Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles under Moral Theology

The World, the Flesh, and the Devil: Introduction

Saint Paul writes to the Ephesians:

“You [Christ] made alive, when you were dead through the trespasses and sins in which you once walked, following the course of this world, following the prince of the power of the air, the spirit that is now at work in the sons of disobedience. Among these we all once lives in the passions of our flesh.”

This is the most immediate scriptural citation behind the traditional formulation of the three enemies of the soul, The World, the Flesh, and the Devil. This is one of the traditional means of distinguishing between the spirits opposed to God and the Holy Spirit, and by the High Middle Ages, we see this triad quoted by Saint Thomas Aquinas as something widely known and accepted in Catholic moral theology.

Saint Paul says that we once walked in the course of this world, the first enemy. The second, the prince of the power of the air, refers to a belief that demons inhabited the air between earth and heaven, and prevented our ascent there. We see this in icon of the Ladder of Divine Ascent, where monks are attempted to climb to heaven, but are being pulled at, and even at times pulled down by flying demons.

Finally, Paul mentions the passions of the flesh.

In a series of upcoming posts, I will be meditating on these three enemies of the soul: the world, the flesh, and the devil. I will be making use of the thinking of Saint John of the Cross, who does a brief exposition of them in a short work called The Precautions. This is written for cloistered religious, and I plan to follow it pretty carefully, making some suggestions about how we might adapt it to the lay state, and I hope that our later discussion can be an opportunity to flesh out how best to make this adaptation.

In this work, he says that the world is the enemy least difficult to conquer, and so we will happily begin our reflection there. But by way of introduction, I will say a bit more in general about the three enemies.

John of the Cross goes on say that the devil is the hardest to understand, and the flesh is the most tenacious.

In his formulation, we can see that defeating the devil requires purification of the intellect, and battling the flesh the purification of the lower appetites, which leaves the higher appetite of the will as the field of combat against the world.

In traditional monastic spiritual theology, which follows on that of Plato and Aristotle, the soul is divided into three parts. The highest is the rational, and the lowest is called the concupiscible. In the middle is the irascible. If we work our way up, we discover that the concupiscible appetites are those of pleasure and a sort of mindless self-preservation, the interior physical needs of the body. The thoughts connected with this part of the soul are primarily gluttony and lust, though avarice is partly connected to this lower part of the soul.

The middle part of the soul regards our relationships to persons and to good and evil. This irascible part used anger to fend off danger and sadness to remind us of previous mistakes and losses. Under the power of sin, we mistakenly use anger against other persons and sadness against others who we feel deprive us in some way. It culminated in sloth or accedia, a kind of abandonment of any spiritual ideal. This is the area we will be looking at in the next post.

Finally, the rational part manifests itself in pride and vainglory.

Natural contemplation, the meaning of creatures, and the end of the virtues

When I initially read Cassian’s first Conference, I found the discussion there of the goal (scopos) and end (telos) of the monk to be interesting but not particular engaging on a personal level. Over the years, as I re-read it, it occurred to me that the problem was the entire worldview that formed me. This worldview sees no goals to anything in the cosmos, depicting it as the open-ended development of initial conditions and inputs of force and motion. That matter and energy happened to produce human beings, gemstones, scorpions and tornadoes is a quirky and ultimately inexplicable part of this random development.

It was through reading Dante, Charles Williams, Chesterton and MacIntyre that I gradually came to understand the perfections of creatures, first on an intellectual level of assent, and eventually at the level of the heart, of appreciation and gratitude. This helped to open up for me what Evagrius calls natural contemplation: the graced ability to see creatures from the spiritual perspective, the perspective of God and the angels, the perspective of eternity.

Natural contemplation means accepting that creatures have meaning. They have ways of flourishing and ways of failing to flourish. We participate in God’s life-giving grace when we work towards this flourishing—or even simply allow it to happen, take note of it, and give God glory.

An example that I have frequently used to illustrate this is that knives are meant for cutting things, and they work best when we understand the type of knife that we are holding. When we use a serrated knife with the right pressure, allowing the blade to gain purchase on the bread crust, we can gently guide it, according to its nature, through the bread. But when we use it like a guillotine, pressing straight down until the piece of food pops apart, the knife, as if objecting to being handled incorrectly, issues a loud report from the plate (which is perhaps also objecting to our misuse of its nature).

