Browsing tag: Church

  • 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.

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Character Building

    Post-Hurricane Clean-Up Meditation

    We shall through patience share in the sufferings of Christ that we may deserve also to share in his kingdom.  (Rule of St. Benedict Prologue 50)

    Patience is a topic that we get tired of quickly.  If we were hanging out in the Italian countryside like St Benedict, maybe it would be more appealing.  But crawling through the contortions of post hurricane traffic colic is not scenic.  Sure, the traffic was bad before.  Now it puts the colostomy in claustrophobic.

    We call this “character building.”

    Take it personally.  Maybe not just the houses need repairs.  Maybe we’re in for character remodeling too.

    Brothers, divine Scripture calls to us saying: Whoever exalts himself shall be humbled, and whoever humbles himself shall be exalted Luke 14:11.  (RB 7.1)

    Or then again, sometimes God takes it out of our hands.  No one has volunteered to suffer. So, he selects a few people for the exaltation track.

    Humility AND patience?  Seriously?

    To clarify: we are talking about the building blocks of character. Might as well take care of the foundation qualities first!  This is what you can accomplish as you’re inching down the road.  You can allow the Holy Spirit to purge your soul.

    That skeleton behind your drywall has been waiting a long, long time: it’s gotta go.  Did you really not know what the smell was?

    But maybe it’s not your skeleton.  Maybe you inherited it from your dysfunctional family.

    No worries.  Clean what you can salvage.  Start over.

    Of course you didn’t choose this.  No normal person wants to be a saint.  But God may be tapping you anyway.

    Patience is humility in action.  The combo is called repentance.  Buy one get two free.

    “Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time” (1 Peter 5:6).

    (Skeleton photo courtesy of Isabel van Strien, who has been working day after day to help people cut out wet walls and clean their belongings).

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Communicate Artfully

    As often as anything important is to be done in the monastery, the abbot shall call the whole community together and himself explain what the business is; and after hearing the advice of the brothers, let him ponder it and follow what he judges the wiser course.  The reason why we have said all should be called for counsel is that the Lord often reveals what is better to the younger. (Rule of St. Benedict 3. 1-3)

    You have a dream of a regular dinner time.  The whole family gathers together and discusses all sorts of interesting things.  Children express their opinions freely but respectfully.  The assertive ones voluntarily fall silent and listen as the less cogent ones share their thoughts.  Lively debate ensues and does not degenerate into a ping pong of opposing assertions.  No one goes off on a rant.  You pay attention to them all and praise each one for saying something sensible or insightful.  Your spouse asks for your opinion.  You arrive together at a decision that takes everyone’s wishes into account and that all adhere to with good humor.

    And then you wake up and realize you’re still in the madhouse.  Some of them don’t speak at all: they just scream and scream at the precise pitch to unravel all your nerves.  They can’t understand anything you say, and they want it all now.  They stick their fingers into electric pencil sharpeners and throw themselves in front of moving vehicles and spread five pounds of flour across the kitchen floor daily.

    When you’ve wrestled away the paring knives clenched in each small fist and extinguished the flames from the cardboard waffle box set on “toast” in your oven, you may feel that your own mind is teetering on the brink.  The teaspoons seem to be disappearing, but you’re afraid to tell anyone, because it sounds–well, crazy.  When you catch your son stashing them in the air vent, you’re so relieved not to be insane after all that you don’t even mind the pilfering he’s been doing.

    Your only chance is to outwit them. You must become cunning. Offer them two choices, either one of which is acceptable to you, and let them decide. Guess what they’re going to do next and get there first. If it can cross your mind–no matter how bizarre a thought it is–it can cross their minds too, but they will actually do it.

    It’s easier to redirect them than to halt their motion. So when you forbid them one action, make sure to tell them what they are allowed to do instead. They can be happy for thirty minutes just running around in circles. After all, they don’t need good reasons, do they? They just need suggestions that channel their impulses in a way you can live with.

    Negotiate. If it’s terribly important to them but just a matter of preference for you, let them have their way. Save your energy for the essential things.

    And take the time to communicate with your spouse. Just because you had a hard day doesn’t mean the other person had it easy.  There are wrong times for dumping a to-do list on the other working adult in the household:

    1) Before your spouse is even out of bed in the morning.

