Monastery of the Holy Cross

Et Incarnatus Est – The Prior’s Blog

The Presidency and the Will to Power

On Friday, I said that I would write something about why “emotivism leads us to court political power.” What is emotivism?

It’s not simply that we act on feelings when we should use our brains. We do fall into this trap, but the reason for this is not that we are childish or bad people. There is a history to our predicament. In what follows, it is important that you keep in mind that I believe that there is also a way out of our predicament.

We’ve all experienced futility in certain types of arguments. Many friends of mine in recent weeks have expressed their belief that supporters of Donald Trump are “irrational.” We experience others as “unreasonable,” unable to give reasons for acting as they do, believing what they do. When this gap appears, fruitful discussion evaporates. What we are confronting is the outworking of incompatible principles, or at least first principles for which we have no way of judging priority. Is it worse that Donald Trump’s rhetoric fuels racism, or is it worse that Hillary Clinton favors a permissive abortion policy (a question that confronted conservative voters)? How do we make judgments between free trade, job creation, health care, and all the rest when we can’t find any kind of bedrock on which we can all agree?

This is what I mean when I say that we are incapable, at present, of having a rational discussion about politics. Persons living in places as different as rural Mississippi, Portland, and Detroit have, unsurprisingly, espoused multiple first principles, and together we have no obvious way of negotiating between their rival claims on us. As philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre points out (actually pointed out, already back in 1981), the situation is even worse than that. The problem with first principles is that by definition, we can’t give reasons for holding them. Don’t we reason from first principles and not to them? But if so how does it come about that we seem to know what they are? And how in the world can I argue with someone who holds first principles that seem wrong to me?

The answer is that we don’t argue, for the most part. We pretend to argue, but what we are usually doing is trying to manipulate other people into changing their first principles, or at least into giving way and letting us follow our principles. This hidden power play of manipulation was already noticed by a much earlier philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche. He made the very strong claim that what appears to be moral reasoning in our public and private lives is really the expression of a desire for power. We then dress up this “Will to Power” with a respectable front of reasoned argument. In other words, when I say something like, “we should raise taxes on the wealthy and redistribute the money to the poor,” it is not completely off the wall to ask what my real motives are. Am I resentful of rich people, and want to see them taken down a notch? Will some of this money come to me? Do I get to enjoy feelings of moral superiority for apparently altruistic aims? Do I want the gratitude of poor people, so that they won’t be a potential nuisance for me? I could go on.

I’m not sure that I was aware of the extent to which Nietzsche was right until I entered the monastery, oddly enough. I’ve always liked Nietzsche, or perhaps felt that he was the primary thinker who needed to be answered if we were to have anything like a flourishing civil order. And to be honest about it, I suspected other people of emotivism, but assumed that my arguments and first principles were unassailable. Monastic life is about conversion, and one of the more surprising aspects of my own conversion (and if it’s real conversion, much of what we discover will come as a surprise, welcome or unwelcome), is the realization that I’m more a part of the emotivist problem than I wanted to admit.

So what have I done about it? Answering that will have to wait for now. Here, I want to finish off the modest point at the heart of this post.

If we have no way (yet) to resolve our moral disagreements rationally, and if our attempts to do so turn out to be assertions of power rather than reason, an important consequence follows. If, in a debate, we recognize that we lack the power to silence opposition and push through our moral agenda, we will try to enlist a more powerful third party who can do this for us. The very interesting sociologist Jonathan Haidt notices this very trend in the campus culture of microagresssion and victimization. Various strategies include organizing protests, public shaming on social media, and so on. But the election of a president is the big prize. He or she has the most power of all, and I suspect that one of the reasons that we have, over the past century, continually added to the power of the presidency, is that we’ve sensed at some level that we need a strong person to enforce policies that we can’t agree on as a people. Note that a major factor in this drift is the original sin of the American republic, that of slavery. We solved the problem of slavery by force, the force of the presidency no less. In contemporary life, when we have a president who shares our first principles, we tend to have a certain sense that good will has a chance of prevailing in the world, and when the president is someone who does share our first principles, history seems to be against us, evil prevailing, and so on. At some level we sense that it depends on power. “Q.e.d.” quoth Nietzsche from the grave.