We go a step further when we use a knife as if it were a screwdriver or prybar. Sadly, this is a common mistake, to judge by the number of knives in our kitchen that are missing tips. But it is an outgrowth, even if a somewhat trivial one, of a worldview that gives objects no meaning, no goal, no nature. Since they have no inherent telos, we are free to make use of them as our wills desire. And so a knife becomes a screwdriver, and in secular culture men become women and women men.

If we lack the ability to be receptive to the goal or end of other creatures, is it really a surprise that we struggle to see our own lives as goal-driven? Human beings flourish in predictable ways. We will move toward this type of flourishing life not by examining our inner movements, but by attending to objective standards like the virtues.

All of the activities of the monastery gain their worth from what they contribute to a growth in virtue and an awareness of our final destination. At the judgement, God will not ask us if we got our work done on such and such a date, but if we labored to serve our neighbor in love, or if we sacrificed ourselves for the poor. We will not be asked if we were true to ourselves, because who we are in Christ is something beyond our ability to discern at the moment.

Fr. Timothy recently mentioned a reading from Saint Teresa Benedicta of the Cross. She says that, at the end times, God will reveal our proper name to us: we won’t understand fully who we are until then. But virtue will help offer us glimpses along the way. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to understand creatures from a proper theological perspective. If we are growing in virtue, we are more likely to be asked to step out of our present comfort zone and take up a task that will stretch us, perhaps quite a lot. But if we lack virtue, others will be reluctant to give us those opportunities to learn whether we have the skill to serve the community and the Church at a new level.

Conference on the Priority of Persons over Rules

Tonight, I would like to follow up on a topic that I spoke about during Chapter last week, and that is the priority of persons over rules. I asked Br. Anthony to look up some examples of this contrast in the Sayings of the Desert Fathers. Some of the examples I will use tonight are the ones he found.

It occurred to me that a major source of the appeal of the Desert Fathers as spiritual teachers is precisely that they refuse to formulate rules. In fact, they seem to be better known for finding all kinds of exceptions to rules. Here’s an example:

A directive was once issued at Scete: “Fast this week.” It came about that some brothers from Egypt visited Abba Moses and he cooked them a little gruel. Seeing the smoke, his neighbors told the clergy: “Here, Moses has broken the directive of the fathers and cooked himself some gruel.” “We ourselves will speak to him when he comes,” they said. When Saturday came round, the clergy, well aware of the great discipline of Abba Moses, said to him before the company: “Oh Abba Moses, you have broken men’s directive but fulfilled God’s.”

The priority of persons is often very explicitly taught by the Fathers. Here is a saying of Antony the Great:

Life and death depend on our neighbor: for if we win over our brother, we win over God, but if we offend our brother, we sin against Christ.

Here, I will note that we do not typically win someone over by quoting the rule book to him. This doesn’t mean that it isn’t sometimes an act of charity for someone to state the Church’s teaching clearly. Among the spiritual works of mercy are instructing the ignorant and admonishing the sinner. Saint Benedict clearly wants the abbot to intervene when a brother is acting disobediently or contrary to the community’s customs.

But notice that here, it depends in another way upon persons: the abbot is the one who determines when and how to intervene, and this can’t be predicted ahead of time by rules. Our current Abbot Visitor, Abbot Cuthbert, once quoted another abbot, I believe an abbot of Solesmes, saying that in a monastery there should be many strict rules, and many dispensations from those rules. But there are not rules for when to grant a dispensation. That depends on the abbot’s personal judgment.

The abbot according to Saint Benedict is a master of virtue. And we know that the virtuous action cannot be legislated ahead of time and out of context. I believe that Alasdair Maclntyre, in the book Dependent Rational Animals, has also demonstrated that we cannot learn virtue apart from the concrete situations that involve us in the lives of others, and involve them in our lives.

What this means in practice is that virtue can only be learned by faith. In other words, we learn the virtuous action by imitating the one who already possesses virtue, which means that we trust that person’s example, and we act without fully knowing what we are to learn by that action. And then, one hopes, through consenting to that action by an act of trust, observing the consequences of that action, and sympathetically observing how it affects others, we gain insight into what is truly virtuous.

