The Lord Is My Shepherd
Even under the shadow of horror
I will not fear evil
For Christ is my companion.
You let me lean on the staff that you hold steady
You wield the weapon that beats off attackers
You have brought food for the journey, and no enemy dares approach the fire that you light
You give me an abundance of everything I need.
With you I can live a good and merciful life
And when I enter into eternity, I will find welcome in the household of God.
Love your enemies (Matthew 5:43-48; Luke 6: 27-35)
(Rule of Saint Benedict 4. 31)
Loving your enemies sounds like a nice idea until you actually have enemies yourself.
When someone asked Jesus, “who is my neighbor?” he responded with the parable of the Good Samaritan, which turns the question on its head. We are to be neighbors even to inveterate cultural enemies. But no one ever asked Jesus, “who is my enemy?” This, it seems, we are left to figure out.
An enemy is not merely someone with whom you disagree. You can disagree passionately with friends on all sorts of topics, as long as you have something more important in common.
Nor is an enemy an opponent in a game. An opponent recognizes the same boundaries you do and does not harm you in real life.
An enemy is not even necessarily someone with whom you are in conflict. Sometimes the angry person turns out not to be a beast. If you give the benefit of the doubt, engage, and communicate what’s going on from your perspective, sometimes you find that the enemy is a neighbor after all.
An enemy, in brief, is someone who acts deliberately on the intent to harm you. After you’ve attempted to resolve a conflict peacefully, the person who stabs you in the back can fairly be called an enemy.
And this is the person we’re called to love.
A Christian concept of love is essentially voluntary. We know that God is love. But we also know that God is not our slave. So, neither are we enslaved to those we love. Love ends where coercion begins.
Therefore, if you are going to love anyone, first you must be free. More to the point: you must be free from the enemy in question. If your enemy is more powerful than you are, escape is the first order of business. Extricate yourself, and then work on making new friends, because even evil people tend to avoid attacking someone who has relationships with others.
If you are, then, free to love, the question becomes, what is love?
We know that “the Lord disciplines those he loves” (Hebrews 12:6; Proverbs 3: 12). Therefore a Christian concept of love includes setting boundaries and enforcing standards. Love sets aside the self-interest of the moment for the good of the other person. But the good of the other person is not always what that person demands. When someone wants something that is not good, you say no, for love’s sake.
The most terrible enemies are the ones you always loved, and who, you thought, also loved you. Those are the ones who break your heart. There’s nothing quite like the distress of loving the antagonist who once was dear. The world roils with enemies who are exes.
Whether the situation is tragic or merely wearisome, loving any sort of enemy requires a combination of efforts. First, you must finesse your way out of range of whatever harm your enemy might inflict. Further, you must refrain from inflicting whatever revenge is within reach. Ultimately, you must make the extra effort to be the sort of person your enemy is not.
Your enemy is enraged, but you must be respectful. Your enemy is vindictive, but you must be peacable. Your enemy is selfish, but you must be generous. Your enemy is false, but you must be true.
Nothing anyone can say will ever make this easy, but the Holy Spirit can make it possible.
Bearing injuries patiently is not a sign of weakness. It’s a sign of goodness. Only the strong bear up. Only the good restrain themselves when evil beckons, because evil is not their master.
This isn’t about defending yourself in the moment of attack. You have the right to self-defense. This is about the aftermath: now what?
Weak people fall apart and lash out at everyone around them as they disintegrate. For a brief moment, they enjoy an experience of power: the power to destroy. There’s something appealing about power, even when you know it’s fleeting, even when you know it’s hateful. The Church calls this appeal the glamor of evil. As Christians, we reject it, along with Satan and all his works.
Strong people hold themselves together, hold onto what they know is good and hold out for what they know is right. Sometimes they hang on by their fingernails. As Christians, this is the character we aspire to, and God knows it’s hard. Sometimes the path leads straight up the face of a cliff.
You can be on the right path and still fall and get hurt. Getting hurt doesn’t mean that God is against you. It means that there’s an inherent risk to living at all. You were thrust into existence without being consulted. But now that you’re here, you’re free to venture your all for the good. The promise of Christ is that ultimately your venture will pay off. Death is not the end.
People who have only this world to live for figure that nothing they do matters. But the Christian message is that everything you do matters, even the tiny things. Even a small creature can live in harmony with its Maker. He is always at work everywhere for good, and he invites you to participate in that work, wherever you are, whoever you are.
You’re free to reject his offer. You can rage against your Creator. He allowed evil into this world, and now you can increase the sum of evil.
But know that if you choose for what is right and true and good, God is on your side, even when everything else in the universe seems to be against you. And he promises that the pain will last only as long as this life. You will emerge into peace for eternity.
That leaves now, and everything we have to face in this moment in time. Sometimes we can’t understand why God does what he does. Why does he hurt us? Why make us stay in our place in a corner with a cone around our necks? We didn’t do anything wrong.
Heave a big sigh and wait: maybe something good will come along next.
