Mary gave birth to a son, her firstborn. She wrapped him in swaddling clothes and laid him in a manger because there was no room for them in the inn.

In the Christmas story, we have always vilified and demonized the innkeeper who turned Mary and Joseph away, leaving them no choice for shelter except a stable. And the lesson we took from this was the need for greater hospitality in our lives, the need to not be so busy and preoccupied that there is “no room in the inn,” that is, that there is no place in our busy lives for a messiah to be born, for Christmas to happen.

In our more reflective moments we sense the importance of prayer, yet we struggle to pray. Sustained, deep prayer doesn’t come easy for us. Why?

First of all, we struggle to make time for prayer. Prayer doesn’t accomplish anything practical for us, it’s a waste of time in terms of tending to the pressures and tasks of daily life, and so we hesitate to go there. Coupled with this, we find it hard to trust that prayer actually works and brings about something real in our lives. Beyond that, we struggle to concentrate when we try to pray. Once we do settle in to pray, we soon feel ourselves overwhelmed by daydreams, unfinished conversations, half-forgotten melodies, heartaches, agendas and the impending tasks that face us as soon as we get up from our place of prayer. Finally, we struggle to pray because we really don’t know how to pray. We might be familiar with various forms of prayer, from devotional prayers to different kinds of meditation, but we generally lack the confidence to believe that our own particular way of praying, with all its distractions and missteps, is prayer in the deep sense.

There’s a story told, more legend perhaps than fact, about a mayor of a large American city in the late 1960s. It wasn’t a good time for his city. It was facing financial bankruptcy, crime rates were spiralling, its public transportation system was no longer safe at night, the river supplying its drinking water was dangerously polluted, the air was rife with racial tension and there were strikes and street protests almost weekly.

As the story goes, the mayor was flying over the city in a helicopter at rush hour on a Friday afternoon. As the rush-hour bustle and traffic drowned out most everything else, he looked down at what seemed a teeming mess and said to one of his aides: “Wouldn’t it be nice if there was a plunger and we could flush this whole mess into the ocean!”

Several years ago, a Presbyterian minister I know challenged his congregation to open its doors and heart more fully to the poor. The congregation initially responded with enthusiasm and programs were introduced that actively invited people from the less-privileged economic areas of the city, including a number of street people, to come to their church.

But the romance soon died as coffee cups and other loose items began to disappear, some handbags were stolen and the church and meeting space were often left messy and soiled. A number of people began to complain and demand an end to the experiment: “This isn’t what we expected! Our church isn’t clean and safe any more! We wanted to reach out to these people and this is what we get!”  

When I was 22 years old, a seminarian, I was privileged to have a unique kind of desert experience. I sat with my siblings in a palliative care room for several weeks, watching my father die.

My father was young still, 62, and in good health until being struck with pancreatic cancer. He was a man of faith and he brought that to his final struggle. He wasn’t afraid of God, whom he had served all his life, nor of the afterlife, which his faith assured him was to be joy-filled. Yet he couldn’t let go of life easily, struggling almost bitterly at times to surrender. There was a deep sadness inside him, ultimately more soft than bitter, during his last weeks of life. He didn’t want to die.

It’s not easy to sustain love, at least not with constant emotional fervour. Misunderstandings, irritations, tiredness, jealousies, hurt, temperamental differences, the familiarity that breeds contempt and simple boredom invariably chip away at our emotional and affective edges and, soon enough, fervour gives way to routine, the groove becomes the rut and love seems to disappear.

But we can easily misread this.

“No community should botch its deaths.” Those are the words of anthropologist Mircea Eliade, and I use them here to introduce a tribute to Otto Herschan, a long-time Catholic publisher who died on July 12 at the age of 84.

For many years he was the publisher and managing director of a number of national Catholic weekly newspapers, including the Catholic Herald in England, the Scottish Catholic Observer and the Irish Catholic. He brought an interesting background to Catholic journalism.

Our world thinks it understands sex. It doesn’t. Moreover, it is beginning to ignore and even disdain how Christianity views sexuality.

And we are paying a price for this, mostly without consciously realizing it. Sex, outside of its proper containers, respect, unconditional commitment and love, isn’t bringing more joy into our lives, but is leaving us more fragmented and lonely. Part of what’s happening to us is expressed in a haunting line in Leonard Cohen’s song “Famous Blue Raincoat,” where a man reminds a friend of the consequences of his having had sex with a woman to whom he was not committed: “And you treated my woman to a flake of your life; and when she came back she was nobody’s wife.”

