Browsing tag: scripture

  • Hold Your Peace

    The ninth step of humility is that a monk controls his tongue and remains silent. . . . for Scripture warns, In a flood of words you will not avoid sinning (Proverbs 10:19). [Rule of St. Benedict 7.56-58]

    When you get to the point of being able to hold your tongue, you know that the Holy Spirit really has been at work within you.

    First of all, you interact differently in a group of people, when everyone is venting grievances. You know from long experience that if you don’t chime in with a complaint of your own, you can’t participate in the conversation. But are you really so bad off today? The Spirit prompts you to remember what you can enjoy and be thankful for. You don’t really want to be one of these people for whom the only pleasure in life is the complaining.

    Or it’s time for opinions. Some people cannot NOT have a say. Their thoughts clack on compulsively without intermission.  They always know best, no matter the topic, and if they really don’t understand, they’re not interested. In a serious discussion, they tell everyone that they themselves don’t know what they mean–and yet they keep talking.

    Because social status is at stake, or success in a classroom or at a job, survival seems to depend on asserting your voice. Existence itself hangs on beating out the competition. To remain silent–unheard, unseen, unacknowledged–can feel actually dangerous, like standing still in a stampede. What will happen to you if you don’t jump in and jostle a place?  We know where the unimportant people end up: at the bottom, invisible, irrelevant, trampled.

    And yet, beneath and behind, present everywhere, seeing everything, we find God himself, sustaining all, yet so often unheeded.

    Remaining silent, listening to others is a way to imitate the character of God himself, and in imitating him, to know his peace. It is a fitting stance for a human being to remain quiet yet present, without asserting self-importance, because God himself is willing to remain present yet silent everywhere, all the time, when if he wished he could overwhelm and silence all voices.

    When you practice this act of humility, you find after a while that the insipid remarks of silly people do not irk you as they used too. That burning urge to have your say has dissipated. You are able to hold your peace.

    But just as proud people everywhere despise God for his silence and mistake his generosity for weakness, so you too may find that someone with whom you have always been gracious turns against you. You offer a listening ear, loyalty and unconditional acceptance. In return you may get–slander. The chill slither of malice through your soul leaves a hole that will not soon heal.

    Be still. Don’t play into the backstabber’s game. God hears your silence and sees your humility. He himself will enter within to comfort and sustain you. When the time comes for you to speak, the Word himself will be with you. Commit your way to him and hold your peace.

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  • Align Your Will With God’s Will

    Scripture tells us: Turn away from your desires Sirach 18:30.  And in the Prayer too we ask God that his will be done in us Matthew 6:10.  We are rightly taught not to do our own will, since we dread what Scripture says: There are ways which men call right that in the end plunge into the depths of hell Proverbs 16:25. (Rule of St. Benedict 7.19-22)

    You don’t need to wait for eternity to see the train wreck.  The bitter rewards of folly are everywhere exhibited around us.  How agonizing to watch as people you care about make foolish choices and then inflict the consequences on others.  Like King Lear they resent honest advice and choose instead to listen to flattery.  They reject offers of help and surround themselves with toxic influences that justify their decisions.  They go from delusion to destruction and leave sorrow in their wake.  Like the Fool, you trail along in the aftermath: faithful, sorrowful, impotent.

    Or not.  If you have a will of iron, for the love of mercy bend it to conform to the truth.  Sometimes that means diverging from those who have been companions.  There are others following behind you who deserve to arrive at destination safely.  Granted that it’s impossible for any human being to act always with perfect insight.  So, commit yourself to the will of the One who knows everything, and who is always, everywhere working for good.  This is what you’re doing when you pray the Lord’s Prayer: “Thy will be done on earth, as it is in heaven.”  You subordinate your will to the will of God.  You align yourself with his plan and trust his Spirit to guide you through this world and into redemption.

    It’s not that we never make independent decisions or take spontaneous action. We don’t wait around for a special revelation about every detail of our lives.  God is not a micromanager.  God is a delegator. Jesus compares our relationship with God to that of a steward whose master has gone away on a journey, and with whom there’s no communication.  He doesn’t know when the master will return, and he’s on his own with his responsibilities (Matthew 25:14-30.)  God entrusts us with enormous freedom to act at our own discretion–more freedom than we want.

    Subordinating your will means that when you have the impulse to depart from his command, you don’t bestow on yourself permission to disobey.  This temptation can come even after years of righteous living, as another steward parable describes (Matthew 24:45-51.)  It’s tough when you find that your practice of the Christian character, rather than earning you the respect and gratitude of those you’ve helped, actually inspires their contempt.  When someone to whom you’ve always been kind abuses you, it calls into question your mode of relating to others.  There’s a natural impulse toward revenge.  And yet, life depends on curving off to the good.

    This includes speaking out.  The record of Scripture and of the Church shows models who speak cogently and forcefully.  We don’t subordinate our will to the will of everyone we meet.  Still less do we defer to the collective will of any group.  On the contrary, knowing what’s right and wrong–based on the standard of Scripture and of the Church, rather than on a code of convenience–we have the courage to stand firm, and to protest.

    We don’t see what lies around the bend into the future.  But the message of redemption is that when we align our will with God’s will–even when we’re not sure where that’s going to take us–a whole new vista opens up.  There is a path forward, through whatever terrain we find ourselves in, over the horizon and into eternity.

    (“We can but trust God,” says the parson in Dorothy Sayers’ The Nine Tailors.  Read it once for the detective story.  Then come back to it for the flashes of spiritual insight.)

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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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