Browsing tag: character

  • Fear Of The Lord

    The first step of humility, then, is that a man keeps the fear of God always before his eyes and never forgets it. Psalm 36:1  (Rule of St. Benedict 7.10)

    The practice of humility isn’t so daunting once you realize that it’s not about what other people think of you.  It’s about your existence.

    The first step in this practice is elemental.  Over and over in Scripture, the fear of God is recommended to us as beneficial to our well-being:

    Happy is everyone who fears the Lord, who walks in his ways.

    You shall eat the fruit of the labor of your hands; you shall be happy, and it shall go well with you.

    Your wife will be like a fruitful vine within your house; your children will be like olive shoots around your table.

    Thus shall the man be blessed who fears the Lord.  Psalm 128:1-4

    Immediately it becomes clear that if your idea of happiness is winning the jackpot in Vegas, you’ve got the wrong God here.  The God of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, the psalmists and prophets, St. Benedict and all the saints of the Church will bless you with a domestic life and a living wage.  God’s idea of happiness for his favorite creatures is not idleness, but satisfying work; not luxury, but abundance; not sexual adventures, but family.

    That’s the carrot.  But in case the carrot doesn’t motivate you, there’s also a stick.  When St. Benedict echoes the psalmist in proclaiming the fear of the Lord, he’s not talking about an intellectual assent to a coherent philosophical proposition.  He stands with all the other prophets in proclaiming that God is a Person.  And this Person holds each human being accountable for every free action.  God will punish those who willfully disobey his commands.  God will reward those who attempt to obey him.  Both the punishment and the reward will endure forever, once we’ve completed our journey through time.  So it is scary.  You’re supposed to feel a thrill of terror.

    But as always in this religion, there’s a paradox.  For those who don’t deserve much of anything, there is infinite mercy, if you’re humble enough to accept mercy.

    The fear of the Lord is a fountain of life Proverbs 14:27 

    The metaphor evokes fresh water in the desert.  On barren cliffs green things flourish.  How can this be?  A seed drifting on the wind lodged in a crack and sensed that it was time to send forth a tiny root.  Just so, the fear of the Lord is the mysterious spiritual sense that God endows his creatures with, enabling them to recognize his presence and to turn to him as the source of their vitality.

    Does it have to be fear?  Fear isn’t nice.  We’ve edited it out of religion.  But then again, we’ll pay money to feel it in a horror flick or on a roller coaster.  If it’s so bad, why do nice people seek it out and pay for it?

    Because we are alive.  Only living creatures can feel fear.  When we feel fear, we also feel alive, because we’re viscerally aware of a threat to our existence.

    The barren rock that never lived cannot fear losing the life it never had.  And people who’ve never felt alive can’t fear the loss of what they’ve never known.  They become indifferent to annihilation, their own and other people’s.  In interactions with others, these petrified souls exhibit a delusion of impunity.  Their moral indifference extends from their spiritual aridity. They’re untouchable, or so they imagine.  This is not a sign of progress or of superiority.  It’s a sign of something missing.

    The fear of God is the first step of humility, because humility is the root that aligns us in the proper posture with respect to our creator, so that we’re able to draw life from him.  We recognize our dependence on the one who called us into being.  We acknowledge the presence of the one who sustains everything at every moment.  And we send out at first just a tiny filament towards him, but as we grow and thrive, this will become a tough root mass that attaches us firmly to the region of our life source.

    What about the trouble that comes to everyone?  The trouble you face in this world is not the punishment of God.  The trouble you face now is what you have to get through on the way to your reward.  Now is the struggle of life in the desert.  Later is the rest at the oasis.

    St. Paul tells us that even if everything in the universe conspires against us–death, life, angels, demons, the present, the future, nature, culture, hurricanes, floods–God is still on our side, through it all, as long as we’re trying to do the right thing (Romans 8: 1-39).  Our struggle toward goodness through harsh surroundings shows that we are vital after all.