Nearly a century ago, Oscar Wilde wrote a famous novel entitled A Picture of Dorian Gray. It begins this way:

Basil Hallward, a painter, has just finished a portrait of a young man of extraordinary good looks, Dorian Gray. Just as he finishes the painting, a brilliant, though highly cynical young Lord, Henry Wotton, wanders into the room, marvels at the painting and compliments Dorian on his good looks. Dorian, quite humble at this stage of his life, tells Lord Henry that his good looks mean little to him. But Lord Henry challenges Dorian to make his good looks mean something, both because they are real and because they are transient.

Here are his words to the young Dorian Gray: “You have a wonderfully beautiful face, Mr. Gray. Don’t frown. You have. And beauty is a form of genius, is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is one of the great facts of the world, like sunlight or spring-time or the reflection in dark waters of that silver shell we call the moon. It cannot be questioned. It has its divine right of sovereignty. It makes princes of those who have it. You smile? Ah! When you have lost it you won’t smile... People say sometimes that beauty is only superficial. That may be so. But at least it is not so superficial as thought is. To me, beauty is the wonder of wonders. It is only shallow people who do not judge by appearances. The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible... Yes, Mr. Gray, the gods have been good to you. But what the gods give they quickly take away. You have only a few years in which to live really, perfectly and fully. When your youth goes, your beauty will go with it, and then you will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory or your past will make more bitter than defeats. Every month as it wanes brings you nearer to something dreadful. Time is jealous of you, and wars against your lilies and your roses. You will become sallow and hollow-cheeked and dull-eyed. You will suffer horribly... Ah! Realize your youth while you have it. Don’t squander the gold of your days, listening to the tedious, trying to improve the hopeless failure or giving away your life to the ignorant, the common and the vulgar. These are the sickly aims, the false ideals of our age. Live! Live the wonderful life that is in you! Let nothing be lost upon you. Be always searching for new sensations. Be afraid of nothing... A new Hedonism? That is what our century wants. You might be its visible symbol. With your personality there is nothing you could not do. The world belongs to you for a season...”

A new Hedonism — that is what our century wants. Oscar Wilde prophesized this nearly a century ago and, it would seem, that is precisely to where we have evolved in the Western world. Bodily appearance, looking good, having a trim, athletic body, being sexually attractive, remaining young and being admired for your body is, for the majority of our culture, a huge, obsessive preoccupation. Most people in our culture, perhaps not in theory but certainly in our practical life-choices, would agree with Lord Henry when he says: The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible. Good looks tend to trump everything.

Not that this is all bad.  Shallow is the spirituality that discredits the body. We are not angelic, dis-embodied spirits, but creatures of body and soul, and both are important for our spiritual health. God did not make us to walk this Earth indifferent to our bodily appearance, sexually numb and careless about our physical health. Indeed, indifference to our health and bodily appearance is one of the signs of clinical depression. Being young, healthy and sexually attractive is meant to be enjoyed, one of the pleasures that God intended for us. There is no virtue in looking and feeling shabby.

Thus, it’s good, spiritually, to be physically healthy. It’s good, spiritually, to work at keeping our bodies attractive. It’s good, spiritually, to healthily feel our sexuality. But these are a means, not an end. Youth, health and sexual attractiveness do not, as Lord Henry and much of our contemporary society suggest, have a divine right of sovereignty. They are not ends in themselves, but only part of our journey towards maturity, altruism and happiness. They are not the aim of that journey.  

And when we do make them the aim of our journey, we will, soon enough, taste the bitter bile warned of in Lord Henry’s counsel to Dorian Gray: You will suddenly discover that there are no triumphs left for you or have to content yourself with those mean triumphs that the memory or your past will make more bitter than defeats.

Today we don’t attach a lot of symbolism to numbers. A few, mostly superstitious, remnants remain from former ages, such as seeing the number seven as lucky and the number 13 as unlucky. For the most part, for us, numbers are arbitrary.

This hasn’t always been the case. In biblical times, they attached a lot of meaning to certain numbers. For example, in the Bible, the numbers 40, 10, 12 and 100 are highly symbolic. The number 40, for instance, speaks of the length of time required before something can come to proper fruition, while the numbers 10, 12 and 100 speak of a certain wholeness that is required to properly appropriate grace.