    2) After the lights are off at night.

    3) As soon as your spouse walks through the front door.

    4) When he or she is in the middle of getting a necessary task done.

    Beware of DDS (Domestic Drone Syndrome): when you can’t remember the last time you said anything to your spouse that didn’t involve a chore.  Try a heartfelt, positive comment once in a while. Watch Monty Python’s The Argument Clinic and laugh together.

    Most important: let’s try our best not to blame our spouses when things go wrong.  Life can be hard. Sometimes it’s scary too.  It’s not the fault of the person you married.

     

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Cultivate Fairness

    The abbot should avoid all favoritism in the monastery…. But the abbot is free, if he sees fit, to change anyone’s rank as justice demands…. God shows no partiality among persons Romans 2:11. Only in this are we distinguished in his sight: if we are found better than others in good works and in humility. Therefore, the abbot is to show equal love to everyone and apply the same discipline to all according to their merits. (Rule of St. Benedict 2.16-22)

    It’s not that you love one more than the other. It’s just that you like them all better when they’re asleep. Each of your children can be difficult to deal with, for different reasons. But each one also has qualities that you want to cultivate. Each one thrives in a unique way.

    But with all sorts of variability in the details, the same principles should apply to everyone. This includes you too. Encourage good habits, but be cautious about proclaiming absolute laws, because your children will soon be clever enough to interpret them and apply them to you in ways that you never thought of. You’ll excuse younger children from certain tasks that are beyond their ability (but those will be the jobs they really, really want). You’ll exempt older children from restrictions that are no longer needed at their age (but expect them to relapse in the face of responsibility).

    Even if you aim to keep the same standard for boys and girls, you may find that divergence in practice is preferable for all concerned. For example, a boy should not be excused from cleaning up the kitchen because he’s a boy. But if he’d rather pick up dog poop out of the yard, why not let him? A girl shouldn’t be allowed to primp in front of the mirror indefinitely because she’s a girl. But if she manages to get dressed on time in skirt and fancy shoes, with her hair done by herself, doesn’t she deserve the accessible seat in the car?

    If one child puts away the dishes unasked, while everyone else runs away, it is fair to praise that one, and to call attention to the difference in behavior. The other children are sure to speak up and inform you of whatever unacknowledged contribution they have made too.

    Sometimes parents begin to favor one child over the others because circumstances dictate this trend; or because one child is needier; or one child is more demanding. It is fair for parents to halt this trajectory and to impose limitations. Explain to the children that your goal is to be equitable. They can be smarter than you are at figuring out ways to achieve a fair balance, and sometimes you discover that their priorities are different from yours. Encourage them when they bring you novel solutions. Let them negotiate terms with each other. Why not?

    Actual favoritism is more insidious and has to do with identity issues on the part of the parent. Sometimes a parent will favor the child who embodies an ideal. For example, a mother may favor the daughter who is everything she wishes she could have been, when she was a girl. The other daughter, who resembles her in other ways (maybe with traits that she dislikes about herself) becomes the inferior one. Both daughters are hobbled as a result: one by the tangled expectation of success; the other by the cutting expectation of failure.

    We arrive at Christian identity in a different way. Our relationship to Christ is analogical. Only Jesus is the definition of God as man. But each one of us is an example of God at work in a human being.

    To realize this is to let drop the heavy burden of idealism. Jesus promises that his Holy Spirit is at work within us to develop the traits God desires. We participate in this process voluntarily, and yes, it is a lot of work. But it’s not the work of desperation. This is because our confidence is not in our own efforts but in the promise of God.

    We can also be confident that God is at work in each of our children. No matter what trials they face, no handicap is insurmountable in an ultimate sense. We grieve when we see them suffer. But we remain confident that God is working out some good purpose in each one. So we don’t flog them on to perform, if they have the traits associated with success. Nor do we abandon hope for them, if they have other traits. The journey of faith includes the assurance that there is no ultimate cause for anxiety, no matter what challenges we face together right now.

    Sibling dynamics movie suggestions: Rain Man (1988); Unbroken (2014); Sense and Sensibility (1995); Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986); Little Women (1994); A River Runs Through It (1992).

