Monastery of the Holy Cross

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Devil

By the sixteenth century, the era of Saint John of the Cross, the Church recognized three particular enemies of the soul: the World, the Flesh, and the Devil. While this formulation doesn’t appear explicitly until the high Middle Ages, the monastic Fathers wrote about spiritual warfare from a similar set of considerations. Their view of the soul was based on the three appetites or desires that move us to act. The lowest, the concupiscible, is our desire for bodily life and pleasure. The corruption of this desire is what Saint John calls the Flesh. He also says that the attacks against by the Flesh are the most tenacious and continue as long as the old Man survives in us. This comports well with what the monks of old warned their disciples, that sexual desire and the desire for inordinate eating will be temptations to the end of our lives for most of us.

The virtues that help us to govern these desires are especially temperance and courage.

More noble than the concupiscible desires are the irascible desires, which we normally think of as related to emotions like anger and sadness. We desire safety, honor, recognition, and the freedom to act, and when these are thwarted we are tempted to lash out in anger or grow sullen and cynical. These desires are nobler because they relate our souls to the world around us, rather than simply to our own bodies. The corruption of these desires is what John calls the World. He says that these are the simplest temptations to vanquish.

The virtues that we need to cultivate to fight back against the World are courage and especially justice.

The most difficult temptations to understand arise from the Devil, and these attack the intellect and will. The will is our “intellectual appetite,” meaning it is what we want to do after we’ve weighed options and made a decision. The vice that is especially dangerous here is pride, which is the vice that characterizes the Devil himself. The cardinal virtue that needs cultivating in this case is prudence. The Church’s own reflection on the Incarnation helps us to see the importance of the dispositions of humility and obedience.  These two stances, modeled for us by Christ Himself, show us how to develop a truly Christian prudence, one that can fight back against the Devil’s temptations.

What are these temptations? The Devil wants us to misjudge, to choose what is evil disguised as good. In other words, we are likely to be led astray by projects that appear to be good, but in fact weaken our docility to God and to the obligations attached to our state of life. This is connected to pride because we often choose tasks with an unrealistic view of our own ability to bring them to a good completion. We may seek out projects that will make us appear more virtuous to others than we are, rather than choosing a less spectacular path that leads to genuine virtue.

John of the Cross offers us three precautions when engaging in spiritual warfare against the Devil. He is writing for contemplative religious, and so we will need to translate these into terms that will make sense in the world. But it probably is good to bear in mind his original teaching in its religious context, so that we don’t subtly weaken his points.

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh. Here are The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh.)

The Word, the Flesh, and the Devil: The First, Second and Third Precautions Against the Flesh

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here are Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh and Part 2 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh.)

Now we turn again to Saint John of the Cross. In the autumn, I mentioned that he had written a short work on our theme for a new Carmelite convent. So he is writing to women who would presumably already be committed to a program of celibate chastity, regular and difficult fasting, and other typical deprivations associated with religious life. But I also believe that what he has to say will be very much of use to persons in the world.

In his first precaution against the flesh, John asserts that every one of my religious brothers and sisters was sent by God to fashion me, as a sculptor fashions a sculpture by blows. Unkind actions, words and gestures cause me pain, but if I see this as purposed by God, I can remain submissive under these treatments. He believes that we will not make headway against sensuality if we are not able to bear these difficulties with patience.

To translate this into the secular state, I think that we can say that, in any line of work that we have undertaken to serve God, our first presumption should be that the difficulties caused by others in that line of work can be borne for just this purpose. We can to learn to bear with irritation, annoyance, pain and the like. Granted, these areas of work do not come with the same guarantee that religious vows are meant to safeguard. Still, bearing the weakness of body and character of those whom God gives us in our walks of life will go a long way to purifying us of self-regard and a lazy selfishness.

John’s second precaution is that, if a work is in the service of God, we should not give it up when it ceases to bring us satisfaction or pleasure. The liturgy, keeping the accounts, cooking, whatever it is. We should learn to do these things apart from whatever pleasure we might expect from them.

This, again, will happen in any line of work. There will come a time when it no longer pleases. The world today urges us to move on rather than accepting the possible benefits of tedium and self-conquest. Again, I am not saying that there will never come a time when the problems associated with your work will not be a good reason to look for another job. But we can first use that boredom and nuisance for spiritual gain.