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  • Reckon With The Day Of Reckoning

    “Whatever the number of brothers he has in his care, let him realize that on judgment day he will surely have to submit a reckoning to the Lord for all their souls—and indeed for his own as well (RB 2.38)

     

    The bad news is: you have to face God on Judgment Day. The good news is: you don’t have to dress your son in polyester from head to toe and make him play Little League in 100 degree weather while you broil in the bleachers. Patience, kindness and faithfulness are mandatory. Olympic medals, faultless test scores and perfect teeth are optional. You must conform to the image of Christ. You don’t have to conform to the image on the screen.

     

    We do so want the best of everything, for ourselves and for our children. But we also want to enjoy what we’ve got. When you see how miserable people can be when they have it all, you realize that there should be more to life than what the world has to offer. You still want the good things. But you grasp that the good life does not proceed from those things. It’s all about ordering worth rightly.

     

    “That he may not plead lack of resources as an excuse, he is to remember what is written: Seek first the kingdom of God and his justice, and all these things will be given you as well. Matthew 6:33 (RB 2.35)

     

    To seek first the kingdom of God is to aim for what is consistent with the will of God. Raising the children God has entrusted to you is certainly consistent with his well. So lay out your needs in prayer. You are the manager, the trainer (and the janitor). God is the owner. This doesn’t mean that you never lose a game. It means that you don’t quit when you see the bills. You have someone to turn to when you need more resources.

     

    Your job is to arbitrate a variety of temperaments with some similarities to your own. You coax, reprove and encourage. You adapt your strategy to each child’s personality and abilities. You foster each one’s well-being. But the child is not your property. Parents are trustees of persons who belong to God. We develop their potential. He determines their fate.

     

    The goal is not to render our children into realizations of our ideals. The goal is to form characters in the image of Christ. In the process of correcting our children’s faults, we realize exactly where they came from. Their most annoying traits are often the ones they inherited from us. Sometimes it’s only through the process of parenting that we even begin to understand our own weaknesses. So we too much change. We ask God to transform us together with them into people who reflect his character.

     

    “And all of us…seeing the glory of the Lord as though reflected in a mirror, are being transformed into the same image from one degree of glory to another (2 Cor. 3:18).

     

    God is the one in charge of this makeover. Our part is to take Christ as our model and adjust ourselves accordingly as best we can. When you look into a mirror, you alter your appearance to conform to what you think you should look like. As Christians, we adjust ourselves to resemble Christ. This doesn’t mean not facing limitations. If God himself willingly took on human limits, should a human being expect to transcend them? But at the end of the day, even the impossible—if it is consistent with God’s purpose—will be done. Sometimes this means venturing the impossible. Sometimes the impossible is the ordinary day ahead.

     

    A psalter organizes each day into hours, with prayers for each period of time based on the Psalms. At whatever moment you feel yourself faltering, take a minute to pray to God for strength just to make it through the next few.

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  • Be A Good Model

    Therefore, the abbot must never teach or decree or command anything that would deviate from the Lord’s instructions (RB 2.4).

     

    Parents shouldn’t teach or demand anything that would deviate from Christ’s instructions either, but to hold yourself to this standard means regularly examining your own words and actions. If you catch yourself deviating, it also means making an effort to realign yourself according to Christ’s standard. Your children will not only imitate what you do: they will perceive what you are aiming for. This is good news for parents who are sincerely trying. Your children will grasp the concept and come up with strategies that you never would have thought of.

     

    Then at last the sheep that have rebelled against his care will be punished by the overwhelming power of death (RB 2.10).

     

    No!  Not eternal death!  As a parent, you’re responsible to turn away from the hot door with the smoke seeping around it.  Don’t imagine that your children won’t follow you through it.  You no longer have the option to ruin only your own life.  Even if there’s not always an exit marked Fun, your job is to find one marked Possible.  Sometimes it opens onto a deep stairwell with many steps, but in front of you are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on: follow them.

     

    He must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words. . . .  Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).

