Gettin' real

Sorry for the clichéd title, but eventually the rubber meets the pothole, and that's when it's a challenge to keep letting God's peace direct my life. Such times and circumstances tend to be outside of our own control, but our response to them never is.

So I'm trying hard not to respond unlovingly to my bride (of 27 years), with whom I feel so frustrated over the past couple days. I don't want to enable more of the same, which further silence will doubtless do, as will getting petulant over the things that are on my mind. So I've got to find a way to communicate on the current issues in a way that expresses my feelings and gives us a chance to work on my issues - and they're clearly mine, as she doesn't seem to have any problem with them.

Who's really doing the work?

Last week my wife and I received an e-mail that shared a reflection based on a long-ago visit with a long-married couple. The writer saw that the wife was highly attentive to her husband's every need, yet seemed joyless. She observed that this wife may have primarily served out of fear of her husband's anger, which generated resentment rather than fear.

She concluded that our actions are "as useless as dry sticks on a cold hearth" until they are set ablaze by the love of God's Sacred Heart. Of course (me, now) this only happens as we set our mind and heart upon this marvelous God whom we serve so unworthily, and allow our actions to be responses to His perfect love.

I've observed that there's a related danger in trying to avoid a sin or make some positive change in my life by my own efforts. During that brief period of time when I am able to "gut things out," since I'm so focused on myself, I of course become convinced that it is I who have accomplished this good thing, whatever it might be. This further distorts my relationship with God, fostering pride rather than humility. This pride then also interferes with my relationship with others (though that is secondary; we sometimes get caught agreeing with the world's attitude that faith is primarily a means to improve our relationship with others - i.e. social justice - when the truth is that our relationship with others is properly and inextricably tied up with our primary relationship with God).

But when I undertake the same effort with the understanding that I cannot hope to accomplish what I think God is calling me to do - or more fundamentally to be the person He is calling me to be - and instead just ask God to do in me what I have proven that I cannot, then I see "my" victories as they truly are: God's grace at work in my life. Simply resting in that grace fosters true, humble growth, and brings a deeper joy, peace, love - and even satisfaction - than any amount of "my own" temporary accomplishments have ever done.

Christ, the model of brotherly love

In our faith sharing group last night, a passage that I read last week became highly pertinent:

From The Mirror of Love by Saint Aelred, abbot
The perfection of brotherly love lies in the love of one's enemies. We can find no greater inspiration for this than grateful remembrance of the wonderful patience of Christ. He who is more fair than all the sons of men offered his fair face to be spat upon by sinful men; he allowed those eyes that rule the universe to be blindfolded by wicked men; he bared his back to the scourges; he submitted that head which strikes terror in principalities and powers to the sharpness of the thorns; he gave himself up to be mocked and reviled, and at the end endured the cross, the nails, the lance, the gall, the vinegar, remaining always gentle, meek and full of peace.

In short, he was led like a sheep to the slaughter, and like a lamb before the shearers he kept silent, and did not open his mouth.

Who could listen to that wonderful prayer, so full of warmth, of love, of unshakeable serenity – Father, forgive them – and hesitate to embrace his enemies with overflowing love? Father, he says, forgive them. Is any gentleness, any love, lacking in this prayer?

Yet he put into it something more. It was not enough to pray for them: he wanted also to make excuses for them. Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing. They are great sinners, yes, but they have little judgment; therefore, Father, forgive them. They are nailing me to the cross, but they do not know who it is that they are nailing to the cross: if they had known, they would never have crucified the Lord of glory; therefore, Father, forgive them. They think it is a lawbreaker, an impostor claiming to be God, a seducer of the people. I have hidden my face from them, and they do not recognize my glory; therefore, Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing.

If someone wishes to love himself he must not allow himself to be corrupted by indulging his sinful nature. If he wishes to resist the promptings of his sinful nature he must enlarge the whole horizon of his love to contemplate the loving gentleness of the humanity of the Lord. Further, if he wishes to savor the joy of brotherly love with greater perfection and delight, he must extend even to his enemies the embrace of true love.

