Monastery of the Holy Cross

Articles tagged with desire

Salvation Is Not From This World

[The following is the homily that I preached at the Solemn Profession of Br. Anthony Daum, OSB, on Sunday, January 17, 2021]

At the moment, in the midst of so much uncertainty, even turmoil, there would seem to be nothing more irrelevant than a solemn monastic profession in a small monastery. Of course, anyone who knew Abraham as he set off from the city of Ur [Genesis 12; first reading today] would have felt that his life was irrelevant to the fate of the superpowers of the day, Babylon and Egypt. For that matter, scarcely any first-century Roman of any importance would have seen a group of a dozen Jewish ex-fishermen being of any relevance to the future of the Roman Empire.

In the gospel of Luke, Jesus warns us not to judge events and persons by worldly standards: “What is exalted among men is an abomination in the sight of God [Luke 16: 15].”

So what might be the meaning of our Brother Anthony’s intention to abandon himself to God in the monastic life, and its relevance to us who are gathered here as witnesses?

God made us for Himself, and this means that we have a capacity for God, the capax Dei, as the Latin theologians would put it. This is an amazing, almost unbelievable reality. But it does correspond to our deepest longings. Saint Augustine says that because we are made for God, our hearts are restless until we rest in Him.

Our capacity for God means that our desire is potentially infinite. Any attempt to satisfy ourselves through material comfort, political power, or even good health will fail at some level. Not only that, but any finite thing or condition I obtain still leaves an infinite distance between my desire and its satisfaction.

The temptation for many of us today is to double down on our efforts to secure finite goods, or to fear their loss. This produces no small amount of anxiety; we encounter the interior abyss meant to be filled with divine life and try to fill it with perishing things. In our present world, we have no lack of perishable things dangled before us, promising a relief to our anxiety. And not only that; politicians promise safety, prosperity, and civility. Or, in our contemporary situation, it is perhaps just as likely that politicians warn us that we will lose safety, prosperity, and civility if we vote for the other side.

But whatever is promised to us as a salve for our infinite desire, this promise is ultimately vain. And so it is that our Lord, as well as His disciple Saint Paul, urge us to rethink, to reassess our priorities and desires, to be renewed in our minds and see as God sees.

Far from urging us to a safe and prosperous life, Jesus teaches us that we must lose our lives in order to gain them [Matthew 16: 24-27; today’s gospel]. Just before He gave this teaching, our Lord rebuked Saint Peter for clinging to a worldly mode of thought: “Get behind me, Satan!…you are not on the side of God, but of men [Matthew 16: 23].”

What had Peter done to deserve this rebuke? He expressed a sense of scandal in the idea that the Messiah must suffer many things from the authorities, and to be put to death. And are we not all tempted to think like Peter? We often don’t like to think about the renunciations that God asks of us. Sometimes they seem entirely too difficult.

And yet, from another perspective, is not this truly the gospel, a word of hope and renewal? After all, if we were to rely on our own efforts to solve our present political problems, would we not be on the brink of despair?

What the gospel proclaims is that our salvation, the fulfillment of our desires, comes entirely from outside the flailing pandemonium of our world. All that God asks of us is to live in accordance with the promises we made at baptism, that moment when God’s infinite life was poured into our hearts from outside the world. In today’s Collect, the opening prayer after the Gloria, the Church shows us that solemn monastic profession is a sign that the sanctifying grace of baptism has been and is flourishing mysteriously in the life of this man. His yes to God is a sign of God’s quiet power at work in the world, calling us out of the world.

We will symbolize this dramatically when Brother Anthony lies prostrate beneath a funeral pall as we sing together the litany, invoking the presence of God’s saints who have triumphed before us and are united with us as members of Christ’s Body.

But let me again quickly shift perspective, that this way to God through self-abandonment is only open because God first entered our world as one of us. God comes from outside of this world to reveal to us that our homeland, that yearned-for place of rest and peace, is not found in this world. And if we seek peace, we must turn our eyes again and again to Jesus Christ and His saints. And we must have men and women willing to leave everything behind to show us how this is done, and to lead the way.