     

    Human being copy each other, especially when they don’t know what to do in a given situation. Children especially copy their parents—maybe not today, but perhaps thirty years from now, when they find themselves facing what you face today, and they have no other model for how to react except for what they absorbed from your reactions. If there’s a contradiction between what you told them and what you actually did, they will have to untangle the truth. It will be easier for them if you do the work now of untangling whatever contradictions you inherited from your own parents.

     

     

     

    How is it that you can see a splinter in your brother’s eye, and never notice the plank in your own? Matthew 7:3 (RB 2.15)

     

    The most important model that parents offer their children is their relationship with each other. The hardest thing to do for that relationship is to hand over to God the defects of your spouse and to focus your energies on fixing your own flaws. Each of us must pry out the stake impaled in our own eye socket, so that when our spouse needs help with a speck, we’ll be half blind but hands free. If each of us has one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together we’ll have the perspective to guide our children.

    That’s not to say that we can’t ever ask our spouse to change. One tactic is to sit down for a swap talk, where each person picks one thing—only one thing—for the other person to work on changing. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for the more difficult change. The other spouse may feel hurt and may not have an equally painful request to make—not yet. Sooner or later the tables will turn. One day you will make the big request, and because you made that effort, back in the day, you will have sufficient influence.

    It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone to see that the person is trying. What drives you to desperation is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose habit is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. That’s when it starts to look like the only solution is to escape from the marriage. But if you see your spouse attempting to work on the problem, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.

    It’s up to the two of you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy. Imperfect families that find ways to work things out are always comedies.

     

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  • Father and Mother: Titles Worth Wearing

    To be worthy of the task of governing a monastery, the abbot must always remember what his title signifies (Rule of St. Benedict, 2.1)

    Father and mother today need guts just to assert that their titles signify anything. These are words under attack, and the linguistic debates are just the tip of the social iceberg. What would in the past have been a yawning tautology today provokes a frisson of risk: a father is a man, and a mother is a woman. But beyond linguistic debates, St. Benedict brings in the concept of worthiness, and that has to do with behavior. A man who begets a child had a consequent responsibility to behave as a father to that child. A woman who conceives a child has the ensuing duty to behave as a mother to the child. Marriage is a partnership between a man and a woman who render each other into father and mother and together serve as parents to the children they engender. These statements are merely observations of phenomena recognized by all human societies—with cultural variations—since the dawn of civilization.

    What the Church adds in is a concept of the sacrament of matrimony in which the marriage of a man and a woman becomes a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. In this sign, the husband figures Christ, and the wife figures the Church (Mark 10: 6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church II.3.7). It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female that goes all the way back to Adam and Eve. But the harmony of masculinity with maleness and of femininity with femaleness has only recently needed defending. For two thousand years, the Church, for all her struggles, never had to prove the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. 

    However, the Church in all times and places has taken a stand for the essential humanity of human beings. Human beings are not merely matter and form, but also souls. We’re not just biological machines enmeshed in sociological parameters. We are eternal persons made in the image of God. And God knows individuals. Far from flattening personalities and erasing differences, the Holy Spirit fulfills and brings to completion the design of God in each person—not despite but within the bodies he gives us. Both G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letterswrite eloquently about the individuation of Christians. This is why we don’t have to rebel against our bodies in order to be free. We are free to be ourselves already. But we are each called to take up our cross daily and head uphill. And sometimes it’s our own bodies that make us suffer.

    We don’t reject pronouns or representatives because we ourselves are representatives of Christ on earth. As redeemer of the world, Christ is the Pronoun, the part of speech that stands in for another. This is why Christians do not reject the power of “him” to represent us. To reject “him” would be to reject the whole concept of redemption, the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before the holy God. 

    All this is to say that worthiness is something we give ourselves to, the effort we make each day. But worth is something given to us, something that an atheist culture does not have the right to take away. We know that we are worth the self-sacrifice of God. Therefore each day we make an effort to be worthy, to embody in our circumscribed, imperfect persons the divine character qualities of Christ.

    So be boldly and bodily the man or woman God bids you to be. Your choices will light the way for people who are groping for their souls.