     

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Aim For Judgment Day

    The abbot must know that anyone undertaking the charge of souls must be ready to account for them. 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 (Rule of St. Benedict 2.37-38).

    Bad news: you have to face God on Judgment Day. Good news: you don’t have to dress your son in polyester and make him play Little League games in 100 degree weather while you broil on the bench. Patience, kindness and faithfulness are mandatory. Olympic medals, perfect 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 cover of the magazine.

    Of course, we do want the best of everything, for ourselves and for our children. But we also want to be able to enjoy what we’ve got. When you see how miserable people can be when they have it all, you realize that there must be more to life than everything the world has to offer. You still want the good things in life. But you understand that the good life is not dependent on the good things. It’s all about priorities.

    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).

    Jesus says, “If in my name you ask me for anything, I will do it” John 14:14. To ask in Jesus’s name means asking for something that’s consistent with the will of God. Raising the children you’ve been entrusted with is certainly consistent with God’s will. So lay out all of your needs in this area with no inhibition 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 negotiate a variety of temperaments, often different from your own. You coax, reprove and encourage as appropriate. This means adapting your strategy to each child’s unique personality and abilities. You cultivate each one’s welfare. But the child is not your possession. Parents are trustees of something that belongs to God. If you need ideas as you think about how to develop another person’s potential, check out these best-of-the-best movie trainers: Sam Mussabini, in Chariots of Fire; Mr. Miyagi, in The Karate Kid; Yoda, in The Empire Strikes Back; Mickey Goldmill, in Rocky.

    The goal is not to turn our children into replicas of ourselves. It’s not even to realize an ideal. The goal is to form characters in the image of Christ. In the process of correcting our children’s faults, we realize exactly where those faults came from. Their most annoying personality traits are often the ones they inherit from us. Sometimes it’s only after having a child that we even begin to realize what our own weaknesses are. And so we realize that we too must change for the better. We ask God’s grace to transform us together with them into people who reflect his character.

    “And all of us, with unveiled faces, 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; for this comes from the Lord, the Spirit” 2 Corinthians 3:18. St. Paul is telling us that God is the one in charge of this makeover. Our part is to contemplate Christ; to study him as the model; and to rehearse the lessons that we learn. When you look into a mirror, you adjust your own face to conform to what you think it should look like. As Christians, we adjust ourselves to resemble Jesus.

    The call to mimic Christ doesn’t mean that you won’t face limitations. If God himself voluntarily took on human limitations, should a human being expect to transcend them? But at the end of the day, even the impossible–if it was consistent with God’s purpose–will be done. Sometimes the impossible is the ordinary day ahead. But you don’t have to face the whole day in one gulp: a Psalter organizes each day into segments, with prayers for each time period based on the Psalms. At whatever moment you feel yourself flagging, take a few minutes to pray and ask for strength to make it through just the next few hours.

     

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Be A Good Model

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

    Neither should parents. Maybe you fail to hit the bull’s eye, but at least you aim for the target. Your children will imitate whatever they see you do. This means that if your son sees you aiming for the bull’s eye, he’ll aim too. And sometimes he turns out to be a much better shot than you are. But you’re the one who points the way. Parents are role models for their children.

    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 wouldn’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 on a deep, daunting stairwell with many steps. But in this passageway are extraordinary people with far worse injuries than yours who still have the courage to go on. Follow them.

    Furthermore, anyone who receives the name of abbot is to lead his disciples by a twofold teaching: he must point out to them all that is good and holy more by example than by words, proposing the commandments of the Lord to receptive disciples with words, but demonstrating God’s instructions . . . by a living example.  Again, if he teaches his disciples that something is not to be done, then neither must he do it (RB 2.11-13).

    Mimetic human beings copy each other, even when they have no idea what’s going on (René Girard). Children especially copy their parents–maybe not now, but thirty years from now, when they face your situation and have no model for how to react except how you react today. If there’s a contradiction between what you tell your children and what you actually do, they will have to untangle your mess. So do everyone a favor and try to be consistent.