Don’t fret. Don’t chew on your hurt and make it worse. Save your energy for the good you can do. If the path before you is clear, and if you have the strength, get up every day and keep going. Be patient. Bear up. There’s no quick fix to any complex problem, and you will encounter many problems along the way.
When you’ve done everything you can do, then stand firm and wait for God himself to act on your behalf. If you can’t stand up anymore, sit down. If even sitting is too much, lie still and be who you are where you are. There’s a time to let people who love you take care of you. You’re not alone in this. Fix sad eyes on your Maker. Remain alert to his call.
An injury can happen in an instant. The healing takes a long, long time. It saps all the strength you’ve got.
Healing is your job now. We want you back.
Do not repay one bad turn with another 1 Thessalonians 5:15; 1 Peter 3:9. Do not injure anyone, but bear injuries patiently. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 29-30)
Do not aspire to be called holy before you really are, but first be holy that you may more truly be called so. Live by God’s commandments every day. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 62-63)
Of all the archaic vocabulary words that have become vestigial, holy has to be the most vacuous. We have no idea what it means, but we’re pretty sure we don’t want to go there. It’s probably the Christian equivalent of a no fat, no sugar, no salt, gluten-free, vegan blueberry muffin.
You try it.
(They make it look like a blueberry muffin, but a deep human instinct tells you that it’s going to be a bad experience.)
What we’ve heard about holiness is that there’s no money, sex or power in it. It’s sinless and spiritual.
Definitely go for it.
Naturally there are people who want to be holy, just as there are people who try to make you eat their special muffins. You pay attention to who they are, and you make a mental note to breakfast elsewhere next time.
(Of course we’re still friends!)
Although we don’t take the word “holy” seriously anymore in everyday speech, its cognate, “whole” is a workhorse we use all the time. Whole and holy are linguistic twins, but over the course of nine hundred years, the version without the W specialized as a religious term, while the other one got a regular job and put food on the table. At birth their meaning was: entire, unhurt, healthy, free of wound or injury. Whole also originally meant “restored,” in the sense of having recovered from a wound or injury, being healed.
As a matter of fact, the Old English parent word is still alive and kicking, pronunciation unchanged through the centuries. It is “hale,” as in hale and hearty, free from defect, disease or infirmity, retaining exceptional health and vigor. You could still use this word, if you ever met anyone who fit the description.
Linguistically it’s entirely plausible to assert that a holy life is a life restored to wholeness, a healthy, vibrant life.
Of course, St. Benedict was writing several centuries before any version of English existed at all. In Latin, his choice was “sanctum,” a word that English eventually swallowed whole to mean “sacred place.” For him and still for us, it means dedicated or set apart for the service of deity.
Latin was a pagan language. In Latin it’s possible to be sacred to the deity and therefore murdered; pimped out as a temple prostitute; locked in an iron cage and suspended over toxic fumes to induce entertaining prophecies for the pilgrims. No one ever claimed that the pagan gods were faithful friends. On the contrary, they were reputed to be fickle, capricious, cruel. You sacrificed to the gods in order to buy their favor, or to buy off their wrath. The thing (or the person) you gave was then sacred to the god. To be sacred to the god was to be consumed by the god.
But English developed as a Christian language and follows a different logic. Holiness merges the concepts “sacred” and “hale” inextricably. This is because our deity wants our good. He doesn’t want to consume us. He flaunts the whole concept of religion by requiring us to consume him. What he wants from us is an interior change of heart that produces action for good. When we’ve done wrong, he wants us to feel remorse and apologize to the person we’ve hurt. He wants us to feel pity and do something to help when we see someone suffering. When he gives us opportunities and resources, he wants us to feel responsible and work to establish justice.
In exchange for dedicating your life to him, he offers to make your death temporary. You will pass through death and emerge immortal. As for your experience in this life, the language itself bears witness that when you offer yourself to the service of Christ, resolving to live by his commands, you will experience a restoration to wholeness.
Live whole. Die good. Be hale forever.
If people curse you, do not curse them back but bless them instead. (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 32)
Sadly, the right to retaliate is not an inalienable right. It may be necessary to fight your enemies and to defeat them, for the sake of the common good. But the Christian must not inflict harm merely for the satisfaction of revenge. Yes, it’s hard. And unfortunately, this isn’t just St. Benedict’s idea. This is Jesus himself Luke 6:28.
Can we give them the light-activated puzzle map of the United States? If they fail to replace Montana, Alabama and Arizona, they’ll be learning about Helena, Montgomery and Phoenix every time the headlights of a passing car flicker through a chink in the curtains. If they bury it under blankets in the closet, in the middle of the night a strangled voice will say, “New Jersey: Trenton.”
Not only are we not allowed to give their children motion-sensitive, musical toys with no OFF button: God requires us to pray for them as well.
When we suffer an insult from another person, we have a reaction, anger, which is as natural as the body’s inflammatory response to injury. If you didn’t feel anger at being wronged, it would be an emotional failure, just as it would be sick for your body not to react to a wound. But just as your inflammatory response can itself become a problem if it doesn’t subside, so anger can become destructive to the person who feels it.