Thus our celebration today will move each of us closer to this new and purified world, mysteriously replacing the old world that is passing away, that world to which we cling so desperately as to make life miserable! Freed from the compulsion to seek satisfaction in things of this world, we will be fortified against the temptations to sin that come from anxiety about the world, the temptation to skimp on justice, to give in to anger and sadness, to seek escape in pleasures of the flesh. And as we point others toward our true home, toward genuine rest and peace, may we learn to embrace the sufferings that come with being in this land of exile, that our faith may bring us joy and consolation, and may win many others to Christ.

Celebrating the Unmaking of the One Ring; a Homily for Annunciation

[The following is the edited text of my homily for March 25, 2020. This is the traditional date of Good Friday and of the Annunciation, and it is the date that J.R.R. Tolkien gives as the date upon which Gollum fell into the fires of Mount Doom, thereby destroying the One Ring and ending the terror of Sauron.]

In our scientific age, atheists demand evidence for the existence of God. For me, among the weightiest bits of evidence is simply the prevalence of belief. Many persons claim not only to believe in God, but to know Him. This requires an explanation. And it’s not enough, I think, just to claim it as some mass delusion—that’s simply kicking the can down the road. Why this particular mass delusion?

A scientist such as Richard Dawkins may well answer that ancient persons were trying to explain the natural world and lacked science, and so posited gods as causes of natural phenomena like lightning. In other words, ancient persons were failed versions of himself. Other more political versions of this attempt at explanation claim that the invention of the gods was a cynical ploy by authority to consolidate power over an awestruck populace.

Contemporary atheists are hardly the first to speculate on this. The Biblical book of Wisdom already gives other explanations for the origin of the gods–or what the author would call “idols.” He notes a longing for beauty in all peoples, and that the beauty of the cosmos moves the observer to imagine that the mysteriously remote magnificence of the stars betokened divinity; or that the power of fire or water signified the presence of the divine [see Wisdom 13: 1-3]. Elsewhere, the Biblical author speculates that a grieving father would make a statue of a recently lost young child, and that his attachment to this statue would grow into a kind of piety, and that the dead child would undergo a kind of apotheosis, a divinization [Wisdom 14: 15-16].

“Christianity set itself the goal of fulfilling man’s unattainable desires”–Ludwig Feuerbach (1804-1872)

In the last two hundred years, learned explanations have become more and more sophisticated (though, alas, I must exclude Mr. Dawkins from any claim to sophistication on this point). In the early nineteenth century, Ludwig Feuerbach saw God as an outward projection of humanity’s inward nature, in some sense representing the infinite desire for order, meaning, and goodness that we observe in human nature. Later, Emile Durkheim applied this insight anthropologically so that God becomes a representation of collective society. The most ambitious, and, to me, the profoundest attempt to account for the origin of the gods is that of René Girard (1923-2015). Girard, whose work drew him back to his childhood Catholic faith, noted not only the widespread belief in the gods, but the near-universal connection of the gods and violence, encoded in the ubiquitous practice of sacrifice in the ancient world. He drew attention to the catharsis that takes place when a tense and fearful community focuses its anxiety and violence unanimously on a victim, that is, when a community chooses a scapegoat. The killing or banishment of this scapegoat brings about peace and restores order to the community. Since peace and order are desirable for both the community and the individual, the scapegoated victim paradoxically becomes a benefactor to the community and gradually becomes a god in the community’s mythological imagination. The connection with authority comes about because kings and others in positions of governance are extremely convenient scapegoats, easy to blame for everyone’s problems. There is an important exception to this mechanism. The prophets of Israel, that fiercely monotheistic nation, are constantly alerting the people to the arbitrary injustice at the heart of human society, this need to generate peace and order by generating victims. Because of God’s championing of the victim, the idea of a true God begins to distance itself from the “gods.”