The presidency is not the only example. Catholics are tempted by the same kind of whiplash. Conservatives who felt that we were finally righting the ship under Pope Benedict XVI feel like we are quite suddenly and astonishingly weak under Pope Francis. Liberals who despaired of seeing the fruits of Vatican II realized because of the traditionalist leaning of the same Pope Benedict XVI, suddenly find blossoming of goodness and love everywhere under the same Pope Francis.1405002171232_wps_6_pope_francis_meeting_with The apparent rapport of the two of them doesn’t seem to affect this perception, which should lead us to believe that something other than a Manichean struggle between good and evil is going on, or at least that we have not characterized the struggle between good and evil properly, as one that goes through our own hearts and not through the conservative/liberal divide that we have inherited from the French Revolution. In the Catholic case, this over-reliance on the Holy Father is especially irritating to me, given that one of the best ideas, in my opinion, to come from the Council is that of subsidiarity. This means learning to solve problems at a local level without constantly appealing to higher-up third parties. To some extent, this implicates the project of Benedictine monasticism, properly understood.

Upcoming:
1) The problem of morality as a thing.
2) Will talking about it help? Or not?
3) Nietzsche (almost) right again: truth as relationship.

Love of Neighbor, Love of Enemies

Several persons have contacted me and asked me to share some thoughts on the election and its meaning and aftermath. What are our responsibilities as Americans, as Christians and Catholics? If anything, Tuesday’s results and the response of those who opposed Mr. Trump have crystallized in my mind certain ideas in moral philosophy that the brothers and I have been hammering out together for many years. I have found it difficult to convey these ideas in other fora, especially on-line discussions such as take place on Facebook. Our ideas tend to get distorted by the typical political and cultural narratives that pervade the internet and other media. Last year, I began to write out a systematic outline on this blog, but I think it’s worth going through the exercise again, with newer insights from Nietzsche, Max Scheler, James Alison, and William Cavanaugh. Not only that, but much of our work turns out to be applicable to the present political situation.

But this first post is meant to establish the context for everything else that is to be said, lest the rest of what I write appear as an irresponsible escape into navel-gazing.

We are still a nation of laws

…or at least we have always aspired to be. When political rhetoric of any kind is used as an excuse to perpetrate bodily harm or issue threats, this should be met not only with disapproval but with the full force of the laws against such behavior. Those of us who denounce violence will make our own insistence on this point more credible by our own principled respect for the law. There are multiple reports of violent incidents that are being connected to the election results. Most of what appears in the media (and, plausibly, most of what has actually taken place) is violence directed against persons such as Muslims and Mexicans, whose religious and ethnic identities are bound up not only in Mr. Trump’s rhetorical gestures, but in his stated policies. Some of the violence has been against Trump supporters. All violence is out of bounds and deserves the condemnation of every American.

Christian discipleship is authenticated by love of enemies

This past political campaign was demoralizing in its constant ratcheting up of the language of demonization. This happened on both sides, and neither side seems to see its own demonization for what it is. This makes civil discourse impossible. Or, perhaps the gradual breakdown of civil discourse has left us with no way of engaging in truly rational discussions (see Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue, chapter 2). Without the possibility of rational argument, the temptation is to resort to demonizing those who disagree. In many cases, we have no way of making common cause, even with those inclined to agree with us, without scapegoating someone (this Girardian insight has been inverted and made into a conscious political tool by Saul Alinsky). Christians cannot settle for this state of affairs, and certainly ought not to demonize those who hold divergent ideas from our own. Pope Saint John Paul II, while an archbishop in Poland, used the strategy of holding the communist regime to account for the gap between their official rhetoric and the actual state of affairs. Václav Havel followed a similar strategy in the former Czechoslovakia.