What derives from this is his last precaution, that we should no longer hope for pleasant feelings in lectio divina, in the liturgy, in any prayer or spiritual exercise that we undertake. Indeed, when they bring bitterness, we should embrace the difficulty, what Benedict would call the dura et aspera.

John’s suggestions seem timely in our world today. The world is geared toward maximizing choice, which usually means maximizing pleasure and comfort, avoiding anything we find inconvenient or annoying. We are frequently told that authenticity requires giving in to any and all desires and curiosities, regardless of whether the kind of instability this invites does real damage to our character. It is a sign of the loss of a larger Christian worldview, centered on the Cross and the hard work of redemption. This season is an opportunity to re-engage in recapturing the world for Christ beginning with our own hearts.

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter

Every human being that ever lived was created for eternity with the God of infinite love. This is part of the Good News that Christians need to share with the world. And that’s because without the Gospel, this infinite longing that we have is easily converted into infinite suffering. Why is this? Because we seek to satisfy this longing with finite things. These can bring us a certain amount of joy, temporary satisfaction and comfort, but soon we begin longing again. As finite creatures ourselves, we cannot obtain the infinite on our own. As Cistercian Father Michael Casey has put it, seeking transcendence sounds great until you realize that it leaves you perpetually out of your own depth.

There are several common secular solutions to this human dilemma, our desire for transcendence and our utter inability to achieve it. There is the tragic option, to recognize the longing as real, and our intimations of transcendence are real. This is the Stoic or philosophical solution. The Stoic purifies his mind and heart and may even rejoice at the beauty of truth. But he knows that eventually it all comes to an end and he must surrender himself to death. His is a life without hope.

To such persons, Jesus says, “I am the Way. Be baptized into my Body, and I will carry you to heaven, to the eternal dwelling with My Father. For there are indeed many dwelling places there, and there is one for you. You cannot reach it on your own, but I have been sent by the Father to be the bridge, the Mediator. No one can come to the Father except through Me, and here I am, and I offer myself to you in the Bread of eternal salvation.”

This is the Way of Hope.

There is a second solution, that of transhumanism, as we call it today. Transhumanists want to use human intelligence and creativity to crack the code of human morality, to rewrite our genetics to reverse aging, to live forever in this world with no need of God. There is something desperate about this approach, and oddly, something anti-human, since to be human simply is to be a finite creature. Nor will it truly address the desire for transcendence, for the transhumanist will only extend biological life, remaining very much a human being, and therefore mortal, prone to accidents and the like.

To these persons, Jesus says, “I am the Truth. Before my Incarnation, you desired to be like God, but because you did not know the truth about yourselves, you attempted to grasp at divinity by eating of the forbidden fruit. In my Body, see the Truth of humanity, that your nature is compatible with the divine. This Truth unlocks every other truth, explains the universe, even the invisible world of spirits. The Truth is that you are my most precious creature. If only you would trust in me, you would have more than you even know how to desire.”

This is Truth that is sought by Faith.

There is a third attempt to deal with the aspiration for transcendence. I will call this strategy the aesthetic. This one appealed to me when I was younger because I was a musician. Several times in performance, I had the sense of being lifted up into some different realm of experience. Time slowed down. Interestingly, after those performances, I discovered that my fellow musicians had a similar experience, expressed in similar ways. There was a sense that we lived for those experiences, an experience of tranquility amidst change, a sensation of harmony with not only the other musicians, but with the audience and with nature itself. It was a feeling of being unusually alive.

But inevitably, the music ended. We would pack up our instruments and go home, rejuvenated for a while. We could perform the same piece a few days later with no particular effect. The poet and the prophet see the beyond and report it to the rest of us. If only we had the strength and acuity to reach it!

To these Jesus says, “I am the Life. Receive Me and receive true life, a spring of water welling up to eternal life. You have seen traces of Me in all things beautiful in all things harmonious, but I have come to give you Myself, the Life that can never be taken away, that never grows weary or dull.”

This is the Life of Love.

Whatever causes us restlessness is a sign of our thirst for God. Let us then take to heart what Christ is teaching us today: to know Him as the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Jesus, in rising from the dead and ascending to the Father has opened up a Way for us to cross over to our true homeland. Not only that, but in sending us the Holy Spirit, He has opened the eyes of our minds and hearts to see the Truth of all things, a Truth that had been obscured by human sin. And this Spirit is also the Giver of Life, Who desires to be the spark and inspiration of all that we do, that the True Transcendent Life of Christ may shine through our words and actions and bring many others to the rest that only God can give.

