Browsing tag: Jesus

  • Forbear

    In truth, those who are patient amid hardships and unjust treatment are fulfilling the Lord’s command: When struck on one cheek, they turn the other; when deprived of their coat, they offer their cloak also; when pressed into service for one mile, they go two [Matthew 5: 39-41].  (Rule of St. Benedict 7.42)

    If you had to pick the craziest-sounding command of Jesus, “turn the other cheek” might win the prize.  Second and third place go to offering extra goods to a thief and volunteering help to a bully.

    But each of these scenarios involves a strictly limited sacrifice.  You can walk two miles out of your way and still get home.  You can give up two items of clothing and still make a living.  A slap in the face is painful and insulting, but you can survive and go on.  In no way do these instructions imply that we should stick around forever to be defrauded, enslaved or murdered.

    No one has more than two cheeks, and the gospels don’t tell us what to do if, after getting a second chance, the attacker keeps on hitting.

    Still, there’s a concept here.  Like so many Christian concepts, a word exists for it in English but has fallen out of use.  The command is: forbear.

    Inherent in this word is the sense that the practice of its principle is hard.  The Old English prefix “for” intensifies the verb “to bear.”  It means to endure–specifically to suffer insult and injury while refraining from revenge.

    Who can do it?

    In fact some people in this world today are already enduring far more than Jesus asked.  They cannot bear up because they have been crushed.  Others are straining so hard against oppression that they expend all their strength just to keep their footing.

    It’s the rest of us who have choices to make.

    Sometimes you choose to walk away from friends who have sold out to trending evil.

    If you have the power to stop an injustice, to stand idle is not forbearance but collusion.  If you are responsible for other people, you must act in their best interest.  Forbearance ends where duty begins.  Sometimes duty requires that you act to oppose bad behavior.

    Nor can you forbear on behalf of someone else.  You bear up under your own suffering.  You don’t glibly offer up another person to endure something that you yourself don’t have to worry about.

    Forbearance is the restraint of strength, not the passive submission of weakness.  In order to forbear, you must first realize that you could hit back.  So think of a way to do it.

    Then, instead, attempt to negotiate a solution.  You hope that your example of restraint will give pause to the other person.  After all, people can behave badly without being bad people.  Perhaps they will reconsider and make an effort to do better.  Instead of escalating the conflict, you give them another chance.  You appeal to the good in them rather than fueling the bad.

    Or you may hold back out of concern for someone else who is innocent and who would suffer as a result of your action.  For the sake of the good person, you refrain from punishing the bad one.  This is the forbearance that God extends to the whole world every day, as he continues to sustain the existence of those who do wrong, for the sake of those who do right.

    There’s no privileged class of people who can bypass the righteousness of God.  He will hold each person accountable individually.  We can refrain from vengeance because he promises that he will establish justice in the end.

    So it’s not only for this world’s life that we struggle.  Yet we do struggle for life in this world.  We refrain from vengeance, but we also work for justice.  We manage to turn the other cheek, because we look over the shoulders of wicked people and see a new day dawning in which they have become irrelevant.

    Your own dwelling is the greenhouse of the seedlings of hope.  It’s at home that we learn to forbear.  When a boy has had his juice spilled by his little sister–the juice he was going to take to school, and now there’s none left–and (after the initial howl of dismay) he tells you not to be mad at her, it was just an accident, and even, “I’ll clean it up”–then rejoice and be glad, because heaven has conquered in that moment.

    Or perhaps a younger child destroys the possession of an older sibling.  This is where the older one learns what grace is.  Because restitution may be impossible.  The child must let go the attachment to the destroyed object and extend mercy to the incompetent other, who not only cannot compensate for the loss but is not even reliably going to refrain from doing the same thing again.  This is forbearance.  It is brotherly love.  A child who can forgive a brother or sister has come very far in the Christian life already.

    When children begin to intercede on behalf of their siblings, so that you won’t be angry at the brother or sister, then you know that you’re in the presence of saints.  They don’t think of themselves as saints.  But their behavior is no less holy.

    Forbearance is that moment when justice halts for the sake of peace.  Truth holds its tongue for the sake of love.  On a small scale, everyone regularly experiences something that feels unfair.  When everyone learns to forbear, you will have a happy home.

    Not wealthy homes but loving ones produce good people.

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  • Friendly Faces Feel

    Have a great horror of hell.  Yearn for everlasting life with holy desire.  Day by day remind yourself that you are going to die.…  Do not love immoderate or boisterous laughter.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 45-54)

    There are those who remind you that you’re going to die, and encourage you to think about eternity. There are others who remind you that you’re getting older, and encourage you to think about Botulinum toxin.

    One guy warns against flippant laughter.  The other guy fixes your face so you can no longer laugh.

    Religious types subtly make you feel that you could be a better person.  Fashionable types subtly make you feel that you’ve aged, sagged and bought last year’s clothes on sale.

    If you’re thinking of splitting the difference with the Spa Special and a charitable donation, realize that both sides will come at you with renewed zest. For every charitable gift, you’ll get a dozen new solicitations. For every photofacial, you’ll get a dozen new spots.

    There’s no rest in this world for us. We’re caught in the movements called Time. There’s the movement toward eternal life, called redemption. There’s the movement toward eternal death, called drifting with the trend.

    You know, the people who care about you will love you no matter how you look. On the other hand, the people who rate you when you walk through the door will never care, no matter what you do.

    If you paralyze your face, your friends won’t know what’s going on with you. Are you sad, mad, anxious?We care. But we don’t know where we stand with you, because your face is without expression. Do you even like us anymore?

    And guys, the problem is not that you’re losing your hair. The problem is that you’re going to die, and we will be left alone.

    So do what you want with your look, but please keep the focus on your health. Above all, could you please make sure your soul is in shape for eternity? We want to be there together.

     

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  • Bless Those Who Blast You

    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.‘”

     

     

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  • Reckon With The Day Of Reckoning

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

     

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

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  • 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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  • 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. (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.

    Outline

     

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