Browsing tag: children

  • Helpers For The Chef

    Household Chores

    If the community is rather large, he should be given helpers, that with their assistance he may calmly perform the duties of his office.  Necessary items are to be requested and given at the proper times, so that no one may be disquieted or distressed in the house of God. (Rule of St. Benedict 31.17-19)

    Who wants to do chores? Isn’t it demeaning, a waste of talent, for an educated person to pick up dirty socks off the floor? If there’s one thing that drives people away from domestic life, it’s the perception of household tasks as endless drudgery.

    Is the drudgery in the tasks themselves, or in the disdain with which people view them?

    A functioning household depends on these mundane, routine tasks. What happens when family members consider them unimportant and undesirable? Whoever does them receives not thanks but contempt. Someone who has worked hard without any recognition eventually from sheer discouragement gives out. Pride, resentment and humiliation damage the fabric of the family. When the members of the household despise the very things that hold it together, sooner or later it falls apart.

    So even if you can afford to hire outside helpers, everyone should still participate in chores, according to ability and opportunity, but not according to rank or privilege. Parents should lead by example to show that the household itself is worth maintaining. There is no formula except to aim for some balance of fairness intrinsic to the family. The willingness is all. Each person contributes cheerfully to a worthwhile enterprise.

    Children like to be helpers, and the problem when they’re little is that they so eagerly make all sorts of mistakes. It’s easier to do the thing yourself, but it’s important to take the time to include them. They need to learn not just the skills but the crucial principle of active participation.

    It’s true that most households have to manage limited resources. But ultimately those resources and the children themselves belong to God. Parents are not owners of their children but stewards of souls entrusted to them for formation. Children are not chattel, and parents are not at liberty to dispose of them like property. Parents who use their children like objects will answer to God for what they have done, and for what they have failed to do.

    Since everything that exists is sustained by God and belongs to him, we are all helpers accountable to him for what he has entrusted to us. But the steward of God is not a slave. Nor is God an employer who is just scraping by himself, squeezing everything he can get out of those he controls. God’s resources are limitless, and he promises to come alongside and be our Helper.

    When your home is a pleasant place to return to, glamor does not lure you. Home is your refuge. You can refrain from excess and be generous toward those in need.

    The trick is to be content. This is the whole end game of the domestic life and the thing that eludes so many unhappy people.

    Contentment is a spiritual state. But it’s also about managing your resources, so that you’re not constantly pushed to the very limits of your strength.

    Which is why, again, you need helpers. The goal is not to survive on your own without depending on anyone. The goal is to live happily together, sharing life’s burdens and joys.

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  • Character Of The Chef

    Temperate Definition

    There should be chosen from the community someone who is wise, mature in conduct, temperate…. If any brother happens to make an unreasonable demand of him, he should not reject him with disdain and cause him distress, but reasonably and humbly deny the improper request….knowing for certain that he will be held accountable for all of them on the day of judgment. (Rule of St. Benedict 31.1-9)

    The cellarer is the person in charge of the food. It may come as a surprise that St. Benedict required this person to possess such a long list of interior traits. We’re accustomed to discerning the qualities of the food, not the qualities of the chef.

    So, is the person in charge of the food really carrying out a moral task? Does this job matter to God?

    St. B decisively affirms that the tasks associated with food are intimately tied to principles of charity and hospitality. So, the person in charge of the food is nurturer and host. A community rests on these pillars.

    But such lofty qualities seem far removed from the experience of raising children. They are constantly making unreasonable demands as to what they want–or don’t want–to eat. If you always give in to their demands, you train them to be selfish. On the other hand, if you enforce rules angrily and impatiently, you drive them away from the family table. How does a human being get from the howling chaos of infancy to the temperate maturity of happy adulthood?

    If you want your children to develop good habits, you’ve got to work on your own habits. This means that you make wise choices about what you eat yourself. Think of yourself as the mature version of what your children will become. Do you need to correct your own behavior, for their sakes? Temperance is the virtue of refraining from excess. Too much food, but also too many restrictions are intemperate.

    So, Mom does not open a bottle of wine every afternoon just before the kids come home from school. Likewise, she does not eat excessively. She is not irritable or doctrinaire, not impatient or tyrannical. She is not lazy or wasteful, but views her stewardship of the food budget and meal planning as work done before God. In other words, she is a saint.