Silence (and Noise) in the City

As the weather warms up, we tend to keep our windows open, as we only have air conditioning in a few areas of the Monastery. This lets in more of the typical noise of the city. This time of year, more people are outdoors, so there’s more sound to start with. Sometimes I’ve been asked whether the noise causes problems for prayer. This question isn’t as easy to answer as it appears. Many “problems” in life are so only because we don’t have the insight to handle them properly. Perhaps if I were fully a man of prayer the noise wouldn’t be an obstacle at all.

As a general rule, I don’t find the noise to be distracting. Chicagoans are famous for being able to stop mid-sentence when the El trains pass by, then pick up where they left off. Noise is the baseline background to everything one does in the city. But more than that, noise is a sign of life. It happens because people are in motion, engaged in activity (admittedly not all of it edifying). We monks are here to serve just these people by our prayer and our witness to the joy of the Gospel. In a quiet way, literally, we offer an alternative vision of community and invite those around us to see the difference that Christ makes. The fact that our habits are radically different from the world around us is exactly what draws attention.

Easter Homily: Beyond the Frontier of Death

As we gather this morning, four astronauts are sailing toward the moon. Right now they are over 200,000 miles away from earth. The Artemis II mission is scheduled to circle around the moon tomorrow and begin the long return home.  NASA has a real-time mission tracker website, where you can look at video feeds from four cameras attached to the solar array wings. There is also a computerized diagram of the flight of the Orion spacecraft that allows you view the path to and from the moon from different angles, seeing the relative positions of earth, moon, and sun.

I thought of this last night at the Easter Vigil when we heard about God, at the beginning of creation bringing forth dry land from chaos and creating the two great lights. I came of age in the wake of the first lunar missions and and when I was around ten years old an uncle of mine gave me Isaac Asimov’s Foundation trilogy, a classic of science fiction, which I read and re-read. My father and I watched reruns of the original Star Trek series. I was enchanted by the mysterious music of the opening, with the famous monologue that begins, “Space: the final frontier.”

These were words that would have resonated with Americans, for whom, in the 1960s, the frontier still meant the wild west. The show’s creator, Gene Roddenberry, wrote scripts for Westerns before conceiving Star Trek, and he modeled the show after the great naval exploratory novels of C.S. Forester.

Artemis II countdown

But Roddenberry was also and atheist, and I believe that he spoke too conclusively about space being the final frontier. He was right about something in the human spirit that craves discovery, that is impelled to “boldly go where no man has gone before.” But is space all there is?

When I got older, I fell in love with music, and this, for me, was also a kind of exploration, but of the mind and heart and community rather than of the physical cosmos. The world of art and music seemed to have truly endless possibilities, being unbound by time or space. But as you can see, I pursued neither the life of an astronaut nor of a musician. And that’s because, in the end, the final frontier for all of us is death.

In the words of Hamlet, the afterlife is the “undiscovered country,” though Hamlet, like Roddenberry, surely spoke a bit too hastily. That’s because we do have reports from beyond the grave.

We celebrate that first reconnaissance today, the day that Jesus rose from the dead after descending into hell, preaching to the captives in prison and liberating those who had been held captive to death. Not only has the undiscovered country been scouted out, it has been conquered, and we are free to move in and explore.

The Harrowing of Hell

For those of you who heard my homily on Good Friday, I hope that you mind me excavating a bit more a theme I introduced then. If this new world of the afterlife is now open for colonization as it were, how exactly do we get there? Do we just simply wait until we die? No; again, not in the physical sense. Rather, the entryway is baptism.

We were baptized into Christ’s death, Saint Paul says, so that “as Christ was raised from the dead…we too might walk in newness of life.” Right now, in the present tense, we are invited by God to live no longer by the flesh but by the Holy Spirit. This is the fulfillment of the distinctive human yearning for the beyond, the urge that impels us to venture into space and to plumb the depths of the heart. What we have been searching for all along is Jesus Christ, the Risen Christ, the God of love and infinite creativity.

So where do we go to explore this new country? In today’s second reading, Saint Paul says, “Seek what is above, where Christ is seated at the right hand of God.” Indeed, the very fact of the empty tomb is an invitation to seek Christ, but to do so spiritually, not physically.