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  • The Call

    Let us get up then, at long last, for the Scriptures rouse us when they say: “It is high time for us to arise from sleep” Romans 13:11 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.8)

     

    I myself had an experience of a call involving Scripture and a stirring up from physical sleep, on a particular occasion.  At about 2 a.m., the morning of June 19, 2012, I woke up with the urgent sense that I should post verses of Scripture online.  

    So I thought, “I’ll do it tomorrow.”

    But the urgency increased.  I felt that I must check the readings for the day–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal app, which I had downloaded on my phone at some point but had never even opened before.  I fumbled with my phone in the middle of the night and read the Scriptures that showed up: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  There was also a daily Bible verse, Acts 17:30-31:

     

    God has overlooked the times of ignorance, but now he demands that all people everywhere repent, because he has established a day on which he will judge the world with justice through a man he has appointed, and he has provided confirmation for all by raising him from the dead.

     

    There was a “share” button to post this verse on Facebook.  It was imperative that I must do so at once.  I signed in to my rarely-used Facebook account, and I posted the verse.

    This experience had never happened to me before.  It hasn’t occurred again since.  Afterwards, trying to come to terms with it, I explained to God that this was the wrong message, entrusted to the wrong person, at the wrong cultural moment.

    These days, God is not supposed to “demand” anything.  God should be grateful if anyone condescends to consider that he might exist.  And if God did want to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook (or Substack) page is not the place to do it.  Furthermore, people these days don’t repent.  A few Catholics make a practice of going to Reconciliation, but the people who do most of the sinning aren’t interested in repentance at all.  

    There must have been some mistake.  The angel tapped the wrong person.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority or the influence.

    Years later, I still find it difficult to view my contributions as tilting the scales toward good, against evil. Even to mention such an eventuality strikes me as comical rather than inspiring. It’s easier for me to perceive in others the spiritual stupor that is the perfectly normal condition of nice people who imagine that evil is always necessarily someone else’s problem. There is a clear difference between the sort of people who make an attempt—any attempt—to engage at whatever level is available to them, and, on the other hand, the people whose lives seem to be devoted to various ways of escaping. If the spiritual battle has to do with this fundamental difference in stance, then I do prefer to resemble the former type rather than the latter. But in a society where spectating rather than participating is the default path, and where any sort of action makes you the fumbling, ridiculous spectacle, resolving to be an agent in your own environment at a small level—because smallness is risible—is peculiarly daunting.

    But St. Benedict provides some insight into personal calls from God:  Seeking his workman in a multitude of people, the Lord calls out to him and lifts his voice again: “Is there anyone here who yearns for life and desires to see good days?” Psalm 34:12 (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.14-15)

     

    There’s a promise here, and it’s not just pie in the sky bye ‘n bye.  The promise of God for those who will heed him is a good life beginning here and now.

    The Lord waits for us daily to translate into action, as we should, his holy teachings.  Therefore our life span has been lengthened by way of a truce, that we may amend our misdeeds.  As the Apostle says, “Do you not know that the patience of God is leading you to repent?” Romans 2:4 (RB Prologue.35-37)

    If we are each called to translate Christ’s teachings into daily action, how do we operate within a culture that has explicitly rejected Christ and that organizes itself along opposing principles?

    Therefore we intend to establish a school for the Lord’s service.  In drawing up its regulations, we hope to set down nothing harsh, nothing burdensome.  The good of all concerned, however, may prompt us to a little strictness in order to amend faults and to safeguard love. (RB Prologue.45-48)

     

    Every household with children is a school: the question is, into whose service are the children being formed?  If the home is spiritual chaos, the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Spiritual discipline costs effort every day, and sometimes it is at odds with the various activities that the world equates with success.  But to overlook spiritual discipline costs far more. You pay the price in illness, loneliness, and despair, and your decisions as a parent also play out in the lives of your children. It’s easier to perceive these trajectories in other people’s lives than in my own, but my own life is the only one I can live.

    Rather than raging at evil in others elsewhere, let us combat it where we are.  The battle for good against evil will be won or lost behind closed doors, without recognition or applause, but the consequences will yield a harvest for good or ill in the lives of those we care about.

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