 I know you're all excited, but settle down. We better get started before any more people come on the fire marshal makes his move. So thank you all for being here. Obviously, Father Tom knows how to pull a crowd in. I know most of you, but in case I don't know some of you, my name's Paul Lakeland. I direct the Center for Catholic Studies here. And this is one of the many events we are putting on this semester, I think about 12. And for those of you who haven't been here before, all our events are offered at no charge. So there's literature over there on the table. We pick it up when you leave and see what else we are doing. There are other almost as spectacular events as this one later in the semester. So it's just my job to introduce Father Tom, although most of you don't need the introduction, but you're going to get it anyway. It's a short introduction. He will speak for a while and then take some comments, conversation, et cetera, for a little while. So like many Jesuits of his generation, Father Tom entered the Jesuits at the age of 18. So he did all his education sort of within the walls of the society. He told me he did his undergraduate and master's degree from Boston College, but they never went to the college. They were always at the seminary, which, again, is typical of the time. He's been a Jesuit for 64 years, and he's been ordained for 51 years. He has a doctorate in theology from the University of Innsbruck in Austria, which is a remarkable university that has trained many of the great European theologians. So he knows whereof he speaks. You know that he works here at Fairfield University, and he works with the Center for Ignatian Spirituality and guiding people in the exercises. In his past, he has taught at Fairfield Prep, at Fairfield University, at Boston College, at the University of Notre Dame, at Western School of Theology, and at the University of the West Indies. I think all of those were short appointments. I don't think he was rejected from each one in turn. But the part that many of us, I certainly didn't know, is how long, how much of his life he spent in the Middle East. So he was the founder and director of the Jesuit Center in Amman in Jordan. For 14 years, he worked there. Then he became director of the Pontifical Biblical Institute in Jerusalem for 10 years, which is an amazingly prestigious appointment, where he founded the Cardinal Martini Leader Institute at Bethlehem University. He's written, and then he came back to us. He's written numerous articles. You can find them in all sorts of periodicals throughout the states. And of course, Sir Jordan and Jamaica. And I think he'll tell you more about this, so I won't say much about the last line I have here. But he is also a playwright. And there may be something coming up soon, but I'll let him talk to you about that. So will you please join me in welcoming Father Tom to talk about sexuality and prayer? Thank you very much, Paul, for that generous introduction. The title is actually Sexuality in Prayer, not sexuality and prayer. But who was going to notice that on an advertising? OK, Sexuality in Prayer, the title of this presentation. What does sexuality mean? Perhaps some other word would be more appropriate. Because of the ambiguity about the term sexuality, I could perhaps call this lecture affectivity or intimacy in prayer. But no. In contrast, the word sex is less ambiguous than sexuality, meaning physical genital relationship intercourse. But then the word sex is used in another way. We check off when asked our sex, whether we are male, female, or neither preferred. Sexuality is much more ambiguous. The Collins English the Tsarist lists as synonyms for sexuality the following words. Desire, lust, eroticism, sensuality, virility, sexiness, voluptuousness, carnality, body, appetites. I stay with the word sexuality because there has been a strain in Christianity to put spirituality over here and sexuality over there. It is somehow dangerous. With the term sexuality, I am bringing us as body front and center into the whole consideration of prayer, presence of God. With all the ambiguity of the term, I expect we would know at least generally what area of human life we are talking about. And I hope that by the end of this presentation, you would have an idea how I am using the term. These ideas that I will present have for me developed over a good number of decades. And I stress the word sexuality has always been central in my long extended pondering. Further, I stay with the title sexuality in prayer because the whole area of human sexuality is widely avoided in church presentations because of sensitivity and contentious issues. People do not want to get into the mess. I am happy to raise the issue of sexuality in the context of prayer. In my reflections, what I say, even inadequately, is a way for us to look upon human sexuality in a very positive way. I do not claim the reflections I present are unique, but I do claim that how I present these reflections are my own. I expect that I will continue to develop these reflections and that the presentation tonight may be a challenge to deepen them further, sharpen them. Desire. In our human experience, we express desires continuously, smaller ones, larger ones. You arrive at the breakfast table, you choose oatmeal rather than raisin bran. That is no big