The new world opened up for us by Jesus Christ is the spiritual life. And I don’t mean this in the sense of a boutique “spirituality,” where we choose a spiritual lifestyle that suits us. The spiritual life is the life of the unique Holy Spirit, God’s gift to us in baptism, the Spirit of Truth who will lead us into all truth. A personal “spirituality” limits us to what is comfortable. The Spirit of God makes us true explorers of what is real, what is given by God. And we discover this previously undiscovered country first of all in our own hearts.

Saint Macarius of Egypt said this of the human heart: “The heart itself is only a small vessel, yet dragons are there, and lions, there are poisonous beasts, and all the treasures of evil, there are rough and uneven roads, there are precipices; but there too is God and the angels, life is there, and the Kingdom, there too is light, and there the apostles and heavenly cities, and treasures of grace. All things lie within that little space.”

Do you see that he is, like Saint Paul, urging us to seek what is above? God and angels, the apostles and heavenly cities and treasures. Yes, we must take up arms against the dragons and lions and poisonous beasts, that is our sins and vices, but victory is absolutely assured if only we cling to the Lord with all the love of our hearts and fight unwearied at His side.

He is risen indeed, and in His unsurpassed love for you, his sisters and brothers, He has invited us where truly no one had gone before, but now where await all the saints and angels at the eternal heavenly banquet.

Homily for Good Friday

We have no king but Caesar.

The Gospel of John is full of irony. Sometimes the irony is amusing; sometimes it’s profound; sometimes it’s depressing. One of the more depressing ironies is the cry of the chief priests when Pilate presents them with Jesus after finding Him not guilty. They say, “We have no king but Caesar.”

To grasp the depth of the irony, it is helpful to return to the Book of Judges and the First Book of Samuel, which form one narrative together, giving us the story of Israel a thousand years before Christ. The Book of Judges ends with this statement: “In those days there was no king in Israel; every man did what was right in his own eyes.”

This is not a celebration of political freedom.

The people of Israel had reeled from one crisis to another, with God regularly intervening to save her. At the opening of the First Book of Samuel, the dangerous Philistines are becoming powerful. The people of Israel are growing increasingly fearful of this new political threat, and they demand that God give them a king, a strongman to fight their wars for them. The prophet Samuel warns the people that they will lose their freedom were they to submit to a king. A king would levy burdensome taxes, conscript their sons, build up a huge government bureaucracy. Perennial human problems!

In spite of Samuel’s warnings, God Himself agrees to appoint a king, eventually settling on David. Samuel’s predictions, however, quickly come true. On the whole, the kings of Israel found it impossible to avoid compromising entanglements with the gods of other nations. Israel was never the most powerful nation, and the world powers of the time dominated them, even exiling them. After God brought them back from exile, they became client states of the Persians, Greeks, and then the Romans, which is the background situation for the life and death of Jesus, Son of David.

The kingship in Judea had been suppressed for five hundred years at this point. But there were prophecies about a return of the King, the anointed one, who would free God’s people from domination by the Gentiles. And just last Sunday, Jesus allowed Himself to be identified as this Messiah, by riding into Jerusalem, the capital city founded by David himself, on a donkey, according to a prophecy of Zechariah the prophet.

And in fact, this is the closing of the circle.

When God agreed to appoint a king, He told Samuel that the people “have rejected me from being king over them.” In Jesus, we not only have a legitimate descendant of David, and therefore a legitimate heir to the throne, but we have God Himself, ready to take up His rightful place as the King of the people whom He had, time and again, delivered from her enemies.

Will they reject Him as king again?

The emotional background to this drama is fear. The chief priests fear the Romans. They also fear the mob and the consequences of a riot. Pilate is afraid of divine nemesis of some kind, which accounts for his reaction on hearing that Jesus claims to be the Son of God. He also fears the Emperor if things get out of hand. The disciples fear getting captured and punished by one authority or another, and so they run away.

When we are afraid, we are easily manipulated. This, by the way, is one reason the news is always negative. It serves a political purpose to keep large portions of the population anxious.

The choice that we all face at some point is here before Pilate, the authorities, and the mob. When we find ourselves anxious, will we choose God? Or will we demand a powerful man or ideology or movement to attack whatever is making us anxious? And what does it look like, exactly, to choose God?

Let’s admit that this can be a challenge. Because what God looks like on Good Friday is a condemned criminal humiliated by the powers of the world. Serving this God might not be quote-unquote “safe” in the normal sense of that term. But this is to limit ourselves to too narrow a field of vision. Jesus suggests this to Pilate when He says, “My kingdom is not of this world.”

