attention to himself, nor insist unduly on his own ideas. He will go wherever he can, work at whatever he must, to further the common good.

Love is patient; love is kind. Love is not jealous, it does not put on airs, it is not snobbish. Love is never rude, it is not self-seeking, it is not prone to anger; neither does it brood over injuries. Love does not rejoice in what is wrong but rejoices with the truth. There is no limit to love's forbearance, to its trust, its hope, its power to endure (I Cor.13:4-7).

Still, there is a limit to this self-forgetfulness. I will not allow myself to be used or manipulated. I must resist any attack on my essential dignity as person; I cannot acquiesce in the destruction of myself. I find it abhorrent to violate what is deepest in another person, his essential dignity and freedom as a human being. But I must be equally opposed to any such violation of myself.

In chapter 21 urged that affirmation of oneself was not opposed to the Christian tradition of humility and self-denial. The same doubts will probably recur exhortations in the Christian tradition to meekness and forgetfulness of self, to thinking of others as better than oneself, and with the many saints who present themselves as the worst of all sinners? Rather than track down each of these objections, I will simply say that I discern this positive sense of self in the life of Jesus. When the Pharisees told him that he cast out devils by the power of Beelzebub, the prince of devils, they attacked his root dignity as Son of God. He did not mildly respond, "Yes, I am the scum of the earth, and whatever you say of me is less severe than what I think of myself." Rather he pointed out roundly the true situation:

"How can Satan expel Satan? If a kingdom is torn by civil strife, that kingdom cannot last. If a household is divided according to loyalties, that household will not survive. Similarly, if Satan has suffered mutiny in his ranks and is torn by dissension, he cannot endure; he is finished. No one can enter a strong man's house and despoil his property unless he has first put him under restraint. Only then can he plunder his house. I give you my word, every sin will be forgiven mankind and all the blasphemies men utter, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never be forgiven. He carries the guilt of his sin without end." He spoke thus because they had said, "He is possessed by an unclean spirit." (Mk. 3:23-30).

The same unbreakable self-possession appears even in the trial. Even though Jesus refuses to physically resist his captors, he takes no willing part in their villainy. His very silence is a protest, a reproach against the illegality of their proceedings, so much so that it is explicitly remarked.

The high priest rose to his feet before the court and began to interrogate Jesus: "Have you no answer to what these men testify against you?" But Jesus remained silent; he made no reply. . . . The chief priests, meanwhile, brought many accusations against him. Pilate interrogated him again: "Surely you have some answer? See how many accusations they are leveling against you." But greatly to Pilate's surprise, Jesus made no further response (Mk. 14:60-61, 15:3-5).

Jesus refuses even to testify against himself, in John's account: "Why do you question me? Question those who heard me when I spoke. It should be obvious that they will know what I said" (Jn. 18:21). When this is taken as impertinence within the priestly courtroom, and Jesus is slapped for his insolence, he is still not abashed, but replies evenly: "If I said anything wrong produce the evidence, but if I spoke the truth why hit me?" (Jn. 18:23).

There is a point after which a person cannot allow himself to be abused; a point where, if he does so, he indulges in collusion with the person who is intent on eliminating his basic dignity. I believe this is true, for example, even in marriage. The normal law of love, of course, is compromise, adjustment, tolerance of each party for the other. But there are cases in which the physical, emotional or spiritual destruction becomes too deep to be supported any longer. As close as the marriage bond is, each partner has a prior commitment to himself or herself. If the essential dignity of husband or wife is being destroyed, he or she has a duty to break off the relationship, either temporarily or permanently. Indeed, I believe that if the partners do not have this kind of self-possession, they are not truly ready for marriage. Their relation will be based on a one-sided or a mutual dependency, which is but a sham for the mature love relationship. The Church has always recognized in extreme cases the need for a "separation of bed and board," which is an implicit recognition of the truth I am affirming here.