So again, the Desert Fathers embody this principle very strictly. We have example after example of virtuous actions and the responses of the other monks, usually edified, but occasionally scandalized. Typically those who are scandalized are so either because they insist on a rule, or because they insist on the action fitting their understanding of the situation, rather than trusting in the example of a wiser monk.

Conference on Thoughts

It’s been awhile since I last addressed this subject. Evagrius, Cassian and Maximus offer a good deal of technical advice, and we should make a habit of regularly reviewing their teachings. What I offer tonight is a reflection on my own experience in the spiritual battle, including insights from spiritual direction with many monks, priests and others over the years.

Our thoughts are not ourselves. This can’t be overstated. Just because we have a thought or a feeling, no matter how intense it is, does not make it worth our time or worry. All thought should be subject to discernment.

I say this because I have watched well-intentioned people get very hard on themselves for having certain kinds of thoughts. Yes, sometimes we bring these on ourselves by our earlier choices. But this still doesn’t mean that we will make any progress by getting sad about having them, or getting angry or frustrated with ourselves or others.

Any thought can be let go of, or we can at least loosen its grip on ourselves. It is a good practice, maybe ten minutes a day, just to sit still and watch our thoughts. There are many images for how to do this, and how to learn to disengage from a thought. One is to imagine thoughts as so many boats floating down a stream. It’s alright to look at what is in the boat, but don’t get in the boat yourself; let it float away.

Another way to disengage is to use a word or short phrase. I often use, “Amen,” or “Jesus,” or “Jesus, Mary, Joseph,” or “Holy angels of God.” In some ways, the content doesn’t matter. The words are there to place gently upon whatever thought we wish to let go of. Many thoughts recur frequently. The worst thing we can do is get angry because they won’t go away. Again, if I have an angry thought against a brother, I take the word “Amen,” and set it lightly upon that thought and let it go. If it returns, I’m not surprised, I’m not impatient; I simply make the same action of reciting my sacred word and moving on.

Making a habit of doing this intentionally each day is very useful because we learn—slowly, eventually—not to get taken in by thoughts when they surprise us.

Another important habit to cultivate is to question our thoughts, especially if we can notice that a thought has accompanied us into the monastic life from our families, workplaces, or local cultures (for example, urban life, country life, academia, the art world, the military). What was the right way to sweep a floor at home might not be the way the community wants me to do it. If I’m corrected, I am offered the opportunity to let go of another kind of thought.

A particularly pernicious thought is the idea that I have some responsibility to change someone else, to focus on his faults and figure them out. Let’s figure ourselves out first. But we can’t do this, frankly, if we’re always right. All that means is that we never get to the bottom of our prejudices and preferences. If we are always angling to get our way, even if we cloak it under the pretense of helping other to do things “the right way,” we will never question our thoughts. We will never broaden our horizon.

It’s good to ask questions, to be the dumbest person in the room. To be curious about what other people’s experiences are. To notice how others do things differently, especially when they seem to excel in something.

In the best case scenario, we would have holy mentors. But would we even know whether they were holy? That’s another thought, and I’m not sure we’re well-positioned to recognize real holiness or insight. But we can always gain valuable experience by trying out someone else’s method of action. And God will reward us for our self-denial.

Lent and Transfiguration

In the Church’s first three centuries, we have very little overt information about the liturgical calendar. Since the sacraments, the heart of the liturgy are ‘mysteries’, the early Christians were often circumspect in describing them in writing, where they might fall into the hands of the unbaptized. A certain amount of catechesis was required to prepare for initiation into baptism, confirmation (or ‘chrismation’) and the Holy Eucharist. Add to this the fact that the Church was largely underground, and it is understandable why the earliest layer of liturgical development is obscure.

Once we do have good documents, especially from the seventh century onward, we find more or less the fully-formed liturgical year, with a period of fasting preceding the great Paschal Mystery. Already, in this early period, we see the gospel of the temptation of Christ in the desert on the first Sunday, and the Transfiguration proclaimed on the second Sunday. Lent was still understood primarily as a preparation for baptism: the disciplines of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, along with a new set of behaviors made the catechumen a fit receptacle for the divine life given at the Easter Vigil.