“Religion is in a word the system of symbols by means of which society becomes conscious of itself.”–Emile Durkheim (1858-1917)

Now I bring all of this up, and I hope that it’s interesting, because the constant in all of this is human desire. We all have desires, some of them not so good, but all of them leaving us in need of fulfillment in some way. Unfulfilled desire leaves us vulnerable, even anxious and fearful. Perhaps worst of all, the noblest things that we desire: justice, truth, beauty, are always just out of reach. This is that infinite desire that Feuerbach rightly noted.

What we proclaim today is that the Great Desire of earth [cf. Haggai 2: 6-7), what all human beings long for in some way, is no longer out of reach. Not because we have figured out finally how to attain the truth, but because the Truth Himself came to us. The Son of God validates the best of human desire by becoming human, sharing these desires with us. Jesus hungers and thirsts, has friends, attends wedding banquets and public festivals. He restores children to bereaved parents, he feeds the multitude, he quiets threatening waves, he relieves lepers of “social distancing” by cleansing them. But profoundest of all, he desires to do His Father’s will as the one thing necessary; he desires justice for all; he desires that all men see in the beauty of the cosmos God’s great love for those made in His image and likeness. He desires that all be set free by knowing the Truth. In the Incarnation, which we celebrate today, Truth Himself has come down from heaven, and in taking human nature to Himself, has made justice spring up from the earth [see Psalm 85: 10-11].

The idols of the nations are an image of distorted desire, stuck in the infernal logic of “the world.” Jesus is recognized, even in His lifetime, as the true fulfillment of all that is best in what we desire. The Apostle Philip found Nathanial and said, “We have found him of whom Moses in the law and also the prophets wrote [John 1: 45].” After the Resurrection, the two disciples on the road to Emmaus unwittingly said to Jesus himself, “We had hoped that he would be the one to redeem Israel [Luke 24: 21].” In other words, we hoped that he would vindicate the one true, transcendent God and the devotion to the true God shown by His chosen people Israel–which He has by His resurrection in our nature.

My brothers, what is it that we desire? How has our Lord Jesus Christ offered us fulfillment or purification of this desire in His Incarnation? How has he invited us to be patient in awaiting this fulfillment by learning to be his Cross-carrying disciples? In this moment of anxiety, how can we follow the prophets in pointing to Jesus and away from the danger of choosing scapegoats for our suffering? Let us, like Mary and her Son, begin by saying to our common Father, “Thy will be done.”

The Path to Contemplation

[I was invited by the Lumen Christi Institute to lead a discussion on contemplation with a group of students on Saturday night. I composed this text to begin the conversation.]

Human beings have typically made use of metaphors when thinking about the mind. In the last two or three generations, we have tended to imagine the human mind as a computer, a storer of information. The mind certainly is this, but this metaphor is part of a myopic turn in human thought, perhaps begun with Descartes, that has brought about many misunderstandings of the ancient idea of contemplation. Let us note here that a computer, at least as we have built them so far, is not capable of having desires, intentions, or insights into the meaning of things. And this is the heart of contemplation.

I listed desire first because desire is necessarily a trait of an embodied, limited, incomplete being…with intimations of fulfillment. The second quality of human minds that separate us from computers is that of intention, which is another quality that admits of fulfillment. The concept of fulfillment itself is central to the proclamation of the gospel: Christ comes to fulfill the Scriptures and the hopes of God’s people Israel. Internalizing this fulfillment is one way of understanding the Christian tradition of contemplation. There is thus an important continuity between desire, intention, and meaning that leads the human mind properly toward contemplation.

Desire and intention–where we begin–belong to a life of action, and it is significant that the active and contemplative life are often paired together. Unfortunately, this pairing is frequently one of opposition, rather than sympathy. The monastic tradition harkens back to a time when these two types of activity were seen not as exclusive, but linked in an important hierarchy. The active life, or–as I would prefer that we call it, the practical life–is the necessary condition for the contemplative life. We see this hierarchy in the thinking of Plato and Aristotle in their distinction between practical reason and theoretical reason. Practical reason is aimed at goals, the satisfaction of desires. As rational beings, many of our desires partake of a higher type of fulfillment than that of simpler bodily desires. In addition to desiring bodily nourishment, we desire understanding. Each of these desires is connected to different types of practical responses, that is to say, different sets of practices.