To distinguish between a negligible blow to my pride and self-importance and an essential attack on my personal dignity, remains, certainly, a further and very difficult question. No doubt we all have a tendency to confuse a real or even imagined slight with a deep personal attack. The distinction is crucial, but no automatic rules can be given for making it. Perhaps it is best merely to say that as one gradually grows in the Christian life, and discerns more clearly the one thing necessary, and learns more deeply his own surpassing dignity, then he will increasingly be able to discriminate between what is trivial and superficial criticism of himself, and what constitutes an unacceptable violation of his basic self-worth.

This touches already on a second moral obligation toward myself: I must listen intently to my own ethical valuations. The deepest moral imperative, to put it another way, is that I must be true to myself. My own best sentiments give me clues to moral action that the most sophisticated of moral codes could not supply, just as the circumstances I encounter are more novel and more complex than any casuist's book of moral cases could ever articulate. We often think of moral directives as preceding moral action: The moral law tells me what I must do, and then I try to carry that out. But the real priority, I believe, is in the other direction. Moral codes are generalizations arising from the experience of generations of moral living, just as theology does not precede, but arises from, Christian experience. When they are reapplied to particular circumstances, they can offer only general guidelines. There is a gap between these guidelines and the novelty and subtlety of situations that only some moral "sixth sense" can bridge. I am not denying that there are general moral norms. I am only saying that, precisely as general, they do not provide exact directions for any particular circumstance. They cannot even offer specific illustrations of how they are to be applied to a concrete situation. Nor am I denying that one learns his morality in the Christian community and the school of tradition. The Christian has to constantly check his moral experience against those norms. Nevertheless, in that very process, and in the course of growing in Christian morality, a person's Christian sensibilities and feelings become honed to such a fine point that they offer a criterion of morality more supple and more discriminating than any articulated set of norms could hope to supply. A temptation bids us write this off as mere sentimentality, pure subjectivity, "just my own feelings." I affirm, on the contrary, that such personal moral reactions must be listened to with intent seriousness. Otherwise we risk neglecting what was known in the tradition as the "gift of wisdom," and the instinctive guidance of the Spirit. Perhaps what I am saying seems highly subjective. It is no more, I believe, than a contemporary restatement of the dictum of Thomas Aquinas that the proximate norm of morality and, in particular circumstances, the final arbiter is one's own conscience.

In relationship to God, I find my primary obligation to be simply to enjoy the world he has given me, to dance mightily in the play-space he has lovingly provided, to flower and bloom and grow in his presence. He gifts me with my existence, with my unique individuality, with an invitation to address him as "Father." His correlative desire is that I do not bury this gift in the ground, but make the fullest possible use of it. So I am called to "play" before him in my prayer, my recreation, my work, my personal relations.

That seems, somehow, too easy. But perhaps it is because we have a perverse ingenuity for making things more difficult than they really are. At the same time, as I brought out above, these images have a sterner side. The joy of the dance cannot be separated from the discipline that accompanies it. To grow deeply into myself will mean dying to many more superficial and unintegrable aspects of myself. And however beautiful the world is, however much God and our friends love us, no man escapes suffering in this life.

The birth of ecological consciousness has raised the question of our obligations toward nature, the world around us. In the light of the vision presented in the preceding chapters, I believe my obligation to the world is to appreciate and cherish it as the many- splendored manifestation of God's presence. We are fellow creatures of the earth, and we owe it a certain reverence. But that does not mean we should be afraid to use it. The original disposition to Adam and Eve was:

God also said: "See, I give you every seed-bearing plant all over the earth and every tree that has seed- bearing fruit on it to be your food. . . . Have dominion over the fish of the sea, the birds of the air, and all the living things that move on the earth" (Gen. 1:29,28).

We have only to bear in mind that it is God's gift, and not our absolute possession. "Everything God created is good; nothing is to be rejected when it is received with thanksgiving . . ." (I Tim. 4:4).