    In order even to want to aim for this standard, you must actually believe that there is a moral quality to the food habits of your household. It’s not that food has any moral value in itself. But food habits form the foundation early in life for all other forms of consumption.

    In short, the goal is for the children to internalize good principles so that they willingly make healthy choices and eventually become responsible adults. To get there, they have to learn to make temperate decisions. This is a project that takes years of effort and perseverance. If you can do this, you can do anything.

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  • Comfort The Wayward

    The abbot must exercise the utmost care and concern for wayward brothers . . . .  Therefore, he ought to use every skill of a wise physician and send in . . . mature and wise brothers who . . . may support the wavering brother, urge him to be humble as a way of making satisfaction, and console him lest he be overwhelmed by excessive sorrow. Rather, as the Apostle also says: Let love for him be reaffirmed [2 Corinthians 2:7-8], and let all pray for him. (Rule of St. Benedict 27)

    Human beings are not born hard-hearted. They become hard-hearted when parents teach them a sense of impunity. We have to correct our children so that they will learn to distinguish right from wrong. When the child seems ungovernable, the parents need to pray for wisdom.

    But parents should not leave a child to figure out the next step alone. A parent should take care to intervene and to discuss the situation. You have to explain the punishment and point the way forward. A contrary child needs to hear explicitly what behavior the parent wants to see.

    If an older sibling steps up to take on the job of remonstrating with and comforting the wayward child, the parents should let the brother or sister handle the situation. Children can sometimes come up with wacky but effective solutions to domestic problems. Adolescents can at times be more insightful about the dynamics of a conflict than their parents are. It’s a good exercise for an older child to attempt to mediate. It also benefits the younger one to interact with a sibling who is taking on the role of intercessor and adviser.

    Ultimate responsibility of course rests with the parents. We must take care that no bitterness takes root to estrange siblings from each other or to alienate a child from father or mother.

     

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  • Choose Your Destination

    Their law is what they like to do, whatever strikes their fancy.  Anything they believe in and choose, they call holy; anything they dislike, they consider forbidden (RB 1.8-9)

    So . . . if you’re thinking that this is a description of our culture today, actually it’s not.  This is Saint Benedict describing corrupt monks in the sixth century.  The mentality that surrounds us now was already an option then.  

    The monks that St. Benedict does approve of are the coenobitarum, which is Latin for koinos bios, which is Greek for common life, which is English for what I aim to discuss here. Life in community is the focus of St. Benedict’s Rule.  He invites us to choose community with our fellow human beings in this world, but it’s clear that the community depends on each individual’s commitment to follow Christ. St. Benedict’s Rule explicates the practical living out of “the communion of saints” of the Apostle’s Creed. This communion joins those on earth with those in heaven, but those on earth are the ones who need help trying to figure out how to live.

    There is another kind of monk that St. Benedict refers to: the eremitarum, which is the Latin transliteration of the Greek eremitēs, which means “one who lives in the desert” and gives us the English word hermit.  He himself lived as a hermit for three years.  He describes the hermit as ready with God’s help to grapple single-handed with the vices of body and mind (RB 1.5).

    When I first started to think of the housewife-mother as a domestic hermit, it was because of the sense of isolation I experienced.  I faced many struggles that didn’t seem to be addressed by the Church.  I don’t think my experience is unusual.  I think that many people flee the domestic life exactly because of the combination of exterior harassment and interior aridity that afflicts people whose vocation is neither respected by the world nor adequately addressed by religious authorities.

    My goal here is to provide some support for this double challenge of Christian families who are attempting both to sustain a personal spiritual vitality and also to create community within a materialistic, competitive culture.  I’m going to write from the perspective of someone who finds Christian goodness difficult and not always attractive.  If you don’t feel that you need help in this area, nothing I say will be of much interest.  But if you’re hanging on by your fingernails and thinking of letting go, I have a few tips for how to claw your way to survival.

    Jesus said, “I am the way, and the truth, and the life” John 14:6.  But his way of life is one among many options, in the post-Christian West, and not the one that the cool people choose.  Many nice people are rushing off along other paths, and they certainly don’t intend to destroy themselves.  But Jesus insists that only his path leads to life: Matthew 7:13-14. If you’ve watched as dreadful consequences play out around you, it’s already clear that not all paths are equally good. But it’s not necessarily obvious either how to live out the life that Christ talks about.