choice, no big desire. It is done without a lot of energy. But then, there are other desires that are deeper, more significant. I use to illustrate at the levels of desiring the metaphor of the onion, a humble vegetable. The onion serves as a good metaphor because there are identifiable layers that can be peeled away. Let us think of all the desires on the outer level that fill much of our day. You go to your office early because you want to be well-prepared for a meeting. You close the door of your office because you do not want to be disturbed. We make constant choices throughout our days, which are the expressions of our desires on this surface layer of the onion. I do not want to say that these surface desires are unimportant. They are very much the stuff of our days, how our days are structured, how we keep our world going. But then, there are those deeper desires. So for example, you want to be a good parent. This is a much deeper layer of the onion. Now, the deeper the desire, the more that desire influences the layers above it. All the desires on the surface are informed by the deeper desire for the good of your family, for example. Your occupation, your daily work, with all of its surface choices, preferences, desires gains a deeper nuance from your desire to support your children. We raised the question, what is the deepest layer of desiring? What is that level beyond which there is no deeper level? The level that is the very core of the onion, the very center of yourself, the bedrock foundation of all your desiring, all your longing. I suggest that desire is the desire for God. This deepest layer of the desire for God may not be conscious and could be a challenge to unwrap. For this, we are invited to pray, to contemplate. I spend much of my occupation guiding people in the Ignatian spiritual exercises. And I offer the challenge, what are your deepest desires? You have to be careful in asking that question. If you asked it in a singles bar, it would have a rather different nuance than when I would ask it as a stimulus for prayer. On this core level of ourselves, this deepest desire is implanted in us by God in creating us, another simple metaphor. We make things and they have a purpose. We make chairs because we want to sit down. We give the chair a purpose. God made us with a purpose. And this purpose is embedded in us. And in contrast to a chair, we can discover, unwrap this purpose. Uncovering this longing, we become conscious of the desire of God for us. Our desire for God and God's desire for us coalesce. Could I just invite you to come in, please? This deep desire for God informs every other desire. It expresses your purpose in life, why you are doing anything at all. We live in a culture that would easily have us live very much on the surface. The very busyness of our lives has the danger of keeping us on a rather superficial layer of ourselves. In the Ignatian exercises, I invite the retreatant to put the embedded longing for God into a verbal expression in their own words. I try not to lead them into what my words would be. When this happens, individuals say, God be with me. I want you abide with me. And similar phrases. And it is mutual. God's desire is for us. He created us as an expression of sharing what is happening in his core. The eternal mutual sharing of a desire that has come to full expression in the love of the Father and Son. The joy in God flows over to us. God creates us because he wants us humans to know his deep divine love within himself and to invite us to share that love. He wants us to want him in a way similar to how the Father and Son express and live out their love. God's radical desire for us could be expressed in phrases like, I want you, and I want you to want me. Be with me in your radical self. I relate desire, desiring to sexuality. The whole thrust of the human person outward toward another person, person's God, and as we shall see to all creation. Sex, physical genital intercourse, is certainly an expression of sexuality. But as I have said, I am using sexuality in a broader way, a term describing the thrust of a person in a whole and entire way to another person. In prayer, when our hearts are open and we are in intimacy with God, we can speak of these moments as instances of knowing God, first of all, but then knowing the very meaning and purpose of our lives. There is no deeper meaning. Everything comes together. This is what our sexuality is all about, being whole and entire before and with God. There is a strain in some thinking that without genital intercourse, we are not sexually whole. That would imply that without physical penetration, full human-healthy sexual relationships would not be possible. Let me point out that if lacking genital intercourse, a human could not be in full communion, we would have to say that vowed celibates and all those others who do not have sex could not possibly be whole. Please let me be personal. I know myself as this happy, rather well-integrated, old, sexually alive celibate. More about this later. Body. Let us talk about ourselves as body. We are body. In Christianity, there is a strain over the centuries of negativity toward the body. Very briefly, and perhaps too simply, Plato says that the body is like a cage for the soul, and the soul like a bird wants to be free of the cage so as to be united