Turning to God will not necessarily give us things that world deems desirable: fame, prosperity, power, comfort, safety. Still, trusting God will give us something much, much greater: victory over death itself. Fame, prosperity, and power will not deliver anyone from death, nor can any worldly power achieve it.

In conclusion, let’s close another circle.

For the chief priests to say, publicly, before Pilate, “We have no king but Caesar” is willingly to adopt the position of a slave—or at best a client serving the interests of a pagan power. My purpose here is not to assign blame, but to present frankly the temptation that we all face in this life.

I said that God will deliver us from death. What does this look like? Is this something that we wait around for, trying to build up credits with God in the time we have left? Where is this kingdom of God, and how do we get there to avoid slavery to the world?

Well, first of all, we have our Lord’s assurance that His kingdom is among us and within us. It is not far at all. On the Cross, He is showing us how to get there. He is opening the path through death to the Kingdom.

We follow, first of all, by being conformed to His death in baptism, by taking up our Crosses daily and following Him through death to life. This requires the eyes of faith, but it has palpable results. It gives us the freedom to live without fear, to accept whatever sufferings come our way, with peace and indeed joy, for they conform us to Christ and lead to His Kingdom.

As we celebrate the mysteries of Jesus’s Passion, Death, and Resurrection, let us ask God to open the eyes of our spirits to see anew the great love Jesus showed in becoming man for us and suffering for us. May it free us to let go of fear and find true joy in the Lord.

A Joyful Mystery in Lent

Today’s feast of the Annunciation can seem, at first glance, to be incongruous, falling as it does in the last weeks of Lent. While we are meditating on Jesus’ Passion, does it make sense joyfully to celebrate the Incarnation?

In fact, there are good reasons why this celebration falls precisely around the time of Holy Week each year. First of all, we might notice that in the Creed, the words “[He] became man,” are followed immediately by these words: “For our sake, He was crucified under Pontius Pilate. He suffered death and was buried.” Nothing is said about his teaching or healing ministry. We go directly from His birth to His death.

Medieval Christians had a lively sense that the purpose of the Incarnation was precisely that it allowed Christ to suffer for the forgiveness of our sins. And indeed, historians of the liturgy believe that March 25 was chosen as the date of the Annunciation because it was also believed to be the date of Good Friday. This followed a belief in the early Church that Jesus’s conception and crucifixion happened on the same date, nicely demonstrating their interrelation.

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 2

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World. Here is Part 1 of the Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh.)

There is a place for pleasure in the Christian life. Aristotle astutely noted that pleasure typically accompanies the completion of a good action, an action with a properly ordered goal. What the flesh would have us do is to seek this pleasure for its own sake. Here lies the beginning of addiction. When pleasure is unhitched from productive actions and achievement, it becomes its own goal. And when it becomes its own goal, our bodies demand that pleasure continually increase in intensity.

So, goals exercise a certain restraint on pleasure. If they are worthwhile, they always entail accepting a certain amount of discomfort, pain, and danger. To become a great academic requires reading and writing when it is not pleasurable to do so. It requires sacrificing other potential good actions which might bring a certain amount of comfort. It requires being tested and corrected by one’s teachers and peers, perhaps even being subject to ridicule and career sabotage. But the young scholar undertakes those risks, believing that becoming learned and being able to credibly teach others will lead to the pleasures proper to a cultivated mind.

As Saint Paul again points out, athletes deny themselves all kinds of things. We can take up his metaphor and note how strength conditioning requires that we continually force our muscles to move weights that cause pain and discomfort.

We have seen that goals naturally tend to reorient pleasure. But what about choosing proper goals? Saint Ignatius of Loyola has made one important contribution to this theme. If I need to choose between two courses of action, when will I know that I am ready to make the choice? The answer has to do with unearthing hidden fears, sensual inclinations and the like. In addition to gathering information germane to my choice, I also must frankly examine the likely fallout from each choice. Only when I am ready to accept whatever discomforts are associated with both choices, am I ready to choose fully rationally, without being swayed by an irrational aversion to difficulties.

If a lot of this sounds like Stoicism, that is because the Stoics’ take on these questions is remarkably similar to the Christian. One area where the Christian parts ways with the Stoic is in this notion of provoking the flesh by voluntarily taking on deprivations. If I could summarize this briefly, and inadequately, while the Stoics contributed much to our understanding of these battles, they shared with other schools of Greek philosophy a tendency to conflate sin and ignorance. They moved closer to the Christian position than did, say, Socrates, but there is still a sense that once the intellect is healed, the will inevitably follows. The Christian, by contrast, believes that the will must be regenerated by grace in order that the intellect may be healed.