Let me offer an example of how practices lead naturally into contemplation. To do this, I would like to use a concept related to that of practices. Instead of speaking about practices, which tend to denote simple types of activities, let me introduce a word that denotes a somewhat more complex set of activities, the notion of a craft.

As a former musician, the idea of craft interests me, and it is something familiar. For my illustration, however, let me use a rather different craft, that of accounting.

The active life of an accountant requires a rigorous training in double-entry techniques, learning from masters of the craft how to interpret human action in quantifiable terms, how to prepare different types of reports, how to maintain proper files for audits. In other words, there are standards of excellence in the craft, but these only become clear to the student of accounting after she has learned how to carry out many routine actions internal to the craft itself. At a certain point, the mind is freed from earlier misconceptions about what accounting is. This is the transition from student (or disciple) to master, and it parallels the transition from active to contemplative practice.

At the point of transition, the newly minted accounting professional may begin to notice ways to characterize human behavior that are more accurate than previous standards of the craft. She may realize that certain practices pose a danger to ethical standards, and so need to reflect on how to train future accountants to identify those dangers and deal with them in a way that upholds the important ethical component of the craft. She may also begin to see more correlations between the work of accounting and the work of management, or of distribution, marketing, and so on. In other words, the master accountant begins to see how her craft fits into a larger and larger perspective.

It is this reason that the contemplative life is traditionally characterized as higher, but not separate from the active life. Contemplation makes possible the perception of necessary connections between crafts, how to understand their contributions to the common good. But this understanding and wisdom is only available after one has apprenticed in some disciplined activity, which serves as an induction into a set of practices by which one can come to understand the commonly held standards of excellence, have one’s mind changed and formed by these standards of excellence, and so have the mind freed more and more from a merely local and subjective set of concerns.

Before I conclude, I would like to make a few last suggestive remarks. First of all, I introduced the notion of “standards of excellence” as something desirable within a craft, something toward which we intend. Excellence, as you may well know, is an acceptable translation of the Greek word arete, which is more normally translated as “virtue.” Thus the practical life is a training in virtue, and once again, Plato and Aristotle, not to mention Saint Paul, assume that there is no rational life without a prior training in virtue.

Second, the ancient monastic tradition included a third term in our ascent to contemplation proper. Between praktike, the practical life, and theoretike, or the “theoretical” or contemplative life, was physike or “natural contemplation.” This notion has been almost entirely lost, and I believe it to be of some importance that we recover its meaning.

We are hampered in this recovery by a novel meaning of the word “nature.” Most people today, when using the word “nature,” tend to mean our earthly environment as a whole, perhaps the material world considered as separate from “spirit” or “the supernatural.” This distinction is entirely modern, with roots in the break from Aristotle that took place gradually throughout the fifteenth century and definitively in the sixteenth. What Aristotle meant by nature is physis, the set of characteristics specific to actual species of things. So humans have a nature determined by our animality, political organization, and rationality. We are, by nature, rational and political animals. A dog has a different nature, as does a starfish. Clouds, stars, nebulae, and quarks have natures in their own domains. Natural contemplation is a deepening understanding of the natures of different species of creatures, seen more and more from the perspective of the Creator Himself. What I am suggesting here is that actual human practices initiate us into understanding the natures of things, by seeing their interconnections. We climb the ladder of significations by making a kind of scaffolding of these interconnected concepts in our own minds and hearts, and gradually the face of God is revealed in His creatures. And by habituation to His presence in created things, we come to know God as God is in Himself. This is the practice of contemplation in its deepest meaning. While there are practices specific to this highest level of contemplation, we must prepare for it by a grounding in the cardinal virtues, gained from our participation in craft, and by a training in wisdom by an initial contemplation of natures. We partake of contemplation proper at each step of the way, by our initial desire for the goal and our intention to reach it, so any of us can begin now on this road, if we so desire.

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