with the really real. This kind of thinking has woven its way through much spirituality in the last several thousand years. I raise one specific example out of my experience. A good number of years ago, a gentleman came to me eager to develop his prayer life. In Ignatian spirituality, remembering is a very important activity to appreciate how God has created us. I asked this gentleman to remember events of his life so he could appreciate God's creation and give thanks for the reality of his life. He responded immediately that he could not do that. He was trained not to remember, because in remembering events of his life, there was always the danger of bodily, sexual memories and that these could easily become temptations again foreseen. I do not know what happened to this person after I met him. I never saw him again. I would like to have been a help in his recognizing the beauty of his life, his body through memory. We are body. There are various aspects through which we are able to talk about ourselves. I am rational. I am heart. I am feeling. I am mind. I am spirit. I am body. I am not attracted to speak of having a body. This could imply that the really real me is some person in my body. I stress that we are this one person with these different ways of talking about ourselves. The negativity towards the body then is negativity towards my whole self and very expressly toward myself as sexual. In the strain of negativity toward the body, we meet a paradox. How do we express our love of God, our desires deep within ourselves, deep within us as bodies? If we think that our bodies as bodies have to be rejected, in the church, we have a longstanding feast of Corpus Christi, the body of Christ. We celebrate in this feast Christ as body. Let me tell you a little fun I have with God in celebrating this feast. You may remember the song that goes like this. You're nobody till somebody loves you. Maybe you have to be a certain age to remember this. You're nobody until somebody loves you. A nice thought. Well, I play with God and say, God, you were a nobody until you became somebody in Christ. God is not body, but he has become body in his son Jesus. One implication of this is that now God knows sexuality as a human. And another implication is that because a specific body is divine, all bodies have the capacity to be divine. We spoke of the lowly onion serving as a metaphor for different layers of desiring and emphasize that the deeper the desire, the more that desire informs the desires above it. The deepest desire penetrates up through the more surface desires. All desires above the deepest desire become lived metaphors, reflections of the deepest desire. So desiring Cheerios for breakfast is a thrust toward desiring God in a specific lived situation. My very speaking with you tonight is itself an implicit but real expression of desire for God. And this is body to body because Jesus, the Son of God, is body. Communication between ourselves bodily is a lived metaphor of bodily communion with Jesus. Human and divine communion come together bodily. There is a beautiful meditation and the Ignatian exercises of God looking at the creation He has made, looking at us humans, and the mess we have gotten ourselves into by our own misguided desiring, our own free choice, and He laments, but does not simply let us go to hell. He decides to intervene, tries to help by becoming one of us, by becoming body like us. He reinvents himself in and through the creation He has made. And so Jesus, the Son of God, is born among us as somebody. The ongoing challenging question for me has been, how is it? How is God a help for us just by becoming body like ourselves? How is God a help for us just by becoming body like ourselves? God now is in communion with us not only in a divine way, but in a human way. I suggest that God and Jesus knows human sexuality in a way before the incarnation as body He did not. We can speak only in space and time. For us, there was a time when Jesus was not this divine person bodily with us. Jesus bodily joins us because of the mess we are in. He joins us in our brokenness, in our fractured relationships, in our pain, in order to bring us to wholeness, to human, and divine communion, divine communion. And at the risk of going too far, let me be very personal. Much of this presentation is the fruit of my prayer life over years. And the phrase that I know myself as this happy, rather well integrated, old, fully alive sexual celibate needs a fuller development in order to have a deeper sense of this whole lecture. I will do that by telling you several stories. Several years ago, I participated in the inauguration ceremony of Lynn Balmington as president of Chaminade University in Honolulu. I could not conceive of traveling to Honolulu for just a few days. I managed to arrange to make my eight-day retreat, annual retreat, in a beach house of the university while I was there. It was literally on a beach. And I had the place to myself. I was for the week a hermit on a beach. For a good many years now, I have made my retreat in solitude. It may take a few days for me to be able mentally to get away from the busyness of my life. I pray to God at the beginning of retreats that I am seeking his presence, that I am not looking for drama, about that I hope I could know God's presence and love. The retreat