The simplest way of stating this is that we are commanded to love our enemies and not to meet violence with violence.

Christian social thought is grounded in love of neighbor

Who is my neighbor? The rise of Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump was an indication of a widespread sense in communities blue and red that the general drift of American politics has been at the expense of a great many Americans. Trump’s hope to “make America great again,” and Sanders’s “political revolution,” need to be seen in the long-range context of a failed war in Iraq, the ongoing symbiotic relationship between the federal government and defense contractors, banks, et al,  5.5 million home foreclosures, with virtually no repercussions for those responsible for this widespread suffering. The Washington and media elites are widely understood to belong to a utopian (i.e. “no-place”) globalist class that has forgotten the responsibility they have for their fellow Americans. Instead of seeing fellow Americans as neighbors with a common cause, elites unthinkingly deride the suffering as the irresponsible “47 percent” or lob them into the bucket of deplorables.

Again, I will have much more to say about how we got here, and what sort of strategies are needed to recover a sense of solidarity between Americans. In various ways, the healing follows from the principle of love of neighbor. The priest and the Levite, political insiders and beneficiaries of political power, were afraid to show compassion to the man left for dead on the way to Jericho. Perhaps we need to become outsiders, like the Samaritan, in order to see the suffering in front of us for what it is. Through the strengthening of local networks of concern, we can bring to bear a properly political pressure to bear upon government leaders, most of whom, after all, are chosen by us and work for us.

Love of God, love of neighbor, love of enemies. These are the measure of Christian witness, which is needed now.

Next: Why emotivism leads us to court political power.

 

On the Impermanence of Institutions and the Permanence of Virtue

I wrote several days ago something to the effect that “things are worse in the Church than people think.” This sentiment is worth qualifying and examining.

Mainly, I’d like to distinguish what I mean from what Rod Dreher means when he writes similar things. As I understand him, he sees Christian institutions under imminent attack from secularizing forces. He fears that Christians are oblivious to the seriousness of the threat. In my experience, Christians are plenty aware that demographics trends and political developments do not bode well for the Church in the immediate future. What he perhaps is responding to is the fact that few Christians make this their first concern. I don’t think that this is necessarily complacency in many cases. To explain this, let me say something about institutions.

Alasdair MacIntyre, whose famous St. Benedict quote is the inspiration for Dreher’s “Benedict Option,” is a man whose comprehensive thinking on modernity, morality, and faith deserves as much attention as one can afford. He spends almost an entire chapter on institutions in his seminal book After Virtue. Institutions are important, but should always be secondary to practices. An institution like a chess club brings together persons interested in playing chess and fostering its proper enjoyment. The club itself is not a substitute for the actual practice of playing chess. We all know that institutions tend to have their own internal logic that can often interfere with the practices they are meant to foster and protect. Therefore institutions can only function well and in proper subordination to practices if the members are virtuous. And, as MacIntyre makes clear elsewhere, virtues are learned in practices, not in the bylaws of institutions.

In my opinion, most Christians are aware that longstanding institutions are endangered. And I would agree that many of us Christians are not spending lots of time worrying about it. Ambivalence in this regard has two sources. The first is a recognition that our current institutional arrangements are often unable to surface the right kinds of virtuous leadership, and so tend to be self-defeating. The response of American bishops to the sexual abuse scandal demonstrated (and continues to demonstrate) that the institutional arrangement (meaning the current structure and operating modes) of the bishops’ conference is faulty. This is to be distinguished from the theological necessity of the episcopacy or even the virtue of individual members. Bishops could choose to organize themselves differently, but this would require hard thinking about the precise practices that the bishops’ conference is meant to foster and protect. The Council documents that encouraged the formation of these institutions are somewhat vague on this point and were, perhaps, slightly naive about how institutions can corrupt practices.