But if he wishes to prevent this fire of divine love from growing cold because of injuries received, let him keep the eyes of his soul always fixed on the serene patience of his beloved Lord and Savior.

Two of our group members are currently challenged by a distressing family situation, in which another family member is being hurt deeply. The "enemy's" actions in this situation are inexplicable, self-centered, and irrational. Loving this person has become both an internal and a practical challenge: internal because it is so difficult to want the best for someone who is acting so hurtfully, especially to someone we love; practical because it is most difficult to continue to love a heart that feels like a brick wall.

I believe we can only desire to love such an enemy if we recognize our own utter unworthiness of the love and forgiveness Christ has lavished upon us. Further, we can only share that love as we allow Christ to transform us. This is somewhat a chicken-and-egg dilemma: our transformation and our loving go hand-in-hand. But ultimately, in Christ we can and will love even our enemies, desiring for them the joy we have found, not just to evoke less hurtful actions from them - though certainly our desire is for Christ's transforming love to be at work in their lives, too - but simply because it is how Christ (within us) responds to them. After all, others' actions are beyond our control - though not entirely beyond our influence.

Too often, we focus on the transformation we want to see in others, rather than seeking our own deeper transformation in Christ. We'll love them when they act appropriately; we seek some desired behavior from them before we will risk loving.

Thankfully, God took no such wait-and-see approach with us, instead loving us before we deserved it.

We're called to become the person God dreams for us to be, which will result in both our desiring (for their sake) God's love to abound in others' lives, too, and our being vessels thereof.

Deliver us from evil

Thus far, by God's grace, I'm having a really prayerful Lent. I'm thoroughly enjoying praying the Way of the Cross in song, at least once every weekend with this group. Folks are clearly being touched by our ministry; every service thus far has been a very prayerful time.

In a not-directly-related matter, I found myself reflecting this weekend on The Lord's Prayer, certainly not for the first time, but in a new way. A phrase we pray so casually near the end of this prayer has really struck me afresh.

I've heard this phrase interpreted from a couple of different viewpoints: deliver us from "the time of trial," that is, the tribulation; deliver us from Satan's grasp for all eternity; deliver us from external evil that might otherwise wreak havoc upon our lives or our loved ones. I suppose I'm still aware of what I heard prayed at one of the national prayer services following 9/11. To paraphrase: our gravest threat will never be what others might do to us, but what we might become in response to them.

If that is so, the real evil from which I must pray for deliverance is that which I might choose, either wittingly or in ignorance.

We have a frightening ability to rationalize all sorts of behaviors that, if we ever engage in a clear-headed analysis, we'd have to agree represent objectively selfish and hurtful choices. These are the things that we know to be some sort of evil (see torture; indefinite "POW" internment when there's no government to release them to; abusiveness or mere rudeness toward others; sexual impurity; etc.) but we choose them anyway, often rationalizing why it isn't merely okay, but in fact necessary. It is right to pray that we be delivered from these temptations.

At other times, we truly believe that there is no harm, and perhaps even that there is ultimate good, along a particular path. I believe it is important to pray that God deliver us from this "ignorant" evil, as well. It isn't that I expect God would condemn us for our ignorance. Rather, knowing - as well as I am able - the abundance of love God has lavished upon me, I pray that I would live in a way that maximally responds to and propagates that love.

As we pray at each Mass, "Deliver us, Lord, from every evil."

Conversion

Lent is off to a great start for me, maybe my best ever. That's due to a lot of factors, all of them Grace.

This past Saturday I provided music for a men's retreat. The upside of serving in this way is that I get to attend the retreat, as well. This year's theme was Conversion of Life, one of the vows taken by Benedictines. The retreat master has a Benedictine background (as an oblate, not a monk), and this is the second year he's brought us a message rooted in that order's vows. While most religious orders take vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience, the Benedictine order is old enough that their vows (conversion of life, stability, obedience, though the latter not in the traditional interpretation of the word) predate the better known "evangelical counsels."