began peacefully enough, and things were quiet for several days. And then it happened. I was walking on a road parallel to the beach. And I was taken very quickly by the experience that God was hugging me. God in everything she, he, is, but also in his whole creation. Everything that God has done, everything and every person he has ever created, and everything and every person he will ever create, were all meshed together in the big hug. This included parallel universes if there are such things. This was a total moment for me, a singularity. Initially, a very brief moment, an infinitesimal moment. Then, very quickly, that moment began to unfold through my whole person, every layer of myself. One result was that God appeared blue. That does not mean blue as sad, but the color blue. The vision of God was blue. You figure that out. One meaning that has had for me is that the initial experience in flowing over into everything I am, every layer, influenced my sight through color, the color blue. I have pointed out to God in the meantime that in a similar experience the year before, God appeared as green. For the rest of the retreat in Honolulu, I dwelt upon that event of being hugged and just let it unfold through my whole person. That event was whole and entire for me. That means it permeated all that I am. The encounter with God happened on the deepest layer of myself and permeated every other layer, all the layers of desire, all the layers of purpose, mind, spirit, heart, body. That event took over. The phenomenon of blue I would highlight is one of the physical bodily aspects of the experience. Out of such experiences, I know myself as integrated. All the various aspects of myself brought into harmony because of this touch of God on the deepest level of myself, the deepest desire for and thrust outward for God, being met by God's hug and everything with God, God's desire for me. This is my sexuality coming into full bloom. Speaking this out seems strange, but it is the only way I have of bringing it to words. This story in Hawaii touches the core of this presentation, an experience of wholeness. I was there complete and entire as full communion as it may be possible to me in this life. This is what I mean by sexuality, yet another story. I spent 20, 24 years in the Middle East working in Amman Jordan, where I helped found the Jesuit Center of Religious Education, and then in Jerusalem, where I was the director of the Pontifical Biblical Institute. As the time came for me to leave the Middle East, I was feeling down because I thought I had not done very much in my 20 years there. This was misguided. I was feeling that in the overall social mess of the Middle East, I had done little. My heart was breaking because of the extreme violence, hatred, hopelessness. But one day some months before I left, I had a particularly strong encounter with God. God said to me, Tom, thank you. That was startling for me. I had never heard anyone say or read anything that God thanks us. We want to live in a spirit of gratitude to God, thanking him for all his blessings. Now in that experience of God's gratitude to me, he was not listing specific works that I had done. He did not say thanks for founding the Cardinal Martini Leadership Institute at Bethlehem University. He thanked me on a deeper level. He thanked me for not losing heart, for being faithful, for staying with it. What does this have to do with sexuality? God was saying, within, over, above, through all of the frustrations, failures, successes, he loves me. That dominates over everything else. That is godly communion, human communion. Genital expression, we would hope, is a help for human communion. But sadly, we know that it is not the case more often than what we would want to think. In rape, there is not only not the movement toward fuller human exchange, but the exact opposite, violent disruption of human communion. Also, the hookup culture describes encounters of sex that are superficial, not in context of deepening human life. Genital activity, then, is an important component of human life, but is not the only factor bringing people to human communion and not the most important. Again, we would hope intercourse could be in the context of helping people come to rich, full, deep human communion. I tell you a story that may help in understanding what I mean by human communion. I taught here at Fairfield in the Prep and the University for three years, beginning in 1962, perhaps before most of the people, if not everybody in this room, was born. It was a time of formation for me as a Jesuit. In 1965, I went to Innsbruck, Austria to study theology in preparation for ordination as a priest. And I also earned a doctorate in theology in the process. 