St. Paul describes anger as the devil’s foothold Ephesians 4:26-27 (also translated “place,” “room,” “opportunity.”) Anger serves as the devil’s foothold because it’s not in itself wrong. All the other vices are absolutes. Only anger has this ambiguous quality of being at the same time justified and harmful. St. Paul tells us, “Be angry but do not sin.” This means that anger itself is not the sin. The sin is what the devil tempts you to do when you’re angry.
Your anger is just. The wrong is real. To dismiss the offense would flaunt the law of God. But because the anger is justified, the devil can easily slip in temptations to vengeful acts which are against God’s law too. So, anger functions as the gateway through which righteous people can be tempted to do things which normally would repel them.
When the thirst for revenge sets in, it’s like a bacterial infection that develops in a contaminated wound. If it isn’t addressed immediately, it can become chronic, like vengeful feelings that persist for years after an offense. The infection can invade your entire body and ruin your health. Vengeful feelings can obsess you even after the perpetrator is dead.
It’s true that revenge can attain to the level of tragedy. There are wrongs that no mere mortal can bear alone. But usually the vindictive person is shallow and selfish. It’s the conceited person who punishes someone for an honest remark. It’s the spiteful person who exacts retribution for a petty grievance. You don’t want to become that person.
This is why God prescribes such a horse-pill. Praying a blessing on the person who has wronged you is like swallowing one of those enormous pills. The prayer operates like an antibiotic within the soul to combat vengeance. You don’t have to be enthusiastic about it, not anymore than you have to like those pills. It may take you more than one try to get it down. Your natural gag reflex might seem at first insurmountable. But even a nauseated blessing through clenched teeth will begin to alter your interior state. Whenever you have vengeful feelings, say, “God bless [so and so].” That’s all you have to do, but you may have to do it many times, every three hours for weeks. Daily for months. Weekly for years.
You’re not requesting on their behalf a life of luxury, flippant and carefree. Still less are you asking for evildoers to continue to do harm with impunity. When you bless those who’ve mistreated you, you’re asking God to intervene in their lives. You may have detailed ideas for how exactly God could proceed. He will consider your suggestions fairly. But at the end of the day, you surrender judgment to Christ.
Who is the person who does inspire respect? It’s the one who can laugh off an insult and make a joke of it. The one who sticks to principle in the face of harassment is inspiring, not the one who lashes out in fury. The one who gets back up after being knocked down and keeps right on running toward the goal: that’s who you want to be. Outmaneuver your opponents. Leave them in the dust, and leave revenge in the hands of God. “‘Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says the Lord.‘”
“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.
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.
This message of mine is for you, then, if you are ready to give up your own will, once and for all, and armed with the strong and noble weapons of obedience to do battle for the true King, Christ the Lord. (Rule of Saint Benedict. Prologue.3)
St. Benedict is not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle. St. Paul talks about the armor and weapon of the Christian in his letter to the Ephesians. It might seem a bit histrionic, though, for me to characterize life in domesticity as a spiritual battle. For that matter, the use of military language to describe the spiritual life of Christians has been generally out of favor for a long time. But there is a point where a struggle deserves to be called a fight.
I certainly felt that a spiritual enemy was prevailing when my fourteen-year-old came home from Catholic high school and told me that her classmate’s sister had committed suicide. The classmate found her sister’s body, hanging by the neck in her closet. In a bid for comfort, the classmate decided to have sex with her boyfriend. Then he dumped her. Then she left the school. The bleakness and wrongness of that series of events does demand some response, some mobilization of effort, some marshalling of troops, so to speak.
Transferring my daughter to a different Catholic high school yielded better academics and more resources, but no escape from brutality. There a sixteen-year-old shared publicly that her boyfriend sent her to the emergency room with a perforated vagina. The parents of the boyfriend see no evil, hear no evil, where their progeny is concerned. Nothing is wrong, and no one is bad. This indifference too strikes me as a spiritual rout, a defeat not merely at an individual level, although it’s individuals who sustain the wounds. If nice people are loveless, are they Catholic?
You can say the Lord’s Prayer over and over, “Thy will be done,” but a call to “obedience” is a socially risky teaching to espouse. It sounds strange, in a culture where we’re constantly being told to break all boundaries, emancipate ourselves, be free, and so on. Obeying the revealed commands of God is hard enough if you accept, say, the Ten Commandments. Obeying the teachings of the Catholic Church may seem so wildly incompatible with survival that it doesn’t even bear considering. But if you’re going to live at all, you’ll be taking actions along certain principles, whether you’ve thought about them yourself or are just doing what everyone else seems to be doing. In fact, you will be following someone or something, whether or not you call it obedience.
The call to follow Christ is a call to obey a Person. Christians are supposed to be able to know what Christ wants through the indwelling of the Holy Spirit. The accumulated revelation of the Church over two millennia is supposed to help us individually understand how to live this life. But whether we understand how or not, we’re still here and doing something. It would be helpful to have some templates that correspond to situations that ordinary people face today. Can you call this obedience to God? I hope so.
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