The second source of ambivalence stems from the typical Christian concentration on real practices. This is to say that the average Christian is more concerned about the practice of virtue at ground level than the institutional backing that supposedly is undergirding it. Another way to look at this is to say that Christians are already developing their own local, ad hoc institutions (which is what the Benedict Option is supposed to encourage). The collapse of larger structures that provide tax shelter for a religious soup kitchen may or may not impact the soup kitchen itself. But Christians will, in one way or another, find a way to feed the hungry. It’s what we do. And I see so much of this in my everyday life, even from the relative obscurity of the cloister, that it seems ungrateful to fret about difficulties to come, even while I do see the need to prepare for them. I’d rather point to the exercise of faith around me and encourage the Christians I know to continue the work of virtue than worry about something that hasn’t happened yet, and may or may not in fact happen. This work is being done by the laity, a visible fruit of the teaching of Vatican II.

Last of all, the mention of virtue brings me at last to explain what I mean when I say that things are worse than people might think. What I mean by this is that our Western culture, especially in America, has been somewhat less-than-fully-Christian for many generations now, and that reviving a genuine, thoroughgoing practice of Christian virtue is a lot more difficult than the average person might think. This is something I can vouch for firsthand. I am a cradle Catholic who has mostly practiced by faith all my life. And yet, I am continually amazed at how far I have to go to be genuinely holy. Now, putting it that way illustrates that this is not pessimism or frustrating, or even necessarily cause for great fear. If you read the lives of the saints, you will discover that most saints had this same experience (which does not make me a saint, by the way). Love of a transcendent God means, in the words of Fr. Michael Casey, being perpetually out of one’s depth. Where I think there is some naivete is in our American optimism that “most people are basically good.” This is a nice, generous sentiment. But it does not help us to gain a lot of energy in the spiritual battle, in which we must first notice that in every heart there are large swaths of unevangelized heathendom. These are, of course, open to hearing the Good News! Which makes them, in their way, “good,” if broken and in need of healing. This healing is what we must first be about, and only if this happens will institutional reform follow in any meaningful way. In the short term, this may mean the tottering and elimination of many institutions. Some may be sad to see them go. But the long-term needs of the Faith may require this purification.

On Christian Leadership: Jottings

My apologies for the prolonged silence. Lots of traveling and the like…and monastic listening.

Rod Dreher, one of the few bloggers I read from time to time, asks, “Can Christians Afford the Leadership We Have?” In the post, he seems to assume that leadership in Christianity is clear. The only leader he mentions by name is Pope Francis. When he writes about “Christians,” I think he means, “American Christians,” and to some lesser extent “Western European Christians (he makes reference to recent slaying of Fr. Jacques Hamel).” The underlying message is that things are much worse for such Christians than most seem to think, and it’s the job of leadership to sound the alarm and prepare Christians for the coming assault on religious freedom, etc.

A number of thoughts, still disconnected:

  1. How much is a problem of leadership and how much discipleship? Cardinal George could hardly have been clearer about the possible coming struggle. What has the Chicago Church done in response? And who is responsible for responding if someone does sound the alarm? I don’t have clear answers to these questions, but focusing on leadership, and on a very narrow sampling of it, certainly raises them.
  2. Another point the late Cardinal made: when the Holy Spirit wishes to renew the Church, he sends saints. This seems appropriate on the feast day of the one the greats, St. Dominic. Innocent III, one of the most powerful popes ever, didn’t think up St. Dominic nor St. Francis of Assisi when faced with heresies, the fraying of society due to economic changes, and so on. “Where are the saints?” Cardinal George asked me once. I think that they are around, but we are still, in my opinion, at too early a stage of change to know what precisely is called for. All we can do is strive for holiness and be prepared. That preparation may include preparing to give our lives for the faith.
  3. I must confess that it is difficult for me to sympathize with the widespread assumption that we don’t live in an age of martyrs, at least in “civilized” places like the United States. The world is still the world, and will always be a source of hostility to the faith. Preachers may not have stressed this enough in recent decades, that is true. And, as I’ve pointed out elsewhere, where we used to celebrate more frequently the very unworldly sorts of saints like martyrs and monks, we’ve more recently populated the liturgical calendar with figures who didn’t have to give their lives for the faith, at least in the obvious way involved in red and white martyrdom. But any familiarity with the early church, Nero, Diocletian, and..ahem..the Cross, really offers us no excuse for imagining that Christian faith will never, ever make hard demands of us. I get why people avoid that, but again, is this a failure in leadership (who wants to hear this?) or a more general failure of imagination?
  4. Another failure of imagination takes the general peace and prosperity that many of us have enjoyed in our country for many decades to be normative for life in general. Having worked in inner cities, and having siblings and close friends who have done social work and ER duty in big cities, I can say that we live in an extraordinarily violent country, and this isn’t about guns. It goes much deeper, and the use of guns is just a symptom. Curbing access to guns will not change the spiritual poverty of our land, which cuts across all groups [it is not politically expedient to care too much about inner cities, since the residents of the areas don’t fund campaigns, for example, so it’s a calculated sacrifice not to look at the ways in which the whole culture contributes to this violence]. The United States military/industrial complex is a force for widespread destruction and bloodshed in numerous places. And, of course, we kill a million babies in the womb each year. So the idea that anybody is safe is, in my opinion, pretty thin.
  5. A long string of excellent popes has been a mixed blessing for Catholics. On the one hand, who can object to the remarkable leadership we’ve enjoyed at that level for a century or more? On the other hand, as Abbot Philip Lawrence once said to me, we can get lazy in our faith and practice if we imagine that we can depend on there being good popes. The current Catholic habit of reading everything the Holy Father writes and says, and interpreting this to maximal effect is a dangerous one, even if you think the pope is completely orthodox. He is the bishop of Rome, the guarantor of Church unity, and has many other important functions. But he is not, and can never be, pastor to every Catholic on the planet.
  6. And what we need are pastors, and masters of the spiritual craft. As I’ve hinted, the problems in our culture are very deep and hidden. In my experience in the monastery, especially for the past twelve years as superior, I’ve come to the conclusion that things are, indeed, a lot worse than people might imagine, but this is not so much because of scheming by human beings who appear to be enemies of the faith. Rather, the practice of genuine virtue and theology has been replaced by an extremely subtle ersatz form of the same. A widespread recovery will take time. But it is certainly possible. God has allowed this for a purpose, and so we might as well get to work repenting and reforming our lives. And any of us can do this; it doesn’t require a leader giving us marching orders, unless we understand that this leader is, of course, Jesus Christ.

This last point should not be heard as making the best of a bad situation or putting on a brave face by another beleaguered hierarch. If God can find a way to get me into a monastery and help me to see the parameters of the challenge that we are facing, there is surely hope for everyone. If you knew me twenty-five years ago, you’d know what I mean. Pray that I finish the memoir I’ve started. It will explain. In any case, God is so much more powerful than we are, and loves us so much more than we love ourselves or others, that we should have all the confidence that we need to place our lives in His hands and go forward, even in this means suffering. Especially, and gloriously so, if this should mean suffering. And it will in one form or another if we care about our souls and the souls of others.

Of Solitude and Contemplation

In my previous post, I noted that behind the Rule of Saint Benedict, there lies hidden the influence of the Desert Fathers. Benedict recommends that the monk eager for advanced pursuits in monastic spirituality should read the “Institutes” and the “Conferences.” Universal tradition as well as common sense asserts that he is referring to St. John Cassian, who spent nearly two decades in the Egyptian desert learning the monastic life. You can find indices to Cassian’s two most important works, the Institutes and the Conferences at the Order of Saint Benedict website.