1965 was exactly 20 years after the Second World War. I lived in a very large community of German and Austrian Jesuits, most the same age as I. I was sensitive about being an American and hesitated to talk about the war. After all, we had been enemies. I made friends, and time went on, and there was no reference made of the war until. One evening, I and an Austrian Jesuit went out for supper in a local restaurant. I remember I had Wienerschnitzel und Pumphrit. We talked about classes and teachers, and then suddenly we shifted into memories we had of the war. We had both been small children during the war. The conversation was like opening of a dam. We spoke of the war for several hours. That evening, we too young adults spoke as we had not before. With an animation, mutual affection, freedom, and even a sense of reconciliation. Compared to his experiences, mine were trivial. I remembered waiting in lines for gasoline and some foods. He remembered fleeing with his whole family, abandoning their ancestral farm in order to land up in what would be the American occupation rather than falling into the Russian sector. The power of the human exchange that night, and its continuing power these many years later, I describe as an example of human communion. I go further and consciously describing that exchange as sexual. That is a mutual expression of affection, sharing of life, total presence, breaking down of barriers. I introduce a metaphor that may be of further help in reflecting about human communion. As the lowly onion was a globe, I introduce another globe, the whole earth. All people live on this orb, the earth. We are separated by space. We are distributed on the circumference of the globe. Now if in our imagination, we all dig down into the earth, we would all come closer to one another. The circle would become smaller. Progressing further inward, we would progress deeper and deeper, become closer and closer. This is a metaphor of our progressing in human communion as we go deeper and deeper in our knowledge, our consciousness, our love of one another. Then as we reach the center, we reach what we could call complete human communion. At some point along the way, we as humans in our communication would be relating more from the inside than the outside, the interior than the surface. I offer another experience as an example of human communion. I spend much of my time on this campus leading people in the Ignatian exercises. I as a guide am helping people to come to as clear a consciousness as possible of how God is with them and they are with God at this time in their lives. In each session, there is invariably a deep human presence between me and the retreatant. We are there in as much wholeness as possible. This is human communion. But then because of the topic, God, there is a godly presence. God washes over us as a wave. Human communion and divine communion come together. Human desire and God's desire coalesce. Our human sexuality and may I say divine sexuality are alive. When I ask people I am leading in the Ignatian exercises to unwrap their deepest desires, rather regularly, people would say the desire for the good of their children are their spouse. I have found that there is a very little distance between desire for people and desire for God. I gently guide people from an awareness of their desire for their loved ones to an awareness of the deeper level of the desire for God. And this is often a help for people to deepen their desire for their family. The deeper the desire, the more every desire above it attains another dimension. So the love of God becomes united with love for family, and this easily overflows to everybody. This thought brings to mind the two great commandments, love of God and love of neighbor. For as believers, these two are inseparable, desire for God and desire for neighbor. Human communion and divine communion again coalesce. Communion with creation. I introduce into our reflection the notion of beauty. Beauty beautifully enters into the discussion on sexuality. Beauty is again one of those concepts that's difficult to pin down. I hope that in how I am talking about it here may make sense in our discussion of sexuality. Beauty is an attractor of desire. Let me tell you yet another story. Regularly, when I would be driving through a forest rich in trees with sun piercing through and some distant opening, I have the movement in myself to jump in. Over the years, this experience has been the stimulus for much reflection and prayer. What is going on here? What does it mean to want to jump into a forest? My reflection is that I want to become more a part of the beauty, just not be an observer. I want to be covered by it, immersed in it. I want to be identified with this beauty, get inside it, be overwhelmed by it, overcome by it. Beauty is an invitation. This is the language of love, the language of desire, the language of sexuality. Yet another story. You're getting it all. When I lived in Amman, Jordan, I regularly walked early in the morning to the Jesuit Center two miles away. One clear morning in this desert area, I was walking in the direction of the sunrise. There was nothing happening in the streets of the Arab city. I was alone. As I walked, I felt that the rhythm of my walking was physically in sync with nature and the rising of the sun. The colors captured me, especially the swath of sea foam green. I prayed God was present. Then the physicality took over. And I was not only responding to the invitation to enter the color, the beauty, but with the very motion of my body, with every step I took, I was helping God to raise the sun. I was helping God to create His creation. My communion with nature was at once communion with God. Now, every time I see the color sea foam green, this episode is reenacted. That we experienced beauty through the experience of nature means that we now include all God's creation to talk about communion. Communion with