My primary obligation toward others, as already suggested, flows from what they have given me, and the attitude God manifests toward me. I basically want to create for each of them a "play-space." That means I must love each person for himself, accept him where he is, encourage him to be his own best self, and foster his freedom rather than manipulate him and create dependencies. Even when it would be simpler by far to just accept a dependent relationship, I must continually challenge the other to stand on his own. On the other hand, when he manages to do so, I must second that independence and growth, and not resent or belittle it out of envy or jealousy. Except in extreme cases, or with children, I must unfailingly treat the other as an adult. I have no right to protect him from reality, or shield him from the consequences of his decisions or actions. The play-space I want to create is a "zone of freedom," and that applies to freedom both as a joy and as a burden.

In treating others as adult equals, I find it important to be honest with them. That means, in the first place, expressing my positive appreciation and "prizing" of them. Such affirmations are crucial in arriving at and preserving one's own self-worth, and we often neglect them because we take it for granted that the other knows. Sometimes at a deathbed a mother and daughter will share how much they meant to each other over the years. The revelation is beautiful. But it is also tinged with sadness when one realizes that for so many years those positive feelings went unspoken.

But expression of negative feelings is equally important. Society trains us so well in the superficial politeness that lubricates everyday life that, at least when it comes to deeper relationships, we have some real unlearning to do. I have found it difficult, and still do, to confront another person with my anger, my resentment, my frustration with him. But I have also discovered that often it was precisely this revelation that triggered the most significant breakthroughs in the relation with that person. So much so, in fact, that it has become a rule for me. If the relationship is personally important to me, and it is something that bothers me over a period of time, I will push myself to speak of it, whatever my initial reluctance. Sometimes we hesitate to do this because we are afraid of hurting the other person. But I think that this is usually a refusal on our part to treat the other as fully adult. We are implying that he is not mature enough to face the violence of our anger, and somehow needs to be protected. If negative feelings are expressed directly, however, without an attempt to tear down the other person, that fear normally turns out, I find, to be a miscalculation. Most people are not that brittie. They do not usually fall all apart just because I am upset with them.

A correlative of this honesty is the willingness to take problems where they belong. So often we will gripe endlessly to a third party about someone, without ever taxing him directly. This violates Jesus' explicit direction: "If your brother should commit some wrong against you, go and point out his fault, but keep it between the two of you. If he listens to you, you have won your brother over" (Mt. 18:15). While we have a need now and then to "sound off" to a third party we trust, to stop there, often enough, is an unproductive manner of handling a problem. Here I have another rule for myself: not to say behind someone's back what I am unwilling to say to his face. I can't say I follow that perfectly, but it remains for me an important ideal.

What I have said so far may seem woefully inadequate to the complications of our relations to others, to the many demands of justice upon us. But I am satisfied to say no more. The sum of the Christian's obligation to others is to love them. And so much of love, I am convinced, is just "letting be." Parents often seem to have such a hard time learning this. They are so used to the child's earlier dependence that they seem inevitably surprised at the youngster's demand for freedom. Or perhaps they so desperately need to be needed. The doting mother who is still so concerned about her grown daughter's life, who frets over her every decision and hovers over her every move, may think she is truly loving her. But the manipulated and dependent daughter, in her deepest self, knows better.

I have learned something in the ministry, I believe, about effectively loving others, about what a person should do if he desires to make some contribution to the world, and leave some residue of goodness behind him. When I was first ordained, I spent two years as an assistant in a city parish. As I left that assignment, I reflected on the many activities I had devoted my energies to: religious education, preaching, visiting homes, bringing Communion to the sick, organizing the altar boys, preparing couples for marriage, giving talks to the Parents Club, attending the Holy Name Society breakfasts, celebrating Mass, forming a youth group, consoling the bereaved, counting the collection, hearing confessions, answering the telephone and so on. As I looked back on it all, I could find only two activities in which I was really sure I had made a deep impression on people. They were both small groups that met regularly over a period of time. Here I felt I had noticed real growth, seen hearts changed, left some real impress of myself on those persons because of having been able to share deeply with them. For the rest, I simply don't know. Preaching, for example, seems so like dropping a stone into a bottomless well. If you stand in front of church, a few people will of course say, "I enjoyed your sermon, Father." But is it real conviction, or only politeness? What about all the others? In any case, I left the parish with the resolution that if I would ever return to that ministry, I would concentrate all my available time on small group and personal approaches.