It was quite common in the early Church to refer to baptism as ‘enlightenment’ or ‘illumination’. With the gift of the Holy Spirit, the newly baptized began to see the world and his own life as if for the first time in the daylight. Obscure prophecies were explained as foreshadowing the Incarnation and Crucifixion; evil was revealed as a kind of parasite, destined for destruction at the end of time. In addition, the baptized were robed in white, a clear reference to the shining garments of Christ on Mount Tabor. The divine nature begins to shine through human nature after the pattern of the Son of God.

Changing behavior is laborious and demanding. Most of us are accustomed to regular setbacks in our Lenten discipline, and where we manage to hold the line, we are sorely tempted to ease up on the fast, to skimp on prayer. We tangle with the inner darkness that stubbornly resists cooperation with grace. By proclaiming to us the gospel of the Transfiguration on the second Sunday of this season, the Church reminds us that “the light shines in the darkness [John 1: 5],” and that in Christ, it is we whom the Father addresses as ‘well-pleasing’ and ‘chosen’.

In his apostolic exhortation Vita Consecrata, Pope Saint John Paul II makes use of the Transfiguration to explain the particular contours of self-denial in the acceptance of the evangelical counsels (poverty, chastity, and obedience). This way of life in close discipleship with Christ is a way of transformation “from glory to glory.” “And we all, with unveiled face, beholding the glory of the Lord, are being changed into his likeness [cf. 2 Corinthians 3: 18].”

Interestingly, Saint Benedict, the great Lawgiver in the Western tradition of monasticism, and hence of much of subsequent religious life, tells us that the whole of a monk’s life should be like Lent. So the Holy Father’s connection of the Transfiguration with the renunciations of religious life is exactly parallel with the liturgy’s use of the Transfiguration to help us make sense of the self-denial asked of all the baptized during this holy season. The glorified body of Jesus Christ is a reminder of the goal of transformation that we are seeking via our Lenten discipline.

Let me add one more detail from the story of this mystery. Jesus chooses His three closest disciplines, Peter, James, and John, to witness the irruption of His divine glory. These same three will later be with Him in the Garden of Gethsemane. Once again, they will be sleepy! Indeed, they will flee when Christ refuses to manifest His divinity before the arresting soldiers.

After the resurrection, Christ appears to them once again under the appearance of His human nature, but His divinity is now known, and His glory recalled from this mysterious anticipatory moment in His ministry. Peter, James, and John chose to record this event for us who would come after the resurrection. We are urged to see Christ in our neighbor, in the poor, in the sick and the imprisoned, under the appearance of His human nature. Let us not forget the hidden glory that lurks potentially in each of us, veiled by the perishing flesh. When service of our neighbor becomes a burden, let us seek, by meditation, to see Christ in glory whenever He presents Himself in ‘distressing disguise.’ And may this Lent see us grow in love for God and neighbor, ready to celebrate with renewed joy and peace the mysteries of our salvation.

Homily for Ash Wednesday

During Lent, the Church urges us to pay attention to what we eat. Let’s focus our attention today on a significant fact about food. Almost all of what we eat was either once alive or comes from an animal that is or was alive. We eat plant products, like fruits, vegetables and legumes. We eat animal products like eggs, milk and cheese. And then we also consume animals themselves: fish, cows, pigs, chickens, and so on. We sometimes speak of a food chain, the top of which is inhabited by predators, whether it be lions or humans.

What this reveals to us is that our life is borrowed, in some sense, from other living things. This is true of all animals; plants receive their life from sun and water, but then other animals make use of the life that is in these plants to obtain necessary nutrients and complex molecules necessary for more complex life. While we might see ourselves as the top of the food chain, this reflection also reveals our total dependency on other living things for our own life. We can’t survive without plants and animals reproducing, growing, and, most significantly, dying so that we may sustain our own life.

The Lenten fast should spur us to reflect on the primal need for eating, and the significance that our life is not self-generated. We are dependent on other living things, and ultimately, our life comes from God Himself. We do not generate our lives; we receive them from God, and God sustains our life through His gifts of sun, water, plants and animals. We, of course, are meant to participate in this sharing of life by cultivating the garden of this world. But the sustaining and handing on of life has become toilsome, painful, and in the case of childbirth, where a child’s life is fully sustained by the life of its mother, even dangerous. This toil and pain is a result of sin. Work has become labor, laborious, difficult, refractory.