At any rate, and without sharing Saturday's entire message, it has me reflecting further, as I suppose a good retreat tends to do. It occurs to me that the biggest obstacle to conversion in my life, and I imagine I share this with most people, is the degree to which I'm willing to be converted. And as I write, it also occurs to me that this is related to our last Why Catholic? session, at which we discussed false gods.

I think everybody has things in their lives about which we say "No, God. Not that. I'll give you anything You want, but don't ask me for that. That is too central/essential/valuable to me." Sometimes that is something that we very well know God wants removed from our lives completely - a relationship or habit that we know in our heart is not God's will for us. In other cases, that is something that might not be a bad thing, in the proper context, but we have gotten the thing out of proportion. That is often nothing more than the thing that represents our (illusion of) control over our own life. We will often have very logical sounding reasons why that is actually a good thing in my life, or rationalize that only an outdated, flawed, human church would ask me to give that up, never a loving God (as I understand God to be).

That ends up being our false god. It is the biggest obstacle to the conversion of our life, and to our becoming the person God dreams for us to become. (I choose that wording very carefully: it is God's dream for us; loving us perfectly, it is God's great vision for me, for you, for each person.)

When we begin to follow Christ, we undertake a spiritual journey which, of course, God has begun in us and nurtures in us. This journey takes us from the person we were without Christ to the person the Father dreams for us to become in the Son, when the Holy Spirit has finished transforming/converting us. All of us, by God's grace, have made progress in that journey. Yet we become enamored of the place we have reached, or of some aspect of our old homeland which we cannot bear to leave behind. This is a familiar part of our life, and the life that awaits us is hidden. We have trouble fully believing that the destination is really that much better. So we cling to that, not realizing the degree to which that keeps us from becoming who God dreams for us to be.

This Lent, I seem to be letting go of a that or two, though it could be that I'm just finding new, less obvious ways of clinging to them. If the former, it is by God's grace, for while I must participate in the process, it isn't me doing the work. I'm praying that God will continue this conversion in my life, and help me become the person He dreams for me to be.

Spiritual snootiness

I hope I'm not engaging in some of that myself, with this post. This is actually a response to a thread on a blend's blog, but parts of it might feel a little chastising there and, not wishing to hijack that blog, I figured I'd post this here:

There is a tendency among some Christian circles (maybe others, as well, but these are the ones I've noticed it in) to proclaim a message that goes something like this:

"You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you to go and bear fruit - fruit that will last. Then the Father will give you whatever you ask in my name." (Jn 15, 16) So, if our prayers are not answered as we wish - and usually in the way that spares us or our loved ones the most pain - it must be because of a shortcoming in our lives, that we haven't borne the fruit that we have been appointed to bear. We're not living rightly, or asking rightly, or our faith is insufficient (i.e. smaller than a mustard seed; Mt 17, 19-20), or there's something else wrong with us.

I think this is a dangerous and inaccurate message that takes our life in this world out of the context of our life for eternity, the only context in which this life - and all of Christianity - really makes any sense.

Whether our prayers have been answered or if they've seemed ignored, I believe this: God loves us deeply, more deeply than we can ever know in this world. God's great desire for us is to know perfect Love, which will take all of eternity. God isn't some tyrant who only bestows blessings if we've sufficiently toed the line; rather, our openness to God is the only way we can be disposed to receiving all that God dreams for us. God knows what we cannot even imagine, and God's vision for us surpasses our analysis of our need, our loved ones' need. The greatest agony of this life is as nothing compared to the joy and love we will live in for eternity. And when we're not in a space to receive this message, God doesn't love us any less because of that, nor forsake us. God continues to wrap loving arms around us, to be at work spiritually in our lives to draw us into perfect Love, so long as we earnestly seek the Truth.

When we watch someone we love go through something awful, we wonder why God doesn't do something about it, if He's real. But He is doing something about it: loving them, even through us, and loving us as we love them. God did not spare His own Son the vastly-underestimated pain of the Passion, yet loved Him through it and brought Him to glory. Why do we suppose our own path through this fallen world to glory, and that of those we love, should not also include unspeakable pain, but also the grace to bear it and be transformed through it?