    If your desired destination is eternal community with those you love and with your Creator, then you’re in the company of St. Benedict.  What follows will be my interpretation of some of the principles he wrote about.

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  • Hallow Your Speech Or Hollow Your Home

    When my first child asked me if Santa Claus was real, I told her quite frankly: “No.” She didn’t believe me. She argued with me. On Christmas morning she rebuked me: “See, Mommy! Look at all these presents. Where do you think these presents came from, if Santa isn’t real?”

    With my second child, I patiently explained that Santa is based on a real person, Saint Nicolas, who lived a long time ago and started the custom of giving presents to poor children at Christmas. Then I got a phone call from my mother: “Do you realize that Anthony is going around telling people that Santa Claus is dead?”

    With the third child, I decided to let my husband handle this issue. Shamelessly he played along with the whole charade. Not only Santa but the Tooth Fairy was real. He snuck presents under the tree and put absurd amounts of money under her pillow, inflating the value of teeth and provoking competition.

    With the fourth child I avoided the whole problem. I agreed that it was too bad the Tooth Fairy didn’t show up, but she might try selling her tooth to her dad instead. I told her to ask her siblings about Santa.

    I recognize that there’s a vast chasm of difference between enjoyable fictions that everyone participates in and, on the other hand, corrupt systems in which the innocent are manipulated by the selfish. It’s one thing to let Santa live on in everyone’s imagination. It’s another thing to lie to your children in order to induce them to do what you want, quickly and without protest.

    There is a place in a child’s life for a teller of tall tales. The tall-tale-teller wants the children to grow up knowing how to distinguish truth from falsehood. Nothing tickles a tale-teller so much as the efforts of a knee-high pipsqueak to put one over on him. And sometimes the pipsqueak wins this game, to everyone’s delight. It’s a game that sharpens the wits, just as tossing balls in the back yard develops athletic skills.

    But then there are adults who hate to see the children maturing, because they no longer believe the little white lies we tell them. How nasty these teenagers are, and how sweet they used to be, back when they still believed everything we said. We used to monitor them electronically. Now they know more about technology than we do, and we can’t even figure out how they’re evading our surveillance. We still track their phones, but they never take our calls, so in the end we don’t know what’s going on in their lives, because they don’t want to talk to us.

    The thing is, if your children can’t trust you to tell the truth about an inane character like the Tooth Fairy, how can they trust you on more important topics?

    If you actually do care about your children, no doubt eventually trust will return. Terminal deceit, from which there is no return is the pretense of love on the part of a parent who is essentially selfish. The friendly father who abandons his family is hollow. The effusive mother who neglects her children is hollow. There’s no need to wonder whose façade is fake. When the perfect-looking marriage collapses, and the hollow family splays out in the open, you’ll wish you didn’t get that sickening glimpse inside.

    The opposite of hollow is to be truly, through and through, what you claim to be. It means actually taking care of your children, and part of that job is to teach them the truth. Fiction can play a role in this, because truth is complex. But your teenagers won’t confide in you if they’ve learned that you rate your immediate convenience above their ultimate good. They’ll have learned your deceptive strategies and will apply them back to you. So consider which sort of parent you’re going to be.

    In the short term, manipulation gets results. But in the long run, integrity stands.

    (Rule of Saint Benedict 4. 24-28)

     

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  • Rid Yourself Of Anger

    It’s easy to be angry when responsible for running a household with children, because children are constantly doing things wrong. The more children you’re responsible for, and the less help you have, the easier it is to remain in a state of perpetual irritation. But a chronic state is not necessarily a good state. Jesus insists: But I say to you that if you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment (Matthew 5:22). This makes the anger itself a problem, or at least the imminent indicator of a problem that is looming.

     

    So where does the anger come from?

     

    Habitual anger is the result of ingrained dissatisfaction. If we constantly focus on the myriad disappointments of life, on the people who don’t live up to our standards, anger will always be at our elbow.

     

    It’s true that yearning for the better thing is a powerful motivator toward the good. But lots of factors are out of our control. There’s only so much we can do to achieve what we want, and anger is a natural response to frustration. If the frustration collapses into despair, we give up working toward the goal and are left with nothing but the chafing desire for something we don’t believe we’ll ever get.