In the gospel of John, Jesus repeatedly teaches us about food and about work. He does this, though, in order to bring new life and a new notion of work into the world. He has come into the world to share His own life with us. He becomes our food, laying down His life for us on the Cross as the Lamb of God, inviting to His Supper. Unless you eat of the flesh of the Son of Man and drink His Blood, you have no life in you. In point of fact, Jesus’s own life is not even His own; he receives from the Father. “As the living Father sent me, and I live because of the Father, so he who eats me will live because of me.” This is quite an astonishing statement. As the Son of God receives life from the very Father, we are being invited at the Eucharistic to receive this same life from God through the sacrifice of His Son Jesus Christ.

Elsewhere, Jesus says, “Do not work for perishable food, but for the food which endures for eternal life [John 6: 27].” And again, “My food is to do the will of him who sent me, and to accomplish His work [John 4: 34].” This work is the harvest of souls, the return of humanity to its rightful Father and God. But idea that the food that sustains Jesus is the doing of the Father’s will is significant for us today on Ash Wednesday. Let me begin to tie up all of these ideas.

As we undertake the fast today, and as we practice various kinds of fasts and abstinence from meat during Lent, let us be conscious of the fact that we are dependent on God. As we experience hunger, let us recognize that this hunger is meant to be a hunger for the true Bread of Life, the Holy Eucharist, in which we receive true and abiding life. To receive this new life fully, we must consent to die to ourselves, to take up our Crosses daily in imitation of Jesus. This is to share in His work, and so, paradoxically, to be fed by the will of the Father. The ashes that we will receive in a moment are a sign of our consenting to die to sin and the old life. Let us remember especially the catechumens and candidates who will receive the Holy Eucharist for the first time at the Easter Vigil, and who are striving to do the will of God and change their lives throughout this holy time.

And then, as we see around us birds returning, plants gradually coming back to life, let us turn our thoughts to the glorious Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, in which we hope to share. And with these thoughts, let us lay aside every weight and sin that clings to us, and run with a lighter step the race that God has set before us, looking always to Jesus who has opened to us the way to eternal blessedness. May He be praised forever. Amen.

The faith of a child

Many years ago, when I was a young adult and attending a family event at my grandparents’, I had an amusing “discussion” with my four- or five-year-old cousin. He had just discovered the word “why” and was asking me an endless stream of questions. “The sky is blue. Why?” When I gave whatever answer seemed suitable for his age, he repeated what I said, and then added, “Why?” I found the exchange rather enjoyable, at least for awhile. I can’t quite remember, but I expect that the conversation ended at the point that I decided to say, “Just because,”…and that was good enough for him. An adult said so.

Faith is the virtue of allowing God to propose to us ideas and plans of action for which the question, “Why?” is more or less irrelevant, at least for the moment. To a child, what I understand about the color of the sky (electromagnetic waves of a certain frequency causing corresponding events in the cones of my eye and brain) is well beyond his cognitive ability at that age. Imagine how much more God knows—He Who knows everything that ever was or will be—than even the most intelligent human. It is clear that sometimes when we ask God, “Why?” He can only respond, “Just because; trust me!”

“Unless you become like a child, you will never enter the Kingdom of Heaven!” May we have that serene and childlike trust in our heavenly Father that Jesus did.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saint Benedict

Put on the armor of God. 

This is the language of battle, even of war.  Saint Paul writes about spiritual armor and spiritual warfare in several of his letters.  But here, in today’s second reading from Ephesians, he is referring to the “panoply,” the full armor of a professional soldier.  He explains why this is necessary:  we must be ready to ward off attacks by principalities, powers, world rulers of this present darkness, evil spirits in the heavens.

If you were to read the accounts of the early monks, you would see that this language was common among the fathers of Christian monasticism.  The biography of Saint Antony the Great, who, together with Saint Benedict, is depicted in the deesis above our altar, is filled with all kinds of spiritual battles between Antony and a host of demons.  Saint Benedict, writing almost two hundred years later, alludes to the great hermits like Antony in the first chapter of his Rule, where he says that hermits fight hand-to-hand with the Devil.  Saint Benedict’s own biography, written by Saint Gregory the Great, also has several stories of Benedict going toe-to-toe with the Devil and his underlings.  He shows that the power of Jesus Christ in his saints is far greater than the power of evil.