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent

Human beings, like all animals, are creatures of desire. We desire food and drink, and we have this desire because we need nourishment to stay alive. And again, this makes us akin to other animals. While plants also need nourishment, they lack desire, properly understood, because they lack awareness of their need. Animals not only hunger but deliberately set off to find food.

In this area, what distinguishes us from other animals is that we can use our reason to determine how to satisfy our natural desires. We can even deliberately not eat, enduring hunger pains for some greater goal such as fasting or dieting. We can also use our intelligence to alter the food we get by cooking it, mixing ingredients, and so on, to produce something that tastes good.

We go even further, using meals to symbolize other desires. For example, we desire companionship and community. A decision to eat together is a decision to satisfy that higher desire. What the philosopher Aristotle discovered is that we have a tendency to rank our desires. He explained this at the beginning of his book on ethics.

When we see someone carrying out an action, and we ask him, “What are you doing?”, we expect that the reason he gives will point to a desire that he is attempting to satisfy.

“Why do you get up at 5:00 a.m.?”

“To get to work on time.”

Aristotle then points out that we can continue to ask, “Why?” to the answer.

“Why do you want to get to work on time?”

“Because I want to get paid and not laid off.”

“Why do you want money?”

And so on.

These chains of questions will always terminate at the one thing that Aristotle says we seek for its own sake, which is happiness. We don’t normally ask people, “Why do you desire happiness? What good is it?”

We all recognize this is a sufficient answer to any question about someone’s motive. If it makes you happy, go ahead!

Aristotle’s theory is pretty sound, but I also think that it requires some filling out. For example, he did not deal with an interesting phenomenon that we find in the Old Testament.

I’m thinking of the prophets. If we were to ask Jeremiah why he was continually criticizing the rulers of Jerusalem, it would be a stretch to show that he did this because he thought somehow it would make him happy. What he desired was something more like proper worship of God. If I could use the words of the Beatitude, he hungered and thirsted for justice.

Alright, with that as background, we look at today’s gospel. We see that, from one perspective, it is all about desire. Both the Samaritan woman and Jesus desire water. Both Jesus and the disciples desire food. And Saint John the Evangelist shows us how these desires point to a higher yearning in the human soul.

Jesus says to the woman, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and you living water.” In other words, if we knew the gift of God, we would desire it.

What is God’s gift?

It is the Holy Spirit. Before the Son of God came into the world, would we even have suspected that it was possible to receive God’s Holy Spirit? I think yes and no.

There are stories from many ancient cultures in which a divine spirit enters a human being, making him or her capable of particular impressive deeds, such as the writing of poetry or the invention of writing itself. We say of the Holy Spirit that He has spoken through the prophets, that in some way, they were conduits of the Holy Spirit.

But what Jesus is promising to the woman at the well is something more profound, a permanent union of ourselves with God. This promise reveals to us that our desires for truth, justice, and beauty are in fact different ways of longing for God. That only God can satisfy, and He intends to do this for us in a way surpassing anything we can imagine.

How are we to respond to this offer from God?

Let’s go back to the gospel reading. When the woman is persuaded that Jesus has something of value to offer, she asks for it outright. And so we, too, should ask. Here, though, we should bear in mind that the gift that Jesus is offering will only be available after His death.

What Jesus does next is surprising: He gently talks the Samaritan woman into an admission of her own serial relationship failures. Is Jesus saying that He will only give the Spirit once she’s fixed all her problems?

No, the Catholic Church doesn’t teach that.

Also bear in mind that the woman still thinks that they are talking about water. Things change, however, when she realizes that Jesus is a prophet. This suddenly prompts her to speak about proper worship of God, a point of sharp dispute between Jews and Samaritans at the time.

Jesus says that God the Father seeks people to worship Him in spirit and truth. This is where God’s invitation points, that we learn to worship Him properly. What this means in the context of this homily is, once again, that God is the final terminus of desire, God is what we crave in our heart of hearts, whether we are aware of it or not.

And the expression of this desire is literally worship. The word worship is derived from the same root as the word “worth.” Worship is then that activity in which we acknowledge that which has highest value, God Himself.