    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)

    Whatever else you aim for, realize that the most important model you offer your children is the marriage of their parents.  The hardest part of marriage is handing to God the defects of your spouse and focusing instead on fixing your own flaws.  Each one of us should work on prying out the stake impaled through our own eyeball, so that when our spouse needs help with a splinter, we’ll be half blind but mobile.  If spouses each have one functioning eye and a hygienic patch, together they’ll have the perspective they need to guide their children.

    And yet, we do want to find ways to encourage our spouse to change for the better… One tactic is to sit down for an explicit swap talk, when each spouse gets to pick one thing (only one thing!) that you want the other person to work on. This is tricky, because the unhappiest person is going to ask for a more difficult change. The other spouse can feel hurt at the criticism and may not have an equally painful request to swap with. But don’t worry: what goes around comes around. Today, you’re the one who must make a huge effort, because your spouse can’t stand to be around you anymore. In a few years, the roles will be reversed. Your turn will come to ask, and the fact that you did try will give you more influence.

    It makes all the difference in how you feel about someone if you can see that the person is trying. The thing that’s so infuriating is to feel that you’re stuck with someone whose defect is making your life miserable and who stubbornly refuses to do anything about it. You start to think that the only solution is to escape from the marriage itself. But if you see your spouse attempting to do what you asked, you can feel sympathy instead of disgust. You can hope that life will get better.  

    It’s up to you to decide whether the story of your family will be a comedy or a tragedy.

    Hint: movies about imperfect families finding ways to work things out are always comedies. Some classics worth revisiting: Overboard; Meet The Parents; Father of the Bride; It’s a Wonderful Life; Mr. Mom; About a Boy; Three Men and a Cradle; The Family Man.

     

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • Live Up To Your Titles: Father And Mother

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

    The father and mother must also remember what their titles signify. Today this seems to require a vocabulary review, even for native speakers.  Never in the history of tautology has such a frisson of excitement run through the announcement that a father is a man, and a mother is a woman.  Who knew that it would become controversial to read a dictionary out loud ?

    A man who begets a child has the responsibility to act as a father to his child.  A woman who conceives a child has the responsibility to act as a mother to her child.  Father and mother should be married to each other. The sacrament of matrimony is a sign of the relationship between Christ and the Church. The husband represents Christ, and the wife represents the Church (Mark 10:6-9; Catechism of the Catholic Church Part II, Chapter 3, Article 7: “The Sacrament of Matrimony.”)

    For two thousand years the Church never had to defend the essential maleness and femaleness of humanity. The Church has, however had lots of experience standing for the essential humanity of human beings.  It’s clear that a Christian understanding of the human being includes a dynamic between male and female. The harmony of masculinity with maleness and femininity with femaleness has always been obvious to everyone in all cultures, notwithstanding the variations peculiar to time and place.

    From the earliest days of the Church, men and women have always been called to develop the same spiritual qualites.  St. Paul lists these explicitly: love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness and self-control (Galatians 5:22-23).  This is not an exhaustive list. There are other qualities such as courage and truthfulness that the Holy Spirit cultivates in those who belong to him.

    Both the father and the mother in a household are called to imitate Christ. Far from flattening their respective personalities or erasing their sexual differences, the Holy Spirit will fulfill and develop them, both as man and woman and as specific individuals with unique characteristics.  (Two authors who write eloquently on the individuation of Christians are G.K.Chesterton in Orthodoxy and C.S.Lewis in The Screwtape Letters).  One of the most important Christian themes is that you fulfill yourself not by focusing on your own personality but by focusing on Christ’s personality.  It’s from within this tradition that I am writing, and so most of what I say will be for parents as parents relating to children as children, without a lot of gender-specific commentary.

    On the other hand, I’m not sold on gender-inclusive language.  Having studied a few other languages, it strikes me that only English speakers take personal pronouns so personally.  I don’t have a problem accepting “he” as representing human beings in general. The whole point of a pronoun is to save you the trouble of listing out everyone you’re referring to.

    Representation is essential to Christianity, never mind democracy.  The Apostle John tells us that Christ is the Word of God, and he emphasizes the creative acts of Christ, the Verb.  But as redeemer of the world Christ also becomes the Pronoun.  He is the atoning sacrifice who stands in for us before a holy God.  If you reject the power of “him” to represent you, don’t you reject the whole concept of redemption as well?