But the Lord still wants us to fight, to enter the lists of this spiritual warfare.  Over the course of the centuries, the common teaching drifted away from a realistic depiction of demons as having visible bodies and doing physical harm to monks.  Writers came to the realization—or perhaps just preferred to believe—that spiritual warfare happens primarily in the realm of the mind.  Demons test us by means of thoughts.  The principal thoughts include lust, gluttony, avarice, anger, sadness, vainglory and pride.

You might recognize this list as being very similar to the more contemporary list of the seven capital sins.  That represents the latest development in the tradition, bringing us up to the present day.  Perhaps on the feast of Saint Benedict we can take stock of what has been lost amidst these changes.  Perhaps we can ask whether monks and nuns might not have a significant contribution to make to today’s Church in recalling the dynamic of spiritual warfare.

When we talk about battling against vices, I suspect that we tend to think that we are battling ourselves.  But all human action begins with thought.  Often, we simply are not aware of the thought that precedes the action, because we aren’t attentive to our thoughts.  They can seem to have a persuasive force from habit, from social custom, and so on.

In fact, once we start paying attention to thoughts, we might start wondering where they come from.  Do they come from us or from somewhere else, or both?  So it is that monks and nuns, especially of the contemplative orders, have a special role to play in this spiritual battle.

In the best-case scenario, such monks and nuns are on the front lines.  We withdraw from the world and practice self-silencing to clarify what is going on in our minds:  to notice the fact that actions follow thoughts, and to catch thoughts before they become actions.  Then we can ask the question:  does this thought come from God? Or does it come from the Devil, from Principalities, from powers, or from other lower-ranking demons?

Saint Benedict is the patron of Western Europe, which is probably the last distinction he would have anticipated.  Like ourselves, he lived at a time of complete political upheaval.  Ten years before his birth, the last of the Western Roman Emperors abdicated.  This was followed by the terrible Gothic Wars, as the Eastern Byzantine Emperor Justinian tried to take back the Italian peninsula and reunite it with what was left of the old Roman world.  The end result was widespread destruction all around Benedict’s monastery of Monte Cassino and the beginning of a period of cultural hibernation.

Saint Benedict did not seek a political solution to the grave disorders of his day.  Rather he sought, in all simplicity, a life of solitude where he could focus on his own fidelity to the witness of Jesus Christ.  Where he could meditate day and night on God’s word and put it into practice in the most radical way possible.  Where he could watch his thoughts, purify his actions, and enter into real spiritual struggle by saying “no” to all kinds of temptation.

The first result was that others noticed his holiness and wanted to imitate him.  This led him to write his Rule for monks, but also to take up the work of caring for others, of bringing Christ to the world.  Eventually his way of life became so popular, and his Rule so widely recognized for its practical wisdom and fidelity to the gospel, that by the year 1100, all of Europe was dotted with Benedictine monasteries.

Under their influence, the European Middle Ages as we now know them came to be.  There arose new gospel institutions like the Truce of God, chivalry—which is the knightly warrior code civilized into service of the poor and weak—devotion to our Lady, and prayers for the dead.  All these practices, pervaded by the spirit and rhythms of the liturgy, flourished under the influence of Saint Benedict and his decision to arm himself and do battle for the one True King.

By withdrawing from the world, Saint Benedict and his disciples were able to replace the founding assumption of the previous world, the old Roman world founded in paganism and a drive for power, with a new vision of life under the Lordship of Jesus Christ.

May God help us to be worthy disciples of this great man.  And may his example light a fire in the hearts of many young men and women, who might choose to fight the ills of this age not by becoming internet influencers or political operatives, but by humbly submitting all thoughts to Jesus Christ.

Bright Sadness and the Joy of Spiritual Longing

Lent begins today. We distributed ashes at Mass this morning. Shortly afterward, I distributed Lenten reading to each of the brothers. Saint Benedict instituted this practice in his Rule: the superior gives a book to each brother to be read straight through during Lent. I typically give each brother a classic from a Church Father or monastic saint, though occasionally, a brother might receive a book of more recent of theology if I think it might be useful.