That puts perhaps too much emphasis on seeing results in a field where results are notoriously inscrutable. Nevertheless I have grown, if anything, to be even more convinced of this stress on personal ministry. I find I am preeminently concerned about ministering to people where they are: to second their joys, to be compassionate with their sufferings, to listen to their dreams, to try to assure them, on some deep level, that they are worthwhile just for themselves. Whether that happens in "official" or "unofficial" structures, when I function most formally as a priest or in some chance encounter, does not seem terribly important. I have a certain distrust of large structures and huge programs. I don't deny their legitimacy or necessity; but I somehow feel that the deed of love done in one's own personal circle, the act of compassion that touches suffering directly, takes priority, in some way, over a long-distance charity, no matter how important or pressing. I see this personal ministry also in the life of Jesus. He was quick to heal the sick he encountered; I believe that was an integral part of his message. But I don't see him organizing this ministry for any mass production. "Please bring all the lepers on Monday, the maimed and the crippled on Friday. ..; and next month we'll move the clinic to southern Judea." I am not saying, of course, that we should simply ignore all the suffering we don't directly meet. There is really no necessity to choose between the two. Our society, especially, is rich enough in resources to come to the aid of those in need, both near and far. I am only stating what has come for me to be the primary emphasis. The ultimate goal of the ministry is to change hearts. Whatever does not change hearts, or at least prepare for and enable such a change, is something of a waste.

Though I put a central stress on a person-to-person ministry, that does not imply that the Christian has no obligation toward institutions. I have stressed above what an indispensable role they play in the long term of history. I have also specified my attitude toward them: a loyalty, but a critical one. They need to be furthered in their essential purposes and noble aims, but this is not to be done with a blind enthusiasm.

Most of the institutions of my experience are benign. They rarely set out directly to encompass evil. At most, they are perhaps overly preoccupied with their self-preservation, overly concerned about their good reputation, too convinced of the importance of their own projects. Nevertheless, they have great power to harm. They can be overzealous in demanding allegiance, and thus run roughshod over personal integrity. They can become callous through routine, and consequently indifferent to personal need. They can become defensive and destroy a critic. Sometimes their huge size is a danger in itself; they can crush a person as heedlessly as an elephant tramples on an ant. I feel I must maintain a critical distance to withstand and resist such institutional action.

The opposite cautions apply when I am entrusted a responsible position in an institution. As institutions are indispensable, so roles within them are necessary. Roles are fixed positions, settled divisions of a task, normal routines for accomplishing it. If there were no stable roles in society, we would have, every morning, to invent our procedures from scratch. That would demand far more creativity, I fear, than most of us could muster. Nevertheless, any authority figure should wear his role lightly. He must know who he is, aside from the role, and be willing to step out from behind it whenever necessary or appropriate. Some members of the clergy, for example, are priests first, and persons second. I have the opposite conviction: I am a person first, a Christian second, and a priest last of all. The person in a role-position should not insist rigidly on the rules and regulations of the institution. There is need, of course, for a certain order and regularity in any large process. Still, institutions are for people, and not people for institutions, just as Jesus insisted that "The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath" (Mk. 2:27). Institutions are created to serve people. When they no longer do so, the suspicion should be that the institution is wrong, not the persons affected.

