Browsing tag: spiritual

  • Human Reefs Need Saving Too

    Do not gratify the promptings of the flesh Galatians 5:16; hate the urgings of self-will.  (Rule of St. Benedict 4. 59-60)

    What is “the flesh”?

    “The flesh” is a Christian metaphor.  The struggle represented by “the flesh” consists of our efforts to do good and to reject evil.  It’s this vital spiritual struggle that builds the moral exoskeleton of formal behaviors that define right living.

    This spiritual struggle is not a fight against our own physical bodies.  Sexual desire isn’t evil, nor are the desires for food, warmth or sleep.  Desires only become “the flesh” when they impel wrong behavior.  “The flesh” tempts us to do things that would violate a command of God, if we yielded to the impulse.  For example, a struggle against an angry impulse to hurt someone is a struggle against “the flesh,” even though bodies may have nothing to do with it.

    The part of us that opposes “the flesh” is our conscience.  Your conscience informs you when you’ve breached a norm of your Creator.  It’s the spiritual organ that corresponds to your physical nervous system.  Just as your nerves react when you’ve injured yourself and produce a sensation of pain, your conscience reacts when you’ve incurred spiritual damage by doing wrong.  The feeling your conscience produces is called remorse.  Most importantly, remorse is meant to help you survive spiritually. Like physical pain, it indicates when and where you have a problem.

    Neither your body nor your soul will function if you numb them with substance abuse or perpetual escapism.  Your conscience will sicken if you bathe it in evil influences.  Temporarily you may feel relief if moral limits disappear from your habitat.  But soon the murky haze of a featureless landscape disorients your conscience, which continues to lash out at evil without knowing where evil is anymore.

    So those who seek holiness immersed in toxic waste shudder daily from the shocks of brutality let loose in their midst.  No stops remain to signal small aggressions.  Suddenly grotesque violence explodes without warning.

    What happens to communities when moral boundaries disappear?

    For generations the West has employed a blast fishing approach to material progress at the expense of spiritual infrastructure. Blast fishing uses dynamite to stun fish so quantities can be netted quickly. As a result, the blasts destroy the nearby coral and eliminate its reef habitat.

    The ban against idolatry was exploded to make room for the supersize ego.  Holy sabbaths crumbled in the vanguard of economic expansion.  Refraining from adultery blew up when personal bonds got in the way of individual satisfaction.  Of the Ten great commandments, not one remains sacred.

    To clarify: not all of the destruction is accidental.  A campaign to erase all formal boundaries has explicitly targeted moral restrictions.  Big players blast away at ethical barriers in the name of their personal freedom.  For large egos, freedom requires the total elimination of any hindrance.  Nor do they permit anyone else to live free.  All in their path must yield.

    Coral polyps are fleshy creatures that form exoskeletons to survive.  They take in colorful algae to farm for nutrients.  Coral communities create vast structures called reefs.  The intricate spaces of the reef formations provide shelter to fish and invertebrates seeking refuge from predators.  Large predators cannot penetrate the narrow fissures of the reef structure.

    Similarly, human beings are vital souls whose efforts to repel evil and cultivate goodness produce the formal systems that support a thriving culture.  Comedy, tragedy, eroticism and remorse all require fixed boundaries to exist.

    What happens when you take the bait?

    The sales pitch has been a promise to eradicate pain.  It is as a form of pain that remorse was slated for elimination.  The lure of numbness generates enormous profits as drugs and distractions achieve insensibility for all.  Millions too zoned out to react to their own destruction float into the nets of unscrupulous profiteers.

    No boundary: ergo no transgression.  No transgression: ergo, no guilt.  And without guilt, there can be no remorse.

    In this wasteland devoid of impeding structures, Homo neuroticus thrashes about. Anything and everything in the cloudy murk triggers a spasmodic reaction, inflicting harm on those nearby. Neuroticus used to be a rare breed and was called “crazy” in the vernacular.  Psychologists of a previous age had observed an association between neuroticus and remorse. But they didn’t have many specimens to analyze. Freudians assumed that neuroticus must be the offspring of remorse, since the two were often seen together.

    Neuroticus is insensitive to humor, grief and contrition.  It must contort itself to get a sexual thrill.  It expends furious energy to control everything in its environment.  But it cannot control itself.  Neuroticus experiences its own impulses as irresistible.  Its large ego prevents it from admitting that it could do anything wrong.  With no cultural reef of formal boundaries to limit its movements, neuroticus produces specimens with larger and larger egos.  No joke can survive in the shadow of neuroticus.  No sorrow throbs.  Mercy moves not.  These have all fled.

    But remorse is not the parent of neuroticus.  Remorse is its guide through the deep.  When you have a sense of where the boundaries are, you can direct your actions purposefully.

    Bring the reef back.  We could all laugh again.  We could weep again.  Real thrills could move us.  We could live again.

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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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  • 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.

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  • 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).

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  • 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.

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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. (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.

     

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