God, communion with humans, communions with nature all come together. God is the beautiful, the great attractor. There is a strange, deep in our tradition about, this is a strange, deep in our tradition about God. My experience is that wherever I experience beauty, there is the breaking through of God. All beauty is the reflection of God, the mirror of God. It is there whether I am taking notice or not, but in the awareness of it, the consciousness of it, there is a communication. God is the beauty. God is communicating His beauty and throwing out to us His hand. He is inviting us into Himself. He is saying, jump in. We are at the root of our being. We are at the root of our desiring. We are at the root of our sexuality. Passion, death, resurrection. God is among us in Jesus' Son in order to be a help. Jesus joins us in our brokenness and all our fractured relationships and our pain in order to bring us to wholeness, to human and divine communion. Some humans reacted by trying to crush this dream by crushing Jesus. Human sexuality in the passion and death of Jesus is perverted by the desire to destroy the dream of God for wholeness, intimacy, love. A great horror of the story of the passion and death of Jesus is that it is so much body. It is not abstract. Jesus is torn apart, nailed on a cross, naked. Sexuality gone awry in the extreme. In our meditation on the passion and death of Jesus, we ask for the grace to identify with Jesus. We ask God to place us with His Son. We desire to be present with Jesus in His pain. We need to meditate on the passion and death of Jesus because although the historical Jesus is no longer in His passion and death, we are. Jesus is no longer in the time of death and suffering. We are. The only Jesus who lives now is the Jesus bodily resurrected from the dead. Jesus is not eternally slaughtered on the cross. The only Jesus now we encounter is the resurrected Jesus. The aspect of Jesus resurrected from the dead as body is unavoidable in the resurrection stories in the gospels. In story after story, the bodily presence of Jesus is stressed. He walks with people, he talks, he eats, he shows his wounds. The whole person Jesus is resurrected from the dead, but what very significantly the disciples experience is this person Jesus as body. Whenever we encounter Jesus, we encounter this somebody, Jesus whole and entire. We do not have the privilege of encountering Jesus as body in the way the first disciples did at His resurrection, but there is no other Jesus now than Jesus as body resurrected. A major point of the resurrection of Jesus is that we are invited to be with Him forever, also as resurrected body. In that circumstance, we will be in full and complete human and divine communion. Desire will be ever expressed and ever fulfilled. Our whole thrust outward toward other human beings and God, our sexual longing will be complete. We have this now in a mirror, darkly, but then face to face body to body, there will be only complete and everlasting human and divine communion. Thank you. And the rest of this will continue. So one minute on your feet, sit down again. Great stuff. Thanks so much. Are you gonna do this again? So what did you tell me? Next summer, about in Chicago, maybe for 300 people, but I'd be happy to do it anyway. I have to think about that. That's the one you told me. Oh, yes. Just get a few students a chance to leave if they have to without Jesus. Oh, thank you. Okay, sit down. You're very obedient, sit down, sit down. Am I talking to sit down? Is it okay? I said, do you hear it? Well, it was on mute. You need to unmute. I thought I did. Oh, maybe you did. It's not on mute. I think they, can you hear me okay? Okay. Okay, now, how do we do this? It's Marcy, Marcy, where are you, Marcy? Marcy has been a very great help to me in putting this talk together and very, very encouraging about being more personal than I really want it to be. And Marcy is the assistant director of the Ignatian Spirituality Center. Marcy, would you have a few remarks or three remarks? Something forward when I was, when I was being raised. So this, the way that you talk about human desire just is a gift and a challenge. Thank you. Do you have anything to say? Do you have anything to say? This is Paula, Paula, get a little pen. I just really love the way. Could you stand up if you didn't think I might know? I just really, I'm just gonna talk to you. I just really, I love the way you just tied all up in a whole complete bow with the human communion and the divine communion and the human sexual holiday and the divine sexual holiday and I've never thought of it that way. But it makes sense and I can relate to your encounters with God in nature and in color and in just breaking through. And I can relate, it is, it's orgasmic when that happens. So yeah. Okay, thank you. Yes. I just have a question, Paula. I thought you did a phenomenal job portraying this longing and desire that we have for God. And then I love how you tied it in that. In contrast, God has this long desire for me. My question is as a poor human being, do you believe that through continual prayer in this life that we'll be able to fully experience this desire and love that God has for us? Okay. I feel safe in saying no, we never get there completely in this life. Even though I talked about some very powerful experiences