     

    This simmering soup of dissatisfaction, disappointment and hopelessness is such a regular meal for so many people that we might describe it as the national spiritual dish of the U.S.A. Left unattended, it can boil over suddenly into violence. The culture we live in keeps the heat up relentlessly. They can’t sell you what you don’t want, so they pour big bucks into figuring out how to make you want it. Not everyone gets to the boilover point, but a lot of people remain in a constant state of miserable frothing beneath rattling lids.

     

    The antidote to anger is joy. You cannot enjoy something and simultaneously feel angry. Joy casts out anger.

     

    Joy in its ultimate form is a lofty mystery. But the pathway to joy begins anywhere, in the small, ordinary thing that you can genuinely enjoy in this moment. Don’t worry about great saints who weirdly experienced joy in the midst of torture. You can begin to feel joyful simply by focusing on whatever good presents itself now, and giving thanks for it.

     

    It can take a huge effort to haul your attention away from the disappointments you’ve been focusing on, but the benefits of doing so are life-changing. As with physical medication, you have to give this practice some time to work. You know that if you swallow a couple of pills for your headache, it’s going to take half an hour for them to take effect. Similarly, begin to make the effort to thank God for what you can enjoy, and soon you’ll begin to feel relief from chronic anger. Just realize that this treatment needs to be an ongoing practice. Thankfulness has to build up in your system and maintain a certain level in your awareness in order to be effective. This means that you must develop a habit of thankfulness to counter the habit of dissatisfaction.

     

    For Christians, thankfulness is not a vague, self-referential shot in the dark. It’s not that we work ourselves up to feeling thankful in general to nobody in particular. We believe that God is the originator of all good: that’s why we thank him for what we enjoy.

     

    We also recognize that human beings have the freedom to choose evil or good. So when someone does a kind thing, that person truly deserves thanks. We practice saying thank you to people for what they’ve done for us not just as a social reflex, but because of freedom. The person who voluntarily does something for you could have omitted that action. So, say thank you to the people through whom you receive good things.

     

    When you thank your children for their good attempts, you’ll find that not only your outlook but their attitudes change for the better. Yes, everything will still be imperfect. But you’ll be imperfectly happy rather than perfectly unhappy all the time.

     

     

    (Rule of Saint Benedict 4.22)

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  • Contend Courteously

    One of the most important skills to develop for life and love is the ability to work through a conflict with another person.

    Yes, you have freedom of expression, but is it going to be the expression of a war zone? Victories can be won on battlefields, but the area remains uninhabitable afterwards for years. Or perhaps you tend to express yourself through the silence of a cold indifference. You may thus establish rulership of your domain, but it will be the barren waste of a permafrost from which have fled all those who attempted to love you.

    There is another alternative. You can choose to approach your relational mess as a construction site. It’s true that injuries can occur during construction, but the intent is to build something.

    Within a family you are always still your own person. But when you got married, you chose interdependence. Does your pursuit of your personal goal disrupt your household? You may have to set that goal aside until a more suitable time. A family like a team is undermined by the sort of individual ambition that sees everyone else as competition. If the thing that is good for you is placing an undue burden on everyone else, then in the long run it’s not good for you either. This is because the people you use or neglect on the way to getting what you want will escape as soon as they get the opportunity. And why would they ever come back?

    These are ugly questions, but you’re better off putting them to yourself than waiting for the terrible day when your children put them to you. Ask them of yourself, and then ask your spouse to assess you. If the two of you can uncover what the underlying problems are, you’ll be well on your way toward improvement.

    Sometimes there’s nothing antisocial about anything you’re doing. Maybe it’s your words that cause problems. Be polite, even to the person you sleep with. Courtesy counts. Listen first, then speak. Remember that it’s on you to explain what you want. The marriage vow does not bestow psychic powers. No one else can read your mind, but if you never pause to reflect, you yourself may not know your own mind either. The more complicated it is, the more time you’ll need to give it.

    And be honest.

    How can you be both honest and polite?

    You’ll need a sense of humor. You also need the grace of God. But as a practical matter, the very small act of checking in with each other regularly can prevent conflicts from emerging. Better to anticipate difficulties and discuss options ahead of time than to play catch-up to poor communication.

    Last but not least, don’t assume that you are right while the other person is wrong. Maybe the other person knows you’re right but is tired of hearing you repeat it. Or maybe something else is going on that would change your view entirely if you just made the effort to find out.

     

    (Rule of St. Benedict 3.4-8)

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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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