What I wish to emphasize here, and in keeping with my aim to write brief and manageable posts, is one key connection between these two books and the two-fold path to spiritual maturity. I wrote last time that Saint Benedict is primarily concerned with the correction of behavior in his Rule for monks, but that he also acknowledges, in quiet ways, that beyond the cultivation of virtue and the elimination of vice, there is the further contemplative aspect of monastic (and Christian) life, what Benedict calls “wisdom of doctrine.” The Institutes correspond to the “active” life of conversion, and the Conferences are concerned with the “contemplative” life of adepts.

The first stage of spiritual growth, the correction of behavior, is therefore the primary concern of Cassian’s Institutes. Note that Cassian does not give us what we would consider “morality.” Rather, he is interested in teaching the times of prayer, the style of dress for monks, and the organization of communal life. This is exactly parallel to Saint Benedict’s Rule.  The connection is not just one of a common culture. The Rule of the Master, an Italian monastic rule from the generation before Benedict, and Benedict’s primary source, cribs from Cassian’s Institutes, so that we can say that St. Benedict’s Rule is a kind of grandchild to the Institutes. Cassian goes somewhat beyond communal organization, and spends the last eight books of the Institutes on the eight vices and how to identify the thought patterns that go with them. So again, we are not so much in the realm of morality as moderns understand it. Cassian is interested in psychology, how our thoughts influence our behavior.

This emphasis on psychology is the link between the active and contemplative stages of Christian spiritual growth. Before we can properly understand doctrine, we must first work against behaviors that are not consonant with Christian doctrine, but then we must also go after the thought patterns that underlie wrongful behavior. This cleansing of the mind of wrongful thinking allows us to receive true “theology,” knowledge of God. This is the focus of Cassian’s Conferences.

In the next several short posts, I hope to walk with you through the two stages with more attention to the particular battles with behaviors and thoughts, along with recommended reading in monastic spirituality.

The Desert Background to the Rule

Saint Benedict composed his Rule for Monks some time around 540 A.D. Egypt, the cradle of Christian monasticism, had been drastically reduced in the previous 150 years from its high point at the end of the fourth century. Saint Benedict makes explicit reference to the “desert” only once, when describing the anchorites in the first chapter, on the kinds of monks. Since his Rule is written, however, not for anchorites but for “cenobites,” monks who live in communities, we might imagine that this off-hand reference to the desert is a mere nod in the direction of Egypt, without any further thread of connection to the ancient tradition.

There are important hints that Benedict knew the Egyptian tradition well and incorporated it seamlessly into his own proto-European style of monasticism. Finding these clues requires a bit of excavation. The place I would like to begin is in a perhaps unlikely spot, in chapter 64, On the Constituting of an Abbot. The abbot, Saint Benedict tells us, should be chosen “vitae…merito et sapientiae doctrina,” for the merit of his life and the wisdom of his doctrine. This sounds common sensible enough, but in fact it encapsulates an entire way of thinking about the spiritual quest in Christian monasticism. It also justifies Fr. Terence Kardong’s contention that the abbot is to be the “perfect” monk.

Merit of life corresponds to the presence of virtue and absence of vice. It is the first step in monastic conversion, a change of outward behavior. One learns to act…as a monk acts. When monks promise “conversion of life” (conversatio morum) according to the formula invented by Saint Benedict in chapter 58, they are promising to change their way of living. This is not a matter of mere “morals” but is implicated in all kinds of habits, preferences, and in personal comportment. This is the minimum observance “for beginners” [RB 73]. For those who are striving for greater advancement, however, as Benedict goes on to show us in chapter 73, there is the inward transformation of doctrine, new habits of thought about the cosmos and insight into God’s ways. It is not enough for the abbot to be worthy by his exterior actions; he must also have the interior virtues that allow him to give spiritual counsel and make wise decisions about the community’s welfare. It is noteworthy that one of the primary sources of doctrine, according to RB 73, is St. John Cassian, the primary link between European and Egyptian monasticism.

In future posts, I hope to demonstrate Saint Benedict’s direct dependence on the Egyptian desert fathers for this two-fold description of monastic spirituality. What the great monastic theologian Evagrius (354-399 A.D.) described as the practical (or “active”) life followed by the theoretical ( or “contemplative”) life is the best way of understanding Benedict’s emphasis on merit of life and wisdom of doctrine.