I have emphasized strongly a person-to-person ministry; but I do not want to deny my previous assertion that a Christian today must consider himself a member of the world community. Within that perspective, man has analyzed and begun to take control of the development of society. In many circles, revolution is proposed as the high road to a new and more equitable order of society. I have seen, indeed, situations where a violent uprising seemed the only practical way to a desperately needed social change. Yet I am generally suspicious of revolution. All too often) I find, as George Orwell implied in Animal Farm, that the brave new order is no better, or even worse, than its predecessor. Again, I insist that the ultimate question is the changing of hearts. Social rearrangements that take place without people's learning, at least in the long run, new attitudes, new virtues and a deeper love, are but tinkering with the machinery. That is why I believe the person who quietly sows seeds of goodness in his own small circle, and changes deeply some hearts, is perhaps contributing more toward a better world tomorrow than the dreamer with Utopian visions of world revolution.

Jesus replied, "Do even you not yet understand? Can you not see that whatever goes into the mouth passes through the stomach and is discharged into the sewer? But the things that come out of the mouth come from the heart, and it is these that make a man unclean. For from the heart come evil intentions: murder, adultery, fornication, theft, perjury, slander. These are the things that make a man unclean"
(Mt. 15:1620). (20)

Perhaps I overstate my case. I am not urging a privatism that hides in a small, comfortable environment from the larger problems of our society and our world. I am only underlining where my deepest values lie, where I feel the strongest emphasis should be placed. There remains a real need to remake institutions and societal structures in the image of a more personal concern for people. My own recipe for social change, to address that problem briefly, is "gentle but insistent pressure." Most efforts at changing society fail, I believe, not because they are not well intentioned, or even well organized, but because they are too sporadic. Like the student protests I spoke of in chapter 3, they have no staying power. The pressure does not have to be excessive. Often as not that simply creates a backlash, which leaves things as they were, or even more resistant to change. But the important thing is that the pressure be sustained. Remaking society in any fundamental way is no weekend lark, no month-long crusade. The person who is serious about it had better dedicate himself to years of unremitting effort. "That was, for me, the lesson of the war in Vietnam. Despite the enormous disparity in power, the ultimate key was perseverance. We thought in terms of years, but they thought in terms of generations. And they meant it.

In my analysis of the process of social change, I see complementary roles being played by the "prophetic figure" and the "institutional figure." The prophet stands outside the community and screams bloody murder, holding up an impossibly high ideal for the society. The enlightened "administrator" stands within the institution and says, "Now isn't that fellow far out! You and I know the real world, and he's just not in touch. Still, you know, maybe we could take just this one little step, don't you think?" Despite all the fervent talk of revolution, it is in such small increments that most effective societal change takes place. Of course, the prophet and the institutional figure generally have little use for each other. The prophet finds the administrator hopelessly timid, compromised, cowardly, and co-opted by the institution. The average administrator sees the prophet as extreme, dangerously radical and totally unrealistic. But whether they know it or not, they need each other. Without the prod of the prophet, the administrator could never budge the inertia of the institution; without the prophetic foil, he would have nothing against which to toss up his own more modest proposals. But without the administrator the prophet would be largely ineffective; his anger would be noticed but soon forgotten, or drowned in the scorn or defensiveness or apathy that always greet bold new ideas.

I have spoken of my obligations to myself, to God, to nature, to others, to institutions, to world needs and social change. I have one final conviction about morality: the ultimate efficacy of good intentions. "The road to hell is paved with good intentions," the saying has it, but I do not believe so. "Deliver me from well-meaning nincompoops!" the astringent critic will insist. It is true that in the short run the well- intentioned but poorly informed or incompetent can create an immense amount of havoc. But in the long run, I am convinced, good intentions are the only important thing. Like the cup of cold water given to the disciple, they will not go without their reward. Somehow I am sure of it every well-intentioned act in human history will be taken by God, somehow, into the Kingdom.

As a way of summarizing all that I have said, I would like to compose a personal creed.

I believe in a God who invites me to call him "Father," who creates the world as a play space for man. He presides over all of history, and is ever lovingly present to man, even in contradiction and turmoil. He made covenants with man, and spoke his faithful care in the prophets.