    But, since it’s impossible not to feel awkward in the third-person singular these days, I’ve decided just to collar the reader and address him or her as you, whoever you are.  I also refer to us, meaning we-the-people-who-are-still-making-an-effort.  My goal is to write succinctly, correctly and honestly.  If I write badly, I risk confusing you.  If I get something wrong, I risk misleading you.

    But if I say nothing at all, I risk offending the Master who reproached only the servant who refused to try (Matthew 25:14-30.)  I’ll do the best I can with the resources I’ve got.  Others are more than welcome to pitch in.  And in fact it’s necessary for each one to make an effort here.  Why would you yield your God-given sexuality to an atheist culture?  Be a man.  Be a woman.  Your choices will contribute to defining the terms.

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • The Call: Awake!

    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)

    This “sleep” is the spiritual stupor of ordinary people who imagine that the front line is somewhere else. They think that they themselves have no responsibility for the outcome of the battle. They presume that they will suffer no consequences for their complacent inaction.

    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 what the readings for the day were–not in the Upper Room guide to prayer that I’d been using for twenty-two years, but in the Catholic Missal, 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 readings: 1 Kings 21: 17-29 (the Lord sends Elijah to confront Ahab). Then there was Psalm 51 (“…in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense….). The Gospel was Matthew 5: 43-48 (“love your enemies“).  Then I checked the daily Bible verse and saw 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” feature on the app to connect to Facebook.  It was urgent that I must do so immediately.  I signed in, and I posted the verse.

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

    First of all, these days God does not “demand” anything.  God is lucky if anyone condescends to acknowledge that he might exist.  Second, if God wants to get a message out to all people everywhere, my Facebook page is not the place to do it.  Third, people these days don’t repent.  A few religious people make a practice of repenting routinely, 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 on the shoulder.  I don’t have the credentials, the platform, the authority, or the influence.

    But St. Benedict actually gives some insight into the call of 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.

    With this conclusion, 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)

    The call to each of us is to translate into action daily the teachings that we believe to be true.  How do we live them out in ordinary life within a culture that has explicitly rejected them 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.  Do not be daunted immediately by fear and run away from the road that leads to salvation.  It is bound to be narrow at the outset. (RB Prologue.45-48)

    Every Christian home is such a school.  If the home is spiritually chaotic, then the child may emerge into adulthood unfit for any good purpose.  Discipline costs effort every day.  But the rejection of discipline costs far more. Everyone pays the price in illness, despair, loneliness and worse.  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 in our own homes.

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • The Challenge

    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. (RB Prologue.3)

    St. Benedict is of course not the first to describe the Christian life as a spiritual battle: St. Paul used that figure of speech in his letters.  On the face of it, however, it seems a bit histrionic to associate the domestic life with anything as dramatic as “battle.”  Surely the metaphor is overblown.

    But then you hear of another teenager who has committed suicide; of another husband who has abandoned his family; of another wife who has had an affair.  You see people with all sorts of destructive habits hurting themselves and their children.  The national abortion statistics come in for the year.  Then it’s your own friends whose marriages rot out.  Their cute kids grow up and do shocking things in the janitor’s closet in high school.  You watch a four year-old fall apart emotionally because she realizes that her father just doesn’t care.  You watch a seven year-old learn to be stoic.  A battle?  It’s a rout; a massacre; a spiritual slaughter.  And if you abandon your post, not only you but your children will join the list of casualties.

    So there is a war raging.  Whether or not you want to fight, it will involve you.  But how can obedience be a weapon?  Isn’t that a hopelessly unfashionable idea?  In Discipleship, the WWII-era Lutheran pastor, Dietrich Bonhoeffer makes the point that obedience to the commands of God is inseparable from faith in God. “You complain that you cannot believe?  No one should be surprised that they cannot come to believe so long as, in deliberate disobedience, they flee or reject some aspect of Jesus’ commandment.”

    Following the epistle of St. James, Bonhoeffer was explaining to a modern readership how false it is to think that an experience of faith must precede an act of obedience.  On the contrary, you must take action to obey in order to experience faith.  Bonhoeffer stepped away from the trend of Germanic philosophy since Kant and rejected the primacy of the thing in the mind over the thing in action.  He stood against Nazi Germany and lost his life as a result.  His side–our side–won that war, but insidious theories of self-invention spread through the post-war culture.