The Heart of Prayer is Thanksgiving

In a word, if we wish to pray, we will want to cultivate a habit of thankfulness. A thankful person sees the same things as an ungrateful person, but the two focus on different aspects of what they see. When we are ungrateful, it is often because we focus on what we wish we had and do not have. When we are grateful, it is often because we notice what we have, and what is often overlooked. Finally, when we reflect on the fact that we have been created, and that God has promised us eternal joy and backed this promise by the gift of His only Son, even when we are deprived of the things that we need in life, there is still scope for gratitude.

This cultivation of a thankful spirit finds beautiful expression in the last words of the great Fr. Alexander Schmemann: “Everyone capable of thanksgiving is capable of salvation and eternal joy.”

All of this is to say that the heart of our life is Eucharist.

Taciturnity and Silence

The doctrinal heart of the Rule of Saint Benedict is found in chapters 4-7: The tools of good works, obedience, taciturnity (often significantly mistranslated as “silence”), and humility.

Can anyone doubt the average modern Westerner is tempted to view the combination of obedience, silence and humility as a way of robbing the individual of his maturity (exercised by choice and responsibility), of his voice, and of his selfhood?

Saint Benedict cannot possibly mean this, of course. Yet well-meaning Christians can fall into this trap of misinterpretation. I’ve already pointed out our tendency to render “restraint of speech” as “silence.” Saint Benedict actually urges responsible speech, especially where it is most typically going to be denied in an unhealthy community. Thus the younger members are urged to speak up and be heard at community meetings of the greatest importance, and monks who find tasks beyond their abilities are directed to give reasons to the abbot rather than toil miserably without recourse.

This loss of voice is what concerns me especially. I hear so often, when persons are hurting and in need of prayer, expressions like “I know I shouldn’t pray for this, but…” Even in seminary, when I took a course on Wisdom literature, the prof (himself a monk at the time, though he has since left the life) concluded his lectures on Job by claiming that God’s revelation in chapters 38-42 meant that God has more important things to do than to bother about every little human being’s problems. This is a problematic interpretation, by the way, just on exegetical grounds. But it harmonizes with what I discern as a dangerous tendency in the life of faith, to think that being a good Christian means being bullied into silence and conformity by a God who is too busy for us.

God is not too busy for us. God wants to hear from us, especially whatever is hurting us. “Then they cried to the Lord in their need.”

The disciplines of obedience, restraint of speech, and humility are necessary–not because God is threatened by us but because we are forgetful of God. God tends to speak in a still, small voice (which is to say, the opposite of the domineering voice that many lectors take on when reading God’s pronouncements at Mass), easily crowded out by noisiness and idle talkativeness. Talkativeness further cheapens words, and God wishes to give us His Word. Let’s not cheapen that exchange! God gives us an astounding palate of freedom, in order that we might freely offer ourselves as a gift in return. Obedience is not about us being so unreliable and depraved that we need to be treated as slaves. Rather, our desires tend to blind us toward the needs of others, and obedience habituates us to an openness to others, an openness that is, one hopes, less patronizing than what we otherwise might produce by do-gooder-ness [see Deus Caritas Est 34*]. And finally humility is a way to open myself to the grandeur of the cosmos (here is a closer approximation of the message of Job 38-42), of which I form a unique and unrepeatable part…as does everyone else.

Faith does not mean allowing my voice to be co-opted by a dominant power structure. Nor is it about a false propheticism that is license to speak self-righteously about everyone else’s problems. I may require taciturnity to restore my true voice, just as physical therapy necessarily includes rest and inactivity for a damaged limb. But the goal is not silence but true speech, accurate speech, healed of both breezy ignorance and of grating pretension.