A perhaps not-so-humble reflection on humility

Our new parish priest shared two local news stories that illustrate an alarming lack of humility among Christians. I won't share them here; they're not the point. But they got me to thinking on this topic.

I'm often appalled at our lack of humility, given that it is the defining virtue of Jesus' earthly life. I'm especially concerned over how quickly we judge others, and have concluded that we often do so because too many of us are walking around with an inaccurate, grade-school concept of salvation. I, too, grew up with the "good people go to heaven, bad people go to hell" mindset that underlies the entire "scales of justice" view of God's mercy, which we may have never grown out of. Instead, we hold onto a foundational belief that we somehow deserve the love that God has bestowed on us.

We may be largely unaware of this attitude; when someone says that no one merits God's grace, we nod our heads in agreement with the definition of grace we've internalized - "unmerited favor." Who could disagree? Yet our response to someone who commits what we consider a terribly sinful, even heinous act, betrays our underlying assumptions. We may say, "There, but for the grace of God, go I," but we don't really believe it. Instead, we often conclude that the offender has forsaken their very humanity.

Perhaps so. But God has not stopped loving him or her.

As long as we believe that we're "mostly pretty good" people, we tend to assume that is mostly why God loves us, and that we’re going to heaven because that’s how "mostly pretty good" people are rewarded. After all, there must be some sort of eternal karma for all the sacrifices we make: the vices from which we abstain, the hurtful things we choose not to do, the pleasure we deny ourselves, the good deeds for which we go out of our way. Rather than seeing these good and important decisions as our response to and participation in God's love, we often consider them to be the steps in our stairway to heaven. We think our own virtue ensconces us in the at-least-somewhat exclusive club of those with whom God is pleased, and quickly judge that others' sins (or beliefs, or other perceived shortcomings) forever bar them from membership. As we cling to such a viewpoint, there will always be those – and we each know who they are – with whom we’d never deign to worship or socialize, let alone spend eternity. Murderers, rapists, child abusers, addicts, racists, abortionists, gays, spics, niggers, honkeys, . . . , jews, muslims, protestants, catholics, conservatives, radicals, liberals, intolerants – there seems no limit to the ways we can delineate our "them" – are going to get what they deserve, we think, not considering that God has given us grace that we could never deserve rather than the death Christ bore in our place.

The sin in my own life has been too great to allow me to operate under an illusion of superiority to others. Not even this lengthy post is rooted in a sense of greater worthiness, as I know many of those who have not had to come to grips with such failings are truly purer hearted than I am, even with all the change God has already made in me. I know that if God's eternal reward is for those who've lived rightly, then I will surely be rejected. I could never hope to make up for the pain I’ve caused by any amount of right living. Yet last week in my living room, my friends expressed incredulity that someone who works for the Lord as I do could believe himself undeserving of God’s love and mercy. "If you're hopeless, what hope is there for me?" they practically said. Fortunately no one suggested that we compare our sinfulness, which could become a sort of reverse pride! But I explained that I'm not at all hopeless; it's just that my hope is in Christ rather than in myself.

I’ve always assumed that one who has been forgiven a truly hurtful action would forever understand the nature of grace. They'd know that no one is more deserving of it than another, and strive to live their lives in response to such an unfathomable love. But while my friends seemed aware of their own shortcomings, they expressed shock that I don't think my visible efforts to live as I am called would be sufficient to overcome my own sin, and thereby gain the reward which Christ has already won for me. They seemed sure that such a conclusion should drive me to despair, rather than to live as fully as I can in this magnificent Love that our Savior has revealed to and purchased for us.

Finally reaching the point: to me, this is humility - to understand (without self-condemnation!) that I don’t deserve God’s love, yet to be willing to receive it anyway, respond to it, be transformed in it. The more this process occurs in my own life, the more deeply I will desire it for every other person. I seek to encourage and embrace others who are sincerely seeking the Truth, trusting that God will lead them to Him, even if I disagree with them. Then will I share Christ's compassionate love with others according to the leading of the Holy Spirit, not considering how "deserving" of it they may be.

Sometimes this will mean speaking difficult words – after all, enabling another's sin isn’t an expression of love – but I will always do so lovingly.