    These days a call to obedience sounds like an insult, to many people.  In the postmodern context, we are self-referential by default.  We find ourselves sequestered inside labile minds, no longer even able to rely on the modern concept of the coherent individual, who at least knew who he was and what he wanted.  More than in previous ages we need to obey the commands of God so as not to be constantly tossed about by our own confused thoughts and erratic feelings.

    But once we’ve obeyed the revealed commands of God—then what?  There’s all the rest of mundane life to live.  Must each individual at every moment debate every choice that needs to be made?  In a chaotic and arbitrary culture, willfully given over to the cult of randomness, it would be less exhausting to have some templates handy, some aids for the organization of behavior. A rational person faces relentless buffeting by the sheer nihilism of the surrounding environment.  A Domestic Rule would be helpful, to provide some guidelines for self-regulation.

     

    Home » Church » Page 3

  • The Motivation

    Listen carefully, my son, to the master’s instructions, and attend to them with the ear of your heart. This is advice from a father who loves you; welcome it, and faithfully put it into practice. (Rule of St. Benedict, Prologue.1)

    When I first thought of writing a domestic rule, the idea was completely sarcastic. In the culture that surrounds me, there are no two things so disdained as domesticity and regulation. But it irked me that out of twenty centuries of Church history, nobody had ever written a rule for married people raising children. It irked me so much that gradually I came to entertain more seriously the idea of writing one myself.  The question is not what the Christian life should look like in its mature state. There are innumerable resources to tell us that. The question is how to raise infants from formless chaos to that mature state, and how to survive the process.

    I feel sure that the things I’ve learned as an ordinary Christian wife and mother have been learned before by many women who were not able to record their experiences in writing.  For many centuries, only a tiny fraction of the population could read, much less write. Writing materials were too expensive to waste on merely personal reflections. So, written documents tended not to contain mundane details.  Even when education and materials became more widely available, how many mothers had the leisure to write anything more than a personal letter to a specific child at a specific moment? They were too tired all the time, and nobody ever asked.

    Out of all the famous leaders of any denomination, only John Wesley, to my knowledge ever asked his mother, Susanna Wesley, to write down her thoughts on raising children.  The only way to account for such a gaping hole in Christian teaching is to acknowledge that the Church for most of its existence has taken for granted that ordinary people would perform the tasks of child-rearing as a matter of course. Nobody ever wrote a domestic rule because nobody ever imagined a society without families.

    Then the twentieth century came along and gave the world atheist experiments in total annihilation of the family. Western countries resisted totalitarian ideologies only to yield to decomposing forces that have dissolved all the primary bonds. Mothers kill their children and call it freedom. Brothers and sisters train to compete against each other, not to love each other. The bond between father and son has become a fight for dominance.

    These existential topics were on my mind, but I hesitated to take on the extra work involved in doing this project.  I started putting pen to paper only after hearing of four healthy people who suddenly died, within a week or so of each other. There was a family friend who went in for surgery and died on the operating table. A business contact dropped dead of a heart attack while working out in the gym. A seventeen year-old shot himself “accidentally.” A woman bled to death giving birth to her fourth baby. It occurred to me that I might not have much time left myself. Before I go, I want to record some parenting advice for my own children as they raise families.

    What follows is not a polemical essay but a personal testimony.  What I myself have learned in the course of struggling to live an ordinary Christian life as that deplorable relic, a housewife, I now proclaim to you. I write so that you may live joyful lives. And I hope that I can spare you many heartaches and miseries by carefully and honestly parsing out the elemental details that are so often taken for granted.  Anything objectionable in what follows I have carefully considered and have decided to include anyway, as an alternative to something worse that I fear more.

    A rule is not a set of laws to obey. A rule is a pattern, a multi-faceted template, to which one can turn when it’s not clear what to do next. The goal is not to be domestic nor to be regulated, but to live a Christian life—even in domesticity. How does one raise children in happy homes that everyone is not always trying to escape from? As my own template I’m taking the Rule of Saint Benedict. Of all the choices I’ve made, this is one of the few that seemed, quite simply, obvious.

     

    Home » Church » Page 3
    • Next