* “Practical activity will always be insufficient, unless it visibly expresses a love for man, a love nourished by an encounter with Christ. My deep personal sharing in the needs and sufferings of others becomes a sharing of my very self with them: if my gift is not to prove a source of humiliation, I must give to others not only something that is my own, but my very self; I must be personally present in my gift.” (emphasis added)

Notes on Prayer, Part 1

I had the blessing to spend this past Thursday evening with the Young Adult Ministry of Lake County, which met at St. Mary’s parish in Lake Forest. I had been invited to speak about prayer, and at the end of the event, I offered to post some of my notes here for those who would like to follow up on further reading. I should mention that I found the questions from the participants most helpful and illuminating, and that the entire evening was edifying and encouraging.

Before I list the books that I mentioned there, I should give a short explanation about what I said to the group.

Prayer is natural. Human beings were created by God to know Him and have a relationship with Him. This is the most important fact to know about prayer. We don’t have to scramble to find God or to try to get His attention. If we are moved to pray, the Holy Spirit has already been active in us, and we are doing what our natures are made for.

Therefore, if we wish to pray well, we should set about discovering what it is about our lives that inhibits this natural activity. Walking is also a natural activity of human beings, but it is something that we learn to do (mainly by watching other people and then by trial and error). It is also the case that injuries and disabilities can hamper our capacity for walking. When this happens, we do rehab.

We live in a world where prayer is not highly valued. This means that many of our base-line behaviors are hostile to this capax orationis. This is not something new, however, and this is why my favorite recommendation for learning to pray is Evagrius Ponticus, who died in 399 A.D. He is a master of identifying the ways in which we inhibit our own ability to pray, and a great pedagogue for learning how to be healed of this malady.

The final note for today: prayer is an activity primarily of the mind. Therefore much of what is helpful for prayer involves a kind of hygiene for the mind, a scouring out of harmful patterns of thought, and the introduction of good habits of thinking. That said, our minds are connected to bodies, and so what we do with our bodies has consequences for prayer. The shorthand idea here is this: we will pray well when we uproot the vices from our bodies and minds and plant the virtues. I will have more to say on this at a later time.

Here are my recommendations:

by Evagrius:

The Praktikos and Chapters on Prayer, translated and with an (excellent) introduction by John Eudes Bamberger

The Ad Monachos, translated by Abbot Jeremy Driscoll–also with fantastic notes

Talking Back (The Antirrhetikos), translated by David Brakke

Evagrius Ponticus by A.M. Casiday (contains several treatises)

by St. John Cassian: The Conferences (especially Conferences nine and ten, which can be found online here.)

by Sister Mary Margaret Funk: Thoughts Matter

Father Thomas Keating: Invitation to Love

 

God’s blessings to you!

Pitch

At what point did hominids begin to recognize musical pitch? Rhythm seems much more obvious, since so many of our bodily functions are rhythmic. We breath, we walk, we chew…Most noises in nature are chaotic, when judged by musical pitch. Even birdsong, while beautiful, is not precisely pitched, nor does it often make use of one pitch held for any identifiable length of time. What was the experience of the first person who heard that a sound could be one note? And who discovered the possibility of adding one pitch to another, that two pitches, with a long enough duration for each, could be heard in relation to one another? I would like to imagine this discovery as a revolution in awareness. A pitch emerges as order out of chaos, hints at fundamentals. This primal recognition is so far from us for whom music is a cheap commodity. It is not so easy for us to engage profitably with ideas like the Music of the Spheres or the myth of Orpheus.

Pythagoras achieved an insight when he heard the relations of pitches in the blacksmith’s shop. For the Pythagoreans and for Plato after him, harmony was represented by an enacted by musical pitch. Today, we have discovered that all of the cosmos can be understood as waves in vibration. But we cannot perceive this fundamental order without an accompanying silence.

[The second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto is often understood as a duel between Orpheus=the piano and the Underworld=the orchestra. Listen to how the piano tames the orchestra and brings the chaotic rhythms and angular pitches into harmony:]

 

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