for myself, the next day was another day. And it takes on a new nuance, maybe it may get deeper and whatnot. And so ending, that's one reason I ended the way I did on the resurrection where we have this longing and we do believe that with the resurrected Jesus forever with the Father, it will be complete. We may not be able to know exactly what all of that is and what are we gonna be doing for all of that time? We can only speak in time. Let me tell you a little story though. This may be a little bit tangential. I hope I've answered in some way. That in thinking about God and the afterlife, again, I play with God, I have fun with God and I'll say, okay, God, what is it gonna be like there? Are we gonna get bored? Will there be too many people? And so I said, okay, what I'd like to do because over the ages, people have often imagined what heaven is gonna be like. And so I remember reading some time many, many years ago that this family living in late Victorian times, they imagined heaven, they were gonna have the best possible stand up piano. And they would all be singing forever around this stand up piano. And so I'm thinking about what we would do there. So I thought with God, what I'd like to do, God. I said, I'd like to help you to make another universe. If there are multiple universes, you're continuing to make them. I would like to be an advisor. And I would suggest to God to avoid some of the mistakes of this one. Like Brussels sprouts. And a few other things. And so that's one way that I have fun and imagining myself with God completely resurrected. What are we going to do for all of that time? But in a way, there's a certain seriousness that I get to that and thinking about my own life in here. But the whole experience of God now for us is not over. It's not complete. Even though there might be very high moments along the way. I use that, I think somewhere along the way, the one where God was hugging me, I don't know of a more, of a deeper experience I've had. So in this human life, I think I talked about that. I could not imagine having anything deeper. Maybe something will. I don't know, I don't know. God plays with me too, okay? I think that would be very similar. It might touch similar experiences of people in this room. The sense of oneness, of wholeness. With everything. With everything. Notice how that all of creation was in everything. Everybody was there. You were there, you know? Yes. That it's if I can just try to be present, I'd notice afterwards just in daily life that maybe he's worked a little bit on my spirit in darkness and silence. And I am not aware of communicating with him. Okay, along the way, we do have to be aware in our spiritual journey. There will be moments, down moments in darkness. I had a very long period in my life of real painful darkness. I thought I was crazy. Maybe I was, maybe I am. But we know that, yes, in our life, often the whole journey with God is very, very rough. And sometimes we have to ask God, why have you made it so difficult? If you want us to come to you and you want us to enjoy your beauty, why is it often so difficult? But that's so right. It's a combination. And so in that little story I told you about working with God in a new universe, I would point out, it actually occurs in the play that reminds me, I want to tell you something. A play that I've written, a young person comes back and says to this person who talks about God that, well, what about creating a universe without pain? And that stops the conversation. And the elder of the Jesuit, you can only guess who that is in the play, says, well, if we do away with all pain, do we do away with beauty? So we live in this mystery of combination, side by side, pain and beauty. And maybe we only know beauty because out of the pain of our lives, but this is a big mystery. I want to recognize Janus, but I'd like to, it's appropriate at this point for me to make an announcement. There's a very exciting announcement for me that I would like to tell you. And I got this information just this afternoon. I have written a play and it will be produced at the Westport Country Playhouse. Remember this because this is an audience that I think would enjoy this play now. There will be two performances on December the 7th in the afternoon at three, at two, and the evening at seven. And the idea of this, that this is a jumping off place for further productions of the play. And of course I have my eyes set eventually on New York City and I'd like to be alive if that happened. And so that's gonna be on December the 7th. And preparing for this talk, I was well along in the preparation where it dawned on me that the themes of the play and the theme of this tonight's lecture are the same. Tonight was a more philosophical, theological reflection, spiritual reflection, the play is a story. It's a very dramatic story. It's an adult play. So I don't think it would be appropriate for people under 18. It's all about divine communion, human communion, communion with nature. The title of the play touches the last phrase I said. The title of the play is the gentle whisper of trees. There's a lot of woods in this story. And so I invite you to think about it. I'd love if you could go. The good news is that the box office is opening up a week from today at 10 o'clock in the morning. It'll, tickets will be