At this point in my life I look forward to Lent with a kind of eager trepidation, if I can put it that way. When I was younger, it was a pure eagerness that accompanied this time of spiritual intensification. As I’ve gained experience, I know that, often enough, an unenlightened eagerness is the beginning of disappointment and recrimination. Therefore I now try to approach Lent with more wariness about the spiritual traps that inevitably accompany any effort to cooperate more fully with grace. The eagerness has in no way left me; it has been, I hope, tempered and made more realistic, more attuned to what spiritual warfare is actually like and to what my own temperament permits in the way of change.

My favorite image of Saint Antony’s temptations, by Martin Schongauer. Two things to notice: the demons, externalized thoughts, are hard to distinguish from Antony. We often have difficulty separating from our thoughts, which is why slowing down and not reacting is so important. Secondly, Antony’s stoic resignation is part of the strategy. Rather than impulsively engaging the thoughts, he is simply allowing them to be, but staying mentally detached from them, not assenting, nor over-correcting by a fretful rejection of their presence.

It is often remarked that the word ‘joy’ appears twice in Saint Benedict’s chapter on Lent. This accords well with the Orthodox phrase “bright sadness” that is the desired disposition of the penitent in Great Lent. For this joy and bright sadness to accompany our fasting, it is important that we actually try to experience hunger. This means “moving toward” the perception of being hungry, accepting it without judgment as another experience. Can we sit still, when hungry, accept the lack of energy and the chills, without reacting? Am I inclined to give in to grumpiness? Or to think about how long it is until lunch? Or to complain about outdated, formalistic Church disciplines? Twenty years ago, our whole community experimented with a scientific, low-carb diet. I was impressed at the fact that balancing one’s carbohydrates with one’s proteins and fat intake makes it possible to lose weight without ever feeling very hungry. This would be another temptation against the fast, I think: seeing it merely in terms of eating healthier, losing weight, getting myself back into those pants that haven’t fit for the past few years or more. Weight loss and physical health are all good, to be sure, and we hope that they are results of the fast. But hunger, as we see in the temptation of Christ in the desert, is part of the process. I am hungry, but I accept that I am not going to eat right now.

We will discover, just as Jesus did, that other temptations dutifully follow after we have decisively, for the moment at least, said no to eating. When we are younger and perhaps less disciplined, the physical craving often remanifests itself laterally in the forms of a lustful eye, fantasizing, or seeking out energetic music or distracting entertainments. It would be useful to recognize this displacement and, as we had said no to eating, to say no to substitutes as well, especially the illicit ones. What we want is for the resistance to food to allow us to peer more deeply into the structure of our desires, especially those desires for safety, love, acceptance, power, and so on. A friend once told me that he stopped fasting because he discovered that it made him angry. My response to this is that fasting often reveals that I am an angry person, or at least a person who has habitually given myself over to anger. And I create an illusion of not being an angry person by cheerfully eating whenever something annoys me. So I never encounter the anger underneath the surface that drives my eating.

When anger, or sadness, or suspicion, or any other negative emotion arises, it is useful again to allow it to be, rather than pretending that it doesn’t exist. This also precludes giving in and treating anger or sadness as legitimate just because I happen to feel one of them at the moment. The point here is to avoid any “quick fix” by giving up the fast or by a superficial happy feeling that we achieve by rewatching an episode of Police Squad for the hundredth time. If I have made a vice of anger, I might need an occasional distraction like that to avoid losing my temper. But the eventual goal is simple and gentle detachment from the disturbance of anger and negativity. This will eventually allow me to confront the thoughts that drive the anger, thoughts of frustration with a brother or a spouse, fear about war in Ukraine (or Covid–remember those days?). From here I can gently substitute thoughts from Scripture, allowing the Holy Spirit to change my outlook gradually. What I discover at this stage are the ways in which I have bought into a narrative about the world, myself, and God, that is profoundly false and distorting–the serpent’s narrative. Holy reading allows me to enter into the truth about these things, a truth that brings an eventual sense of peace and trust.

Power is the deepest danger. Again, it is quite useful to sit still and tell myself, “I am hungry, and the lack of food means that I don’t have the energy to work as hard as usual.” Overwork and, more generally, overfunctioning, is a way of attempting to dominate my environment. In Saint Augustine’s famous and frightening phrase, it is the corrupting libido dominandi, the drive to dominate. When we get sick or injured, or when we are lethargic because of hunger, we lose a good amount of control over our circumstances. Again, this lack of control most often manifests first as anger or sadness. One benefit of being hungry is that anger and sadness are harder to maintain, and we are confronted eventually with our real powerlessness, the realization that our bodies one day (and every day one day sooner) will fall apart and die. “Remember that you are dust and to dust you shall return.”