I believe in Jesus Christ, the eternal and uncreated Son, who becomes in history and the reality of human flesh the Father's final Word of love. That love is expressed to the uttermost in the figure on the cross. I believe that the Father accepts that divine and human yes in the resurrection, and thus reveals the deepest meaning of our whole history. Jesus lives in triumph with the Father, and I share that life, receiving it in baptism to nourish it in the Eucharist.

I believe in the Holy Spirit, who energizes the Church with the presence of Jesus, directs its tradition from Pentecost even down to our day, and keeps it ever faithful to its Spouse. I embrace the living body of the Church, and rejoice in my brothers and sisters who give witness to Jesus; but I know that God loves all his children. I await a full and final revelation of the Father's love, when Christ will gather all human good into his Kingdom, and God will be all in all. Amen.

(1) All Scripture quotations will be taken from The New American Bible (New York: Benzinger, Inc., 1970) unless otherwise noted.

(2) Martin Luther, The Freedom of the Christian in H. Grimm (ed.), Luther's Works, v. 31 (Philadelphia: Muhlenberg Press, 1957), pp. 343-44.

(3) Summa Theologiae, I, q. 1, a. 2.

(4) Karl Rahner, "Theology and Anthropology," Theological Investigations, v. 9 (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).

(5) Bernard Lonergan, "Theology in a New Context," A Second Collection (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1974), p. 66 and Method in Theology (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), p. 240.

(6) Jean Paul Sartre's basic vision is developed in Being and Nothingness (New York: Philosophical Library, 1956).

(7) The Revelations of Divine Love, tr. J. Walsh (St. Meinrad, Ind.: Abbey Press, 1974), p. 96.

(8) Confessions X:6, tr. V. Bourke, Fathers of the Church, v. 21 (New York, 1953), pp. 270-71.

(9) Ibid., p. 4.

(10) In this text, and the one following, the translation is the author's.

(11) The basic presentation of Carl Rogers' thought can be found in Client Centered Therapy, its Current Practice, Implications and Theory (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1951); see also On Becoming a Person (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1961).

(12) Complete Poems of Robert Frost (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1949), p. 53.

(13) See, for example, the excellent notes in The Jerusalem Bible (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday and Company, Inc., 1966).

(14) Karl Rahner, "Theos in the New Testament," Theological Investigations, v.1 (Baltimore: Helicon Press, 1961), pp. 117, 123, 125.

(15) Karl Rahner, Hearers of the Word (New York: Herder and Herder, 1969), p. 94.

(16) Does man also, by his response, issue a personal challenge to God? No, if by this is meant that after man responds to God, then it is "God's move," and He has somehow to wait and see what man will do before He conceives a response. This falsely imagines God as in time with man. God's life is eternal: not measured out in moments and drops of existence, as is man's, but a simultaneous and complete possession of itself. To God there is no before and after; all is eternally present in his sight. However, if it is a question of whether God's actions are always wise and just, always a perfect complement to a man's previous responses, so that the series of God's initiatives toward man as a whole or as any individual constitute a perfectly wise and loving side of a dialogue in that sense, God can be said to "respond" to man. There is need here for a delicate balance between the fact that God truly creates man as a reality "over against" himself, with a real freedom, and treats him as a true friend and dialogue partner, and the equally important fact that man remains, throughout this interchange, a creature facing his Creator. The fact of dialogue is brought out in Abraham's almost humorous bargaining with God (Gen. 18:22-32), while the unilateral nature of God's challenge to man is enshrined in the following query: "Who has directed the spirit of the Lord, or has instructed him as his counselor? Whom did he consult to gain knowledge? Who taught him the path of judgment, or showed him the way of understanding? (Is. 40:13-14).

(17) Constitution on Divine Revelation, W. Abbott (ed.), The Documents of Vatican II (New York: Guild Press, 1966), p. 112.

(18) Confessions I:4, Fathers of the Church, v. 21, p. 7.

(19) I am obviously here not speaking of what Christ accomplished as man, but of what other men do "in Christ." An exception should also be made for Mary that is, perhaps, the meaning of the Assumption.

(20) This quotation is taken from The Jerusalem Bible.