available online through the Westport Country Playhouse. I'd just like to point out maybe to her embarrassment that one of the producers is here tonight, Christine Brown over here at the end of the second row. There are two producers. The other could not come tonight. He will be looking at the video, though. So I'm very happy to announce that this is all a part of a dream at my own age that is kind of unbelievable. It's another miracle that I'm doing this tonight. It's a miracle in my life. The play is another one. And we will see what happens after that. I do have a second play. And do you know what the name of that one is? C-Foam Green. I don't know. I don't know. C-Foam Green. I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. Now, Janice had her hand up. Now, Janice, I owe a lot to Janice for this presentation this evening because I gave a homily at St. Anthony's Parish on the Feast of Corpus Christi, June 30th, this last June. And along the way, I said something about the story of my playing with God about he's a nobody until he became somebody in Jesus. And I said a few things about human sexuality. And Janice picked that up and wrote me a wonderfully gracious long letter by hand and sent it by mail. And I was very touched by that. And she ended by saying, I wish, I hope this is the first homily of number two and number three. And so I wrote back to her immediately. I said, you caught me. I've been thinking about years, wanting to do something like this. And so this has resulted in this evening. So Janice, do you have? Spirituality, this idea that is floating in my head that body and spirit promulgated through not just the Catholic Church, but churches in general, would there be a deeper integration in secular society where sexuality is not cut off from our entire and just experienced for its own sake rather than experiencing it as part of our totality? That is a very large question. And really honestly, it's right on the point. I feel incompetent to answer it. What would happen if this would happen? I think along the way we as human beings don't come to a final, complete, peaceful solution for ourselves on the whole difficult issue of human sexuality. I mentioned there's a strong strain of negativity in the last couple of thousand years in spirituality about negativity towards the body, towards sexuality. But at the very same time, there are very beautiful documents, official documents in the church of the beauty of sexuality, of intercourse. You can look in the catechism under marriage. Vatican II has some very powerful, beautiful stuff. But at the same time, and also all along the way with all kinds of movements that arose within the church and churches of negativity towards the body, and some of them were very, very strong. But with that, there was always official positions, no, there's something wrong with this. But it's never really contained. And I think a part of it is that sexuality is a frightening thing, the sex part of it can be very frightening. And so we never get to a complete balance in it all. We pray all of the time. I had a very upbeat presentation tonight on human sexuality and one reason was very deliberate because one, as I said, there's not much talk out there about it because of all of the very, very difficult issues. And so I said, okay, I present this very upbeat, but I hope you could see this is the way I see life. This is the way in my work that I see I'm relating to people and that I use that phrase, I see myself as a happy, integrated, sexually alive celibate, I mean that. And now that doesn't mean there are the down times with all of this. But so I tended deliberately to be very upbeat and talk about sexuality in a very positive way and in a kind of broad way too. When I looked up the Thasaris on synonyms, those were presented as synonyms of sexuality, virility, voluptuousness, sexiness. And you say, wow, how do we pin this down, you know? I hope by the end of the talk, you at least had some idea, it seems the way you were responding, yes, some idea to how I was using the word sexual. Anybody else, yes? Just to cover a quick thought, well I thought on the question. So the thought would be, you know, as you talked about all this, I was waiting for you to mention the song of Psalms. Yes, okay. There is a perfect example of what you're talking about. Right. But the question has to do with the relationship between ordered desire and disordered desire and discernment relative to the desire for death. You end this catalogically, so have you got a word about that? Yeah, I am 82 years old, do I desire for death? No, I do desire for life, but the life that I believe in that is complete is going through the portals of death. And as an older person, for all of you younger people, you tend to think more about death as you get older. It becomes more a part of almost the naturalness of it. But I don't pray for it. I think it's a part of God's, I think it's a part of the natural aspect of God's creation. And that I hope in praying to be with Jesus in this passion, which I hope is sincere, I hope not to die that way. This brings up a whole theology of what God desired in the death of Jesus that takes us in another direction. But I don't know if I feel competent of giving you a complete satisfactory answer to that. Can we talk around it? December 7th at two or seven.