I will admit to using Drebinisms from time to time to get some distance from angry thoughts.

At this point, we have little left but to turn to God, and this is undoubtedly the best place to be, because God really is in control of everything that matters in the end. “Submit to God. Resist the devil, and he will take flight. Draw close to God, and He will draw close to you [James 4: 7].” “Cast all your anxieties on Him, for he cares about you [1 Peter 5: 7].” This is the source of true joy and peace. As creatures of infinite desire, we find our rest in learning to desire the infinite God and His holy will. Recognizing all of the ways in which we settle for lesser goods is the source of compunction, a type of sadness. But it is a bright sadness because through it we are discovering the source and end of all spiritual longing, the love of the God of Jesus Christ.

No One Was Greater Than John the Baptist

Think about all of the things you know, not by experience, but by testimony. Virtually everything we know about history, for example, we know because others have written down descriptions of past events. I had an art teacher who liked to say that if we learned everything from experience, most of us would die from poison mushrooms. How do we know that some mushrooms are poisonous? Because someone told us, and we trusted them.

Here’s a more troubling example: what we know about current events is from the reports of anchormen and journalists. This raises an important point. The knowledge that we have from testimony is only as good as the trustworthiness of the source. When assessing someone’s testimony, we check carefully to see whether that person is reliable. In other words, the character of the person testifying is important.

John the Baptist is one of the most important persons in the New Testament precisely because he bears testimony to Christ as the Messiah. And what we discover, when we look more closely at John’s career, is that he was widely known to be trustworthy. His character was unassailable. He spent a lifetime meditating on the Scriptures and living a manifestly holy life. People of all kinds were fascinated by him. Roman soldiers went out to hear him speak and ask his advice. Herod’s career was jeopardized by John’s public criticism. The historian Josephus tells us that John’s arrest happened because Herod feared that John’s popularity could lead to an uprising.

John insisted on personal integrity and drew to himself bands of disciples. And he did this not for personal gain, but for the sake of God’s kingdom—this detachment was part of his integrity. This meant that when the Lamb of God appeared, John was ready to point to Him and to send his own disciples to follow Jesus. These disciples included Saint Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter.

John thus prepared a people ready to receive Christ, and He testifies to Christ so that others can see and follow. In this, John provides an important example for us.

In his years in the wilderness, meditating on God’s prophecies, John learns, under the teaching of the Holy Spirit, how to live an upright life in the truth, and how to recognize the signs of Christ’s coming and His presence.

In our world, many people have forgotten about Jesus Christ and His message of redemption, forgiveness, and the promise of eternal life. When we lament this reality, often our first response is to think about organizing some kind of movement or program, or joining such a movement. But the start of any renewal, as we see in monastic history, time and again, is first to check our own reliability as witnesses. Christ hasn’t gone anywhere—but do we see Him in His daily coming? Do we see Him in our neighbor, in the guest, in the poor, in the superior of the monastery? If we don’t, perhaps we can ask John to point to Him. What John tells us is that we can prepare ourselves for Christ’s daily advent by withdrawing into the desert of our hearts and there meditating on God’s prophecies, purifying our own hearts and clearing away distractions.

When it does come time to point others to Christ, how strong will I be as a witness? Am I truthful, disinterested? In a word, am I a reliable witness, a credible source of information? Or do I risk making the gospel less credible by my sins or imprudence? Perhaps John is exactly the saint we need today to prepare again a way of the Lord. Maybe we can leave behind the unreliable information we get from the media and go out to the wilderness where John will teach us again to see Christ passing by. We can learn to say with John, “Christ must increase, and I must decrease.”

One last important example of John’s witness is that John tells us that he rejoices when he sees Christ as the friend of the bridegroom rejoices to see the groom receive his bride. This narrow path of self-denial and witness to Christ will eventually be a path of joy. It will make us fearless witnesses after the pattern of John the forerunner and herald of salvation. Blessed are we to celebrate the life of this great man today!

Blog Topics

Blog Archives