This is what I said that the prophets like Jeremiah were desiring rather than earthly happiness. And it was, in some sense, the Holy Spirit that both satisfies that desire and inflames it. The reason that Jesus brings up the ex-husbands of the Samaritan woman is to help us see that we can’t obtain satisfaction of this desire for God without correcting our lower desires.

The longing for love that the Samaritan woman manifested in her many marriages was a sign that could have pointed to God but did not. At some level that is why the marriages didn’t work.

Jesus is healing her and recalibrating this desire, and it truly changes the woman. She goes from being someone avoiding the eyes of others to speaking directly and persuasively to them.

As we move toward the middle of Lent, what desires of ours point away from God, and how can we redirect them? Is there a hidden sin that I’m keeping from God and from my own scrutiny out of shame? And if so, how might Jesus’s gentle example move me to re-examine and heal my own past?

As we cooperate with God’s grace in this process of healing, the Holy Spirit will become more of a conscious companion. And what more could we ask for than that?

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction to Precautions Against the Flesh, Part 1

(Here is the Introduction to the whole series. Here are The First Precaution Against the World and The Second and Third Precautions Against the World.)

In his Letter to the Galatians, Saint Paul writes, “Now the works of the flesh are plain: immorality, impurity, licentiousness, idolatry, sorcery, enmity, strife, jealousy, party spirit, envy, drunkenness, carousing and the like.” This quote helps to situate what we mean when we say that one of the three enemies of the soul is the flesh. Perhaps when we hear “sins of the flesh” we are inclined to narrow down the temptations of the flesh to lust and gluttony, with a nod toward other excesses of alcohol or drug consumption. But the tradition sees the danger here at a deeper level because of the subtle corruptions of our intellect and will that come about from an undue search for pleasure, comfort, and safety.

In our posts last year, we looked at the three traditional enemies of the soul, the World, the Flesh and the Devil. We saw that they correspond to three parts of the human soul. The Flesh is a distortion of the concupiscible part of the soul, that which seeks health, self-preservation and procreation. The World distorts the irascible part of the soul, that which governs anger, sadness, and to a certain extent vainglory. The Devil operates primarily on our intellect, distorting our notion of ourself and of God.

Jesus’s temptations in the desert also typify these three battles. The temptation to turn stones into bread is clearly a temptation of the hungering and fatigued flesh. The temptation to exercise power over all the nations is a world-related one, and the temptation to tempt God, to force God’s hand, is specifically diabolical.

So let’s begin with Jesus’s fast of forty days. The first interesting aspect of this is that Our Lord’s fast was a provocation. He is forcing the battle against the flesh out into the open. Later on, I will be making a brief comparison between the Christian understanding of the flesh versus the Stoic version. One of the important contrasts is here, that Jesus deliberately chooses prolonged hunger in order to get the Tempter to manifest himself on the pretense of the flesh.

Jesus is teaching us that it is a good practice to choose, for a season, what is uncomfortable, whether it be the discomfort of hunger, of a hard chair without a cushion, which is a typical monastic discipline, or hard manual labor. The goal is to get the flesh to mumble and complain against us and then to respond with a simple “no.” This has the eventual effect of freeing us from unthinking sensuality, which often operates at a subconscious level.

When we attempt these things, we can now see that the Tempter will use our discomfort as a pretext. Jesus’s response is interesting: “Man does not live on bread alone.” This is to say that our survival does not depend on comfort and ease.

One of the tempting ideas that the modern world has put into our minds is that these ascetical practices of the great saints of old—wearing hair shirts, sleeping on the ground, eating once every other day—will make us unhealthy, cause us to wither into resentful Feraponts. But in fact the Christian tradition, and more specifically the monastic tradition has always made a distinction between causing pain or discomfort and causing injury and harm. Not all pain is associated with damage.

And indeed, relaxation has its place. A story is told of Saint Antony the Great one of the champions of extreme ascetical practices. A farmer, having heard about Antony incredible feats of self-denial, was scandalized when he saw the great man from a distance, talking and even joking with a group of younger monks. When he confronted the saint Anthony had him string his bow and shoots a series of arrows. After a few bowshots, the farmer objected: if he continued to stretch his bow in this way, it would break. So too, said Saint Anthony, with the monk. It is not healthy to practice asceticism without relaxation.

This is also true when our health is compromised. Sometimes survival and the restoration of health requires treating the body gently. The pain and discomfort of sickness or age, when borne well, are penance in and of themselves.

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